(From Internationalisme - August 1946)

This article first appeared in Internation­alisme no 12 in August 1946. Although it is a product of the immediate post-Second World War period, it is still remarkably relevant today, 36 years later. It deals with the question of when the formation of the party is both necessary and possible.

For those who refuse to recognize the need for a political party of the proletariat, the problem of the role of such a party, its function and the moment for its form­ation is obviously of no interest.

But for those who have understood and acc­epted the idea of the party as an express­ion of the working class in its struggle against capitalism, the question is crucial. For those militants who understand the need for the party, putting the issue of when to form it in a historical perspective is of the utmost importance because the question of when you form a party is linked to your whole conception of what the party should do. Is the party a pure product of the ‘willpower' of a group of militants or is it the result of the evolution of the working class in struggle?

If it is a mere product of will, the party can exist or be formed at any time at all. If, on the other hand, it is an expression of the class in struggle, its formation and continued existence are linked to periods of upsurge and decline in the proletarian str­uggle. In the former case, we are talking about a voluntaristic, idealist vision of history; in the latter, a materialist conception of history and its concrete reality.

Make no mistake about it -- this is not a question of abstract speculation. It is not a scholastic discussion on the proper words or labels to use: either ‘party' or ‘fraction' (‘group'). The two conceptions lead to diametrically opposite approaches. An incorrect approach based on not under­standing the historical moment for the proclamation of the party necessarily leads a revolutionary organization to try to be what it cannot yet be and to miss being what it can be. Such an organization, look­ing for an immediate audience at any price, transforming principles into dogmas instead of maintaining clear political positions based on a critical examination of history, will not only find itself blurring reality in the present but compromising its future by neglecting its real tasks in the long term. This approach leaves the way open for all sorts of political compromise and opp­ortunism.

This is the very paint Internationalisme criticized in the Bordigist party in 1946, and 36 years of the ICP's activity amply confirms the validity of these criticisms.

However, some formulations of Internation­alisme lend themselves to possible misinterpretation. For example, the phrase: "the party is the political organism the proletariat creates to unify its struggles" (p2). Put this way, the statement implies that the party is the only motor force towards this unification of struggles. This is not true and it is not the position Internationalisme defended, as any reader of its press can verify. The formulation should be taken to mean that one of the main tasks of the party is to be a factor, an active factor, in the unification of the class struggle by orienting it "towards a frontal attack on the state and capitalist society, towards the building of a comm­unist society." (ibid)

Regarding the question of the Third World War, the war did not happen in the way Internationalisme predicted. There was no generalized war, but a series of local, peripheral wars called ‘national liberation' struggles or ‘anti-colonial' struggles; in reality they were subservient to the needs and interests of the major powers in their struggle for world hegemony.

It is nonetheless true, as Internationalisme predicted, that the Second World War Zed to a long period of reaction and profound dec­line in class struggle, which lasted until the end of the period of reconstruction.

Some readers may be shocked by the use of the term "formation of cadres" which Internationalisme announced as the "task of the hour" in that period. Today the word "cadres" is only used by leftists preparing future bureaucrats for capital against the proletariat. But in the past, and as used by Inter­nationalisme, the idea of forming cadres meant that the situation did not permit revolutionaries to have a large-scale infl­uence in the working class and that there­fore the work of theoretical development and formation of militants inevitably took pre­cedence over any possibility of agitation.

Today we are living in a completely different period, a time of open crisis for capitalism, and of the renewal of class struggle. Such a period makes the regroup­ment of revolutionary forces both necess­ary and possible. This perspective can be carried out by the existing, scattered revolutionary groups only if they reject any rationalization of their own isol­ation, if they pave the way for a real debate on the political positions inher­ited from the past which are not necess­arily valid today, if they consciously commit themselves to a process of inter­national clarification leading to the possibility of a regroupment of forces. This is the real way towards the form­ation of the party.

When to form the Party

There are two conceptions of the formation of the party which have clashed ever since the first historical appearance of the proletariat, that is, its appearance as an independent class with a role to fulfill in history rather than its mere existence as an economic category.

These conceptions can be summarized as follows:

* The first conception holds that the form­ation of the party depends essentially, if not exclusively, on the desires of indiv­iduals, of militants, of their level of consciousness. In a word, this conception considers the formation of the party as a subjective, voluntaristic act.

* The second conception sees the formation of the party as a moment in the development of class consciousness directly linked to class struggle, to the relation of forces between the classes at a given moment due to the economic, political and social sit­uation at the time; to the legacy of past struggles and the short and long-term per­spectives of future struggles.

The first conception, basically subjective and voluntaristic, is more or less con­sciously tied to an idealist view of history. The party is not determined by class struggle; it becomes an independent factor determined only by itself and is elevated to being the very motor force of class struggle.

We can find ardent defenders of this con­ception right from the beginning of the workers' movement and throughout its hist­ory up to the present time. In the early days of the movement Weitling and Blanqui were the most well-known representatives of this tendency.

However great their errors and however much they deserved the severe criticism Marx meted out to them, we should consider them and their mistakes in a historic perspective. Their errors should not blind us to the great contribution they made to the workers' movement. Marx himself recognized their worth as revolutionaries, their devotion to the proletarian cause, their merit as pion­eers inspiring the working class with their unflagging will to end capitalist society.

But what was an error for Weitling and Blanqui, a lack of understanding of the objective laws governing the development of class struggle became for their later foll­owers the very focal point of their exist­ence. Voluntarism turned into complete adventurism.

Undoubtedly the most typical representatives of this today are Trotskyism and everything linked to it. Their agitation has no limits other than their own whims and fantasies. ‘Parties' and ‘Internationals' are switched on and off at will. Campaigns are launched, slogans, agitation like a sick man in con­vulsions.

Closer to us we have the RKD[1] and the CR[2], who spent a long time in Trotskyism and left it very late in the day. They have unfortunately kept this taste for agitation for its own sake, agitation in a vacuum, and have made this the very basis of their existence as a group.

The second conception can be defined as determinist and objective. It not only considers that the party is historically determined but that its formation and exis­tence are also determined by immediate, contingent circumstances.

It holds that the party is determined both by history and by the immediate, contingent situation. For the party to really exist, it is not enough to demonstrate its general historical necessity. A party must be based on immediate, current conditions which make its existence possible and necessary.

The party is the political organism that the proletariat creates to unify its struggles and to orient them towards a frontal attack on the state and capitalist society, towards the building of a communist society.

Without a real development of the perspect­ive of class struggle rooted in the object­ive situation and not simply in the subject­ive desires of militants, without a high degree of class struggle and of social crisis, the party cannot exist -- its exist­ence is simply inconceivable.[3]

The party cannot be created in a period of stagnation in the class struggle. In the entire history of the workers' movement there are no examples of effective revol­utionary parties created in periods of stagnation. Any parties begun in these con­ditions never influenced or effectively led any mass movements. There are some forma­tions that are parties in name only but their artificial nature only hinders the formation of a real party when the time comes. Such formations are condemned to be being sects in all senses of the word. They can escape from their sect life only by falling into quixotic adventurism or the crassest opportunism. Most of them end up with both together, like Trotskyism.

The possibility of maintaining the Party in a period of reflux

What we have said about the formation of the party is also true for the question of keeping it alive after decisive defeats of the proletariat in a prolonged period of revolutionary reflux.

People often use the example of the Bolsh­evik party to counter our argument but this is a purely formalistic view of history. The Bolshevik party after 1905 cannot be seen as a party; it was a fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic party, itself dislocated into several factions and tendencies.

This was the only way the Bolshevik fraction could survive to later serve as a central core for the formation of the communist party in 1917. This is the real meaning of the history of the Bolsheviks.

The dissolution of the First International shows us that Marx and Engels were also aware of the impossibility of maintaining an international revolutionary organization of the working class in a prolonged period of reflux. Naturally, small-minded formal­ists reduce the whole thing to a maneuver of Marx against Bakunin. It is not our intention to go into all the fine points of procedure or to justify the way Marx went about it.

It is perfectly true that Marx saw in the Bakuninists a danger for the International and that he launched a struggle to get them out. In fact, we think that fundamentally he was right in terms of content. Anarchism has many times since then proven itself a profoundly petty-bourgeois ideology. But it was not this danger than convinced Marx of the need to dissolve the International.

Marx went over his reasons many times during the dissolution of the International and afterwards. Seeing this historic event as the simple consequence of a maneuver, of a personal intrigue is not only a gratuitous insult to Marx; it attributes him with demonic powers. One has to be as small-minded as James Guillaume to ascribe events of historic dimensions to the mere will of individuals. Over and above all these leg­ends of anarchism, the real significance of this dissolution must be recognized.

We can understand it better by putting these events in the context of other dissolutions of political organizations in the history of the workers movement.

For example, the profound change in the social and political situation in England in the middle of the 19th century led to the dislocation and disappearance of the Chart­ist movement.

Another example is the dissolution of the Communist League after the stormy years of the 1848-50 revolutions. As long as Marx believed that the revolutionary period had not yet ended, despite heavy defeats and losses, he continued to keep the Communist League going, to regroup forces, to streng­then the organization. But as soon as he was convinced that the revolutionary period had ended and that a long period of reaction had begun, he proclaimed the impossibility of maintaining the party. He declared him­self in favor of an organizational retreat towards more modest, less spectacular and more really fruitful tasks considering the situation: theoretical elaboration and the formation of cadres.

It was not Bakunin or any urgent need for ‘maneuverings' that convinced Marx twenty years before the First International that it was impossible to maintain a revolutionary organization or an International in a period of reaction.

Twenty-five years later, Marx wrote about the situation in 1850-51 and the tendencies within the League in these terms:

"The violent repression of a revolution leaves its mark on the minds of the people involved, particularly those who have been forced into exile. It produces such a tum­ult in their minds that even the best become unhinged and in a way irresponsible for a greater or lesser period of time. They can­not manage to adapt themselves to the course history has taken and they do not want to understand that the form of the movement has changed ..." (Epilogue to the Revelations of the Trial of Communists in Cologne, 8 Jan­uary 1875.)

In this passage we can see a fundamental aspect of Marx's thought speaking out against those who do not want to take into account that the form of the movement, the political organizations of the working class, the tasks of this organization, do not al­ways stay the same. They follow the evol­ution of the objective situation. To answer those who think they see in this passage a simple a posteriori justification by Marx, it is interesting to look at Marx's argu­ments at the time of the League as he form­ulated them in the debate with the Willich­-Schapper tendency. When he explained to the General Council of the League why he pro­posed a split in September 1850, Marx wrote, among other points:

"Instead of a critical conception, the minority has adopted a dogmatic one. It has substituted an idealist conception for a materialist one. Instead of seeing the real situation as the motor force of the revol­ution, it sees only mere will ...

... You tell ( the workers) : ‘We must take power right away or else we should all go home to bed.

Just like the democrats who have made a fetish of the word ‘people' you make a fetish of the word ‘proletariat'. Just like the democrats, you substitute revolutionary phrase-mongering for the process of revol­ution."

We dedicate these lines especially to the comrades of the RKD or the CR who have often reproached us with not wanting to ‘construct' the new party.

In our struggle since 1932 against Trotsky­ist adventurism on the question of the form­ation of the new party and the Fourth Inter­national, the RKD only saw who knows what kind of subjective ‘hesitations'. The RKD has never understood the concept of a ‘fraction', that is, a specific organization with specific tasks corresponding to a specific situation when a party cannot exist or be formed. Rather than making the effort to understand this idea, they prefer the simple dictionary-style translation of the word ‘fraction', in order to support their claim that ‘Bordigism' only wanted to ‘re­dress' the old CP . They apply to Left Comm­unism the measure they learned in Trotsky­ism: ‘either you are for redressing the old party or else you have to create a new one'.

The objective situation and the tasks of revolutionaries corresponding to this sit­uation, all that is much too prosaic, too complicated for those who prefer the easy way out through revolutionary phrase-mon­gering. The pathetic experience of organizing the CR was apparently not enough for these comrades. They see the failure of the CR simply as the result of a certain prec­ipitousness while in fact the whole opera­tion was artificial and heterogeneous from the start, grouping militants together around a vague and inconsistent program of action. They attribute their failure to the poor quality of the people involved, and refuse to see any connection with the objective situation.

The situation today

It might at first sight seem strange that groups who claim to belong to the Inter­national Communist Left, and who for years have fought alongside us against the Trot­skyist adventurism of artificially creating new parties, are now riding the same hobby­horse, and have become the champions of a still faster ‘construction'.

We know that in Italy, there already exists the Internationalist Communist Party which, although very weak numerically, is none­theless trying to fulfill the role of the party. The recent elections to the Constit­uent Assembly, in which the Italian ICP participated, have revealed the extreme weakness of its real influence over the masses, which demonstrates that this party has hardly gone beyond the limitations of a fraction. The Belgian Fraction is call­ing for the formation of the new party. The French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFGC) , formed recently, and without any well-defined basic principles, is following in its footsteps, and has ass­igned itself the practical task of build­ing the new party in France.

How are we to explain this fact, this new orientation? There can be no doubt that a certain number of individuals[4] who have recently joined this group are simply expr­essing their lack of understanding and their non-assimilation of the concept of the ‘fraction', and that they continue to expr­ess within the various groups of the ICL (International Communist Left) the Trotsky­ist conceptions of the party that they held yesterday and continue to hold today.

It is equally correct, moreover, to see the contradiction that exists between abstract theory and practical politics in the ques­tion of building the party as yet another addition to the mass of contradictions that have become a habit for all these groups. However, all this still doesn't explain the conversions of all these groups. This expl­anation must be sought in their analysis of today's situation and its perspectives.

We know the theory of the ‘war economy' set forward before and during the war by the Vercesi tendency in the ICL. According to this theory, the war economy and the war itself are periods of the greatest develop­ment of production, and of economic expan­sion. As a result, a ‘social crisis' could not appear during this period of ‘prosper­ity'. Only with the ‘economic crisis of the war economy', ie the moment when war production would no longer be able to supply the needs of war consumption, when the continuation of the war would be hind­ered by a scarcity of raw materials, would this new-style crisis open up a social crisis, and a revolutionary perspective.

According to this theory, it was logical to deny that the social convulsions which broke out during the war could come to any­thing. Hence also, the absolute and obstin­ate denial of any social significance in the events of July 1943 in Italy[5]. Hence also, the complete misunderstanding of the signif­icance of the occupation of Europe by the allied and Russian armies, and in particular of the importance of the systematic destruc­tion of Germany, the dispersal of the German proletariat taken prisoner of war, exiled, dislocated, and temporarily rendered inoff­ensive and incapable of any independent movement.

For these comrades, the renewal of the class struggle and, more precisely, the opening of a mounting revolutionary course, could only occur after the end of the war, not because the proletariat was steeped in patriotic nationalist ideology, but because the obj­ective conditions for such a struggle could not exist during the war period. This mis­take, already disproved historically (the Paris Commune and the October Revolution), and even partially in the last war (look at the social convulsions in Italy 1943, and certain signs of a defeatist spirit in the German army at the beginning of 1945) was to be fatally accompanied by a no less great error, which holds that the period following the war automatically opens a course towards the renewal of class struggles and social convulsions.

This error's most complete theoretical form­ulation is to be found in Lucain's article, published by the Belgian Fraction's L'Inter­nationaliste. According to his schema, whose invention he tries to palm off on Lenin, the transformation of imperialist into civil war remains valid if we enlarge this position to include the post-war period. In other words, it is in the post-war period that the transformation of imperialist war into civil war is realized.

Once this theory has been postulated and systematized, everything becomes simple and we have only to examine the evolution of the situation and events through it and starting from it.

The present situation is thus analyzed as one of ‘transformation into civil war'. With this central analysis as a starting-point, the situation in Italy is declared to be particularly advanced, and thus justifying the immediate constitution of the party, while the disturbances in India, Indonesia and other colonies, whose reins are firmly held by the various competing imperialisms and by the local bourgeoisies, are seen as signs of the beginning of the anti-capit­alist civil war. The imperialist massacre in Greece is also supposed to be part of the advancing revolution. Needless to say, not for a moment do they dream of putting in doubt the revolutionary nature of the strikes in Britain and America, or even in France. Recently, L'Internationaliste wel­comed the formation of that little sect, the CNT, as an indication "amongst others" of the revolutionary evolution of the sit­uation in France. The FFGC goes to the point of claiming that the three-party coalition government has been renewed due to the proletarian class threat, and insists on the extreme objective importance of the entry into their group of some five comrades from the group ‘Contre le Courant'[6]

This analysis of the situation, with the perspective of decisive class battles in the near future, naturally leads these groups to the idea of the urgent necessity of building the party as rapidly as possible. This becomes the immediate task, the task of the day, if not of the hour.

The fact that international capitalism seems not the least worried by this menace of proletarian struggle supposedly hanging over it, and goes calmly about its business, with its diplomatic intrigues, its internal riv­alries and its peace conferences where it publicly displays its preparations for the next war -- none of this carries much weight in these groups' analysis.

The possibility of a new war is not compl­etely excluded, first because it is useful as propaganda, and because they prefer to be more prudent than in the 1937-39 adven­ture where they denied the perspective of world war. It's best to keep a way out just in case! From time to time, following the Italian ICP, it will be said that the sit­uation in Italy is reactionary, but this is never followed up and remains an isol­ated episode, without any relation to the fundamental analysis of the situation as one that is ripening ‘slowly but surely' towards decisive revolutionary explosions.

This analysis is shared by other groups like the CR, which counters the objective perspective of a third imperialist war with the perspective of an inevitable revolution; or like the RKD which, more cautiously, takes refuge in the theory of a double course, ie of a simultaneous and parallel development of a course towards revolution and a course towards imperial­ist war. The RKD has obviously not yet understood that the development of a course towards war is primarily conditioned by the weakening of the proletariat and of the danger of revolution, unless they have taken up the Vercesi tendancy's pre-1939 theory according to which the imper­ialist war is not a conflict of interests between different imperialisms, but an act of the greatest imperialist solidarity with the aim of massacring the proletariat, a direct capitalist class war against the proletarian revolutionary menace. The Trot­skyists, with the same analysis, are infin­itely more consistent , since they have no need to deny the tendency towards a third war; for them, the next war will simply be the generalized armed struggle between cap­italism on the one hand, and the proletariat regrouped around the Russian ‘workers' state' on the other.

In the final analysis, either the next imp­erialist war is confused, one way or another, with the class war or its danger is minimized by making it the necessary precursor of a period of great social and revolutionary struggles. In the second case, the aggrav­ation of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the war preparations going on today are explained by the short-sightedness and un­awareness of world capitalism and its heads of state.

We may remain thoroughly skeptical about an analysis based on nothing more than wishful thinking, flattering itself with its clairvoyance, and generously assuming a com­plete blindness on the part of the enemy. On the contrary, world capitalism has shown itself far more acutely aware of the real situation than the proletariat. Its behavior in Italy in 1943 and in Germany in 1945 proves that it has assimilated the lessons of the revolutionary period of 1917 damned well -- far better than the prolet­ariat or its vanguard. Capitalism has learn­ed to defeat the proletariat, not only through violence, but by using the workers' discontent and leading it in a capitalist direction. It has been able to transform the one-time weapons of the proletariat into its chains. We have only to see that capitalism today willingly uses the trade unions, marxism, the October Revolution, socialism, communism, anarchism, the red flag and the 1st May as the most effective means of duping the proletariat. The 1939-45 war was fought in the name of the same ‘anti-fascism' that had already been tried out in the Spanish war. Tomorrow, the workers will once again be hurled into battle in the name of the October Revol­ution, or of the struggle against Russian fascism.

The right of peoples to self-determination, national liberation, reconstruction, ‘econ­omic' demands, workers' participation in management and other such slogans, have be­come capitalism's most effective tools for the destruction of proletarian class consc­iousness. In every country, these are the slogans used to mobilize the workers. The strikes and disturbances that break out here and there remain in this framework, and their only result is to tie the workers still more strongly to the capitalist state.

In the colonies, the masses are being mass­acred in a struggle, not for the state's destruction but for its consolidation, its independence from the domination of one imperialism to the profit of another. There can be no possible doubt as to the meaning of the massacre in Greece, when we look at Russia's protective attitude, when we see Jouhaux becoming the advocate of the Greek CGT in its conflict with the government. In Italy, the workers' ‘struggle' against the monarchy in the name of the republic, or get massacred over the Trieste question. In France, we have the disgusting spectacle of workers marching in overalls in the 14th July military parade. This is the prosaic reality of today's situation.

It is untrue that the conditions for a re­newal of class struggle are present in the post-war period. When capitalism ‘finishes' an imperialist world war which lasted six years without any revolutionary flare-ups, this means the defeat of the proletariat, and that we are living, not on the eve of great revolutionary struggles, but in the aftermath of a defeat. This defeat took place in 1945, with the physical des­truction of the revolutionary centre that was the German proletariat, and it was all the more decisive in that the world proletariat remained unaware of the defeat it had just undergone.

The course is open towards the third imper­ialist war. It is time to stop playing the ostrich, seeking consolation in a refusal to see the danger. Under present conditions, we can see no force capable of stopping or modifying this course. The worst thing that the weak forces of today's revolutionary groups can do is to try to go up a down staircase. They will inevitably end up breaking their necks.

The Belgian Fraction think they can get away with saying that if war breaks out, this will prove that the formation of the party was premature. How naive! Such a mistake will be dearly paid for.

To throw oneself into the adventurism of artificial and premature party-building not only implies an incorrect analysis of the situation, but means turning away from the real work of revolutionaries today, neglecting the critical elaboration of the revolutionary program and giving up the positive work of forming its cadres.

But there is worse to come, and the first experiences of the party in Italy are there to confirm it. Wanting at all costs to play at being the party in a reactionary period, wanting at all costs to work among the masses means falling to the level of the masses, following in their footsteps; it means working in the trade unions, taking part in parliamentary elections -- in a word, opportunism.

At present, orienting activity towards building the party can only be an orient­ation towards opportunism.

We have no time for those who reproach us for abandoning the daily struggle of the workers, and for separating ourselves from the class. Being with the class is not a matter of being there physically, still less of keeping, at all costs, a link with the masses which in a reactionary period can only be done at the price of opportunistic politics. We have no time for those who, having accused us of activism from 1943-45, now reproach us for wanting to isolate ourselves in an ivory tower, for tending to become a doctrinaire sect that has given up all activity.

Sectarianism is not the intransigent defense of principles, nor the will to critical study; nor even the temporary renunciation of large-scale external work. The real nat­ure of sectarianism is its transformation of the living program into a dead system, the principles that guide action into dog­mas, whether they be yelled or whispered.

What we consider necessary in the present reactionary period is to make an objective study, to grasp the movement of events and their causes, and to make them understood to a circle of workers that will necess­arily be limited in such a period.

Contact between revolutionary groups in various countries, the confrontation of their ideas, organized international dis­cussion with the aim of seeking a reply to the burning problems raised by historical evolution -- such work is far more fertile, far more ‘attached to the masses' than hollow agitation, carried out in a vacuum.

The task for revolutionary groups today is the formation of cadres; a task that is less enticing, less concerned with easy, immed­iate and ephemeral successes; a task that is infinitely more serious; for the form­ation of cadres today is the precondition that guarantees the future party of the revolution.

Marco

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[1] The RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany). They were an Austrian Trotskyist group opposed to the foundation of Fourth International in 1938 because they felt it was premature. In exile, this group moved farther and farther away from this ‘International'. They were particularly opposed to participation in the Second World War in the name of the defense of Russia, and in the end came out against the whole theory of ‘degenerated workers' state' so dear to Trotskyism. In exile this group had the enormous political merit of maintaining an intransigent position against the imperialist war and any participation in it for any reason whatsoever. In this regard it contacted the Fraction of Italian and French Left during the war and participated in the printing of a leaflet in 1945 with the French Fraction addressed to the workers and soldiers of all countries, in several languages, denouncing the chauvinistic campaign during the ‘liberation' of France, calling for revolutionary defeatism and fraternization. After the war, this group rapidly evolved towards anarchism where it finally dissolved.

[2] The CR (Revolutionary Communists) were a group of French Trotskyists that the RKD managed to detached from Trotskyism towards the end of the war. From then on, it followed the same evolution as the RKD. These two groups participated in the International Conference in 1947-48 in Belgium, called by the Dutch Left which brought together all the groups which remained internationalist and had opposed all participation in the war.

[3] We must be careful to distinguish the forming of a party from the general activity of revolutionaries which is always necessary and possible. The blurring of these two distinctions is a very common error which can lead to a despairing and impotent fatalism. The Vercesi tendency in the Italian Left fell into this trap during the war. This tendency rightly considered that the conditions of the moment did not allow for the existence of a party nor for the possibility of large-scale agitation among the workers. But it concluded from this that all revolutionary work had to be scrapped and condemned. It even denied the possibility for revolutionary groups to exist under these conditions. This tendency forgot that mankind is not just the product of history: "Man makes his own history" (Marx). The action of revolutionaries is necessarily limited by objective conditions. But this has nothing to do with the desperate cry of fatalism: ‘whatever you do will lead to nothing'. On the contrary, revolutionary Marxist has said: "By becoming conscious of existing conditions and by acting within their limits, our participation becomes an additional force influencing events and even modifying their courses." (Trotsky, The New Course)

[4] This refers to the ex-members of Union Communiste, the group that printed L'Internationale in the 30s and disappeared at the outbreak of war in 1939.

[5] The fall of the Mussolini regime and the refusal of the masses to continue the war.

[6] A little group constituted after the war, which had an ephemeral existence. Its members, after a brief passage in the ICP (Bordigists), left politics.

The International Communist Party (Communist Program) at a turning point in its history

At the end of the sixties, the working class put an end to fifty years of counter-revol­ution by engaging in struggle internationally (1968 in France, 1969 in Italy, 1970 in Poland, 1975-6 in Spain, etc). At the present time the mass strike in Poland has marked the highest point in a new period of struggle which will lead to class confrontations that will decide the fate of humanity: either revolution or war.

On an international scale, the bourgeoisie recognizes what a mortal danger the combativity of the workers means for its system. In order to confront the danger of the mass strike the capitalist class collaborates across national frontiers and even across the imperialist blocs. The proletariat will not face a surprised and disconcerted bourgeoisie as it did in the first wave of struggle in 1968; it will confront a bourgeoisie which is forewarned and prepared to use its capacities of mystification, derailment and repression up to the hilt. The process of the inter­national unification of the working class in its struggle for the destruction of capitalism promises to be a long and difficult one.

This is the reality confronting the revolutionary minorities who are part­icipating in the process of the unification of the working class and in the development of its consciousness. Far from being up to the demands of the present period, revolutionary organiza­tions are in an extreme minority. They exist in a situation of political confusion and profound organizational dispersion.

For more than a year, the weaknesses have been accentuated by splits and the disappearance of groups. This phenomenon is culminating today with the crisis shaking the International Communist Party (ICP) (Communist Program). After a wave of exclusions and numerous depart­ures, the majority of the organization has taken up the most chauvinist and nationalist positions of the bourgeoisie, by taking sides in the imperialist war in the Middle East. This organization is paying the price of its political and organizational sclerosis.

The ICP has been unable to draw a critical balance sheet of the revolutionary wave between 1917-23 and the counter-revolution which followed it, of the positions of the Communist International and the left fract­ions which broke from it -- particularly on the union and national questions and on the question of the organization of revol­utionaries and of the party. These, together with its incapacity to understand the stakes of the present period, have led it straight to opportunism and activism and to the dislocation of the organization.

It is the responsibility of all revolution­ary organizations to draw the lessons of this crisis which expresses the general weaknesses of the revolutionary movement today, and to actively ensure that the necessary and inevitable decantation does not lead to a dispersion of revolutionary energies. History does not pardon, and if revolutionary organizations today are not capable of living up to the demands of the situation, they will be swept away without recourse, weakening the working class in its task of defending the perspectives of communism in the course of its battles.

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"A crisis which is very serious for us and whose repercussions will probably be decisive throughout the organization, has just exploded in the Party". (‘Better fewer, but better', Le Proletaire no.367, Il Programma Comunista, no. 20). The articles in the press tell us of cascading departures:

In France:

-- the split of those who were regrouped around El Oumami, which used to be the organ of the ICP for Algeria, and now has become "the organ of Algerian Leninist Communists", defending bourgeois nationalist positions in a pure third ordlist style;

-- the departure of the majority of members in Paris and a few others scattered around France "amongst which were those with lead­ership responsibilities", apparently on positions close to E1 Oumami, with a plan by some to bring out a magazine, Octobre.

In Italy:

-- "In Italy, the crisis has shaken all the sections because of its suddenness, but only some comrades in Turin and some comrades in Florence (we don't know how many) have been involved in the liquidation" (I1 Programma Comunista, 29.10.82).

In Germany:

-- the disappearance of the section and of the publication Proletarier.

In giving this news, the press of the ICP doesn't speak of:

-- the expulsion last year of sections in the south of France, including Marseilles, by the same leadership who have now left in France, and of sections in Italy, including Ivrea.

It appears that those who were expelled put in question the whole policy of setting up a panoply of ‘committees' (‘committee against redundancies', ‘committee against repression', committees in the army, of squatters, feminists, etc) , whose objective was to better ‘implant' the Party inside ‘social struggles';

-- the departure of other elements who protested against these expulsions, and individual resignations for unclear reasons.

-- the disappearance of the ‘Latin American sector'.

The whole of the ICP has been thrown into disarray in a few months without any real clarity. Why is there a crisis? And why now?

The events taking place in today's period of mounting class struggle are starting to dissipate the mist of bourgeois ideology in the heads of workers. Further, they put the political positions of revolutionary minorities to the test by sweeping aside the debris of groups made gangrenous by bourgeois ideology and by shaking or dislocating ambiguous and use­less groups.

In this sense, the crisis in the ICP is the most spectacular manifestation of the con­vulsions of the revolutionary milieu today. A year ago, when we spoke of con­vulsions, splits and regression in the revolutionary milieu (International Review, no.28) in face of the ‘years of truth', the whole political milieu turned a deaf ear. Perhaps today these people are going to wake up! The revolutionary milieu (including the ICP) didn't want to create a framework of international conferences allowing the decantation of political positions in a clear way; today they submit to a process of decantation by the ‘force of events', with all the attendant risks of a loss of militant energies. Even today reality is exposing the programmatic weaknesses of the ICP, it is still up to revolutionaries to draw up a balance sheet in order to avoid repeating the same errors ad infinitum.

It cannot be denied that for a long time the ICP has been a pole of reference, in some countries, for elements searching for class positions. But by basing itself on an inadequate and erroneous political program and on the internal structure of a sect, the ICP has been over the years, growing more and more sclerotic. Its political regression was revealed in the test of events: faced with the massacre in Lebanon, the ICP called on the proletarians in the Middle East to fight "to the last drop of blood" in defense of the Palestinian cause in Beirut. Some months later, the organization burst apart.

The crisis can't be explained by mistakes ‘made by the leadership' or by ‘tactical errors', as both the splitters and the remaining ICP seems to believe. The mistakes are programmatic and lie at the very root of the constitution of the ICP (see the articles on p.15 and p.20 in this issue). Today they are paying for these errors. The ‘return to Lenin' in order to support the ‘glorious struggle for national liberation', which the splitters advocate, in order quite simply to cover up their Maoist leanings, is very close to the position of the ICP. If the ICP is today only hanging by a thread, this way of explaining the crisis in terms of ‘tactical errors' or ‘mistakes of the leadership' is going to definitively finish it off.

A crisis which illustrates the weakness of a conception of organization

The bluff of the ICP

The crisis today leaves us with a somber balance sheet for "tomorrow's compact and powerful party". It has led, according to the ICP's press, "to the organizational collapse of the international centre and the disappearance of the former editions of Proletaire, and to the departure of all the responsible centers in France". (Le Proletaire, no.387). The militants who remain in the ICP were not aware of what was going on. They were reduced to making appeals in the press for members who wanted to remain in the party to express themselves in writing to the box address. It's unbelievable that they have had to resort to methods of communication that give the state such an easy means of identification.

The famous and arrogant ‘responsible centers' left taking with them material, and money which included the dues which had been paid that very day by local sections (according to an ICP militant in Paris). We see here the habits of bourgeois political gangsterism totally foreign to the proletariat which we unambiguously bra­nded as such at the time of the ‘Chenier affair' during the crisis of the ICC (International Review, no.28). The grand, high-sounding words on the ‘centralized' pure and hard party were only a bluff. The ICP is collapsing like a house of cards: "the crisis was expressed by a decentralized and localist activity, covered up by a facade of centralization" (Il Programma Comunista, 29.10.82).

The grand speeches on ‘organic centralism' hid a federalism of the worst kind where each part of the organization ended up only doing what it decided to do, a flabby structure open to all the influ­ences of bourgeois ideology, a true nursery of irresponsible people, of apprentice bureaucrats and future rec­ruiting sergeants for imperialist massacres, as has already happened for the Middle East.

After having prattled on for forty years about the party which ‘organizes' the working class, you can't fall any lower than this.

Perhaps this crisis will serve as a lesson to all the groups in the present movement who reduce any debate to the question of the party, who bestow upon themselves titles of glory which they have done nothing to merit, who shackle any real progress towards a true party of the working class by their absurd pretensions today. To explain all the difficulties of the class struggle internationally as being due to the absence of the party, to put forward the idea that this eucharistic presence is the only perspective for solving everything, as the ICP has done for years, is not only false and ridiculous it also has a cost. As we said in International Review no.14:

"The drama of Bordigism is that it wants to be what it isn't -- the Party -- and doesn't want to be what it is: a political group. Thus it doesn't accomplish, except in words, the tasks of the party, because it can't accomplish them; and it doesn't take on the tasks of a real political group, which to its eyes are just petty. (‘A Caricature of the Party: the Bordigist Party').

Where then is this famous ‘monolithic bloc' of a party? This party without faults? This ‘monolithism' asserted by the ICP has only ever been a Stalinist invention. There never were ‘monolithic' organizations in the history of the workers' movement. Constant discussion and organized political confrontation within a collective and unitary frame­work is the condition for the true solidarity, homogeneity and centralization of a proletarian political organization. By stifling any debate, by hiding divergences behind the word ‘discipline', the ICP has only compressed the contradictions until an explosion was reached. Worse, by preventing clarifica­tion both outside and inside the organization, it has numbed the vigilance of its militants. The Bordigist sanctification of hierarchical truth and the power of leaders have left the militants bereft of theoretical and organizational weapons in the face of the splits and resignations. The ICP seems to recognize this when it writes:

"We intend to deal (with these questions) in a more developed way in our press, by placing the problems which are being posed to the activity our party before our readers". (1l Programma, idem)

For the moment these words seem more like a wink to the militants who have left in a state of complete political confusion, some of whom must be aware of the mire into which they have sunk, than a real recognition of the bankruptcy of the ICP, ‘alone in the world', as it describes itself. The recognition of the necessity to open up the debate on the "problems being posed to the activity" and the actual opening up of discussions both internally and externally, is one of the conditions for keeping the ICP within the proletariat, for fighting against the political decay which is gnawing at the organization. The ICP has experienced other splits in its forty years of existence, but today's one is not only shaking its organizational frame­work, but also the fundamentals of its political trajectory, placing before it the alternative: third worldism or marxism.

Internationalism against any form of nationalism

The open nationalism of El Oumami

El Oumami broke with the ICP because their defense of the PLO in Beirut had met with resistance. But judging by the positions of the ICP on the question, this resistance must have been rather weak. The only point at issue seems to have been how far one should go in defending the PLO.  El Oumami entitled the document in which it declared itself ‘From the program-party to the party of revolutionary action'. A whole program!

El Oumami defends the progressive character of the Palestinian national movement against "that cancer grafted onto the Arab body, the Zionist, colonialist entity, the mercenary, racist and expansionist state of Israel". For El Oumami it is out of the question to put on an equal footing the "colonialist-Settlers' state" (Etats-pied-noir) and the "legitimate states" of the "Arab world".

This type of distinction has always been the argument used by the bourgeoisie to enlist the working class into war. Yes, all capitalist states are enemies of the revolution, so we are told, but there is enemy no.1 and enemy no.2. For the first world war German Social Democracy said in essence ‘let us fight against Russian despotism'; for the other side, it was ‘let's fight against Prussian militarism'. In the second world war, it was with the same language that all the ‘anti-fascists' with the Stalinists at their head, enlisted the proletarians, by calling on them to participate in fighting enemy no.1, the ‘fascist state', in order to defend the ‘democratic' state.

For E1 Oumami, the ‘Jewish union sacree' has made class antagonisms disappear in Israel. It is useless to make appeals to the proletariat in Israel. This is pre­cisely what the Stalinists said during the Second World War when they talked about the ‘accursed German ‘people'. And when, after a ‘Solidarity with the PLO' demon­stration, El Oumami, to the cries of "Revenge for Sabra and Chatila", bragged of having "captured a Zionist and giving him a good duffing up", it was the same as the French Communist Party's "to each a boche" at the end of the second world war.

E1 Oumami has joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie with this abject chauvinism. At this level, it is a Maoist, virulently third-worldist group, which doesn't merit much time being spent on it. But what is striking, in reading the texts, is that these nationalist chauvinists are full of the words of the Italian Left, that fraction of the International Communist Left which was one of those rare examples and the most important, that was able to resist the counter-revolution and maintain a proletarian internationalism in the whirlpool of the second imperialist war.

How could the ICP, ‘continuator' of the Italian Left, develop such a nationalist poison within it? How could it affect the Paris leadership, the editors of Proletaire, the editors of E1 Oumami, the section in Germany?

In the third part of this article we shall recall how the ICP conceived this child by forgetting a whole period of the history of the Italian Left between 1926 and 1943; how the ‘Party' was formed in 1943-45 with elements from the Partisans in Italy and the ‘anti­fascist committee of Brussels', how political confusions on the role of ‘anti-fascism' and the nature of the blocs set up at the end of the second world war were never clarified. Today all this has broken through to the surface.

Because the ICP nourished this child and even today still recognizes it, it is now the legitimate product of its own incoherence and degeneration.

The shameful nationalism of the ICP

"Naturally for the true revolutionary, there isn't a ‘Palestinian question', but only the struggle of the exploited of the Middle East, both Arabs and Jews, which is part of the general struggle of the exploited of the whole world". (Bilan, no. 2)

E1 Oumami deserts this position: schooled in the ICP's tactics, it poses the question not in terms of classes but in terms of nations. The future ‘party of revolutionary action' therefore puts its begetter, the ICP, against the wall, knowing full well its congenital incoherence, and hurls a defiance to it:

"Let's imagine for an instance the invasion of Syria by the Zionist army. Must we remain indifferent or worse (sic), call for revolutionary defeatism under the pretext that the Syrian state is a bourgeois state that needs to be overthrown? If the comrades of Proletaire are to be consistent, they must say so publicly. As for us, we openly take a position against Israel".

And further:

"Le Proletaire pronounces itself for the destruction of the Colonialist-Settler state of Israel. So be it. But at the same time, it supported the submission of the Palestinians to a national oppression in the Arab countries, when Israel entered Lebanon in order to continue Syria's work. So then, where does the specificity of Israel lie? Do we have to believe that the destruction of the Colonialist-Settler state has the same significance as the destru­ction of the Arab states, however react­ionary they are?".

For E1 Oumami, it's clear: class criteria don't apply to an Arab proletarian. His state is an Arab state, and that's that. First the war, then the bright tomorrow.

But how does the ICP reply? What does the historic party, the intransigent defenders and heirs of the Italian Left have to say? Just a small "yes, but...".

The article ‘The national struggle of the Palestinian masses within the framework of the social movement in the Middle East', published in Le Proletaire and Il Programma, begins by preaching to us about pan-Arab feelings, Arab capital, the Arab unitary tendency and the Arab nation. It's like the dream of a university student who missed the mark at the end of a course on pan-Slavism, black studies and other Guevarist preoccupations from the sixties.

"Arab capital" doesn't owe allegiance to American capital - ...that would be a "superficial" vision. On the other hand, the "colonialist Jewish state" is "constitutionally" in this position. The ICP doesn't say that Israel is totally a classless bloc, but that the prolet­arians there seem to it to be "more anti-Arab than the bourgeoisie". Xenophobic sentiments of course never touch Palest­inian or French or Italian proletarians. And to finish up, we are left with the lowest level of Maoism that could be cooked up -- a reheated version of the kind pioneered by the American ‘Students for a Democratic Society', who talked about the working class having "white skin privilege", through which they exploited the black workers of America.

As for the PLO, it remains a defender of widows and orphans in "the most advanced part of the gigantic social struggles in the Middle East".

The ICP affirms:

"It is precisely on the terrain of the common struggle (ie. common to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) that Arab and Palestinian proletarians can acquire the strength to stand up against those who are their apparent allies, but who in reality are already their enemies".

Who? What? Ah, but it is only

"the appearance which is inter-classist",

Bordigist science tells us . .. In reality the class struggle

"lives inside physical subjects themselves... beyond, outside and even against the consciousness of individuals them­selves".

The ICP replaces politics by individual psy­chology.

"It is necessary to strengthen the nat­ional struggle by taking out, the content which the bourgeoisie takes care to give it".

This is called defending the ‘double rev­olution' by doing so and not doing so....

The article of clarification (?) ends up quite simply, in delirium. It is necessary to "build an army under proletarian leader­ship thanks to the organizational work of communists", in order to create a "co-belligerent" with the PLO army.

The ICP dishes out the same lamentations as the splitters:

"The proletariat in the metropoles isn't really going into action".

So --

"in its place, one could look to the movements of the young, of woman, to anti-nuclear and pacifist movements". (Le Proletaire, no. 367).

This is the sad refrain of all third­worldists, students, the blase and the modernists: the proletariat is ‘letting us down'.

As the ICP claims to be the party already, its children can only want the movement ‘immediately', hence its description of those who resigned or split as ‘mouvement­ists'. But El Oumami was only taking the leftist tendencies in the ICP to their logical conclusion. It will not be easy for the ICP to get out of this leftist pit. It is not taking that path. For now, it means its ‘mea culpa' on exactly the same ground as E1 Oumami. The party doesn't know how to make "the tactical link" with the masses; it is still too ‘abstract' too ‘theoretical'. All this is false. The ICP uses the words ‘communist prog­ram' in order to cover up a ‘theor­etical void' and a practice of supporting nationalism, of unprincipled activism. We are now going to examine in more detail this theoretical void and its practical ramifications.

The sources of errors: the theoretical void

"Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circum­stances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumst­ances with which they are directly con­fronted. The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living". (Marx, The 18th Brumaire).

The CI and the Lefts

In order to explain the crisis of the ICP you have to go back to the roots of its political regression, to the lack of understanding of the errors of the Communist International and to the necessary critical re-examination of the past which the present milieu has neither wanted nor been able to do.

The Communist Left of the 20's didn't seek to explain the degeneration of the CI by a ‘crisis of leadership' nor simply by ‘tactical errors', as the ICP today wants to explain its own crisis. That would have been to reduce the crisis of the CI to the Trotskyist line that "the crisis of the revolutionary movement can be reduced to the crisis of the leadership", (Trotsky's Transitional Program). The Communist Left took into account that the CI was founded during an international revolutionary wave that arose suddenly from war and that it hadn't succeeded in grasping all the demands of the "new period of war and revolution". Each Congress of the CI testifies to the increasing diffi­culties felt in grasping the implications of the historic crisis of capitalism, in throwing off the old social democratic tactics, in understanding the role of the party and workers' councils. To draw all the programmatic implications of such a situation was impossible during their tumultuous times. To try today to elevate into dogmas everything that the CI produced means turning your back on the Communist Left.

The Lefts within the CI, the German, Italian, Dutch, British, Russian and American Lefts, were the expression of the avant-garde of the proletariat in the major industrial centers. With its hesitant and often confused formulations, the Left tries to pose the real problems of the new epoch: are the unions still working class organs or have they been caught up in the mach­inery of the bourgeois state? Should you finish with the tactics of ‘parlia­mentarism'? How should one understand the national struggle in the global period of imperialism? What is the perspective for the new Russian state?

The Communist Left never managed to act as a fraction within the 111rd International, to confront it with its positions. In 1921 (when the ‘provisional' banning of fractions in the Bolshevik Party in Russia took place), the German Left (KAPD) was excluded from the Communist International. The successive elimination of all the Lefts followed until the death of the CI with its acceptance of ‘socialism in one country'.

If the Lefts were already dislocated within the CI, they would be even more so outside it. At the time of the death of the CI, the German Left was already dispersed into several bits, fell into activism and adventurism, and was eliminated under the blows of a bloody repression; the Russian Left inside Stalin's prisons; the weak British and American Lefts had long since disappeared. Outside Trot­skyism, it was essentially the Italian Left and what remained of the Dutch Left which, from 1928 on, would maintain a proletarian political activity -- without Bordiga and without Pannekoek -- by each making a different assessment of the experience they had had.

The revolutionary movement today still has a tendency to see only the partial and dislocated form of the Communist Left, as it was left by the counter-revolution. It speaks of this or that positive or negative contribution of this or that Left outside the global context of the period. The ICP has accentuated and aggravated this tendency by always reducing the Communist Left to the Italian Left, and then only the Left between 1920 and 1926. For the ICP, the German Left became a bunch of ‘anarcho­-syndicalists', identical to the Gramsci tendency. This is not to say that one must not severely criticize the mistakes of the German Left, but within the ICP these become a total caricature. The idea of restoring the heritage of the Communist Left which was buried by the counter­revolution becomes in the ICP an end­less process of republishing Bordiga's texts. The heritage of the Left is above all a critical work: the ICP has reduced it to the liturgy of a jealous sect. Thus, a whole generation of ICP militants only has a deformed idea of the reality of the International Communist Left and the political questions they posed.

The period of the ‘fraction' and Bilan (1926-1945)

The Bordigists never speak of this period of the Italian Left: it's not acknowledged by the ICP. What becomes then of the ‘organic continuity' which the ICP lays claim to in order to announce itself as the one and only heir of the Communist Left?

A whole twenty years of militant work. But ...Bordiga wasn't there during those years. The only explanation one can find is that ‘organic continuity' means the presence of a ‘genial leader'.

The Italian Left in exile around the magazine Bilan continued the work of the Communist Left with the watchword of the times: "Don't betray". The reader will find the details of this period in the ICC pamphlet called La Gauche Communiste  d'Italie (available in French) .

In order to continue its activity during a period much more difficult than the present one, it rejected the method which consisted of turning Lenin into a bible. It gave itself the task of drawing the lessons of the defeat by sifting the experience ‘without censorship or ostracism' (Bilan, no.1). In exile, the Fraction enriched its contributions with the Luxemburgist heritage through, amongst other things, the support of militants in Belgium who rallied to the Italian Left. As the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, it took up the whole work of the Left: by rejecting the defense of national liberation struggles; by putting into question the ‘proletarian' nature of the unions (without ending up with a defini­tive position); by analyzing the degeneration of the Russian revolution, the role of the state and the party. It outlined the historic perspective of the period as a course towards world imperialist war and this was done with such a degree of clarity that it was one of the only organizations to remain faithful to proletarian principles, by denouncing anti-fascism, popular fronts and participation in the defense of ‘Republican' Spain.

The war numerically weakened the Fraction but the ICP completely hides the fact that it did maintain its political activity during the war, as witnessed by the bulletins, leaflets, Conferences and constitution (in 1942) of the French circle of the Communist Left which published Internationalisme. Towards the end of the war, the Fraction excluded one of its leaders, Vercessi, condemning his participation in the Brussels ‘Anti-Fascist Committee', (just as it had excluded the minority which let itself be dragged into the anti-fascist enrolment for the war in Spain). In contrast, the ICP, being formed in Italy in 1943, flirted with the ‘Partisans' and made Appeals for a united class front with the Stalinist CP and the Socialist Party of Italy (see the article ‘The ICP: What it claims to be and what it is', in this issue of the IR).

The formation of the ICP

The International Communist Party of Italy was formed on the basis of a heterogeneous regroupment: it demanded the dissolution of the Fraction, pure and simple, while groups of the ‘Mezziogiorno', who had ambiguous relations with anti fascism, the Trotskyists and even the Stalinist CP, were integrated, albeit with Bordiga's caution, as constitutive groups. Vercessi, and the minority excluded on the question of Spain, were likewise integrated without discussion.

"The new party isn't a political unity but a conglomerate, an addition of currents and tendencies which cannot help but clash. The elimination of one or other current is inevitable. Sooner or later a political and organizational delimitation will impose itself". (Internationalisme, no. 7, February 1946).

Indeed, the Damen tendency split from the Party in 1952, taking the majority of the members and the newspaper Battaglia Comunista and the publication Prometeo.[1]

All the political and theoretical work of the Fraction disappeared so that the ICP could be formed in an immediatist and unprincipled regroupment. The ICP turned its back on the whole heritage of Bilan: on anti-fascism, the decadence of capit­alism, the unions, national liberation, the meaning of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the state in the period of transition. All this heritage the ICP considers ‘deviations' from the ‘invariant' program. For the new ICP the Stalinist parties are ‘reformist'; Russia is a less dangerous imperialism than enemy no.1, US imperialism; the historic decadence of capitalism becomes ‘cyclical and structural crisis'; the theoretical acquisitions of Bilan on the program, are replaced by a return to ‘Leninist tactics'. Thus the ICP helped to take debates in the revolutionary movement back twenty years, to the time of the CI, as though nothing had happened between 1926 and 1945.

While Bilan insisted that a party can only be formed in a period of mounting class struggle, the ICP proclaimed itself the ‘Party', in a period of utter reaction. Thus, they created a ‘tradition' in which anybody can call themselves a ‘party', at any time.

The re-examination of the lessons of the past which Bilan carried out became, in the ICP, the ‘invariant' program, ‘fixed for all time', ‘undiscussed and undiscussable'. Instead of a critical examination of the past, a ‘restored' marxism was created, with an ‘immutable' nature, transformed into a liturgy inside a monolithic structure where only the voice of the master, Bordiga, was permitted to be heard. On the basis of a theoretical regression and an absolute isolation, with the germs of activism and an ambiguity on principles from its birth, with the internal structure of a sect, the ICP could only become sclerotic and paralyzed. What Internationalisme wrote in 1947 has become prophetic:

"More than its political errors, it is its organizational conceptions and its relations with the rest of the class, which make us doubt the possibility of the ICP of Italy correcting itself. The ideas which came to the fore at the end of the revolutionary life of the Bolshevik party and which marked the beginning of its decay: the forbidding of Fractions, the suppression of free expression in the party and in the class, the cult of discipline, the exaltation of the infallible leader, today serve as the very foundations of the ICP in Italy. If it persists on this path, the ICP will not be able to serve the cause of socialism. It is with a full consciousness of the whole gravity of the situation that we cry: ‘Stop there. You must turn back, for the slope here is fatal'." (Internationalisme, ‘Present-Day Problems of the Workers' Movement', August 1947).

Today, the ‘tactical' plan which the ICP searches for like a Holy Grail is only a subterfuge to avoid the real, necessary theoretical and political work.

The reawakening of the class struggle

When the period of reconstruction came to an end with the resurfacing of the crisis of capitalist decadence, when the first wave of class struggle, from the end of the sixties to the mid-seventies took place, marking the end of the period of counter-revolution, the ICP, faithful to the diktat of Bordiga that the crisis would break out in... -- 1975, didn't make the connection. Fixed in its ‘invariant' immobility, it wasn't to be found during the 1968 strikes in France or in Italy in 1969, but it was waiting for "the masses to line up behind its banners". The over­flowing of the unions, the rejection of parliamentarism, and the growing disillusion with the results of ‘national liberation struggles', which these battles produced, found no response within the ICP. It didn't speak to the new generation with the voice of Bilan, and Internation­alisme, but with that of the mistakes of the CI, elevated into dogmas. The total incomprehension of this period is today summed up by the fact that discontented militants reproach the ICP for not having supported the "glorious struggle for national liberation in Vietnam".

This first wave of struggle against the crisis didn't leave sufficiently solid acquisitions to ensure a political stability to the new groups and elements who emerged. The situation had to mature, and revolutionary minorities had to retie the historic thread by working towards political clarification.

In order to ensure the necessary critical reexamination of the past, in order to avoid the dispersion of revolutionary energies, an International Conference of discussion was called for in 1976 with political criteria defining the framework of the Communist Left. The ICC particip­ated in this work with all its strength. The Conferences (see the minutes in the Bulletins of the International Conferences, see the IR nos.16, 17, and 22), like that at Zimmerwald at the time of World War 1, attempted to provide a framework for the decantation which would inevitably be produced within the movement in a period of crisis and upheaval.

In a period of mounting struggles, the possibility and necessity of working towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces is the expression and the spur for a process of unification of the international working class. But for the ICP, the very word ‘regroupment' is blasphemous, for it is already the Party.

For the ICP, we were only the "debris of the revival of the class". The party rejected any idea of a conference of international discussion, considering that between revolutionary groups, it is possible to have relations of force: the "fottenti e fottuti" (crudely speaking, the fuckers and the flicked). Indeed, why discuss when the ICP has already so infused the truth that the militants of the organization mustn't buy the press of other ‘rival' organizations, because that would only give them money!?

"The Party can only grow on its own basis, not through a ‘confrontation' of points of view, but through a clash against others, even those who seem close". (‘On the Road Towards the Compact and Powerful Party of Tomorrow', Programme  Comuniste, no.76)

Today we can see how the ICP has grown on its own basis:

This sectarian attitude isn't the pre­rogative of the ICP. The ex-Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC), the Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (FOR). the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI), all considered these Conferences as a ‘dialogue of the deaf'. You only discuss when you agree! It's more peaceful! Even the PCInt-Battaglia Comunista who put out the first appeal for the Conferences hasn't truly under­stood why they were necessary. For the PCInt, since it is also imbued with Bordigist self-satisfaction, they had to serve as a spring-board towards a "common practical work" in order to respond to the "social democratizations of the CP's" (see the letter of appeal for the 1976 Conference). In order to convince the PCInt to invite other Bordigist parties, this organization had to be pushed, quite hard, and it was only too happy when they turned the invitation down.

But even a beginning of political clarification was too much for the PCInt and the Communist Workers' Organization. They ‘excluded' the ICC at the 3rd Conference because of its disagreements on the question of the party, not after a profound discussion, but a priori, after a maneuver worthy of the most sinister intrigues of a Zinoviev in the degen­erating CI. What a fine school Bord­igism is! Especially if you touch their fetish, the party -- which they alone know how to build, with the results that are now well known. At a recent meeting, called the ‘4th International Conference of the Communist Left', which Battaglia sees as "an indisputable step forward from the preceding conferences" (Batt­aglia Comunista, 10.11.82), Battaglia and the CWO "began to deal with the real problems of the future party" ... with a group of Iranian students who have hardly broken from thirdworldism. After all, everyone has a people to liberate: Programma its Palestinians, Battaglia its Iranians.

But during this period, 1976-1980, the ICP did, despite it all, begin to feel that it was time to ‘move'. Having turned its back on international political clarification, and without a coherent analysis of the new period, the ICP simply swapped its immobility for frenzied activism: two sides of the same coin. Today, seeing the organization in tatters, what does the ICP emphasise? ‘Tactics' once again -- and not only for the national question, but for everything.

The ICP transformed the anti-parliamentarism of the Abstentionist Fraction into a ‘tactic' and then called for participation in elect­ions and referendums. It calls for the defense of ‘democratic rights' for immigrant workers, including the right to vote. Why? So that it can afterwards tell them not to vote? Now we see what happens ‘afterwards'. ‘Anti-narliamentarism' has become purely verbal, separated from any coherence about the historic period of capitalism.

Union ‘tactics', frontist committees, crit­ical support for terrorist groups, like Action Directe in France - it's OK as long as it helps to ‘organize' the masses.

And in Poland, the ICP saw the saboteurs of class autonomy, Solidarnosc and its advisors in the KOR, as the ‘organizers' of the class movement -- the ones who did everything they could to drag the movement onto the terrain of defending the national economy. And the ICP calls for the ‘legalization' of Solidar­nosc, alongside the democratic bourgeoisie!

Not wanting to discuss with the "debris of the class revival", the ICP preferred to recruit from the residues of the decomposi­tion of Maoism. When the ICP played the policeman, the ‘steward' against the ‘fasc­ist danger' at demonstrations of immigrant rent strikers in France -- which in fact meant forbidding the distribution of the revolutionary press -- this was a symbol of its descent down the slippery slope of leftism.

Perspectives

The ICP should have rejected the position of E1 Oumami a long time ago, before this gangrene penetrated the organization. E1 Oumami sings the siren song that lures the ICP towards the coherence of the bourgeoisie. The ICP can no longer take refuge in incoherence and jargon. Patch-up jobs don't last long in the present period. In the first place, the ICP and the whole revolutionary milieu have to recognize clearly that in this epoch internationalism can only mean a total break with all forms of nationalism, an intrans­igent struggle against any national movement, which today can only be a moment in the str­uggle between imperialist powers large or small. Any wavering on this question immed­iately opens a breach to the pressure of bourgeois ideology which will quickly and ineluctably lead a group towards the counter-revolution.

It's not too late for the ICP to draw back, on condition that it has the strength and the resolve to look reality in the face, to re-examine the lessons of the past, to re­view its own origins in a critical manner.

There have been other departures from the ICP over the past year, but we don't know exactly what has become of these militants. In Marseille there survives a circle which says ‘the formal party is dead, only the historic party lives on.' This Bordigist vocabulary isn't very clear to common mort­als: does the ‘historic party' mean the Bordigist program? Marxism? What bal­ance-sheet has to be drawn and why are these elements silent today?

Others left the ICP because of the stifling organizational atmosphere and out of instinct­ive reaction against degeneration. But you have to go further than a mere observation. You have to go to the roots of the disease.

You can't stop half-way, in the belief that you are ‘restoring' a ‘true' Bordigism which doesn't exist, the pure Bordigism ‘of Bord­iga', which never existed. This path leads to the land of small sects, to tinier and tinier ‘Partiti', each one claiming the leg­itimate title, each one ignoring the others. We've seen this with numerous Bordigist splits over the years. Each one claims to be the true ‘leadership' that will guide the working class to paradise.

Political clarification can't come out of patch-up jobs, or out of isolation. It can only be done with and in the revolutionary milieu. The spell of silence has to be broken, by opening up a public debate, in the press, in meetings, to finish with the errors of the past, to ensure that this decantation takes place in a conscious way, to avoid the dispersion and loss of revol­utionary energies. This is the only way to clear the ground for the regroupment of revolutionaries, which will contribute to the unification of the international work­ing class. This is the task of the hour; this is the real lesson of the crisis of the ICP.

JA

---

[1] After the split Bordiga's party became the Partito Communista Internationale. Many ex-members of the Fraction left with Damen and the program of Battaglia Communista (PCInt) in 1952 contained certain important positions of Bilan on the national question, the union question, on Russia. Unfortunately, the thirty years that separate us from the beginnings of Battaglia saw this group get caught up in a process of sclerosis. This can be easily seen by reading its press today and comparing it to the platform of 1952.  

Defensive struggles, revolutionary struggles: the dynamic of the working class

The "Groupe Communiste Internationaliste", formed in 1979 by militants who had just split from the ICC, is a typical illustration of the weakness and difficulties of today's revolutionary milieu. These comrades' ill-considered creation of a ‘tendency' within our organization on an irregular and incoherent basis; their hasty departure, without trying to conduct a debate on principle which would have made it possible to clarify their diver­gences fully, expressed some of the most wide­spread faults in the revolutionary milieu today -- immediatism, voluntarism and sectarianism. Their starting point was, in fact, an impatience with the stagnation of the class struggle in the mid-70s. Disappointed by the proletariat, they took refuge in the Bordigist vision which makes the Party the ‘dens ex machina' of the class movement. In the same way, frustrated by their inability to immediate­ly convince the rest of the organization, they left before even drawing up a document summarizing their disagreements. Rather than under­take serious revolutionary work (which, in a living proletarian organization, also implies defending minority positions) they preferred to abandon themselves to the typically leftist and student delights of multiplying little circles where each individual can indulge him­self whole-heartedly in the petty-bourgeois ambition to be ‘master in his own home'. In a word, to sectarianism.

Following its original trajectory, the GCI has continued a systematic denigration of the ICC, constantly looking for counter-examples to disprove our analyses, constantly deforming our positions rather than taking up a real and fruitful polemic. Moreover, in arguing their basic positions, these comrades have been led to develop vague theories and abstract schemas to which they "adapt" reality. In so doing, they have rapidly abandoned any real under­standing of the working class and its move­ment; they have thrown into the dustbin of history whole chunks of the workers' movement and, in particular, the Second International.

As with many of today's revolutionary groups, this is at the core of the GCI's confusions on a whole series of' problems -- especially on the process of the development of working class consciousness and the role of revolutionary minorities, on the nature and the role of class violence, on the present perspectives for the class struggle and for our period's historic direction -- confusions which prevent it from contributing usefully to the coming battle.

This is what we aim to demonstrate in the following article.

Class consciousness and the role of the Party

The GCI[1] is perfectly aware that, unlike the bourgeois revolutions, the proletarian revolution will be a conscious one:

"The conditions and determinations of the proletarian struggle are thus radically different from those which conditioned the class struggle in the past. For the proletariat, which has no new system of exploitation to impose, the knowledge of its own being in movement (and therefore of its own goal) is necessary to its victory." (La Communiste, No 6, page 3) Unfortunately, while the GCI accepts this general premise, it immediately deforms it by ‘adapting' it to its own vision of class and party, The GCI is firmly anchored in the conviction that only a minority of the proletar­iat can arrive at a clear awareness of the means and ends of the revolution: "to demand that there be a general consciousness, in the sense that all workers are conscious of the objective and the means to achieve it, and of their accumulated experience, is to ask the impossible; the very conditions of exploitat­ion prevent it." (Rupture avec le CCI, page 10) Class consciousness is seen as the prerogative of those ("communist nuclei, groups, fractions, even individuals") who are to make up the world communist party. As for the great mass of workers, it is only later that they will acquire this precious gift, after the seizure of power and during the proletarian dictatorship. The GCI thus finds itself caught in two mutually exclusive affirmations: on the one hand, that "for the proletariat, the knowledge of its own being in movement (and therefore of its own goal) is necessary to its victory," and on the other, that "to demand that there be a general consciousness, in the sense that all workers are conscious ... is to ask the impossible." In the use and distorted meaning it makes of the word "all", the GCI plunges further into the confusion it thinks it is escaping. Do we have to remind them that, for marxism, "all the workers" is not a mere arithmetical sum of individuals? This "all" refers to the class as a social entity, with its own historical dynamic, It refers to the consciousness of the class as a whole, not to the consciousness of each worker as an individual, This difficulty in grasping the concept of the class as a whole, a difficulty common to every kind of petty-bourgeois approach, presents the GCI with an insuperable problem which it ‘gets out of' only by resorting to another old aberration.

How then, according to the GCI, will the proletariat be able to make the revolution? Essentially, this job falls to the party.

This position presents a number of difficult­ies in dealing with more concrete problems. If the workers are no better than unconscious sheep, why should they follow the party, why should they follow revolutionary slogans rather than those of the bourgeoisie? Why did the workers in Germany not follow their parties (KPD, KAPD) when these latter called the March Action in 1921? "There was a putsch because of a lack of preparation (eg the VKPD's overnight changes in position), and errors in appreciating the state of mind of the masses, and the balance of forces between the two antagonistic classes." (Le Communiste No 7, page 16).

What did this preparation (a success in Russia, a failure in Germany) consist of? In the March Action, there was no "serious conspiracy," no "insurrectional plot, no massive insurrection, and still less any weak­ening of the bourgeoisie," (ibid), This is how the GCI ‘gets out of' the difficulty it finds itself in -- by completely eliminating the factor of class consciousness.

The factors determining the victory of the insurrection are reduced: for the party, to a "conspiracy", a "plot", and for the class, to a "massive insurrection". Full stop.

If the GCI eliminates class consciousness so easily from its analysis of revolutionary movements, when they talk about it so much in other texts, this is fundamentally because they do not know what they are talking about, and because they do not understand what class consciousness is.

Class consciousness is the working class' consciousness of its own being, of its per­spectives, and of the methods it adopts for carrying them out. It is not awareness of an object outside the proletariat, but a self-awareness, and is therefore accompanied by a change within the proletariat. Class conscious­ness only exists through a conscious class. The class being conscious does not mean that each worker, taken individually, has this consciousness, but it is a material fact that a conscious class means the class affirming itself through the destruction of the capital­ist system. Any attempt to dissociate class consciousness, the conscious class, and the material destruction of capitalism, is simply to reintroduce the separations and specializations of bourgeois ideology into revolutionary theory.

Collective class consciousness cannot, then, by its very nature, be the property of a minority. The party, or the revolutionary nuclei, does indeed have a theoretical understanding of the problems of the revolution, but they cannot claim to be the exclusive owners of class consciousness.

In fact, the GCI does not see where class con­sciousness comes from, nor how it develops. On the pretext that "action precedes con­sciousness", they refuse to understand that class consciousness is formed in the daily struggles of the class, and from the inevit­able reflection it is obliged to undertake on its own experience. Nor does the GCI see that it is because the proletariat gains in aware­ness that it is able to modify its methods of struggle. The proletariat will not undertake a "massive insurrection" under the pressure of misery alone, as the GCI seems to think. The proletariat will only make the revolution if it knows what it is doing and where it is going.

On this point, the GCI likes to spread the idea that the ICC is, amongst other things, profoundly "democratic". "With its cult of generalized consciousness (which it turns into a fetish before which it falls down on its knees), the ICC has fallen straight back into ‘bourgeois democratic' ideology." (Rupture avecle CCI, page 11). Elsewhere, the GCI affirms that "the minority aspect of class conscious­ness will certainly remain until an advanced stage of the revolutionary process, to be spread to ever-widening sections of workers during the period of dictatorship. The communist revolution is thus mainly undemocratic".

Contrary to what the GCI thinks, the question is not one of ‘minority' or ‘majority' in itself. We have no attachment to scenes of voting mechanisms, of forests of raised hands, of fine majorities carrying the day but are concerned with understanding the conditions that make the revolution possible. Neither the revolution, nor the transformation that follows, will be possible thanks simply to a ‘conscious minority'. The transformation of capitalist society, whose blind forces domin­ate the proletariat, as they do the rest of society, will not be done by decree; it is possible only through the proletariat's conscious and collective action. The guarant­ees of society's transformation are the prolet­ariat's mobilization and its ability to take on complete power. This is why the dictatorship of the proletariat will mean workers' democrac­y; that is to say a real equality, an unprece­dented liberty for the whole working class.

This will also mean the rejection of all violence within the proletariat. While on the subject, we might ask the GCI what they mean concretely when they say that the communist revolution will be anti-democratic even within the proletariat?

The GCI reproaches the ICC just as virulently for our "assemblyism", "formalism" or "general assembly fetishism" -- the exact term varies from day to day -- in brief, the fact that we propagandize, in our general intervention, for particular organizational forms for the workers' struggle: that is, today, general assemblies, strike committees, elected and revocable delegates, which foreshadow the Workers Councils of the revolutionary period ... The GCI argues that since all organizational forms (Councils, strike committees, unions, etc) can be recuperated by the bourgeoisie (which is quite true), the form is therefore unimportant, and all that matters is the content. The GCI has thus developed a schema which obliterates the link between form and content.

We are not attached to an organizational form as such, but to a content: the development of class consciousness through the workers' active participation in the struggle, their collect­ive functioning, the supersession of the separation between ‘economic' and ‘political', the breakdown of the division of workers by sector or by factory. There are not any number of organizations that correspond to this content, and in any case not the trade unions (even if the GCI considers some of them to be "classist"), nor the industrial unions. A political group's lack of clarity on the organizations where the revolutionary dynamic will find its expression is dangerous. The GCI's position on today's struggles' organizational forms has led them to a hopelessly inadequate intervention in relation to Poland. So on the one hand, as they try to prove that "it is impossible to say in advance and outside real life that the ‘class union', ‘council', ‘commune' or ‘soviet' forms have completely exhausted their historical cycle and will no longer appear as expressions of the proletar­ian movement" (Le Communiste, No 4, page 29), so instead of denouncing the free unions, the GCI writes: "These (free unions) can indeed be real workers' organizations, wide, and open to all workers in struggle, coordinating and centralizing the strike committees, but, they may also, under the joint pressure of the authorities and the ‘dissidents' be transformed into organisms of the bourgeois state". (Le Communiste, No 7, page 4.).

On the other hand, the GCI has been content to insist on the movement's massive and centralized character, without bringing themselves to talk about the forms of organization that this presupposes -- general assemblies, elected and revocable delegates -- doubtless because this reality was too ‘democratic' for their taste?

The GCI's silence as to the struggle's organizational forms is all the deeper since, in the final analysis, they are not interested in understanding the movement of the working class. As far as they are con­cerned, it is the party that organizes the class.

The concrete role of the Party

"(Communists) are not opposed to the numerous associations that appear amongst the proletarians, and which struggle for particular objectives (...). They act to raise their level, to generalize their tasks and objectives, to melt them together organically: that is to say, to unite them in one organization, or at least, if this is not possible directly, to centralize them around the most advanced pole". (Rupture avec le CCI, page 8).

The GCI's perfect ideal is the party tending to centralize the whole class -- the function fulfilled by the First International in the 19th century of "organizing and coordinating the workers' forces for the battle that awaits them." (Marx, 1871). The GCI is completely unaware that the revolution of the working class on the one hand, and the change in the historical period on the other, have modified the historic role of revolutionaries:

"In the early days of the workers' movement, the necessity for distinct communist organizations fulfilling a particular function was not felt in an urgent way. The primary task of organization that revolutionaries like Marx gave themselves was to try to make the proletariat, into an organized and autonomous force, by uniting the dispersed class expressions existing at the time. This was the course followed by the First Internation­al which was as much a political party in the strict sense of the term as a general organization of the class (workers' associations and societies, unions, etc). With the Second International, a greater separat­ion was put into operation between, on the one hand, the political party, and on the other, more general organisms such as the unions. However, the immaturity of the burgeoning proletariat and the possibility of waging permanent struggles for reforms, and therefore of creating and keeping alive permanent organizations of struggle (unions), gave a great weight to the ‘organizing' role of revolutionaries. The parties themselves were mass organizations, linked to the unions. This practice was reflected in the ideas that marxists held about their role. In fact, throughout this period, in the absence of decisive revolutionary experiences (the Paris Commune being an isolated event), marxists tended to see the political party as an organism which would more or less progressively organize the majority of the class and which because of this mass nature would be led to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. This con­ception was particularly strengthened during the period of social democracy ....

But after 1905 in Russia, this conception began to break down. The entry of capital­ism into its period of decline, the opening of the epoch of world revolution marked by the first world war, definitively and profoundly changed the conditions of the workers' struggle and therefore equally the characteristics of its organizations. Capital­ism's crisis prevented the survival of permanent struggles, and the mass organizations (unions and parties) were engulfed by the state apparatus. At the same time, the greater maturity of the proletariat led it to launch itself into revolutionary confront­ations and to spontaneously create unitary class organizations abolishing the division between politics and economics; the Workers Councils. The Workers' Councils are "the discovered form of the dictator­ship of the proletariat" (Lenin). In this situation, the real function of revolution­ary organizations became much clearer: revolutionaries, even if they still formed parties, constituted a minority whose impact as ‘organizers' was reduced vis-a-vis the mass of the proletariat in movement. Instead their specific political role of developing class consciousness became crucial for the progress of the revolution...." (quoted from ‘The Necessity and Function of the Party', World Revolution No 55).

In the present period, when the proletariat is tending to launch itself into massive struggles and the workers to organize in their millions, the vision of a party unifying the workers' associations in "one organization" betrays a deep-seated megalomania and anachronism in those who put it forward. The GCI thinks it has found a historical prop for this conception: the KAPD in Germany, from 1920-21, which worked essentially in the ‘Unionen' (AAUD). This organizational form has won its approval for two reasons: first, because the ‘Unionen' were strictly linked to a party and second, because there was a political criterion for membership -- acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So the GCI glorifies the KAPD: "In the KAPD's practice, we cannot but find indications as to the content of the revolutionary movement to come," (Le Communiste No 7, pages 18-19). Blinded by the fact of having finally discover­ed the organizational form they were looking for and a party that created it, the GCI is incapable of appreciating to what extent both the creation of the ‘Unionen' and the KAPD's intervention were in many respects the results of the weakness of the revolut­ionary movement in Germany. The ‘Unionen' were created after the defeat of the Workers' Councils, which the bourgeoisie had succeeded in neutralizing. The political disorientation of the proletariat that followed was reflected in these bodies, which were clearly a withdrawal to the factory and which the workers saw simply as more radical trade unions. This disorientation was also to influence the intervention of revolutionaries: the KAPD's intervention was a voluntarist attempt to rebuild the mass movement thanks to the ‘Unionen'. The KAPD's centralization was only the mirror image of the lack of any real centralization in the class, and of the dispersal of its forces. In the end, the KAPD's putschist attitudes (in the March action) only led to defeat.

Armed with all this ‘historical-theoretical' baggage, the GCI sees its role as being primarily one of "organizing the class" - or at least those elements that will let themselves be organized. Its efforts have come to nothing either because its ‘calls' have met no echo in the groups concerned (eg their call for a "coordination of workers in struggle" in Le Communiste No 2, criticized in International­isme No 35), or because its various committees, set up on an artificial basis and lacking any real internal life, rapidly succumbed to their own contradictions. These disastrous experiences should be enough to show the GCI that this is not the direction for revolutionary work to take today. In the present period, revolut­ionaries must intervene to defend clear perspe­ctives within the general struggles of the class; something the GCI had practically stopped doing, up to the movements in Belgium at the beginning of 1982, being too preoccup­ied with the organization and the activation of their phantom ‘committees'.

The working class

Carried away by their search for "active" and "historic" minorities, the GCI has been led to define the working class in a manner peculiarly their own: "The ICC is unaware that the existence of the working class does not appear in the static numbering of proletarians, nor even in a majority of them, but often in minorities that express the tendency towards the constit­ution of the class," (Rupture avec le CCI, page 3). The GCI has thus developed a completely abstract vision of the working class. A vision which is foreign to Marxism because it simply wipes out the class' economic determinations. Where does this "movement" that they make a criterion for defining the class come from; what is the material motive force for the struggle, if not the proletarians' exploitat­ion?

This is the definition of the working class that has propped up the GCI's intervention which has been progressively centered upon certain sectors of the working class, espec­ially the unemployed, presumably considered likely to break out into motion more rapidly than workers employed in the industrial con­centrations. We can see how far the GCI has gone in its worship of "movement", irrespective of the social forces behind it, in its posit­ion on the Berlin squatters' struggle: "The struggle in Berlin, conducted above all by the youth, is in fact part of the proletariat, because the occupations correspond to an authoritarian satisfaction of a general need of the workers, and because to carry out these occupations, the movement must confront the bourgeois state and call into question the sacred principle of private property," (Action Communiste No 4, page 6).

If the GCI has rejected "static economic determinations" this is the better to glorify a movement on the grounds that it confronts the state, and in the name of purely moral criteria: "authoritarian satisfaction", "sacred principle of private property," etc...

The squatters' movement expresses the dead-end that capitalism has come to, a dead-end which provokes convulsions throughout society.

Nevertheless, such movements do not bear with­in themselves the supersession of this system. Only the working class contains this super­session, and can and must develop its struggles in order to unify all these social revolts. The GCI prefers to give the squatters' movement its own perspectives -- centralizing housing struggles across national frontiers. The GCI's blind attraction for ‘everything that moves' makes them call into question an essential basis of marxism and of the revolutionary struggle: that the working class is today's only revolutionary class.

Class violence

Since the GCI does not understand the working class' ability to organize itself unitarily, and develop its class consciousness, no more does it grasp how the proletariat will be able to beat the bourgeoisie by means of its organized class violence. This leads it into a number of confusions which all have in common the idea that physical confrontations will play a central part in the development of the revolut­ionary perspective. The GCI also defends ‘workers' terrorism' and insists on the need for ‘military preparation' of the insurrection, and for the proletariat to develop a ‘red terror'. Because we do not share these ideas, the GCI accuses us of ‘pacifism' and ‘legalism' - "The ICC has never disengaged itself from social-pacifism," (Rupture avec le CCI, page 14).

The ICC is in no doubt that the permanent struggle between two irremediably antagonistic classes is, and that the revolution will be violent. But the real question is: "What role does violence play in the proletarian revolution?"

To this question, Rosa Luxemburg replied:

"In the previous bourgeois revolutions, it was the bourgeois parties that took charge of the political education and leadership of the revolutionary masses and, moreover, it was simply a matter of overthrowing the old gov­ernment; and so short-lived street fighting on the barricades was the most, appropriate form of revolutionary struggle. Today, the working class has no choice but to educate itself, to unify and to lead itself in the course of the struggle; and so the revolution is directed as much against capitalist exploitation as against, the old state regime. So much so, that the mass strike appears as a natural means of recruiting, organizing and preparing for the revolution the largest possible proletarian strata, as well as being a means for under­mining and destroying the old state, and for limiting capitalist, exploitation (...) What was once the main outward sign of the revolut­ion -- fighting on the barricades and direct confrontation with the forces of the state  -- is in the present Revolution, no more than the culminating point, a phase in the pro­cess of the mass proletarian struggle." (Mass Strike, Party and Unions).

The battles for the proletarian revolution may well be bloodier and more violent than those the bourgeoisie went through in making its revolution. But it is the proletariat's consciousness and its ability to organize that will determine how effective its violence is, and not any ‘military preparation in itself', as the GCI thinks. This is why the proletarian party's essential role in preparing the insurr­ection, as at a more general level, lies in the development of class consciousness.

The GCI's incomprehension of the question of class violence consequently determines certain errors in its intervention. According to the GCI, the working class will have to go through a specific apprenticeship in violence. This leads them to applaud every violent act carried out by isolated groups of workers. "Violence is today an immediate need for every struggle that wants to strike home," (see the article on Longwy-Denain in Le Communiste No 1). And because they are afraid that this might weaken their propaganda for violence, they absolutely refuse to consider that these violent outbursts often combine a real combativity with an equally real lack of perspectives, as in the steel struggles in France or Belgium. The GCI's intervention does not correspond to the real needs of the class.

The working class does not need to learn how to be violent, any more than it needs to learn how to go on strike. The working class produces revolutionary organizations because it needs to understand and analyze the situation, and to trace clear perspectives for its struggles -- not to applaud its more immediately spectacular actions.

In its leaflets, the GCI is constantly advanc­ing slogans such as "illegal restraint of the bosses" or "destruction of stockpiles". And yet the ‘exploits' of rank-and-file unionism (destruction of banks, tax-centers and company headquarters, or illegal restraint of bosses) should be enough to make them understand that these slogans are not in themselves, any more than any others, a sign of the seriousness of the proletariat's autonomous struggle.

An organizing activism, a worship of partial movements, an apology for ‘minorities' and violence in a context where the working class' immaturity has so far left room for illusions on the party ‘leading the class', ‘organizing it', or ‘centralizing its violence' -- these are the factors which have enabled the GCI's intervention to have produced a relative and ephemeral increase in numbers in Belgium. The GCI's foundations are shaky. We have just seen that they are built on a basic miscomprehension of the nature of the working class, of how the class develops its consciousness and of the role of revolutionary organizations and of the party. This is, in fact, an incomprehension of the dynamic of the class struggle.

The dynamic of class struggle

When we leave the realm of definitions and theory, which has become a pure abstraction for the GCI, we can see the full extent of these theoretical errors. The GCI is, in fact, unable to offer any serious analysis of the movement of the class struggle. The main reason is their refusal to take account of the objective conditions, ie the material conditions which determine, within the capital­ist system, a struggle's potential -- or its limits. This idealist approach appears as much in their historical incomprehension (the difference between struggles in capitalism's ascendant and decadent periods) as in their incomprehension of the struggle's development at an international level today.

Rejection of the Second International and the trade unions

The GCI has rapidly rejected the concept that forms the mortar of the ICC's platform -- the division of capitalism into ascendant and decadent periods. To be precise, they have never produced a real critique, preferring to let drop the odd word of this here and there[2]. They also reject the implications of this periodiza­tion for the potential of the workers' struggle. That is to say: in the 19th century, the period of capitalism's expansion, the revolut­ion was not directly on the agenda. In the context of this expansion, the proletarian struggle could culminate in reforms, improve­ments in its conditions, whether on the econ­omic level (reduction in working hours, increase in wages) or on the political (rights of assoc­iation, freedom of meeting and of the press, extension of the right to vote, etc). Over and above these immediate aims it was through these struggles that the proletarians developed their organization, unity and class consciousness; through this experience, the revolutionary struggle was prepared. In this period, the social-democracy and the unions were the organizations that regrouped workers around both the immediate and long-term objectives. A century later, the GCI considers that any reform that capitalism could integrate was anti-proletar­ian to the core: "Following the improvement in working conditions and the rise in wages made possible by the high level of capitalist accumulation, the workers' struggles were, on each occasion, transformed into struggles for reforms (and therefore destroyed as proletar­ian struggles), factors for capitalist expan­sion and ‘progress'," (Le Communiste No 6, page 32). So what should the proletariat fight for? According to the GCI: "our class can only realize one kind of partial conquest; when the workers wrench a reduction in the rate of exploitation from capital's grasp," (Le Commun­iste to No 4, page 14). We have already answered this hopeless absurdity, "Outside its revolut­ionary moments, the workers' struggle has never had the aim of putting an end to the growth of the rate of exploitation, for the very good reason that this would mean the end of capitalist accumulation, and so the end of capitalism itself," (‘Lutte revendicative et Revolution', Internationalisme No 40). This analysis of the GCI's is a good illustration of their approach, which delights in elaborat­ing sterile schemas. Perhaps the reality of the struggle at the end of the 19th century should come into it? It is simply dumped in the dust­bin of history. The proletarian organisations of the time? Social-democracy and the unions are decreed ‘counter-revolutionary', the former from its birth, the latter once they were legalized by the bourgeois state. Quite apart from its political grotesqueness, this example is significant. What the GCI rejects, in fact, is that the working class is not only a revolut­ionary, but also an exploited class. This implies that it struggles firstly for immed­iate objectives (for the improvement or against the deterioration of its living conditions), and that the struggle's revolutionary potent­ial can only be realized in given historical circumstances -- the period of capitalist decadence.

For the GCI, the working class ought to be revolutionary in all historical conditions, and in each particular struggle. They try to ram reality into this schema by affirming in every one of their utterances that the workers' struggle today is "for an increase in wages and unemployment benefits," "for a reduction in working hours," thus attributing to every struggle an offensive character direc­ted against the bourgeoisie on the economic terrain. This vision is, in many respects, profoundly absurd. Even today, when determined struggles of the class contain the question of the Revolution directly within them, every struggle has defensive aspects. It is the resistance to the degradation of its living conditions that pushes the working class to develop its combat to the point where it becomes a revolutionary struggle, when the defensive aspect, while always present, takes second place. The transformation from defensive to revolutionary struggle demands a whole maturation on the part of the working class, its struggle, and its consciousness. The GCI's vision, which only recognizes as ‘struggle' those movements that pose the question of revolution and which see the revolution con­tained directly in every struggle and every factory, is a wholly idealist one.

Internationalization of struggle

The GCI generally ignores the problem of the struggle's generalization. But when it does consider the problem, it always does so incorrectly because it does not understand the material conditions that determine the potent­ial of the present workers' struggles.

The GCI thinks that the revolution is on the agenda in an identical manner throughout the world, with some secondary differences between various countries. For us, the fate of the Revolution will be determined in the central countries of capitalism, where the proletariat is the most concentrated and the most experien­ced -- and where the bourgeoisie is the most highly developed, with all that this implies. This is why we have always placed the resurgence of international class struggle in 1968, when the whole of Europe was shaken by social convulsions. We explicitly reject the theory of the ‘weak link', which sees the Revolution breaking out in those conditions where the bourgeoisie is weak and ill-equipped against the proletariat. We have reaffirmed this posit­ion in trying to understand the perspective opened up by the mass strike in Poland in 1980-81. We have insisted that the development of the struggle in Poland, like the Revolution, was essentially dependent on the proletariat in the central countries of capitalism taking up the struggle.

As far as this question goes, the GCI has up to now demonstrated a hopeless inability to under­stand the dynamic of the class struggle in the present period; what are its important movements? Where, within the international movement of the working class, are we to find the focus of the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat? Etc, etc...

So, on the pretext that there were struggles before 1968, the GCI thinks it's clever to deny the significance of the period opened up in 1968. In the same way, when we analyze Poland as "the most important workers' movement since 1917," the GCI (more to be ‘original' than to offer another analysis) proclaims that "this bombastic and apologetic affirmation really actively forgets (no less!) the important class movements which in recent years have shaken the capitalist world from Latin America to Iran, from Turkey to Korea, and from Italy to China)," (Le Communiste No 13, page 13). The GCI needn't worry, we haven't forgotten these struggles. But not all these movements are of the same importance[3]. It's not a question of judging a movement's characteristics in themselves (from this point of view, the struggle in Latin America has often been more violent and more general than those in Europe), but of seeing how they do or do not integrate into the gener­al dynamic of the world working class, taking account of the maturity of the situation -- on a historical level. From this point of view, Poland, like the 1968 movements in Europe, represents a qualitative step forward for the whole movement and for the consciousness of the world proletariat.

The GCI puts everything on the same level. Worse still, at times it reverses events in order of importance. Thus while "in Poland, the schema of the counter-revolution is unfolding" (after December 13th), "the struggle of the proletariat in El Salvador represents a great step forward in the communist struggle and the formation of the world party." While the first thing they have to say about the defeat in Poland is that it shows fully "the inadequacy that materializes through the absence of a communist leadership," the lesson they draw from E1 Salvador is that "We know from our own class experience that in the present situation in El Salvador (...) in spite of everything, communist minorities exist," (Le Communiste No 12). The totally disproportion­ate importance accorded here to E1 Salvador, and to Latin or Central American struggles in general[4], originates in their worship of violence in the struggle, and of ‘military' confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Their inability to understand that only the struggle in the centre of capitalism can offer a perspective to the workers' combativity in the peripheral countries, and to defend this perspective before the working class, condemns them to the role of admiring spectators of the perpetual massacres there, to becoming the apologists for the isolation of this fraction of the world working class.

In these conditions, it is not surprising that the GCI understands nothing about the problem of the internationalization of the class struggle. "Revolutionary marxism has always analyzed the best way of generalizing a movement, as being neither to ‘invade' other countries, nor to ‘wait' for the movement to break out simul­taneously everywhere (...) On the contrary, the best means of generalizing a movement world­wide is to reply blow for blow against ‘one's own' bourgeoisie, or the direct representatives of the world bourgeoisie; it is to intensify the class struggle as much as possible where it has broken out." (Le Communiste No 13, pages 9-10) -- this was what the GCI had to say in reply to the questions posed by the events in Poland: when and how can such a struggle become international? Once again, the GCI is half right -- and therefore half wrong. Clearly, the best way for workers in a given country to help a movement internationalize is not to wait, but to take action in this direction. But more was needed than these banalities -- and in particular a reply to the following questions: was the situation ripe enough for the movement in Poland to go beyond national frontiers in this way? What objective conditions determine such a situation? Essentially, it is a matter of the proletariat in capitalism's centre setting itself in motion. From this point of view, it was impossible to ignore the immaturi­ty of the international class struggle (see the International Review Nos 24, 25, 26 and lnternat­ionalisme Nos 59 and 60). The GCI seems incapable of situating itself at this level of analysis, and of understanding that the conditions for internationalization are above all world-wide.

The historic course

The GCI's profound lack of confidence in the working class potential prevents them from replying clearly to the question: what direct­ion is society going in? Towards generalized war or class confrontations?

The ICC has pointed out that, since the beginning of the crisis, and contrary to the class' situation in the 1930s, the proletariat has resumed its struggle on a world scale. While war is the only solution the bourgeoisie can propose for the crisis, it cannot be un­leashed as long as the proletariat's resistance remains unbroken on a world level. The future is thus one of class battles which will decide victory of the proletariat (and so of the Revolution) or its defeat (and the possib­ility for the bourgeoisie to unleash war).

The GCI is well aware of the difference between today and the 1930s; they state quite correct­ly that in that period of blackest counter-revolution, the course lay inevitably towards war. But today, for them, the tendencies towards war and towards Revolution are develop­ing simultaneously, each supporting the other.

For example, the GCI writes, on the struggle in Poland: "it is clear that today's events, which materialize the force of our class, dial­ectically strengthen the intensification of the world bourgeoisie's march towards its ‘solution' to the crisis, generalized war. The develop­ment of the proletarian struggle is also a development of anti-working class measures and mystifications, thus strengthening the struggle between classes," (Le Communiste, No 7, page 7).

The GCI's ‘contribution' to marxist theory is to have completed ‘dialectically' the slogan that Lenin addressed to workers during World War 1 - "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war" -- by providing its bourgeois complement. The bourgeoisie is supposed to be able to "transform the danger of civil war into the material and ideological preparation for imperialist war" (Le Communiste No 13, page 13). This hazy new theory ill conceals the GCI's incomprehension and profound mistrust of what the proletarian struggle means in practice. The GCI does not really understand that when the proletariat struggles, it tends to become aware of its own interests, to struggle on its own class terrain, and to organize independently of the bourgeoisie; and that as long as it has this ability, the bourgeoisie will be unable to lead it off to war. The GCI, on the contrary, sees the prol­etariat as a mass, manipulated either by the bourgeoisie or by a party. The bourgeoisie is supposedly capable of confronting the struggle and producing mystifications to take the prol­etariat off its class terrain (where it has its solidarity and its internationalism, struggling at the same time against war and the crisis), into imperialist war (where the proletariat is divided, under the yoke of nationalist war propaganda)! This position leads the GCI into numerous errors: on the theoretical level, they unconcernedly propagate the bourgeois idea that the class struggle increases the danger of war. Their analysis of particular situations is equally incorrect: for instance, their analysis of the Falklands War -- designed in reality to give more weight to the bourgeoisie's ideologi­cal campaigns on the danger of war -- as an inter-imperialist war between the US and the USSR (see The International Review No 30). These incorrect positions can only make their intervention in the working class yet more sterile.

Conclusion

This text is not an exhaustive examination of the GCI's positions. This polemic has essentially tried to clarify a series of confused ideas that still hold sway in the revolutionary movement. In fact, for the GCI as for other groups, the main source of these confusions lies in their incomprehension of the working class' nature, of its real dynamic, and of the different aspects of its struggle. The extent of these confusions is a good demonstration of the revolutionary movement's difficulty in re-appropriating marxist theory. It also brings out the necessity for groups prepared to under­take the work of clarification to answer these confusions, whether in public meetings or in the written press.

In our opinion, the GCI is not among those groups whose existence is an expression of the effort to clarify revolutionary perspectives. Up to now, the GCI's main function in the revolutionary movement (including those ele­ments that it ‘organized' in its committees) has been to spread confusion.

Quite apart from their theoretical regression since leaving the ICC, and the regular outpouring of "historico-theoretical" innovations in their press, this is demonstrated by their attitude towards today's revolutionary milieu. By their refusal to hold public meetings, or to attend those we organize, by their attempt to sabotage the 3rd Conference of Left Communist groups, the GCI up to now has only demonstrated one thing -- its ever-deepening sectarianism.

In fact, the GCI's main concern is its own self-satisfaction, the justification of its existence by an ‘original' vision, as much of the history of the workers' movement as of the problems posed today.

Sadly, these ‘discoveries' of the GCI do not take us far, unless it is to an ever-greater calling into question of marxism. The fact that this group has been promising for three years to produce its "Theses of political orientation defining our group's theoretical bases," (Le Communiste No 1, May 1979), and has still not managed to publish its "theoretical bases" says much about its difficulty in defining itself coherently.

Those, like the GCI, who are constantly quoting Lenin, need reminding that nothing irritated him more than "bombastic, hollow, radical phraseology."

But those who are constantly mouthing their ‘Bolshevism' need reminding of Lenin's reply to a call for ‘Bolshevism on a West-European scale':

"I don't attach much importance to this desire to call oneself ‘Bolshevik', since I know some ‘old Bolsheviks' from whom heaven preserve us ...In my opinion, it shows a frivolity and absolutely inadmissible lack of party spirit to trumpet a new Bolshevism for a whole year, and leave it at that. Isn't it time to think, and to give comrades something which lays out this ‘Bolshevism on a West-European scale' as a coherent whole?" (Lenin, Oeuvres Completes, Tome 23, page 18).

-J‑

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[1] GCI - Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, BP54, Bruxelles 31, 1060 Bruxelles, Belgium.

[2] We learn from the GCI that the notion of "capitalist decadence" defended by the Left Communists on the basis of Luxemburg's economic analysis, was in fact nothing other than "one of the period's (1936) two dominant bourgeois theses (upheld by the social democrats, Trotskyists and Stalinists ....)" (Le Communiste no 6, page 46) - a statement they don't for a minute think of demonstrating! The GCI thinks it can refute the notion of decadence simply by declaring that "capitalism has not stop growing, as can be verified in the sequence of events from the imperialist war of 1939-45 to the infernal growth of capitalism since the war..." (ibid). But this argument shows nothing if not that the GCI has got stuck in the swamp of bourgeois propaganda which tries to use its ‘growth rates' to bludgeon us into belief in the eternal life of capital!

[3] By contrast, what the GCI ignores, or has never learned, is how to determine the repercussions of a particular struggle, and its impact on the development of class struggle world-wide. For them, ‘all cats are grey'.

[4] According to the GCI, ‘class unions' have thus existed in Argentina and Peru, of which, moreover, they are unable to give another example anywhere else in the world. Nor does the GCI hesitate to illustrate the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 by the example of the class struggle in ....Patagonia! (Le Communiste no 5). More recently, the GCI has ‘discovered' that in El Salvador the BPR, a populist organization set up in 1975 and led by leftists, was originally a proletarian body! (Le Communiste no 12).

Introduction

Within the proletarian milieu it is more or less well known that the Bordigist current claim to be a ‘sure, hard party', with a ‘complete and invariant program'.

All the evidence shows that this ‘party' is divided into four or five groups, including the International Communist Party (Programme Communiste), stemming from the same tree -- all claiming to be the only legitimate heir of the Italian Left and the sole incarnation of the ‘historic party' of their dreams. This is probably the only ‘invariance' they all share. On the other hand, the real political positions of this ‘party' at its origins, ie when it was founded in 1943-44 following the collapse of Mussolini's regime in Italy in the middle of World War II, are hardly known, and this is especially true with regard to the majority of the militants in these parties.

In order to lessen this ignorance, we think it is extremely important to republish here one of the first documents of this new party (the Internationalist Communist Party, as it was called), which appeared in the first issue of its paper Prometeo. This document, which deals with a crucial question -- the position of revolutionaries towards an imperialist war and the political forces participating in it will enable every militant to have a precise idea of the clarity and maturity of the political positions which presided over the foundation of this party, and the practical actions which these positions necessarily implied.

What the ICP (Program) claims to be

To make clearer the difference between what it claims to be and what it has been and continues to be, we should begin by recalling what the ICP (Program) claims to be. To do this we shall limit ourselves to a few quotes from an article which saw itself as fundamental, and which still serves as a central reference point: ‘On the Road to the ‘Compact and Powerful' Party of Tomorrow', which appeared in no.76 of Programme Communiste in March 1978.

"Its (the party's) existence isn't attested by the fact that it is ‘finished' rather than being built, but by the fact that it grows like an organism with the cells and structure it had at birth; that it grows and becomes stronger without altering itself, the materials which served to constitute it, with its theoretical links and its organizational skeleton" (p.15).

Leaving aside the Bordigist's pompous style, and with considerable reservations about the affirmation that the ‘theoretical materials' are the sole, exclusive precondition for the proclamation of the party, independent of whether the class struggle is advancing or receding, let's simply look at the idea that the ultimate evolution of an organization largely depends on the pol­itical positions and the coherence it had at the beginning. The ICP (Program) is an excellent illustration of this!

Polemicizing against us, the author of the article finds himself obliged to say some­thing (but once is no mortal sin....) about the positions defended by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left and its enormous theoretical and political contrib­ution in the review Bilan and then in Octobre from the early 30's to 1945[1]:

"To claim today the continuity which the Fraction managed, through a splendid battle, to maintain so firmly... also means understanding the material reasons why the Fraction has also left us, alongside many positive values, number of decrepit elements." (p. 7).

Among other things, these decrepit elements derive from the fact that

"it's not a question of looking for failings in its own theoretical and programmatic weapons, but of rediscov­ering on all the points their strength and power, and of referring to them as to a monolithic bloc and so going forward again....of arriving, with the original weapons to the exclusion of any other, at a complete understanding of the causes of the defeat and of the conditions for a future offensive."

The problem is that the Fraction was impru­dent enough to have made a critique of the positions and orientations of the Communist International. This

"led the Fraction into certain weaknesses, for example, on the national and colonial question, or with regard to Russia, where it sought a different road from the Bol­sheviks in the exercising of the dictator­ship.... and also, in a certain sense, on the question of the Party or the International."

And, further on, Programme cites Bilan to illustrate the heresies of the Fraction: "the left fractions can only transform themselves into a party when the antagonisms between the position of the degenerated party and the position of the proletariat threaten the whole system of class relations."

"Passages of this kind obviously feed to the speculations of those who, like the group Revolution Internationale, theorize today about the inevitable opportunist degeneration of any class party which claims to have constituted itself before the future revolutionary wave and who, while awaiting this wave under the pretext of Bilan, dedicate themselves to a total revision of the founding theses of the International." (p. 9).

The Bordigist party absolutely cannot conceive of the possibility of criticizing, in the light of real experience, positions which have been shown to be false or inadequate. ‘Invariance' doesn't allow it. However, let us note that having doffed his hat to the ‘firmness', the ‘splendid battle', the ‘positive values' of the Fraction, the ICP's spokesman rejects just as ‘firmly' everything that was a real contrib­ution in the work of the Fraction. As for ourselves, the ICC, we openly recognize that the contribution of the Fraction has been a major element in our own development, not only on the question of when the party is constituted, but on many other questions which the article describes as ‘weaknesses'. The ‘monolithic bloc' which the article talks about, besides being a windy phrase, is no less than a regression vis-a--vis the positions of the Fraction, and even of the Communist International.

"What defines even a small nucleus of militants as a party is a clear awareness of the need to win the influence within the class which it only possesses in potential, and the effort devoted to achieving this end not only through propaganda for its program, but through active participation in the struggles and in the forms of collective life of the class; this is what, even today, clearly defines us as a party." (p. 14).

Here is a new definition of the constitution of the party. This time the emphasis is on ‘activism'. We are well acquainted with this kind of activism through the leftists, from the various Trotskyist parties to the Maoists.

The ICP has again and again fallen into this trap, from its foundations during World War II to its active support for the Palestinian camp in Lebanon today, and including part­icipation, alongside the Trotskyists and Maoists, in all kind of phantom committees - soldiers committees, committees for supporting the Sonacotra struggle, immigrants struggles, etc....In all these frenetic activities, it's always less a question of ‘defending the program' than of acting as ‘hewers of wood' in order to ‘win influence in the class'.

But this doesn't stop the ICP from sitting on its paws like a cat and writing:

"Let us say in passing that the Fraction in exile in no way limited itself to ‘theoretical research' but waged a raw practical battle! If it wasn't yet a party but a prelude to it, this wasn't due to any lack of practical activity, but rather to an insufficient; theoretical work." (note p.13).

Let's pass over this ‘insufficient theoret­ical work' of the Fraction. The latter never had the pretension of having the ‘completed program' in its pocket like Programme Communiste does. It modestly saw itself making a contribution to the program in the light of a critical examination of the experience of the first great revolutionary wave and of the counter­revolution which followed. The Fraction certainly lacked the megalomania of Bordigism after World War II, which, without the slightest embarrassment, and without laughing, can write:

"The history of our small movement has shown.... that the party isn't born because and when the class has, under the pressure of material circumstances, rediscovered the necessary road of the class struggle. It is born because and when a necessarily ‘microscopic' circle of militants have reached an under­standing of the causes of the immediate objective situation and an awareness of the conditions for a future revival; because it has found the strength, not to ‘complete' marxism through new theories...but to affirm marxism in its integrality, unchanged and intact; because it has been able to draw up a balance-sheet of the counter‑revolution as a total confirmation of our doctrine in all domains." (p. 10).

"It's because it (the Bordigist current) achieved this (the ‘global balance-sheet of the past') that 25 years later it could constitute itself into an organized critical consciousness, into an active, militant body, into a party.... we shall see later on in what conditions and on what basis, but we can say straight away that it was not carried along by an ascendant movement, but on the contrary preceded it by far." (p. 5).

This basis is defined as:

"...the unitary bloc of the theoretical, programmatic and tactical positions reconstructed by the small, the ‘micro­scopic' party of 1951-52 (?) or of today; and this can only be done within its ranks". (p. 5-6).

Let's take careful note of this conclusion: "it can only be done within its ranks". However, the Party had a regrettable accident along the way, an accident spoken about with some embarrassment:

"In 1949...the Appeal for the International Reorganization of the revolutionary marxist movement was produced. What was being proposed to the small, scattered nuclei of revolutionary workers who wanted to react against the disastrous course of opportunism certainly wasn't a bazaar of all those who wanted to build that rickety edifice called the ‘unity of revolution­ary forces' which everyone talks about. On the contrary what was being proposed was a homogenous method of struggle, based on a rejection of the solutions presented by the groups influenced, if only particularly (sic!) and indirectly (sic!) by the conformism which infests the world -- solutions whose inanity could be confirmed by a ‘doctrinal critique'."

Let's not dwell on all these contortions, which are supposed to explain an orientation which can be seen clearly enough through its title. What's more, this wasn't the first time that the Bordigist party had launched such appeals, and not just to "small, scattered nuclei of revolutionary workers". As we shall see, in the middle of the imperialist war, an appeal was addressed to much more ‘serious' forces, for the constitution of a ‘workers' Front', for the ‘Class Unity of the Proletariat'.

So let's see the party at work as it is and as it was ‘at birth'.

Appeal of the ‘Agitation Committee' of the ICP

(Prometeo no. 1, Apri11945)

The present appeal is addressed by the Agitation Committee of the Internationalist Communist Party to the agitation committees of parties of a proletarian direction and to the union movements in the enterprises in order to give to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat a unity of directives and of organization on the eve of social and political events that are going to revolutionize the Italian and European situation; with this aim, we propose a meeting between the various committees to put forward a common plan.

In order to facilitate such a task, the Agitation Committee of the ICP will briefly state its programmatic viewpoint, which can be regarded as an initial base for discussion.

Why have we judged it opportune to address ourselves to the agitation committees in the factories rather than to the central committees of the various parties?

A panoramic view of the political milieu which has defined itself not only in the anti-fascist struggle but in the more specific struggle of the proletariat has convinced us (and this not just today) that it is impossible to find the minimum common political and ideological denominator to serve as the basis for an agree­ment on revolutionary action. The differ­ent appreciations of the war (its nature and aims), different appreciations of the definition of imperialism, divergences on methods of union, political or military struggle are sufficient proof of this.

On the other hand, we are all agreed that the crisis opened by the war is the most profound and incurable crisis ever to afflict the bourgeois regime; (we also agree) that the fascist regime is finished socially and politically, even if German weapons still bring it some oxygen, and even if we must still wage a hard and bloody struggle to extirpate it from Italian soil; and finally, that the proletariat is the only protagonist of the new history of the world which must arise out of his inhuman conflict.

But the triumph of the proletariat is only possible if it has solved in advance the problem of its unity in organization and in struggle.

And such a unity has not been realized; nor can it ever be realized on the basis of the Committee of National Liberation, which arose for contingent reasons due to the war, which wanted to take up an aspect of the ideological war against fascism and Hitlerism but which was congenitally incapable of posing the questions which could surpass such contingencies. It did not take up the historic demands and objectives of the working class, which in fact have come up against the reasons and aims of the democratic war -- a war which the CNL has instigated and animated. The CNL has thus shown itself unable to unify the mighty forces of labor.

In the face of the war, leaving aside ideo­logical pressures, we can see the represent­atives of high finance, of industrial and agrarian capital, side by side with repre­sentatives of workers' organizations; but who would dare to think of the CNL, which includes people like De Gasperi, Gronchi, Soleri, Gasparotto, Croce, Sforza, acting as the motor of the class struggle and of the assault on bourgeois power.

If the CNL is historically capable of resolving the problems due to the state of urgency within the framework of the bourgeois state, it can in no way be the organ of the proletarian revolution which is the task of the class party, which will have understood the basic needs of the proletariat and will have adhered profoundly to the necessities of the struggle.

But this party will be unable to accomplish its historic mission if it finds the pro­letariat morally and physically divided, discouraged by inane internal struggles, skeptical about its own future.

This is the blocked situation we've seen in all the movements of crisis in recent years. The huge waves of the proletarian revolution have foundered on this reef.

A disunited proletariat can never mount an attack on bourgeois power, and we must have the courage to recognize that at present to the Italian proletariat is disunited and skeptical like the whole European prolet­ariat.

The imperious task of the hour is thus the class unity of the proletariat. The factor­ies and workplaces constitute the natural and historic milieu for the affirmation of this unity. This is the only way the pro­letariat will be able to take advantage of the crisis of capitalism which the war has opened but cannot resolve.

We conclude our appeal by summarizing our thinking in a few points:

1) Because the reasons, final aims, and practices of the war divide the proletariat and its fighting forces, we must oppose the policy that aims to subordinate the class struggle to the war with one that subord­inates the war and all its manifestations to the class struggle;

2) We are for the creation of unitary organs of the proletariat which emanate from the factories and industrial and agricultural enterprises;

3) Such organs will in fact be the united front of all the workers, and the agitation committees will participate democratically within them;

4) All the parties linked to the struggle of the proletariat will have the right to propagandize their ideas and their pro­grams the proletariat will be able to attain political maturity and freely choose the political leadership that will guide it to victory;

5) The struggle of the proletariat, from partial agitations to the armed insurrection, if it is to triumph on a class basis, must develop towards the violent conquest of all the power - the only serious guarantee of victory.         

10 February 1945

Prometeo's comments on the responses to the appeal

We have a response to this appeal from the Agitation Committee of the PDA and the Party of Labor (Milan) who declare themselves unable to take up our proposal, though they would have done in more favorable conditions, because the political line of the PIL, while aiming at the proletarian revolution, doesn't allow it to exercise such and influence over the masses of northern Italy.

Our appeal met with full agreement from the revolutionary unions, who explicitly accept­ed to collaborate in the creation of base organs and who declared themselves fully in agreement with our position on the struggle against the war.

There was also a reply from the Libertarian Communists, who saw the terms of the proposal as being the terrain they themselves were working on, "both from the point of view of the general political situation, the attitude towards the war and the necessity for a class organization of the workers whose objective is the expropriatory revolution through the constitution of workers' councils of management"; and they are satisfied that such a standpoint is shared by the internationalist communist comrades.

On the other hand, it is stupefying to find that the Communist Party of Italy verbally expressed its refusal to answer us, having already expressed its position towards us in its press. Not long afterwards, following a sporadic campaign of denigration against us (accusing us of being fascists in disguise), it put out a paragraph in its review Factory which call us provocateurs, referring directly to our proposal for the constitution of organs of the workers' united front. In March, there followed a circular from the Party's Milan Federa­tion inviting the base organs to "intervene energetically to cleanse...".[2]

Traditionally incapable of answering yes or no, the Socialist Party replied:

"Dear comrades, in response to your appeal, we confirm that our Party is not at all against the fact that your comrades should participate in the Agitation Committees in the factories where your Party has a real presence and that their collaboration takes place in the framework of the general mass struggle, for which the agitation committees have arisen".

Our response to this letter which elegantly eludes the question was as follows:

"Dear comrades, we would have preferred it if your response had been more in conformity with the questions posed in our document, and in this serve more conclusive, thus avoiding a waste of time, especially because the political sit­uation, following the military events, is aggravating more and more and is imp­osing ever-more serious and urgent tasks on the masses and on proletarian parties in particular.

Allow us to draw your attention to two points:

a) our proposal didn't pose the question of adhering to already existing agita­tion committees of this or that party, but was seeking an agreement between the leading organs of such committees in order to concretize a joint plan of action, to resolve in a unitary manner all the problems arising out of the crisis of capitalism.

b) It was implicit that the objective of our initiative wasn't "the general mass struggle" but the creation of organs of proportional representation, on a class terrain and moving towards class objectives.

It goes without saying that such committees can have nothing in common with the committees which have arisen on the basis of CNL, which as you say can't be consid­ered as class organs.

We hope for a more precise response on these points, since the possibility of common work depends on them."

So far, there has been no response.

(Prometeo, no.1, April 1945).

Conclusion

We can save ourselves the bother of a commentary. Such an appeal, addressed to the CP and the SP (living forces of the proletariat, these are!), for the constr­uction of proletarian unity, speaks for itself, and this in spite of the astute tactic which consists of the Party not directly addressing the other parties, but doing so through a phantom ‘Agitation Committee' of the Party, addressed to the ‘agitation committees' of the other parties.

We should add that nothing came out of this appeal (and for good reason!); but it does leave us with a testament, an indic­ation of a party which has "grown with the materials which served to constitute it, with its theoretical limbs and its organizational skeleton".

But it would be imprecise to say that this appeal didn't produce anything. This was its result:

"By following the directives given by our leading organs, under the pressure of events, our comrades -- having pre­ventively warned the masses against premature actions and having repeatedly indicated what objectives (class objectives) they had to reach -‑ united without distinction with the formations working for the destruction of the odious fascist apparatus by participating in the armed struggle and in the arresting of fascists ..." (‘A Panoramic View of the Movement of the Masses in the Factories', Prometeo no.2, 1st May 1945 -- cited by A. Peregralli, in L'Altra Resistanza„ La Dissidenza di Sinistra in Italia 1943-45).

So much for the Party in the north of the country. As for the south, we can cite an example from Calabbrio (Catanzano), where the Bordigist militants grouped around F. Maruca -- a future leader of Damen's group -- remained in the Stalinist party until 1944, when it went over to the ‘Frazione'.

"Maruca affirmed (in 1943) that the victory of the antifascist front was the indispensible historic condition for the proletariat and its party ‘being in a position where they could accomplish their class           mission ". (cited in Peregralli, op cit, p.57).

In conclusion: with regard to the Bordigist party, we can say:

Tell me where you come from and I'll tell you where you're going.

MC

 

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[1] The author talks about the activity of the Fraction from ‘30-40', and is completely silent about its existence and activity between 40 and 45, when it was dissolved. Is this out of simple ignorance or is it to avoid having to make a comparison between the positions defended by the Fraction during the war and those of the ICP formed in 43-44?

[2] Translator's note: the rest of the phrase is unreadable but one can guess its general gist.

Mankind has developed productive forces which if put to good use could in several years time eliminate on this planet all scarcity in food supplies, housing, health services and communication. But today, these forces, this enormous productive potential, is increasingly paralyzed and destroyed by the mechanisms and internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

More and more the world is being deprived of everything as it plunges into a capital­ist crisis of overproduction.

By the end of 1982, unemployment figures in the major industrialized countries had broken all records since World War 2. Moreover, the rate of unemployment is still steadily increasing: a half a million more unemployed in the US in a single month.

The same record-breaking phenomenon and the same accelerating rhythm applies to business failures and countries sliding into financial bankruptcy. Famine is spreading in the underdeveloped zones of the world.

In the Eastern bloc food rationing rivals the worst years of the Second World War. And in the heartland of the most power­ful country in the world, in Detroit, unemployed workers at the end of their funds line up in front of soup kitchens.

At the same time, factories are closing down or working at a steadily decreasing percentage of their capacity (70% in the US; the European steel industry is paralyzed at 50%!). Agricultural surplus is being destroyed and prices of agricult­ural and industrial raw materials are plummeting because there are no buyers.

In terms of future perspectives, governments have now abandoned the rhetoric of “the light at the end of the tunnel” and are now talking about “preparing for years of sacrifice and austerity”.

The reality of the crisis is more and more obvious. ‘Natural’ causes (lack of energy sources or raw materials) are not responsi­ble for blocking the productive machinery: international traders do not know what to do with all the unsold stocks of oil and milk. It is not the lack of manpower either (educated or not): unemployment is hitting illiterate workers, workers with diplomas or without, and university grad­uates.

It is not a lack of technological innovation: the most advanced sectors of modern indust­ry (electronics, computers) which were spared in the early days of the crisis are being hit now. Silicon Valley in California, the world mecca for advanced electronics, is for the first time hit by unemployment. It is not for any lack of ‘good capitalist economic policies’ either; all economic policies are failing. Reagan’s policy promising recovery through spending cuts and a balanced budget has brought neither recovery nor a balanced budget. Production has fallen in the US and the State deficit is at one of the highest points in the history of the country. Mitterand’s policy which, on the other hand, promised recovery through a rise in consumption and an increase in the State deficit has indeed inflated the deficit but industrial production has continued to decline like the workers’ standard of living. Eastern bloc state capitalism is suffocating in the swollen growth of arms production.

With each convulsion of the crisis, one thing comes clearer: the source of the paralysis of the productive forces is to be found in the world social system of production itself.

Once again in less than 50 years, mankind is living through a merciless demonstration that capitalist laws of production are historically played out.

Whether they want to or not, the exploited classes are going to have to face the issues that this bleak and frightening perspective raises.

Can there be a new period of relative ‘economic recovery’ once again as there was after the convulsions of 1967, 1970 or 1974-5? Is a genuinely communist solution to the crisis simply a utopian dream?

Can there be a short or medium-term economic recovery?

First let us see what the experts of western international economic organizations have to say. The Financial Times of November 17, 1982 reported the conclu­sions of the OECD’s Committee on Economic Policy concerning predictions for 1983:

“The secretariat of the organization now doubts that the prediction it made for a 2.5% increase in production in 1983 can be achieved, because of the stagnation in 1982. No growth is to be expected in Europe next year and the Japanese economy will continue its slow-down, partly caused by the agreements on export limitations. The OECD is less optimistic than Washington concerning any solid economic recovery in the US”.

Those who in principle are responsible for the functioning of the capitalist economy see no possibility for recovery in the near future. At most, some of them predict a momentary slow-down in the economic decline of the US and only in the US, just in time for the presidential elections... But judging by the present evolution of the situation even this paltry perspective seems unrealistic.

Some ‘savants’ of the decadent bourgeoisie talk about an eventual economic recovery in the ‘long-term’ but they do not know where or when or how such a recovery could happen.

This lack of any future perspective expresses the impasse of the bourgeoisie; it is forced to deal not only with the growing ineffectiveness of all its economic policies but with the accumulation of difficulties these policies have themselves produced.

As we wrote at the beginning of 1980:

“Not only have the remedies that the governments used to fight the crisis proven increasingly ineffective but the abusive use of these remedies has led to a poisoning of the patient”. (International Review no. 20, ‘The 80s: The Acceleration of the Crisis’).

The financial insolvency of the governments of Mexico, Argentina, Poland, and Zaire is not a problem ‘localized’ in the less-industrialized regions. It sanctions the failure of international capitalist policies founded on generalized deficit-spending, debts and credit.

The media talk a lot about the debts of the less-developed countries. But the estimated 500 billion dollars debt of these countries seems laughable when compared to the debts of the most powerful countries...especially the US. In this strongest industrial metropole of the world, the general econ­omic debt from 1960--1980 multiplied by 5.4! From 1970 to 1980 the American public sector debt went from. 450 billion dollars to 1069 billion dollars; the private sector debt went from 975 billion dollars to 2840 billion dollars!

Today, more and more debts are coming due but the debtors do not have any real means of paying, no more than they had when they first began this policy of massive credits. In this situation no government cares to talk about a genuine recovery.

The Achilles heel, the congenital handicap of capitalism, is that it cannot itself create markets enough to absorb, to buy, all the potential production it is capable of bringing forth. Unlike slave societies of ancient history or feudalism when capitalism becomes historically unable to assume society’s material means of survival, it is not because of any lack in the means of production (capitalism has “too much” in a overproduction crisis) but because there are not enough paying markets.

Decadent capitalism, whose scarcity of markets has led to two world wars, whose subjection of all social life including the most advanced scientific research to the military imperative of “protecting markets” from each other; this sterile and barbarous system thought that credit could be a palliative for the chronic lack of solvent markets, especially since the end of the sixties -- in other words, since the end of the post-war reconstruc­tion.

But the development of credit can only ease the functioning of the economy if it is accompanied from time to time by a corresponding increase in the capacity for real payment of those who have become debtors. Otherwise it merely masks the fundamental problem, delays the payment question and worsens the situation. What we have been seeing in recent years is in fact an increasing acceleration of credit while real production has slowed down and even declined.

Through the use of credit, capitalism has delayed the violent explosion of its contradictions, but it has done only that -- delayed it.

To accomplish this it has paid dearly. It has had to destroy the foundations of one of its most vital instruments, the international monetary system.

Thus, in recent years, capitalism has meticulously, step by step, created the conditions for an economic crisis which combines the characteristics of the 1929 crash with the characteristics of Germany in 1920s, when you needed a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a stamp.

At the end of 1982 the fear of economic collapse due to the growing number of insolvent debtors led to a wave of panic in the financial world. What is the solution they have come up with?

To stampede ahead with more of the same thing: increasing the amount of money in circulation through the International Monetary Fund, the Special Drawing Rights (reportedly 50% more!).

To prevent a financial crash, which would mark capitalism’s inability to counter­balance the lack of solvent markets through credit, through an excess of paper money, capitalism has no other solution but to produce...more paper.

For the capitalists, the problem is less and less “how to bring about a recovery” and more and more “how to avoid an un­controllable collapse”.

This spells the end of illusion for those who believed in the purely “monetary” nature of the crisis or in the explanation of “restructuration”. The real cause of the crisis is at the heart of production relations, in the way the different classes of society work together to produce.

For the workers, capitalism has only one perspective to offer, unemployment, misery, exclusion from society. Less and less able to rule through the strength of the economy, capital rules and will rule more and more through force and terror. It is the language of “austerity”, of unemploy­ment blackmail, of forced sacrifices.

But misery and poverty open no doors to economic recovery; on the contrary, they just further shrink the existing markets. And yet each national capital is forced by international competition to take this road.

Slowly but inexorably the collapse of capitalism is preparing enormous class confrontations. The fate of mankind rests with the outcome of these battles between capital and the world proletariat.

If one day the bourgeoisie succeeds in definitively breaking proletarian resistance and mobilizing workers into a new war, the very existence of the human species will be in question.

But if the workers of the whole world manage to engage an international struggle for the intransigent defense of their class interests, they will open the way to the only possible solution for man­kind -- communism.

Communism is not a utopia; it is the only realistic solution

Because the problem is in the roots of the system, these very roots must be torn out!

Capitalist institutions, capital itself, wage-labor, the market, commodities, nations, have all become living absurdities in terms of the needs and capacities of humanity.

The basis of the laws of capitalism dates back to the end of the Middle Ages. At that time a serf with his work and the work of his whole family could scarcely feed a single member of the nobility. Today an agricultural worker in the US can feed 80 people. But just like the workers of the Renaissance, his income is not determined by his needs, or by the productive possibilities of the society as a whole but by the value of his labor power as a commodity on the market. Just as in the time of the merchants of Venice, capital produces and will always produce only as a function of the needs of its own accumulation.

When for reasons of the market this accum­ulation becomes impossible, capitalist production collapses, whatever the prod­uctive forces society has at its disposal, whatever the needs of mankind.

Humanity will not be able to avoid a violent, world social revolution, completely changing the organization of society from top to bottom.

Factories must be made to function only for the fulfillment of human needs; production must be distributed accord­ing to the needs and possibilities of man, and the market and wage labor must be eliminated. Mankind will have to consciously unify world production -- in a word, create socialism.

The crisis which is only at its beginnings today will by its devastation show that what seems to be a utopian dream right now is in fact the only possible way to escape from nuclear holocaust.

Each day more the economic crisis will place the burden of historical respons­ibility on the shoulders of the world proletariat: either break the chains of the old world or perish with it.

What point has the crisis reached?

Industrial production is at the level of 1973

For the fourth time since the beginning of the crisis at the end of the 60’s, capital is experiencing a fall in industrial growth which following the past pattern will be more profound than each previous fall.

Since 1978 industrial production has declined overall in the major western countries.

At the end of 1982, production fell to the 1973 level in most of these countries: that means to the level of 10 years ago.

Japan is now in its turn feeling the crisis: growth has continually slowed down and the fall will be all the more brutal as in 1974-5.

Unemployment accelerates

The number of unemployed and the proport­ions of unemployed in the active population are at the highest level since the war.

But the rate of unemployment far from slowing down has been speeding up since 1980 at an unprecedented pace.

“The bourgeoisie is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”. (Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party).

 

The crisis is ahead of us

The unemployment rate is still far from the level of the depression in the 30’s. This should not be a “consolation” but an illustration of how far capitalism can go in this crisis if the international proletariat does not have the strength to impose its revolutionary solution.

The explosion of debts

The “solution” adopted, opening the flood gates of credit, is clearly seen in the evolution of the debt of less developed countries (it has increased fivefold in10 years).

But this is only a small part of the global debt of world capitalism.

 

The fall in raw materials

The crisis of overproduction is shown by a fall in demand and in the prices of raw materials especially since 1981.

For the less developed countries which are generally producers of raw materials, this means certain bankruptcy.

The fall in oil prices at a time when the crisis is deepening has destroyed the myth of the ‘oil crisis’.

 

The slowdown of world trade

The growth of world trade, like production, has constantly slowed down since 1977.

In 1982 the growth of international trade fell in absolute terms and faster than the volume of production. This has led to the development of protectionism.

 

Sources: Annual Report of the GATT 1981/2; Newsweek; OECD "Principaux Indicateurs Economiques".

 

Karl Marx died on the 14th March 1883. It is thus 100 years since the workers' movement lost its greatest, theoretician.

The bourgeoisie -- this class that Marx fought un­tiringly all his life and which paid him back in kind -- is preparing to celebrate this centenary in its own way by heaping new mountains of lies over Marx and his work.

Each fraction goes about this in its own way, according to the particular interests it has to defend and its specific place in the apparatus of mystification.

Those for whom Marx was ‘an evil being', a kind of ‘incarnation of wrong' or ‘creature of the devil', have practically disappeared. They are in any case the least dangerous today.

By contrast, there are any number left of those for whom Marx, while ‘always remaining a very intelligent and cultivated man, was nonetheless completely mistaken'; a variation on this lie is the one that says ‘while Marx's analysis was valid in the 19th century, it is now completely out of date'.

However, the most dangerous are not those who reject Marx's work explicitly. Rather, it is those who claim to continue it, whether they belong to the social-democratic, the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, or that we might call the ‘university- -- ‘marxologist' - branch of the ruling class.

At the centenary of Marx's death, we shall see all these fine gentlemen get very agitated, make a lot of noise, speak authoritatively, invading the columns of the press and the television screen. It is thus up to revolutionaries to refute this thickly-woven tissue of lies, to sweep away all these self-interested panegyrics, and so establish the simple truth of plain facts and this, moreover, is the real homage they have to render Marx and his work.

Is Marx out of date?

Marx uncovered the underlying secret of the cap­italist mode of production: the secret of surplus value, appropriated by the capitalists thanks to the unpaid labor of the proletarians. He showed that work impoverished the proletarian instead of enriching him, and that crises become more and more violent because the need for outlets inr­eases while the world market contracts. He took on the job of showing that its own laws drive capitalism to its destruction and create the conditions for, and the necessity of, the communist revolution. Born covered in blood and filth, fed like a cannibal on the proletarians' labor-power, capitalism would leave the scene in a cataclysm.

This is why the bourgeoisie, for a hundred years, has fought the ideas of Marx. Army upon army of ideologues has tried again and again to wipe his thought from the earth. Preachers and learned professors have made a business out of ‘refuting' Marx. Through its schools and universities, the bourgeoisie has kept up a continual barrage of fire against Marx. Within the workers' movement itself, the revisionists attacked Marxism's fund­amental principles in the name of its ‘adaptation' to the new realities of the period (end of the 19th Century). It was, moreover, no accident that Bernstein, the theoretician of revisionism, set himself to attack marxism on two fundamental points:

-- capitalism's supposed discovery of a way to overcome its catastrophic economic crises;

-- the supposed diminution in the exploitation of the working class to the point where it would eventually disappear.

These are the two main ideas that the bourgeoisie has frantically advertised every time that the economic situation has apparently improved to the point of allowing a few crumbs to the working class. This was particularly the case in the re­construction period following the Second World War, where economists and politicians were to be heard announcing the disappearance of crises. Thus, in his book Economics Samuelson (a Nobel prizewinner for economics) exclaimed, "everything is happening today as if the probability of a great crisis - a profound, sharp and durable depression of 1930, 1870 or 1890 - had been reduced to zero." (p. 226)

President Nixon, for his part, confidently declared on his day of inauguration (January 1969) that "we have at last learned to manage a modern economy in such a way as to ensure its continued expansion."

And so, until the beginning of the 1970s, those for whom ‘Marx is out of date' spoke with great authority[1]. Since then, the clamor has died down. Inexorably, the crisis unfolds. All the magic potions prepared by the Nobel prizewinners of different schools have failed and have only mada matters worse. Capitalism is beating all the records: record indebtedness, a record number of bankruptcies, record under-utilization of productive capacity, record unemployment. The specter of the Great Crash of 1929 and the crisis that followed has returned to haunt the bourgeoisie and its appointed professors. Blind optimism has given way to black pessimism or disarray. Some years ago the Nobel prizewinner Samuelson noted sadly "the crisis of economic science" which had shown itself incapable of providing solutions to the crisis. Eighteen months ago, the Nobel prizewinner Friedman confessed that "he no longer understood anything". More recently, the Nobel prizewinner Von Hayek stated that "the Crash is inevitable" and that "there is nothing to be done".

In his postface to the 2nd German edition of Capital, Marx observed that the "general crisis ..., by the universality of its action and the intensity of its effects was to ram the dialectics even into the heads of those scribblers who sprouted like mushrooms" during one of capitalism's prosperous phases. The economists, those scribblers par excellence, are once again going through the same experience: the crisis unleashed today is beginning to make them intell­igent. They are beginning to discover, to their great alarm, that their 'science' is impotent, and that there is "nothing to be done" to rescue their beloved capitalism from the abyss.

Not only is Marx not ‘out of date' today; it needs saying loud and clear that never before have his analyses been so clearly relevant.

The whole history of the 20th Century is an illustration of the validity of Marxism. Two world wars and the crisis of the 1930s proved that capitalism cannot overcome the contradictions of its mode of production. Despite its defeat, the revolutionary upsurge of 1917-23 confirmed that the proletariat is indeed today's only revolutionary class, the only social force capable of overthrowing capitalism, of being the ‘gravedigger' (as the Communist Manifesto put it) of this dying system.

Today's acute and deepening capitalist crisis is sweeping away the illusions sowed by the second post-war reconstruction. The illusion has fallen of an eternally prosperous capitalism, of ‘peace­ful coexistence' between the great imperialist blocs, of a ‘bourgeoisified' working class and ‘the end of the class struggle', the latter demonstrated since May ‘68 by the historic res­urgence of the working class and amply confirmed in particular by the battles in Poland in 1980. Once again, the alternative pointed to by Marx and Engels reappears in all its clarity: "soc­ialism or a fall into barbarism".

The first homage paid to Marx's thought on the centenary of his death thus comes from the very facts of the crisis, the ineluctable aggravations of the convulsions of capitalism, the historic resurgence of the class struggle. What better homage could there be to him who wrote, in 1844: "The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but is a practical question. In prac­tice man must prove the truth, that is, the real­ity and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking." (Theses on Feuerbach)

Marx used against the working class

"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death attempts are made to canonize them, so to speak, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation' of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarizing it and blunting its revolutionary edge." (Lenin, State and Revolution)

These words of Lenin's, written in 1917 against the Social-Democracy and especially against its ‘pope' Karl Kautsky, have since been borne out on a scale their author never dreamed of. He himself was transformed literally after his death into a ‘harmless icon' since his mummy remains a place of pilgrimage to this day.

The degenerating Social-Democracy which passed openly to the bourgeois camp had already done much to ‘emasculate' Marx's thought and empty it of its revolutionary content. While the first offensive against marxism - Bernstein's at the end of the 19th Century -- proposed to ‘revise' this theory, Kautsky's offensive of around 1910 was conducted in the name of ‘marxist orthodoxy'. Through a careful choice of quotations, Marx and Engels were made to say the exact opposite of their real thought. This was the case in partic­ular on the question of the bourgeois state. Kautsky passed in silence over Marx's repeated insistence, after the Paris Commune, of the need to destroy the state and went on to hunt out quotations that might give some credence to the opposite idea. And since revolutionaries, even the greatest, are not immune from ambiguities, or even mistakes, Kautsky succeeded in his aim -- to the profit of the Social-Democracy's reform­ist practice, and to the great loss of the prol­etariat and its struggle.

But the ignominy of the Social-Democracy did not stop at falsifying Marxism. This falsification, after preparing the proletariat's total demobilization in the face of the threat of war, announced Social-Democracy's complete betrayal, its passage body and soul into the bourgeois camp. In the name of ‘marxism' it jumped feet first into the blood and filth of the first imp­erialist war; in the name of ‘marxism' it helped the world bourgeoisie fill the breach opened in capitalism's edifice by the October Revolution; in the name of ‘marxism' in 1919 it coldly order­ed the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Lieb­knecht, and thousands of Spartakists. By usurping Marx's name the Social-Democracy won ministerial portfolios in bourgeois governments, positions as prefects of police or colonial governors. In Marx's name, it undertook to be the executioner of the European proletariat and the colonial populations.

But however abject the debasement of social-dem­ocracy, it was completely surpassed by Stalinism.

The social-democratic falsifications of marxism were nothing beside those of the Stalinists. Never have the bourgeoisie's ideologues been so cynical in deforming the slightest phrase to give it a meaning exactly contrary to its real one.

While internationalism and the total rejection of chauvinism were the cornerstone of both the Oct­ober Revolution and the foundation of the Comm­unist International, it was left to Stalin and his accomplices to invent the monstrous theory of ‘building socialism in one country'. In the name of Marx and Engels, who had written in 1847: "The communist revolution will not be a purely national revolution, it will occur simul­taneously in all the civilized countries .... It is a universal revolution, and so will have a universal terrain" (Principles of Communism) and "The workers have no fatherland" (Communist Man­ifesto) -- in their name, the degenerated Bolsh­eviks and other so-called ‘communist' parties called for ‘the construction of socialism in the USSR', for the defense of the ‘socialist father­land', and later for the defense of the national interest, of flag and fatherland in their res­pective countries. The jingoism of the socialists in 1914 pales by comparison with the stalinist parties' hysterical chauvinism before, during and after the second imperialist butchery -- the "To every man his Bache" and the "Long live eternal France" of L'Humanite (newspaper of the Parti Communiste Francais) in 1944[2].

In the hands of the stalinists, marxism, enemy of religion and a more consistent enemy of the state than anarchism has ever been, has become a state religion and a religion of the state. Marx, who always considered liberty and the state to be incompatible, slavery and the state to be in­dissolubly linked, is used as an ideological knout by the powers that be in Russia and its satellites, and has been turned into a pillar of the repressive police apparatus. Marx, who began his political life in the struggle against religion, which he described as "the opium of the people", is now recited like a catechism by school children in their hundred thousands. In the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx saw as the condition for the emancip­ation of the exploited and the whole of society, the bourgeoisie exercises a brutal reign of terror over millions of proletarians.

After the revolutionary wave that followed the First World War, the working class suffered the most terrible counter-revolution in history. The spearhead of this counter-revolution was the ‘socialist fatherland' and the parties that def­ended it. And this counter-revolution, with its millions of dead in its stalinist concentration camps and in the second imperialist holocaust, was conducted in the name of Marx and in the name of the communist revolution for which he struggled all his life.

Stalinism has repeated tenfold all the ignominies the Social-Democracy could boast of.[3]

Marx: savant or militant?

It has not been enough for the bourgeoisie to transform Marx and marxism into symbols of the counter-revolution. To finish off the job, it has turned marxism into a university discipline, the subject for theses in philosophy, sociology and economics. On the centenary of Marx's death, we can therefore expect plenty of activity alongside the socialists and stalinists from the ‘marxolo­gist' (who are frequently socialists or stalin­ists, moreover). A sinister irony! Marx, who ref­used a university career in order to devote him­self to the revolutionary struggle, is relegated to the ranks of the philosophers, economists and other bourgeois ideologues.

It is true that, in many realms of thought, there is a ‘before' and ‘after' Marx. This is especially true in economics; this discipline was completely transformed by Marx's enormous con­tribution to the comprehension of society's econ­omic laws. But this phenomenon is by no means the same as, for example, the discovery of an import­ant new theory in physics. In the latter case, the discovery forms the point of departure for an advance in knowledge (so the ‘after' Einstein, for instance, constitutes a considerable deepening in the study of the laws of the Universe). By contrast, Marx's discoveries in economics inaugurated, not an advance, but on the contrary an immense regression. The reason for this is very simple. The economists who preceded Marx were the intellectual representatives of a class that incarnated historical progress, of a revolutionary class against feudal society: the bourgeoisie. Despite their inadequacies, Smith and Ricardo could push forward society's know­ledge because they defended a mode of production -- capitalism -- which at the time constituted a progressive step in the evolution of society. Faced with the obscurantism of feudal society, they needed to deploy all the scientific rigor that their epoch made possible.

Marx acknowledged and used the work of the classical economists. His objective, however, was completely different. If he studied the capitalist economy, it was not to try and improve its functioning but to combat it and prepare for its overthrow. This is why he did not write a ‘Political Economy', but a ‘Critique of Political Economy'. And it is precisely because, in study­ing bourgeois society, he did so from the stand­point of its revolutionary overthrow that he was so well able to understand its laws. Only the proletariat, a class which has no interest in the preservation of capitalism, could lay bare its mortal contradictions. If Marx was able to make such progress in understanding the capit­alist economy, this is above all because he was a fighter of the proletarian revolution.

After Marx, any new progress in the understanding of the capitalist economy could only be made with his discoveries as point of departure, and there­fore from the same class standpoint. By contrast, bourgeois political economy, which by its very nature rejects this standpoint, could no longer be anything other than an apologetic, a discipline aimed at justifying capitalism's preservation by whatever argument came to hand, and so inherently unable to understand its real laws. This is why today, even the brightest econ­omists look like cretins.

Marxism is the theory of the proletariat; it can­not be a university discipline. Only a revolutionary militant can be a marxist. This unity of thought and action is precisely one of marx­ism's foundations. It is clearly expressed as early as 1844 in the Theses on Feuerbach, and especially in the last one: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Some have tried to make Marx out as a scholar shut away with his books from the world outside. Nothing could be further from the truth. When, one day, one of his daughters made him play the parlor-game, ‘Confessions', (the answers were pub­lished later by Riazanov) and asked him his idea of happiness, he replied: "struggle". And like any revolutionary militant, the struggle was at the centre of his life.

As early as 1842, before he had yet committed himself to communism, he began his political struggle against, Prussian absolutism on the edit­orial committee, and later as director, of the Rheinische Zeitung. Thereafter, this untiring fighter was expelled from one country to another by the various European authorities until he finally settled in London in August 1849. In the meantime, Marx had taken part directly in the battles of the revolutionary wave that shook all Europe in 1848-49. He took part in these strugg­les at the head of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in which he had invested all his savings. But he made his most important contribution to the proletarian struggle through his role in the Communist League. For this was always Marx's app­roach: unlike some of today's pseudo-marxists, he considered the organization of revolutionaries as an essential instrument of the proletarian struggle. The most famous and the most important text of the workers' movement -- the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in 1847 -- was in fact entitled the Manifesto of the Comm­unist Party and constituted the program of the Communist League, which the two friends had joined a few months previously, after "the elim­ination from the Statutes of everything that fav­ored authoritarian superstition." (Marx).

Just as he played a major role in the development of the Communist League, so he played a leading part in the foundation and life of the First Int­ernational -- in other words, the first great worldwide organization of the proletariat. To him we owe the International's inaugural address and Statutes as well as most of its fundamental texts, in particular the address on the Civil War in France written during the Paris Commune. But this was not his only contribution to the life of the International. In fact, between 1864 and 1872 he was continuously and untiringly active in the International's General Council whose main driv­ing force he was, though without ever taking credit for it. His participation in the life of the International cost him an immense time and energy which he was unable to devote to the com­pletion of his theoretical work, Capital, whose first volume only was published in 1867, the rest being published after his death by Engels. But this was a deliberate choice on his part. He con­sidered his activity as a militant of the Inter­national as fundamental because this was the liv­ing organization of the world working class, the class that in freeing itself would free all hum­anity. As Engels wrote: "Marx's life without the International would have been like a gem-stone without its setting."

In the profundity of his thought, the rigor of his reasoning, the breadth of his learning and his untiring search for new knowledge, Marx indubitably takes on the appearance of a ‘great scholar'. But his discoveries never brought him honors or official titles, nor material advantage. His commitment to the working class' cause, which lent energy to his theoretical work, earned him, on the contrary, the permanent hatred and antagonism of the ‘respectable society' of his time. It also meant that he struggled for most of his life against an extreme material poverty. As his biographer Franz Mehring wrote: "Not only in the poverty of his way of life, but in the total insecurity of his whole existence, Marx shared the lot of the modern proletarian."

But never was he diverted from his fight, neither by adversity, nor even by the cruelest defeats suffered by the proletarian struggle. Quite the reverse. As he himself wrote to Johann Philipp Becker: "... all really well-tempered characters, once they are engaged on the revolutionary path, constantly drain new strength from defeat and become ever more resolute the further the river of history carries them."

To be a marxist today

In all the history of human thought, there has never been a great thinker who has not been involuntarily betrayed by one or other of his disciples. Marx, who even during his lifetime saw his method of analysis of reality transformed into a facile catch-phrase, was not immune from this common fate. He denied in advance all responsibility for the emasculation of his theor­etical method by certain social-democrats. In­stead of a sterile scholasticism, he intended that they should study a society in constant revolution with the help of a method, and not that they should indiscriminately transform everything he said into an unvarying law.

To seek in Marx, solutions ready-made for art­ificial transplantation from a past epoch into a new one is to crystallize a thought that was con­stantly alert and spurred on by the desire to remain a critical weapon. Thus, rather than un­critically accepting everything that comes from Marx, the marxist today must determine exactly what still serves the class struggle and what has ceased to do so. In a series of letters to Sorge (1886-1894), Engels urges him to avoid all big­otry since, in his own words, Marx never claimed to be setting up a rigid theory, an orthodoxy. For us, to reject a so-called ‘invariant' doctrinarism means to reject a contradiction in terms: an eternally true theory, the Word that creates Action and awaits only its catechists to become Action.

This ‘invariance' is nowhere to be found in Marx's work, for it is incapable of distinguishing the transitory from the permanent. No longer corr­esponding to a new situation, it is useless as a method for interpreting reality. Its truth is deceptive, despite its repeated pompous assertions.

"Such ideas are only of interest to a satiated class, that, feels at ease and confirmed in the present situation. They are worthless for a class that struggles and tries to go forward and is necessarily unsatisfied by the situation as it is." (Karl Korsch, At the Heart of the Material­ist Conception)

To be a marxist today does not therefore mean sticking to the letter of everything Marx wrote. This would, moreover, be difficult to the extent that numerous contradictory passages are to be found in Marx's work. Nor is this at all a proof of any incoherence in his thought: on the contr­ary, even his adversaries have always recognized the extraordinary coherence of his thought and method. In fact, it is a sign of the living qual­ity of his thought, of the fact that it was con­stantly alert to reality and historical exper­ience; in the image of the "proletarian revol­utions (which) ... criticize themselves con­stantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts ..." (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) Marx never hesitated to go back on his earlier analyses. Thus he recognized, in the preface to the 1872 German edition of the     Communist Manifesto that "no special stress is ­laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today ... One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz; that, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield for its own purposes'."

This is the approach of real Marxists. It was Lenin's method in 1917 when he fought against the Mensheviks who stuck to the letter of Marx in order to support the bourgeoisie and oppose the proletarian revolution in Russia. It was Luxemburg's in 1906 when she came up against the union bosses who condemned the mass strike on the basis of an 1873 text of Engels written against the anarchists and their myth of the ‘general strike'. It was precisely in the name of marxism that she defended the mass strike as the essential weapon of the proletarian struggle in the new period:

"If, therefore, the Russian revolution makes it indispensable fundamentally to revise the previous marxist view of the mass strike, it is nonetheless the method and general viewpoint of marxism which emerges from it victorious, in a new form." (Mass Strike, Party and Unions)

To be a marxist today means using the "method and general viewpoints of Marxism" in defining the tasks fixed for the proletariat by the new period of capitalism opened up by the First World War: its decadence as a mode of production.[4]

In particular, it means using the same method that led Marx and the First International to encourage the workers' unionization, to denounce all forms of unionism. It means denouncing any participation in Parliament or elections from the same viewpoint as Marx and Engels when they fought against the abstentionism of the anarchists. It means refusing all support to today's so-called ‘national liberation' struggles, using the same method as the Communist League and the International used in understanding the need to support certain of the national struggles of their time. It means rejecting the conception of the mass party in the coming revolution, for the same fundamental reasons that made the First and Second Internationals mass organizations.

To be a marxist today means drawing the lessons from the whole experience of the workers movement, from the successive contributions of the           Communist league, of the First, Second and Third Internationals, and of the left fractions that split from the latter as it degenerated, in order to enrich the proletarian battles that have broken out since 1968 in response to the capitalist crisis and to arm them for the overthrow of capitalism.

RC/FM

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[1] It is important to pint out that the confessed defenders of the capitalist system were not alone in putting forward this idea. During the 1950s and ‘60s a tendency developed in certain groups claiming to defend the communist revolution to call into question the fundamental basis of marxism. Thus the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, led by its ‘great theoretician' Castoriadis (alias Chaulieu-Cardan) built up a theory of the ‘dynamic of capitalist', affirming that Marx was totally mistaken in trying to prove that the system's economic contradictions could not be resolved. Since then, things have fallen into place again: professor Castoriadis has distinguished himself with his ‘left' justification of the Pentagon's war effort by publishing a book that ‘demonstrates' that the USSR has an enormous military advance on the USA (!). Naturally enough, for Castoriadis, his rejection of Marxism has opened wide the doors of the bourgeoisie.

[2] Clearly, this in no way either excuses the crimes of Social-Democracy or diminishes their seriousness. The proletariat has no choice to make between the plague of Social Democracy and the cholera of Stalinism. Both pursue the same goal: the preservation of capitalism, with methods that may vary following the particular characteristics of the countries where they act. What makes Stalinism still more shameful than the Social-Democracy is its extreme position within decadent capitalism, within its evolution towards the historical form of state capitalism and its development of state totalitarianism. In backward countries, where the private bourgeoisie is undeveloped and already senile, this inexorable process of capital demands a particularly brutal political force, capable of the bloody installation of state capitalism. This political force appears, according to country, as a military dictatorship or as Stalinism which not only maintains a bloody repression but claims to be doing so in the name of ‘socialism', ‘communism' or ‘marxism', so beating every record for ignominy and cynicism.

[3] With their modest means, the Trotskyists have fallen into step with their big brothers, Social-Democracy and Stalinism. They invoke Marx and Marxism with an exaggerated vehemence (witness the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, the ‘lambertiste' tendency, launching a fund to republish the biography of Marx written by Franz Mehring) when for more than forty years they have not missed an opportunity to give ‘critical' support to Stalinist ignominies (the Resistance, defense of USSR, glorification of so-called ‘national liberation struggles', support for left governments).

[4] Within the limits of this article, we are unable to go over all the implications of capitalist decadence for the methods of the working class struggle. On this subject, see the ICC's Platform and the article The Proletarian Struggle in Capitalist Decadence, in IR 23.

1. The structure adopted by an organisation of revolutionaries corresponds to the function it takes up within the working class. Since a revolutionary organisation has tasks which apply to all stages of the workers' movement and also has tasks which are more particular to this or that juncture in the movement, there are constant characteristics of the organisation of revolutionaries and characteristics which are more circumstantial, more determined by the historic conditions in which it emerges and develops.

 

Some of these constant characteristics are:

• the existence of a programme valid for the whole organisation. This programme, because it is a synthesis of the experience of the proletariat of which the organisation is a part and because it is produced by a class which doesn't just have an immediate existence but also a historic future;

  • expresses this future by formulating the goals of the class and the way to attain them:

  • gathers together the essential positions which the organisation must defend in the class;

  • serves as a basis for joining the organisation;

• its unitary character - expressing the unity of its programme and of the class which it emanates from. The practical manifestation o~ this unity is the centralisation of its structure.

Some of its more circumstantial characteristics are:

• the greater or lesser scale of the organisation, depending on whether it is a product of the first groupings of the workers' movement (secret societies, sects), or of the stage when workers' parties were in their full development inside capitalist society (mass parties of the Second International) or of the period of direct confrontation with capitalism (the period opened by the revolution of 1917 and the foundation of the Communist International) which imposed on the organisation stricter and narrower criteria for selection.

• the level at which its programmatic and organic unity is most directly manifested: the national level when the working class faced specific tasks within an expanding capitalism in the various countries where the struggle was going on (parties of the Second International); the international level when the proletariat has only one great task to accomplish: the world revolution.

2. The ICC's mode of organisation directly corresponds to these different points:

• organic and programmatic unity on an international scale;

• 'narrow' organisation, with strict criteria for joining.

But this unitary international character is more marked with the ICC than with the organisations which emerged previously in the period of decadence (CI, Left Fractions). This is because there is no organic link with the organisations coming out of the Second International whose country-by-country structure was much more marked. This is why the ICC emerged straight away as an international organisation which subsequently gave rise to further territorial sections, and not as the result of a process of coming together by organisations already constituted on the national level.

This 'positive' result of the break of organic continuity is however counterbalanced by a whole series of weaknesses connected to this break and concerning the understanding of questions of organisation. These weaknesses are not limited to the ICC but concern the whole revolutionary milieu. It is these weaknesses which have manifested themselves once again in the ICC and which have motivated the holding of an international conference and the present text.

3. At the centre of the incomprehensions which plague the ICC is the question of centralism. Centralism is not an optional or abstract principle for the structure of the organisation. It is the concretisation of its unitary character. It expresses the fact that it is one and the same organisation which takes positions and acts within the class. In the various relations between the parts of the organisation and the whole, it's always the whole which takes precedence. In the face of the working class you cannot have political positions or conceptions of intervention which are particular to this or that territorial or local section. These latter must always see themselves as part of a whole. The analyses and positions expressed in the press, leaflets, public meetings discussions with sympathisers, the methods used in our propaganda and in our internal life are those of the organisation as a whole, even if there are disagreements with this or that point in this or that place or with this or that militant, and even if the organisation expresses in public the political debates going on within it. We must absolutely reject the conception according to which this or that part of the organisation can adopt, in front of the organisation or of the working class, the positions or attitudes which it thinks correct instead of those of the organisation which it thinks incorrect. This is because:

• if the organisation is going in the wrong direction, the responsibility of the members who consider that they defend the correct position is not to save themselves in their own little corner, but to wage a struggle within the organisation in order to help put it back in the right direction[1];

• such a conception leads a part of the organisation to arbitrarily impose its own position on the whole organisation with regard to this or that aspect of its work (local or specific).

In a revolutionary organisation the whole is not the sum of the parts. The latter are delegated by the whole organisation to carry out a particular activity (territorial publications, local interventions, etc), and are thus responsible in front of the whole for the mandate they have been given.

4. The highest moment in the unity of the organisation is its International Congress. It is at the International Congress that the programme of the ICC is defined, enriched, or rectified; that its ways of organising and functioning are established, made more precise or modified; that its overall orientations and analyses are adopted; that a balance sheet of its past activities is made and perspectives for future work drawn up. This is why preparation for a Congress must be taken up by the whole organisation with the greatest care and energy. This is why the orientations and decisions of a Congress must serve as a constant point of reference for the whole life of the organisation in the ensuing period.

5. The unity and continuity of the organisation between Congresses is expressed by the existence of central organs nominated by the Congress and responsible to it. It's the central organs which (according to whether they are international or territorial organs) have the responsibility:

• to represent the organisation to the outside world;

• to take positions whenever necessary, on the basis of orientations defined by the Congress;

• to co-ordinate and orientate all the activities of the organisation;

• to watch over the quality of our intervention towards the outside world, especially in the press;

• to animate and stimulate the internal life the organisation, notably by circulating internal discussion bulletins and taking up positions on debates when necessary;

• to manage the financial and material resources of the organisation;

• to carry out all the measures necessary for maintaining the security of the organisation

• to call Congresses.

The central organ is a part of the organisationand as such is responsible to it, when it meets at its Congress. However it's a part whose specificity is that it expresses and represents the whole, and because of this the positions and decisions of the central organ always take precedence over those of other parts of the organisation taken separately.

Contrary to certain conceptions, notably so-called 'Leninist' ones, the central organ is an instrument of the organisation, not the other way round. It's not the summit of a pyramid as in the hierarchical and military view of revolutionary organisation. The organisation is not formed by a central organ plus militants, but is a tight, unified network in which all its component parts overlap and work together. The central organ should rather be seen as the nucleus of the cell which co-ordinates the metabolism of an organic entity.

In this sense the whole organisation is constantly concerned with the activities of its central organs, which have to make regular reports on their activity. Even if it is only at the Congress that they are given their mandate the central organs have to have their ears open all the time to the life of the organisation, to constantly take this life into account.

According to necessities and circumstances, the central organs can designate from amongst themselves sub-commissions which have the responsibility of carrying out the decisions adopted at the plenary meetings of central organs, as well as accomplishing any other task (notably taking up positions) which proves necessary between plenums.

These sub-commissions are responsible to the plenums. On a more general level, the relations between the organisation as a whole and its central organs is the same as that between the central organs and their permanent sub-commissions.

6. This concern for the greatest possible unity within the organisation also applies to the definition of the mechanisms which allow for the taking up of positions and the nomination of central organs. There is no ideal mechanism that will guarantee that the best choice will be made when it comes to taking positions, adopting orientations, and nominating militants for the central organs. However, voting and elections are the best way of ensuring both the unity of the organisation and the widest participation of the whole organisation in its own life.

In general decisions at all levels (Congresses, central organs, local sections) are taken on the basis of a simple majority (when there is no of unanimity). However, certain decisions, which could have a direct repercussion on the unity of the organisation (modification of platform or statutes, integration or exclusion of militants) are taken by a stronger majority than a simple one (three-fifths, three-quarters, etc).

On the other hand, still with the same concern for unity, a minority of the organisation can call for an extraordinary Congress when it becomes a significant minority (for example two-fifths). As a general rule it's up to the Congress to settle essential questions, and the existence of a strong minority demanding that a Congress be held is an indication that there are important problems in the organisation.

Finally, it's clear that the votes only have a meaning if the members who are in a minority carry out the decisions made, decisions which become those of the organisation.

In the nomination of central organs the following three elements have to be taken into account:

• the nature of the tasks which these organs have to carry out;

• the candidates' aptitude with regard to these tasks;

• their capacity to work in a collective living manner.

It's in this sense that you can say that the assembly (Congress or whatever) which elects a central organ is nominating a team; this is why in general, the outgoing central organ puts forward a proposed list of candidates. However it's up to this assembly (and this is also the right of each militant) to put forward other candidates if it thinks this is necessary, and in any case it elects members to central organs on an individual basis. This is the only kind of election which allows the organisation to equip itself with organs which have its maximum confidence.

It is the responsibility of the central organs to apply and defend the decisions and orientations adopted by the Congress which elected it. In this sense it is more opportune if, within the organ, there is a strong proportion of militants who, at the Congress, pronounce themselves in favour of its decisions and orientations. This, however, doesn't mean that only those who defended majority positions at the Congress, positions which then became those of the organisation, can be part of the central organ.

The three criteria defined above remain valid whatever positions defended during the debates by this or that candidate. Neither does this mean that there must be a principle of representation - for example proportional representation - of minority positions within the central organ. This is a typical practice of bourgeois parties, notably social democratic parties whose leadership is made up of representatives of different currents or tendencies in proportion to the votes received at the Congress. Such a way of designating the central organ corresponds to the fact that in a bourgeois organisation the existence of divergences is based on the defence of this or that orientation for managing capitalism, or simply on the defence of the interests of this or that sector of the ruling class or this or that clique, orientations and interests which are maintained on a long term basis and which have to be conciliated by a 'fair' distribution of posts among their representatives. This does not apply to a communist organisation where divergences in no way express the defence of material interests, of personal interests, or those of particular groups, but express a living and dynamic process of clarification of problems posed to the class and Which, as such, can be resolved through the deepening of discussion and in the light of experience. To have a stable, permanent, and proportional representation of the different positions, which appeared on the various points on the agenda of a Congress would thus be to ignore the fact that the members of central organs:

• have as their first responsibility the task of applying the decisions and orientations of the Congress;

• can perfectly easily change their personal positions (in one direction or another) with the evolution of the debate.

7. We should avoid using the terms 'democratic' or 'organic' to describe the centralism of a revolutionary organisation:

• because it takes us no further to a correct understanding of centralism;

• because these terms are themselves bound up with the practices which they described in the past.

Today the idea of 'democratic centralism' (a term we owe to Lenin) is marked by the seal of Stalinism which used it to cover up the process by which any revolutionary life in the parties of the CI were stifled and liquidated. Moreover, Lenin himself bears some responsibility for this in that, at the Tenth congress of the Russian Communist Party (1921), he asked for and won the banning of fractions which he - wrongly, even on a provisional basis - considered to he necessary in the face of the terrible difficulties the revolution was going through. Furthermore the demand for a "real democratic centralism", as practiced in the Bolshevik party, has no sense either, in that:

• certain conceptions defended by Lenin (notably in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back) about the hierarchical and 'military' character of the organisation, conceptions exploited by Stalinism to justify its methods, should be rejected.

• the term 'democratic' is itself not the most appropriate, both etymologically ('power of the people') and because of the meaning it has acquired under capitalism which has turned it into a formalistic fetish used to cover up and justify the bourgeoisie's domination over society.

To a certain extent, the term 'organic' (which we owe to Bordiga) would be more correct in describing the kind of centralism that exists in an organisation of revolutionaries. However the fact that the Bordigist current has used this term to justify a mode of functioning which prevents the organisation as a whole exerting any control over its central organs and over its own life, disqualifies the term and makes it necessary for us to reject it also. For Bordigism, the fact - correct in itself - that a majority is in favour of a position doesn't guarantee that it Is correct, or that the election of central organs is not a perfect device which prevents it from any kind of degeneration, is used to defend a conception of organisation where votes and elections are banned. In this conception the correct positions and the leaders arise 'by themselves' through a so-called organic process, which in practice means giving the 'centre' the job of deciding everything and settling every debate, and leads this 'centre' to align itself behind the positions of a 'historic leader' who has a sort of divine infallibility. Since they are opposed to any kind of religious or mystical spirit, revolutionaries have no intention of replacing the pontiff of Rome with one from Naples or Milan.

Once again voting and elections, however imperfect they may be, are in present conditions still the best way of guaranteeing the maximum unity and life in the organisation.

8. Contrary to the Bordigist standpoint, the organisation of revolutionaries cannot be 'monolithic'. The existence of disagreements within it is an expression of the fact that it is a living organ which does not have fully formed answers which can be immediately applied to the problems arising in the class. Marxism is neither a dogma nor a catechism. It is the theoretical instrument of a class which through its experience and with a view towards its historic future, advances gradually, through ups and downs, towards a self-awareness which is the indispensable precondition for emancipating itself. As in all human thought, the process whereby proletarian consciousness develops is not a linear or mechanical process but a contradictory and critical one: it necessarily presupposes discussion and the confrontation of arguments. In fact, the famous 'monolithism' or 'invariance' of the Bordigists is a decoy (as can be seen in the positions taken up by the Bordigist organisations and their various sections); either the organisation is completely sclerotic and is no longer affected by the life of the class, or it's not monolithic and its positions are not invariant.

9. While the existence of divergences within the organisation is a sign that it is alive, only by respecting a certain number of rules in the discussion of these divergences can we ensure that such discussion is a real contribution to the strengthening of the organisation and to the improvement of the tasks for which the class has engendered it. We can thus enumerate certain of these rules:

• having regular meetings of local sections, and putting on the agenda of these meetings the main questions being discussed in the organisation: in no way must this debate be stifled;

• the widest possible circulation of different contributions within the organisation through the appropriate instruments;

• consequently, the rejection of secret and bilateral correspondence which, far from allowing debate to be more clear, can only obscure it by giving rise to misunderstanding, distrust and a tendency towards the formation of an organisation within the organisation;

• respect by the minority for the indispensable organisational discipline (as we saw in the last point);

• rejection of any disciplinary or administrative measure on the part of the organisation with regard to members who raise disagreements: just as the minority must know how to be a minority inside the organisation, the majority must know how to be a majority, and in particular it must not abuse the fact that its position has become the position of the organisation and annihilate debate in any way, for example, by compelling members of the minority to be spokesmen for positions they don't adhere to;

• the whole organisation is interested in discussion being as wide-ranging and as clear as possible (even when it deals with divergences of principle which can only lead to an organisational separation): it's up to both the minority and the majority to do all they can (obviously without this paralysing or weakening the tasks of the organisation) to convince each other of the validity of their respective analyses, or at least to allow the greatest possible clarity to emerge on the nature and significance of these disagreements.

To the extent that the debates going on in the organisation generally concern the whole proletariat they should be expressed publicly while respecting the following conditions:

• that these debates involve general political questions and that they have matured sufficiently for their publication to be a real contribution to the developments of class consciousness;

• the place given to these debates should not disrupt the general balance of the publications;

• it's the organisation as a whole which decides on and carries out the publication of such contributions, basing such decisions on criteria which apply to any other article in the press: whether it's clearly written, whether it's of interest to the working class as a whole, etc. We must therefore reject the publication of texts outside of the organs responsible for publications, on the 'private' initiative of a certain number of members of the organisation. Similarly, there is no formal 'right' of anyone in the organisation (individual or tendency) to have a text published if the responsible organs don't feel that it is useful or opportune.

10. The divergences which exist within the organisation of revolutionaries can give rise to organised forms of minority positions. While, when such a process gets underway, no administrative measure (such as the banning of such organised forms) can substitute for the most thorough-going discussion, it's equally important that this process is handled in a responsible manner, which implies:

• that this organised form of disagreements is based on a positive and coherent position, not on a heterogeneous collection of points of opposition and of recriminations;

• that the organisation is able to understand the nature of such a process; in particular, that it is able to understand the difference between a tendency and a fraction.

A tendency is above all an expression of the life of the organisation, of the fact that thought never develops in a linear manner but through a contradictory process of discussion and of confrontation of ideas. As such, a tendency is generally destined to be reabsorbed once a question has become sufficiently clear for the whole organisation to put forward a single analysis, either as a result of discussion, or as the result of new elements which confirm one view and refute the other. Furthermore, a tendency develops essentially on points determining the orientation and intervention of the organisation. It is not constituted straight away around points of theoretical analyses. Such a conception of tendencies leads to a weakening of the organisation and a dispersal of militant energies.

A fraction is an expression of the fact that the organisation is in crisis, that a process of degeneration, of capitulation to the dominant ideology, has appeared within it. Contrary to the tendency, which emerges a around differences of orientation on circumstantial questions, the fraction is formed around programmatic differences which can only result either in the bourgeois positions being expunged from the organisation, or in the departure of the communist fraction. Since the fraction expresses a demarcation between two positions which have become incompatible within the organisation, it tends to take on an organised form with its own organs of propaganda.

It's because the organisation of the class is never guaranteed against degeneration that the role of revolutionaries is to constantly struggle against the bourgeois positions which can appear within it. And when they find themselves in a minority in this struggle their task is to organise themselves into a fraction, either to win the whole organisation to communist positions and to exclude the bourgeois positions or, when this struggle has become sterile because the organisation - generally in a period of re-flux - has abandoned the proletarian terrain to constitute a bridge towards the reforging of the class party, which can only emerge in a historic period of rising class struggle.

In all these cases the concern that must guide revolutionaries is one that is valid for the class in general: not to waste the already tiny revolutionary energies that the class possesses; to ensure at all times the maintenance and development of an instrument which is so indispensable and yet so fragile - the organisation of revolutionaries.

11. While the organisation must oppose the use of any administrative or disciplinary measures in the face of disagreements, this doesn't mean that it cannot use these means in any circumstances. On the contrary, it is indispensable that it resorts to measures such as temporary suspension or definitive exclusion when it is faced with attitudes, behaviour, or actions which constitute a danger to the existence of the organisation, to its security and its capacity to carry out its tasks. This applies to behaviour inside the organisation, in militant life, but also concerns behaviour outside the organisation incompatible with belonging to a communist organisation.

Moreover, it is important that the organisation take all the measures necessary to protect itself from attempts at infiltration or destruction by agents of the capitalist state, or by elements who, without being directly manipulated by these organs, behave in a way likely to facilitate their work. When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations.

12. A fundamental precondition for a communist organisation being able to carry out its tasks in the class is a correct understanding of the relations that should exist between the organisation and its militants. This is a particularly difficult question to understand today, given the weight of the organic break with past fractions and of the influence of elements from the student milieu in the revolutionary organisations after 1968. This has allowed the reappearance of one of the ball-and-chains carried by the workers' movement in the 19th century - individualism.

In a general manner, the relations between the militants and the organisation are based on the same principles as those mentioned above concerning the relations between the parts and the whole. More precisely, the following points need to be made on this question:

1. The working class doesn't give rise to revolutionary militants but to revolutionary organisations: there is no direct relationship between the militants and the class. The militants participate in the class struggle in so far as they become members and carry out the tasks of the organisation. They have no particular 'salvation' to gain in front of the class or of history. The only 'salvation' that matters to them is that of the class and of the organisation which it has given rise to.

2. The same relations which exist between a particular organ (group or party) and the class exists between the organisation and the militant. And just as the class does not exist to respond to the needs of the communist organisation, so communist organisations don't exist to resolve the problems of the individual militant. The organisation is not the product of the needs of the militant. One is a militant to the extent that one has understood and adheres to the tasks and functions of the organisation.

3. Following on from this, the division of tasks and of responsibilities within the organisation is not aimed at the 'realisation' of individual militants. Tasks must be divided up in a way that enables the organisation as a whole to function in the optimal way. While the organisation must as much as possible look to the well-being of each of its militants, this is above all because it's in the interest of the organisation that all of its 'cells' are able to carry out their part in the organisation's work. This doesn't mean ignoring the individuality and the problems of the militant; it means that the point of departure, and the point of arrival, is the capacity of the organisation to carry out its tasks in the class struggle.

4. Within the organisation there are no 'noble' tasks and no 'secondary' or 'less noble' tasks. Both the work of theoretical elaboration and the realisation of practical tasks, both the work in central organs and the specific work of local sections, are equally important for the organisation and should not be put in a hierarchical order (it's capitalism which establishes such hierarchies). This is why we must completely reject, as a bourgeois conception, the idea that the nomination of a militant to a central organ is some kind of 'promotion', the granting of an 'honour' or a 'privilege'. The spirit of careerism must be completely banished from the organisation as being totally opposed to the disinterested dedication which is one of the main characteristics of communist militantism.

5. Although there do exist inequalities of ability between individuals and militants, and these are maintained and strengthened by class society, the role of the organisation is not, as the utopian communists thought, to pretend to abolish them. The organisation must try to ensure the maximum development of the political capacities of its militants because this is a preconditions for its own strengthening, but it never poses this in terms of an individual, scholarly formation, nor of an equalisation of everyone's formation.
   The real equality between militants consists in the maximum of what they can give for the life of the orgainsation ("from each according to his means", a quote from St. Simon which Marx adopted). The true 'realisation' of a militant, as a militant, is to do all they can to help the organisation carry out the tasks for which the class has engendered it.

6. All these points imply that the militant does not make a personal 'investment' in the organisation, from which he expects dividends or which he can withdraw when he leaves the organisation. We must therefore reject, as totally alien to the proletariat, any practice of 'recuperating' material or funds from the organisation, even with the aim of setting up another political group.

7. Similarly, "the relations between the militants", while they "necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society...cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goal pursued by revolutionaries, and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism" (ICC Platform).

FOOTNOTES

1. This affirmation isn't only applicable internally; it's mot just aimed at the splits which have taken place (or may take place in the future) in the ICC. Within the proletarian political milieu, we have always defended this position. This was notably the case when the Aberdeen/Edinburgh sections split from the Communist Workers Organisation and when the Nucleo Communista Internationalista broke from Programma Communista. We criticised the hasty nature of these splits based on divergences which didn't seem to be fundamental and which weren't clarified through a rigorous internal debate. As a general rule, the ICC is opposed to unprincipled 'splits' based on secondary differences (even when the militants concerned seek to join the ICC). Any split on secondary differences is in reality the result of a monolithic conception which doesn't tolerate any discussions or divergences within the organisation. This view is typical of a sect.

Unemployment in the 30’s

 

Source: A. Madisson, Economic Growth.

After a terrific acceleration which (especially in the US), gave rise to an explosive social situation, the state’s reflationary policies allowed a reduction of unemployment to below its 1932 level right up to the outbreak of war. Moreover, for a Proletariat still marked by the bloody repression of the revolution, the inauguration of unemploy­ment and various other benefits was the trap that allowed the bourgeoisie to defuse the political bomb of a high unemployment rate in the heart of industrial capitalism.

The State's Role in the Economy during the 30’s

The bourgeoisie defused the social bomb of unemployment thanks to the state’s reflationary pol­icies, The state came to control an ever larger and more dominant part of the national economy -- whether through the war economy in Germany, the New Deal in the US, or the Popular Front’s nationalizations in France. State indebtedness made it possible to delay the effects of the re­emerging crisis. This gave it enough respite to conclude successfully its policy of control over the proletariat in the war behind the illusion of the social state -- national socialist, Stalinist and, above all, the democratic welfare state.

 

Unemployment today

 

Unemployment today is developing differently from that of the great crisis of the 30s. Throughout the 70s there was a slow increase. The beginning of the 80s sees an upsurge with more than 11 million unemployed in the US, 3 million in Britain, 2.5 million in West Germany -- this is the equivalent of the entire working population of Germany, Holland and Belgium put together.

From this point of view, the situation is the opposite of that in the 30s. The crisis is developing on the basis of the exhaustion (expressed in a growing ineffectiveness) of the measures that allowed the bourgeoisie to face up to the crisis of. 1929. Unemployment is developing inexorably and ever more rapidly while social assistance is diminishing. The social situation will become more and more explosive. Employment is not going to increase while investment drops.

Declining Investment

 

The impossibility on an oversaturated market of making any profit from the sale of commodities, the rapid obsolescence and under-utilization of the productive apparatus in the face of bitter competition, pushes the bourgeoisie not only to diminish its industrial investments but also to increase its speculation on the world market, whether on the financial level or in raw materials. Moreover, most investment is concentrated in the search for greater competivity through intensive mechanization and automation -- which inevitably eliminates more jobs than it creates. Even the hypothetical reflation that we hear so much about would only accelerate this tendency. In those conditions, unemployment can only go on rising.

World Indebtedness

The policy of reflation is based on state indebtedness. During the 30s this policy was new and the state was not already heavily in debt; this is no longer the case today. The USA, which was the motive force behind the successive (but unsuccessful) reflations of the 70s, is now heavily in debt on the world market; the combined state and private debt is in the region of 5000 billion dollars. To liquidate this debt would require American workers to work for free for 1.5-2 years.

The policy of austerity which arrived to soak up some of this indebtedness is coming up against the instability of the international monetary system and the difficulty of attacking the living standards of a still combative working class. The colossal American budget deficit ($100 million in 1982, a possible estimated $200 million for the years to come) and the need to help out the Third World to avoid a financial collapse means working the IMF’s financial pump (an increase of 74% in its credits is planned) . The bourgeoisie is obliged to use its printing presses; the Reagan-Thatcher medicine is impotent against this indebtedness and the danger of a new upsurge of inflation -- which is the only “reflation” we can expect.

Inflation has not gone away

In order to justify the deflationary policies of the last few years, the bourgeoisie congratulates itself with having got inflation under control. However, inflation is not only still present but, more importantly, inflationary pressures are appearing more strongly despite the recession as we have seen. The policies of reflation and deflation, austerity, produce the same negative results and demonstrate the bourgeoisie’s inability to confront the crisis.

The policy of reflation renews inflation without preventing the tendency towards recession from getting the upper hand; the policy of deflation plunges the economy into the depression without preventing the development of inflationary tendencies. Despite the fall in inflation observed these last few years, the years to come will see the parallel development of growing inflation and growing unemployment. The working class should have no illusions; all the bourgeoisie’s economic policies are impotent to confront the crisis.

"Proletarian revolutions, like those of the nine­teenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerci­ful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been cre­ated which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out; Hic Rhodus, hic saltar!"[1]

The years of truth, the 1980s, began with a major explosion of the class struggle. The August 1980 mass strike in Poland, clashing with enormous force against the state, showed that the open struggle between the proletariat and the ruling class had become, and would more and more become, the basic characteristic of the coming period. However, the Polish workers found them­selves isolated. Between 1980 and 1982 the number of workers' struggles, in particular in the most industrialized countries, has tended to diminish more and more. How are we to understand this retreat at precisely the time when the world crisis of capitalism is visibly accelerating? What is the perspective for the class struggle?

1968-1982: 15 years of economic crisis and workers' struggles

The proletarian struggle can only be understood by seeing it in its world-wide, historical dim­ension: it's not a mosaic of national movements with no past or future. In order to grasp the present movement of the world class struggle we must first of all situate it in its historic con­text, in particular that of the general movement which began with the breakthrough in 1968.

By understanding the dynamic of the relationship between the classes in these years of the open economic crisis of decadent capitalism, we can draw out perspectives for the class struggle.

1968-1982: Fifteen years of economic crisis and workers' struggles

Concerning this balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, we can broadly speaking distinguish four phases within the 1968-­82 period[2]:

1968-74: development of the class struggle

1975-78: reflux, counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie

1978-80: revival of struggle

1980-82: reflux, counter-offensive

1968-74: The break with half a century of triumphant counter-revolution

The thunderbolt of a ten-million strong strike in France in May-June 1968 opened up a period of proletarian struggles which marked a clear break with 50 years of counter-revolution. Since the mid-‘20s, the workers of the entire world had carried the scars of the crushing of the revol­utionary wave that broke out at the end of the First World War, Stalinism, fascism, anti-Stalinism, anti-fascism, the ideology of national liberation movements, bourgeois democracy -- all this had kept the workers in a state of atomization, of material and ideological subordination, and even of mobilization behind the flags of differ­ent national capitals.

On the eve of 1968, ‘fashionable' thinkers were theorizing the ‘disappearance of the working class' into ‘embourgeoisification' and the so-called ‘consumer society'.

The 1968-75 wave of struggles which, in varying degrees, hit virtually all countries (both dev­eloped and under-developed) was in itself a striking rebuttal of all theorizations about ‘eternal social peace'. And this was by no means its least achievement. From Paris to Cordoba in Argentina, from Gdansk to Detroit, from Shanghai to Lisbon, 1968-75 was the workers' response to the first shocks of the world economic crisis, which capitalism was now sinking into after completing twenty years of post-war reconstruc­tion.

This first great period of struggle posed right away all the problems the proletariat was going to come up against in future years: encapsulation by the unions and the so-called ‘workers' parties', illusions in the possibilities of a new prosper­ity for capitalism or the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy, the national vision of the reality of the class struggle. In short, the difficulty of developing working class autonomy and self-organization against the political forces of the bourgeois state.

But generally speaking, these confrontations did not represent a break with the illusions of a period when the reality of the economic crisis was only just coming to the surface.

For twenty years capitalism had been through a period of relative economic stability. The idea that it was possible to go back to this situation was still predominant, all the more so because in 1972-73 western capitalism was able to come out of the 1970-71 recession by ridding itself of the constraints of a fixed rate of exchange and of convertibility of the dollar. This gave rise to an unprecedented burst of ‘growth'.

Between 1968 and 1974, unemployment grew noticably in many western countries, but it was still at a relatively low level[3]. The attacks suff­ered by the working class in this period took place mainly at the level of consumer prices[4].

Faced with the rising class struggle, the left forces of the bourgeoisie were able to radicalize their language and readapt their structures in order to, in one way or another, keep control of the struggles. The example of the Italian unions during the ‘hot autumn' of 1969 is perhaps one of the most significant and spectacular examples of this: after being violently contested by assem­blies of workers in struggle, they responded by setting up ‘factory councils' composed of deleg­ates from the base, in order to reassert their power in the factories.

This was to prove insufficient as the economic crisis picked up speed again in ‘74-‘75 the bourgeoisie had to impose new sacrifices on the exploited class,, Starting from the still-power­ful illusion of a ‘return to prosperity' (an illusion which still captivated the bourgeoisie itself), it successfully developed the perspect­ive of the ‘left in power'.

Through this first wave of struggles the world proletariat marked its return to the centre-stage of history. But the evolution of the objective situation didn't allow the revolutionary class understand the overall perspective and resolve the problems posed by the struggle.

1975-78: The counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie. The Left in power

The 1974-75 recession, which the press called the ‘oil crisis', marked the beginning of the real effects of the crisis. It brought about profound changes in social life. Restrictions on working class living standards became more and more noticeable. Unemployment rose irreversibly in Europe and, while it diminished momentarily in the USA, it still remained at a high level.

Using the pretext of energy shortages, the bourgeoisie starting talking about restrictions, sacrifices, austerity. It cultivated the illusion that if the crisis was managed by the political parties of the left, by parties ‘close to the workers', the workers' sacrifices would be put to proper use and inequalities would be reduced.

In 1976, left parties had already formed govern­ments in the USA, in Britain, in Germany. In France the left had a growing number of elect­oral victories and developed the theme ‘no strikes -- otherwise we will frighten the popul­ation and prevent the victory of the left'. In Italy, after a number of electoral triumphs, the Italian Communist Party had a share in power through the ‘historic compromise' with the Christian Democrat government. In most countries, the number of strikes went down. Reality, however, began to undermine the old illusions. The econ­omic crisis got deeper and deeper. The electoral victories of the left parties changed nothing. Calls for sacrifices increased, even though it was becoming more and more obvious that they had no effect.

By 1978, the signs already indicated that this period of reflux was over.

1978-80: The second wave of struggles: Poland

At the beginning of 1981, we wrote about this "second wave ... led ... by the American miners in 1978, the French steelworkers at the start of 1979, the Rotterdam dockworkers in autumn ‘79, the British steelworkers at the start of 1980, as well as the Brazilian metalworkers throughout this period. The present movement of the Polish proletariat belongs to this second wave of str­uggles." (The International Dimension of the Workers' Struggle in Poland, IR 24)

The workers' struggles which preceded the ones in Poland were less numerous than those in 1968-74. But when one looks at them as a whole it becomes clear that they summarized in just over a year the essential experiences of the first wave of struggles.

By confronting or even overflowing the unions, like the US miners, by creating in the struggle a form of self-organization independent of the unions, as with the Rotterdam port workers, by trying to take the struggle to the centers of power and to the main concentrations of the class, like the French steelworkers with their ‘march on Paris', by making solidarity the key to their fight like the British steelworkers with their flying pickets; all these battles took up many of the problems of the struggle at the level they had been left at by the clashes in the first wave.

The mass strike in Poland brought practical answers to many of these problems. The mass strike showed the capacity of the proletariat to unite, to fight without regard to differences of category or sector. It demonstrated the workers' capacity for self-organization by creating assemblies and committees of delegates on a scale never reached during the first wave. Above all, it illustrated concretely how by unifying, generalizing and organizing its struggles the proletariat could form itself into a power capable of standing up to and even pushing back the most totalitarian of governments.

But by developing this force, by throwing the national government (and with it the entire Russian military bloc) into disarray, the proletariat found itself at a higher level of confrontation with the state. Not since the 192Os had the working class imposed such a political balance of forces on the bourgeoisie.

The struggles in Poland showed clearly that when the confrontation between the classes has reached this level, things no longer operate at a purely national level. The bourgeoisie confronted the Polish proletariat with all the economic, military and ideological forces it possesses on an international scale. Even if the workers weren't always aware of this, they were still faced head-on with the real consequences of their own power: if they were to, in their turn, answer the bourg­eoisie's riposte, if they were going to take their struggle forward -- the only alternative to retreating -- they would have to proceed to the international generalization of the proletarian struggle.

This generalization was indispensable not only for the obvious military and economic reasons but above all because it was a precondition for the development of the consciousness of the Pol­ish workers themselves.

The workers in Poland were still prisoners of two major mystifications: nationalism and illus­ions in bourgeois democracy (the fight for a legal union, etc). Only a massive struggle by the workers of the other eastern countries, and above all of the main industrialized countries of the west, could have given the Polish workers a practical demonstration of the possibility of an international unification of the proletariat; and thus aided them to break out of a national perspective and to understand the divisive, anti-proletarian character of any nationalist ideology and the illusory, dictatorial nature of bourgeois ‘democracy' with its western-style unions and parliaments.

Like its material being, the consciousness of the proletariat has a world-wide reality. It cannot develop independently in one single country. The Polish workers could only pose the problem of international generalization in an objective manner. Only the proletariat of other industrialized countries, in particular of Western Europe, could have responded in practice. This was the principal lesson of the proletarian movement in Poland.

1980-82: The new bourgeoisie counter-offensive: the Left in opposition. Retreat in the workers' struggle

When the mass strike broke out in Poland in Aug­ust 1980, the western bourgeoisie had already begun its counter-offensive against the new wave of struggles. It had begun to reorganize the line-up of its political forces. Priority was given to strengthening its apparatus for con­trolling the proletariat on the terrain of the factory and the street. As illusions crumbled, left governments gave way to right-wing govern­ments which spoke a ‘frank', firm, threatening language. Thatcher and Reagan became the sym­bols of this new language. The parties of the left went back into the opposition in order to safeguard their function of controlling prol­etarian movements, putting themselves at the head of struggles and keeping them within the stifling logic of the ‘national interest'.

The way the world bourgeoisie faced up to the struggles of the workers in Poland, the international campaigns it waged to hide the real significance of these struggles, show the essential characteristics of this counter-off­ensive.

In Poland itself we saw the construction of the apparatus of Solidarnosc with the collaboration, financial support and sage advice of all the unions of the US bloc, supported by their govern­ments. This left in opposition ‘a la Polonnaise' exploited the ‘anti-Russian' feelings of the pop­ulation in order to imprison the workers in a nationalist view of their struggle. It became systematic in derailing workers' struggles against poverty and increased exploitation into battles for a ‘democratic Poland'. It became ad­ept in maintaining order and openly sabotaging strikes in the name of the national economy and social peace (cf Bydgoszcz) without losing too much credibility. It was able to do this:

-- thanks to the development of a radical wing of the unions, capable of putting itself at the head of movements which opposed the union lead­ership, and thus of keeping such movements in a trade unionist framework;

-- thanks to the government's ‘anti-Solidarnosc' line, which always meant that Solidarnosc could appear as a victim and a martyr.

Complementarily and a division of labor between government and opposition in order to deal with the proletariat; complementarily and a division of labor within the forces of the left, between a ‘moderate' leadership and a ‘radical' union and political base: Poland was a living laboratory for the bourgeoisie's counter-offensive.

The way the bourgeoisie confronted the struggles of the Belgian steelworkers at the beginning of 1982, and those of the Italian workers in January 1983, was almost like a schematic carica­ture of what it had done in Poland: the government moves to the right and acts tough, the left in opposition radicalizes its language using rank and file unionism to control movements which tend to question the union prison.

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

On the international level, the campaign organized by the western bourgeoisie around Poland is a typical example of the series of ideological campaigns which is being orchestrated on an international level and which has the conscious objective of disorientating and demoralizing the working class[5].

In order to disfigure the example of the Polish workers' response to the world economic crisis, in order to counteract the tendency for the wor­kers of the whole world to recognize themselves in the combativity of the Polish workers, the western bourgeoisie (with the explicit collabor­ation of the bourgeoisie of the east) used every­thing from the ‘Reagan show' to the Pope to put across its message: ‘the struggle of the Polish workers has nothing to do with your situation; its aim is to be able to live like we do in the west'. Walesa was made an international star so that he could say to workers in the west: ‘we're not fighting to abolish exploitation but so that we can have a regime like yours'.

The imposition of martial law on 13th December was the first result of this counter-offensive. The ensuing campaigns aimed at spreading confus­ion and fear -- over E1 Salvador, the Falklands, terrorism, the war in the Lebanon -- helped to prolong and extend its effects on workers' com­bativity.

This counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie at the beginning of the ‘80s hasn't just been an ideo­logical one. Bureaucratic and police repression has advanced in a spectacular way. All the gov­ernments have set up various kinds of ‘anti-riot' brigades, and there has been increased inter­national cooperation amongst the police to deal with those who threaten the ‘security' of the state.

But the worst form of repression hitting the workers is none other than the effects of the economic crisis itself: hours of queuing outside shops, and the jungle of the black market in the eastern bloc; in the west, the misery of unem­ployment and the threat of losing your job for those still working.

The violent acceleration of the crisis between 1980 and 1982 has meant, in concrete terms, a reinforcement of everything that keeps the wor­kers atomized and in competition with one another. In this initial period the world bourgeoisie has been able to exploit this to its advantage.

In the main western countries, the number of strikes fell sharply in 1980. In 1981, in countries as important for the class struggle as the US, Germany, Britain, France and Italy, the num­ber of strikes was either the lowest or one of the lowest for over ten years.

As in the mid-70s, the bourgeoisie has managed to erect a dam against the rising flood of class combativity.

But the dams of the bourgeoisie are made with un­stable materials, and the floods they are supp­osed to hold back have their origins in the most profound historic needs of humanity.

The objective and subjective factors which the most recent counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie has been based upon are being worn out as the economic system disintegrates at a faster and faster rate.

Perspective: towards the end of the retreat

Speaking very generally, the bourgeoisie -- like all exploiting classes in history -- has ensured its power:

a) through the capacity of its economic system to provide the exploited, producer class with the minimum required for its subsistence;

b) through its ideological domination;

c) through repression.

But when the economic base begins to collapse and the historic obsolescence of its relations of production becomes clearer with each passing day, the material underpinnings of the ideological power of the ruling class disappear. In such con­ditions, simple repression to maintain ‘order' and profitability is revealed more and more as the barbaric defense of the privileges of a min­ority.

This has been the general tendency since the beg­inning of the crisis which opened up at the end of the ‘60s, and it has accelerated considerably since the beginning of the ‘80s.

The conditions that have determined the present retreat in the class struggle are bound to crumble, because the overall tendency today is not towards a greater unity between bourgeoisie and proletariat but on the contrary towards the exacerbation of the antagonisms between the two main classes in society.

In fifteen years the contradictions and tensions provoked by the crisis of decadent capitalism have sharpened more and more: the contradictions between the necessity and possibility of the dev­elopment of the productive forces on the one hand, and the laws and social institutions which constrain the use of these forces on the other; the contradiction between the concrete reality of a decomposing, ruined society, and the domin­ant ideology which continues to sing its praises; the contradiction between the interests of the immense majority of the population, who are sub­jected to increasing poverty, and those of the minority who manage and profit from capital; the contradiction between the objective necessity for the world communist revolution and the strength­ening of capitalist repression.

Before 1968 the bourgeoisie could make people believe that capitalism had become an eternal system without economic crises; in 1975-78 it could still put out the idea that the crisis was only temporary and could be overcome by economies in oil and the restructuring of ind­ustry; at the end of the ‘70s it could develop the line that by ‘working more and earning less' the workers would help to keep unemployment down. But today reality is making it clearer and clearer that all these are simply myths whose function is to safeguard the system.

It's the same with the mystifications which have weighed on the world proletariat for decades, especially during the crisis in the ‘30s: the ‘working class' nature of the eastern bloc reg­imes (the struggles in Poland played a decisive part in destroying this lie); the ‘progressive' character of national liberation struggles; the capacity of electoral mechanisms and of the ‘workers' parties to prevent the intensification of exploitation and poverty; the myth of the benevolent state.

As a result of all this, the effectiveness of the great ideological campaigns of the world bourgeoisie has become more and more precarious. The workers believe less and less in the ideological values which justify the capitalist system.

How does this affect the workers' struggle itself?

Whether we're talking about the weakening of the proletariat in Poland, which was caught up in the impasse of nationalism and of illusions in west­ern-style democracy, or about the isolation of the Belgian steelworkers' struggle at the begin­ning of 1982, or about the inability to unite the movements of the class in Italy at the beginning of 1983, the reality of the class struggle shows clearly that the workers' struggle in the years to come will be faced with two basic and inter­dependent problems:

a) the necessity to generalize the struggle;

b) the necessity not to allow the struggle to be led by the forces of the left of capital that work inside the class: the question of self‑organization.

Generalization

In August 1980, the Polish workers demonstrated in practice two essential truths of the workers' struggle:

-- the working class can generalize the struggle by itself without recourse to any union apparatus;

-- only the power given by generalization can push back the might of the state.

The international isolation of the movement in Poland for over a year also showed that the wor­kers' struggle can only develop its real potent­ial if it generalizes across national frontiers.

In this sense, the perspective drawn up at the beginning of the ‘80s by the struggles in Poland is that of generalization on an international scale.

This perspective depends fundamentally on the action of the proletariat of Western Europe, because of its number, its power, its experience .... and the fact that it is divided up into a multitude of small nations. This isn't something that's going to happen overnight. Generalization on this scale will inevitably be preceded by a whole series of struggles on a local, ‘national' scale: only such experiences will demonstrate, in practice, the vital, indispensable need for international generalization.

The recent struggles in Belgium and Italy both showed spontaneous tendencies towards generalization. In effect, the European proletariat is preparing itself to follow the party opened up in August 1980. But to do this it still has to gain its own experiences of struggle.

The more it enters upon this path the more it will find itself up against a wall of mystifications that has been built systematically by the union organizations and the political for­ces of the bourgeois left.

The Left inside the workers' ranks

The movements in Poland in 1981 and in Belgium in 1982 illustrate concretely how the radical forces of the bourgeois left can divert a push towards generalization and lead it into an impasse.

When the state of siege was declared in Poland, the consequences of international isolation app­eared in all their naked violence. The necessity to appeal to workers of other countries emerged as a crucial question. Solidarnosc and its rad­ical forces were able to derail this necessity into appeals to the bourgeois governments of the west (cf the banners displayed in December 1981 in the shipyards of Szetzin).

In Belgium, in the assemblies of steelworkers in different towns, more and more criticisms were being made of the union leadership, and there was a real push towards direct unification and generalization of the struggle. But the radical tendencies in the unions were able to nut them­selves at the head of these movements and channel them into ‘united' actions under the control of the central union machinery and carefully isol­ated from all the other sectors of the working class.

Until its final emancipation, the proletariat will have these skilful forces of the ruling class within its own ranks. But, pushed by the necessity to react against the attacks of the system in crisis, the class will learn to fight them and destroy them in the same way as it learns anything else: through the experience of the struggle.

There will certainly have to be many partial battles and temporary defeats before the class is fully able to take things in its own hands and move towards generalization. It's a process that is taking place on a world level and in it, as Marx said, the workers will constantly "return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again."

Towards the revival of the struggle

Hesitations and momentary retreats are inevitable in the development of the struggle of an exploit­ed class. What has to be understood is that, through its ups and downs, the general tendency of the struggle over the past fifteen years -- a tendency strengthened at the beginning of the ‘80s -- is towards a break with the dominant ideo­logy, towards more numerous and violent clashes with the left of capital, towards the generalization of the fight.

The worst of the economic crisis is still in front of us. Its effects, the attacks it will provoke on the world working class, are going to get more and more intense, forcing the workers to raise their struggle onto a higher, more global level.

Unemployment, the main effect of the crisis, which hits the workers as one of the worst forms of repression (whether directly or in the shape of a threat) , can momentarily hold back the struggle. By making the workers compete with each other for jobs, it can make the unification of the proletariat more difficult. But it cannot prevent it. On the contrary: the struggle against lay-offs, against the living conditions of the unemployed, will constitute one of the main starting-points of coming workers' struggles. What can, in an initial period, act as a barrier will be transformed into a factor of accelera­tion, compelling the workers, employed and un­employed, to see their struggle in an increas­ingly general manner, to more and more take on the political, social and revolutionary content of their struggle.

The very gravity and breadth of the system's crisis will -- to cite Marx again -- force the workers to "shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions them­selves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!"           RV

---

[1] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. "Rhodes is here. Leap here and now" is a Latin proverb inspired by a fable of Aestop. Its meaning is: the time has come to show that you're capable of.

[2] It's not always easy to determine precisely periods in history. There is no strict simultaneity in the social crisis in all countries. according to economic development, geographical factors, the political conditions in this or that part of the globe, the general international tendencies of the class struggle manifest themselves more or less rapidly and with more or less breadth and intensity. In this sense, to say that ‘this year marked the end of the period of retreat and the beginnings of a class resurgence' doesn't mean that in the year in question all the workers of the world broke out of their atomization and entered into struggle. The point is to determine the reference points which indicate the general tendencies of the world movement. Moreover, the life of the class struggle in the most concentrated and experienced forces of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie, inevitably has a preponderant place in determining such periods.

[3] The average rate of unemployment in industrialized countries of the western bloc was around 3% at the end of the ‘60s (now it's over 10%). In 1974 it only grew by one or two points. In 1975, the blackest year of '74-'75 recession, it averaged around 5%.

[4] Between 1968 and 1975 inflation, measured by the indices of consumer prices, went from 4.2% to 9.1% in the USA, from 5.3% to 11.8% in Japan, from 2.9 to 6% in Germany, from 4.1% to 11.3% in the OECD as a whole.

[5] We are often reproached by some elements for having a Machiavellian view of history when we talk about such campaigns. We have responded at length to these criticisms in the articles on "Machiavellianism: the Consciousness and Unity of the Bourgeoisie" in IR 31. To those who have any memory, we can point out that such campaigns are nothing new. As soon as the Second World War was over, in the period of ‘cold war' the two new military powers which had divided up the world unleashed gigantic international ideological campaigns within their blocs to inculcate the new imperialist alliances in the heads of their population: the enemies of yesterday had become allies, the allies enemies. Forty years later it would be foolish indeed to believe that the bourgeoisie is less manipulative today than it was then.  

International Review no.33, 2nd Quarter, 1982.

(From Internationalisme-August 1947)

In politics, there’s nothing new in a group radi­cally changing its way of seeing and acting once it has become a big organisation, a mass party. One could cite several examples of such metamorphoses. One could to some extent apply it to the Bolshevik party after the revolution. But what’s striking about the International Communist Party of Italy is the surprising rapidity with which its main leaders have undergone such a change. And this is all the more surprising in that the Italian Party, both numerically and functionally, is in essence an enlarged fraction.

How are we to explain this change? For example: at the time that it was founded the Italian Communist Party, animated by the leadership of the Left and of Bordiga, was always an ‘enfant terrible’ in the Communist International. Refusing to submit a priori to the absolute authority of leaders — even those it held in the greatest regard - the Italian CP insisted on freely discussing and, if necessary, fighting against any political position it didn’t agree with. As soon as the CI was formed, Bordiga’s fraction was in opposition on many points and openly expressed its disagreements with Lenin and other leaders of the Bolshevik party, the Russian revolution, and the CI. The debates between Lenin and Bordiga at the Second Congress are well known. At this time nobody thought about questioning this right to free discussion; no one saw it as an insult to the authority of the ‘leaders’. Perhaps men as feeble and servile as Cachin[1] believed in their heart of hearts that this was scandalous, but they wouldn’t have dared to admit it. Moreover, discussion wasn’t seen simply as a right but as a duty; the confrontation and study of ideas were the only way of elaborating the programmatic and political positions required for revolutionary action.

Lenin wrote: “It is the duty of communist militants to verify for themselves resolutions coming from the higher bodies of the party. Any­one in politics who believes in mere words is an incorrigible idiot.” And we know what contempt Lenin had for such ‘incorrigible idiots’. Lenin insisted time and again on the necessity for the political education of militants. Learning and understanding could only develop through free discussion, through the general confrontation of ideas, involving each and every militant. This wasn’t simply a question of pedagogy, but a fundamental precondition for political elaboration, for the progress of the movement for the emancipation of the proletariat.

After the victory of Stalinism and the exclusion of the left from the CI, the Italian Fraction never stopped fighting against the myth of the infallible leader. Within the left opposition, in contrast to Trotsky, it insisted on making the greatest efforts towards the critical exam­ination of the positions of the past, towards theoretical research via the widest possible discussion of new problems. The Italian Fract­ion dedicated itself to this work before the war. But it never claimed to have resolved all the problems and it is well known that there were divisions within it on questions of the utmost importance.

It has to be said that all these excellent traditions and practices have disappeared with the foundation of the new Party. The ICP is today the group where the least amount of theoretical and political discussion takes place. The war and the post—war period have given rise to a whole number of new problems. None of these problems are being looked at within the Italian Party. It’s enough to read the texts and papers of the Party to see their extreme theoretical poverty. When one reads the proceedings of the Founding Conference of the Party, one wonders whether this conference took place in 1946 or 1926. And one of the leaders of the Party - comrade Damen if we’re not mistaken — was right when he said that the Party was starting again from the positions of .... 1925. But what for him represents a strength (the positions of 1925) expresses more than anything else a terrible theoretical and political backwardness, the extreme weakness of the Party.

No period in the history of the workers’ movement has overturned so many fundamental ideas and posed so many new problems as the relatively brief period between 1927 and 1947, not even such a momentous period as the one between 1905 and 1925. Most of the fundamental .theses upon which the CI was founded have become obsolete. The positions on the national and colonial question, on tactics, on democratic slogans, on parliamentarism, on the unions, on the party and its relationship to the class: all these have had to be radically revised. What’s more, answers have to be given to questions such as the state after the revolu­tion, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the characteristics of decadent capitalism, fascism, state capitalism, permanent imperialist war, the new forms of struggle and unitary organisation in the working class. A whole series of problems which the CI hardly began to deal with, and which appeared after the degeneration of the CI.

When in the face of the immense problems one reads the interventions at the Turin Conference, which repeat the litanies the old problems of Lenin in An Infantile Disorder, and which were already out of date at the time he defended them; when one sees the Party returning, as though nothing has changed, to the old positions of 1924 in participating in bourgeois elections and struggling within the unions, one can see the whole political backwardness of this Party, the vast distance it still has to cover.

And yet this Party, which, we repeat, is a considerable regression in comparison to the work of the Fraction before the war, is the one which is most strongly opposed to any internal and public political discussion. It’s in this Party that ideological life is the most colourless. How are we to explain this?

The explanation was given by one of the leaders of this party, in a conversation he had with us[2]. He said to us that:

“The Italian Party is for the most part made up of new elements, without theoretical formation — political virgins. The old militants themselves have for 20 years been isolated, cut off from any developing poli­tical thoughts. In the present situation the militants are incapable of dealing with problems of theory and ideology. Discussion can only disturb them and will do more harm than good. For the moment they need to walk on solid ground, even if it’s made up of old positions which are now out of date but which have at least been formulated and are comprehensible to them. For the moment it’s enough to group together those who have a will to act. The solution to the great problems raised by the experience between the wars demands the calm of reflection. Only a ‘great mind’ can approach them fruitfully and give them the answers they require. General discussion will only lead to confusion. Ideological work can’t be done by the mass of militants, but only by individuals. As long as these brilliant individuals haven’t arisen, we can’t hope to advance ideologically. Marx and Lenin were such individuals, such geniuses, in the past. We must await the arrival of a new Marx. We in Italy are convinced that Bordiga is such a genius. He is now working on a whole series responses to the problems tormenting the militants of the working class. When this work appears, the militants will only have to assimilate it, and the Party to align its politics and its action with these new developments.”

This discourse, which we reproduce almost textually contains three elements. First, a statement of fact: the low ideological level of Party members. Secondly, the danger of opening up a broad discussion in the Party because this will only disturb the members and weaken their cohesion. And thirdly, that the solution to new political problems can only be the work of a brilliant mind.

On the first point, the comrade is absolutely right: it’s an incontestable fact. But we think that this observation should lead us to pose the question of the value of this Party. What can such a Party contribute to the class?

We’ve seen how Marx defined what distinguished communists from the proletariat as a whole: their awareness of the general goals of the movement and of the way to reach them. If the members of the Italian Party don’t exhibit this distinction, if their ideological level doesn’t go beyond that of the proletariat as a whole, can we then really speak about a Communist Party?

Bordiga correctly indicated the essence of a Party:

- that it was a “body of doctrine and a will to action”. If this body of doctrine is lacking, a thousand regroupments won’t add up to a Party. In the future, the most important task of the ICP is the ideological formation of cadres, i.e. the ideological work needed for it to become a real Party.

This isn’t how our ICP leader thinks. On the contrary he considers that such work will only interfere with the members’ will to action. We can only say that this is a monstrous way of thinking. Do we need to recall the remarkable passages in What Is To Be Done?, where Lenin cites Engels on the necessity for a struggle on three fronts: economic, political and ideological?

There have always been socialists who have thought that discussion and the expression of divergences can disturb the proper activities of militants. One could perhaps call this narrow-minded socialism, or the socialism of ignorance.

Marx fulminated against Weitling, the recognised leader, when he wrote: “the proletariat doesn’t need ignorance.” If the struggle of ideas can trouble the activity of militants, how much more true would this be for the proletariat as a whole? And that would be the end of socialism, unless we were to say that socialism is ignorance. This is the conception of the Church, which is also afraid of worrying the heads of the faithful with too many doctrinal questions.

Against the idea that militants can only act on the basis of certainties, even if they are founded on false positions, we insist that there are no cert­ainties but only a continual process of going beyond what were formerly truths. Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are constantly being enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary. One might try to feed the members with absolute certainties and truths, but only relative truths which contain an antithesis o~ doubt can give rise to a revolutionary synthesis.

,If doubt and ideological controversy are likely to disturb the activity of militants, one can’t see why this should only be valid today.. At each stage in the struggle, the necessity arises to go beyond the old positions. At each moment acquired ideas and positions that have been taken up have to be verified and thrown into doubt. We are thus in a vicious circle: either we think and don’t act, or we act without knowing whether our action is based on adequate reasoning. This is the fine conclusion our ICP leader would have to come to if he were to remain consistent. In any case, this is an idealisation of the “incorrigible idiot” against whom Lenin couldn’t find enough sarcasms. This is the “perfect cretin” raised to the level of the ideal militant of the Italian ICP!

All the reasoning of our leader about the ‘momentary’ impossibility of theoretical-political research and controversy within the ICP is devoid of an ounce of justification.

The ‘trouble’ provoked by such controversies is precisely the condition for the formation of a militant, the condition for his activity being based on a conviction that is continually being verified, understood and enriched. This is the fundamental condition for revolutionary action. Outside of this there can be only obedience, cretinism and servitude.

But the most intimate thoughts of our leader can be found in the third point. The theoretical problems of revolutionary action cannot be resolved through controversies and discussions but through the brilliant mind of an individual, a leader. The solution isn’t the result of collective work but of thought of an individual isolated in his study, who finds the basic elements of the solution in his own genius. Once this work has been done, and the answers have been given, all that remains is for the man of militants, for the Party as a whole, to assimilate this solution and bring their political activity into line with it. This would mean that discussion, if not harmful, would at best be a useless luxury, a sterile waste of time. And to support this whole theory we are given, among others, the example of Marx.

Our leader has a funny idea of Karl Marx. Never was a thinker less of a ‘man alone in his Study’ than Marx. Less than anyone is it possible to separate Marx the thinker from Marx the man of action, the militant of the movement. Marx’s thought developed not in direct correspondence with the action of others, but with his own action and that of others in the general move­ment. Not one idea in his work wasn’t drawn from confrontation with other ideas in the course of his activity. This is why his work always retained such freshness and vitality. All his work, even Capital, was an incessant controversy, where the most arduous and abstract theoretical researchers were tightly bound up with discussion and direct polemic. It’s a strange way of seeing Marx’s work, describing it as the product of the miraculous biological composition of his brain!

In general, the role of the genius in human history is over. What did the genius repre­sent in the past? Simply the fact that the extremely low level of knowledge of the average man meant that there was an immense gap between this level and the knowledge held by a few elite elements. At the lower stage in the development of human knowledge, a very relative degree of knowledge could be an individual acquisition, just as the means of production could have an individual character. What distinguishes the machine as a tool is that it changes the character of what was formerly the rudimentary product of private labour, turning it into the complicated product of collective social labour. It’s the same with knowledge in general. As long as it remained on an element­ary level an isolated individual could embrace it in its totality. But with the development of society and of science, the sum of knowledge could no longer be held by an individual: only humanity as a whole could do so. The gap between the genius and the average man diminishes in proportion to the growth in the sum of human knowledge. Science, like economic production, tends to be socialised. From the genius humanity has gone to the isolated scholar, and from the isolated scholar to the team of scholars. The division of labour tends to increase. To produce anything today it is necessary to rely on the co-operation of large numbers of workers. This tendency towards further division exists at the level of ‘spiritual’ production as well, and it’s precisely through this that it advances.

The scholar’s study gives way to the laboratory where teams of scholars co-operate in their researches, just as the artisan’ workshop gives way to the big factories.

The role of the individual tends to diminish in human society - not as a feeling, aware individual but as an individual emerging out of a confused mass, riding above the chaos of humanity. Man as individual gives way to social man. The opposition between the individual and society will be resolved by the synthesis of a society in which all individuals will find their true personality. The myth of the genius isn’t the future of humanity. It will join the myth of the hero and the demi-­god in the museum of prehistory.

You can think what you like about the diminution of the role of the individual in human history. You can applaud it or regret it. But you can’t deny it. In order to be able to carry on with its technically evolved production, capitalism was forced to introduce general education. The bourgeoisie had to open more and more schools. To the extent compatible with its interests, it has been obliged to allow the children of proletarians to enter higher education.

By the same token, the bourgeoisie has had to raise the general level of culture across society. But it can only do this to a certain degree before it becomes a threat to its rule; thus the bourgeoisie becomes an obstacle to the cultural development of society. This is one of the expressions of the historic contradiction of bourgeois society, which only socialism can resolve. The development of culture and of consciousness, in a process that is continually going beyond what has been acquired, is not only a result of but also a condition for socialism. And now we see a man who calls himself a marxist, who claims to be a leader of a Communist Party, and who tells us to wait for... a genius who will bring salvation.

To convince us of all this he recounted this anecdote: after the war he went to see Bordiga, who he hadn’t seen for 20 years, asking him to comment on certain theoretical and political texts. After reading them Bordiga found their content to be erroneous and asked him what he intended to do with them. ‘Publish them in the reviews of the Party’, replied our leader. Bordiga’s reply was that, since he didn’t have the time to do the theoretical research necessary to refute the content of these articles, he was opposed to their publication. And if the Party thought differently he would cease his literary collaboration with it. Bordiga’s threat was sufficient to make our leader renounce his intention of having these articles published.

This anecdote was supposed to convince us of the greatness of the master and the pupil’s sense of proportion. In fact it has left us with a painful feeling. If this anecdote is true it gives us an idea of the reigning spirit in the ICP of Italy, a spirit that is truly lamentable. Thus it’s not the Party, the mass of militants or the working class as a whole which have the task of judging whether this or that political position is correct or false. The mass isn’t even to be informed. The ‘master’ is the only judge of what can be understood and taught. So much for the sublime concern not to ‘disturb’ the peace and quiet of the mass. And what if the ‘master’ is wrong? This cannot be, because if the ‘master’ is wrong how could a mere mortal judge! But other ‘masters’ have been wrong before - Marx and Lenin included. But this presumably couldn’t happen to our true master today. And if it did, only a future master could correct him. This is a typic­ally aristocratic conception of thought. We don’t deny the great value that the thought of specialists and scholars can have. But we reject the monarchist conception of thought, the idea of Divine Right. As for the ‘master’ himself, he is no longer a human being - he becomes a sort of phoenix, a self—moving phenomenon, the pure Idea looking for itself, contradicting itself and grasping itself, as in Hegel.

Awaiting a genius is a proclamation of one’s own powerlessness; it’s the crowd waiting at the foot of Mount Sinai for some kind of Moses, bringing who knows what kind of divinely inspired Bible. It’s the old, eternal awaiting for the Jewish

Messiah, coming to liberate his people. The old revolutionary song of the proletariat, the Internationale, says: “no saviour on high, no God, no Caesar, no Hero”. Now we would have to add ‘no Genius’ to cover the particular standpoint of the members of the ICP.

There are many modern versions of this messianic conception: the Stalinist cult of the ‘infallible leader’, the Fuhrer principle of the Nazis, the blackshirts’ ideal of the Duce. They are the expression of the anguish of the decadent bour­geoisie, becoming vaguely aware of its approach­ing end and hoping to save itself by throwing itself at the feet of the first adventurer to come along. The concept of the genius belongs to the same family of divinities.

The proletariat has nothing to fear in looking reality in the face, because the future of the world belongs to it.

Many comrades, unfamiliar with the history of the Italian Left since the 1920s, will have trouble finding their way through this rel­atively little-known period of the revolut­ionary movement. We are aware of this diff­iculty and have tried to contribute to overcoming it by reprinting a whole series of texts from the past in the press of the ICC. The reprinting of the ‘Appeal of 1945' in the International Review no.32 sparked a response by Battaglia Comunista (which we are reprinting below) and later by the Comm­unist Workers' Organization in Revolutionary Perspectives no. 20 (new series). Before answering the criticisms of these groups we would just like to make a brief comment about methods used. For the CWO, the ICC was lying when it talked about an appeal to the Stalinists, making it seem "that the Appeal was directed to the Stalinist parties instead of simply to the workers under their influence" (RP no.20 p.36). At this point there are 2 objections to raise. The first is that the CWO' s allegations are false. The Appeal is not addressed to workers influenced by counter­revolutionary parties but to the Agitation Com­mittees of the Stalinist and Social-Democra­tic parties themselves.

Second of all, the ICC did not "try to make it seem" like anything; we published the Appeal in its entirety so that comrades could make up their own minds. But speaking of this, what exactly is the judgment of the CWO on the content of this text aside from these accu­sations about lying?

Such methods are completely unproductive and contrary to the excellent initiative in the same issue of Revolutionary Perspectives: the publication of several internal discuss­ion texts of the CWO on the Italian Left "so as to bring the debate into the whole revol­utionary movement". Up to now the ICC was practically the only organization to publish in its press some of its internal discussions. The ICC and the CWO can only hope that Battaglia Comunista will someday follow this example.

About origins (from Battaglia Comunista, no.3, 1983)

"It often happens in partisan polemics that when there are no valid arguments left, people fall into lying ruses hidden in rhetoric and demagogy. Thus the ICC, for example, in discussing the crisis of the Partito Comunista Internazionale (Programma Comunista) in the International Review no. 32 claims to find in the origins of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PC Int) in 1943-45 the signs of an original sin condemning the PC Int to damnation (or at least the faction that split in 1952).

We do not want to go into an exhaustive answer here; we offer only some very short comments:

1. The document entitled "Appeal of the Agitation Committee" which was published in no.l of Prometeo in April 1945 -- was it in fact an error? Yes, it was; we admit it. It was the last attempt of the Italian Left to apply the tactic of the ‘united front at the base' defended by the CP of Italy in 1921-23 against the Third International. As such, we categorize this as a ‘venial sin' because our comrades later eliminated it both politi­cally and theoretically with such clarity that today we are well armed against anyone on this point.

2. Here and there other tactical errors were committed but without waiting for the ICC we have already corrected them all by ourselves and we are keeping them in mind so as never to repeat them. But these errors have not prevented us from going forward precisely because we have corrected them. We have never left our own terrain which is that of revolutionary Marxism.

3. Only those who never make a move or who don't exist never make mistakes. Thus, during the imperialist war, when the exploited masses pushed into a massacre showed the first signs of a tendency to break out of the prison of the inter-classist forces linked to the imperialist blocs, the ‘forefathers' of the ICC, judging that the proletariat was defeated because it had accepted the war, remained comfortably at home without ever thinking of ‘dirtying their hands' in the workers' movement.

4. Much later, judging that the proletariat was no longer prostrate and defeated, they resurfaced, having collected some students and intellectuals, to ‘fertilize' the new class struggles which will supposedly lead us straight to the revolution. Here we see the real fundamental error of the ICC. The origi­nal sin of the ICC lies in its way of dealing with problems including the relation between the class, its consciousness, and the party. And if (we say "if" because it is a strong probability) war breaks out before the working class engages the enemy, the ICC will simply return home again while we will ‘dirty our hands', working to the fullest of our organizational possibilities towards revolutionary defeatism before, during and after the war.

5. Concerning the errors of Programma, they are as great as its profound opportunism. (see preceding issue of Battaglia Comunista). In Programma Comunista many very important questions remain open despite protestations to the contrary: the questions of imperialism, of national liberation wars and, certainly not by accident, unionism. It is because of these questions that Programma is in crisis, like the ICC. And if we may say so, that is exact­ly what we wrote in no.15 and 16 in December 1981 in the article ‘Crisis of the ICC or Crisis of the Revolutionary Movement'. We said that only some organizations are in crisis, namely the ICC and Programma. Organizations without clear ideas on very import­ant problems break up when these problems no longer correspond to their schemas and force­fully intrude. These are crisis-organizations which never manage to intervene in the movement. They are ‘alive' only when the situation is ‘calm'; they survive as a dead weight as long as their delicate balance is not disturbed.

Our response

First of all, we are pleased to note that Battaglia Comunista has at least confirmed the authenticity and truthfulness of the texts we published.

This being clear, BC then asks: "was this Appeal an error? Yes, we admit it", but only a ‘venial sin'! We can only admire the delicacy and refinement with which BC fixes up its own self-image. If a proposal for a united front with the stalinist and social democratic butchers is just a ‘minor' sin what else could the PC Int have done in 1945 for it to fall into a really serious mistake ... join the government? But BC reassures us: it has corrected these errors quite a while ago without waiting for the ICC and its has never tried to hide them. Possibly, but in 1977 when we just brought up the errors of the PC Int in the war period in our press, Battaglia answered with an indignant letter admitting that there had been mistakes but claiming that they were the fault of comrades who left in 1952 to found the PC Internazionale.[1]

At the time we said that it seemed strange to us that Battaglia should just wash its hands of the whole affair. In effect, Battaglia told us: "We participated in the constitution of the PC Int ... we and the others. What is good is from us and what is bad is from them. Even admitting that this could be true, the ‘bad' existed ... and no one said anything about it." (from Rivoluzione Internazionale no 7, 1977)

It's much too easy to accept compromise after compromise in silence in order to build the Party with Bordiga (whose name attracted thousands of members) and with Vercesi (who took care of a whole network of contacts outside Italy) and then when things go badly start to whine that it is all the Bordigists fault. It takes two to make a compromise.

Apart from this general point, the claim to throw the blame on the ‘bad guys' is just not on. The Appeal of ‘45 was not written by the ‘groups from the South' who referred to Bordiga. It was written by the Centre of the Party in the North, led by the Damen tendency which is today Battaglia Comunista. To give another example, just one among many, the worst activist and localist errors came from the Federation of Catanzaro led by Francesco Maruca who was a member of the Stalinist Communist Party until his expulsion in 1944. But when the split took place in the PC Int the Federation of Catanzaro did not go with Bordiga and Programma Comunista but remained in Battaglia. In fact, an article in no. 26/27 of Prometeo still cited Maruca as an exemplary militant. It is true that the art­icle (a sort of apology) did not actually deal with the positions defended by Maruca. On the con­trary, to pretty things up, the article dated his exclusion from the CP in 1940, that is, four years before it really happened. This is how Battaglia Comunista deals with its continual need to corr­ect its own errors.

At the beginning, Battaglia publicly bragged about having a spotless past. Afterwards, when some spots came out, they attributed them to the ‘programmistas'. When they can no longer deny their own participation, they present their errors as mere pecadillos. But they still have to find someone to blame and so they make it all our fault or, more precisely, the fault of our ‘forefathers' who, judging that the proletariat was defeated because it accepted the war, supposedly remained safe at home without "dirtying their hands with the workers' movement".

An accusation of desertion from the struggle is a serious one and the ICC wants to answer it right away, not to defend ourselves or our ‘forefathers' -- they don't need it -- but to defend the revolutionary milieu from unacceptable smearing techniques: throwing around grave accusations without even feeling the need to offer a minimum of proof.

During the war, a whole part of the Italian Fraction and the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left felt that the proletariat no longer had any social existence. These comrades abandoned all political activity except at the end of the war when they participated in the Anti-Fascist Committee in Brussels. The majority of the Italian Fraction reacted against this tendency led by Vercesi and regrouped in Marseille in 1940. In 1942 the French nucleus of the Communist Left was formed with the help of the Italian Fraction; in 1944 the nucleus published Internationalisme and the agitational paper ‘1'Etincelle'. During these years the debate centered on the class nature of the strikes in 1943 in Italy:

"One tendency in the Italian Fraction, the Vercesi tendency and parts of the Belgian Fraction, denied right up to the end of the war that the Italian proletariat had emerged on the political arena. For this tendency, the events in Italy in 1943 were simply a manifestation of the economic crisis, as they called it, ‘the crisis of the war economy' or a mere palace revolution, a dispute among the higher echelons of Italian capital and nothing else.

"For this tendency, the Italian proletariat was completely absent, politically and socially. This was supposed to go along with a whole theory they had made up about the ‘social non-existence of the proletariat during the war and during the entire period of the war economy'. Thus, before and after 1943 they were totally passive and even defended the idea of the organizational dissolu­tion of the Fraction. With the majority of the Italian Fraction we fought this liquidationist tendency step by step. With the Italian Fraction, we analyzed the events of 1943 in Italy as an avant‑garde manifestation of the social struggle and an opening of a course towards revolution; we defended the possibility of the transformation of the Fraction into the Party." (Internationalisme, no 7, February 1946: ‘On the First Congress of the PC Internationaliste of Italy')

But in 1945 a whole series of theatrical turn­abouts took place. When it became known that the Party had indeed been formed in Italy at the end of 1943, the Vercesi tendency did a triple back-flop and propelled itself into the leadership of the Party along with the tendency excluded in 1936 for its participation in the Spanish Civil War and the majority of the Italian Fraction that had excluded them at the time!

The only ones who refused to join this opportun­ist back-slapping were our ‘forefathers' in Internationalisme. And there was good reason for this. Unlike Vercesi they were in the forefront of illegal work during the war to reconstitute the proletarian organization; that is why they had no reason to hide behind ‘hurrahs' for the Party when the reckoning came. On the contrary, they saw that capitalism had succeeded in defusing the prolet­arian reaction against the war (March 1943 in Italy; Spring 1945 in Germany) and had closed off any possibility of a pre-revolutionary situation. Consequently, they began to question whether the time for the transformation of the Fraction into a Party had really come. Furthermore, although Internationalisme defended the proletarian charac­ter of the PC Int against the attacks of other groups[2], it refused to cover up for the polit­ical wanderings and non-homogeneity of the new Party. The comrades of Internationalisme const­antly called for a political break with all opport­unist temptations:

"Either the Vercesi tendency must forsake its anti-fascist policy and the whole opportunist theory that determined it publically in front of the Party and the proletariat, or the Party, after open discussion and critique, must theoretically, politically and organizationally forsake the opportunist tendency of Vercesi." (idem)

What was the reaction of the PC Int to this? For more than a year it pretended not to notice and completely ignored the repeated appeals of Inter­nationalisme. At the end of 1946, when an Inter­national Bureau was reconstituted under the impetus of the PC Int and their French and Belg­ian comrades, Internationalisme sent another of the many, many open letters asking to participate in the conference so as to create an honest disc­ussion on the points that the PC Int refused to discuss and to work towards clearly defining the opportunist danger. The only answer that it got was:

"Since your letter only demonstrates once again the proof of your constant deformation of facts and the political positions of the PC Int of Italy and the Belgian and French Fractions; that you are not a revolutionary political organization and that your activity is limited to spreading confusion and throwing mud on our comrades, we have unanimously rejected your request to participate in our International Meeting of the organizations of the Internat­ional Communist Left.

Signed: PCI of' Italy."

(Internationalisme no 46, ‘Answer Of the Internat­ional Bureau of the International Communist Left to Our Letter')[3]

This is the way the ‘forefathers' of Battaglia, in the name of an opportunist alliance with the Vercesi tendency, liquidated the only tendency of the International Communist Left which had the political courage to stand up against sectarianism and those who conveniently chose to forget.

In terms of physical courage, it is not our style to play up this aspect but we can assure Battaglia that it took a great deal more courage to put up defeatist posters against the resistance during the ‘liberation' of Paris than to fall in with the ranks of the partisans and participate in the fascist-hunts of the ‘liberation' of northern Italy.

To come back to today, Battaglia claims that the revolutionary movement is not in crisis but just the ICC, Programma Comunista and all the other groups of the Italian left (except of course Battaglia) plus all the groups in other countries who did not participate in the International Confer­ence organized by Battaglia and the CWO. But wait a minute. If we take away all these groups what is left? Just Battaglia and the CWO!

But the crisis does not manifest itself only through the disintegration of groups through splits. It is also produces political back­sliding such as when the CWO considered insurr­ection to be an immediate necessity in Poland, or when Battaglia presented the Iranian Unity of Communist Militants and the Kurdish KOMALA, extremely suspicious forces from any proletarian class point of view, all of a sudden communist organizations and encouraged them with critical support in the ‘exchange of prisoners (!)' between the KOMALA and the Iranian Army.

It must be noted that both Battaglia and the CWO have corrected mistakes after fraternal critic­ism in our press, especially in our English-lang­uage press. But this only goes to show that the momentary hesitations of a group can be corrected also through the efforts of other groups and that no revolutionary organization can consider itself totally independent from the rest of the revolu­tionary milieu.

Battaglia seems to think that in republishing documents from the revolutionary movement, the ICC wants to show that Battaglia has a history full of errors and therefore should be outside the proletarian milieu. They are very much mis­taken in this. The hesitations of a Maruca do not belong to Battaglia any more than the defeatism of a Damen or any more than the errors and contribu­tions of a Vercesi belong to Programma Comunista. All of this, the good and the bad, is part of the heritage of the whole revolutionary movement. It is up to the entire revolutionary movement to draw up a critical balance sheet that will allow us all to profit from these lessons.

This balance sheet cannot be drawn up by isolated groups each nursing its own wounds. It demands the possibility of open and organized debate as was begun in the framework of the International Conferences of the groups of the Communist Left (1977, 78, 79) . Battaglia was one of the grave­diggers of these conferences[4]. It is not sur­prising today that it does not understand how to contribute to the discussion.

Beyle

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[1] Up to 1952, the Bordiga tendency and the Damen tendency were in the same organization called the Partito Comunista Internazionalista. Thus the Bordiga tendency cannot bear the exclusive responsibility for what happened in the PC Int especially because this tendency was a minority. When the split came in 1952 the Bordiga tendency had to leave the PC Int and founded the PC Internazionale (Programma Comunista) while the Damen tendency kept the publications Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista. Although Battaglia Comunista polemicized a great deal against Programa, it has never attacked its origins because these origins are the same for both groups.

[2] Refer, in the article cited "Revolutionaries (in Italy) should join the PC Int of Italy - response to the Communist Revolutionaries in France and Germany.

[3] All these documents were published in Internationalisme December 1946. The open letter from the GCF to the PC Int was published in the Bulletin d'etude et de Discussion of Revolution Internationale no. 7, June 1974.

[4] See the International Review no. 16, 17, 22 and "Texts and Proceedings of the International Conferences (Milan 1977, Paris, 1978, 1979).

The workers' struggle in Poland was a striking demonstration for workers the world over that the so-called ‘socialist paradise' of the East­ern bloc is only another face of the capitalist hell that maintains the yoke of human exploita­tion throughout the planet.

The myth of the ‘socialist' countries has had a long life. In fact, all sectors of the bourg­eoisie, from East to West, have an interest in its survival whether as a theme to enroll the workers in imperialist wars or as a means to disgust them with the idea of ‘socialism' and turn them away from any perspective of social transformation. For fifty years revolutionaries have fought unceasingly against this mystifica­tion which was the most effective weapon of the terrible counter-revolution that struck down the world proletariat in the ‘20s and which lasted until the end of the ‘60s.

But as Marx said, "one real step forward of the real movement is worth a dozen programs." In this sense, the workers' struggles of summer 1980 have done more to clarify the consciousness of the international proletariat than decades of propaganda from communist groups. And it's not finished ... Under the repeated blows of the world economic crisis, the bourgeoisie's mystifi­cations crack and collapse -- and that of the supposed ‘socialism' of the Eastern bloc in particular. What has happened to the Eastern bloc's supposed ‘economic prosperity', to the magnificent development of the productive forces so vaunted by stalinists and trotskyists alike? What is the condition of the proletariat in this ‘workers' paradise', where exploitation and the bourgeoisie are supposed no longer to exist?

We deal with this question in the first of the two articles below.

The powerful proletarian struggles in Poland did more than simply confirm what revolutionaries have been saying for decades. They have also, as we said in IR 27, brought to the fore front "cer­tain problems that have not yet been decisively resolved in practice, even though they have long been posed at the theoretical level." In this article we mentioned among others the problems of "the kind of bourgeois weapons that the work­ing class will have to confront in the Russian bloc", and more especially the contradiction between, on the one hand the ruling class' need to use (as it does in the West) a left in oppos­ition with the task of sabotaging the workers' struggles from the inside, and on the other the stalinist regimes' inability to tolerate an organized opposition.

The declaration of the state of martial law in December 1981 and the official ban laid on Solid­arnosc in October 1982 have made it possible to add further elements to this question. These elements are put forward in the second article.

The crisis of capitalism and its offensive against the workers

The Eastern bloc plunges into the economic crisis

For any capitalist business, inability to pay its debts means bankruptcy. Even if states can­not shut up shop in the same way as a company does, the inability of Poland and Romania to repay debts incurred with western banks on the world market reveals capitalism's economic bank­ruptcy in the East, just as the similar situa­tion in Mexico or Brazil does so in the West. The Russian bloc's indebtedness has grown con­siderably in recent years to reach extraordinary sums:

-- the Polish debt of over $25 billion represents a third of the annual GNP;

-- the same is true of the Romanian debt of $10 billion.

During the ‘70s the bourgeoisie in the East, like their colleagues in the West, resorted to credit in an attempt to conceal and retard the economic deadline of a collapse in production. Debts, however, must always be paid and the attempt to cheat the law of value is today coming to its limits. As in the West, Eastern capitalism has gone into recession.

It is very difficult to give complete confidence to the official figures supplied by the bourgeoisie; this is true in general and especially in Russia. Nonetheless, their evolution corresponds exactly to what is happening in the Western bloc. For 1982, the official figure for growth in nat­ional income will be 2%, this is the lowest level ever and follows a continuous drop spanning several years. This rate of growth would have to be doubled in order to carry out the ambitious 5-year plan decided under Brezhnev. Industrial growth has been at its lowest since the war: in 1982 production of steel, cement and plastics fell relative to previous years. Debt and rec­ession -- the only thing missing from the picture is inflation, and we find ourselves once more with the same characteristics of capitalist crisis as in the West. Well, this inflation also exists in the East! Without speaking of the inflation in consumer prices, which we'll come back to, prices rose throughout industry an average 13.4%: the rise was 42% for coal, 20% for steel products, 70% for thermal energy[1].

The same factors are thus at work both East and West; the world economic crisis' devastating effects on capitalist production are accelerat­ing. The economically weaker Eastern bloc suffers the effects of the crisis more deeply. The USSR's GNP per inhabitant is lower than that of Greece; East Germany's -- that of the most developed country in the Russian bloc -- is roughly equal to Spain's. Economically under­developed, the Russian bloc has not the slightest chance of achieving any kind of economic competitivity in a period of worldwide over­production; it has great difficulty in selling its products on the world market. This is not a novelty for Russia and its bloc, arriving as it did too late on the scene of world capitalism. The myth of overtaking the West, so much pushed by Stalin and Khrushchev, is long since dead! Today the economic crisis is baring all the lies, and showing up all the weaknesses of capitalism in Russia and its satellites.

In these conditions, the tendency that has all­owed the Russian bloc to survive since its creation is further accentuated: the ever-greater concentration of the economy in the hands of the state at the service of the war economy.

The growth of war economy

Since the Eastern bloc cannot rival the West economically, its only means of keeping its place on the world scene is to develop its war economy, to mobilize its whole productive appar­atus for military production. This phenomenon has existed since Stalin, but has been still further accentuated in recent years.

Confronted with the West's economic and military pressure, the USSR has no choice other than the increasing sacrifice of its economy to war prod­uction.

Let's take an example: transportation is one of the black spots of Russian capitalism, paralyzing all economic activity. Lack of equipment is the main reason for the transport sector's inad­equacy -- and yet freight-car production in 1982 was scarcely higher than in 1970. This might seem a paradox, in view of the fact that 4/5 of land transport goes to the railway network. But it is easier to understand when we add that freight-car ­production was sacrificed to give priority to satisfying military needs (the main rolling-stock factory, at Niznij Taghil, also builds tanks).

What is true for rolling-stock is true for the rest of the Russian economy; in every factory, military production has absolute priority which blocks the whole of production. Unlike capital goods which are used in a new cycle of produc­tion, and unlike consumer goods which serve to reproduce labor-power, weapons are useless in the production process. This means that massive arms production is equivalent to a gigantic destruction of capital, which can only sharpen the effects of the crisis.

The USSR alone is responsible for 40% of world military production while producing only 10% of Gross World Product. This country can only keep its place on the world scene at the cost of a constantly growing military effort which further deepens its economic bankruptcy.

Exact figures are hard to come by since all things military are necessarily secret. Accord­ing to ‘Military Balance', Russian military spending is equivalent to the GNP of Spain (about £90 billion). This means that in Russia, the production of a country the size of Spain is destroyed in the arms economy -- without count­ing the cost of the resulting economic disorganization, ie at least 20-30%, of production.

For the proletariat in the Russian bloc, the choice between ‘butter or guns' takes on a form of caricature. For the proletariat, the combined effects of the war economy and the crisis mean a constantly growing misery in the ‘workers' para­dise'.

Austerity for the working class

The official absence of inflation and unemploy­ment has always been major arguments for the stalinist and trotskyists in affirming the ‘socialist gains' of workers in the Eastern bloc. In reality, for the working class in the so-called ‘socialist' countries, austerity is a euphemism. The misery of its economic and social condition no longer needs demonstrating, and the bourgeoisie's current attack on the workers' living standards means an even more austere austerity.

The Russian bourgeoisie itself is no longer able to hide the reality between faked figures. Officially, in the USSR 1982 saw zero growth in working class purchasing power. The avalanche of price increases has finally exposed the myth of the lack of inflation in the Eastern bloc. The explosion of discontent in Poland was sparked off by brutal price increases on foodstuffs forming the workers' staple diet, with some increases going as high as 100%. The working class' living standards were brutally attacked; as in the West, the prices of consumer goods are rising but with scarcity and draconian rationing of most products into the bargain. More and more guns always mean less and less butter.

As for full employment, it does indeed exist. But it is not the product of the ruling class' generosity in not leaving the poor workers unemployed. This full employment expresses the scarcity of capital, the lack of machines and the paralysis of the productive apparatus. All the capital that is not invested in constant capital that is destroyed in the production of war machines is replaced by ‘human capital'. Elbow grease replaces machine oil. Moreover, living standards are so low that workers are generally obliged to have two jobs and do a double day's work to ensure their and their family's survival.

Full employment is also a means for maintaining a draconian supervision of the proletariat. Andropov's arrival in power has been followed by increased surveillance in the work-place: clock­ing-on, identity checks and controls of presence on the job, ‘raids' in the shops to see that workers are not doing their shopping during work­ing hours, etc ... all in the police tradition of this one-time boss of the KGB. All this in the name of the struggle for productivity, against absenteeism and slackness. Labor disc­ipline is a constant theme of Russian state propaganda and indicates an increased repression of the working class.

In the Eastern bloc, as in the West, the ‘80s are marked by a vicious attack on the working class' living conditions.

Forms may differ (policed full employment, scarcity, rationing), but the fundamentals re­main the same -- the capitalist crisis and the war economy -- and the consequences for the work­ing class are the same in each bloc: an over­growing misery.

Confronted with this situation, the workers in Poland have shown the example of the class struggle. This example will not remain isolated. Under the pressure of the crisis, the bourgeoisie East and West is forced to attack the working class ever harder.

Such a situation generalized throughout the planet must necessarily lead the proletariat to develop its class struggle.

JJ

 

The weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat

For revolutionaries, the proletarian struggles of 1980-81 in Poland came as no surprise. Those who have upheld the firm defense of Marxist principles, against desertions and onslaughts of every kind, have known and said for decades that the so-called ‘socialist' countries are as capitalist as all the others, that their economies are subject to the same contradictions that afflict capitalism as a whole, that the working class is exploited and struggles against its exploitation there as everywhere else. They have understood, and have announced before their class, that since the mid-‘60s world capitalism has used up the respite accorded by the post-war recon­struction period, and has entered a new phase of acute economic convulsions, which will leave no country immune, and which will every­where provoke proletarian counter-attacks. In the May ‘68 general strike in France, the ‘hot autumn' in Italy ‘69, the 1970 uprising in Poland, and in the numerous other movements between 1968 and ‘74, they were able to recognize the first of these counter-attacks, and to foresee that these struggles would not be the last.

However, the immense movement of 1980, while it confirmed their analyses, demanded from revolutionaries prudence and humility in con­fronting situations unlike anything we have seen up till now. So that, while we analyzed the development of the independent trade union Solidarnosc as the Polish form of the policy of the left in opposition put into action by the bourgeoisie on a world scale to sabotage and stifle the workers' struggles, we were careful to avoid proclaiming that the Eastern bloc countries were going to evolve towards the ‘democratic' political forms that exist in the advanced Western countries.

"...the confrontations between Solidarity and the Polish CP aren't just cinema, just as the opposition between right and left in the western countries isn't just cinema. In the west, however, the existing institutional framework generally makes it possible to ‘make do' with these oppositions so they don't threaten the stability of the regime, and so that inter-bourgeois struggles for power are contained within, and resolved by, the formula most appropriate for dealing with the proletarian enemy. In Poland on the other hand, although the ruling class has, using a lot of improvisations, but with some mom­entary success, managed to install these kinds of mechanisms, there's no indication that this is something definitive and capable of being exported to other ‘socialist' countries. The same invective which serves to give credibility to your friendly enemy when the main­tenance of order demands it, can be used to crush your erstwhile partner when he's no longer any use to you ... By forcing the bourgeoisie to adopt a division of labor to which it is structurally inadapted, the prole­tarian struggles in Poland have created a living contradiction. It's still too early to see how it will turn out. Faced with a situation unprecedented in history.... the task of revolutionaries is to approach the unfolding events in a modest manner". (International Review, no. 27, 3/10/81).

Since then, events have spoken. The military coup of 13th December 1981 suspended all activity on Solidarnosc's part. On 8th October 1982, the Polish Diet (Parliament) banned it definitively. How are we to interpret these events?

Is this ban revocable, as the leaders of the underground Solidarnosc claim? -- the same leaders who mix radical declarations with continued appeals for a ‘national entente' and for ‘trade union liberty'.

Does the outlawing of Solidarnosc mean that this organization is no longer of any use to capital?

More generally, what kind of weapons do and will the bourgeoisie use against the workers' struggles in the Eastern bloc. Will they play the card of the left in opposition? Within what limits and with what specific­ities?

Can the Eastern bloc regimes ‘democratize' themselves?

Solidarnosc's 15 months of legality apparent­ly answered the affirmative. This was the period when Kuron, theoretician of the KOR, waxed eloquent on the prospects for democratization in Poland ‘along Spanish lines'. This perspective was at the heart of all Solidarnosc's propaganda: it was necessary to accept economic ‘sacrifices', not to ‘abuse' the strike weapon, to be ‘responsible' and ‘moderate' in order to preserve and extend the ‘democratic gains' of the Gdansk agree­ment.

Since then, history has shown that this ‘mode­ration' has done nothing for ‘democracy', and everything to prepare the ground for the work­er's defeat and the repression that has hit them since December 1981.

In fact, the proclamation of the state of war went further than a mere concretization of this defeat. Like all repression, it aimed to inflict a vicious ‘punishment' on the proletariat, to intimidate it, and to deprive it, through terror, of any taste for struggle. But it also aimed to outlaw Solid­arnosc -- the main agent of the workers' demobilization and defeat.

Poland 1981 is not the only defeat the prole­tariat has suffered since its historic reapp­earance in 1968. In particular, the May ‘68 trial of strength between proletariat and bourgeoisie in France ended in a victory for the latter. As we know, the main instruments of this defeat were the trade unions, especi­ally the CGT controlled by the French CP. And logically enough, the unions were rewarded by the employers' recognition of the union sect­ion in the factory; the CGT even got an extra little present, in the form of the renewal of a government subsidy that it had lost several years previously. In Poland, by contrast, Solidarnosc got no reward for its loyal serv­ices between 1980 and 1981. Quite the oppos­ite: its main leaders were imprisoned, and while the most famous of them is now at liber­ty and back in his old job, many still remain in Jaruzelski's gaols -- Guriazda, Jurczyk, Modzelewski, Julewski, along with the leaders of the KOR like Kuron and Michnik. Does this mean that the bourgeoisie is less grateful in the East than in the West? It's certainly not a question of gratitude. The bourgeoisie has long since disencumbered itself of such sentiments, "and has left remaining no nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies...in the icy water of egotistical calculation" (Communist Mani­festo). In fact, the main reason that the Polish authorities, unlike their Western colleagues, have not allowed the continued existence of an official or legal opposition is that "the Stalinist regimes cannot safely tolerate the existence of such oppositional forces" to the extent that these "are a foreign body... that every fiber of their organism rejects" (International Review, no. 24).

This means that, while it is only possible to understand the meaning and the implications of events in Poland during the last 3 years by situating them in their international con­text, and by considering them as an important moment in the historic and worldwide confront­ation between the 2 main classes in society -- proletariat and bourgeoisie -- we cannot draw out all their lessons unless we take account of the differences that separate the condi­tions of the class struggle in the Eastern bloc from those in the advanced Western countries.

The most obvious, and the most widely known, characteristic of the Eastern bloc countries -- the one moreover which is the basis for the myth of their ‘socialist' nature -- is the ex­treme statification of their economies. As we have often pointed out in our press, state capitalism is not limited to those countries. This phenomenon springs above all from the conditions for the capitalist mode of produ­ction's survival in its decadent period: faced with the threat of the dislocation of an economy, and a social body, subjected to growing contradictions, faced with the exacerbation of commercial and imperialist rivalries provoked by the saturation of the world market, only a continuous strengthening of the State's power makes it possible to maintain a minimum of social cohesion, and a growing militarization of society. While the tendency towards state capitalism is thus a universal, historical fact, it does not affect all countries in the same way. It takes on its most complete form where capit­alism is subjected to the most brutal contrad­ictions, and where the classical bourgeoisie is at its weakest. In this sense, the state's direct control of the main means of production, characteristic of the Eastern bloc (and of much of the ‘Third World'), is first and foremost a sign of the economy's backwardness and fragility (see the previous article). To the extent that the tendency towards state capitalism is worldwide and irreversible, and that the present convuls­ions of the capitalist economy touch the backward countries still more violently than the others, there is no possibility, in these countries -- and in the Eastern bloc in part­icular -- of relaxing the statification of the economy, which is increasing everywhere, the developed countries included.

We thus have the beginnings of a reply to the question ‘can the Eastern bloc countries democraticize themselves?'in our observation that there can be no return, in these count­ries to the classical forms of capitalism. In fact, there is a close link between the bourgeoisie's economic and political forms of domination: the totalitarian power of a single party corresponds to the near-total statifica­tion of the means of production[2].

One Party

The one-party system is not unique to the Eastern bloc, or to the Third World. It has existed for several decades in Western Europe­an countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portu­gal. The most striking example is obviously the Nazi regime that governed Europe's most powerful and developed nation between 1933 and 1945. In fact, the historical tendency towards state-capitalism does not concern the economy alone. It also appears in a growing concent­ration of political power in the hands of the executive, at the expense of the classical forms of bourgeois democracy -- Parliament, and the interplay of political parties. During the 19th century, the political parties in the dev­eloped countries were the representatives of civil society in or before the state; with the decadence of capitalism, they were transformed into the representatives of the state within civil society[3]. The state's totalitarian tendencies are expressed, even in those count­ries where the formal mechanisms of democracy remain in place, by a tendency towards the one-party system, most clearly concretized during acute convulsions of bourgeois society: ‘Gov­ernment of National Unity' during imperialist wars, unity of the whole bourgeoisie behind the parties of the left during periods of rev­olution, the prolonged and uncontested domin­ation of the Democratic Party in the US 1933­-53, of the Gaullists in France 1958-74, of the Social-Democrats in Sweden 1931-77, etc.

The tendency towards the one-party system has rarely reached its conclusion in the more developed countries. Such a conclusion is unkn­own in the US, Britain, Scandinavia, and Holl­and, while the Vichy government in France dep­ended essentially on the German occupation. The only historical example of a developed country where this tendency has unfolded completely is that of Nazi Germany, and then only for a duration of 12 years -- 18 months less than the Democrats' domination of the United States. The phenomenon of fascism has been fully analyzed since the ‘30s by the Communist Left -- including in previous issues of the International Review.[4] We will therefore limit ourselves here to a brief resume of what brought the Nazi party to power:

-- violent economic convulsions (Germany was harder hit than any other European country by the 1929 crisis);

-- the fact that the working class had been physically crushed during the 1919-23 revol­ution, making the democratic mystification ineffective and unnecessary;

-- the wearing out of the democratic parties that had carried out this counter-revolution;

-- following on the Versailles treaty, the frustration felt by large sectors of the bour­geoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, who deserted their traditional parties in favor of one that promised them their revenge.

If the traditional parties or political structures were maintained in the other advan­ced countries, this was because they had shown themselves solid enough, thanks to their experience, the depth of their implantation, their connections with the economic sphere, and the strength of the mystifications they peddled, to ensure the national capital's stability and cohesion in the difficulties that confronted it (crisis, war, social uph­eaval).

But what is only an exception in the advanced countries is a general rule in the under-developed ones, where the conditions we have outlin­ed do not exist, and which are subjected to the most violent convulsions of decadent capitalism. And the Eastern bloc has a special position amongst the under-developed countries. To the strictly economic factors that go to explain the weight of state capitalism, we added historical and geo-political ones: the circums­tances in which the USSR and its empire were founded.

State capitalism in Russia arose from the ruins of the proletarian revolution. The feeble bourgeoisie of the Tsarist era had been completely eliminated by the 1917 revolution (in fact, it is this very weakness that explains the fact that Russia was the only country where the proletariat succeeded in taking power during the revolutionary wave following World War 1) and by the defeat of the White armies. Thus it was neither this bourgeoisie, nor its traditional parties who took the head of the inevitable counter-revolution that was the result, in Russia itself, of the defeat of the world pro­letariat.

This task fell to the state which came into being following the revolution, and which rapidly absorbed the Bolshevik party -- the party having made the double mistake of sub­stituting itself for the class and of taking on state power.[5] In this way, the bourgeois class was reconstituted not on the basis of the old bourgeoisie (other than exceptionally and individually), nor of private ownership of the means of production, but on the basis of the state/party bureaucracy, and of state ownership of the means of production. In Russia, an accumulation of factors -- the backwardness of the country, the rout of the classic bourgeoi­sie and the physical defeat of the working class (the terror and counter-revolution that it underwent were on the same scale as its revolutionary advance) -- thus drove the overall tendency towards state capitalism to take on its most extreme forms: near-total statificat­ion of the economy and the totalitarian dicta­torship of a single party. Since it no longer had to discipline the different sectors of the dominant class, nor to compromise with their economic interests, since it had absorbed the dominant class to the point of becoming com­pletely identified with it, the state could do away definitively with the classical political forms of bourgeois society (democracy and pluralism), even in pretence.

Imperialist domination

At the end of World War II, when the USSR extended its empire towards Central Europe, and temporarily towards China, it exported its political and ideological ‘model'. Obviously this has nothing to do with ideology as the narrow-minded western bourgeois claims.

The fundamental reason for Russia's installat­ion of regimes like its own in its satellite countries must be sought in its weakness as leader of an imperialist bloc -- a weakness expressed first and foremost at the economic level. While the US was able to strengthen its supremacy over Western Europe by means of Marshall Plan dollars, the USSR had no other way of ensuring its grip on the zones it had occupied militarily than by putting into power parties devoted to it body and soul: the ‘comm­unist' parties. This devotion does not mean that the stalinist parties are simply agents of Russian imperialism: all bourgeois parties are above all parties of national capital.

What sets the stalinists apart is the way they intend to manage this national capital, and to guarentee its external security in a world arena dominated by two imperialist blocs. Being the most determined defenders of the general tendency towards state capitalism, they are, within its political spectrum, the most favorable to their country's insertion in the Russian bloc. This foreign policy orientation is linked to the fact that these parties can only come to power by armed force, generally within an inter-imperialist conflict. In fact, a particular characteristic of the Stalinist parties -- capitalist parties ‘par excellence' -- is their total lack of support from the classic sectors of the bourgeoisie, great or small (from the large and small hol­ders of individual capital) to the extent that their program includes these sectors' expro­priation for the benefit of the state. While in some countries they can count on the support of at least part of the proletariat, they are unable to make very much use of it since the proletariat, deprived of any means of produc­tion, can only constitute a real force within the class by struggling on its own terrain -- ie potentially calling into question the dom­ination all sectors and parties of the bourg­eoisie. The stalinist parties have been able to use workers' struggles to put pressure on other sectors of the bourgeoisie (eg France 1947, where the French CP, having been kicked out of the government in May, hoped to win its place back in the wake of the massive strikes that continued until the end of the year) . But they have never encouraged these struggles to overthrow the government in power: in the end, bourgeois class solidarity has always won the day. This is why the conditions for these parties taking power have been the most favor­able where:

-- the working class was weak, defeated, or enrolled behind the bourgeoisie (the latter case obviously including the former two);

-- they have been able to set themselves up as the best defenders of the national capital, which has allowed them to ally with other sectors of the bourgeoisie who they later eliminated;

-- they have had the help, whether direct or in­direct, of Russian military strength.

These conditions were present during and after World War II, for which the ‘communist' parties were the most effective recruiting-sergeants, in the framework of the ‘resist­ance' movements (except in Poland, where the AK, directed from London, was far more power­ful than the movement directed from Moscow), and where in most cases they were able to count on the support of the ‘red' army. The same conditions were also present in certain wars of decolonization or ‘national indepen­dence' (notably China and Indo-China) , or even in plain military coups d'état (Ethiopia, Afghanistan, etc) .

In fact, the stalinist parties' great capacity for military methods, for leading or transfor­ming themselves into armies, is to be explained by their ultra-militarized structure, and by the capitalist form whose agents they are. The militarization of society is at once a cause and an expression of the historical tendency towards state capitalism. The parties that take this tendency in hand in the most deter­mined way are never happier than when they are confining to barracks, barking orders, enforcing the reign of blind submission to authority through brutalization, terror, firing squads, prisons, special powers, cultivating chauvinism and xenophobia ‑- in a word, all those things that are the glory of the military institution.

In the final analysis, the fact that the USSR -- one of the least developed countries in its bloc -- can only maintain its grip on its empire by force of arms determines the fact that the ruling regimes in the satellite countries (as in Russia) can only maintain their grip on society by the same armed force (army and po­lice). To some extent, the link between the USSR and the countries in its bloc is of the same variety as that between the USA and the ‘banana republics' of Latin America: the regimes of these latter are detested by the majority of the population, and only survive thanks to direct or indirect US military aid. In exchange, the US can count on their comp­lete devotion to its economic and military interests. However, for the US this kind of control over their bloc is of secondary imp­ortance. The United States, by far the most developed country in its bloc, and the world's foremost economic and financial power, ensures its domination over the principal countries of its empire -- themselves fully developed nations -- without having to apply constant military force, just as these countries can do without an ever-present repression to ensure their own stability. The American bloc's mainstay is the military might of the United States -- the most powerful country in the world. But this mil­itary power is not set into motion to preser­ve America's domination of these countries, nor their internal stability, whether direc­tly (as in Hungary ‘56, or in Czechoslovakia ‘68), or as a means of intimidation (Poland 80-81). The dominant sectors of the main western bourgeoisies adhere ‘voluntarily' to the American alliance: they get economic, financial, political and military advantages out of it (such as the American ‘umbrella' against Russian imperialism). In this sense, there is no ‘spontaneous inclination' amongst the major nations of the US bloc to pass over to the other side, in the same way as other movements in the opposite direction (the change of camp in Yugoslavia 1948 or China at the end of the ‘60s, the attempts in Hungary ‘56 or Czechoslovakia ‘68). The USA's strength and stability allows it to tolerate the existence of all kinds of regimes within its bloc: from ‘communist' China to the very ‘anti-communist' Pinochet, from the Turkish military dictatorship to the very ‘democratic' Great Britain, from the 200-year old French republic to the Saudian feudal monarchy, and from Franco's Spain to a social-democratic one. By contrast, the USSR's weakness and military backwardness prevents it from controlling other than military or stalinist regimes. As a res­ult:

-- while a stalinist regime can always envisage ‘passing to the West' without risking any internal disorder, a ‘democratic' regime is un­likely to survive as such if it ‘passes to the East';

-- while the American bloc can quite well ‘man­age' the ‘democratization' of a fascist or military regime whenever necessary (Japan, Germ­any, Italy following World War II; Portugal, Greece, Spain during the ‘70s), the USSR can tolerate no ‘democratization' within its bloc.

An impossible ‘democratization'

The ‘Spanish model' recommended by Kuron is thus every bit as absurd as Walesa's proposal to turn Poland into a ‘second Japan'. It is doubly meaningless:

1) despite the importance of the state sector, the classical bourgeoisie in Spain had kept control of the decisive sectors of the national capital: the change in regime had no effect on this partition of the economy, nor on the privileges of any sector of the dominant classes, whichever political force might be in control of the state (the Centre or the Social-Democratic); by contrast, any ‘democratization' in Poland would mean the immediate loss by the present bourgeoisie, to the extent that it is fused with the leadership of the Party, and that all its powers and pri­vileges depend on the Party is complete dom­ination of the state, on the fusion of these two institutions[6], and that ‘free' elect­ions would only give the party an insignifica­nt number of votes (those of its members, at best) .

2) the American bloc controlled the ‘transi­tion to democracy' after Franco's death in a prudent, systematic and coordinated manner (in particular, with the close collaboration of German social-democracy and the French pre­sident Giscard); the protagonists had no difficulty in exercising this control: it was simply a matter of bringing Spanish politi­cal structures into line with those already existing in the advanced Western countries -- whose governments were even able to gain credit with their own ‘public opinions', traditionally hostile to Francoism; by con­trast, it is hard to see how the USSR could control such a process in its own bloc: even if the eventual ‘democratic' replacements firmly committed themselves to ‘respect the traditional alliances', their arrival and con­tinued presence in power in one East European country would give the green light to similar processes in the others, where the vast major­ity of the population aspires to this kind of change; the USSR would then be faced with a chain reaction that would destabilize the whole bloc, its own regime included: not only would this regime (the ‘toughest' in the bloc) be unable to serve as an ‘example' -- it would be seriously compromised by the ‘example' of the ‘democratization' of one of its vassals.

If the Eastern bloc is thus absolutely unable to tolerate any variety of ‘Spanish model' of ‘democratization', no more is it capable of tolerating the kind of intermediate version established in Poland in September 1980. Sol­idarnosc, despite being from the start an unconditional defender of the national capital, an indubitable enemy of the proletariat, whose main function and preoccupation was the sabotage of the workers' struggles, and although it never for a moment challenged either the power of the Party or Poland's place within the Russian bloc, thus embodied a program that was totally incompatible with the stalinist regime. Essentially, it was to mislead the workers that Solidarnosc put forward demands such as the ‘self-managed Republic', where the state power would be controlled by society ‘at the factory, communal and provincial level', where there would be ‘democratically elected diet', ‘independent courts' and where ‘culture, education, and the media would be at the service of society' (Solidarnosc's program). But these demands, upheld over a long period by an organisation with 9 million members and recognized as its representative by 90% of the population, constituted a danger for a regime as fragile as Poland, and for a bloc as fragile as Eastern Europe.

In the advanced Western countries, the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie can tolerate the existence of stalinist parties, whose prog­ram threatens them with elimination -- though they do everything they can to weaken the stal­inists for the benefit of social-democracy. Since these parties will never win a parli­amentary majority, they are allowed free access to the parliamentary game, and even offered tit-bits of state power: this is a cheap way of refurbishing the tarnished image of ‘democ­racy'. But this is a luxury for the rich, for a strong bourgeoisie capable thanks to its economic power, the age of its institutions, and the weight of its mystifications, to mas­ter the workings of this ‘democracy' (however formal they may be) and the mechanisms of its ‘alternations'. It is a luxury that the bour­geoisie in power in the Eastern bloc cannot afford. They are incapable of restricting, in a lasting way, the political forces that they do not control directly within a well-defined role, as the Western bourgeoisie is able to do with the CPs . The mere official presence, even in opposition, of mass political forces that challenge the absolute power of the party-state calls into question the regime's very found­ation, and is a permanent factor of instabil­ity for it.

So Solidarnosc's fate was sealed right from the start. The bourgeoisie of the Eastern bloc was obliged to legalize the ‘independent' trade union, and give it free rein as long as this was absolutely necessary to confront the workers' struggle; once the job was done, the union's outlawing was inevitable.

In the East, even more than in the West, all talk of democracy is no more than hollow phrases, lies whose job is to lead the pro­letariat into a dead-end and defeat.

F.M.

---

[1] ‘Le Courrier des Pays de l'Est', no. 27

[2] Officially, there exist in certain Eastern bloc countries, parties other than the ‘communist' one. So that, in Poland, we have alongside the ‘United Polish Workers' Party, the ‘Democratic Party' and the ‘United Peasant Party', all three being grouped in the ‘Front of National Unity' which officially governs the country. In East Germany there are no less than five separate parties. As in the Federal Republic we find a Liberal, a Christian Democratic and even a National-Democratic Party. It is obvious that these are no more than appendages for the ruling Stalinist party.

[3] This is particularly clear in the case of the workers' parties of the Second International. Before 1914, these parties (despite their increasingly reformist and opportunist tendencies) represented working class interests in parliament, local government and other elected bodies. This allowed them, under certain conditions, to put pressure on the state. From the start of the First World War these parties were absorbed by the capitalist state to become its agents within the working class with the job of using their origins and language to help enroll the proletariat in the imperialist war and to sabotage - or directly suppress - its struggles. The same process overtook the communist parties which, from being in the vanguard of the working class during the post-World War I revolutionary wave, degenerated with its defeat still more rapidly than the socialist parties before them: as decadent capitalism advances so increase the state's power to absorb proletarian organizations that claim to ‘use' bourgeois institutions. The betrayal of the trotskyist current during World War II is another example.

Though to a lesser extent the same reversal of functions has affected the classical bourgeois parties. From being the representative of different sections of the capitalist class within the state, they have increasingly tended to be the state's representative towards their respective clienteles. However, the fact that these clienteles belong to the economically dominant class forces these parties - under certain conditions, and unlike the so-called ‘workers' parties' - to defend in a real, though limited way some of the specific interests they supposedly represent.   

[4] On fascism and anti-fascism, see the International Review nos 3 and 10, as well as Revolution Internationale (nouvelle serie) nos 14 and 21.

[5] See International Review no 8 (‘The Communist Left in Russia') and nos 12 and 13 (‘The Beginning of the Proletarian Revolution in Russia).

[6] In the Eastern bloc, all functions of any importance in society figure in the ‘Nomenklatura' - ie the list of positions whose incumbents are chosen by the leading circles of the party and which are associated with material privileges relative to their place in the hierarchy. These functions range from chief of police to hospital director, from chiefs-of-staff to secretaries of the party's ‘rank-and-file' organizations in the factories, from factory managers to regional presidents of the volunteer firemen's association, from ambassadors to presidents of district committees for physical culture. Thus, the director of a state farm is chosen, not by the Ministry of Agriculture but by the party district committee; generals and colonels are nominated, not by the Ministry of Defense or the Chiefs of Staff but by the Politburo or the Party Secretariat.

ICC Introduction

The immaturity of the proletarian political milieu today as shown by its sectarianism and immediatism, especially since the failure of the International Conferences has stood in the way of serious public debate on the main issues of our time. The ICC’s analyses on the perspectives for class struggle in the light of the left moving into opposition and on the role of revolution­aries have not -- side from a few rare excep­tions -- encountered much of an echo. Sarcasm and “the silent treatment” have taken the place of a serious and responsible attitude towards the confrontation of political positions. The fact that questions raised in debate have an importance going beyond the existence of any one particular group or organization, that the ideas put forward are not the personal property or the trademark of any one political group but the result of a common effort -- all this is far from being understood. The idea that there is only one political group, “one’s own”, has led to the most frantic and destructive immediatism and has lowered the level of debate and weighed heavily on the development of the whole revol­utionary milieu.

However, it is encouraging to see that despite this state of affairs, there are some revolutionaries developing today who realize the need to take positions on major political issues and who consider these positions as “everyone’s business” in the milieu. It is worth noting that the text we are publishing – “The ICC’s Perspectives on the Left in Oppos­ition: Empirio-Criticism and the Role of Revolutionaries” -- was written by a comrade from Hong Kong who left the anarchist group “Minus”; a person geographically isolated from the political milieu in Europe. His contribu­tion to the debate on the left in opposition is concrete proof that this question is not just a hobby-horse of the ICC nor a question limited to only the “western” revolutionary milieu. All fundamental political positions concern the entire proletarian milieu on all 5 continents. These positions express the world proletariat’s effort to arrive at a the­oretical and political coherence and thus a unity, going beyond the geographical and political dispersion of revolutionary groups. As the comrade has written, “if the present weak milieu is to move forward it must be equal to the immense tasks facing it in the coming years”.

In this brief introduction we cannot go into all the points raised in this text, for example the criticism directed at the ICC for “a wrong analysis of the course of history”. While agreeing that the bourgeoisie is united against the proletariat (the author of the text calls it a “conspiracy”), he makes a distinction between a bourgeoisie 1 (the managers and “captains of industry”) and a bourgeoisie 11 (the “ideologists”). We do not think this distinction helps clarify things very much.

1. On the historical level, capitalist pro­duction relations have created 2 antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The rallying of hesitant elements of the petit-bourgeoisie is a function of the social dynamic set up by class struggle. But experience shows that at decisive moments all factions of the bourgeoisie from left to right join to­gether against the proletariat. The comrade seems somewhat in doubt about this; he main­tains that political parties today exist to struggle for political power within the state. But in fact historical experience leads us to the opposite conclusion: divisions between the right and left today are only a facade.

2. The division of labor within the bourge­oisie (the various functions carried out in the economic political and ideological apparatus of the bourgeoisie) must not be mistaken for real, fundamental differences in the nature of the bourgeoisie. The existence of complementary factions within the bourgeo­isie is not contradictory with its basic unity as a class. These factions have complementary functions which allow them to fulfill all the better their task of mystification in relation to the proletariat.

3. The role of the right is not specifically to prepare for war; the entire bourgeoisie does this including the left whose participa­tion is mainly through pacifist campaigns. The role of the left in the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie is clear to see throughout the sixty year period since the First World War. Its anti-working class role is not for “later on” but for right now in the context of the bourgeoisie’s tactic of putting the left in opposition.

Aside from these few brief remarks, we think this text shows that the comrade is committed to really debating the question of the left in opposition and the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie “not for the purpose of discred­iting other organizations of the milieu but for the purpose of clarification for the whole milieu”. Such a commitment is particularly encouraging.

Letter from L.L.M. (Hong Kong)

Over the past three years or so, the ICC has systematically put forward its ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective which has been severely criticized by many. This short article nei­ther attempts to defend nor to reject it, it merely wishes to discuss some of the questions thrown up by the debate, which seem to have been largely neglected by the revolutionary milieu.

Before going into these questions, I wish to make two general points:

1. In the past, with few exceptions, debates between organizations have rarely been address­ed by third parties, ‘it’s their business’ seems to be the general attitude. It is my firm conviction that debates on important issues is not only the business of the parties directly involved, but are the busi­ness of the whole milieu. Third parties must be prepared to and should take up positions publicly. This is not a matter of throwing one’s weight behind the party one agrees with (if one does agree with one of the protagon­ists), nor is it a matter of acting as an arb­iter, but a matter of clarification for the whole milieu. If the present weak milieu is to move forward to be equal to the immense tasks facing it in the years ahead, this is one pre­requisite. The long-running disputes between the CWO and the ICC, the KPL’s rejection of the concept of decadence, etc, are, for example, issues on which third parties should have spoken extensively. The ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective is another example. Pri­vately I have heard a lot of criticisms of it, but have not read one single detailed critique of it in print (as my only foreign language is English, I may have missed published criticisms in other languages, and there may be some in English that I am unaware of).

2. It has more than once been remarked that the ICC has been degenerating over the past few years, one of the signs of which is where­as previously it offered intelligent analyses, today it more often than not merely regurgitat­es empty journalistic assertions. I agree there is some justification for the latter acc­usation. As to the first, if it is meant that the ICC is increasingly compromising on class positions, then I do not agree. If on the other hand, it is meant that the ICC has organizationally degenerated, then I am not in the position to judge. Returning to the latter accusation, I think if it is partly justified, it also misses a very important point. It is easy to write a discourse on, say, Marx’s crisis theory or how and why the Communist International degenerated after its 3rd Congress. But it is extremely difficult and an entirely different matter when it comes to analyzing, say, the current state of the crisis or the current balance of class forces. In the latter type of analyses, because events are only in the process of emerging, because a lot of things are at best only half-known, because we lack the benefit of hindsight,…their very nature is that they can only be based upon scanty evidence, and thus inevit­ably have a ring of mere assertion about them. If we look at, for example, the International Review, the tasks of its early issues were mainly to reappropriate the lessons of the proletarian struggle since World War 1. In this type of analysis, one is able to amass considerable documentary evidence to support one’s perspective, and even more importantly, one possesses the wisdom of hindsight. But revolutionaries are not intellectuals/academicians. They do not only analyze the past, but must also analyze the present and forecast the future. They do not engage in theoret­ical elaboration for its own sake, but for the sake of using the theory to analyze the current balance of class forces, the current state of capital’s development; to map out the future of the class struggle; to devise strat­egy and tactics for the proletariat. Thus, when we criticize the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, or the ICC’s analysis of the historic course, we must not fall into the empiricist trap of rejecting them for lack of evidential support (of which more below) but must consider whether they are consistent with the Marxist method; nor must we remain, as does the intellectual/academician, on the ‘pure’ theoretical level (for example, the materialist theory of history versus a ‘conspiratorial’ theory), but must address the questions that they are addressing. This is how I propose to consider the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective below.

The perspective is basically criticized for being a machiavellian view of the bourgeoisie and a conspiratorial view of history, held on to by the ICC to justify its (wrong) analysis of the historic course, against all evidence to the contrary. At one time I also held a similar view, as evidenced in the following remarks I made to the ICC sometime late last year:

“...this question involves the question of ideology... What is ideology? ... Is it created by ‘professional’ hacks in a conscious deliberate, machiavellian way? ... If Marx him­self never made an exposition of the ‘nature’ of ideology, it is nevertheless implicit in at least his mature works. One of the most ill­ustrative is his discourse in Capital III on the ideology of (bourgeois) political economy. To go straight to the point: on the basis that being determines consciousness, it is ‘natural’ that the bourgeoisie, occupying a particular position in the relations of production, thinks such relations from the vantage point of that position. The result is it thinks such relations in particular categories (rent, inte­rest, virtue of abstinence, etc). If we re­call Marx in Capital III, it’s obvious that for him, such categories are ‘natural’ for the bourgeois political economist, and there is nothing at all machiavellian about them. On the other hand, it is just as ‘natural’ for the proletariat to be unable to think in (or appropriate) such categories because they occupy a different (in fact, opposing) posi­tion in the relations of production. It was ‘natural’ for Marx to think in categories such as surplus value. If we accept the above form­ulation, then it’s obvious that as far as (bourgeois) ideology is concerned, it does not know the number 1 enemy of the bourgeoisie is the proletariat, for such a knowledge is impossible for it...But for the bourgeoisie who are directly engaged in the ‘management’ of the relations of production (the capitalists the high echelons state bureaucrats, top unionists, etc -- for the sake of presentation, I shall call them bourgeoisie 1), their imm­ediate exposure to the class struggle gives them this knowledge. While they obviously (to various degrees) subscribe to the categ­ories of bourgeois ideology, they know damn well that the existence of what these categ­ories signify depends on the exploitation and suppression of the proletariat. On the other hand, for the sundry ideological hacks of the bourgeoisie (intellectuals, academics, mass media people, Trotskyists, rank and file unionists, etc – let’s call them bour­geoisie 11), this knowledge is absent. There is no doubt in my mind that bourgeoisie 1 are capable of uniting in a subjective conspirato­rial way while bourgeoisie 11 only unite with bourgeoisie 1 in the sense that all factions of the bourgeoisie are always united against the proletariat. Personally, I don’t think, for example, that the Trotskyists, rank and file unionists etc ever co-operate with bour­geoisie 1 in a subjective conspiratorial way. It will therefore be fatally incorrect to assert that such conspiracies between bourgeoi­sies 1 and 11 exist for it flies in the face of the ‘nature’ of ideology. Even with the bourgeoisie 1 we must be very careful not to overexert their capability to subjectively unite against the workers in conspiracies, in case we forget that the fundamental con­tradictions within bourgeoisie 1 are also insolvable. (... ) One of these fundamental inner contradictions is that between seekers of' political power... As far as I can see, there is no possibility at all that the Left and Right political parties can sit toge­ther and work out which faction should form the Government. The grabbing of political power is the raison d’être of' political part­ies and even if politicians knew that the coming of revolution is going to sound the death knell for all of them, they don’t come together in such negotiations -- to say they are capable of doing so is to give them wisdom they are incapable of having. Of course, pol­itical parties often make tactical decisions as when to ‘go to the country’, to provoke crises for the government, etc. But these are of an entirely different nature. Such decisions are made for the purpose of grabbing power. The kind of negotiations that we are talking about here entails the decision on the part of some parties to relinquish power when it already has it or give up the search for it when it has the chance to get hold of it -- both occasions being antithetical to their raison d’être. My own interpretation of the Left (being) in opposition is as follows (...): it is not that the Left must stay in opposit­ion today because to go in power, they will lose all credibility. This view represents a half-truth for it doesn’t follow through to the logical conclusion. Even if the left loses credibility.... by going into power, it doesn’t mean that the bourgeoisie will be at their wits’ end in terms of' political ideology. For to the left of the ‘established’ left, they still have the Trotskyists, etc. If the ‘established’ left does lose credibility by going into power, their ultra-lefts will surely take their place today. There will then not be a rightward split of Labor, but instead a left­ward split (...). The Left is forced into opp­osition because the economic policies that they traditionally embody (Keynesianism) have now been proved to be ineffective...Ask the man in the street today what’s preventing the economic recovery, he’ll tell you it’s the high interest rates. For quite some time now, because of the failure of Keynesian economics, the ideological hacks of the bourgeoisie have been vigorously propagandizing the ideology that a return to (Adam) Smithian economics will do the job. With the sophistication of the mass media… the climate has been created that suddenly everybody is turned into an economist and ‘believes’ that lower interest rates will bring recovery”.

What I was saying, basically, was that in putting forward the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, the ICC was in danger of ignoring the ‘nature’ of ideology and unconsciously assuming that the bourgeoisie is capable of solving some of its fundamental inner contradictions.

As I see it now, the distinction between bour­geoisie I and II is still basically correct, but the point about being the raison d’être of polit­ical parties as well as that about the Right coming to power for reasons of their economic philosophy are too simplistic. I shall dis­cuss why in more detail below. As the ICC said in reply: “The raison d’être of (the bour­geoisie’s) factions is not a simple lust for power....an over-emphasis on the idea of ‘power’ being held by a party ‘in parliament’ can tend to divert attention away from the framework of state capitalism and totalitari­anism. We must not fall for the false anta­gonisms the bourgeoisie would have us believe”. More importantly, nowhere in my comments did I make any assessment of the present state of the crisis or that of the present balance of class forces. We can certainly dispute the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, but to do so we need to base our critique on an analysis of these two critical aspects of the class strugg­le, which, regardless of the perspective’s val­idity, is exactly what the ICC is doing, and is precisely what is lacking in most of the criticisms of the perspective that I am aware of, which are heavily intellectualist in their approach.

The more I come to consider it, the less can I understand why to say the bourgeoisie is capable of conspiring against the proletariat is scandalous. Today, we all revere Bilan’s analysis of the Spanish Republic and the Span­ish Civil War in the 30s. But if we read its articles carefully, there can be no mistake that it suggested a conspiracy between the fascist wing of the bourgeoisie and the anti-fascist wing of the popular front to drag the workers to World War II. Bilan clearly stated that due to the proletariat’s resis­tance in Spain, the bourgeoisie found that to crush it head on was a worse strategy that to derail it by means of the Spanish Republic and that the anti-fascist popular fronts all over Europe were the means by which the bour­geoisie of the ‘democracies’ mobilized their proletariat in order to turn it into its cannon fodder. Today we all take as a fact that Bilan’s analyses were correct, as they indeed were. But why is it that a conspirat­orial theory which has been proven to be correct is so much revered, but a similar theo­ry today be regarded as scandalous?

All Left Communist groups today regard as a self-evident fact which it is, that trade unio­ns are the state’s police inside the ranks of the workers. Trade unions do not betray the workers because in decadent capitalism, no durable gains can be made by the latter within capitalism, but are in fact consciously playing their policing role. A cursory examina­tion of any Left Communist publication today will convey this attitude/position. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine the bourgeoisie’s left and right political parties to be in a conspi­racy while the conspiracy between the trade unions and the bosses be taken without the slightest hesitation?

I am sure no one will deny that different states are capable of conspiring to achieve some common goals. For all who have eyes to see, the conspiracy between the US and the UK in the Falklands/Malvinas War, that between the US and Israel in the latter’s invasion of Lebanon, etc are clear as daylight. Or if we go back into history a bit, are not the less­ons of the Paris Commune and the Russian Revol­ution enough to drive home the lesson that, threatened by the proletariat, the bourgeoisie is capable of setting aside even its most powerful antagonists to unite against it, as the ICC has correctly pointed out? Why, then, is it that when it comes to a conspiracy between the right and left of the bourgeoisie within national frontiers, it becomes so unimaginable? Did Noske murder the German proletariat uncon­sciously or consciously? Wouldn’t we all laugh were someone to tell us that the left of bourgeoisie 1, blood on their hands, in actual fact subjectively have the interests of the workers at heart, though objectively they can only betray the workers in decadent capitalism?

To say that the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged in conspiracy is not the same as holding a bad guys’ conspiratorial view of history. The bourgeoisie conspires not because they are bad guys, but because cap­italism compels it to conspire. If the bour­geoisie is capable of conspiring, then for a faction of it to conspire against it to con­spire itself out of power isn’t so extraord­inary either. The examples of the Paris Comm­une and the Russian Revolution have already been mentioned while recently we have seen several military dictators in South America voluntarily relinquishing power in unfavorable circumstances.

The validity of the ‘Left in Opposition’ per­spective is certainly open to question, but just as certainly, its method is valid. It is obvious that the crisis is biting deeper everyday, it is obvious that the bourgeoisie is preparing for war, it is obvious that to do so it must mobilize the proletariat and other sectors of the population. The persp­ective starts from these premises, and if we are to offer a genuine critique, we must also start from these premises, and not worry, as does the empiricist, about whether evidence exists to catch the bourgeoisie red-handed in conspiracy. Bilan did not worry about such things, neither should we. This does not, of course, mean that we do not concretely analyze the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers, but it does mean that our analysis must be of the dynamic of the system’s underlying relations, the hall­mark of the Marxist methodology. To ‘fall for the false antagonisms the bourgeoisie would have us believe’ is to return to the phenomen­ological pseudo-science of the bourgeoisie.

In IR 31, the ICC says that the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers are “confined within and determined by a framework set by:

* the historic period (decadence);

* the conjunctural crisis (whether it has opened or not);

* the historic course (towards war or revo­lution);

* the momentary weight of class struggle (in upsurge or reflux).

According to the evolution of the actual per­iod, the hand of particular key factions of the bourgeoisie is strengthened inside the state apparatus, as the importance of their role and orientation becomes clear for the bourgeoisie”. (p. 15).

I think this is basically correct, though the way it is phrased can surely be improved by linking it less to the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective; but I also hasten to add that the perspective does not necessarily follow from it. Utilizing the same framework, it is poss­ible to come to a very different perspective such as the following. The crisis has for a while reached a stage at which there will be a period of stagnation fluctuating around the level of the current trough. This has made the bourgeoisie realize that war will break out and thus has started to prepare for it with a view to really fight it. But just as in the ‘30s, the bourgeoisie needs an ideology to mobilize the proletariat and other laboring masses, and this ideology may well be a ‘moral’ crusade against Soviet aggression. That is, the peace (sic) movement is playing the role anti-fascism played in the ‘30s. In other words, when the crunch comes the Western proletariat will have to be led to war by today’s ‘cham­pions’ of peace, that is the bourgeoisie’s left (the same old ‘to fight a war to end (sic) all wars’ in a new guise). This means that the groundwork of building up the war machine has to be undertaken by the right. The left, therefore, is in the oppositional role today not to derail the workers from their combat­vity (which many dispute), but to prepare itself for its real role later. As WR 25 said some time ago: “Generally speaking, the left’s participation tin power is only absolutely necessary in two extreme situations: in a ‘Union Sacree’ to dragoon workers into national defense in … direct preparation for war, and in a revolutionary situation when the rest of the bourgeoisie willingly or otherwise hands over power to the left (cf my earlier erroneous point about the raison d’être of political parties) whose coming to power is presented as the ultimate goal of the revolution itself.” (p. 6, emphasis mine).

The above is only an off-the-cuff perspective stricken with many holes, implicit in it is an assessment that the historic course is to­wards war. But it does go to show that the ICC’s ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective does not necessarily follow from its own framework.

To summarize this short contribution, I am essentially making two points:

1. To suggest that the bourgeoisie (class l) is capable of conspiring against the prol­etariat is entirely consistent with the Marxi­st method. Concerning bourgeoisie 11, I agree with the ICC when it says: “It is therefore possible to talk, say, about the ‘plans of the bourgeoisie’ while in fact it is only a small proportion of the class actually making them”. (IR 31, p. 14).

2. In putting forward the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, with which I obviously have a lot of differences, the ICC displays a remarkable understanding of the role of revolutionaries and a willingness to assume the role, both still rare in the milieu today. We definitely need to put more effort to definitively supercede the still prevalent intellectualist attitude in our theoretical practice.

Finally, I wish to make one more point about the empiricist attitude that I sense to be existing to some degree in the milieu. When the ICC says the historic course today is towards revolution, many raise their arms in despair protesting that all evidence is again­st such a view. But how is the ICC supposed to be able to produce the evidence in support of its view? By carrying out a consciousness survey with the working class?! Given the very nature of revolutionary consciousness, can safely say that whatever evidence there is, it does not suggest revolution is on the cards until its very eve. There definitely will be more violent sporadic clashes between workers and the state, but until the revolution’s very eve these struggles will inevitably be engulfed more or less rapidly by trade union­ism. Thus all analysis of the historic course can only be highly abstract, based upon gener­al frameworks such as a longitudinal view of capitalism’s development (eg, decadence), what that development means in terms of the bourg­eoisie’s ideological hold over the proletariat (see Marx’s preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’), etc. Evidence has no place in this type of analysis.

P.S. To expand somewhat on the point I made at the very beginning, while the spirit of open critique and self-critique in the present milieu is not lacking, it still leaves much to be desired. Not only is the ‘it’s their business’ attitude prevalent, even with the parties directly involved, they often maintain silences/half-silences on arguments they have lost; worse still, on many occasions they cont­inue to stick to their fallen positions, and in some cases, even resort to what can only be regarded as slanders, which are based either upon positions not held by their victim, or upon sweeping denigratory remarks which, when unsubstantiated, are bound to be misleading (such as ‘unlike XYZ which erroneously says... we say....’). This, to varying degrees, exists in all groups, and I can cite at least half a dozen of examples off-hand (but to do so here, without going into some details, would be un­fair to the parties involved). We are no leftists, we engage in debates not for the purpose of discrediting other organizations of the milieu, but for the purpose of clarifica­tion for the whole milieu. To these familiar with the positions of the slandered parties, slanders have nowhere to hide, but for the newly-initiated they create prejudices. If even an ex-Maoist as Sweezy was capable of ad­mitting publicly that he had been convinced by another ex-Maoist Bettelheim of the falsity of his position (see their debate ‘Between Capit­alism and Socialism (sic)’, Modern Reader) , I think we are justified to expect a more open milieu than there is today.

L.L.M. February 1983.

IR 34, 3rd Quarter 1983

Communists and the National Question, Part 1 (1900-1920): The debate on the national question at the dawn of decadence

“Workers of countries, unite.” This call at the end of the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in 1848 was not just an exuberant exhortation; it expressed one of the most vital conditions for the victory of the working class. From its very birth the movement of the working class proclaimed its international class character against the national boundaries which marked the development of the domination of the capitalist class over the proletariat. But in the 19th century capitalism had not yet exhausted all its potential for development in relation to pre-capitalist production relations. At certain moments and wider certain conditions communists took into account the possibility for the working class to support factions of the bourgeoisie because, in developing itself, capitalism accelerated the maturing of the conditions for the proletarian revolution.

But at the beginning of the 20th century, with the existence of a world market sanctioning the extension of the capitalist mode of production all over the globe, a debate began on the nature of this revolutionary support to national movements. The following article, the first of a series devoted to the attitude of communists towards the national question, goes back over the terms and the concerns of the debate between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

The failure of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the triumph of the counter-revolution in Russia and the 50-year subjection of the proletariat to the barbarism of decadent capitalism did not allow for a complete clarification of the national question in the workers’ movement. Throughout this period, the counter – revolution did everything to distort the content of the proletarian revolution, constantly trying to pretend that there was a continuity between the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the state capitalism established in Russia, a continuity between the proletarian internationalism of the revolutionary period and the imperialist policy of the Russian state capitalism pillaging in the name of ‘the right of self-determination of peoples’ and the ‘national liberation of oppressed peoples’. The positions of Lenin were transformed into infallible dogma. Thus the possibility for the proletariat to use national movements as a ‘lever’ for the communist revolution, a tactic adopted at the time of the reflux of revolution in the key countries and the need to defend the ‘proletarian state’ in Russia, tended to be embraced as an absolute truth in the ranks of revolutionaries with the exception of some minorities.

    Today the dispersion and the crisis of revolutionary organisations, particularly the crisis of the Bordigist party, the ICP (Programma) highlight the importance of communists defending a clear and principled position on the so- called wars of ‘national liberation’ if they want to avoid being broke under the enormous weight of bourgeoisie ideology on this crucial point. The fact that the ICP abandoned the internationalist position in the inter-imperialist conflict in the Middle East in order to critically support the capitalist force of the Palestine Liberation Organisation - a position which provoked the dislocation of the group and the birth of an openly nationalist and chauvinist split (1) – i.e. a recent example of the danger to the proletariat of any concession to nationalism in the period of capitalist decadence.

    The source of the theoretical weaknesses of the Bordigist on the national question, like the whole so-called `Leninist’ tradition, lies in their defence of Lenin’s position in the early years of the Communist International in favour of supporting national movements under the slogan of ‘the right of self-determination of nations’. The ICC rejects all support of this nature in the epoch of imperialism. This rejection is based on Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of Lenin’s ideas developed at the beginning of the century. Today, in the light of the experiences of the proletariat in the last 60 years, we can only reaffirm that Luxemburg’s position and not Lenin’s has been confirmed by history and offers the only clear basis for a Marxist approach to this question.

Today there are many elements emerging in the revolutionary milieu or at least making a partial break with leftism, who still take Lenin’s position against Luxemburg’s on this question. Because it is so essential to break clearly with all aspects of Leftist ideology, we are publishing a series of articles which critically examine the debates which took place in the revolutionary movement before and after the first imperialist world war. We want to demonstrate why Luxemburg’s position is the only one to deal coherently with all the implications of capitalist decadence on the national question. We also aim to restore to memory the real position of Lenin which was an error in the workers’ movement in the past but has been distorted and used by the left of capital.

NOTE

(1)    See International Review 32.

---

LENIN ON ‘THE RIGHT OF NATIONS TO SELF-DETERMINATION’

“Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just’, ‘purest’, most refined and civilised brand.” (Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question)

In view of the gross distortions of Lenin’s position on the national question inflicted by his epigones, it is necessary first of all to point out that Lenin, as a marxist, based his attitude to support for nationalist movements firmly on the foundations laid down by Marx and Engels in the First International: as with all social questions, he affirmed, marxists must examine the national question:

• within its definite historical limits and not as an abstract or a historical ‘principle’;
• from the point of view of the unity of the proletariat and the primary need to strengthen its class struggle for socialism.

So while Lenin advocated that the proletariat should recognise ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ – meaning the right of a bourgeoisie to secede and establish an independent capitalist state if necessary – he emphasised that this should only be supported where it was in the interests of the class struggle, and that the proletariat, “while recognising equality and equal rights to a national state values above all and places uppermost the alliance of the proletarians of all nations, and assesses any national demand, any national separation, from the angle of the workers’ class struggle”. (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914).

For Lenin, the right to self-determination was a necessary demand in the struggle of the proletariat for democracy, along with equal rights, universal suffrage, etc. He posed the fundamental question as the completion of the bourgeois revolution which was still underway in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements were historically inevitable in the destruction of feudalism by the rising bourgeoisie and the spreading of capitalist social relations across the world. Where these bourgeois democratic nationalist movements arose, Lenin said, marxists must support them and fight for the maximum degree of democracy, to help sweep away feudal remnants and remove all national oppression, in order to clear away all obstacles to the class struggle against capitalism.

This task had a particular significance in Russia for the Bolsheviks who were concerned to win the confidence of the masses in the nations oppressed by the Tsarist Empire. Lenin saw ‘Great Russian’ nationalism as the principal obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle, since it was “more feudal than bourgeois” (ibid): to deny the right of these small nations to secede would mean, in practice, supporting the privileges of the oppressor nation and subordinating the workers to the policy of the Great Russian bourgeoisie and feudal landlords.

But Lenin was well aware of the dangers of the proletariat supporting nationalist movements, because even in ‘oppressed’ countries the struggles of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were diametrically opposed:

• the proletariat supported the right to self-determination only in order to hasten the victory of bourgeois democracy over feudalism and absolutism, and to secure the best, most democratic conditions for the class struggle;
• the bourgeoisie raised national demands in order to obtain privileges for its own nation and to defend its own national exclusiveness. For these reasons, Lenin emphasised that the proletariat’s support for nationalism was “strictly limited to what is progressive in such movements”; it supported the bourgeoisie “conditionally”; “only in certain direction”.

From the point of view of the completion of the bourgeois revolution through the struggle for democracy and against national oppression support for the bourgeoisie of an oppressed  nation was only to be given where it was actually fighting the oppressor nation: “... insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations stands for its own bourgeois nationalism; we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation”. (ibid). In other words, bourgeois nationalist movements were to be supported solely for their democratic content, i.e. in their ability to contribute towards the best conditions for the class struggle and the unity of the working class: “The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support. At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness...” (ibid) original emphasis)

As for the historical limits of the struggle for democracy and the need to raise the slogan of self-determination, Lenin in 1913 was quite specific. In western continental Europe the epoch of bourgeois democratic revolutions was over by about 1871: “Therefore, to seek the right to self-determination in the programmes of West-European socialists at this time of day is to betray one’s ignorance of the ABC of Marxism”. (ibid). But in Eastern Europe and Asia the bourgeois revolution was yet to be completed, and “It is precisely and solely because Russia and the neighbouring countries are passing through this period that we must have a clause in our programme on the right of nations to self-determination” (ibid, our emphasis).

From the beginning, the slogan of self-determination was full of ambiguities. For example, Lenin was forced to admit that it was a negative demand, for a right to form a separate state, for which the proletariat could give no guarantees, and which could not be given at the ‘expense’ of another nation. His writings, limitations and exceptions, some of them contradictory, and it was intended above all to be raised as a propagandistic slogan by socialists in the ‘oppressing’ countries. But according to Lenin’s strictly historical method, at root it was based on the continuing capability of the bourgeoisie in those areas of the world where capitalism was still expanding to struggle for democracy against feudalism and national oppression, the inescapable conclusion being that when this period was over the whole democratic content of these struggles disappeared, and then the only progressive task of the proletariat was to make its own revolution against capitalism.

LUXEMBURG’S CRITIQUE OF ‘SELF-DETERMINATION’

Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks’ acceptance of the slogan of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ was inseparable from the struggle of the left-wing of the social democratic parties in Western Europe against the growing tendencies towards opportunism and revisionism in the Second International.

By the early 20th century it was possible to see the emerging trend in the advanced capitalist countries towards state capitalism and imperialism, and the consequent tendency of the state machine to absorb the permanent organisations of the workers’ movement – the trade unions and social democratic parties. Inside the International, theoreticians like Bernstein arose to ‘revise’ the revolutionary marxism of the International in order to justify its accommodation to these developments in capitalism. Luxemburg was one of the foremost theoreticians on the left who fought the ‘revisionism’ and sought to expose its root causes.

She rejected the notion of self-determination so energetically because she saw it as a sign of dangerous ‘social-patriotic’ influences in the International; reactionary forces who disguised themselves in socialist colours and were justified by such leading theorists as Kautsky.

The adoption by the Second International in 1896 of a resolution recognising “the complete right of all nations to self-determination” was in response to an attempt by the Polish Socialist Party to obtain official support for the restoration of Polish national sovereignty. This was rejected, but the adoption of the more general formula in Luxemburg’s opinion avoided the underlying issues: the historical basis for the proletariat’s support to nationalist movements and the need to combat social-patriotism in the International.

Luxemburg began her critique by accepting the same basic framework as Lenin, that:

• the bourgeois-democratic revolution remained to be completed in Russia, Asia and Africa;
• in the interests of developing the conditions for revolution the proletariat could not ignore nationalist movements for their democratic content in areas of the world where capitalism was still destroying feudalism;
• the proletariat was naturally opposed to all forms of oppression, including national oppression, and was in no way indifferent to the plight of oppressed nations.

But her first task was to defend the marxist approach to the national question against those who, like the Polish social patriots, used the writings of Marx in support of Polish independence to justify their own reactionary projects for national restoration, trying hard “to transform a particular view of Marx’s on a current issue into a genuine do dogma, timeless, unchangeable, unaffected by historical contingencies, and subject to neither doubt or criticism – after all, ‘Marx himself’ once said it”. This is nothing but “an abuse of Marx’s name to sanction a tendency that in its entire spirit was in jarring contradiction to the teachings and theory of Marxism”. (Foreword to the Anthology ‘The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement’, 1905).

Against this fossilisation of the historical methodology of Marxism, Luxemburg affirmed that “without a critical assessment of the concrete historical conditions, nothing of value can be contributed to the problem (of national oppression)”. (The Polish Question at the International Congress, 1896), and from this standpoint, proceeded to outline her main arguments against the slogan of self-determination:

• the dependence or independence of nation states was a question of power, not ‘rights’, and was determined by socio-economic development and  material class interest;
• it was a utopian slogan, since it was clearly impossible to solve all the problems of nationality, race and ethnic origin within the framework of capitalism;
• it was a metaphysical formula which offered no practical guidelines or solutions to the day-to-day struggle of the proletariat, and which ignored the marxist theory of social classes and the historical conditions of nationalist movements, Nor could it be equated with the struggle for democratic rights as it did not represent a legal form of existence like the right to organise, for example, in a mature bourgeois society;
• it did not differentiate the position of the proletariat from those of the most radical bourgeois parties, nor from the pseudo-socialist and petty- bourgeois parties. In fact it was a paraphrase of the old slogan of bourgeois nationalism and not specifically connected with socialism or working class politics at all;
• it would lead to the fragmentation of the workers’ movement, not its unification, by leaving it up to the proletariat in each separate oppressed nation to decide its own national position, with inevitable contradictions and conflicts.

The majority of her arguments, which in many cases simply repeated basic marxist positions on the state and the class nature of society, went unanswered by Lenin. Against the idea of the proletariat supporting self-determination, she emphasised the second part of the general resolution adopted by the International in 1896, which called on workers on all oppressed countries “to join the ranks of the class conscious workers of the whole world in order to fight together with them for the defeat of international social democracy”. (Cited on The National Question and Autonomy, 1908). Only in this way, in the victory of international socialism, could real self-determination be effected.

LUXEMBURG ON POLISH INDEPENDENCE

Luxemburg’s critique of self-determination was developed with particular reference to Poland, but the reasons she gave for rejecting support for its independence from Russia have a general importance in clarifying the marxist approach to such questions and the implications of change in the conditions of capitalism for the national question as a whole.
    Marx and Engels originally gave their support to Polish nationalism as part of a revolutionary strategy to defend the interests of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Western Europe from the Holy Alliance of feudal, absolutist Eastern European regimes. They went so far as to call for a war against Russia and for insurrections in Poland to safeguard bourgeois democracy. Luxemburg pointed out that this support for Polish nationalism was given at a time when there were no sign of revolutionary action in Russia itself; nor indeed was there a significant proletariat in Russia or Poland to wage a struggle against feudalism: “Not socialist theory or tactics, but the burning political exigencies of German democracy at the bourgeois revolution on Western Europe-determined the viewpoint that Marx, and later Engels, adopted with respect to Russia and Poland” (Foreword).

Luxemburg’s re-affirmation of the marxist approach was based on an analysis of the historical development of capitalism: by the last half of the nineteenth century Poland was experiencing: “the frantic dance of capitalism and capitalist enrichment over the graves of the Polish nationalist movements and the Polish nobility...” (ibid), which gave rise to a Polish proletariat and a socialist movement which from the start took up the interests of the class struggle as opposed to nationalism. This was matched by developments in Russia itself where the working class began to assert its own struggle.

In Poland, capitalist development created an opposition between national independence and the interests of the bourgeoisie, which renounced the nationalist cause of the old nobility in favour of the closer integration of Polish and Russia capital, based on their need for the Russian market-which would be denied to them if Poland were to break away as an independent state. From this, Luxemburg concluded that the political task of the proletariat in Poland was not to take up the utopian and diversionary struggle for independence but to join in a common struggle with the Russian workers against absolutism, for the broadest democratisation in order to create the best conditions for a struggle against Polish and Russian capital.

The revival of Marx’s 1848 support for Polish nationalism by the Polish Socialist Party was therefore a betrayal of socialism; a sign of the influence of reactionary nationalism within the socialist movement which used the words of Marx and Engels while turning its back on the proletarian alternative to national oppression: the united class struggle, which showed itself in 1905 when the mass strikes spread from Moscow and Petrograd to Warsaw. Nationalism in Poland had become “a vessel for all types of reaction, a natural shield for counter-revolution”; it had become a weapon in the hands of the national bourgeoisie who in the name of the Polish nation attacked and murdered striking workers, organised ‘national unions’ to counteract the class’s militancy, campaigned against ‘unpatriotic’ general strikes, and used armed nationalist bands to assassinate socialists. Luxemburg concluded: “Mistreated by history, the Polish national idea moved through all stages of decline and fall. Having started its political career as a romantic, noble insurgent, glorified by international revolution, it now ends up as a national hooligan – a volunteer of the Black Hundreds of Russian absolutism and imperialism”. (The National Question and Autonomy, 1908).

Through an examination of the actual changes brought about by capitalism’s development, Luxemburg was able to wipe away the abstract talk of ‘rights’ and ‘self-determination and most importantly to refute the whole rationale for Lenin’s position that it was necessary to support Polish self-determination in order to advance the cause of democracy and hasten the erosion of feudalism. Nationalism itself was becoming a reactionary force wherever it was faced with the threat of unified class struggle. Whatever the specificities of Poland, Luxemburg’s conclusions could only have a more and more generalised application in a period when bourgeois national liberation movements were giving way to the growing antagonism between the bourgeoisie as a class and the proletariat.

THE RISE OF IMPERIALISM AND “STATES OF CONQUEST”

Luxemburg’s rejection of self-determination and Polish independence was inseparable from her analysis of the rise of imperialism and its effect on national liberation struggles. Although this was a major issue in the socialist movement in Western Europe, Luxemburg’s comments were not taken up at all by Lenin until after the outbreak of the first world war.

The rise of capitalist imperialism, Luxemburg argued, rendered the whole idea of national independence obsolete; the trend was towards “the continuous destruction of the independence of more and more new countries and peoples, of entire continents” by a handful of leading powers. Imperialism, by expanding the world market, destroyed any semblance of economic independence: “this development, as well as the roots of colonial politics, lies at the very foundations of capitalist production....colonialism will inevitably accompany the future progress of capitalism.... only the innocuous bourgeois apostles of ‘peace’ can believe in the possibility of today’s states avoiding that path” (ibid). All small nations were condemned to political impotence, and to fight to ensure their independence within capitalism would mean, in effect, returning to an earlier stage of capitalist development, which was clearly utopian.

This new feature of capitalism gave rise, not to national states on the model of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Europe, but states of conquest, better suited to the needs of the period. In such conditions, national oppression became a generalised and intrinsic feature phenomenon of capitalism, and its elimination impossible without the destruction of imperialism itself by the socialist revolution. Lenin dismissed this analysis of the growing dependence of small nations as irrelevant to the question of national movements; he did not deny that imperialism or colonialism existed, but for him political self-determination alone was the issue, and on this question he defended Kautsky, who supported Polish restoration, against Luxemburg.

The development of imperialism as a condition of the world capitalist system was not yet unequivocally clear, and Luxemburg could point only to a few ‘model’ examples – Britain, Germany, America – while she recognised that the world market was still expanding and that capitalism had not yet entered into its mortal crisis. But the value of her analysis was that it examined some of the basic tendencies in capitalism and their implications for the working class and the national question: her rejection of national liberation struggles was based on an understanding of the changed conditions of capitalist accumulation, and not on moral or subjective consideration.

SOME CONCLUSIONS ON THE ATTITUDE OF REVOLUTIONARIES TO ‘SELF-DETERMINATION’ IN ASCENDANT CAPITALISM

The slogan of self-determination for Lenin served a dual purpose: as an important demand in the proletariat’s struggle within capitalist society for democracy; and as a propaganda tactic to be utilised against national chauvinism in the Tsarist empire. But from the beginning this slogan contained theoretical ambiguities and practical dangers which undermined the Bolshevik’s defence of proletarian internationalism on the eve of capitalism’s imperialist phase:

-- as a democratic demand it was utopian. The achievement of national independence by any faction of the bourgeoisie was determined by relations of force, not rights, and was a product of the evolution of the capitalist mode of production. The task of the proletariat was first of all to maintain its autonomy as a class and defend its own interests against the bourgeoisie.

-- the forging of proletarian unity was undoubtedly a problem for communists, in the Tsarist empire or anywhere else, in their struggle against the influence of bourgeois ideology. But it could only be solved on the solid ground of the class struggle, and not by giving concessions to nationalism, which even in the late nineteenth century was becoming a dangerous weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Furthermore, Lenin’s use of the terms ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ nations was inadequate even in ascendant capitalism. It is true that Luxemburg used the same terms herself in describing the rise of a handful of ‘Great Powers’ which were dividing up the world between them, but for her these ‘states of conquest’ were only models for a general tendency within capitalism as a whole. One of the values of her writings on Polish nationalism was to demonstrate that even in so-called oppressed nations, the bourgeoisie used nationalism against the class struggle and acted as an agent of the major imperialist powers. ‘All talk of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ nations leads to an abstraction of the bourgeois ‘nation’  which hides the fundamental class antagonism within it.

The whole strategy of ‘self-determination’ was adopted not from Marx and Engels, but the Second International which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was thoroughly corroded by the influence of nationalism and reformism. Lenin’s position was shared by the centre of the social democratic parties and on this question he supported Kautsky, the foremost ‘orthodox’ theorist, against Luxemburg and the left-wing in the International. Arguing strongly from the point of view of the situation in Russia, Lenin failed to show that self-determination was adopted in the first place as a concession to nationalism: in order to go to the roots of social democracy’s degeneration, it was therefore necessary to reject ‘the right of nations to determination’.

The real importance of Luxemburg’s position was that it was based on an analysis of the major tendencies in the heart of the capitalist mode of production, and in particular the rise of imperialism in Europe, as indicators of the nature of the whole world economy in the imperialist epoch. Lenin’s position, in contrast, was based on the experience and needs of these countries in backward areas of the world where the bourgeois revolution was not yet completed, on the eve of the epoch in which it was no longer possible for the proletariat to win reforms from capitalism, and in which nationalism could serve no further progressive role. It was a strategy for a fast disappearing historical period, which was incapable of serving the needs of the working class in the new conditions of capitalist decadence.

(to be continued)

S. Ray

Part 2: The debate during the years of imperialist war [19]

Part 3: The debate during the revolutionary wave and the lessons for today [20]

 

When the working class openly demonstrates its strength, when it threatens to paralyze producti­on, pushes the state back, stirs up a real ferm­ent in the whole of society -- as was the case, for example, during the mass strike in Poland in the summer of 1980 -- the question ‘is the working class the revolutionary force of our time?' seems rather absurd. In Poland, as in all the social struggles that have shaken capitalism, the heart of the social movement was none other than the heart of the working class: the shipyard wor­kers of the Baltic coast, the steel workers of Nova Huta, the miners of Silesia. When the Pol­ish peasants went into struggle, when the stud­ents or artists decided to fight the state, they had no other reflex than to ‘go and see the workers.'

When the workers manage to break through the forces that keep them powerless and atomized, when they unite against the ruling class and shake the whole edifice of their domination, it's easy, even obvious, to understand how and why the working class is the only force capable of con­ceiving and undertaking the revolutionary trans­formation of society.

But, as soon as the open struggle ceases, as soon as capital regains the upper hand and reimposes its leaden weight on society, what once seemed obvious can become blurred, even in the memory, and decadent capital then inflicts on its subjects its own sinister view of the world: that of subjugated atomized working class which silent­ly troops through the factory gates every morning, incapable breaking its chains by its own efforts.

At such moments there is no lack of ‘theoreticians' to explain to all those who want to hear that the working class, as such, is an integral part of the system, that it has a place in it to defend, and that only blind fanatics cam see this mass of money-conscious individuals as the bearer of a new society.          

Those who openly defend the benefits of the capitalist system, whether in its ‘western' or stalinist form, never come up with any other credo. But in periods of retreat in the workers' struggle we also see the regular appearance of groups or publications who theorize ‘doubts' about the historic nature of the working class, even among those who claim to be for the communist revolution and who have no illusions about the so-called ‘socialist' countries or the so-called ‘workers' parties in the west. A new lease of life is given to old ideas coming from anarchism and populism, according to which the revolution will not be the work of a specific economic class, but of all people who in one way or another suffer the inhumanity of capital.

Today, with the post-Poland retreat in the work­ers' struggle, ‘modernist' ideology, the ideology of a ‘modern theory of the revolution' which re­jects the ‘old workers' movement' with its ‘dusty marxism', seems to be undergoing a certain reviv­al, as it did during the reflux that followed the 1968-74 wave of struggles. Thus, among other things, we have seen in France the appearance of the review La Banquise[1] (literally ‘The Great Ice Barrier') and the review La Guerre Sociale[2] becoming a quarterly, and in Britain the reappearance of Solidarity[3].[4]

These publications are quite a bit different from each other. La Guerre Sociale and La Banquise are more directly part of a theoretical line which passes through Invariance and Le Mouvement Communiste. But they all share the same rejection of that basic idea of ‘old' marxism: the working class is the only truly revolutionary force in society; the destruction of capitalism and the opening up of a communist society requires a period of transition characterized by the polit­ical dictatorship of this class.

It's not our intention here to develop a complete critique of all the ideas defended by currents of this type. Polemic with these tendencies is, in any case, often sterile and tedious; firstly because we're talking about groups that are somewhat informal (and proud of being so), comprising various ‘independent' individuals, which means that articles that appear in the same publication can contain contradictory ideas; secondly, because modernists permanently cultivate ambiguities, ‘yes-buts' and ‘no-buts', especially vis-a-vis marxism, whose vocabulary they often use (Marx is quoted wherever possible) while rejecting what is essential. Because of this, they can always reply to criticisms with the classic formula ‘that's not what we say, you're distorting our position.'

What is important now, in a period of temporary retreat in the working class struggle, a period in which the social contradictions that will lead to the communist revolution are maturing at an accelerated rate, is to reaffirm the central role of the working class, to show why it is the revolutionary class and why, from the moment you ignore this essential reality of our time, you condemn yourself both to not understanding the course of history unfolding in front of our eyes (cf. the pessimism of La Banquise), and to falling into the worst traps of bourgeois ideology (cf. the ambiguities of La Guerre Sociale and Solidarity about the Solidarnosc union in Poland)

This is all the more necessary because, like the ‘radical' students in 1968, certain modernist groups often develop a lucid and searching analysis of some aspects of decadent capitalism, which only adds to the credibility of their political nonsenses.

What is the proletariat?

With Marx, as with all marxists, the terms work­ing class and proletariat have always been syn­onymous. However, among those who call into ques­tion the revolutionary nature of the working class as such, without daring to openly espouse the anarchism or radical populism of the end of last century, we often find that a distinction between the two words is invented. The working class is defined as the workers and employees as you see them day-by-day under the domination of capital, with their struggles for better wages and for jobs. The proletariat is defined as a revolutionary force, its contours being somewhat indeterminate, but generally embracing all those who, at one moment or another, are in revolt against the authority of the state. This can be anyone from a metal worker to a professional criminal, and might include battered women, rich or poor, homosexuals or students, depending on the modernist ‘thinker' in question (cf. the fascination of the Situationist International or Le Mouvement Communiste with ‘outlaws'; cf. the journal Le Voyou (The Hooligan) in the mid-70's; cf. Solidarity's headlong flight into feminism).

For the review Invariance (Carnatte) in 1979, the definition of the proletariat ended up being ex­tended to its maximum: the whole of humanity. Since the domination of capital over society had become more and more impersonal and totalitarian, the conclusion was that the whole ‘human commun­ity' had to revolt against capital. This amoun­ted to denying that the class struggle was the dynamic of the revolution.

Today La Guerre Sociale offers us another defin­ition, more restricted, but not much more pre­cise:

"The proletarian isn't the worker or even the worker and employee, those who labor at the bottom rung. The proletarian is not the producer, even if the producer may be a proletarian. The proletarian is he who is ‘cut off', ‘excluded', who has ‘no reserves'. (La Guerre Sociale no. 6, ‘Open letter to the comrades of the maintained International Communist Party, December 82).

It's true that the proletarian is excluded, cut off from any real control over the running of social life and thus of his or her own life; it's true that, contrary to certain pre-capital­ist exploited classes, the proletarian does not possess any means of production and lives without reserves. But there's more to it than that. The proletarian isn't just someone who's ‘poor', they're also a producer, the producer of surplus value that is transformed into capital. They are exploited collectively and resistance against exploitation is immediately collective. These are essential differences.

To broaden the definition of the proletariat in this way isn't to enlarge the revolutionary class, but to dilute it in the fog of humanism.

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

La Banquise, following in the wake of Invariance, believes that you can refer to Marx to broaden the notion of the proletariat.

"From the moment... that the individual product is transformed into a social product, into the product of a collective laborer whose different members participate in handling the material at many diverse degrees, or even not at all, the determination of productive labor, of the productive laborer necessarily broaden. In order to be productive, it's no longer necessary to touch things with your hands; it's enough to be an organ of the collective laborer or to fulfill one of its functions." (Marx, Capital Vol. 1) However, what Marx was emphasizing here wasn't the idea that anybody and everybody in the world had become productive or proletarian. He was showing that in developed capitalism it wasn't the spec­ific quality of the task accomplished by this or that worker which was a criterion for determining whether they were productive or not. By modifying the process of production according to its needs, capital exploits the whole of the labor power it buys, as though it were that of one productive laborer. The concrete use it makes of each mem­ber of this collectivity, bakery worker or office employee, producer of arms or floor-cleaner, is secondary from the standpoint of knowing who is exploited by capital. It's the collectivity as a whole which is exploited. The proletariat, the working class, today includes most of the employ­ees in the so-called ‘tertiary' sector.

However much it developed, capitalism has never generalized the condition of the proletariat to the whole of society. Capital has engendered huge masses of marginals without work, especially in the underdeveloped countries. It has allowed pre-capitalist sectors to survive, such as small ind­ividual peasants, small shopkeepers, artisans, the liberal professions.

Capital dominates all sectors of society. And all those who are living in misery and subjected to its domination have good reasons for revolting against it. But only those who are directly link­ed to capital through wage labor and the produc­tion of surplus value are truly antagonistic to capital, they alone constitute the proletariat, the working class.

Why is the proletariat the revolutionary class?

Before Marx, the dynamic of the history of soc­iety remained a mystery. In order to vainly try to develop a coherent picture of history, you had to resort to religious notions like Providence, to the genius of military leaders, or to History with a capital H. By demonstrating the central role of the class struggle in this dynamic, marxism made it possible to understand it for the first time. However, in doing so, it didn't evolve a way of interpreting the world, but a view of the world that made it possible to trans­form it. Marx considered that his fundamental discovery wasn't the existence of the class struggle in itself -- this the bourgeois theor­eticians had already established -- but the fact that the class struggle led to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx said that the irreconcilable antagonisms between the working class and capital had to lead to a revolutionary struggle for the destruction of capitalist social relations and the establishment of a communist society. The protagonist of this revolution would be the working class, which had to organize itself autonomously, as a class, in relation to the rest of society, and to exer­cise a political dictatorship in order to destroy the bases of the old regime from top to bottom.

It's this analysis which the modernists reject:

"In order to really transform their conditions of existence, the proletarians cannot rise up as the ‘working class'. But this is difficult, because they fight precisely on the basis of their condition of existence. This contradiction can only be clarified in theory when it has been overcome in practice." (La Banquise no 1, ‘Arant la Debacle' p.11) "The proletariat cannot first pose itself as a social force before changing the world." (ibid, no 2, ‘Le Roman de nos Origines')

"But, right now, you can only close yourself up in this oppression if you don't attack it as proletarians, or as humans, and not on the basis of a specificity -- which is becoming more and more illusory -- to be conserved or defended. The worst thing would to be to make this specificity the depositary of a capacity for revolt." (our emphases, La Guerre Sociale no 5,'Towards the Human Community', p 32).

The modernists don't know what the proletariat is fundamentally because they don't understand why it is revolutionary. Why should it organize sep­arately, as a class, when it has to fight for the elimination of classes? For the modernists, the working class, as a class, is no more revolution­ary than anyone else: as a class, its struggle is limited to the fight for better wages and to the defense of a slave's employment. Instead of constituting itself into a political class, the proletariat must begin to negate itself as a class and to affirm itself as... ‘human'. The worst thing, says Le Guerre Sociale, would be to make a specificity -- being a worker for example - "the depositary of a capacity for revolt."

With the modernists, history always seems to begin with them. The Paris Commune, the mass strike in Russia in 1905, the October 1917 rev­olution in Russia, the revolutionary movement in Germany in 1919 -- none of this shows us or teaches us anything. "The contradiction can only be clarified in theory when it has been overcome in practice", says La Banquise. But who led all the revolutionary struggles against capital for over a century if it wasn't the working class, which was fighting to defend its specific aspir­ations?

Why has it always been like that?

"...in the fully formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this humanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the condition of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman condit­ions of life of .society today which are summed up in its own situation." (Marx, The Holy Family)

This is the specificity of the working class: its immediate and historic interests coincide with those of humanity as a whole. This isn't the case with any other layer of society. It cannot liberate itself from capitalist wage labor, the most complete form of the exploitation of man by man, without eliminating all forms of exploitation, "all the inhuman conditions of life of society today." But it doesn't follow from this that all parts of humanity possess the material force and the consciousness indispensable for undertaking a communist revolution.

The working class derives its strength first of all from its central situation in the process of production. Capital isn't machinery and raw mat­erials, it's a social relation. When through its struggle, the working class rejects this relat­ionship, capital is immediately paralyzed. There's no capital without surplus value, no surplus value without the labor of proletarians. Here resides the power of mass strike movements. This explains in part why the working class can materially undertake the destruction of capital­ism. But it's not enough to explain why it can lay the bases for a communist society.

The Spartacus slaves in antiquity, or the serfs in feudalism, also played a central, decisive role in the process of production. However, their revolts could not give rise to a communist pers­pective:

"The separation of society into an exp­loiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of pro­duction in former timed. So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society -- so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes." (Engels, Anti- Duhring. Part 3, chap 2)

The proletariat is the bearer of communism because capitalist society has created the mat­erial means for creating it. By developing the material riches of society to the point of allow­ing sufficient abundance to suppress economic laws, ie the laws of managing scarcity, capitalism has opened up a revolutionary perspective for the class it exploits.

In the final analysis, the proletariat is the bearer of communism because it is the bearer of communal consciousness. If we leave aside the semi-religious, pre-capitalist visions of a society without exploitation, the project of a communist society without private property, without classes, where production is oriented directly and exclusively towards the satisfaction of human needs, appeared and developed with the emergence of the working class and of its struggles.

The socialist ideas of Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier reflected the development of the working class at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The birth of marxism, the first coherent and scientifically-based theory of communism, coincided with the appearance of the working class as a specific political force (the Chartist movement, the 1848 revolut­ions). Since then, in one way or another, with greater or lesser degrees of clarity, all the important struggles of the working class have taken up communist ideas.

Communist ideas, revolutionary theory, can only be developed through an understanding of workers' struggles. All the great steps forward in the theory of the communist revolution have been the product, not of the pure logical deductions of a few thinkers in their studies, but of a militant and committed analysis of the major advances of the real movement of the working class.

This is why it's only the working class which has attempted to destroy the power of capitalism in a communist manner (Paris Commune, October1917). The history of the communist movement is none other than the history of the workers' movement.

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Does this mean that the proletariat can make the revolution all on its own, ignoring the rest of society? Since the 19th century, the proletariat has known that communism has to be "the unification of the human species". The experience of the Russian revolution clearly showed it the importance of winning the support of all exploited strata. But experience has also shown that the proletariat alone can put forward a coherent revolutionary program. The unification of humanity, and to begin with, of all the exploited, can only be brought about on the basis of the activity and program of the working class. By organizing separately, the proletariat doesn't divide society. It is giving itself the means to achieving its communist unification.

This is why, contrary to what the modernists say, the movement towards the communist revolution begins with the unitary organization of the working class as a force; with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The disorientation of modernism

The Historic Period

Understanding the present historic period while being unaware that the working class is the rev­olutionary force is as difficult as understand­ing the end of the feudal regime without taking into account the development of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

It's hard to find out whether the conditions for a revolutionary upheaval are developing if you don't know how to identify the protagonist of the revolution.

Anyone who knows the history of the workers' movement and understands its revolutionary nature knows that the process which leads the proletar­iat towards the communist revolution is neither linear nor automatic. It is a dialectical dynamic made up off advances and retreats, in which only long practice and the experience of the struggle enables millions of proletarians, under the pressure of poverty, to unite, to rediscover the lessons of past struggles, to break the ideolog­ical grip of the ruling class, and launch a new assault on the established order.

But when you see the struggles of the working class as a class as something with no future, if you can't understand their revolutionary potent­ial and dynamic, you can only be ‘disappointed'. If you see struggles like those in Poland in 1980 merely as struggles ‘within capital', it's obvious you're going to be depressed, fifteen years after May 68; it's obvious that you won't see the significance of the fact that, despite the momentary retreat in the workers' struggle since 1980, strikes have broken out here and there in the heart of the industrialized countries (Belgium 82, Italy 83), and that we are not seeing the mobilization of the workers behind the interests of the national economy and its union representatives, but on the contrary, increasingly violent clashes between workers and unions.

Thus no 1 of La Banquise opens with a phrase marked by a nostalgia for the barricades of 1968 in Paris and by a depressed tone:

"‘Under the paving-stones, the beach', we said before the great glaciation. Today the Great Ice Barrier has covered all that. Ten, twenty, a hundred meters of ice above the paving-stones. Then, the beach."

This is a depression as senile as the radical students of 1968 were infantile in their belief that you could have ‘everything, now.' Modernism seems to grow old very quickly!

The Impotence and Confusion of Modernism in the face of the Class Struggle

It's no accident that modernist publications like Solidarity or La Guerre Sociale ceased to appear during the struggles in Poland. Like the petty bourgeoisie of which it is the ‘radical' express­ion, the modernist current lives in a state of ambiguity and hesitation between the rejection of bourgeois ideology and a contempt for the down-to-earth struggles of the workers. When the rev­olutionary force affirms itself, even in a still embryonic manner, as in Poland, history has a tendency to get rid of ambiguities and thus of the ideologies which splash about in them. This is what happened temporarily with the modernists in 1980.

But the political disorientation of the current doesn't unfortunately remain at the level of mere impotence. It can lead to the defense of frankly leftist positions when it comes to pronouncing on a workers' struggle.

Thus La Guerre Sociale found itself alongside the Trotskyists and other democrats in repeating that Solidarnosc -- organiser of the defeat of the workers in Poland -- is a proletarian organ: "Solidarity is incontestably an organ of the proletariat. The fact that elements coming from non-working class strata (intellectuals or others) were installed at its head didn't alter the fact that from the beginning the proletariat recognized itself in it. How else can we explain the adhesion of virtually the whole Polish prol­etariat? How can we explain the union's influence on the class?" (La Guerre Sociale no 6)

This is a typically leftist way of reasoning, in the spirit of the degenerating IIIrd International. Following this logic, the Polish Church, which has more faithful workers than Solidarnosc should also be "incontestably an organ of the proletariat"... and the Pope, Lenin!

La Guerre Sociale also talks in general terms about the nature of the unions, but only to serve up the old ambiguous soup of the group Pouvoir Ouvrier (at the end of the 1960s -- in fact, also of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie) about the ‘dual nature of the unions':

"The union isn't an organ of capital, a war machine against the proletariat, but the organizational expression of its relationship with capital, antagonism and cooperation. It expresses the fact that capital is nothing without the proletariat, and that, in the immediate, the reciprocal is also true" (ibid)

In decadent capitalism there's no cooperation between capitalism and workers that benefits the workers. In our epoch, the view that identifies the unions with the working class is none other than the propaganda of the ruling class (which also knows how to cooperate on a world level to create a credible ‘Solidarnosc'). It is based on the idea that there can be a conciliation between the interests of capital and the interests of the proletariat. It ignores the revolutionary nature of the working class. Thus La Guerre Sociale makes the following candid observations: "The essential difference between Solidarity and the Polish proletariat is that the former took into account national and international economic interests necessary for the survival of the sys­tem, whereas the second carried on the defense of its immediate interests without in the least con­cerning itself with the problems of the valorization of capital." (ibid)

Only by ignoring the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, by considering it as essentially a part of capital and not as its destroyer, can you see some sort of identity between "the national and international economic interests" of capital, and the "immediate interests" of the proletariat.

The disorientation provoked by failing to recognize the revolutionary character of the working class thus leads to the same view as that of the leftists, so heavily criticized by radical mod­ernism.

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The proletariat is the first revolutionary class in history that is also an exploited class. The process of struggle which leads to the communist revolution is inevitably marked by periods of retreat. These retreats are not only concretized -- by a diminution in the number of workers' struggles. On the level of consciousness, the proletariat also undergoes a disarray which mani­fests itself in the weakening of its revolution­ary political expressions and the resurgence of political currents who cultivate ‘doubts' about the working class.

The breakthrough in 1968, after nearly half a century of triumphant counter-revolution, opened a course towards decisive class confrontations. This course hasn't been reversed by the post-Poland retreat any more than it was by the reflux of 1975-78. The historic conditions of this re­treat are being worn out at the same rate as the economic crisis is deepening, and it is the real­ity of the crisis which is slowly but systematic­ally undermining the pillars of decadent bourge­ois ideology (the working class nature of the eastern bloc, the welfare state, parliamentary democracy, unions, national liberation struggles, etc...)

All the conditions are maturing for the struggle of the proletariat to point the way to the future of humanity, and to sweep away all doubt about its revolutionary nature.

RV

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[1] La Banquise, BP 214, 75623 Paris, Cedex 13, France.

[2] La Guerre Sociale, BP 88, 75623 Paris, Cedex 13, France. Yearly from 1977 to 1979, this publication temporarily ceased to appear in ... 1980, during the biggest struggles in Poland. It didn't reappear till May 81 and went quarterly in June 82.

[3] The group Solidarity has its origins in 1960s. Throughout the 1970s it published, fairly, regularly, a review of the same name. but, in autumn 1980, unable to take a coherent position on the struggles in Poland and to pronounce on what attitude to adopt towards Solidarnosc, the review disappeared. It reappeared at the beginning of 83 with a new series (the crisis of 1980 was discussed here) Solidarity: c/o 123, Lathom Road, London E6, UK.

[4] These three groups are directly and indirectly linked to Socialisme ou Barbarie, a magazine of the 50s and 60s, whose main animator, Castoriadis (alia Chaulieu, Cardan, Coudray) has spent a great deal of time theorizing the transcendence of Marxism.

This text of Internationalisme is taken from a series of articles published in 1947 called ‘Present Problems of the Workers' Movement'. We refer the reader to the introduction to the first part of this article published in the International Review 33. In that introduction we tried to put Internationalisme's critique of the organizational conceptions of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy into the historical context of the post-war period.

Having criticized in part 1 the ‘conception of the brilliant leader' which theorized that only cert­ain individuals have the capacity to deepen rev­olutionary theory, in this second part Internat­ionalisme attacks ‘discipline', a corollary of this conception which treats the militants of the organization as robots who have nothing to do with discussing the political orientation of the organization. Internationalisme reaffirms that "the only basis for the organization and for concerted communist action is the consciousness of the militants participating in it. The greater and the clearer this consciousness, the stronger the organization, the more concerted and effective its action."

Since the ‘40s, all the repeated splits from the original ICP of Italy founded on this ruinous vision of the organization, up to today's disloc­ation of the biggest of these splits (the International Communist Party (Programma Communista)) have only confirmed the validity of Internation­alisme's warning about such conceptions.

"Discipline ... our principal strength..."

At the time of the parliamentary elections in Italy at the end of 1946, a lead article -- which was really a program unto itself -- appeared in the main publications of the Internationalist Communist Party with ‘Our Strength' as its title and the Secretary-General of the Party as its author. What was it all about? The disturbance provoked in the ranks of the ICP by the electoral policy of the Party. One part of the comrades, more obedient (it appears) to the memory of the abstentionist traditions of the Bordiga faction than to a really clear position, revolted against the policy of participation in the elections. These comrades reacted more out of bad temper, lack of enthusiasm and practical ‘carelessness' in the electoral campaign than a clear political and ideological struggle within the Party. On the other hand, a certain number of comrades carried their electoralist enthusiasm to the point of taking part in the referendum ‘for the Monarchy or the Republic', evidently by voting for the Republic, despite the abstentionist position on the referendum taken by the Central Committee.

Thus, in seeking to avoid ‘disturbing' the Party by a general discussion on parliamentarism, in again-taking-up the no longer valid policy known as ‘revolutionary parliamentarism', the Party has effectively confused the understanding of its members who no longer know to what ‘genius' to bow, some participating too eagerly, others too coolly. The Party has blown hot and cold, and has come out of the electoralist adventure in a very bad way[1].

It is against this condition that the Secretary-General rose up with such vehemence in his edit­orial. Brandishing the thunderbolt of discipline, he cleaves asunder the local political improv­isations of left and right. What counts is not the correctness or error of a position, but of impressing the fact that there is a general pol­itical line -- that of the Central Committee -- to which one owes obedience. It is a matter of disc­ipline. The discipline which is the principal strength of the Party ... and of the army, the first NCO to come by would add. It is true that the Secretary-General specifies a discipline which is freely consented to. God be praised! With this addition we are completely reassured...

What beneficial results have come in the wake of this call to discipline? From the south, from the north, from right and left, a growing number of militants have, in their own way, translated ‘freely consented discipline' into freely exec­uted resignations. The leaders of the ICP have told us, in vain, that this is the "transforma­tion of quantity into quality" and that the quantity which left the Party took away with it a false understanding of communist discipline. To that we reply by saying that our view is that those who have remained -- and most of all the Central Committee -- have retained not a false understanding of communist discipline, but a false conception of communism as a whole.

What is discipline? An imposition of the will of others. The adjective ‘freely consented' is only a rhetorical flourish at the end to make the thing more attractive. If it emanates from those who submit to it, there is no need to remind them -- and above all to continuously remind them that it has been freely ‘consented'.

The bourgeoisie has always pretended that its laws, its order, its democracy are the emanation of the ‘free will' of the people. It is in the name of this ‘free will' that it has constructed prisons on the front of which it has inscribed in letters of blood, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'. It is also in this same name that it mobilizes the people into armies, where during the inter­vals between massacres it reveals to them their ‘free will' which is called discipline.

Marriage, it seems, is a free contract, so that divorce, separation turns into an intolerable mockery. ‘Submit to your own will' has been the perfection of the jesuitical art of the exploiting classes. Thus, gift-wrapped and nicely deck­ed out in ribbons, oppression is presented to the oppressed. Everyone knows that it was out of love, out of respect for their divine souls, to save them, that the Christian inquisition burned heretics whom it sincerely pitied. The divine soul of the inquisition has become today ‘freely consented' discipline.

"One, two, one, two, left, right... march!" Exercise your ‘freely consented' discip­line and you will be happy!

What is the basis of the communist conception -- and we repeat, not of discipline but -- of organization and action? It has as its postulate that men act freely in being fully conscious of their interests. Historical, economic and ideological evolution condition this development of consciousness. ‘Freedom' only exists when this conscious­ness is present. Where there is no consciousness, freedom is an empty word, a lie; there is only oppression and submission, even if it is formally ‘freely consented'.

Communists do not have the task of bringing free­dom to the working class; they have no gifts to bring. They only aid the proletariat in becoming conscious "of the general goals of the movement", as the Communist Manifesto expresses it in a truly correct fashion.

Socialism is only possible by being a conscious act of the working class. Everything which pro­motes the development of consciousness is soc­ialist, but only what promotes it. You do not bring socialism by the club. Not because the club is an immoral means -- as a Koestler would say -- but because the club does not contain the element of consciousness. The club is quite moral when the goal you assign yourself is class opp­ression and domination, because it concretely brings about this goal. There do not -- and can­not -- exist other means to this end. When one has recourse to the club -- and discipline is a moral club -- to compensate for a lack of consciousness one turns one's back on socialism, one brings about the conditions for non-socialism. That is why we are categorically opposed to violence within the working class after the triumph of the proletarian revolution, and are the resolute adversaries of the recourse to discipline within the Party.

Let there be no misunderstanding! We do not reject the necessity for organization, we do not reject the necessity for concerted action. On the contrary. But we deny that discipline can ever serve as a basis for this action, being in its nature alien to it. Communist organization and concerted action have for a basis uniquely the consciousness of the militants who compose it. The greater and clearer is this consciousness, the stronger is the organization and the more concerted and more effective is its action.

Lenin more than once violently denounced the re­course to ‘freely consented discipline' as a club of the bureaucracy. If he used the term dis­cipline, he always understood it -- and he many times explained himself on this subject -- in the sense of the will to organized action, based on the revolutionary consciousness and conviction of each militant.

One cannot require militants -- as does the Central Committee of the ICP -- to carry out an action with which they do not understand, or which goes against their convictions. That would be to believe that one can do revolutionary work with a mass of cretins or slaves. The need for discipline, raised to the level of a revolution­ary divinity, then becomes understandable. In reality, revolutionary activity can only be done by conscious and convinced militants. And then, this activity breaks all the chains, including the ones forged by holy discipline.

Old militants remember what a trap, what a terrible weapon against revolutionaries, this discipline constituted in the hands of the bureaucrats and leadership of the Communist Internat­ional. The Nazis had their holy tribunals, the Zinovievs at the head of the CI had their holy discipline: a veritable inquisition, with its control commissions torturing and investigating the very soul of each comrade. A strait-jacket was imposed on the parties, imprisoning and stifling every manifestation of the development of revolutionary consciousness. The height of refinement consisted in forcing militants to publicly defend what they condemned in the organizations and organs of which they were a part. This was the test of the perfect Bolshevik. The Moscow trials did not differ in nature from this conception of freely consented discipline. If the history of class oppression had not be­queathed this notion of discipline, it would have been necessary for the Stalinist counter­revolution to invent it.

We know militants of the first order in the ICP of Italy, who in order to escape this dilemma of participating in the electoral campaign against their convictions, or through lack of discipline, could find nothing better than the ruse of an opportune trip. To consciously use guile, deceit with the Party, to disapprove and hold one's tongue, to let things alone: here are the clear results of these methods. What degradation for the Party, what debasement for the militants!

The discipline of the ICP doesn't extend only to the members of the Italian Party, it is also required on the part of the Belgian and French fractions. Abstentionism was something that went without saying in the International Communist Left. So, a comrade of the French Fraction of the Communist Left writes an article in its newspaper trying to reconcile abstentionism with the participationism of the ICP. According to her, this is not a question of principle and therefore the participation of the ICP is perfectly acceptable, though she believes that it would have been "preferable" to abstain. As one can see, a not very ‘vicious' criticism -- dictated above all by the need to justify the French Fraction's critique of the electoral participation of the Trotskyists in France.

But even this criticism was enough for the offending comrade to be called to order by the Secretary of the Party in Italy. Fulminating, the Secretary declared the criticism of the policy of the Central Committee from overseas to be unacceptable. The accusation of "a knife in the back" was taken up again, but this time it came from Italy against France.           

Marx, Lenin said: teach, explain, convince. "... discipline ... discipline ..." echoes the Central Committee. There is no task more important than that of forming conscious militants, by a steady work of education, explanation and political discussion. This task is at the same time the safe way of guaranteeing and strengthening revolutionary activity. The ICP of Italy has discovered a more effective means: discipline. There is nothing surprising in that, after all. When one adheres to the concept of the genius contemplating himself and basking in his own reflected light, the Central Committee becomes the general staff distilling and transforming this light into orders and ukases, the militants into lieutenants, NCOs and corporals, and the working class into a mass of soldiers who are taught that "discipline is our principal strength".

This conception of the struggle of the proletariat and of the Party is that of a drill sergeant in the French army. It has its source in age-old oppression and the domination of man by man. It is up to the proletariat to get rid of it forever.

The right of factions: The internal regime of the revolutionary organization

It can appear flabbergasting after the past long years of epic struggles within the CI over the right of factions, to return today to this question. It seemed resolved, for every revolutionary, by lived experience. It is, however, this right of factions that we are obliged to defend today against the leaders of the ICP of Italy.

No revolutionary can speak of freedom or democracy in general, because no revolutionary is duped by general formulae, because he always tries to bring out their real social content, their class content. More than anyone else, we are beholden to Lenin for having torn off the mask and laid bare the shameless lies covered up by the beautiful words ‘freedom' and ‘democracy' in general.

What is true for class society is also true for the political formations active within it. The Second International was very democratic, but its democracy consisted in drowning the revolutionary spirit in an ocean of bourgeois ideological influences. Communists want nothing of this democracy, where all the flood-gates are opened to drown the revolutionary spark. The break with these parties of the bourgeoisie which call them-selves socialist and democratic was necessary and justified. The foundations of the Third International on the basis of the exclusion of this so-called democracy were the historic response to this. This response is a definitive acquisition for the workers' movement.

When we speak of workers' democracy, of democracy within the organization, we understand something completely different from the socialist left, the Trotskyists and other demagogues. The democracy which they try to sell to us, with a tremor in their voice and honey on their lips, is the one where the organization is ‘free' to furnish ministers to run the bourgeois state, the one which allows you to ‘freely' participate in imperialist war. These organizational democracies are no closer to us than the non-democratic organizations of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, which do exactly the same work.Nothing is more revolting than the annexation (the socialist parties are familiar with imperialist annexations) of Rosa Luxemburg by the tartuffes of the socialist left in order to oppose its ‘democratism' to Bo1shevik ‘intolerance'. Rosa, any more than Lenin, hadn't resolved all the problems of workers' dem­ocracy, but both know what this ‘socialist' democracy meant, and both denounced it accordingly.

When we speak of the internal regime, we must be understood as talking about an organization based on class criteria and on a revolutionary program, and not one open to the first advocate coming from the bourgeoisie. Our freedom is not freedom itself, abstract, but essentially concrete. It is the freedom of revolutionaries, grouped together, seeking the best means to act for social emancipation. On this common basis, tending to the same goal, many divergences always unfailingly arise along the way. These divergences always express either the absence of all the elements for an answer, the real difficulties of the struggle or the immaturity of thought. They can neither be conjured away nor prohibited, but on the contrary must be resolved by the experience of the struggle itself and by the free confrontation of ideas. The regime of the organization, therefore, consists not in stifling divergences but in creating the conditions for their solution. That is to say, to promote, and to bring them into the light of day, instead of allowing them to develop clandestinely. Nothing poisons the atmosphere of an organization more        than when divergences remain hidden. Not only does the organization thereby deprive itself of any possibility of resolving them, but it slowly undermines its very foundations. At the first      difficulty, at the first serious reverse, the edifice that one believed was as solid as a rock, cracks and collapses, leaving behind a pile of stones. What was only a tempest is transformed into a decisive catastrophe.

We need a strong party, say the comrades of the ICP, a united party, which the existence of tendencies, the struggle of factions, will divide and weaken. To support this thesis, these same comrades invoke the resolution presented by Lenin and adopted at the 10th Congress of the Russian CP, prohibiting the existence of factions in the Party. This appeal to the famous resolution of Lenin and its adoption today, characterizes better than anything else the whole evolution of the Italian Fraction which has become a Party. A policy which the Italian Left and the whole left in the CI rebelled and fought against for more than 20 years has today become the credo of the ‘perfect' militant of the ICP. Must we also recall the fact that the resolution was adopted by a party three years after the revolution (it had never been envisaged previously) which found itself in the grip of innumerable difficulties: foreign blockade, civil war, famine and economic ruin within? The Russian revolution was in a terrible impasse. Either the world revolution would save it or it would succumb under the combined pressure of the exter­nal world and internal difficulties. The Bolsheviks in power submitted to this pressure and retreated on the economic plane and, what is a thousand times more serious, on the political plane. The resolution on the prohibition of factions, that Lenin moreover presented as temporary, dictated by the terrible contingent conditions in which the Party was operating, was one of a series of measures which far from strengthening the revolution in fact only opened up the road to its degeneration.

The 10th Congress saw, at the same time as this resolution was adopted, the crushing by state violence of the workers' revolt at Krondstadt and the beginning of the massive deportation of oppositionists in the Party to Siberia. Ideological suffocation within the Party could only be con­ceived together with violence within the class. The state organ of violence and coercion substit­uted itself for the ideological, economic and unitary organs of the class; party, unions and soviets. The GPU replaced discussion. The counter-revolution swamped the revolution, under the flag of socialism; an iniquitous regime of state capitalism was being constituted.

Marx said, a propos of Louis Bonaparte, that great historical events happen twice, and he added, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The ICP of Italy reproduces as farce what was the grandeur and tragedy of the Russian revolution and of the Bolshevik Party. The anti-fascist coalition committee of Brussels for the Petrograd Soviet, Vercesi in the place of Lenin, the poor Central Committee in Milan for the Communist International in Moscow, where the revolutionaries of all countries assembled; the tragedy of a struggle of tens of millions of men by the petty intrigues of a few village chiefs. Around the question of the right of factions, the fate of the Russian and world revolution was played out in 1921. No factions in Italy in 1947 are the cry of the impotent, not wanting to be forced to think as a result of criticism, and not wanting their peace to be disturbed. No factions led to the assassination of a revolution in 1921. No factions in 1947 are at the most a little mis­carriage of a non-viable party.

But even as farce, the prohibition of factions becomes a serious handicap to the reconstruction of the revolutionary organization. The recon­struction of the International Bureau of the International Communist Left could serve us as a palpable example of the prevailing methods. This International Bureau found itself dislocated with the outbreak of the war. During the war political divergences manifested themselves within the groups and between the groups belonging to the International Communist Left. What must be the method for the reconstruction of the organizational and political unity of the ICL? Our group proposed the convocation of an international conference of all the groups belonging to the ICL and having for its objective the broadest discussion of all the questions at issue. Against us, there prevailed the other method, which consisted in muting divergences as much as possible and in exalting the constitution of the Party in Italy -- round which any new regroupment had to be made. No international discussion or criticism was tolerated, and a semblance of a con­ference took place at the end of 1946. Our spirit of criticism and frank discussion was considered intolerable and unacceptable, and in response to our documents (the only ones which had been submitted to discussion for the conference) they preferred not only not to discuss them, but besides to simply eliminate us from the conference.

We published in Internationalisme no 16 of December 1946 our document sent to all the groups belonging to the ICL with a view to the conference. In this document, we have -- as is our old habit -‑ enunciated all the political divergences existing in the ICL and frankly explained our point of view. In this same number of Internationalisme can also be found the ‘response' of this singular International Bureau. This response says "since your letter once more demonstrates the constant deformation of the facts and political positions taken by the ICP of Italy or the French and Belg­ian Fractions" and further on "since your activ­ity is limited to sowing confusion and slinging mud at our comrades, we have unanimously excluded the possibility of accepting your demand to part­icipate in the international meeting of organizations of the ICL."

One can think what one likes about the spirit in which this response has been made, but one must recognize in its absence of political argu­ments that it does not lack energy and decision ... of a bureaucratic sort. What the response does not say and what is to a very high degree characteristic of the truly general conception of discipline professed and practiced by this organization, is the following decision taken in great secrecy[2]. Here is what a comrade of the ICP of Italy wrote us on this subject the day following this international meeting:

"On Sunday, December 8, the meeting of the deleg­ates of the International Political Bureau of the ICP took place. In reference to your letter add­ressed to the comrades of the fractions of the ICL of Italy, an official response will be made and sent shortly. In reference to your request for common meetings for subsequent discussions, your proposition has been rejected. Besides, an order has been given to every comrade to break all communication with the dissident fractions. I therefore regret that I will not in the future be able to continue my contact with your group." Jober, December 9, 1946.

Do we need to comment on this internal and secret decision? Certainly not. We will only add that in Moscow, Stalin evidently had more appropriate means to isolate revolutionaries: the cells of the Loubianka prison, the camps at Verkhni Our­alsk and if necessary a bullet in the neck. Thank God the ICL does not yet have this power -- and we will do everything so that it never does -- but this is not to its credit. What really import­ant is the goal pursued and the method, which con­sists in trying to isolate, in wanting to reduce to silence the thought of an adversary, of those who do not think as you do. Fatally, and corres­ponding to the place that you occupy and the strength you possess, you are led to more and more violent measures. The difference with Stalinism is not a question of nature, but solely one of degree.

The only regret that the ICP must have is that of being compelled to have recourse to these miserable means of forbidding members to have any contact with dissident fractions. The whole conception concerning the internal regime of the organization and its relations with the class is illustrated and concretized in this -- in our opinion -­- monstrous and disgusting decision. Excommunication, calumny, imposed silence; such are the methods which are substituted for explanation, discussion and ideological confrontation. Here is a typical example of the new conception of organization.

Conclusion

A comrade of the ICL has written us a long letter, as he says "to unburden himself of everything which has weighed on him, from the anti-fascist coalition to the new conception of the party." "The Party," he writes in his letter, "is not the goal of the workers' movement, it is only a means. But the end does not justify the means. These must be impregnated with the character of the ends that they seek to attain, the ends must be present in each of the means employed. Consequently, the Party cannot be built following Leninist conceptions, because that would mean -- once again -- absence of democracy: military discipline, prohibition of free expression, infractions for one's opinions, the mystification of the monolithism of the Party. If democracy is the most glorious mystification of all times, that must not prevent us from being for proletarian demo­cracy in the Party, the workers' movement and the class. Or let someone propose a better term. What counts is the thing itself. Proletarian democracy means the right of expression, free­dom of thought, freedom to disagree, an end to naked violence and terror in all their forms in the Party -- and naturally, in the class."

We understand and share entirely the indignation of this comrade when he speaks out against the building of the barracks Party and the dictator­ship over the proletariat. How far is this com­rade's healthy and revolutionary conception of the organization and internal regime from this other conception that one of the leaders of the ICP of Italy recently gave us: "Our conception of the Party" -- he literally said - "is a monolithic, homogeneous and monopolistic Party."

Such a conception, linked to the concept of the brilliant leader and to military discipline, has nothing to do with the revolutionary work of the proletariat, where everything is conditioned by the raising of consciousness, by the ideological maturation of the working class. Monolithism, homogeneity and monopoly are the holy trinity of fascism and of Stalinism.

The fact that a person or party calling itself revolutionary can lay claim to such a formula tragically indicates all the decadence, all the degeneration of the workers' movement. On this triple basis, you cannot construct the party of the revolution, but rather a new barracks for the workers. You effectively contribute to keeping the workers in a state of submission or domination. You engage in a counter-revolutionary act.

What makes us doubt the possibility of putting the ICP of Italy right, more than its actual political errors, is its conception of organization, of its relation to the whole of the class. The ideas through which the end of the revolu­tionary life of the Bolshevik Party manifested itself and which marked the beginning of its disgrace -- prohibition of factions, suppression of free expression in the Party and in the class, the cult of discipline, the exaltation of the infallible leader -- serve today as the foundation, as the basis of the ICP of Italy and of the ICL. If it sticks to this road, the ICP can never serve the cause of socialism. It is with a full consciousness of the gravity of what we are saying that we cry out: "Stop! Turn back, because you're heading for a fatal fall."

Marc

---

[1] According to the latest news, the ICP of Italy will not participate in the next elections. So the Central Committee has decided. Is this the result of a re-examination of the position and of a discussion in the Party? Don't be fooled. It is always too soon to open a discussion which would risk ‘disturbing' the comrades, as our well-known leader told us. But what then? Simply that the Party has lost many members and its treasury is empty. So, lacking munitions the Central Committee has decided to stop the war and not participate in the next elections. It is a convenient position which satisfies everyone and, besides, has the advantage of disturbing no one. It is what our leader calls "the reverse transformation of quantity into quality".

[2] This is comrade Jober who was then in discussion with us in the name of Turin Federation of the ICP, which he represented. Since then, the Turin Federation, protesting against the method of the Central Committee, has become autonomous and in this capacity participated in the international contact conference. See International Review no 24.

“In each crisis, society is smothered under the burden of its own productive forces, of its own products which it cannot put to use, and it is thrown helplessly up against this absurd contradiction: the producers have nothing to consume because there aren’t enough consumers.” This passage, written by Engels in 1876 for Anti-Duh­ring shows the whole relevance of marxism today.

The capitalist economy is collapsing because of a lack of solvent outlets, ie of consumers who can pay. This is the contradiction which trans­lates itself into the horrible paradox in which the majority of the world's population is threatened with famine, in which the living standards of the proletariat is sinking below the poverty line, not because not enough is being produced but because capitalist industry produces more than it can sell; not because there’s ‘not enough’ but because there’s ‘too much’ as far as the laws of capital are concerned.

Because there is generalized overproduction on a market that is too restricted, competition bet­ween capitalists becomes more and more frenzied. The policies of ‘recovery’ based on an intensive utilization of credit, which artificially expand the market, are coming up against the barriers of inflation which threatens to make the inter­national monetary system explode. The bourg­eoisie is seeing the mechanisms of the econ­omy escaping its control: it can’t prevent deeper and deeper lurches into recession, while at the same time inflationary pressures are becoming more and more powerful.

Graph no 1 shows that since 1967 the policies of ‘recovery’ have three times led to a revival of world trade, ie of demand to keep production going. But they haven’t prevented the fall in the growth of production, nor the recession of 1974-75, nor the still more profound one that began in 1980.

Why is this? Because, as an exploited class, the proletariat produces more than it can consume.

This supplementary production, surPlus value, can only be realized and lead to an accumulation of value if capital sells it to extra-capitalist sectors. When these disappear, capital can no longer find outlets for the totality of produc­tion. In order to sell, you have to be as com­petitive as possible, to reduce wages in order to reduce the costs of production. As each cap­italist nation has no choice but to follow the same policy, the world market becomes more and more restricted. In these conditions, production collapses, factories close and the workers are hurled into unemployment, which does not make them good consumers. The policies of austerity imposed on each bourgeoisie by the competitive nature of the capitalist economy can only accelerate the fall in world demand and thus the collapse of production.

Graph no 2 shows the fall in the rate of utilization of the productive apparatus in the USA, the world’s major power, which has 20%, of world production. At a rate of 68% in 1982, this is the equivalent of nearly one factory in three closing down. In West Germany at the end of 1982, 76% of the productive apparatus was being used -- the equivalent of one factory in four being closed. In Britain, only 30% of factories are operating at full capacity.

Capitalism can find no way out of its contra­dictions; it can only sink deeper and deeper into economic chaos and race ahead with its imperialist rivalries. The proletariat is today being subjected to an attack the like of which it hasn’t seen since the last world war. Inflation, unemployment and poverty are its daily lot, and they merely point the way to worse to come. The future of humanity depends on the proletariat’s capacity to react to all this. Capitalism has nothing more to offer but misery and death. The present economic catastrophe has no solution within capitalism, 15 years of failed economic policies show that the bourg­eoisie has no perspective: it’s up to the world proletariat to demonstrate that it alone can offer a way out.

The life of revolutionary organizations is part of the life of the revolutionary class. Even if they don't have much size or influence, even if certain organizations have a tendency to forget it, proletarian political organizations are secreted by the proletariat and its historical struggle for communism. To under­stand this is to understand the responsibility that these organizations have.

The Fifth Congress of the ICC, which took place at the beginning of July, and which was attend­ed by delegates from ten countries, was thus -- both in its strengths and weaknesses -- not a private event, the work of a few individuals, but a moment in the life of the working class.

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

As usual, our Congress devoted itself both to defining the characteristics and perspectives of the present historical period, and to exam­ining the state of the organization and draw up the main lines of its activity in the near future. It also looked at the general question of the proletarian political party and adopted an "Address to Proletarian Groups" which put forward the necessity -- faced with the crisis which for over two years has been hitting an already weak revolutionary milieu -- to work to­wards a greater spirit of debate and fraternal confrontation to fight more energetically than ever against any spirit of sectarianism.

The international situation

"At the beginning of the ‘80s we analyzed the new decade as the ‘years of truth', in which the convulsions and open bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production would reveal in all its clarity the historic alternative: communist revolution or generalized imperialist war. At the end of the first third of the this period we can say that this analysis has been fully confirmed: never, never, since the 1930s, has it been so clear that the capitalist economy is in a total impasse; never, since the last world war, has the bourgeoisie set in motion such huge military arsenals, or mobilized so much productive effort towards destruction; never, since the 1920s, has the proletariat fought battles on the scale of those which shook Poland and the whole ruling class in 1980-81. However, all this is just the beginning. In particular, although the bourgeoisie is apparently consoling itself by talking about the ‘economic recovery', they have a hard time masking the fact that the worst of the crisis is still ahead of us. Similarly, the worldwide retreat in the workers' struggle following the tremendous fight in Poland is only a pause before the enormous class confrontations that will in­volve the decisive detachments of the world proletariat, those of the industrial metropoles and of Western Europe in particular."

(‘Resolution on the International Situation')

The reports and resolution on the internation­al situation adopted at this Congress thus emphasized:

(a) on the level of the crisis of capital

-- the impossibility for the world bourge­oisie to put forward any economic policy that will really enable it to get its economic machinery rolling again;

-- that capital is more and more revealing itself to be an anachronistic social relation­ship whose maintenance can only give rise to poverty and barbarism;

(b) on the level of the class struggle

-- that the retreat in the workers' struggle, especially in Western Europe, since 1980, a retreat produced by an international counter­offensive of the bourgeoisie, will inevitably be a temporary one, since the deepening crisis and the wearing down of bourgeois mystificat­ions are creating the conditions for going be­yond it;

-- that while the proletariat may still be to a considerable extent paralyzed and disoriented by the sheer breadth of capital's economic and political attack, its combativity remains in­tact and -- in contrast to the 1930s -- it is not really mobilized behind capital on an ideolog­ical level;

-- that, in this sense, the present historic course is still the one that was opened up in 1968: towards increasingly decisive class con­frontations that will pose the possibility of a victorious, world-wide communist revolution.

The state of the ICC and the crisis in the revolutionary milieu

In these conditions, can it be said that the ICC, and more generally the revolutionary mil­ieu as a whole, have been and are up to the de­mands of the situation? How have the revolut­ionary organizations been adapting to and pre­paring for the trials of history? This is what we said in the ‘Resolution on the Life and Act­ivities of the ICC', adopted by the Fifth Congress:

"Since its Fourth Congress, the ICC has been through the most serious crisis in its exist­ence. A crisis which wasn't limited to the vic­issitudes of the ‘Chenier affair' and profound­ly shook the organization, very nearly making it fall apart, resulting, directly or indirect­ly in the departure of forty members and cut­ting in half the membership of its second lar­gest section. A crisis which took the form of a blindness and disorientation the like of which the ICC has not seen since its creation. A crisis which demanded the mobilization of ex­ceptional methods if it was to be overcome: the holding of an extraordinary international conference, the discussion and adoption of basic orientation texts on the function and function­ing of the revolutionary organization, the adoption of new statutes."

Already in 1982, in a resolution adopted by its extraordinary international conference, the ICC pointed out that

"the difficulties that the ICC has been going through are not unique to it and are an expression of a crisis which is hitting the whole revolutionary milieu. This crisis is the expression of the fact that the convulsions of the ‘years of truth' which are hitting society do not spare the communist groups. For them as well the‘80s are the years of truth and history will not forgive them any weaknesses."

The 5th Congress drew up a positive balance sheet of the way the ICC faced up to this crisis:

"The ICC bears with it all the weaknesses that affect the entire proletarian milieu. If it has resisted these weaknesses better, if it has been able to avoid falling apart like other groups, if it was essentially able to regain its balance after the crisis of ‘81, it's essentially because of the solid frame­work of its platform and statutes, based on the experience of the whole communist left (even if it neglected, forgot or ignored them for a while)." (‘Resolution on the Life and Activities of the ICC').

If it is to avoid being at the mercy of violent routs in the face of growing social chaos, a permanent objective of any communist organization must be to arm itself with the programmatic and organizational means to under­stand and adapt itself to the demands of the historic period. This is how the 5th Congress concretized this effort in its resolution on activities:

"The 4th Congress, held 9 months after the mass strikes in Poland, could not yet see the tendency towards a retreat in the struggle. The 5th Congress, on the other hand, is quite aware that, over the last two years, the offensive of the entire world bour­geoisie, based around the card of the ‘left in opposition', has been crowned with a cert­ain amount of success, the consequence of this being not only a very definite diminution in the class struggle, but also in the audience for revolutionary ideas (drop in sales, attend­ance at public meetings, etc). This situation is only temporary, but as long as it lasts revolutionaries must take it into account so as not to waste their energies and arrive exhausted at the decisive battles. In this sense the ad­vice of the extraordinary conference remains as valid as ever:

‘When necessary the organization must undertake a retreat in good order to devote its efforts to what is essential in the present period: the strengthening of the political and organizational framework. ‘Better less but better'."

The control that a revolutionary organization has to have over its own activities is all the more important when the historic period is, in the most profound sense, one of rising class struggle. The organization must be prepared to be able to accelerate its intervention without much warning and without falling into activist stampedes, as was too often the case during the struggles of 1978-80.

The Statutes

It's not enough, however, for a communist organization to have a good analysis of the historic situation and a general orientation for its activity. It must also have an organizational structure and mode of life which allows it to translate these orientations into its daily practice, with a real homogeneity between all its sections.

The statutes of the organization are the in­struments for realizing this objective. The product of the historic experience of all the communist organizations of the past, and of the organization's capacity to assimilate these experiences and apply them to the problems of its time, the statutes of an organization are a real expression of its organizational and political maturity. They are a practical concretization of all the organization's positions on questions as essential as: the way the rev­olutionary process and class consciousness dev­elop, the place that revolutionaries have within this process, centralization and workers' democracy, the relations that must exist within the revolutionary class and thus within its political organization. Thus, in line with its general conception, the ICC's statutes are the materialization of a rejection of, for example, federalist, monolithic, and substitutionist tendencies (see ‘The Functioning of the Rev­olutionary Organization' in IR 33).

By adopting new statutes[1], the ICC has strengthened its capacity to face up to the tasks of the hour. But while the statutes are an immediate organizational framework, they are also a preparation for the future. This preparation requires a continually enriched and renewed understanding of the forms, the function, and the operation of the communist organizations of the proletariat. Thus the 5th Congress also put the question of the party on its agenda.

The Party

The text adopted by the Congress does not con­tain any particular innovations of what has been the ICC's analysis since its inception. It is, above all, an affirmation of the method with which this question must be approached: ie, the historical method.

Too often the debates on the question of the communist organization get bogged down in ideo­logical analyses (councilism, partyism) where abstract and purely logical syllogisms ignore and cover up the essential point: the practice, the historic experience of the real movement.

The conferences of the communist left were scuttled by the Partito Comunista Internazionalist (Battaglia Comunista) and the Communist Workers' Organization in the name of their dis­agreement with the ICC on the question of the party. Instead of, as the ICC insisted, having an open public debate on the question, these organizations preferred to run away, from confrontation by imposing their conception of the party as a criterion for participation in the conferences, thereby excluding the ICC.

The publication of the document adopted by the 5th Congress thus aims to contribute to this de­bate on the only basis which can serve as an objective point of reference; the experience of our class. It is therefore an appeal to the other revolutionary organizations to take up their responsibilities and to see their real importance -- without megalomaniac overestimation or self- castrating underestimation.

The address to proletarian political groups

The ruling class fears nothing more than the perspective of the communist revolution. Proletarian political groups are the main defenders of this revolutionary perspective. When they are weakened, the exploiting class is strength­ened.

Faced with the present situation of crisis in the revolutionary milieu, faced with a period in which the responsibilities of what is going to have to be a vanguard of the world proletariat are becoming more and more urgent, it's more necessary than ever to fight against tendencies towards atomization, act­ivist or academicist fragmentation, sectar­ianism and the denigration of other groups for its own sake. More than ever it's vital that revolutionary groups give themselves the means to have a political life in which they don't ignore each other, in which open theor­etical debate and confrontation makes it poss­ible to go beyond disagreements, and which serves as a point of reference for all the communist forces that will be engendered by the intensification and generalization of the class struggle.

This is the aim of the text adopted by the 5th Congress of the ICC.

---

[1] These are in fact a reformulation of the statutes adopted at the Ist Congress of the ICC in 1976, taking subsequent experience into account.

The 1980s are proving themselves to be the ‘years of truth' for the whole of humanity.

Through its inexorable aggravation, the world economic crisis which has been shaking capitalism for the last 15 years is more and more demonstrating that the system is in a total impasse. It is showing the reality of the historic alternative already put forward by the Communist International: either the proletarian response to the crisis, the development of class struggle leading to the revolution, or its bourgeois outcome: a generalized imperialist holocaust threatening the whole of humanity with destruction. Thus the revolutionary groups have a considerable responsibility as an active factor in the capacity of the proletariat to give a positive answer to this alternative. However, for the whole political milieu of revolutionary organizations, the acceleration of history in these past years has led us not to a strengthening of these groups, but to a series of internal organizational crises; to activist escapades, or to paralysis at moments of rising struggle (especially at the time of Poland 1980) and to tendencies towards demoralization, exhaustion and introspection when the struggle is in retreat. Instead of serving as a reference point, a beacon in the emerging social storms, the political vanguard of the proletariat frequently finds itself being buffeted and shaken by the turbulence of the historic crisis of capitalism.

In the short term, the counter-offensive unleashed by the bourgeoisie at the beginning of the 80s is hitting the revolutionary class, but also its political vanguard. This is all the more so because it has been unable to find the means for overcoming its dispersion and its divisions which are an inheritance of the terrible counter revolution which descended on the proletariat between the 20s and the 60s.

The international conferences of the groups of the communist left (1977-80) could have been a reference point on a world scale, a frame­work for trying to go beyond these weaknesses. But the weight of immaturity, of sclerosis and sectarianism, having kept these conferences ‘dumb' by refusing to take up any common pos­itions, finally put an end to this effort.

In the present conditions, it is of the utmost importance that all revolutionary organizations see the gravity of the situation and the res­ponsibilities they have; and in particular, they know how to mount a real, effective resi­stance to the pressures of a bourgeoisie with its back to the wall. These responsibilities cannot be carried out by the mere efforts of each group taken individually. It is a question of establishing a conscious co-operation between all organizations, not in order to carry out hasty and artificial re­groupments, but to develop a will and an approach which centers its attention on a systematic work of fraternal debate and confrontation between proletarian political forces.

In this sense the work undertaken with the first three conferences of the communist left must be resumed. It must be based on the same criteria of demarcation which were used for these conferences, because these criteria weren't circumstantial but were the result of the whole historical experience of the working class since the revolutionary wave after World War I. It must also be based on the lessons of the failure of these conferences and notably on the fact that they must be seen not as simple forums of discussion but as a militant effort -- one of whose most notable tasks is to take a position on the main events in the class struggle and the life of society.

The time has not yet come for calling for new conferences of communist groups: there is much ground to be covered before the conditions for such an effort can exist. However, the development of such conditions is something that must be prepared right now. It is in this perspective that, at its Vth Internat­ional Congress, the ICC issues an address to all revolutionary groups, calling on them to take up their responsibilities in the face of such a grave historical situation:

-- recognition of the existence of a prolet­arian milieu: communist groups must reject the megalomaniac pretensions of each one being the only holder of class positions;

-- systematic development of a spirit and a will towards debating and confronting political positions: this is the first pre­condition of a decantation and clarification in the milieu and the class as a whole, and it must take place in the respective publi­cations, public meetings, etc;

-- in these debates, a rejection of dilett­antism and irresponsible blather, of sectarianism and the systematic denigration of other organizations.

The huge class confrontations which are brewing are also a test for the communist groups: either they will be able to take up their responsibilities and make a real contribution to the struggle, or they will stay in their present isolation and will be swept away by the tidal wave of history without being able to carry out the functions for which the class gave rise to them.

1. The question of the communist party and its relationship with the class must be situated in the context of our basic texts on the function of the organization of revolutionaries[1] [26].

2. The communist party is a part of the class -- an organism secreted by the class in its movement, with the aim of developing the historic struggle of the class towards its ultimate vict­ory, the radical transformation of social rela­tions, the foundation of a society which realizes the unity of the human community: each for all, and all for each.

3. Against the thesis defended by Lenin in What Is To Be Done, the idea of 'the party in the service of the class', and contrary to the stupid caricatures of ‘Leninism' championed by the var­ious Bordigist tendencies who say that it is the party which founds the class, we affirm along with Luxemburg that the party is a product of the class itself, in the sense that the constit­ution of the party is the expression of the process whereby the class comes to consciousness through its struggle: it is a manifestation of the level of consciousness reached by the class. This formulation has nothing in common with an­other conception developed by the kind of upside-down Bordigism which, in the 1970s, reached its most complete form in the magazine Invariance which said that ‘the class is the party'. Such a simplistic conception replaces the whole, the unity of the whole and its real movement, by a mere identification of these ele­ments, ignoring the differences that do exist, the dialectical links within the unity of which they are an integral part.

4. This ‘identificationist' conception is unable to grasp the role played by the different elements that emerge from this unity. It doesn't see any movement: it is static, not dynamic. It is fundamentally ahistorical. It is the same as the idealist, moralizing view of the modernists, those latter-day epigones of degenerating coun­cilism, who have fallen into the old dichotomy between black and white, good and evil - and for whom any political organization within the class is by definition an absolute evil.

5. The main error of the councilism of the Dutch Left, under the influence of Pannekoek, is that it attributes a purely educational, peda­gogic role to the groups and currents that arise within the class. It ignores their political role as an integral, militant part of the prol­etariat, whose task within the class is to de­fend and elaborate coherent positions crystallized in a communist program, and in view of which these groups act in an organized manner. By attributing to them solely the role of ed­ucators, rather than the defense of the communist program, Pannekoek's councilist organization becomes the ‘counselor' of the class, thus joining up with Lenin's vision of an organization in the service of the class. Both con­ceptions end up negating the idea that the party is a part of the class, one of the active organisms produced by the class.

6. Political society is the unified social world of a humanity which has lost itself by div­iding into classes -- a loss which humanity, in the person of the proletariat and through its struggle, is painfully seeking to overcome. In this sense the struggle of the proletariat still necessarily takes on a political character (to the extent that this is still the struggle of a    class).

In fact, the struggle of the proletariat is fund­amentally a social struggle, in the fullest sense of the term. Its victory implies the dissolution of all classes and of the working class itself, into the human community that will be reconstit­uted on a planetary scale. However, this social solution necessarily involves a political struggle, a struggle for power over society, for which the working class provides itself with the necessary instruments -- revolutionary organizations, political parties.

7. The formation of political parties express­ing and defending class interests is not specific to the proletariat. We have seen it with all classes in history. The level of development, definition and structure of these forces reflects the classes they emanate from. They find their most advanced form in capitalist society -- the last class society in history -- where social classes have their most complete development, and where the antagonisms between them appear in the clearest manner.

However, if there are indisputable common points between the parties of the proletariat and those of other classes -- notably the bourgeoisie -- the differences between them are also considerable.

As with previous historic classes, the objective of the bourgeoisie, in establishing its power over society, was not to abolish exploitation but to perpetuate it in other forms; not to suppress the division of society into classes but to install a new class society; not to destroy the state but to perfect it. The kind of political organisms the bourgeoisie equips itself with, their mode of action and intervention in soc­iety, are directly determined by these object­ives: bourgeois parties are state parties whose specific role is to take and exercise state power as an emanation and guarantee of the perpetuation of class divisions in society.

The proletariat on the other hand is the last class in history: its seizure of political power has the objective of abolishing class divisions and eliminating the state, the expression of these divisions. In this sense, the parties of the proletariat are not state parties. Their aim is not to take and hold state power; on the contrary, their ultimate goal is the disappear­ance of the state and of classes.

8. We must guard against an abusive interpreta­tion of the somewhat unfortunate phrase in the Communist Manifesto (which can only be understood in the political context of the pre-1848 period), where it says that "communists do not form a distinct party ..." Taken literally, this phrase is in obvious contradiction with the fact that this was the manifesto of a particular organization called precisely the Communist League. This is all the more surprising when you consider the two men who wrote the manifesto, Marx and Engels, who throughout their lives were militants of the general movement of the class. They were party men, men of political action.

9. As part of the general movement of the class which gives rise to them, these political organ­isms, the parties, evolve with the development of the class struggle. As with any living organ­ism, these political parties of the proletariat have a history, one which is indissolubly linked to the history of the general movement of the class, with its high points and momentary retreats.

You cannot study or understand the history of this organism, the party, unless you situate it in the general context of the different stages the movement of the class has gone through, of the problems posed to the class, of its efforts at any given moment to become aware of these problems, to respond to them adequately, to draw the lessons from experience and use these lessons as a springboard towards future struggles.

While political parties are a major factor in the development of the class, they are thus, at the same time, an expression of the real state of the class at a given moment in its history.

10. Throughout its history, the working class has been subjected to the weight of bourgeois ideology which tends to deform and corrupt prol­etarian parties, to distort their real function. In response to this tendency, revolutionary frac­tions have arisen with the aim of elaborating and clarifying communist positions, of making them more precise. This was notably the case with the communist left which came out of the Third Inter­national: any understanding of the question of the party necessarily involves assimilating the experience and the acquisitions of the whole international communist left.

It was the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, however, which had the specific merit of pointing out the qualitative differences in the organization of revolutionaries according to whether the period was one of developing class struggle or one of defeat or retreat. The Italian Fraction showed what form the revolutionary organization took in each of these two periods: in the first case, the form of the party, an organization the which could have a direct and immediate influence on the class struggle; in the second case, a num­erically restricted organization with a much weaker influence in the immediate life of the class. To this second type of organization it gave the distinctive name of the ‘fraction' which, between two periods in the development of the class struggle, ie two moments in the exist­ence of the party, constitutes a link, an organic bridge between the past and future party.

The Italian Fraction fought against the incom­prehensions of someone like Trotsky, who believed that you could create a party and an inter­national in any old situation -- for example, in the 1930s -- but who ended up with splits and an even greater dispersal of revolutionary elements. It rejected the subtle theorizations of Bordiga[2] [27] who, by juggling with words and with empty abstractions, came up with sophistries such as ‘the invariance of the program' and the dist­inction between the ‘historic' party and the ‘formal' party. Against these various aberra­tions, the Italian Fraction demonstrated the validity of its thesis by basing itself on solid ground -- the experience of a century's history of the workers' movement.

11. Real history rather than fantasy shows us that the existence of the class party goes through a cyclical movement of emergence, devel­opment and passing away. This passing away may take the form of its internal degeneration, its passage into the enemy camp, or its disappearance pure and simple, leaving more or less long inter­vals until once again the conditions for its re­emergence make their appearance. This applies both to the pre-marxist period, beginning with Babeuf, to the successive appearance of revol­utionary organizations during the life and act­ivity of Marx and Engels, and to the period from their deaths to the present day. The Communist League only lasted 5 years (1847-52), the First International nine years (1864-73), the Second 25 years (1889-1914), the Communist International 8 years (counting generously, 1919-27). Obviously, there is a continuity here: they are all organisms of the same class, successive mom­ents in the unity of the class which, like the solar system in relation to the planets, can appear as a stable whole within which its var­ious organisms have their movement. But there can be no stability or fixity in this organism called the party.

The Bordigist pseudo-theory of the ‘historic' party and the ‘formal' party is essentially a mystical one. According to this theory the real party is (like the program) something fixed, immutable, invariant. But this party only mani­fests its reality in the ‘formal' party. So what happens to the ‘historic' party when the ‘formal' party disappears? It becomes invisible and inop­erative, but still exists somewhere, because it's immortal. This is a return to the themes and problems of idealist, religious philosophy which separates spirit from matter, soul from body ‑- one existing in eternal beatitude, the other in this mortal coil.

12. No enlightened, voluntarist theory of spontaneous generation or of exceptional intelligence can explain the phenomenon of the emergence and existence of the party, still less provide reasons for its periodicity, for the order of succession of its different moments. Only an app­roach which takes into account the real movement of the class struggle -- itself conditioned by the evolution of the capitalist system and of its contradictions -- can give a valid answer to the problem of the party, by inserting it into the reality of the class movement.

13. The same approach must be used when we look at the variability in the functions of the party at different stages of history. Just as ancient philosophy encompassed various disciplines, the party, produced by the class movement of the proletariat, carried out, in the first stages of its history, a whole number of tasks within the class. In particular,

-- it was the crucible for the theoretical elabor­ation of the class;

-- it made explicit the final goals potentially contained in the struggles of the class;           

-- it was an active organ within the class, in the front line of the defense of the class' immediate economic and political interests;

-- it functioned as an educator, multiplying and diversifying its interventions in the class and carrying out this education at all levels, through its press and through conferences, through organizing evening courses, workers' colleges, etc;

-- it carried out the dissemination of revolutionary ideas and propaganda within the class; 

-- it ardently and tirelessly combated the pre­judices of bourgeois ideology which continuously penetrates the thinking of the workers and obstructs the development of class con­sciousness;

• - it acted as an agitator, organizing and multi­plying workers' demonstrations, rallies, meetings and other actions of the class;

-- it acted as an organizer, creating and support­ing all sorts of workers' associations -- cultural ones, and those for the defense of its  immediate material conditions -- mutual aid, production co-ops, strike funds, financial solidarity, and above all the formation of the unitary, permanent organizations for the defense of the immediate economic interests of the class: the unions;

-- it waged the struggle for political reforms that were in the immediate interest of the workers -- universal suffrage, electoral particip­ation -- through the presence of workers' repre­sentatives in parliament.

Four great steps in the life of the proletariat: 1848, 1870, 1914, 1917

14. The history of the last 140 years has seen four great upheavals in capitalism:

-- 1848 completion of the cycle of anti-feudal revolutions by the bourgeoisie;

-- 1870 with the Franco-Prussian war, completion of the constitution of the great economic and political units of capitalism -- the nation states -- and the opening-up of the long epoch of capitalist expansion across the globe -- of colonialism;

-- 1914 culminating point of the imperialist phase. The exacerbation of the system's contradictions, its entry, with the First World War, into its phase of decline;

-- 1917 the first breach in the system, posing the necessity for a transformation of society.

15. How did the proletariat respond to these four crucial events?

-- 1848. Behind the bourgeoisie appeared the giant shadow of the young proletariat (the June workers' uprising in Paris), an event announced a few months before by the constitution of the Communist League. The first real party of the modern proletariat, this organization, breaking with the romanticism of the conspiratorial societies, announced and demonstrated in a coherent program (the Manifesto) the inevitability of the downfall of capitalism as a result of its insurmountable internal contradictions. It defined the proletariat as the subject of the historical solution to the contradictions of capitalism. Through its revolution, the proletariat would put an end to the long phase of the division of humanity into antagonistic classes, of the exploitation of man by man. Opposing any kind of revolutionary phraseology or voluntarism, the League recognized that 1852 marked the victory of capitalism over the first workers' uprisings in a situation where the conditions for the triumph of the socialist revolution had not yet ripened. And it was in these new conditions of defeat that the League inevitably had to disappear as an active centralized political organization.

-- 1870. The militants of the League didn't disappear into the void. While waiting for the maturation of the conditions for a new wave of workers' struggles, they carried on the work of theoretical elaboration, of assimilating the experience of the class. After the great social convulsions of 1848 the bourgeoisie made great strides in its development and its expansion. Some 15 years later we find a proletariat that is more numerous, has spread to more countries, is more mature and is determined to enter into mighty struggles, not yet for the revolution (because the objective conditions still aren't­ ripe) but for the defense of its immediate economic interests. It was in this context that, in 1864, on the initiative of workers from France and Britain, the First International was founded. This organization regrouped tens of thousands of workers from all the industrialized countries and those on the road to industrialization from America to Russia. The former militants of the Communist League quite naturally found themselves in the ranks of this International Workingmen's Association where, with Marx at the helm, they occupied positions of the highest responsibility.

From one year to the next, and all over the world, the International became the rallying cry for more and more workers who were everywhere becoming more and more combative. The point was soon reached when the International became a major concern for all the governments of Europe. It was within this general organization of the class that the marxist current, the authentic expression of the proletariat, came up against Bakunin's anarchist current, representing the petty bourgeois ideology which still had a considerable influence among the proletarians of the first generation and among the semi-proletarianized artisans.

The Franco-Prussian war, the miserable defeat of the Second Empire and its fall in France, the felony of the Republican bourgeoisie, the misery and hunger of the Parisian workers besieged by Bismark, the provocation of the government ... all this pushed the Parisian workrs into a premature armed confrontation with the aim of getting rid of the bourgeois government and proclaiming the Commune. The crushing of the Commune was inevitable. It certainly demonstrated the combativity of the working class, its exasp­erated determination to attack capital and its state, and it left priceless lessons to future generations of the world proletariat. But its defeat in a huge bloodbath had as an immediate and irremediable consequence the disappearance of the International.

-- 1914. The bloody triumph of capital, the mass­acre of the Commune and the ensuing disappearance of the International, was to weigh heavily for many years and scar a whole generation of the proletariat. But once its wounds began to heal the proletariat gradually regained confidence in itself and in its ability to fight capitalism. Slowly the organizations of the class were recon­stituted: labor funds, unions, political parties. These latter tended to centralize themselves, first nationally, then on an international scale, giving birth in 1889 (18 years after the Commune) to the Second International which was a strictly political organization.

But the capitalist system was then at the peak of its development on a world scale. It was draw­ing the maximum of profit out of the existence of a market which seemed unlimited. This was the golden age of colonialism, of the development of the means of production and of relative surplus value instead of absolute surplus value. The struggle of the proletariat for the reduction of the working day, for wage increases, for polit­ical reforms, generally paid dividends. The sit­uation looked as if it could go on forever, lead­ing to the illusion that capitalism could grad­ually be transformed into socialism through a series of reforms. This illusion is known as ref­ormism, an illness which deeply penetrated the minds of the workers and their political and economic organizations (especially the economic ones), undermining class consciousness and ob­scuring the proletariat's revolutionary mission.

The triumph of reformism ultimately meant the defeat of the proletariat. It was a triumph for the bourgeoisie, which won the proletariat over to its own nationalist and patriotic values. The proletariat's union and party organizations became hopelessly corrupted, and passed once and for all into the camp of capital.

-- 1917. Lulled, chloroformed, betrayed by the passage of its organizations into the bourgeois camp, soiled by the nationalism and patriotism administered by the bourgeoisie in extra-large doses, the proletariat was mobilized for war, deafened by shell-fire, plunged into a sea of blood, surrounded on all sides by corpses. It took three years of this cataclysm of world imperialist war for the proletariat to wake up and see what was really happening.

1917 was the first explosion of a revolutionary wave that was to last for several years. During the course of this explosion the proletariat was led to reconstitute new class organizations which corresponded to its new tasks -- not in the form of the unions, which was henceforth totally un­suitable for the period of capitalism's decad­ence, but in the form of the workers' councils; not by resuscitating Social-Democracy, which had passed once and for all into the enemy camp, but by creating a world communist party -- the Third International -- which was capable of undertaking the task of the hour: contributing towards the world proletarian revolution. The new party, the new Communist International, was constituted around the left fractions and minorities of the Second International, those who for many years had been fighting reformist ideology, who had denounced the treason of Social-Democracy, who had struggled against the war and against the ideology of national defense: in short, those who had remained loyal to marxism and to the proletarian revolution.

The test of the counter-revolution

16. This first great wave of the proletarian revolution failed because it arose during the course of a war, which isn't the most favorable condition for the revolution, and also because of the immaturity of the proletariat's conscious­ness. This expressed itself among other things in the survival, within the new International, of many of the positions inherited from Social-Democracy:

-- the false responses to the problem of the party's role in the revolution, of the rela­tionship between party and class;

-- the identification between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship of the party;

-- the particularly dangerous confusion on the question of the state in the period of transition, which was proclaimed a ‘proletarian' or ‘socialist' state.

These errors, together with the survival of the soviet state which was labeled a ‘workers' state', the insufficiency of the Left Opposi­tion's analysis of the degeneration of this state (the idea that it still retained its proletarian character and guarded the ‘gains of October'), interacting with each other and with the success­ive defeats of the proletariat in other countries (for which they were partly responsible), served to re-establish a balance of forces in favor of the world bourgeoisie, leading to the historic crushing of the class. All these elements also led to the disarray, degeneration and death of the Bolshevik party and all the parties of the Third International which now joined the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The depth of the defeat suffered by the prolet­ariat was in direct proportion to the height of the revolutionary wave which preceded this def­eat. Neither the great crisis, which broke out in 1929, nor the Second World War of 1939-45, nor the post-war reconstruction period, saw any significant proletarian upsurges. Even in the few countries where the workers' combativity persisted because it hadn't been put to the test directly, this combativity was easily pushed off its class terrain by the political forces of the left, which had the specific task of preparing the ground for the next world war. This was the case with the 1936 general strike in France, and the Spanish workers' uprising in the same year, which was rapidly diverted into a ‘civil war' between fascism and anti-fascism, a general re­hearsal for the coming world war. In other countries like Russia, Rumania, Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Balkans, or Portugal, the proletariat was subjected to the most ferocious repression. Millions were thrown into prison or into concentration camps. All the conditions for the re-emergence of the class party were absent. Only the voluntarism and total incomprehension of reality of someone like Trotsky, who saw 1936 as the beginning of the proletarian revolution in France and Spain, and who confused Russian state capitalism with the survival of the ‘gains of October', could allow him and his followers to rush into the adventure of proclaiming new, supposedly revolutionary parties and a new international. And this came after his current had gone back for a sojourn in the ‘socialist' parties of the defunct Second International.

Far from being a period of convergence for the revolutionary forces, of a centripetal movement towards unification and the formation of the class party, this period was marked by a categ­orically centrifugal movement. It was a time of dispersal, of fragmentation, for revolutionary groups and elements: the British Left had long ago disappeared; the Russian Left had been physically exterminated in Stalin's jails; the German Left had been completely liquidated. The revolutionary groups that survived became iso­lated, turned in on themselves, and wasted away more as each year passed.

The 1936 war in Spain led to a severe selection among those groups -- between those who got caught up in anti-fascism and those who stayed firmly on a class terrain: the Fractions of the International Communist Left, which carried on a work of theoretical development, subjecting the political positions of the Communist Inter­national at its height to the most severe crit­ique, a fertile and fearless critique which was based on the real experience of the movement since 1917.

The International Communist Left was itself shak­en by events. First by the split by a minority in 1936, which opted to participate in the war in Spain alongside the anti-fascist republicans; then at the beginning of the world war by the departure of a minority proclaiming ‘the social disappearance of the proletariat' in times of war, and thus the impossibility of any activity and of maintaining the organization of the Fractions. The third and definitive crisis came in 1945 with the split by the French Fraction (the GCF) which was opposed to the decision to dissolve the International Communist Left and to the enrolment of its members, as individuals, in a party proclaimed in Italy -- a party whose plat­form and positions were not known; all that was known being the fact that it had been constit­uted around O. Damen and Bordiga, two eminent fig­ures of the Italian Left in the 1920s. Thus the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left came to its sad end.

The main lessons of a century's history concerning the nature and function of the Party

17. This rapid survey of the history of the workers' movement teaches us that:

a) there is a close link between the class as a whole and the party as a particular organism of this whole. There are periods when the class exists without the party, but the party can never exist without the class;

b) the class secretes the party as an indis­pensible organism in the maturation of class consciousness, so that the class is able to attain its final victory. The final triumph of the proletariat would be impossible if it hadn't developed the organs which are indis­pensible to it: notably the general unitary organs of the class, grouping together all the workers, and its political organization, the party, which is formed round a general program made up of positions which indi­cate the ultimate aim of the proletarian struggle -- communism - and the means to attain it.

c) there is a substantial difference of evolution between the general organizations that are open to all workers and the polit­ical organization, the party. In the ascen­dant period of capitalism, the general organization of the class, whose task was to defend its immediate economic interests, while going through important structural changes, had a permanent existence. This was not the case with the political organization, the party, which only existed in an intermittent manner, in periods of growing class combativity. This observation strongly underlines the fact that the existence of the party is closely dependent on the state of the class struggle. In the case of a period of rising struggles, the conditions were there for the party to emerge and to act. In periods of reflux, with the disappearance of these necessary conditions, the party tended to disappear. In the first case centripetal tendencies dominated, in the second, centrifugal ones.

d) On this point, we should point out that things are somewhat different in the decadent period of capitalism. In this period, when the maintenance and improvement of working class living conditions is no longer possible there can no longer be a permanent organization which carries out this function. This is why trade unionism has lost any proletarian content, and the unions can only maintain their exist­ence and permanence as appendages of the state whose task is to contain, control and derail any expression of the class struggle. In this period, only wildcat strikes, tending towards the mass strike, controlled and dir­ected by general assemblies, have a clear class content. Because of this these assem­blies cannot, at the beginning, exist perm­anently. A general organization of the class can only become permanent when the defense of the proletariat's immediate interests become intermingled with the possibility of revolution, ie in a revolutionary period, when the workers' councils are formed. This is the only moment in the history of capitalism when the permane­nce of this organization is really general, concretizing the real unity of the class. This isn't the case with the political party which can perfectly well arise before this culminating point marked by the workers' councils. This is so because its existence isn't conditioned by the final moment, but simply by a period of rising class struggle.

e) With the historical evolution of the class struggle certain functions of the party have changed. To enumerate some examples:

-- as the class struggle evolves, as the workers accumulate experience and attain a higher cultural level, the party gradually loses its role of general educator;

-- this is even more the case with regard to its organizing role within the class. A working class like the British proletariat in 1864 which was capable of taking the initiative in the formation of the International Workingmen's Association really had no need of a tutor to teach it how to organize. The notion of going ‘to the people' or the workers in order to organize them may have made sense in a backward country like Russia was at the end of the 19th century, but it could make no sense at all in industrialized countries like Britain, France, etc. The foundation of the IWA in 1864 wasn't the work of any party. In the main no such parties existed, and in the rare cases where they did, as with Chartism in Britain and Blanquism in France, they were in complete decomposition.

The First International was much closer to being a general organisation than an organisation like the Communist League, i.e. a party-type organisation, strictly grouped and selected on the basis of a coherent theoretical and political programme. Because the First International took this form, it was possible for diverse currents to coexist and confront each other within it -- the marxist (collectivist) wing, ouvrierists, Proudhonists, anarchists, and even, at the beginning, a current as bizarre as the Mazzinists. The International was a crucible in which ideas and currents were decanted, but a party is already the product of a decantation. This is why the currents within the International remained informal. Only one political party in the full sense of the term was born after the dissolution of the Communist League and during the period of the Ist International: the Eisenach social democratic party, a marxist tendency formed in 1868 under the leadership of W. Liebknecht and Bebel. It wasn't until 1878, for the elections in France, that the Parti Ouvrier was formed, led by Guesde and Lafargue and with the direct participation of Marx, who wrote its political platform.

It wasn't until the 1880s, with the accel­erating development of capitalism and the resurgence of class struggle, that the need and possibility were felt for the formation of political parties to carry out the political struggle properly speaking, organs distinct from the unions, whose task was to defend the workers' immediate economic interests. In the 1880s there began a real process towards the formation of parties in nearly all the industrialized or industrializing countries, following in the wake of German social democracy, which took the initiative for the formation of the Second International in 1889.

The Second International was the result of a political decantation which had been going on in the workers' movement since the dissolution of the First International 16 years before, and of the unification of the marxist current on an international scale. It proclaimed the ‘scientific socialism' which had been formulated 40 years before by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. It no longer gave itself the task, as the First International had done, of organizing an inquiry into the living conditions of the working class in various countries, or of elaborating lists of economic demands. This kind of activity was left to the unions. On the other hand, it did take up the task of struggling for immediate political demands, universal suffrage, freedom of assembly and of the press, participation in electoral campaigns, the struggles for political reforms, against the colonialist policies of the bourgeoisie, against its foreign policies, against militarism, etc, while at the same time carrying on the work of theoretical elaboration, of defending the final goals of the movement, the socialist revolution.

Engels was quite right, in one of his prefaces to the Communist Manifesto, written in the 1880s, to say that the First internat­ional had completely carried out its tasks in the historic period in which it had arisen. He was wrong in his hasty conclusion that the political movement of the class, the formation of parties in different countries, had advanced so much that the working class "no longer needs an international organization". With all its insufficiencies, all its errors, and despite the penetration of reformism (finding its main support in the unions) which would ultimately win out and cause it to lose its proletarian character, the Second International also accomplished an eminently positive work in the class, a work which is still an acquis­ition of the movement, if only because it served as an unequalled terrain for theo­retical confrontation and clarification in a number of spheres -- as an arena for a confrontation between the political positions of the left and Bernstein's revisionism and Kautsky's centrism. It was within the Second International that the revolutionary left lived and learned to struggle.

When all the varieties of modernism moralizers amuse themselves today by drawing up a totally negative balance-sheet of history -- that is when they have any idea of history at all -- when they entirely dismiss the contr­ibution the Second International made to the workers' movement, they only display their utter ignorance of what is a historical movement in development. They don't even understand that the little they do know they owe to the living history of the working class! They throw the baby out with the bathwater, and they don't see that their own ideas and ‘inventions', which they think are original, come from the wastepaper bins of the workers' movement, from the utopian epoch which is long gone. Even bastards have parents, even if the parents didn't intend to have them!

Like the modernists the Bordigists also ignore the living history of the working class, a class in movement and evolution, with its moments of strength and its moments of weakness. Instead of studying it and understanding it, they replace it with dead gods, eternally immobile, mummified into absolute Good and Evil.

18. The reawakening of the proletariat after three years of imperialist massacre, and after the shameful betrayal and death of the Second International, opened up a new period which made it possible to reconstitute the class party. This new period of social struggles, which saw the rapid collapse of fortresses which had seemed impregnable, of mighty empires, monarchies and military machines such as those of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany, represented not simply a moment in the evolution of the workers' movement, but a qualitative leap in history, because it straight away posed the problem of the revolution, of the seizure of political power by the working class. For the first time in history the working class and its recently formed communist parties had to respond to a whole series of crucial questions each one of which was a matter of life or death for these questions -- and sometimes they had no idea at all, or ideas that were frankly anachronistic and erroneous. Only tiny dwarfs with a large touch of meg­alomania, who have never seen a revolution, not even from afar -- and the proletarian revolution is the greatest leap in the whole of human history up to now -- can, sixty years afterwards, point a contempt­uous, self-satisfied finger at the errors and stutterings of those giants who dared to storm the heights of the capitalist world and resolutely followed the path of the revolution.

Yes, the working class, and above all its parties and the Communist International often groped in the dark, improvised, and committed grave errors which got in the way of the revolution. But they did leave us with inestimable acquisitions, a rich experience which we must study in detail in order to understand the difficulties they met with, to avoid the traps they fell into, to overcome the errors they made, and, on the basis of their experience, to give a more adequate response to the problems posed by the revolution. We have to take advantage of the distance in time between us and them in order to try and resolve these problems, if only partially -- without losing sight of the fact that the next revolution will bring with it new problems which we can't completely foresee.

19. To return to the precise problem of the party and its function in the present period and in the revolution, we can outline an answer above all in terms of what a party is not, in order to then establish what it should be.

a) The party cannot claim to be the sole and exclusive bearer or representative of class consciousness. It is not predestined to have any such monopoly. Class consciousness is inherent in the class as a whole. The party is the most advanced organ of this conscious­ness and no more. This does not imply that it is infallible, nor that at certain times it may be behind the consciousness attained by other sectors or fractions of the classy. The working class is not homogeneous but it tends to become so. The same goes for class consciousness which tends to homogenize itself and to generalize. It's the task of the party -- and this is one of its main functions - to contribute consciously to the acceleration of this process.

b) Thus the task of the party is to orientate the class, to fertilize its struggle; it's not the leader in the sense of something which takes decisions on its own, in place of the class.

c) Because of this we can recognize the possibility that various groups (whether or not they are called parties doesn't matter) can arise within the class and its unitary organizations, the workers' councils. Not only can the communist party not in any way assume the right to forbid such groups or put pressure on them, it must energetically combat any such attempts.

d) Like the class which, as a whole, can contain within it several more or less coherent revolutionary tendencies, the party, within the framework of its program, will recognize the possibilities of divergences and tendencies. The communist party will categorically reject the conception of monolithic party.

e) The party can in no way come up with a recipe book which responds in detail to all the questions posed by the struggle. It is neither a technical, administrative or executive organ of the class. It is and must remain a political organ. This principle applies both to the struggles which precede the revolution and to those of the revolution itself. In particular it's not the party's role to be the ‘general staff' of the insurrection.

f) The discipline in organization and in action which the party demands from its members can only be a reality in the frame­work of a constant freedom of discussion and criticism, within the bounds of the party's platform. It cannot demand of members who disagree with certain important positions to present and defend these positions to the world outside -- it can't force them to be party spokesmen on these issues against their conviction. This is as much out of the concern to respect the integrity of its members as for the general interest of the organization as a whole. To entrust the defense of impo­rtant positions of the organization to comrades who don't agree with them results in a poor defense of those positions. In the same sense, the party can't resort to repressive measures to put pressure on its members. On principle, the party rejects the use of force and violence, or of relations of force within the class and in its own relationship to the class.

g) The party as such does not ask the class to ‘have confidence' in it, to delegate the power of decision to it as such. On principle, the communist party is against any delegation of power by the class to any organ, group, or party which is not under its constant control. The communist party is for the real practice of elected, revocable delegates, responsible at all times to the assemblies which elect them; in this sense, it is against any method of election lists presented by political parties. Any other conception inevitably leads to a substitutionist practice.

While the party has the right to demand that one of its members resigns from a post, committee or even a state organ, to which this militant was elected by an assembly and to which he is still responsible, the party cannot demand that he is replaced by another member by its own decision alone.

h) Finally, and in contrast to bourgeois parties, the proletarian party doesn't have the role of taking over or running the state. This principle is intimately linked to the need for the class as a whole to maintain its independence vis-a-vis the transitional state. The abandoning of this principle would inevitably lead to the party losing its proletarian character.

i) From all the above it follows that the proletarian party in our epoch cannot be a mass party. Since it does not have the task of running the state or organizing the class, since it is selected round a program that is as coherent as possible, the party will necessarily be a minority organization up to and during the revolutionary period. In this sense, the CI's conception of the ‘mass revolutionary party', which was wrong at the time, the product of a period that was already past, must be categorically rejected.

20. The ICC analyses the period opened up by the resurgence of workers' struggles in 1968 as a period of historical revival in the class struggle, in response to the open crisis that emerged with the end of the post-World War II reconstruction period. In line with this analysis, it considers that this period contains the premises for the reconstitution of the party. However, even if they do so in conditions that are independent of their will, it is men who make history. In this sense, the formation of the future party will be the result of a conscious and deliberate effort -- an effort to which the existing revolutionary groups must devote themselves right now.

This effort necessitates a clear compre­hension both of the general characteristics of the process by which the party is formed -- those which are valid in all periods -- and of the specific, historically unprec­edented conditions which pertain to the emergence of tomorrow's party.

21. One of the main specificities about the emergence of the future party resides in the fact that, in contrast to the past, it will straight away take place on a world scale.

Already in the past, the political organizations of the class were world-wide, tending towards a world unity. However, these world organizations were the result of the regroupment of formations that had been more or less constituted at the national level, and around a formation emanating from a particular national sector of the proletariat which occupied a vanguard position in the workers' movement as a whole.

Thus, in 1884, the IWA was constituted essentially round the proletariat of Britain (the founding conference was held in London, which was also the seat of the General Council up till 1872; and for a long time the British Trade Unions were the most important contingent of the IWA). At this time, Britain was by far the most developed country, the place where capitalism was most powerful and concentrated.

Similarly, the Second International was formed mainly round German Social Demo­cracy which was the oldest, most developed most powerful workers' party in Europe and the world -- the result, above all, of the formidable development of German capitalism in the second half of the 19th century.

Finally, the indisputable pole of the Third International was the Bolshevik party, not because of the prominence of capitalism in Russia (which, though fifth in the world's industrial league, remained very backward) but because the proletariat in this country was, due to specific circumstances, the first (and only) one to overthrow the capitalist state and take power during the first great revolutionary wave.

The situation today is considerably different from that which prevailed at various points in the past. On the one hand, the period of the decadence of capitalism has prevented the emergence of new big sectors of the world proletariat which might have represented a new pole for the whole workers' movement (as was the case with Germany last century).

On the other hand, in decadent capitalism there has been a considerable leveling out of the economic, social, and political characteristics of the system, especially in the advanced countries. Never before in its history has the capitalist world, despite its insurmountable national and bloc divisions, reached -- due, among other things, to the development of world trade and the use of modern means of comm­unication -- such a high degree of homogeneity, of interdependence between its different parts. For the working class, this has meant an unprecedented leveling out of its living conditions and, to a certain extent, of its political experience.

Finally, the present circumstances of the historic development of the class struggle towards revolution (simultaneous aggrav­ation of the economic crisis in all countries and not imperialist war as in 1917, the considerable level of the bourgeoisie's unity against the proletariat) imply that this development will tend towards a much higher degree of simultaneity, unity and generalization than in the past.

All these conditions imply that the future world party won't be formed around this a or that national sector of the proletariat, as in the past, but that it will straight away be constituted on a world scale around the clearest, most coherent, most developed political positions.

In particular it's for this reason that, much more today than in the past, it is vital that the different communist groups that exist today mobilize and unify their efforts towards the constitution of this pole and, in the first place, towards the clarification of proletarian political positions.

These essential tasks are a major part of the conscious and deliberate assumption by revolutionaries of their responsibilities in the process towards the formation of the future party.

22. In line with this perspective, the ICC insists on the urgent necessity to break with the isolation to which the existing communist groups find themselves, to fight against the tendency to make yesterday's objective necessity a virtue for today. Such a tendency can only be the result of a sectarian standpoint. Our task is to create a real international discussion among these groups, with the firm intention of eliminating misunderstandings,  incomprehensions, false interpretations based on the needs of polemic or on ignorance of the positions of this or that group. This is the only way to get to a real confrontation of political positions and to open up a process of decantation and regroupment.

The ICC doesn't ignore the enormous difficulties that will be encountered in taking up this task. These difficulties are largely the result of the terrible counter-revolution that the working class was subjected to for over 40 years, a counter-revolution which brought an end to the left fractions which came out of the CI and broke the organic continuity which had existed between the different prolet­arian political organizations since the middle of the last century. Because of this break in organic continuity, the future party won't be formed in the manner envisaged by the Italian Fraction, with the Fraction constituting a bridge between the old and the new party.

This situation makes it even more vital to carry forward the process of confront­ation and decantation that leads to the regroupment of communist organizations. The ICC has attempted to contribute to such a process through contacts with other groups in the communist camp; we have suggested and actively participated in international conferences between proletarian groups. We have to recognize the failure of this initial effort, due above all to the sectarian split of the groups who are the debris of the Italian left, now more or less sclerotic despite all their pretensions to being the ‘historic party'. These ‘parties' (there are now about five of them) are doomed to an irreversible sclerosis if they persist in this attitude.

For its part, the ICC is convinced that there's no other way. It's the way which has always triumphed in the history of the workers' movement -- the way of Marx and Engels, of Lenin and Luxemburg, of Bilan and the International Communist Left in the 1930s. It's the only way that has any hope of bearing fruit, and the ICC is more than ever determined to keep to it.

 

[1] [28] Without being exhaustive, we can cite the following texts

-- point 16 of ICC's platform

-- ICC's contribution to the 2nd International Conference of groups of the communist left

-- ICC's pamphlet Communist Organization and Class Consciousness.

[2] [29] The aberrant analysis developed by Bordiga - notably after 1948 - should not obscure the crucial role he played in the formation of the Communist Party of Italy and in the struggle of the Left against the degeneration of the Communist International. However, recognition of the importance of this contribution cannot justify adhering to these aberrations, or considering them to be the alpha and omega of communist positions.

Economic crisis: Descent into the abyss and the impasse of the capitalist class

This part of the report on the international situation is concerned with the course of the world capitalist economic crisis which is, ultimately, the determining factor in the development of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the axis around which the shifting rapport de force between the capitalist class and the proletariat revolves[1]. The actual evolution of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the course of the class struggle can be analyzed only on the basis of a clear understanding of the course of the economic crisis itself.

Unlike 1929-1933, which saw an abrupt collapse of the world capitalist economy, the consolida­tion of the universal tendency to state capit­alism made it possible to ‘phase in' the present world crisis of overproduction during the 1970s. The systematic recourse to a massive expansion of credit, orchestrated by the central banks of the industrialized countries of the American bloc, and in particular by the international finance arms of American state capitalism (the IMF, the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, etc) momentarily permitted world capital to compensate for the growing lack of effective demand on a saturated world market. This creation of a vast mountain of fictitious capital (to which there corresponds no real capital assets) could do no more, however, than provide the world economy with a decade of chronic stagnation, punctuated by two increasingly sharp downturns in industrial production (1970 and 1974-75), together with galloping inflation. This latter had by 1979-1980 brought the capitalist metropoles themselves to the brink of a hyper-inflation which would have quickly led to a collapse of the world economy. The only course open to world capital, if it was not to be consumed in the whirlwind of a hyper-inflation, was a shift to an economic policy of deflation and auster­ity. However, no longer able to rely on a Keynesian policy of steady credit expansion, the ever larger doses of which had alone made it possible to phase in the crisis, world capital over the past three years has plunged headlong into the dark abyss of a depression which on the economic level has already con­firmed the ICC's analysis of the ‘80s as the years of truth.

In this text, we shall first survey the curr­ent economic situation of world capital focus­ing on the key indices which clearly show the desperate condition of the global economy today. We shall then demonstrate the increas­ingly narrow range of economic policies avail­able to capital as it tries to slow down its descent into the abyss. In demonstrating the impasse into which the crisis has led the capitalist class, we shall show how in terms of the economic perspective alone[2] the situation of the capitalist class is today much worse than was the case 50 years ago, in 1933.

**********

The current economic situation of world capital

Perhaps the most infallible index of the existence of a super-saturated world market is the figures for industrial output and the percentage of industrial capacity which is idle. Industrial output in the seven largest industrial countries of the American bloc (US, Japan, West Germany, France, Italy, Canada, France) was virtually stagnant in 1981 rising a miniscule 0.8% with respect to 1980. In 1982, industrial output plunged in these same countries, falling 4.5% for the year. In the US, industrial production began to collapse in the second half of 1981 and had declined more than 12% by the end of 1982, In Britain, the fall in industrial production since its cyclical peak in 1979 is 16%, while in Canada output in August 1982 was 14.75% below its June 1981 peak. In West Germany, France and Italy, where the collapse began somewhat later, industrial output fell 6% during July, August and September 1982, comp­ared to the preceding three months., Meanwhile, by the end of 1982, 31.6% of the industrial plant in the US and 31.8% of the industrial plant in Canada lay idle, the glaring express­ion of the hypertrophy of productive capacity in the face of the chronic lack of effective demand which is the hallmark of capitalism's permanent crisis.

The counterpart to this sharp decline in output and bloated mass of idle plant through­out the advanced countries of the American bloc, which account for by far the largest part of the world's industrial production, has been a no less devastating collapse in produc­tive investments. Thus, in the US, between the second and forth quarters of 1982, business investment in new plant and machinery fell 14.5%. Meanwhile, in West Germany, machinery and equipment investments declined 6.5% and construction investment 15% during the first half of 1982.

In the advanced countries of the American bloc, the saturation of the world market man­ifests itself in the form of a mounting stock­pile of unsaleable commodities, and an over­production of capital for which no productive investment is possible. In the countries of the Russian bloc, the same global crisis of overproduction manifests itself in long lines before empty stores and the rationing of basic necessities for the working class, together with a chronic scarcity of capital with which to vainly attempt to overcome the backwardn­ess which is the historical legacy of an imp­erialist bloc which arrived on the world market in the full decadence of capitalism. The impact of the economic crisis on the Stalinist regimes can be seen in the fact that in Russia itself, industrial production rose an anemic 2.8% in 1982 instead of the planned 4.7% rise, the smallest increase in production since World War II. Given the fact that the military sector -- which represents a steriliza­tion of capital, though absolutely essential in terms of inter-imperialist competition accounts for perhaps 25% of Russian production, and that output in this sector is growing at an extremely rapid pace, this means that there has been a very sharp downturn in the output of the productive sector of the Russian economy. In those economies of the Russian bloc most immediately bound to conditions on the world market, the situation is even more grim. In Poland, industrial output in 1982 declined 5% with respect to 1981. In Hungary and Czechos­lovakia, industrial production was virtually stagnant, rising only 1%, while in Romania industrial output rose 2.5% instead of the 5.5% target the planners had set.

In the handful of third world countries which are not totally dependent on the production of foodstuffs and raw materials for export, but which also have a significant industrial sector, the same picture of decline or stagnation in industrial output is repeated. In Mexico, land of the last great ‘economic miracle' of the 1970s, the bubble has burst and industrial output has begun to plunge, declining 1% in 1982. In Argentina, industrial production fell by more than 4%, while in Brazil and India output in industrial sectors was stagnant.

The same crisis of overproduction which has brought about this decline in industrial output is also working havoc with that part of the economy devoted to the production of food­stuffs and raw materials. Thus, in a world where an ever-growing mass of the population is condemned to starvation, 16% of world-wide grain production in 1982 was unsaleable, adding 35 million metric tons of grain to the already swollen world stocks. The glut of food and raw materials for which there is no effective demand has led to a collapse of prices in 1982:

Wheat ---------- -15%	Iron ---------- -31%
Corn ------------ -12%	Zinc --------- -15%
Sugar ----------- -38%	Coal --------- -12%
Oil -------------- -15%

For farmers this has meant a crisis of devast­ating proportions, not seen since the 1930s. All commodity crops (eg corn, cotton, sugar, soybeans) are now selling below farmers' real production costs. In the US, the agricultural giant of the world economy, since 1979 net income for farmers has plunged 50%, from $32.3 billion to 16.5 billion in 1982. Mean­while, the interest on farm loans alone was $22 billion in 1982 -- far in excess of net income. The result has been a spate of bank­ruptcies and forced sales of farms which are spreading like a plague through the country­side.

The situation of the world market has now led to a decline in the volume of world trade for two years in a row, the first time this has happened since the end of World War II and the creation of GATT, when a victorious American imperialism imposed its brand of free trade on a prostrate world. To this fact must be added the unraveling of the complex financial network set up by the American state to facilit­ate the flow of trade on a world market, the bulk of which had fallen under its domination in 1945. In 1982, an unprecedented 30% of world trade -- in contrast to 2% just two years ago -- was carried on in the form of barter.

The recourse to barter has been imposed by the dearth of foreign exchange, the collapse in the value of most currencies and the lack of credit available to the bulk of the world's countries. This fact is one more indication that the elaborate financial mechan­isms created by capital to link the various parts of the world are disintegrating before its very eyes.

The massive recourse to credit, which made it possible to stave off an abrupt collapse of the world economy during the ‘70s, but which had to be restrained as the advanced countr­ies hurtled towards hyper-inflation, has left world capital with an enormous and insupport­able burden of debt. The foreign debt of the third world and Russian bloc countries has now reached an astronomical $853 billion! Caught between this crushing burden of debt on the one hand and the downturn in production, prices and trade on the other, the three biggest debtors, Mexico ($81 billion), Brazil ($70 billion) and Argentina ($40 billion), whose ‘economic miracles' had been built on a foundation of paper, lurched into bankruptcy in 1982. The biggest debtors of the Russian bloc, Poland ($27 billion) and Romania ($10 billion), also declared themselves insolvent. Only a frantic rescheduling of debts and moratoria on payments worked out by the IMF, the World Bank and ‘private' lenders prevented the whole international monetary system from collapsing like a house of cards. Moreover, both the debt and the danger of bankruptcy by third world and Russian bloc countries is only the tip of the iceberg. The debt of the advanced countries of the American bloc by far overshadows the debts of the poor countr­ies and has made the financial situation of even these industrial giants precarious. In the US, the cumulative result of the hyper­trophy of credit is a public and private sector debt which has now reached a stagger­ing level of five trillion dollars!

A capitalist crisis is always a crisis of profitability, one in which not only the rate of profit but the mass of profit sinks. The situation of American capital, the dominant national capital in the world, can perhaps illustrate the increasingly precarious state of this most important index of the health of the capitalist economy. In the US, pre-tax corporate profits, which were running at an annual rate of $260 billion in the first quarter of 1980, sunk to an annual rate of only $170 billion at the end of 1982. The after-tax profits of the largest American companies declined almost 20% in 1982; in the key oil industry, the profits of the twenty-five largest American companies fell 27% in 1982. Beyond this dramatic fall in the mass of profit, is the fact that crit­ical sectors of basic industry in the US are now operating at a loss: steel, automobiles, machine tools, agricultural implements, non­ferrous metals, mining. The American steel industry, to take a glaring example, lost $684 million in 1982.

The enormous rise in unemployment is at one and the same time the expression of the barbarism of capitalism, which condemns an ever-growing mass of humanity to the scrap heap, and the admission of the historical bankruptcy of a mode of production which can no longer profitably exploit the labor-power of its wage-slaves. In the industrialized countries of the American bloc, there are now 32 million unemployed workers, on the basis of official government figures which clearly hide the real depth of this catastrophe. (thus, if unemployment today were measured on the same basis in the US as in the 1930s, the unemployment rate for American workers would be the highest since 1935!) The extent of the increase in unemployment in these countries is but one more devastating index of capitalism's plunge into the abyss:

	1980	1981	1982
U.S.	7%	7.5%	10%
Japan	2%	2.2%	2.4%
W. Germany	3%	4.4%	7%
France	6.3%	7.3%	9%
Britain	7.3%	11.4%	13%
Italy	7.4%	8.3%	10%
Canada	7.5%	7.5%	11%
Belgium	9%	11.1%	15%
Netherlands	4.9%	7.5%	10.4%
Spain	11.2%	14%	16%

In the backward countries, meanwhile, capitalism continues at an even faster rate -- its grisly process of creating a permanent mass of unemployed living in sub-human cond­itions in shanty towns, or mobilized to work in slave labor battalions in the country­side (China, Vietnam, etc).

Three years of deflationary policies in the metropoles of the American bloc, after a decade during which an abrupt collapse a la 1929 was only averted by the creation of a mass of paper values, has accelerated the downward plunge without, however, banishing the specter of hyper-inflation. A number of key economies remained caught in the grips of double-digit inflation at the end of 1982!

Annual rate of consumer price increases:

FRANCE ----- 12.6%	CANADA ----- 11%
ITALY --------16.6%	SPAIN            --------- 16%

An unparalleled budget deficit in the US of over $200 billion for 1983, massive foreign borrowings by countries like France, Canada Spain and Italy to shore up their collapsing economies, together with interest rates which remain at historically extremely high levels, all indicate that the inflationary whirlwind remains a real danger to the terminally ill capitalist economy.

All of the indices, therefore, show that over the past three years, the world economic crisis has taken a qualitative leap forward from which -- as we will now show - no recovery is possible.

The impasse of the capitalist class

Even in this epoch of an historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, which poses the alternative of imperialist world war or proletarian revolution as the only possible outcomes to the economic collapse, the course of the crisis is never straight down. The crisis retains its zig-zag charact­er, though its basic thrust is to become even deeper. Therefore, the descent of world capitalism into the abyss of depression is not incompatible with short, cyclical upturns, limited both in time and space. Indeed, the American economy is probably already beginn­ing to experience such an upturn. However, unlike the situation after 1933, when it was possible for capital to stimulate the economy for a period of five or six years through the consolidation of state capitalism and a variety of Keynesian economic policies, today such policies and therefore such a recovery is excluded.

The year 1933 saw Roosevelt and Hitler come to power in the US and Germany in the midst of a quasi-total economic collapse. In Germany Hitler and his economic czar Hjalman Schacht launched a recovery program based on autarky and the deficit financing of vast public works and armaments projects. Industrial production in Germany rose 90% between 1933-38, while unemployment declined from 3.7 million workers to 200,000 over the same period. Roosevelt and his ‘brains trust' utilized the protectionism begun by the Snoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 together with a combination of Keynesian pol­icies consisting of deficit spending, credit expansion and monetary inflation, and the creation of a ‘social wage' to compensate for the lack of effective demand[3] -- which brought about an annual growth in GNP of 9.1% during 1933-35 and 9.8% during 1935-38, Cert­ainly the vast expansion of state capitalism and the utilization of Keynesian economic policies, which were the basis of the five years of recovery, could not provide any solut­ion to the historic crisis of capitalism. In the US, from September 1937 to June 1938, ind­ustrial output dropped 30%, while unemployment rose 22%. Before this devastating new stage in the economic crisis could spread to Europe, the second imperialist butchery had begun and capitalism had thereby provided the only ‘solution' to the economic crisis of which it is capable.

The situation which faces world capital today is qualitatively different from that prevail­ing in 1933. The type of policies which made it possible for the capitalist class to bring about an economic upturn for five years, during which time the economic, military and ideo­logical preparations for imperialist world war were completed, are precluded in the present conjuncture. The universal tendency to state capitalism, which was the response of capital to the necessity to centralize and organize its productive apparatus for the world war during 1914-18, had to a consider­able degree been attenuated during the phase of reconstruction in the 1920s. The utilization of state capitalist measures after 1933, therefore, for several years had the effect of rationalizing a productive and financial apparatus which was obsolete in the face of the needs of capital itself, faced as it was with a permanent crisis. Today, however, after fifty years of almost uninterrupted expansion of state capitalism under either a Stalinist or ‘democratic' form, the capitalist economic base is crumbling under the very weight of the parasitism of the leviathan state. Additional state capitalist measures -- however necessary as capital reacts to growing inter-imperialist antagonisms and to the danger of proletarian class struggle - far from stimulating an economic upturn only constitute a further burden on an economy smothered under the unproductive weight of a parasitic bureaucracy.

The Keynesian reflationary economic policies introduced after 1933 had as their point of departure four years of deflation and rapidly falling prices, during which a mountain of debt was liquidated. As a result a vast expansion of credit and massive deficit financing could compensate for an effective lack of demand without immediately provoking galloping inflation or a breakdown of the monetary system. Today, though, after decades during which the drug of credit was lavishly administered to a capitalist economy mired in a permanent crisis, world capital totters on the brink of hyper­inflation and is suffocating under a mount­ain of debt. These very Keynesian economic policies must now be reversed if the capit­alist patient is not to die of an overdose of the lethal drug which was used to keep it alive over the past years.

After 1933, the expansion of the ‘social wage', that part of the cost of producing and reproducing the commodity labor-power (variable capital) paid directly by the state, which was primarily a means of bind­ing the working class to the capitalist state, also acted as a stimulant to the depressed economy. This growth of the social wage has always been linked to Keynesian reflationary policies, and, therefore, it follows that in the present situation the social wage is everywhere under attack and is being savagely cut. This dismantling of the ‘welfare state' necessarily being carried out by governments of the left and right alike, removes one of the key ideological props of capitalist domination over the proletariat; at the same time it will lead to a further shrinking of a market which is already too small to absorb the plethora of commodities the industrial plant of capitalism is capable of producing.

The war economy, which was the real axis around which state capitalism developed again beginning in the 1930s, has never been an economic policy, an attempt to overcome the intrinsic barriers to the accumulation of capital; it is by its very nature unproductive in capitalist terms. The real function of the war economy is always a direct preparat­ion for inter-imperialist war itself. Nonethe­less, after 1933, within the framework of the period of savage deflation which had just occurred, the war economy could have the subsidiary effect of momentarily stimulating the economy. Today, while armaments production must grow at an ever-faster rate as the two imperialist blocs prepare for war, its econ­omic impact -- in sharp contrast to the 1930s -- will be disastrous for capital. In the face of    already unmanageable budget deficits, the massive increase in military spending, which the growth of inter-imperialist antagon­isms makes necessary, is an economic burden which will only accelerate capitalism's descent into the abyss.

After 1933 autarky and protectionism were utilized by Hitler and Roosevelt, together with deficit financing, to temporarily overcome the saturation of the home market even while world trade stagnated. Today, the extreme inter-dependence of the advanced capitalist economies of the American bloc under US dom­ination is such that the dominant factions of capital in each country are bound to the Ameri­can imposed version of ‘free trade' which has prevailed since 1945. Certainly there are real and growing sectors of capital in each country demanding a shift to protectionism, but these remain concentrated in the most anachronistic and weakest sectors of each economy. A thorough-going policy of protect­ionism or autarky is opposed by the most pow­erful sectors of the capitalist class because it directly threatens to exacerbate the collap­se of world trade and the international monet­ary system, as well as the very coherence of the American bloc. The real value of protect­ionism for capital today is not as an economic policy as in the 30s but as a nationalist mystification to attempt to derail the class struggle -- a tool particularly important to the left of capital in opposition.

What we are now seeing is nothing less than the complete bankruptcy of Keynesianism, of the economic policies upon which capitalism has relied since the 1930s. The state can no longer compensate for the lack of effective demand on a saturated market through reflationary policies, which was the veritable lynchpin of Keynesianism. Moreover, while the state's direction and control over the economy -- the other basis of Keynesianism -- will continue to grow at an ever faster rate, it is now absolutely clear that this can provide no ‘solution' to the economic crisis. The bank­ruptcy of Keynesianism is the glaring manifestation of the impasse of the capitalist class, the confirmation of the fact that in economic terms the perspective facing world capital today is much more grim than it was in 1933.

The long dependence on Keynesianism having shattered the very basis for the continuation of these reflationary policies, capital has no new economic palliatives with which to replace them. The only policy open to capital today is deflation and austerity, economic policies which can only push capital further into the abyss of world depression, while at the same time destroying the bases on which it has sought to maintain a semblance of ideological control over the proletariat (welfare state, social wage, etc.).

To prevent the collapse of the whole internat­ional monetary system -- the veritable spinal column of world capital -- by hyper-inflation requires policies of austerity and deflation which will accelerate the plunge in industrial production and world trade. Yet these policies themselves will generate ever new pressures towards a generalized bankruptcy by debtor nations and enterprises which would also result in the very collapse of the monetary system which the austerity measures were intended to prevent. This dilemma is insoluble short of a destruction of capital values only possible through a third inter-imperial­ist war -- though the physical destruction of such a holocaust would very probably make any kind of ‘reconstruction' problematic. Nevertheless, it is this very path that capital -- because of the nature of its own contradictions -- must take. This means that capital must attempt to respond to this new stage in the unfolding of its historic crisis, not with economic policies, which are today no more than a very short-term holding operat­ion, but with a political strategy designed to first derail and then defeat the working class. Only such a defeat can open the way to the capitalist ‘solution'.

********

 

---

[1] This, of course must not lead to overlook the fact that the ways in which capital reacts to inter-imperialist antagonisms and class struggle can itself affect the way the crisis unfolds.

[2] The situation of the capitalist class vis-à-vis the proletariat is examined in the other part of the report on the international situation.

[3] Clearly the objective function of all these policies was to bind the proletariat to the capitalist state and allow imperialism to complete its mobilization for world war.

"The military coup of 13 December 1981 has put an end to the most important prolonged combat between the world working class and capital for half a century. Never, since the histor­ical resurgence of the proletariat struggle at the end of the 60s, has the working class taken its combativity, its solidarity and its self-organization so far. Never before has the class used so extensively the indispensible weapon of the struggle in the period of decadence -- the mass strike. Never had the class given the bourgeoisie such a fright, nor forced it to use so many methods of defense. Today, the proletariat in Poland has been gagged. Once again, it has shed its blood, and, in contrast to the sequel to 1970 and 1976, its exploitation has been multiplied tenfold, it has been reduced to near-famine; misery and terror is unleashed on it. This episode is thus concluded with a defeat for the working class. But it is important for the proletar­iat, now that force of arms and the combined strength of the whole bourgeoisie has obliged it to leave the stage in Poland, to draw as many lessons as it can from the experience it has just gone through. The class -- and its communist vanguard -- must be able to answer the question: ‘Where are we? What are the perspec­tives for the class struggle?'" (IR no29 ‘After the Repression in Poland')

Where are we?

In August 1980, the mass strike of the workers in Poland gave a reply to the questions posed but never resolved in the struggles of their class brothers in Western Europe:

-- the need to extend the struggle (Rotterdam dockers' strike, Autumn 1979)

-- the need for self-organization (British steel strike, Winter-Spring 80)

-- the attitude to state repression (Longwy/Denain Winter 79).

Their combat thus confirmed the end of the reflux in the class struggle that had marked the 1970s, already announced by the strikes of 1978-80 in Western Europe.

It showed the world proletariat the true capit­alist nature of the so-called ‘socialist' states, thus killing a lie that had already lost much of its credibility, but retained certain vigor within the working class.

This combat was a concrete brake on imperialist tensions paralyzing the Russian military appara­tus in Eastern Europe, and demonstrating to the whole world bourgeoisie the combativity of the proletariat in the heart of Europe.

Nonetheless, the workers in Poland remained isolated, and the call of their struggle was not answered. The question they could not answer by themselves was that of the generalization of the class struggle, which implied that workers in other countries take up the combat.

The defeat of the workers in Poland is not a ‘Polish' defeat, but a defeat for the whole world proletariat; it is an expression of the world proletariat's weakness. The mystifica­tions that allowed the bourgeoisie to derail the class struggle and impose its repression are fundamentally the same as those faced by the workers in Western Europe: democracy, nationalism and unionism. They are the same as those that allowed the bourgeoisie to force a retreat on the struggles in Western Europe, and of which the defeat in Poland is a result.

The proletariat in Western Europe is at the heart of the capitalist world. It is the most experienced fraction of the world proletariat, and so has confronted the bourgeoisie's most perfected mystifications. If the struggle in Poland made it possible to understand the capitalist nature of the Eastern bloc countries only the struggle of the western proletariat will really be able to purge the illusions of democracy, nationalism and unionism -- which are a brake on the struggle everywhere -- from the consciousness of workers through-out the world.

After the strikes of 1978-80, there was a lull in Western Europe. The bourgeoisie's counter­offensive began at the end of the 70s, with the reorganization of its political apparatus (the left in opposition), the development of rank‑and-file unionism, and the campaigns of ideological disorientation. This whole strategy, orchestrated in a more or less organized and unified way at world level, produced a weak­ening of the workers' struggle in Western Europe.

Moreover, the absence of any clear workers' reaction to the direct participation of French and Italian contingents in the Lebanon, and of British troops in the Falklands conflict in the midst of a constant increase in military budgets, and with the deafening tramp of boots transmitted by the media, might lay doubt in the Western European proletariat's ability to assume it historic responsibilities and oppose the bourgeoisie's solution to the crisis of capitalism: generalized imperialist war.

The First and Second World Wars were made possible by the bourgeoisie's ability to pro­fit from the weaknesses of the European prol­etariat, and to enroll it behind the bourgeoi­sie's own imperialist objectives.

Today, with the retreat of the world proletariat, concretized by the defeat in Poland, and accom­panied by the beating of the drums of war, the specter of the 1930s and World War II returns to haunt the workers.

However, the balance sheet of the reflux in class struggle should not lead us to alarmist conclusions. The bourgeoisie has started a new offensive against the proletariat, but its conditions, reason, and nature demonstrate its limits.

Today, the situation is very different from what it was in the 30s. This is what we will try to show in the following section.

The differences between the 30s and today

1. The Proletariat today is not defeated.

The generation of proletarians that found itself confronted with the open crisis of capitalism that began in 1929, and was to lead to the war of 1939-45, had already lived through the crushing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The world proletariat came out of this defeat with its combative potential profoundly affected, especially where the revolutionary perspective had stood out most forcibly: in Germany and Russia.

But even in those countries where the repression was less violent, as in the western democracies (France, Britain, the USA), the proletariat's combativity was profoundly affected by the ideological confusion brought about by the defeat of the revolution and the resulting collapse of the IIIrd International.

The defeat of the revolution was a defeat for the world proletariat, and the proletariat was weakened on a world level. This was the essen­tial factor that was to allow the bourgeoisie to march the workers off to the Second World War.

This is not the situation today: the genera­tion of proletarians that is now confronted with the open crisis of capital is not coming out of the defeat of a revolutionary wave. In the period following the Second World War, the bourgeoisie maintained its control over the proletariat much more through the illusions based on the relative prosperity arising out of the reconstruction rather than on direct oppression. Today, while the slow but inexor­able aggravation of the crisis undermines these illusions, the potential combativity of this new generation of workers remains intact.

The working class may be confused by its lack of experience -- the result of 50 years of counter-revolution -- but it is not demoralized, and above all it has not been drawn into the defense of the state, which leads straight to war. From this point of view, the main pre­condition for the outbreak of a Third World War is missing.

2. The Bourgeoisie's room for maneuver has been reduced.

However, the difference between the present situation and that of the 30s doesn't only exist at the level of the historic conditions of the proletarian struggle.

History doesn't repeat itself: since it entered its period of decadence, capitalism has contin­ued to transform itself. And while the causes of its open crisis are fundamentally the same, the characteristics of its development have changed. This reality expresses itself at the level of the terms of control which the bour­geoisie seeks to re-impose on the proletariat.

Today's developing economic crisis is getting worse, despite all the policies of state capitalism systematized since the 1930s. This is a clear demonstration of the real ineffectiveness of the policies of statification of the economy which, during the crisis of the 30s, gave the bourgeoisie sufficient breathing space to complete the mobilization of the proletariat for the war.

For a mystification to have any effect over the proletariat, it must be based on a reality. The ‘effectiveness' of state capitalist measures in the 1930s, which allowed the bourgeoisie temporarily to redress the economic situation, was above all a result of their newness. Economic illusions gave the bou­rgeoisie a foundation for political illusions and thus enabled it to defuse the workers' combativity. State capitalism hid behind the myth of the social state: National-socialism in Germany, the Popular Front in France or Spain, the Welfare State in the US or Britain. The social state is the political corollary of state capitalism on the economic level. Directed at the proletariat, it allowed the bourgeoisie to keep the working class in the shackles of the counter-revolution, behind the banner of democracy, right up to today.

Thanks to state capitalism, the bourgeoisie has been able to contain temporarily the most important manifestations of the economic crisis, and thanks to the Welfare State, it has been able to avoid the political crisis. But the crisis which is developing today in spite of the state's intensive inter­vention in economic life tends to wear out the illusion of the Welfare Stare and the illusion of democracy in general. The bour­geoisie is no longer really able to slow down the effects of the crisis, and so the whole basis of its control over the proletariat during the last decades is pushed more and more into a political crisis.

The capitalist economic crisis leaves the bourgeoisie no way out of a confrontation with the proletariat. Both classes are being pushed towards this confrontation because all the bourgeoisie's ideological weapons are being worn out by the economic bankruptcy of its system. During the 30s, the bourgeoisie could make it seem as if the bankruptcy of 1929 was only that of private capitalism, and so could preserve the most essential illusions: that the state stands above classes, that the working class has its place and can defend its interests there. Today the economic crisis demonstrates what revolutionaries have always proclaimed, that all this is nothing but an illusion.

In the practical reality of its existence, the proletariat is beginning to see the state for what it really is: an instrument of coercion at the service of one class -- the bourgeoisie. Thus, all the mystifications that the bourg­eoisie has erected to hide the totalitarian reality of the state are starting to wear out.

3. An illustration of these differences: the question of unemployment.

The Crash of 1929 was to throw millions of workers into the most total destitution. The unemployment figures rose continuously from 1929-34. However, the application of state capitalist measures -- public works in the USA (eg the Tennessee Valley Authority), the development of the war economy in Germany and Britain, -- made it possible to limit them momentarily, without them ever falling to the pre-1929 level. But this also made it possible to reinforce the idea that there existed a real solution to the crisis of capital: the inter­vention of the state. Furthermore, the cre­ation of unemployment benefit, and other forms of aid to the unemployed, which had not existed previously, made it possible to stren­gthen the workers' confidence in the state as their protector against uncontrolled private capitalism.

During the 30s, the bourgeoisie was thus able to defuse the social bomb of unemployment. Following the determined struggles of unempl­oyed workers, notably 1930-32 in the USA, the state's policy made it possible to absorb the workers' combativity, and prepare their ideological enrolment behind the ‘left' democratic state, the defender of the workers against big business[1]. In this way the bourgeoisie prepared the coming enrolment in the imper­ialist war.

Today, the situation is radically different. Unemployment is developing inexorably, without the bourgeoisie being able to take the slightest economic measure to slow it down, and in the absence of any political illusion to make it acceptable. In the developed countries, unemployment has now reached the level of the late 1930s. As the failure of the reflationary policies of the 1970s has shown no reflation in the future will be able to reabsorb the unemployed; on the contrary, faced with the aggravated competition on the world market, investments are much more aimed at increasing productivity than expanding production.

Moreover, unlike the 30s, the capitalist state can no longer base its control on its supposed generosity, through the creation of increased social protection for the unemployed; on the contrary, it is obliged to attack the ‘gains' of the Welfare State set up after the 1929 crisis, and perfected during the reconstr­uction period. The capitalist state can no longer afford the policies for mystifying the proletariat that have allowed it to ensure its domination up to now. In practice, the bourgeoisie is compelled to destroy the bases of its ideological control over the prolet­ariat.

4. The Question of war.

One of the characteristics of the 1930s was the preparation of the Second World War, on the one hand through an increase in military program, and on the other hand through the development of localized conflicts on the periphery, such as the conflict between Japan and China, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the war in Spain, Nazi Germany's Auschluss in Austria.

From this point of view, are we in the same situation as that which preceded the Second World War?

However, the increase in the military programs in recent years in all countries, and especially in the most powerful, the most heavily armed at the outset, shows that, as in the 30s, the pressure of the crisis pushes the bourgeoisie further into growing inter-imperialist tens­ions. Each bloc accelerates the reinforcement of its military arsenal.

Moreover, certain conflicts at the periphery recall the ones which preceded the Second World War: the invasion of Afghanistan with the direct presence of 100,000 Russian soldiers the Israeli intervention in Lebanon to expel all soviet presence from the region, the diff­erent conflicts in Africa and Asia where the Russian bloc uses Cuban, Libyan or Vietnamese troops to fight its wars, and even the war between Iraq and Iran which has already pro­duced more than 300,000 dead and wounded, where Russia plays no direct role, but whose aim is to restore the western bloc's military potential weakened in Iran and is a response to Russia's offensive in Afghanistan.

All these conflicts are the expression of real imperialist tensions which torture the world. However -- and here resides the whole difference between today and the 30s -- other open conflicts, like those in El Salvador and the Falklands, while they occur within the context of world imperialism, are not expressions of real inter-imperialist rivalries, whether local or global. These ‘wars' serve above all to feed the intensive propaganda campaigns which the bour­geoisie inflicts on the proletariat. And the sound of marching boots is amplified out of all proportion by the media, which bring the horrors of war to every home, sowing fears about a Third World War.

The events in Poland reveal the real aims of these campaigns. The strikes in Poland were the pretext for a hysterical propaganda in each bloc, Russia denouncing the West's ‘un­acceptable interference', the USA and its allies shrieking about the menace of a Russian invasion. Was history going to repeat itself? Would Poland be at the origin of the 3rd World War as it was at that of the 2nd?

In reality, this warlike facade hid the fact that the two blocs were working hand in hand to beat the workers' struggle in Poland. The West gave the bourgeoisie in the East room for maneuver by supplying credits; to intimidate the Polish workers, the West lent credence to the danger of a Russian invasion, through its pro­paganda relayed over the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe. In the West itself, the bourgeoisie did everything in its power to make the ‘problem' a specifically Polish one in order to isolate the proletariat. And by trumpeting that the mass strike in Poland created a danger of war, it hammered home the idea that the class struggle leads to imperi­alist war.

We can see what the bourgeoisie uses its war­like propaganda for: dividing and intimidating the proletariat. This concern is decisive for the bourgeoisie to the extent that the prolet­ariat, in Western Europe especially, is not enrolled in the preparations for war.

This is the fundamental difference with the 1930s. In the 30s, the Russian and German proletariats, physically crushed, were unable to put up any opposition to the war. In the West, the anti-fascist campaigns succeeded in enrolling the workers behind the banner of democracy.

Today, the bourgeoisie has not got the workers under control in the very heart of capital's contradictions -- in Europe, which has already seen two world wars unleashed over its soil, and which is now the prize at stake in a hypo­thetical 3rd World War. This is expressed in the fact that conflicts remain on the periphery where weaker and more isolated fractions of the proletariat can more easily be mobilized behind the illusions of nationalism. But even in Israel, where the bourgeoisie has had an easy time playing on local and historical specificities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify, in the eyes of the proletariat, the necessity of the war -- as we have seen from the resistance amongst the troops to the intervention in Lebanon.

The lack of any reaction from the proletariat in France and Britain to the dispatch of professional contingents to the Falklands or the Lebanon is certainly not a sign of the working class' strength, but neither does it prove that the proletariat supports these measures. In fact, we have only seen a real reaction from the proletariat to war during the war itself -- whether it be on the Marne front in 1917, on the Russian front, in Italy in 1943, or in Germany in 1945.

The proletariat's struggle against war develops out of its struggle against the attacks of the bourgeoisie at the economic level. Out of this struggle arises a consciousness of the necessity to fight against imperialist war. For it is at this level that the alternative between guns and butter is made concrete.

As long as the European proletariat -- the decisive fraction of the world proletariat -- has not been beaten on the terrain of the defense of its living standards, it cannot be mobilized for war, it cannot be made to sacrifice life itself.

The historic course today is not open for war. A course towards war, like that of the 30s, presupposes the prior crushing of the only force capable of preventing the unleashing of imperialist rivalries -- the proletariat. On the contrary, the present historic course is towards the development of class confront­ations, giving rise to the perspective of revolution.

However, this doesn't mean that the course can't be overturned, that the revolution is inevitable, an already accomplished fact.

In the present situation, all the bourgeoisie's efforts are aimed at undoing the proletariat -- first at demobilizing it, from its own struggle then at mobilizing it for war. This is a permanent pressure exerted on the working class and it expresses itself in the advances, retreats, and detours followed by the class struggle.

The bourgeoisie is adapting its weapons for confronting the proletariat in today's conditions

1. For the bourgeoisie as well: the end of illusions.

During the 1970s, the bourgeoisie thought it was living through a repetition of the 30s, in the illusion that the same remedies could be applied mechanically to the same disease. The bourgeois states went into debt to finance the reflationary policies that were to put an end to the crisis, and above all were to delay and spread out the necessary frontal attack on the living conditions of the proletariat in the industrial centers of world capitalism. This was the essential condition for trying to strengthen the state's hold over the proletariat in the capitalist metropoles, where the exploited class is the most concentrated, and where most of the world's wealth is produced.

This economic policy had its corollary in the ideological attack on the proletariat after the first upsurge in response to the first signs of the crisis (May 68 in France, the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969, etc) is the policy that allowed the bourgeoisie to impose a retreat on the class struggle during the 70s: the "Programme Commun" in France, the Social Contract in Britain, Social Democracy in power in Northern Europe, and the Democrats in power with Carter as President in the USA. At the end of the 70s, the campaigns for ‘human rights' hid the same humanist themes that had made it possible in the 1930s to enroll the proletariat under the banner of anti-fascism. However, the failure of these policies of reflation, which were unable to soak up unemployment, and only accelerated inflation, put an end to the bourgeoisie's illusion that the proletariat could be controlled so easily. The 70s showed the bourgeoisie, firstly, that the proletariat is not as weak as it was in the 30s, and secondly, that the contradictions of capitalism have been sharpened throughout the period of decadence, to the point where the bourgeoisie today no longer has the same room for maneuver on the economic level. These two aspects are expressed on the political level, in the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Because the ‘recipes' inherited from the 1930s no longer work either on the economic level or the political level; because, in these new conditions, the old forms of mystification and control are no longer enough to prevent the revolutionary class from developing a political consciousness, the bourgeoisie is faced with an urgent need to adapt if it is to maintain it its control over the proletariat. It is com­pelled to become more intelligent, to streng­then and homogenize its system of control. But in a general context where the ruling class is getting weaker, this strengthening is essentially a strengthening of the state -- which is rather like reinforcing a castle built on sand.

2. Unity of the bourgeoisie and ideological campaigns.

The need to confront the working class has become a prime preoccupation of the bourgeoisie, which thus tends to relegate its internal tensions, on the national and international level, to the background.

Confronted with the proletarian class, whose strength lies in its ability to unite, and to develop its political consciousness, the bourgeoisie is also forced by circumstances to be more united. At the same time as the economic crisis pushes the bourgeoisie towards an exacerbation of its inter-imperialist rivalries, the fact that all factions of the bourgeoisie are confronted with the same enemy -- the working class -- also pushes them to unite.

This is not a new phenomenon; history has already given us some clear examples:

-- faced with the Paris Commune, the warring French and German armies united to crush the Parisian insurrection;

-- faced with the victorious revolution in Russia, and the threat of one in Germany, the bourgeoisie put an end to the 1st World War, and united its efforts to crush the revolutionary wave.

This unity is also made possible by decades of decadence, of the concentration of power in the hands of the state. This is a reality which tends to become permanent, and which marks the whole international balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In recent years, since the failure of the classic 1930s style methods, this has appeared in the bourgeoisie's development of an international strategy, aimed not only at the reinforcement of its repressive arsenal, but above all at a more effective use of its ideological campaigns, through a stricter control over the mass media.

The bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns have developed internationally around two main, mutually dependent, themes -- war and pacifism. These campaigns might seem paradoxical in a period when the road to war is closed, and when the war campaigns around the ideology of human rights have ended in failure. However, precisely because the proletariat is not immediately confronted with the problem of war, these are not, in fact, real war campaigns; rather, they aim at hindering the development of the proletariat's class consciousness by hiding from it the revolutionary alternative.

The bourgeoisie is trying to make use of the same reaction of fear as it used during the anti-terrorist campaigns to gain acceptance for police control. The bourgeoisie's aim, in filling the newspapers and the TV screens with the horrors of war, is not an immediate mobilization of the working class in a war, but to immobilize the class' reaction, to austerity, and to thrust it into the arms of the ‘pacifist' left, while at the same time using the illusion of non-alignment to rein­force nationalist feeling.

These campaigns around the war thus have meaning and effectiveness only to the extent that there exists a left in opposition able to profit from them by means of a corresp­onding pacifism and neutralism.

3. The left in opposition.

With the decline of its economy, the bour­geoisie can no longer simultaneously keep the left in government and make the workers think of the same left as the defender of their interests.

The left of the bourgeoisie's political app­aratus is the faction specifically destined to exercise the state's ideological control over the proletariat; it can only do so as long as the left attaches itself to the working class' political and trade union traditions. Unable to maintain the credibility of the left, and so of the state, with the left in government, the bourgeoisie has been forced to reorganize itself so as to put the left in opposition. At a time when the state must apply increasingly drastic anti-working class measures, the left must be in opposition if it is to continue to appear credible. Behind this question, the whole relationship of the proletariat to the state is at stake.

Increasingly, the crisis widens the gulf that separates the state from civil society. The working class especially is losing ill­usions in the Welfare State, and is becoming clearer as to the state's anti-proletarian role; the class is obliged to lose its demo­cratic illusions. The bourgeoisie is trying to block this process of developing consciou­sness by identifying the state with the right and maintaining the illusory opposition of a ‘good', ‘left wing' state.

Because the effects of the crisis were still felt relatively weakly in the centers of capital during the 70s, the bourgeoisie could then use electoral campaigns and the democratic mystification to drown the proletariat in the population in general. Within the left, the electoral political parties played the deter­minant role, while the trade unions' job was essentially to keep the workers on the electo­ral terrain. The new upsurge in workers' combativity at the end of the 70s was to show that the electoral lie was no longer enough. The bourgeoisie had to confront the proletariat at the very roots of its struggle. The role of the trade unions has become preponderant. The ‘radicalization' of their language, and of rank-and-file union activity, aims to hinder, demoralize, delay, and to prevent the extension and self-organization of workers' strikes. Radical unionism is becoming the spearhead of the bourgeoisie's offensive against the workers, and we have seen its effectiveness against the workers' struggles of recent years.

This general strategy of the left in opposition, concretized in the central countries (USA, West Germany, Britain, Belgium, Holland) is not contradicted by the arrival of the left in power in certain countries.

The bourgeoisie is not a unified class; it is divided, and has difficulty in overcoming its internal tensions. These tensions appear within the state, and are expressed in the flexibility of the political apparatus. The division of labor imposed by the need to put the left in opposition implies a uni­fication of the bourgeoisie behind the state, which comes up against the ideological weakness of certain sectors of the traditional right. The arrival of the left in power in France showed up this weakness, and surprised the world bourgeoisie. This slip-up on the part of the bourgeoisie, in the heart of ind­ustrial Europe considerably weakens its capacity to control the proletariat. The left in government must impose on the workers the austerity necessary for the national capital. In doing so, the left shows itself to be like the right, and so loses its power to mystify and control a fraction of the world prolet­ariat which has distinguished itself hist­orically by its political sense, and whose experience in the strikes of 1968 that marked the end of 50 years of counter-revol­ution has not been forgotten.

The arrival of the socialists in power in Greece, Sweden and Spain does not have the same importance, since the proletariat in these countries has a less central role to play. Moreover, the arrival of the left in power in these countries was not a surprise for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie prepared for this situation because it could not do otherwise. The right's chronic weak­ness in these countries -- the weight of their fascist past in Spain and Greece, the right's inexperience in Sweden, where the social-democracy has monopolized power for decades -- is a congenital weakness.

Nevertheless, the right in these countries will be on hand to be called back into government in the context of the right in power/left in opposition line-up -- a line­up that will increasingly be imposed as a necessity in the face of the developing class struggle. Only through a period of convalescence in opposition will these right-wing factions be able to restructure themselves so that they can effectively assume government office in the future.

Because any development in the class struggle has international repercussions, the bourgeoisie must close ranks at an international level. We have seen, with the class struggle in Poland, how the bour­geoisie is capable of overcoming it imperia­list divisions in order to face the proleta­riat with a united front, and to lend credi­bility to the myth of the left in opposition in its union form, through Solidarnosc. Solidarnosc's ‘life' in Poland, in the teeth of all the rigidity of the Stalinist political apparatus, was made possible by the union of all the forces of the world bourgeoisie against the workers.

The immediate aim of the bourgeoisie's present offensive is not to enroll the working class --because this is not possible today -- but to confront it and block the development of its unity, to fragment and demoralize it. The impact of such an offensive cannot be judged in the short term. However, we can already get an idea of its effectiveness from the retreat in the class struggle in 1981-82, concretized by the defeat in Poland, which itself increased the retreat and the confusion of the world proletariat.

However, because the world proletariat, and especially the proletariat in Western Europe, is not enrolled for war, its combative potential is still fundamentally intact. This is true despite the partial defeat in Poland, and despite ails the illusions which still weigh on the class. Because it compels the class to struggle, to abandon these illusions, the cap­italist crisis is the best ally of the prolet­ariat.

"What matters, is not what any particular pro­letarian thinks, or even the proletariat as a whole at a given moment in its history, but what it is historically obliged to do, in conformity with its being". (Marx, The Holy Family)

What perspectives?

Up to now, the central fraction of the prolet­ariat in the industrialized countries has been relatively lightly attacked by the rigors of austerity, compared to its class brothers in the peripheral countries. Cap­italism's plunge into the crisis forces the bourgeoisie into an ever more severe attack on the living conditions of the proletariat in the world's greatest industrial concen­tration -- Western Europe.

Given the essential subjective precondition, the non-defeat of the proletariat and the fact that its combative potential remains intact, the accelerated deepening of the crisis is the necessary objective precondition for the opening of a revolutionary period. This crisis pushes the proletariat to generalize its strikes and its consciousness, and to put forward in practice the revolutionary perspective.

1. The question of unemployment and the generalization of the struggle.

It is now the question of unemployment which best concretizes the meaning of the crisis for the working class in the developed countries: 32 million unemployed in the OECD, ie the equivalent of the active popu­lations of Germany, Holland and Belgium put together. Nor is there any improvement in sight; the worse of the crisis is still to come.

At first, the bourgeoisie was able to use the slow growth of unemployment to divide the workers. ‘Accept redundancies to save the business'; the description of the unem­ployed as privileged scroungers; ‘throw out the immigrants to save jobs': all these lies will be smashed to pieces by the accelerated development of unemployment.

Up to now, the bourgeoisie has been able to limit the impact of unemployment on working class combativity, firstly by paying unempl­oyment benefits, and then by developing the illusion that unemployment was a necessary sacrifice to put an end to the crisis. This situation must come to an end with the inexor­able deepening of the crisis, as the bourgeoisie is forced into ever heavier attacks on the living conditions of the unemployed, in common with the rest of the proletariat.

Unemployment affects the whole proletariat; irrespective of national, ethnic, or corpor­atist divisions, unemployment shows the workers what threatens them all, and so lays the base for the unity of the working class.

The problem of unemployment, in all the industrialized countries, is posed at an international level; it shows that the situation is the same everywhere, no matter what lies each national bourgeoisie uses.

The inevitable development of unemployment must push the proletariat to struggle. The workers are faced with the concrete choice between struggle and the slow death of unemployed misery. The queues of unemployed at the soup kitchen show unsparingly what capital is preparing for all of us. The proletarians will have to struggle, because their survival is at stake.

All the bourgeoisie's lies are wearing thin under the pressure of the crisis and the workers' resistance. The development of the crisis must weaken the bourgeoisie and strengthen the proletariat in the historic struggle that opposes them. The bourgeoisie's ability to face up to the proletariat is determined by the dynamic of this struggle.

Throughout the 70s, one could say that the workers showed more combativity than a real consciousness of their goals and the means of to attain them. This phenomenon was shown very clearly in Poland where the enormous combativity of the proletariat -- revealed in the massive character of its struggle and its ability to face up to the threat of repression -- came up against the most classic democratic illusions -- pluralism, unionism, nationalism.

It was these illusions that ended up exhausting the dynamic of the mass strike, of extension and self-organization.

The first months of the mass strike in Poland lit up the world scene with the force and rapidity of its dynamic. While this dynamic demonstrated the proletariat's vitality, it was also made possible by the local weakness of the bourgeoisie. This weakness is linked to specific aspects of the Eastern bloc coun­tries, and is expressed in the rigidity of the political apparatus, which leaves little room for the opposition forces needed to mystify the proletariat. The bourgeoisie in the Russian bloc could only overcome this chronic weakness in order to confront the class struggle in Poland thanks to the aid of the world bourgeoisie, economic as much as political, which made it possible to ‘breath life' into the Solidarnosc variety of the rank-and-file unionist illusion.

In the same way, the development of the class struggle in France in May 68 was facilitated by the unpreparedness of a bourgeoisie which still thought the working class was as passive as it had known it over the previous 40 years.

Today, the proletariat of Western Europe is in a different situation; 15 years of economic crisis and class struggle have put the bour­geoisie on its guard. It has reorganized and adapted its political apparatus to confront the foreseeable development of the class struggle. The West European proletariat must confront the most experienced faction of the world bourgeoisie, the most perfected mystif­ications, and the most sophisticated apparatus of social control, of which the left in opposition trick is one of the most important elements.

2. Generalization of class consciousness and the union hurdle.

Since the resurgence of the class struggle in 1968, all the working class' most significant combats have gone beyond, to a greater or lesser extent, the union apparatus.

The unions are the spearhead of the ruling class apparatus of control over the working class. In every workplace, the unions over­see the workers on behalf of the state, in order to prevent the struggle from starting if possible, and to derail it if not. They are the bourgeoisie's forward troops on the front of the class struggle.

In 1917, the question of war played a central role in the development of the proletariat's consciousness; nonetheless, the unions question came to the forefront as soon as it was a matter of extending the revolution to Western Europe.

Today, with the road to war closed, the union question is central to the development of the proletariat's overall consciousness, because the unions are the first obstacle the workers confront at every point in their struggle.

No struggle can go beyond the national framework without going beyond the union apparatus and developing into a mass strike. The national question and the union question are intimately linked. The proletariat in Poland was unable to answer the question it posed, of the struggle's international generalization, because this question is linked to the ability to overcome the illusions of unionism, the left, and democracy. The working class in Poland could not answer this question alone, due to its specific situation and experience.

The proletariat of Western Europe, by contrast, because it is not in same isolated position, because it has accumulated decades of exper­ience in confronting unions and the left, because today more than ever it is pushed to struggle by the crisis, because its combative potential remains intact, because it is not mobilized for war, finds itself in more favorable conditions than it has ever known for clarifying the real nature of the unions, the left and democracy.

The workers of Western Europe are the best placed to sweep away the obstacles placed before them and their class brothers in the rest of the planet -- obstacles aimed at preventing them from putting forward a revolutionary perspective in their struggles.

The proletariat of Western Europe is not in the same situation as in May 68, nor in that of Poland 1980. The dynamic of the mass strike cannot get under way without a movement that goes beyond the union apparatus; and this is made more difficult by the left in opposition and by rank-and-file unionism.  In the struggle itself, the proletariat will have to learn the difficult lesson. This conscious­ness cannot be acquired at once, in one struggle; the road towards generalization will be marked by advances and retreats, and so also by moments of confusion, a sign that the class is breaking with its illusions.

However, the calm of these last two years is not due uniquely to the bourgeoisie's political offensive; it is also an inherent product of the difficulties in the process of development of proletarian conscious­ness. Up to now, since the resurgence of 1968, the consciousness that accompanied the combat­ivity of the proletariat has been marked by con­fusions about the possibility of finding a way out of the crisis. These illusions cannot survive. While the whole activity of the bourgeoisie seeks to isolate struggles under union control in order to lead them into a dead end, all the proletariat's experience of its defeats, where these isolated strikes have won nothing, pushes it increasingly to take on the political aspects contained in the economic basis of its struggles. Because the problem is general, the proletariat is pushed to generalize its struggles and its consciousness.

The proletariat's ability to develop the mass strike and to put forward the revolutionary perspective in practice depends on its ability to clarify these questions, by confronting the trade unions and developing its own self-organization.

The revolutionary perspective is not just a theoretical, but is above all a practical question. In May 1968, the striking workers posed the question of revolution -- though obviously without being able to answer it in practice -- and so gave a perspective for the whole period to come. In the years that followed, the bourgeoisie did everything it could to hide the necessity, and above all the possibility, of the revolution.

The world working class' consciousness that the communist revolution is not only necessary, but above all possible, depends on the European proletariat's ability to struggle, and to show concretely that there is an alternative to capitalist barbarism.

3. The importance of the proletariat in Western Europe.

It was the crushing of the German proletariat that stopped the extension of the Russian revolution; it was the bourgeoisie's control over the European proletariat which made World War II possible; it was the reawakening of the class struggle in Europe which marked the end of the period of counter-revolution; it was the retreat of the European proletariat before the mystification of the left in power that deter­mined the reflux of the 1970s; it was the exhaustion of this mystification that made possible the resurgence of the class struggle at the end the 70s; and it is the bourgeoisie's counter-offensive behind the left in opposition that is at the origin of the reflux of 1981-82.

Today more than ever, the role of the western European proletariat is crucial -- both on the level of the objective conditions within which its struggle develops (the obvious nature of the crisis as a crisis of over­production which makes the revolution possible) and on the level of subjective conditions (its experience of the most sophisticated bourgeois mystifications).

The revolutionary perspective, the very future of humanity, depends on the coming struggles of the western European proleta­riat, on its capacity to draw the lessons from its defeats and its victories.

Rosa Luxemburg said: "The proletariat is the first class that comes to power after a series of defeats".

The defeat of the workers in Poland was one of those defeats that announce the future perspectives of the class struggle. It showed the strength of the enemy and led to a disorientation of the world proletariat. Nevertheless, the struggles that preceded it served to clarify for the whole world prol­etariat the nature of the Eastern bloc countries, to unmask the mystifications of Stalinism.

On a much larger scale, the struggle of the proletariat in Western Europe will provide a clarification for the entire world prolet­ariat; it alone can give a direction, a per­spective, a unity to all the struggles of the working class faced with the economic crisis, with war, with the barbarity of capital in all its forms.

Because the terrain for the development of struggles and of class consciousness is today an inexorable economic crisis and not an imp­erialist war; because the proletariat has not been through any historic defeats, the con­ditions have never been so favorable for the emergence of a revolutionary perspective.

More than ever, the future belongs to the proletariat, and, in this future, the workers at the heart of the capitalist world, in old Europe, have a vital role to play.

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[1] In Germany, the Nazi state gained a ‘popular' image mainly by developing the war economy, which enable it to absorb a considerable amount of unemployment.

1. At the beginning of the ‘80s we analyzed the new decade as the ‘years of truth' in which the convulsions and open bankruptcy of the cap­italist mode of production would reveal in all its clarity the historical alternative: commun­ist revolution or generalized imperialist war. At the end of the first third of this period, we can say that this analysis has been fully confirmed: never, since the 1930s, has it been so clear that the capitalist economy is in a total impasse; never since the last world war has the bourgeoisie set in motion such huge military arsenals, so much effort towards the production of the means of destruction; never since the 1920s has the proletariat fought battles on the scale of those which shook Poland and the whole ruling class in 1980-81. However, all this is just the beginning. In particular, although the bourgeoisie is apparently consol­ing itself by talking about the ‘economic recovery', they have a hard time masking the fact that the worst of the crisis is still ahead of us. Similarly, the world-wide retreat in the workers' struggle following the tremendous fight in Poland is only a pause before enormous class confrontations that will involve the decisive detachments of the world proletariat, those of the industrial metropoles and of western Europe in particular. This is what this resolution will attempt to show.

2. The recession which marked the beginning of the ‘80s has shown itself to be "the longest and deepest" of the post-war period (Third Congress of the ICC, 1979). In the main advanced count­ries, the heart of world capitalism, this rec­ession has been characterized by:

-- a brutal fall in industrial production (-4.5% in the seven most important countries of the OECD in 1982, after a stagnation in 1981);

-- a massive underutilization of the productive forces, both industrial potential (nearly a third unused in the US and Canada in 1982) and labor power (32 million unemployed in the OECD countries, ie 10% of the working population);

-- a very sharp drop in productive investment (-14% in 1982 in the US for example) ;

-- a regression in world trade (-1% in 1981, -2% in 1982).

All these elements show that the crisis capit­alism is suffering from has its roots in the saturation of markets on a world scale in the overproduction of commodities in relation to solvent demand.

This inability to find outlets for its commod­ities has its repercussions on what constitutes the actual objective of capitalist production: profit. Thus, in the main world powers, the annual rise in industrial profits (before tax) fell by 90 billion dollars (-35%) between ‘80 and ‘82 while a number of basic sectors, like steel and automobiles, were running at a loss. Thus one of the classic theses of marxism is confirmed: from being a mere tendency, the fall in the rate of profit becomes effective when the markets are saturated.

3. The crisis of capitalism has its sources in the industrial metropoles. However, and for the same reason, it is a world-wide crisis: no country can escape from it. The countries at the periphery, in particular, suffer from it in the most extreme forms. The decadence of the capitalist mode of production has made it impossible for these countries to go through a real indust­rial development and to catch up with the most advanced countries, so that the open crisis of the system puts them in the front ranks of its victims. In fact, in the early phases of the crisis, the most powerful economies were able to push an important part of the effects of the crisis onto the weaker ones. Today, the world crisis is leading to a new and tragic aggrava­tion of the endemic afflictions the third world countries suffer from: huge masses of workless stuck in shanty towns, the development of fam­ines and epidemics. Those third world countries that were pointed to as examples of ‘miraculous' growth, like Brazil and Mexico, provide the proof that there is no exception to the rule: their efforts to acquire a modern industrial apparatus in a world where even the strongest powers are now experiencing the full rigors of the crisis has led them to bankruptcy, into an astronomical accumulation of debts which every­one knows cannot be repaid and which force them, under the whip of the IMF, to adopt draconian austerity measures which plunge their popula­tions into even greater poverty.

The list of insolvent countries is swelled by the so-called ‘socialist' ones. The backward, fragile economies of these countries are now being hit head-on by the world crisis, a fact expressed by their permanent and growing inab­ility to reach the objectives laid down in their plans, even though they are less and less ambitious, and also by the development of an increasingly catastrophic scarcity which puts paid both to the Stalinist and Trotskyist lies about their ‘socialist' character and to the ramblings of certain proletarian currents about their capacity to ‘escape' the law of value.

4. The recent convulsions of the world econ­omy, notably the regular threats of an explos­ion of the whole international financial edif­ice, have led a number of economists to compare the present situation to 1929 and the 1930s, usually concluding that the present crisis is less grave than the one 50 years ago. It's up to revolutionaries, to marxists, to show both what the two crises have in common as well as their differences, to understand the true grav­ity of the present situation and the perspect­ives which flow from it.

The common factor in the two crises is that they constitute the acute phase of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production which entered into its decadent period around the time of the First World War. They result from an exhaustion of the stimulant provided by the reconstruction which followed both imperial­ist world wars. They are the brutal manifesta­tion of the world-wide saturation of the mar­ket that results from the absorption or destruc­tion, more or less completed by the beginning of this century, of the extra-capitalist sec­tors which, since capitalism first appeared, were the soil for its expansion.

However, if the basis of these two crises is the same, they differ both in form and rhythm because of the different characteristics of capitalism today and capitalism 50 years ago.

The crisis of 1929 broke out in a capitalism which in many respects was still living accord­ing to the rules it inherited from the period of full prosperity in the 19th Century. In part­icular, the statification of the economy which was introduced with much ado during the First World War to a large extent gave way to the old ‘laisser faire'. Similarly, the imperialist blocs which were constituted during this war significantly relaxed their grip, in particular with the illusion that this had been the ‘war to end war'. Because of this, hardly had the reconstruction finished, when the re-emergence of the contradictions of capitalism resulted in a brutal collapse. The banks and the firms re­acted in a dispersed way, which only aggravated the ‘house of cards' effect of the financial crash. And when the states intervened, it was also in a dispersed manner on the international scene, through a quasi-total closing of front­iers and savage devaluations.

Capitalism today is very different from the cap­italism of 1929. The state capitalism which went through a major leap in the ‘30s in the form of Stalinism, fascism and Keynesian policies, has since that time only continued to strengthen its grip on the economy and on society in gen­eral. Also, while the imperialist blocs were realigned at the end of the last war, their existence and power were in no way called into question. On the contrary: while they are fund­amentally based on a military alliance around the two dominant nations, they have more and more extended their prerogatives into the econ­omic sphere (COMECON in the east, IMF, OECD etc in the west). For these reasons, it was not private enterprises which individually confront­ed the aggravation of economic contradictions that marked the end of the post-war reconstruc­tion in the mid-60s; it was nation states. And the states did not carry out their policies in a dispersed manner but in agreement with the orientations decided at the level of the blocs. This does not mean that the commercial rival­ries between the different nations within each bloc have disappeared. On the contrary: the growing saturation of the market can only shar­pen them and protectionist tendencies, however much they are exploited in nationalist cam­paigns, are nonetheless real. However, the sit­uation demands that each bloc prevents these rivalries and protectionist tendencies from hav­ing a free rein, because otherwise they would run the risk of bringing about the immediate collapse of the world economy.

5. The development of state capitalism and the elaboration of economic policies at the level of the blocs also make a financial crash like that of 1929 very improbable. Although the development of the crisis since the ‘60s has gone through sudden spurts (1967, ‘70-71, ‘74-75, 80-82), capitalism has since the ‘30s learned how to control the overall pace of the crisis, to avoid a brutal collapse. This does not mean that the situation today is less grave than in 1929. On the contrary: it is in fact much more grave. The measures that allowed a certain re­covery in the world economy in the mid-‘30s have already been massively deployed since the end of World War II and were further strength­ened during the ‘70s. Huge armament expendit­ures, Keynesian policies of public works and ‘stimulating demand' through budget deficits and state debts, which were momentarily poss­ible after 1929 at a time when there had been a period of deflation and the state treasuries were not completely exhausted, are now quite incapable of giving rise to any kind of revival, after decades of inflation resulting from in­tensive armaments programs and the abuse of neo-Keynesian drugs. These drugs also include the astronomical piling up of debts. The world economy is now resting this pile ($750 billion owed by the third world should not hide the $5000 billion debt of the US economy alone, not to mention other advanced countries) and this can only lead to the death of the patient through an apocalyptic surge of the inflation­ary spiral and the explosion of the internat­ional financial system. In particular, the development of military expenditure, which in the ‘30s momentarily contributed to a revival, is now clearly showing itself to be a factor that aggravates the crisis even more. The ‘mon­etarist' policies orchestrated by Reagan and now followed by all the leaders of the advanced countries are a recognition of the failure of neo-Keynesian policies and allow the underlying causes of the crisis to come to the surface: generalized overproduction and its inevitable consequences -- the fall in production, the elimination of surplus capital, unemployment for tens of millions of workers, massive dec­line in the living standards of the whole prol­etariat.

Because of this, the so-called ‘recovery' we have heard so much about in recent months won't last long. The timid way it has expressed itself, and the limited number of countries benefitting from it (USA and UK) express the fact that it is now out of the question that capitalism should repeat the operation of ‘76-78 when .mass­ive loans to the third world allowed production in the advanced countries to pick up somewhat. One of the indices of the continued aggravation of the crisis is the fact that the periods of recession are getting deeper and longer, whereas moments of upturn are getting shorter and more insignificant.

6. The inexorable aggravation of the crisis thus confirms that we have indeed entered the ‘years of truth', a period that will unmask the real nature of the contradictions of the capit­alist mode of production. These years of truth will not only manifest themselves on the econ­omic level but also and above all at the level of what is at stake for the whole of society, of the historic alternative already announced by the Communist International: war or revol­ution. Either the proletarian response to the crisis, the development of its struggle leading to the revolution, or the bourgeois outcome of the crisis: a generalized imperialist holocaust.

For its part, the bourgeoisie is pursuing and will continue to pursue its military prepara­tions as long as its class rule is not directly threatened. But it is important to show what it is that today and in the coming period funda­mentally determines the policies of the bourg­eoisie: preparations for war or preparations for a decisive confrontation with the working class. Here it is important to distinguish, when look­ing at the warlike gesticulations of the govern­ments, what directly serves to aggravate imper­ialist conflicts from what is above all part of a global policy against the proletariat.

7. In the recent period, the aggravation of imperialist tensions manifested itself in the first place through a new advance by the US bloc in one of the crucial zones of the conflict, the Middle East. The ‘Peace in Galilee' operation carried out by Israel, the disciplining of the PLO and the expulsion of its troops from Lebanon the installation of western expeditionary forces in that country constitute a new phase towards the complete liquidation of Russia's presence in this region. This is what explains the desp­erate attempt of the latter to maintain a last foothold through the intensive armament of Syria. The attempt to impose a ‘Pax Americana' in the Middle East is complemented by the grad­ual disciplining of Iran and the strengthening of Iraq's integration into the western bloc, to the extent that the delivery of weapons to these two countries to feed the war in the Gulf makes them more dependent on the western world. The liquidation of the Stalinist party in Iran (Tudeh) illustrates that these maneuvers are more and more reducing Russia's hopes that the invasion of Afghanistan would one day enable it to gain access to the ‘hot seas'.

The other expression of the aggravation of imp­erialist tensions is the new step taken by all the main countries, and notably the USA, in re­inforcing armaments, particularly their deployment in Europe, the essential theatre of a third world war - in the form of Pershing II and cruise missiles. This latter operation is a good confirmation, if it was ever really in doubt, of the absolute loyalty of the western European countries to the American alliance.

8. Quite different is the significance that we should attribute to all the noise we've heard recently over the Falklands and Central America. In the first case, this was an inter­nal operation of the western bloc aimed above all at disorientating the working class of the advanced countries (notably in Britain) through a deafening ideological campaign, and second­arily at serving as a live test of the most mod­ern armaments. In the second case, the presence of Cuban advisors and Russian weapons in Nic­aragua, or this country's support for the guerrillas in El Salvador, in no way threatens the USA with the appearance of a new Cuba on its frontiers. Reagan's campaigns on this question, and the opposition to them by the ‘pacifists' and ‘doves' of the American bourg­eoisie are all part of a concerted policy by all sectors of the ruling class in the west, aimed at diverting the proletariat from its class struggle.

Similarly, the huge pacifist campaigns which, with some success, have been organized in most western countries don't have the same role as those of the ‘30s which were a direct prepara­tion for the Second World War. Here again, the main objective of these campaigns, which are based on a real disquiet about the preparations for war, is to disorientate the working class and to fragment its inevitable reactions to the deepening crisis and its declining living stan­dards. These campaigns are part of the division of labor, now operating more and more clearly on a world scale, between the ‘right' sectors of the bourgeoisie, whose task is to carry out from government harder and harder austerity measures against the working class, and the ‘left' sectors whose function is to sabotage the workers' struggles.

9. This division of labor between sectors of the bourgeoisie, the use of the ‘left in oppos­ition' card which the ICC has pointed to since 1979 has been further confirmed in recent months with the arrival of the Christian Democrats in the government of Germany and the crushing vic­tory of the Tories in the British election, to the detriment of a Labor Party which ‘committed suicide' on the electoral level through its ‘ex­tremism' and ‘pacifism' -- a fact seen even by bourgeois observers -- with the aim of streng­thening control over the working class. This perspective is in no way negated by the fact that the forces of the left have come to power in a number of countries recently -- France, Sweden, Greece, Spain and Portugal. In all these cases, this has not been an expression of the strength of the bourgeoisie, but of weakness. In the case of the last three countries, it was basically the expression of the difficulty the ruling class has in constituting solid right wing forces following a long period of fascist or military rule. In the case of Sweden, it's the result of the long hegemony of social demo­cracy which did not allow the forces of the right to accustom themselves to exercising power. As for France, it is a very striking illustration, a contrary, of the left in opposition perspective. Whereas in the other countries, the needed arrival of the left in power was consciously carried out by the bourg­eoisie, Mitterand's victory in ‘81 was an ‘acc­ident', something that is being confirmed day by day through his government's difficulties in carrying out coherent policies and through the preparations of the CP and the left of the SP to go into opposition. While in the majority of the advanced countries of the west (USA, West Germany, UK, Belgium, Holland, Italy), the com­ing to power or maintenance in power of the right leaves the left and the unions with their hands free to sabotage workers' struggles from the inside, notably through a radicalization of their language, the ‘strained' presence of the left in power in France (ie the second power in western Europe) clearly reveals the bourgeois nature of the so-called ‘workers' parties' and thus represents a weakness for the bourgeoisie, not only in that country, but on a world scale.

10. The ‘left in opposition' card which the bourgeoisie is playing all over the west is not limited to this part of the world. It was used and continues to be used in the eastern bloc, in Poland, with the anti-working class activit­ies of the ‘independent' union, Solidarnosc. Although the congenital fragility and rigidity of the Stalinist regimes has not allowed a ‘democratic', western-style facade to be set up in these countries, or even the preservation of the legal existence of Solidarnosc for any longer than was strictly demanded by the combativity of the working class, the basic mech­anisms and effectiveness of the ‘left in opposition' showed themselves to be comparable to those in the west, not only before December 1981, but afterwards as well. Before this date, thanks to its apparently intransigent opposition to the authorities, Solidarnosc, supported by the western bourgeoisie and in the context of an offensive by the whole ruling class, was an essential instrument in sabotaging the struggle and opening the door to military/police repress­ion. But its function did not disappear when it was made illegal. In fact, the persecution of its leaders, by conferring on them a martyr's halo, has facilitated the organization in its work of disorienting the working class, just as Thatcher's attacks on the unions in Britain only strengthen their anti-working class effic­iency. In the final analysis, the ‘left in clandestinity' is only an extreme form of the ‘left in opposition'.

11. The defeat of the world proletariat in Poland, and the general retreat of 1981-82 which allowed this defeat to happen, must there­fore largely be attributed to the policy of the left in opposition, both in the east and the west. There is no doubt that there has been a retreat. Whereas the years ‘78-80 were marked by a world-wide resurgence of workers' strikes (strikes of the Rotterdam dockers, steelworkers in Britain, metal workers in Germany and Brazil, the clashes at Longwy-Denain in France, the mass strikes in Poland), the years ‘81 and ‘82 have seen a clear reflux in the struggle. This phen­omenon is particularly evident in the most ‘classic' of capitalist countries, Britain, where 1981 saw the lowest number of strike days since the last war, whereas in 1979 they had reached their highest quantitative level since 1926 (the year of the General Strike) with 29 million strike days. Thus, the setting-up of martial law in Poland and the violent repress­ion which descended on the workers of this country in no way came like bolt out of the blue. The most advanced point of the workers' defeat after the huge battles of summer ‘80, the December ‘81 ‘coup de force', was part of a defeat for the whole proletariat.

The proletariat suffered this defeat from the moment that capitalism, through concerted action and particularly through its left forces, managed to isolate the Polish workers from the rest of their class, to imprison them ideolog­ically within the frontiers of the bloc (the ‘socialist' countries of the east) and nation (Poland is a Polish affair); from the moment it succeeded in turning the workers of other countries into spectators (troubled certainly, but passive) and in diverting them from the only form that class solidarity can take: the generalization of their struggles in all countries. They managed this by holding up a caricature of solidarity: sentimental demonstrations, human­ist petitions, and Christian charity with its Christmas parcels. To the extent that it doesn't provide an adequate response to the demands of the period, the non-generalization of the work­ers' struggle was in itself a defeat.

12. Thus, as we already said in 1981, one of the essential lessons of the class confronta­tions in Poland is the necessity for the prol­etariat, faced with the holy alliance of the bourgeoisie of all countries, to generalize its struggles on a world scale, with a perspective of a revolutionary attack on the capitalist system.

The other major lesson of these battles and their defeat is that this world-wide generalization of struggles can only begin from the countries that constitute the economic heart of capitalism. That is, the advanced countries of the west and, among these, those in which the working class has the oldest and most complete experience: Western Europe. The world bourgeoisie was able to create a ‘cordon sanitaire' around Poland because it was part of a backward bloc, where the counter-revolution weighs heaviest, and where the proletariat has not been directly confronted with decades of democratic and union mystifications. These conditions explain why the proletariat there was able to straight away find the formidable weapon of the mass strike; they also explain why it was then able to be imprisoned in unionist, democratic and nation­alist mystifications. In the advanced countries of the west, and notably in Western Europe, the proletariat will only be able to fully deploy the mass strike after a whole series of str­uggles, of violent explosions, of advances and retreats, during the course of which it will progressively unmask all the lies of the left in opposition, of unionism and rank and filism. But then its struggle will really show the way to the workers of all countries, opening the door to the world-wide generalization of work­ers' struggles and thus to the revolutionary confrontation with the bourgeois order.

If the decisive act of the revolution will be played out when the working class has dealt with the two military giants of east and west, its first act will necessarily be played out in the historic heart of capitalism and of the proletariat: Western Europe.

13. Another lesson of the events in Poland is that the working class will remain at the mercy of defeats, of tragic ones, as long as it has not overthrown capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg said, "the revolution is the sole form of ‘war' whose final victory can be prepared by a series of defeats'", but the proletariat, and partic­ularly its revolutionary organizations, must guard against a series of partial defeats lead­ing to a complete defeat, to the counter-revol­ution. Some communist elements have said that this was already the case with the defeat in Poland and the present stagnation of struggles on a world level. For our part, we affirm the opposite. Since the proletarian resurgence of 1968, we have said that the historic course was not towards generalized imperialist war but to­wards class confrontations. This does not mean that the course cannot be reversed.

The existence of a course towards war, like in the ‘30s, means that the proletariat has suffered a decisive defeat that prevents it from opposing the bourgeois outcome of the crisis. The existence of a course towards class con­frontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butch­ery; first, it must confront and beat the work­ing class. But this does not prejudge the out­come of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a ‘course towards class confrontations' rather than a ‘course towards revolution'.

Whatever the seriousness of the defeat the work­ing class has been through in the last few years, it does not call the historic course into question, in that:

-- the decisive battalions of the world prolet­ariat have not been in the front line of the confrontation;

-- the crisis which is now hitting the metropoles of capitalism with full force will com­pel the workers of these metropoles to bring out the reserves of combativity which have not yet been unleashed in a decisive manner.

Thus, by provoking an increasingly brutal, simultaneous and universal degradation of the living conditions of the proletariat, in part­icular through the massive intensification of unemployment in the main industrial centers, the crisis shows itself to be the best ally of the world proletariat. It is developing, to a degree unprecedented in history, the objective and subjective conditions for the internationalization of struggles, for the development of a revolutionary consciousness. Because there is no perspective today of even a temporary restabilisation of the capitalist economy (in contr­ast to the ‘30s when the recovery allowed the bourgeoisie to put the finishing touches on an already beaten proletariat), the perspective is still one of class confrontations.

The greatest battles of the working class are yet to come.

This editorial gives the broad outlines of our analysis of the events of summer ‘83, at the time of appearance of this issue of the Inter­national Review which is devoted to the reports and resolutions of the 5th Congress of the ICC. These events illustrate the orientations of the Congress texts with regard to the threat of war and the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie.

The summer of 1983 has been marked by the hotting-up of inter-imperialist tensions on a world scale:

-- the Chad conflict in the heart of Africa, which has been going on for years, has gone onto a higher level owing to the determined interven­tion of the armed forces of the western bloc, most notably of France;

-- the Lebanon conflict, after several months of relative calm, has savagely caught fire again and Beirut is once more under a hail of bombs;

-- finally, the destruction of the South Korean Boeing 747 by Russian fighters has demonstrated the hypocrisy of the American bloc which does not hesitate to use civil passengers as hostages in a sinister game of espionage, while the USSR has shown that it had no hesit­ation in killing them for the sacrosanct defense of national territory and military secrets.

There has been an intensive propaganda campaign around these events, amplified by all the media, with the aim of dulling consciousness and kind­ling fears of a third world war. All this prop­aganda tries to show that the adversary is the real aggressor, the true barbarian and war­monger, and the western bloc is a past-master in this art: if troops intervene in Chad, it's a response to the aggression by that ‘crazed meg­alomaniac' Khadafy, the ally of the Russians; if American, French, Italian and British troops are stationed in Beirut, it's to ‘protect' the freedom and independence of the Lebanon from Syrian imperialism, supported by Russia, etc. These are all alibis which hide the real point: it's the western bloc which is on the offensive and which is demonstrating its superiority by attempting to rid Africa and the Middle East of the last vestiges of eastern bloc influence.

Precisely at a time when the great powers are negotiating about Euro-missiles and armaments in general, all in the name of peace (Madrid, Gen­eva, etc), there has not been such an intense war effort since the Second World War. Increas­ingly sophisticated and murderous armaments are being designed, produced in huge quantities and deployed all over the world. To use this weapons technology the great powers are more and more being led to intervene directly in military oper­ations: the USSR in Afghanistan, France in Chad, France plus the USA, Italy and Britain in the Lebanon, etc -- not to mention the numerous strategic military bases being set up and maintained        over the globe.

The so-called divergences within the American bloc -- between France and the USA, for example -- are nothing but a smokescreen of propaganda which seeks to mask the real unity, the real division of labor, between these allies and the Russian bloc. This shows that if the speeches are different -- Reagan on the right, Mitterand on the left -- the aims and results are the same: militarism and imperialism in defense of the same camp.

Faced with this pressure, Russia is in a position of weakness -- on the economic, military and pol­itical levels. Unable to really support its allies on the periphery (Libya, Syria, Angola, etc), saddled with a weapons technology which is falling behind that of the west, bogged down in the Afghanistan conflict, the eastern bloc also finds that its capacity for military mobilization is weakened by its difficulties in contr­olling the proletariat -- as the 1980-81 strikes in Poland showed.

If the western bloc is able to take advantage of this situation, it's because it has so far been able to muzzle the class struggle in the main industrialized countries, through an intensive utilization of democratic and trade union mystif­ications, and through relentless campaigns about war (Falklands, E1 Salvador, middle East) which have disorientated the working class and rein­forced its passivity. The different conflicts with their toll of massacres should remind the proletariat of its historic responsibilities. Pinned down by the crisis, the world bourgeoisie is intensifying its military preparations for war. The only obstacle it encounters on this road is the class struggle of the proletariat. All the diplomatic verbiage about peace is pure propaganda: all wars are waged in the name of peace. There is no peace in capitalism. Only the communist revolution, by doing away with capital, can do away with war and the threat of war.

However, if the present passivity of the world proletariat, especially in its main concentrations in Europe, is permitting the accentua­tion of inter-imperialist tensions, the road to a third world war is not open. The working class is passive, but it is not yet mobilized and it has not been crushed. The bourgeoisie in all countries is well aware of this, and the western bloc is proceeding cautiously, only using pro­fessional troops, and developing a whole propaganda campaign which doesn't aim at an immediate and direct mobilization, but which seeks -- by stirring up fear of war -- to demoralize the working class and prevent it from struggling.

At a time when the bourgeoisie is more and more obviously on the war path, when military budgets are devouring social spending, when unemployment is hitting millions of workers, when the miser­ies imposed by austerity are becoming more and more dramatic, a response by the western prolet­ariat would be a key factor in opening up a pers­pective for the struggles of the world proletariat.

The future of humanity -- war or revolution -- depends on the ability of the main fractions of the working class to throw off the dead weight of the ideology of resignation which bourgeois propaganda seeks to sustain.