The previous two articles in this series[1] have to a large extent focused on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 because they are a rich vein of material on the problem of alienated labor and on the ultimate goals of communism as envisaged by Marx when he first adhered to the proletarian movement. But although Marx had, as early as 1843, identified the modern proletariat as the agent of the communist transformation, the EPM are not yet precise about the practical social movement that will lead from the society of alienation to the authentic human community. This fundamental development in Marx's thinking was to come about through the convergence of two vital elements: the elaboration of the historical materialist method, and the overt politicization of the communist project.

The real movement of history

The EPM already contain various reflections on the differences between feudalism and capitalism, but in parts they present a somewhat static image of capitalist society. Capital and its associated alienations sometimes appear in the text as simply existing, with no real explanation of their genesis. As a result, the actual process of capitalism's downfall also remains rather cloudy. But only a year later, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels had outlined a coherent view of the practical and objective bases of the movement of history (and thus of the various stages in humanity's alienation). History was now clearly presented as a succession of modes of production, from tribal community through ancient society to feudalism and capitalism; and the dynamic element in this movement was not men's ideas or feelings about themselves, but the material production of life's necessities:

"We must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to 'make history ', But life involves before anything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself."

This simple truth was the basis for understanding the change from one type of society to another

"a certain mode of product ion, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a 'productive force '. Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determine the nature of society, hence, that the 'history of humanity' must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange."

From this standpoint, ideas and the struggle between ideas politics, morality and religion cease to be the determining factors in historical development:

"We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process ... Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (all quotes from the German Ideology, part one, 'Feuerbach'),

At the end point of this vast historical movement, the GI points out that capitalism, like previous modes of production, is doomed to disappear not because of its moral failings, but because its inner contradictions would impel it towards self-destruction, and because it had given rise to a class capable of replacing it with a higher form of social organization:

"In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, whim, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, whim has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, whim, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes, a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness ... " (ibid).

As a result, in complete contrast to all the utopian visions which saw communism as a static ideal that bore no relation to the real process of historical evolution, "Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs". 

Having established this general method and framework, Marx and Engels could then proceed to a more detailed examination of the specific contradictions of capitalist society. Here again, the critique of bourgeois economics contained in the EPM had provided much of the groundwork for this and Marx was to come back to them again and again. But a decisive step was marked by the development of the concept of surplus value since this made it possible to root the denunciation of capitalist 'alienation in the most solid of economic facts, in the very mathematics of daily exploitation. This concept was of course to preoccupy Marx in much of his later works (Grundrisse, Capital, Theories of Surplus Value), which contained important clarifications on the subject - in particular the distinction between labor and labor power. Nevertheless the essentials of the concept are already outlined in The Poverty of Philosophy and Wage Labor and Capital, written in 1847.

The later writings were also to study more closely the relationship between the extraction and realization of surplus value, and the periodic crises of overproduction which shook capitalist society to its foundations every ten years or so. But Engels had already grasped the significance of the 'commercial crises' in his Critique of Political Economy in 1844, and had rapidly convinced Marx of the necessity to understand them as the harbingers of capitalism's doom - the concrete manifestation of capitalism's insoluble contradictions.

Elaborating the program: the formation of the Communist League

Since communism had now been grasped as a movement and not merely as a goal- specifically, as the movement of the proletarian class struggle - it could now only develop as a practical program for the emancipation of labor - as a revolutionary political program. Even before he formally adopted a communist position, Marx had rejected all those high-minded 'critics' who refused to dirty their hands with the sordid realities of the political struggle. As he declared in his letter to Ruge in September 1843 "Nothing prevents us, therefore from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics ,from taking sides in politics, ie from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them". And in fact the necessity to engage in political struggles in order to achieve a more thorough-going social transformation was embedded in the very nature of the proletarian revolution: "Do not say that social movement excludes political movement" wrote Marx in his polemic with the 'anti-political' Proudhon: "There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions" (Poverty of Philosophy).

Put in another way, the proletariat differed from the bourgeoisie in that it could not, as a propertyless, exploited class, build up the economic basis of a new society within the shell of the old. The revolution that would put an end to all forms of class domination could thus only begin as a political assault on the old order; its first act would be the seizure of political power by the propertyless class, which on that basis would proceed to the economic and social transformations leading to a classless society.

But the precisely defined political program of the communist revolution did not come into being spontaneously: it had to be elaborated by the most advanced elements of the proletariat, those who had organized themselves into distinctly communist groupings. Thus, in the years 1845-48 Marx and Engels were increasingly involved in building such an organization. Here their approach was again dictated by their recognition of the need to insert themselves into an already-existing 'real movement'. So instead of constructing an organization' ex nihilo', they sought to attach themselves to the most advanced proletarian currents with the aim of winning them over to a more scientific conception of the communist project. Concretely, this led them to a group composed mainly of exiled German workers, the League of the Just. For Marx and Engels, the importance of this group lay in the fact that, unlike the various brands of middle-class 'socialism', the League was a real expression of the fighting proletariat. Formed in Paris in 1836, it had been closely connected with Blanqui's Societe des Saisons and had participated along with it in the unsuccessful rising of 1839. It was, therefore, an organi- sation which recognised the reality of the class war and the necessity for a violent revolutionary battle for power. To be sure, along with Blanqui, it tended to see the revolution in conspiratorial terms, as the act of a determined minority, and its own nature as a secret society reflected such conceptions. It was also influenced, especially in the early 40s, by the semi-messianic conceptions of Wilhelm Weitling.

But the League had also exhibited a capacity to develop theoretically. One of the effects of its 'emigre' character was to confirm it, in Engels' words, as "the first international workers' movement of all time" ('On the history of the Communist League', MESW, p431). This meant that it was open to the most important international developments in the class struggle. In the 1840s, the League's main center had shifted to London and, through their contact with the Chartist movement, its leading members had begun to move away from the old conspiratorial conceptions towards a view of the proletarian struggle as a massive, self-conscious and organized movement in which the key role would be played by the industrial workers.

The concepts of Marx and Engels thus fell on fertile soil on the League, though not without a hard combat against the influences of Blanqui and Weitling. But by 1847, the League of the Just had become the Communist League. It had changed its organizational structure from one typical of a conspiratorial sect to that of a properly centralized organization with clearly defined statutes and run by elected committees. And it had delegated to Marx the task of drawing up the organization's statement of political principles - the document known as The Manifesto of the Communist Party[2], first published in German, in London in 1848, just before the outbreak of the February revolution in France.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party

The rise and fall of the bourgeoisie

The Manifesto of the Communist Party, along with its 'first draft', The Principles of Communism, represents the first comprehensive statement of scientific communism. Though written for a mass audience, and in a stirring, passionate style, it is never vulgar or superficial. Indeed it repays continual re-examination, because it condenses in a relatively few pages the general lines of marxist thought on a whole series of inter-connected questions.

The first part of the text outlines the new theory of history, announced from the very beginning in the famous phrase "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"[3]. It briefly charts the various changes in class relations, the evolution from ancient to feudal to capitalist society, in order to show that "the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange." Eschewing any abstract moral condemnation of the emergence of capitalist exploitation, the text emphasizes the eminently revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in sweeping away all the old parochial, hidebound forms of society, and replacing them with the most dynamic and expansive mode of production ever seen; a mode of production that, by so rapidly conquering and unifying the globe, and setting in motion such immense forces of production, was laying down the foundations for a higher form of society that will have finally done away with class antagonisms. Equally devoid of subjectivism is the text's identification of the inner contradictions that will lead to capitalism's downfall.              .

On the one hand, the economic crisis: "Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on trial, more and more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism,· it appears as if a famine, a universal war of destruction had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed,· and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much commerce".

In the Principles of Communism, the point is made that capitalism's inbuilt tendency towards crises of overproduction not only indicates the road towards its destruction, but also explains why it is creating the conditions for communism, in which" instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all" .

For the Manifesto, the crises of overproduction are of course the cyclical crises which punctuated the whole of the ascendant period of capitalism. But although the text recognized that these crises could still be overcome "by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones", it also tends to draw the conclusion that bourgeois relations have already become a permanent fetter on the development of the productive forces - in other words, that capitalist society has already achieved its historic mission and has entered into its epoch of decline. Immediately after the passage describing the periodic crises, the text goes on: "The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered .... The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them".

This appraisal of the state reached by bourgeois society is not altogether consistent with other formulations in the Manifesto, especially the tactical notions that appear at the end of the text. But they were to have a very important influence on the expectations and interventions of the communist minority during the great upheavals of 1848, which were seen as the precursors of an imminent proletarian revolution. It was only later on, in drawing up a balance sheet of these upheavals, that Marx and Engels were to revise the idea that capitalism had already reached the limits of its ascendant curve. But we shall return to this matter in a subsequent article.

The gravediggers of capitalism

"Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons - the modem working class - the proletariat".

Here in a nutshell is the second fundamental contradiction leading to the overthrow of capitalist society: the contradiction between capital and labor. And, in continuity with the materialist analysis of the dynamics of bourgeois society, the Manifesto goes on to outline the historical evolution of the proletarian class struggle from its first inchoate beginnings to the present and on to the future.

It chronicles all the major stage in this process: the initial 'Luddite' response to the rise of modem industry, where workers are still mainly scattered in small workshops and frequently "direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves"; the development of class organization for the defense of workers' immediate interests (trade unions) as the conditions of the class become more homogeneous and unified; the participation of the workers in the bourgeoisie's struggles against absolutism, which provided the proletariat with a political education and thus with "weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie"; the development of a distinctly proletarian political struggle, waged at first for the implementation of reforms such as the 10 Hour Bill, but gradually assuming the form of a political challenge to the very foundations of bourgeois society.

The Manifesto contends that the revolutionary situation will come about because the economic contradictions of capitalism will have reached a point of paroxysm, a point where the bourgeoisie can no longer even "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". At the same time, the text envisages an increasing polarization of society, between a small minority of exploiters and an increasingly impoverished proletarian majority: "society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great camps, into two great classes facing each other", since the development of capitalism increasingly propels the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and even parts of the bourgeoisie itself into the ranks of the proletariat. The revolution is therefore the result of this combination of economic misery and social polarization.

Again, the Manifesto sometimes makes it appear that this great simplification of society has already been accomplished; that the proletariat is already the overwhelming majority of the population. In fact this was only the case for one country at the time the text was written (Britain). And since, as we have seen, the text gives space to the idea that capitalism has already reached its apogee, it tends to give the impression that the final confrontation between the "two great classes" is very close indeed. In terms of the actual evolution of capitalism, this was very far from being the case. But despite this, the Manifesto is "an extraordinarily 'prophetic' work. Only a few months after its publication, the development of a global economic crisis had engendered a series of revolutionary upheavals all over Europe. And although many of these movements were more the last gasp of the bourgeoisies combat against feudal absolutism than the first skirmishes of the proletarian revolution, the proletariat of Paris, by making its own independent political rising against the bourgeoisie, demonstrated in practice all the Manifesto's arguments about the revolutionary nature of the working class as the living negation of capitalist society. The 'prophetic' character of the Manifesto is testimony to the fundamental soundness, not so much of Marx and Engels' immediate prognostications, but of the general historical method with which they analyzed social reality. And this is why, in essence, and contrary to all the arrogant assertions of the bourgeoisie about how history has proved Marx wrong, the Communist Manifesto does not date.

From the dictatorship of the proletariat to the withering away of the state

The Manifesto thus anticipates the proletariat being driven towards revolution by the whip of growing economic misery. As we have noted, the first act of this revolution was the seizure of political power by the proletariat. The proletariat had to constitute itself as the ruling class in order to carry through its social and economic program.

The Manifesto explicitly envisages this revolution as "the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie", the culmination of a "more or less veiled civil war". Inevitably, however, the details of the way in which the working class would overthrow the bourgeoisie remain vague, since the text was written prior to the first open appearance of the class as an independent force. The text actually talks about the proletariat winning "the battle of democracy"; the Principles say that the revolution "will establish a democratic constitution and through this the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat". If we look at some of Marx's writings about the Chartists or about the bourgeois republic, we can see that even after the experience of the 1848 revolutions, he still entertained the possibility of the proletariat coming to power through universal suffrage and the parliamentary process (for example, in his article on the Chartists in The New York Daily Tribune of 25 August 1852, where Marx contends that the granting of universal suffrage in England would signify "the political supremacy of the working class"). This in turn opened the door to speculations about an entirely peaceful conquest of power, in some countries at least. As we shall see, these speculations were later seized upon by the pacifists and reformists in the workers' movement in the latter part of the century to justify all kinds of ideological liberties. Nevertheless, the main lines of Marx's thought go in a very different direction after the experience of 1848, and above all, the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, which demonstrated the necessity for the proletariat to create its own organs of political power and to destroy the bourgeois state rather than capture it, whether violently or 'democratically'. Indeed, in Engels' later introductions to the Manifesto, this was the most important alteration that historical experience had brought to the communist program:

" ... in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this program has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz, that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready- made state machine and wield it for its own purposes'" .

But what remains valid in the Manifesto is the affirmation of the violent nature of the seizure of power and of the need for the working class to set up its own political rule - the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as it was referred to in other writings of the same period.

Of equal validity to this day is the prospect of the withering away of the state. From his first writings as a communist, Marx had stressed that the real emancipation of humanity could not restrict itself to the sphere of politics. 'Political emancipation' had been the highest achievement of the bourgeois revolution, but for the proletariat this 'emancipation' only signaled a new form of oppression. For the exploited class, politics was only a means to an end, viz, a thorough-going social emancipation. Political power and the state were only necessary in a class-divided society; since the proletariat had no interest in forming itself into a new exploiting class, but was compelled to fight for the abolition of all class divisions, it followed that the advent of communism meant the end of politics as a particular sphere, and the end of the state. As the Manifesto puts it: "when in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by force of circumstance, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class" .

The international character of the proletarian revolution

The phrase "a vast association of the whole nation" raises a question here: did the Manifesto hold out the possibility of revolution, or even of communism, in a single country? It is certainly true that there are ambiguous phrases here and there in the text; for example when it says that" since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word". Actually, bitter historical experience has shown that there is only a bourgeois meaning to the term national, and that the proletariat for its part is the negation of all nations. But this is above all the experience of the decadent epoch of capitalism, when nationalism and struggles for nationhood have lost the progressive character they could have in Marx's day, when the proletariat could still support certain national movements as part of the struggle against feudal absolutism and other reactionary vestiges of the past. In general, Marx and Engels were clear that such movements were bourgeois in character, but ambiguities inevitably crept into their language and their thought because this was a period in which the total incompatibility of national and class interests had not yet been brought to a head.

That said, the essence of the Manifesto is contained not in the above sentence, but in the one immediately before it: "The working men have no country. You cannot take from them what they do not have"; and in the final words of the text: "Workers of all countries unite". Similarly, the Manifesto insists that" united action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat".

The Principles are even more explicit about this:

"Question: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? Answer: No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has coordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that in all of them bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries, that is to say, at least in England, America, France and Germany ... It is a universal revolution and will accordingly have a universal range" 

From the beginning then the proletarian revolution was seen as an international revolution. The idea that communism, or even the revolutionary seizure of power, could become a reality within the confines of a single country, was as far from the minds of Marx and Engels as it was from the minds of the Bolsheviks who led the October revolution in 1917, and of the internationalist fractions who led the resistance to the Stalinist counter-revolution, which encapsulated itself precisely in the monstrous theory of 'socialism in one country'.

Communism and the road towards it

As we have seen in previous articles, the marxist current was from its inception quite clear about the features of the fully developed communist society it was fighting for. The Manifesto defines it briefly but significantly in the paragraph following the one on the withering away of the state: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". Communism is thus not only a society without classes and without a state: it is also a society which (and this is unprecedented in all of human history up till now) has overcome the conflict between social needs and the needs of the individual, and which consciously devotes its resources to the unlimited development of all its members - all this being a clear echo of the reflections on the nature of genuinely free activity which appeared in the writings of 1844 and 1845. The passages in the Manifesto which deal with the bourgeoisie's objections to communism also make it plain that communism means the end not only of wage labor but of all forms of buying and selling. The same section insists that the bourgeois family, which is characterized as a form of legalised prostitution, is also doomed to disappear.

The Principles of Communism give more space than the Manifesto to defining other aspects of the new society. For example, they emphasize that communism will replace the anarchy of market forces with the management of humanity's productive forces "in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole of society" . At the same time, the text develops the theme that the abolition of classes will be possible in the future because communism will be a society of abundance: "... existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will ensure to society all the products it needs. In this way such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members. The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary".

Again, if communism is devoted to the "free development of all', then it must be a society which has done away with the division of labor as we know it: "People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to it, exploited by it,' they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all the other ... Industry controlled by society as a whole and operated according to a plan presupposes well-rounded human beings, their facilities developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety" (Principles of Communism).

Another division to be dispensed with is the one between town and country: "the dispersal of the agricultural population on the land alongside the crowding of the industrial proletariat into the great cities is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt to be an obstacle to further progress."

This point was considered so important that the task of ending the division between town and country was actually included as one of the 'transitional' measures towards communism, both in the Principles and the Manifesto. And it remains an issue of burning importance in today's world of swollen megacities and spiraling pollution. (We will return to this question in more detail in a subsequent article, when we come to consider how the communist revolution will deal with the 'ecological crisis').

These general descriptions of the future communist society are in continuity with the ones contained in Marx's early writings, and they need little or no modification today. By contrast, the specific social and economic measures advocated in the Manifesto as the means to attain these ends are - as Marx and Engels themselves recognized in their own lifetimes - are much more time bound, for two basic and intertwining reasons:

- the fact that capitalism at the time that the Manifesto was written was still in its ascendant phase, and had not yet laid down all the objective conditions for the communist revolution;

- the fact that the working class had had no concrete experience of a revolutionary situation, and thus either of the means whereby it could assume political power, or of the initial social and economic measures that it would have to take once power was in its hands.

These are the measures which the Manifesto envisages as being "pretty generally applicable in the most advanced countries" once the proletariat had taken power:

"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rent of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of the right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc etc. "

It will be evident from the outset that the majority of these measures have, in the decadent period of capitalism, been shown to be perfectly compatible with the survival of capitalism - indeed that many of them have been adapted by capital precisely in order to survive in this epoch. The decadent period is the period of universal state capitalism: the centralization of credit in the hands of the state, the formation of industrial armies, the nationalization of transport and communication, free education in state schools ... to a greater or lesser extent, and at different moments, every capitalist state has adopted such measures since 1914, and the Stalinist regimes, those which claimed to be carrying out the program of the Communist Manifesto, have adopted practically all of them.

The Stalinists based their 'marxist' credentials partly on the fact that they had put into practice many of the measures advocated in the Manifesto. The anarchists, for their part, also stress this continuity, though in an entirely negative sense of course, and they can point to some 'prophetic' diatribes by Bakunin to 'prove' that Stalin really was the logical heir of Marx.

In fact this way of looking at things is completely superficial, and only serves to justify particular bourgeois political attitudes. But before explaining why the social and economic measures put forward in the Manifesto are, in general, no longer applicable, we should stress the validity of the method that lay behind them.

The necessity for a transition period. Such deeply ingrained elements of capitalist society as wage labor, class divisions and the state could not be abolished overnight as the anarchists of Marx's day pretended and as their latter-day descendants (the various brands of councilism and modernism) still pretend. Capitalism has created the potential for abundance, but this does not mean that abundance appears like magic the day after the revolution. On the contrary, the revolution is a response to a profound disorganization in society and, for an initial phase at least, will tend to further intensify this disorganization. An immense work of reconstruction, education and reorganization awaits the victorious proletariat. Centuries, millennia of ingrained habits, all the ideological debris of the old world, will have to be cleared away. The task is vast and unprecedented and pedlars of instant solutions are pedlars of illusions. This is why the Manifesto is right to talk about the need for the victorious proletariat to "increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible", and to do so, in the beginning, by means of "despotic inroads in the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures , therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which.in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production. " This general vision of the proletariat setting in motion a dynamic towards communism rather than introducing it by decree remains perfectly correct, even if we can, with the benefit of hindsight, recognize that this dynamic does not derive from placing capital accumulation in the hands of the state, but in the self-organized proletariat reversing the very principles of capital accumulation (eg, by subordinating production to consumption; by "despotic inroads" into the commodity economy and the wage labor form; through direct control by the proletariat over the productive apparatus etc).

The principle of centralization. Again, in contrast to the anarchists, whose espousal of 'federation' reflected the petty bourgeois localism and individualism of this current, marxism has always insisted that capitalist chaos and competition can only be overcome through the strictest centralization on a global scale - centralization of the productive forces by the proletariat; centralization of the proletariat's own political/economic organs. Experience has certainly shown that this centralization is very different from the bureaucratic centralization of the capitalist state; even that the proletariat must distrust the centralism of the post-revolutionary state. But the capitalist state apparatus cannot be overthrown, nor the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the 'transitional' state be resisted, unless the proletariat has centralized its own forces. At this level again, the general approach contained in the Manifesto remains valid today.

The limits posed by history

Nevertheless, as Engels said in his introduction to the 1872 edition, while "the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever ... the practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section 1I. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today." It then goes on to mention "the gigantic strides of modern industry in the last 25 years", and as we have already seen, the revolutionary experience of the working class in 1848 and 1871.

The reference to the development of modern industry is particularly relevant here, because it indicates that, as far as Marx and Engels were concerned, a primary aim of the economic measures proposed in the Manifesto was to develop capitalism at a time when a number of countries had not yet completed their bourgeois revolutions. This can be verified by looking at the 'Demands of the Communist Party in Germany', which the Communist League distributed as a leaflet during the revolutionary upheavals in Germany in 1848. We know that Marx was quite explicit at this time about the necessity for the bourgeoisie to come to power in Germany as a precondition for the proletarian revolution. The measures proposed in this leaflet thus had the aim of pushing Germany out of its feudal backwardness and of extending bourgeois relations of production as rapidly as possible: but many of these measures - heavy progressive income tax, a state bank, nationalization of land and transport, free education - are exactly the same as the ones advocated in the Manifesto. We will discuss in a subsequent article how far Marx's perspectives for the revolution in Germany were confirmed or refuted by events; but the fact remains that if Marx and Engels saw the measures proposed in the Manifesto as already being outdated in their lifetimes, they have even less relevance in the period of decadence, when capitalism has long established its world-wide dominion, and long outstayed its welcome as a force for progress anywhere in the world.

This is not to say that either in Marx and Engels' day, or in the revolutionary movement that came after them, there was a real clarity about the kind of measures that a victorious proletariat would have to take in order to initiate a dynamic towards communism. On the contrary, confusions about the possibility of the working class using nationalizations, state credit and other state capitalist measures as stepping stones towards communism persisted throughout the 19th century and played a very negative role during the course of the revolution in Russia. It took the defeat of this revolution, the transformation of the proletarian bastion into a frightful state capitalist tyranny, and much subsequent reflection and debate among revolutionaries, before such ambiguities were finally set aside. But this will also have to be dealt with in future articles.

Trial by practice

The final part of the Manifesto concerns the tactics to be followed by communists in different countries, particularly those where the main order of the day was, or appeared to be, the struggle against feudal absolutism. In the next article in this series, we will examine how the communists' practical intervention in the pan-European uprisings of 1848 clarified the perspectives of the proletarian revolution and confirmed or refuted the tactical considerations contained in the Manifesto. CDW

[1]See 'The alienation of labor is the premise for its emancipation' in International Review 70, and 'Communism, the real beginning of human society' in IR 71

[2] The term 'party' here does not refer to the Communist League itself: although the Manifesto rally was the collective work of that organization, its name did not appear in the first editions of the text, mainly for security reasons. The term 'party' at this stage did not refer to a specific organization but to a general trend or movement.  

[3] In later editions of the text, Engels had to qualify this statement by saying that it applied to "all written history", but not to the communal forms of society that had preceded the rise of class divisions.

IR 72, 1st Quarter 1993

How not to understand the development of chaos and imperialist conflicts

We have shown in this Review (no. 61) that the serious political groups, who publish a regular press, such as Battaglia Comunista, Workers Voice, Programma Comunista, Il Partito Comunista, Le Proletaire, reacted vigorously to the whole campaign about the ‘end of communism’ by reaffirming the necessity for communism and the capitalist nature of the Stalinist ex-USSR [1] [18]. Similarly, these groups responded to the outbreak of the Gulf war by taking a clear position denouncing any support for one camp or the other and calling on the workers to wage a struggle against capitalism in all its forms and in all countries (see International Review no. 64). However, beyond these positions of principle, which are the minimum that one can expect from proletarian organisations, you would look in vain for any framework for understanding the world situation today. Whereas, since the end of 1989, our organisation has made the effort, as was its elementary responsi­bility (and we don’t glory in this as though it was some kind of exceptional exploit for revolutionaries), to elaborate such a framework and stick to it [2] [19], one of the features of the ‘analyses’ put forward by these groups is their tendency to zigzag in all directions, to contradict themselves from one month to the next.

The zigzags of the proletarian political milieu

To get some idea of the inconsistency of the groups of the political milieu, it’s enough, for example, to follow their regular press in the period of the Gulf war.

Thus, the attentive reader of Battaglia Comunista could read in November 1990, in the midst of preparations for military interven­tion, that the war “had certainly not been provoked by the madness of Saddam Hussein but is the product of a conflict between that part of the Arab bourgeoisie which demands more power for the oil-producing countries, and the western bourgeoi­sie, particularly the American bourgeoisie, which aims to impose its law in matters of oil prices as has been the case up until now”. We should note that, at the same moment, there had been a whole procession of western political personalities (notably Willy Brandt and a collection of former Japanese prime ministers) who had come to negotiate openly for the liberation of the hostages, to the great annoyance of the USA. From this point on, it was clear that the USA and its western ‘allies’ were a long way from sharing the same objectives; that since the collapse of the eastern bloc, there was no longer the same convergence of interests among the ‘western bourgeoisie’; that, on the contrary, the imperialist antagonisms between the western bourgeois powers were grow­ing more and more, above all from this moment. But all this escaped the ‘marxist’ analysis of BC.

At the same time, in this issue, it was correctly affirmed that “the future, even the most immediate, will be characterised by a new series of conflicts”. This was less than two months before the war broke out. However, this perspective was hardly the one announced in the December issue.

With the January 1991 issue, the reader would be greatly surprised to discover, on the front page, that “the third world war began on January 17”! However, the paper only devoted one article to this event: one might ask whether the comrades of Battaglia were themselves really convinced of what they had written in their press.

In February, a large part of the paper was devoted to the question of war. It reaffirmed that capitalism was war and that all the conditions were there for the bourgeoisie to impose its ‘solution’: a third world war. “In this sense, to affirm that the war which began on 17th January marks the beginning of the third world conflict is not a flight of fantasy, but a recognition of the fact that we are now in a phase in which trade conflicts, which began to sharpen at the beginning of the 70s, have no possibility of being resolved except through the prospect of generalised war”. In another article, the author is much less assertive and in a third which shows the “fragility of the anti-Saddam front”, there are questions asked about the protagonists of future conflicts: “with or without Gorbachev, Russia cannot tolerate an American military presence at its very gates, which would be the case if there was a military occupation of Iraq. Neither could it tolerate... the overturning of the present equilibrium in favour of the traditional pro-American Arab coalition”. Thus, what had already been obvious from the last months of 1989: the end of the antagonism between the USA and the USSR owing to the latter being KOed [knocked-out], to its definitive inability to contest the crushing superiority of its ex-rival, particularly in the Middle East - none of this had come into BC’s field of vision. With hindsight, now that Gorbachev’s successor has become one of the USA’s best allies, we can see the whole absurdity of Battaglia’ s analyses and ‘predictions’. To be fair to BC, in the same issue, it does state that Germany’s loyalty to the USA had become highly dubious. However, the reasons it gives for this assertion are to say the least insufficient: it was because Germany had “embarked upon the construction of a new sphere of influence in the East and in the establishment of new economic relations with Russia (a great oil producer)”. While the first argument is perfectly valid, the second is rather weak: frankly, the antagonisms between Germany and the USA go well beyond the question of who will benefit from Russia’s oil reserves.

In March, and one would like to say “at last” (the Berlin wall had fallen a year and a half before...), BC announced that with “the crumbling of the Russian empire, the whole world will be dragged into a situation of unprecedented uncertainty”. The Gulf war had engendered new tensions; instability had become the rule. In the immediate, the war continued in the Gulf, and the USA was still in the area. But what was seen as a source of conflict were the rivalries over the enormous ‘business’ to be made out of the reconstruction of Kuwait. This is called looking at the world from the wrong end of the binoculars: the stakes of the Gulf war were far higher than this little Emirate, or the markets for its reconstruction.

In the November 91 issue of Prometeo, BC’s theoretical review, an article is devoted to analysing the world situation after “the end of the cold war”. This article shows that the eastern bloc can no longer play the same role as before and that the western bloc itself is vacillating. The article focuses on the Gulf war and reaffirms that it is a war for oil and the control of “oil rents”. However, it goes on to say: “But this in itself is not enough to explain the colossal deployment of forces and the criminal cynicism with which the USA has picked on Iraq. To the fundamental economic reasons, and as a result of them, we must add political motives. In essence, it is a question of the USA affirming its hegemonic role, through the basic instruments of its imperialist policies (displaying the strength and efficiency of its destructive capacities), in the face of its western allies, who have been called to cooperate in an alliance of everyone against Saddam”. Thus, even though it still clings to the ‘oil hypothesis’, BC here begins to perceive, even though a year late, the real stakes of the Gulf war. Better late than never!

In the same article, the third world war still appears to be inevitable, but, on the one hand “the reconstruction of new fronts is being carried out around axes which are still confused”; and on the other hand, there is still a lack of the “great farce which can justify, in the eyes of the peoples, the perpetration of new massacres between the central states, which today appear to be so united and solid”.

Once the emotion of the Gulf war had passed, the third world war which had begun on January 17 had become no more than a general perspective ahead of us. After imprudently getting itself soaked at the beginning of ‘91, BC had decided, though without saying so, to put up a big umbrella. This saved it the trouble of examining in a precise manner to what extent this perspective was being concretised in the evolution of the world situation, and in particular in the conflicts ravaging the globe and Europe itself. In particular, the link between imperialist conflicts and the chaos developing in the world was not analysed, in contrast to what the ICC had tried to do [3] [20].

In general, the groups of the political milieu could hardly miss seeing the growing chaos and often made some very correct descriptions of it, but you would search in vain in their analyses to find out what were the underlying tendencies either behind the aggravation of chaos (even seen independently of imperialist conflicts), or behind the organisation of society for war.

Thus, in November ‘91, Programma Comunista (PC), no 6, in a long article, affirmed that the real responsibility for what was happening in Yugoslavia “should not be sought in Ljubljana or Belgrade, but in the capitals of the most developed nations. In Yugoslavia, through various interposed persons, there is a confrontation between the needs, necessities and the perspectives of the European market. It’s only when you see that an aspect of this intestinal war is the struggle for the conquest of markets, for the financial control of vast regions, for the economic exploitation required by the most advanced countries from the capitalist point of view; it’s only when you see this war as a struggle for new economic and military outlets, that it will appear, in the eyes of the workers, that there is no justification for fighting to free yourself either from the ‘Bolshevik’ Milosevic or from the Ustashe Tudjman”.

In May 92, in PC no. 3, the article ‘In the swamp of the new capitalist social order’, makes a lucid observation of the tenden­cies towards ‘every man for himself’ and of the fact that “the new world order is just the arena for the explosion of continuous conflicts”, that “the break-up of Yugoslavia has been as much an effect as a factor in Germany’s great expansionist push”.

In the following issue, PC recognised that “once again, we are seeing the Americans trying to assert their traditional right of pre-empting any possibility of European defence (or self-defence), a right conferred on Washington at the end of the second world war; and an analogous attempt (in the opposite direction) by Europe, or at least of the Europe ‘that counts’ to assert its own right to act by itself, or - if it really can’t do anymore - not to have its every movement depend on the will of the USA”. This article thus contains the essential elements for understanding the conflict in Yugoslavia: the chaos resulting from the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of eastern Europe and of the eastern bloc, the imperialist antagonisms dividing the great western powers.

Unfortunately, PC is not able to hold onto to this correct analysis. In the next issue (September 92), when a part of the US Mediterranean fleet was cruising the Yugoslav coast, we have a new version: “war has been ravaging Yugoslavia for two years: the USA has shown the most splendid indifference towards it; the EEC gives itself a good conscience by sending humanitarian aid and a few armed contingents to protect it, and by calling periodic meetings, or rather peace conferences, which always leave things exactly the way they were... Should we be astonished at this? It’s enough to think about the frenetic race, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, by the western merchants, in particular the Austro­-German ones, to grab hold of economic, and thus political sovereignty over Slovenia and, if possible, Croatia”. Thus, having made a step towards clarification, PC goes back to the theme of ‘business’, so dear to the political milieu, to explain the great imperialist stakes of the current period.

BC intervenes on the same theme a propos of the war in Yugoslavia, explaining at great length the economic reasons which have pushed the different fractions of the Yugoslav bourgeoisie to take up arms to ensure “that quota of surplus value which hitherto went to the Federation”. “The splitting up of Yugoslavia is in the interest above all of the German bourgeoisie and also of the Italian bourgeoisie. And even the destruction wrought by the war can be useful when it comes to reconstructing: lucrative contracts, juicy orders which, who would believe it, are beginning to arrive in Italy and Germany. This is why, in contradiction with the principles of the common European household, the states of the EEC have recognised the ‘right of peoples to self-determination’. At the same time, they have got their economic operations underway: Germany in Croatia, and, in part, in Slovenia,~ Italy in Slovenia. Among these operations, the sale of arms and ammunition to replace those consumed during the war”. Of course, BC underlines, this doesn’t please the USA which doesn’t like to see the European countries strength­ening themselves (BC no. 7/8, July/August 92).

One can only wonder about this ‘fabulous business’ that capitalism is going to do in Yugoslavia, in a country that collapsed at the same time as the Russian empire and is also ravaged by war. We’ve already seen the ‘fabulous business’ done over the recon­struction of Kuwait; now we can see on the horizon the ‘recon­struction of Yugoslavia’, with a special bonus to the wicked arms dealers, who go around stirring up wars.

We can’t go on with a chronological enumeration of the meanderings of the proletarian political milieu; these examples are eloquent and damning enough. The proletariat cannot content itself with statements of faith such as “Through continuous convulsions, and we don’t know when, we will arrive at the culmination indicated by marxist theory and the example of the Russian revolution” (Programma). We can’t even salute the fact that most of the organisations of the milieu identify the new potential ‘fronts’ of a third world war as being around Germany on one side and the USA on the other. Like a stopped clock, for decades they have seen as the only possible scenario the one that prevailed before the first two world wars. After the collapse of the eastern bloc, the situation does tend to present itself in that way, but it’s more or less by luck that the organisations can give the ‘right time’ today. A stopped clock can do this twice a day, but it’s still useless. The reasons for this overturning of history, the perspective - or lack of it - of a third world war are vague or totally ignored. What’s more, the attempts to explain why wars break out, when they are not frankly incoherent and variable from one month to the next, are almost surrealist and devoid of any credibility. As Programma puts it, it’s indeed true that marxist theory must guide us, must serve as a compass to measure the evolution of the world that we have to change, and above all, to grasp what’s at stake in this period. Unfortunately, for most of the organisations of the political milieu, marxism, as they understand it, resembles a compass gone awry because it’s sitting next to a magnet.

In reality, at the origin of the disorientation that afflicts these groups we find, to a very large extent, an incomprehension of the question of the historic course, i.e. of the balance of forces between the classes, which determines the direction assumed by a society that has been plunged into an insoluble economic crisis: either the bourgeois ‘solution’, world war, or the proletarian response - the intensification of class combats leading to the opening of a revolutionary period. The history of the revolutionary fractions on the eve of the second world war has shown us that the affirmation of basic principles is not enough, that the difficulty in understanding both the question of the course and the nature of imperialist wars profoundly shook and more or less paralysed them [4] [21]. To get to the roots of the incomprehensions of the political milieu, we must once again go back to the question of the historic course and of wars in the period of decadence.

The historic course

It is surprising to say the least that BC, who refused to see the possibility of a third world war when there were fully formed military blocs, announced the war to be imminent as soon as the two blocs broke up. BC’s incomprehensions are at the basis of this volte-face. On several occasions (e.g. IRs nos. 50 and 59) explained the weaknesses of this organisation’s analyses and shown that they threaten to deprive it of any historical perspective.

Since the end of the 60s, the collapse of the capitalist economy could only push the bourgeoisie towards a new world war, all the more so because the blocs were already in place. For more than two decades, the ICC defended the view that the wave of workers’ struggles which began in 1968 marked the opening of a new period in the balance of forces between the classes, of a historic course favourable to the development of proletarian struggles. In order to send the proletariat to war, capitalism needs a situation characterised by “the growing adhesion of the workers to capital­ist values, and by a combativity which either tends to disappear, or appears within a perspective controlled by the bourgeoisie” (IR 30, ‘The historic course’).

In answer to the question “why has the third world war not broken out, even though all the objective conditions for it are there?”, the ICC has argued, since the beginning of the open crisis of capitalism, that the balance of forces between the classes is what prevents the bourgeoisie from mobilising the proletariat of the advanced countries behind the banners of nationalism. What was the response given by BC, who, it should be said, recognised that “at the objective level, all the reasons for the outbreak of a third world war are present”? Refusing to consider the question of the historic course, this organisation offered us all sorts of ‘analyses’: the economic crisis wasn’t sufficiently advanced (which contra­dicted its affirmation about all the “objective reasons” being there); the framework of alliances was still “rather fluid and full of uncertainties”; and finally, the armaments were... too developed, too destructive. Nuclear disarmament was thus one of the necessary conditions for the outbreak of world war. We responded to all these arguments at the time.

Does today’s reality confirm BC’s analysis, according to which, this time around, we really are going towards world war?

Was the crisis not advanced enough before? At the time we warned BC about underestimating the gravity of the world economic crisis. Now, if BC has recognised that the difficulties of the ex-eastern bloc were due to the crisis of the system, for a whole period, and against all reality, it had illusions in the opportunities opening up in the east, which were supposed to provide a “shot of oxygen” for international capitalism… though this didn’t prevent BC, at the same time, from seeing the outbreak of the third world war as imminent. For BC, when the capitalist crisis is attenuated, world war comes closer. Like God, the logic of BC moves in a mysterious way.

Concerning the question of armaments, we have already shown how BC‘s position lacked all seriousness. But today nuclear weapons are still there, and are in fact in the hands of more states than before. But still, according to BC, world war is on the agenda.

When the world was divided into two blocs, BC thought that the framework of alliances was “fluid”. Today, the old division is finished and we are far away from a new one (even if the tendency towards the reconstitution of new imperialist constella­tions is affirming itself more and more). And yet, for BC, the conditions for a new world war are already ripe. A bit more rigour, please, comrades!

Our concern here is not to claim that BC always says whatever comes into its head (even though that is sometimes the case). It is rather to show that despite the heritage of the workers’ movement to which this organisation lays claim, in the absence of a real method, and without taking into account the evolution of capital­ism and of the balance of forces between the classes, you end up being unable to provide the working class with any clear orien­tation. Having failed to understand the essential reason why generalised war did not break out in the previous period - the end of the counter-revolution, the historic course towards class confrontations; being, as a result, unable to show that the course had not been put into question, since the working class had not suffered a decisive defeat, BC ended up announcing the imminence of a third world war at the very time that the convulsions in the global situation have made the perspective of world war more distant than before.

In particular, this incapacity to take account of the resurgence of the working class at the end of the 60s in its examination of the conditions for the outbreak of a third world war prevents BC from seeing what’s really at stake in the current period - a situation where the social situation is blocked and society is rotting on its feet. “But although the proletariat was able to prevent the outbreak of a new imperialist slaughter, it was still unable to put forward its own perspective: the overthrow of capitalism, and the construction of communist society. Consequently, it could not help feeling more and more the effects of capitalist decadence. But history has not stopped during this temporary blockage of the world situation. For 20 years, society has continued to suffer the accumulation of all the characteristics of decadence, made still worse by the deepening economic crisis which the ruling class has proved utterly incapable of overcoming. All that the latter can offer is a day-by-day resistance, with no hope of success, to the irrevocable collapse of the capitalist mode of production. Inca­pable of offering the slightest way forward (even a way into suicide, such as a world war), capitalism has plunged deeper into a state of advanced social decomposition and generalised despair.

“If we do not destroy capitalism, then capitalism, even without a new world war, will destroy humanity, through an accumula­tion of local wars, epidemics, destruction of the environment, famines, and other supposedly ‘natural’ disasters” (Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC).

Unfortunately BC is not alone in this total inability to grasp what’s at stake in the period opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc. Le Proletaire says it clearly: “ In spite of what certain political currents write, not without a touch of hypocrisy, about the collapse of capitalism, ‘chaos’, ‘decomposition’ etc, that’s not where we are”. In fact “even if we have to wait years to destroy the domination of capitalism, its destiny has already been decided”. It’s sad that Le Proletaire has to console itself; but the fact that it hides from the proletariat the gravity of what’s at stake is far more serious.

Even if world war is not on the agenda today, this doesn’t at all minimise the gravity of the situation. The decomposition of society itself constitutes a mortal danger for the proletariat, as we have shown in this Review [5] [22]. It is the responsibility of revolu­tionaries to warn their class against this danger, to say clearly that time is running out and that if it waits too long to embark upon the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, it risks being caught up in the system’s own putrefaction. The proletariat requires far more from the organisations which aim to form its vanguard than a total incomprehension of what’s at stake, still less a stupid ironic attitude to the situation.

Decadence and the nature of wars

At the root of the incomprehensions about the stakes of the present period among most of the groups of the political milieu, there’s more than just ignorance about the historic course. We also find an inability to understand all the implications of the decadence of capitalism for the question of war. In particular, it is commonly thought that war still has an economic rationality, as it did last century. Even though obviously, in the last instance, it is the economic situation of decadent capitalism which engenders wars, the whole history of this period shows us to what extent, for the capitalist economy itself (and not just for the exploited, who are turned into cannon fodder), war has become a real catastrophe, and not only for the defeated countries. Because of this, imperi­alist and military rivalries can’t be identified with the commercial rivalries between the various states.

It was no accident that BC considered that the division of the world between the eastern bloc and the western bloc was “fluid”, that it didn’t constitute a sufficient basis for war - the most important commercial rivalries were not between these two blocs but between the main western powers. Neither is it accidental that today, when we are seeing the open development of commercial rivalries between the USA and the great powers which were its former allies, such as Germany and Japan, BC sees war as being closer. Like the groups which don’t recognise the decadence of capitalism, BC - which doesn’t see all its implications - identifies trade wars with military wars.

This isn’t a new question and history has already proved Trotsky right when, at the beginning of the l920s, he fought the majority position in the Communist International, which held that the second world war would be between blocs headed by the USA and Britain, the two main commercial rivals. Later on, the Gauche Communiste de France, at the end of the second world war, reaffirmed that “there is a difference between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalist society (in relation to war) ... The decadence of capitalist society is expressed most strikingly in the fact that, while in the ascendant period, wars had the function of stimulating economic development, in the decadent period eco­nomic activity is essentially restricted to the pursuit of war... war in the imperialist epoch is the highest and most complete expression of decadent capitalism, its permanent crisis, and its economic way of life ...“ (Report on the international situation, 1945, republished in IR no. 59). The more capitalism sinks into its crisis, the more the logic of militarism imposes itself, irreversibly and uncontrollably, even though militarism itself is no more capable than other policies of proposing the least solution to the economic contradictions of the system [6] [23].

By refusing to admit that, between the last century and this one, the significance of wars has changed, by failing to see the increasingly irrational and suicidal character of war, by trying at all costs to see the logic of war as being the same as the logic of commercial rivalries, the groups of the proletarian political milieu deprive themselves of any means of understanding what is really going on behind all the conflicts in which the great powers are involved, whether openly or not; more generally, these groups are thereby rendered incapable of understanding the evolution of the international situation. On the contrary, they are led into all kinds of absurd positions about the ‘hunt for profits’, the ‘huge business’ that the developed countries can supposedly make out of regions which are completely ravaged and ruined by war, such as Yugoslavia, Somalia, etc. War is one of the most decisive questions that the proletariat has to face, not only because it is the main victim of war, as cannon fodder and as a labour force subjected to unprecedented levels of exploitation, but also be­cause it is one of the essential factors in the development of consciousness about the bankruptcy of capitalism, about the barbarism towards which it is leading the human race. It is therefore of the utmost importance that revolutionaries are as clear as possible on this question. War constitutes “the only objective consequence of the crisis, decadence and decomposition that the proletariat can today set a limit to (unlike any of the other manifestations of decomposition), to the extent that in the central countries it is not at present enrolled under the flags of national­ism” (‘Militarism and decomposition’, IR no. 64).

The historic course has not changed (but to see this, you first have to admit that there are different historic courses according to the period). Even though it has been paralysed and disoriented by the enormous convulsions of recent years, the proletariat is more and more being forced back onto the path of class combat, as can be demonstrated by the September-October struggles in Italy. The path will belong and difficult, and it will require all the forces of the working class to be mobilised in decisive battles. Within all this, the task of revolutionaries is primordial, otherwise they will not only be swept away by history, but will make their own contribution to the annihilation of any revolutionary perspective.

Me

Marxism and the nation

The anti-fascist resistance: an appendage of imperialism

From Somalia to Angola, from Venezuela to Yugoslavia, from famines to massacres, coups d'états to 'civil wars', the whirlwind of decomposing capitalist society can only create havoc. Not only do the promises of prosperity and liberty remain unrealized everywhere, but capitalism has put everything to the fire and the sword, unleashing militarism, reducing the immense majority of the world's population to destitution, poverty and death, and massively attacking the living conditions of the proletariat in the great urban and industrialized centers.

Chaos, lies and imperialist war

Even the most ardent defenders of the existing order are more and more forced to recognize that the 'new world order' is nothing other than generalized chaos. However, unable to hide the deterioration in every country of all the political, economic and social aspects of life, the newspapers, radio, television - mouthpieces of the dominant class - still compete to hide reality. Political scandals, ethnic genocide, deportations, pogroms and catastrophes of all kinds, epidemics and famines, it's all there. But instead of being explained for what they are, ie, at root, the consequence of the world crisis of capitalism[1], events are always presented as a sort of inevitability.

In showing the famine in Somalia, the massacres of 'ethnic cleansing' in Yugoslavia, the deportations and martyring of populations in the southern republics of the ex-USSR, or the political scandals, the propaganda recognizes how rotten things have become. But it does so by presenting phenomena without any link between them, thus distilling a sense of impotence, preventing the awareness that it is the capitalist mode of production as a whole which is responsible for the situation, and that in the front rank of the guilty are the bourgeoisies of the big capitalist countries.

Decomposition, which permeates all areas of society, is not an inevitability. It is the result of a blockage at the heart of society: an open, general world economic crisis of more than 25 years duration, and the absence of a perspective of emerging from it. The great powers, which with the end of Stalinism claimed that a period of peace and prosperity was opening up for capitalism, are locked in a war of each against all, which exacerbates social disintegration, on both the domestic and the international level.

Within the industrialized countries, the national bourgeoisies attempt to contain the manifestations of decomposition while using them to reinforce the authority of the state[2]. This is what the American bourgeoisie was doing at the time of the Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992; it even controlled the time and extension of the riots[3]. It is what the German bourgeoisie has been doing since the autumn by developing an enormous campaign on 'immigrant bashing' . It controls and sometimes covertly provokes the events in order to pass measures reinforcing immigration controls - in order to do its own 'immigrant bashing'. It then tries to enroll the population in general, and the working class in particular, into the policy of the state, by the orchestration of demonstrations in defense of democracy ...

On the international level, the industrialized countries are less and less allies since the break-up of the western bloc discipline which had been imposed on them faced with the Russian imperialist bloc; this trend has been reinforced by the acceleration of the crisis, which is now hitting at the heart of the world economy. They are locked in a desperate confrontation between rival capitalist and imperialist interests. They are not going toward peace but are aggravating military tensions.

Somalia: a prelude to more difficult interventions

For more than a year and a half Germany has thrown oil on the Yugoslavian fire, breaking the status quo which assured American control of the Mediterranean, by its support for the constitution of an independent Slovenia and Croatia. The United States has tried, since the beginning of the conflict, to resist the extension of a zone of influence dominated by Germany. After their veiled support for Serbia, with the sabotage of European initiatives aimed at weakening its hegemony, the United States has moved into a higher gear. American military intervention will not bring peace to Somalia, nor will it alleviate the famine which has ravaged this country as well as others in the most destitute region of the world. Somalia is only the soil on which the United States is preparing military operations of a much wider scope, directed against the great powers liable to dispute its supremacy on the world arena, the first of which is Germany.

The 'humanitarian action' of the great powers is only another pretext serving to "mask the sordid imperialist interests which guide their actions and for which they attack each other ... and to hide their own responsibility for the present barbarism behind a smokescreen and to justify new escalations"[4].

The intervention of the US armed force in Somalia has nothing to do with the poverty, famine and massacres which blight this country, just as the Gulf War two years ago had nothing to do with the plight of the local populations. The situation of the latter has only worsened since this first victory of the 'new world order'.

The discipline which had been imposed on all concerned by the coalition under the American boot in the Gulf War has crumbled these past two years. The USA has had trouble in maintaining its 'world order', which has turned more and more into open disorder. Hemmed in by the weakening and bankruptcy of entire sectors of its economy, the American bourgeoisie needs a new offensive to reimpose its military superiority and thus to be able to impose its diktats over its old allies.

The first phase of this offensive consisted of dealing a blow to the pretensions of French imperialism: imposing US control in the Somalian operation, and consigning a walk-on part to the French military forces to Djibouti, without giving them any real role in Mogadishu. But this first phase is only a preparatory one for an intervention in ex-Yugoslavia, in Bosnia, which must be massive in order to be effective. The Chiefs of Staff of the American army, notably Colin Powell, one of the leaders of the Gulf War, already said this in the summer of 1992[5]. Because while the Horn of Africa does constitute, through its geographic position, a strategic zone of considerable interest, the size of the US operation[6] and all the media publicity around it serve above all to justify and prepare more important operations in the Balkans, in Europe: the prize in the imperialist stakes, as has been shown by two world wars.

The aim of the USA is not to smother Somalia under a carpet of bombs as it did Iraq[7], although it will certainly do nothing to stop the massacres or the famine in the region. The objective is first to try and establish an image of a clean war, in order to obtain the necessary adhesion of the population to difficult, costly and lengthy interventions. It also aims to give a warning to the French bourgeoisie; and behind it the German and Japanese bourgeoisies, of the determination of the US to maintain its leadership. Planned well in advance, it serves, finally, like all action to 'maintain order', to reinforce war preparations in the event of American military action in Europe.

The Franco-German alliance was not mistaken when its spokesman Delors demanded the increase in the participation of troops of the European countries in Yugoslavia. Not in order to establish peace as it pretended, but to be militarily present on the ground faced with the initiative of the US. Germany, for the first time since the Second World War, is sending 1500 troops outside of its frontiers. Under cover of protecting life in Somalia it is the first step towards a direct participation in the conflicts. And it is a message to the US about Germany's intention to be militarily present on the battlefield in ex-Yugoslavia, It is a new step which will go beyond this confrontation, particularly on the military level, but also in all aspects of capitalist politics. The election of Clinton in the US, while it does not modify the essential strategy of the US bourgeoisie, is a sign of the turning point in the world situation.

Clinton: a more muscular policy

In 1991, some months after the victory of Desert Storm, despite a fall in popularity linked to the worsening of the crisis in the USA, it seemed Bush would be re-elected easily. Clinton finally won because, little by little, he received support from significant fractions of the American bourgeoisie. This was shown, amongst other ways, by the support of influential organs of the press; then by the deliberate sabotage of the Bush campaign by Perot. The latter, who at first tried to rally support to the Republican party, later reemerged to directly confront Bush. With the revelation of the Iraqgate scandal[8], then the accusation against Bush, in front of tens of millions of viewers, that he encouraged Iraq to invade Kuwait, the American bourgeoisie effectively showed the door to the victor of Desert Storm, The relatively comfortable victory of Clinton over Bush showed that the desire for change was felt by a majority of the American bourgeoisie.

In the first place, faced with the catastrophe on the economic level, a majority of the US bourgeoisie resolved, after several hesitations, to shelve its ideology of liberalism. The latter had proven powerless to prevent the economic decline, and worse, was seen as being responsible for it. Since the open recession of 1991, the bourgeoisie has been obliged to recognize the bankruptcy of ultra-liberalism, which cannot justify the growing intervention of the state necessary to preserve what's left of the productive and financial apparatus. Most of the bourgeoisie rallied to the propaganda of 'more state' promised by Clinton, which accords better with reality than the language of Bush, who remained in continuity with 'Reaganomics'[9].

In the second place the Bush administration could not maintain the initiative of the US on the world arena. At the time of the Gulf War it could depend on the unanimous support of the American bourgeoisie, based on its undisputed role of world military superpower, which it clearly displayed through this war. But subsequently it began to run out of steam and could no longer find such spectacular and effective ways of imposing itself on the potential rivals of the USA.

In Yugoslavia, when the US envisaged an aerial intervention in Bosnia in the summer of 1992, the Europeans put a spoke in the wheel. The surprise trip of Mitterand to Sarajevo cut short the humanitarian propaganda preparing the bombardments. Moreover the imbroglio of the armed factions and the geography of the terrain made any military operation much more dangerous because it lessened the efficacy of the airforce, the central piece of the American army. The Bush administration was not able to deploy the necessary means. Even if a new action in Iraq took place with the neutralization of part of its airspace, it did not give the opportunity for a new demonstration of force. This time Saddam Hussein did not respond to the provocation.

Bush, in losing the elections, thus served as the symbol of the reverse of United States policy on the economic level as well as on the level of world military leadership. By being seen as responsible he rendered a last service to his class, hiding the fact that there could not be any other policy and that it is the system itself which is definitively rotten. Moreover the bourgeoisie faces a public opinion disenchanted with the disastrous economic and social results since the 1980s and skeptical about the 'new world order'. The alternation of Clinton after twelve years of the Republican party gives a dose of oxygen to the credibility of American democracy.

As far as stepping up military interventions is concerned, the bourgeoisie can have full confidence in the Democratic Party. The latter has a proven experience like the Republican Party, since it has governed the country before and during the second world war, led the Vietnam War, and relaunched the policy of militarization under Carter at the end of the 1970s.

With Clinton, the bourgeoisie is trying to turn the situation around, as regards both the economic crisis and the task of maintaining its world leadership on the imperialist level faced with the tendency for the constitution of a rival bloc led by Germany.

The abortion of Europe 1993

Before the collapse of the eastern bloc, various agreements and institutions guaranteed a certain degree of unity between the different countries of Europe. These countries took shelter under the American umbrella because they had a common interest faced with the menace of the Russian imperialist bloc. With the disappearance of this threat European unity has lost its cement and the famous 'Europe 1993' is about to abort.

In place of the monetary and economic union towards which the Maastricht Treaty constituted a decisive step, regrouping all the countries of the European Economic Community with others to follow, we now see a two-speed Europe. On the one hand the alliance of Germany with France, which is attempting to integrate Spain, Belgium and to some extent Italy, is pushing to take measures which confront American and Japanese competition and tries to combat American supremacy on the military level[10]. On the other hand countries like Britain and Holland, which resist the growing power of Germany in Europe and, allied to the US, are determined to oppose by all means the emergence of a rival bloc.

The conferences at European summits, parliamentary ratifications and referendums do not show greater unity or a greater harmony between the national bourgeoisies of the different European countries. There is an increasing row engendered by the necessity to choose between an alliance with the US, which remains the first world power, and one with its challenger Germany. The whole situation is propelled by an unprecedented economic crisis, and a social decomposition which is beginning to make its disastrous consequences felt at the heart of the industrialized countries. And if this row gives the appearance of a game between democracies concerned to find a common ground, the bloody war in ex-Yugoslavia, fed by the confrontation between the great powers behind the rivalries between the new independent states[11] gives the lie to the idea of unity between the great democracies and shows the barbarism which they are capable of when it comes to defending their imperialist interests[12]. Not only does the war continue in Bosnia, but it risks spreading to Kosovo and Macedonia where the population will also be swept into the whirlwind of barbarism.

If Europe is at the heart of conflicts between the principal powers and holds a central place in the tendency towards the formation of a German bloc, and if ex-Yugoslavia is the European military laboratory, it is the entire planet which is the theatre of tensions between the new imperialist poles, tensions which are helping to aggravate the armed conflicts in the third world and the ex-Russian bloc.

The increase of local conflicts

With the collapse of the old world order, the old local conflicts have not only continued, as in Afghanistan or Kurdistan. New conflicts, new civil wars arise between local fractions of the bourgeoisie previously obliged to collaborate for the same national interests. But the eruption of new areas of tension is never limited to the strictly local situation itself. All conflicts immediately draw fractions of the bourgeoisie from neighboring countries into their orbit, in the name of ethnic differences, contentious frontiers, religious quarrels, the danger of disorder and all the other pretexts. From the smallest local warlord to the great powers, all are pushed to throw themselves into the spiral of armed confrontation. No matter whether the war is civil or local it inevitability leads to a confrontation between the great imperialist powers.

Not all tensions are linked to the interests of the great powers from the beginning. But the latter, by the logic of imperialist war, always finish by joining the melee in order to prevent their competitors from doing it, and as a weapon in the general balance of forces.

Thus the United States intervenes in or follows closely the local situations which may serve its interests against potential rivals. In Africa, in Liberia, the war between rival gangs has today become the spearhead of the US offensive to evict the French presence from its hunting grounds in Mauritania, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. In South America the US observed a kindly neutrality at the time of the Venezuelan coup d'état, looking to reverse Carlos Andres Perez, friend of Mitterand and of Willy Brandt, member of the Socialist International, and favorable to the maintenance of French, Spanish, as well as German interests. In Asia the US is closely interested in the pro-Chinese policy of the Khmer Rouge in order to keep China within its orbit, especially considering Beijing's opening to Japan.

The great powers are equally led to immerse themselves in the confrontations between regional sub-imperialisms which by their geographic situation, their dimension, and the nuclear arms they possess, weigh dangerously on the world imperialist balance of forces. Such is the case in the Indian sub-continent, where a catastrophic situation reigns, provoking all sorts of rivalries in each country between factions of the bourgeoisie, as testified by the recent massacres of Muslims in India. These rivalries are exacerbated by the confrontation between India and Pakistan, Pakistan supporting the Muslims in India, India fomenting the revolts against the Pakistani government in Kashmir. The putting into question of old international alliances, India with the USSR, Pakistan with China and the USA, does not calm the conflicts but risks worsening them.

The great powers are also sucked into new conflicts that initially they neither support nor foment. In the territory of the ex-USSR the tensions between republics continues to develop. Each republic is confronted with national minorities which proclaim independence, form militias, receiving the open or disguised support of other republics: the Armenians of Azerbaidjan, the Chechenes of Russia, the Russians in Moldavia and the Ukraine, the factions in the civil war in Georgia, etc. The great powers shrink from immersing themselves in the chaos of these local situations. But the fact that secondary powers like Turkey, Iran, Pakistan have their sights on these parts of the old USSR, and that today Russia itself is more and more tom apart by the struggle of conservatives against reformers, opens the way to the enlargement of the conflicts.

Decomposition intensifies the contradictions, engenders new rivalries and conflicts. All factions of the bourgeoisie, from the smallest to the largest, can only respond with militarism and wars.

War and crisis

The capitalist regimes of the Stalinist type have collapsed. Coming from the counter-revolution of the 20s and 30s in Russia, they installed a rigid and totally militarized form of capitalism. Bureaucrats of yesterday have spruced up their old nationalism with the phraseology of independence and democracy, but they have nothing more to offer than corruption, gangsterism and war. It is now the turn of the western capitalist regimes, which claimed that their economic superiority testified to the victory of capitalism. They now find themselves locked into the collapse of the system: slowing down of their economies, drastic purge of their profits, unemployment of tens of millions of workers and employees, unceasing and growing degradation of the conditions of work, housing, health, education and security.

But in these countries, unlike those of the third world or the ex-eastern bloc, the working class is not ready to submit without reacting to the dramatic consequences of this collapse of its living conditions. This was shown by the powerful anger of the working class in Italy in the autumn of 1992.

Towards a resurgence of working class struggles

After three years of passivity, demonstrations, stoppages, and strikes by hundreds of thousands of Italian workers and employees in the autumn of 1992, constituted the first signs of a change of considerable importance.

Faced with the most brutal attacks since the Second World War, the working class in Italy has responded. This movement reminds us not only that the economic crisis puts all the workers in the same boat by attacking everywhere its conditions of existence; above all it shows that, beyond the divisions that capitalism imposes, the working class constitutes the only social force which can oppose the consequences of this crisis. The workers' initiatives, the strikes, the massive participation in demonstrations of protest against the government's austerity plan, and the discontent against the official unions which support this plan, have shown that the proletariat's fighting spirit is still intact. Even if the bourgeoisie kept the initiative, and even if the initial massive movement was subsequently curtailed, a gain remains from these first important struggles of the proletariat in an industrialized country since 1989: the return of class combativity.

The events in Italy mark a stage for the working class in resuming the struggle on the common ground of resistance to the capitalist crisis, in developing confidence in its capacity to respond to the attacks of capitalism and to open up a perspective.

The black-out of information on the events in Italy, contrary to the publicity given to the steel workers' strikes, the transport strikes, and the public sector strikes contained within the great union maneuvers in Germany in the spring of 1992[13], is testimony to the fact that there was a real thrust from the workers in the movement in Italy. When the German bourgeoisie acted to stifle any workers' initiative in the previous year, its operation had the blessings of the medias of the international bourgeoisie. In the autumn of 1992 the Italian bourgeoisie got its support through the black -out, since the international bourgeoisie expected and feared that the reaction of the Italian workers to the austerity measures would not be limited to the Italian state.

However, the Italian movement was only the first step toward the resurgence of international class struggle. Italy is the country of the world where the proletariat has the greatest experience of class struggle and the greatest distrust of the unions; this is far from being the case in the other European countries. On this level the workers' reactions elsewhere in Europe and the US did not immediately take on the radical and massive character of those in Italy.

Moreover, in Italy itself, the movement was limited. On the one hand, the massive rejection of the big unions by the majority of the workers in this movement has shown that despite the break of the last three years the long experience of the working class in confrontation with unionism has not been lost. But on the other hand the bourgeoisie also expected this rejection. The bourgeoisie played on it to focus workers' anger on spectacular actions against the union leaders to the detriment of a large-scale reaction against the measures and against the whole of the state apparatus and all the union appendages.

Instead of taking the struggle in hand in the general assemblies where the workers can decide collectively on the objectives and means of their struggle, the radical organs of base unionism organized the stifling of the discontent. By throwing bolts and stones at the heads of the union leaders they maintained the trap of the false opposition between base and official unionism, sowing disarray and putting a brake on the massive and unified mobilization which alone can develop an effective response to the state's attacks.

The workers' struggles in Italy thus mark a recovery of combativity but they did not escape the difficulties which await the working class everywhere: most importantly, the difficulties in going beyond unionism, both official and unofficial, and corporatism.

The atmosphere of disorientation and confusion spread throughout the working class by the ideological campaigns on the bankruptcy of communism, the end of marxism and the end of class struggle is still a weight, and combativity is only the first condition for emerging from this atmosphere. The working class must also become conscious that its struggle must put into question capitalism as a world system, as the bearer of poverty, war and destruction.

Today, the passivity instilled by triumphant capitalism's promises of peace has begun to crumble. Desert Storm helped to uncover this lie of peace.

The participation of the great democratic countries in the wars in Somalia and ex-Yugoslavia is less clearly a demystification, since they pretend to be intervening to protect populations and give them food. But the cascade of attacks on the living conditions of the working class will create an ambiance where the humanitarian pretexts will start to war thin. Workers will start to question the humanitarian alibis for sending troops and the most costly, sophisticated and deadly armaments. They will begin to see that the real dirty work of the democratic armies is of the same ilk as that of all the gangs, militias and armies that they pretend to combat.

As for the promise of prosperity, catastrophe is everywhere. The unprecedented acceleration of the economic crisis is in the process of exposing the last refuges where the conditions of life have been relatively spared, countries like Germany, Sweden, or Switzerland. The massive unemployment spreading now in the highly skilled sectors which were the least affected until now, will add tens of millions to those already unemployed in areas of the world where the proletariat is most numerous and most concentrated.

The reawakening of the class struggle in Italy in autumn 1992 has signaled the revival of workers' combativity. The development of the crisis, and the increasingly omnipresent militarism in the social climate of the industrialized countries, are going to contribute to important struggles in the future. These struggles will provide the basis for the working class becoming aware of the need to reinforce its unity and, with the aid of its revolutionary organizations, to rediscover the authentic perspective of communism.

[1] See the article on the economic crisis in this issue.  

[2] The bourgeoisie has tried to forestall decomposition which disturbs its social order. But it is a class which is totally incapable of eradicating the ultimate cause, since it is its own system of exploitation and of profit which is at the root of the latter. It can only saw off the branch on which it is sitting.

[3] See International Review no 71

[4] See International Review no 71. And as Liberation of 9.12.92 mentioned:

"Thus under an anonymous cover a very high functionary of the UN in Somalia (Onusom) has spoken his real thoughts: 'The American intervention stinks of arrogance. They consulted no one. The intervention was prepared long beforehand, humanity serving a pretext. In fact they are testing here, like a vaccine on an animal, their doctrine for resolving future local conflicts. Now this operation will cost by their own estimates between $400m-$600m in its first phase. For half of this sum, without a single soldier, I could return Somalia to stable prosperity. '"

[5] Colin Powell pronounced himself against intervention in Yugoslavia in September 1992.

[6] According to sources close to Boutros Ghali, secretary of the UN, the needs of intervention to provide food would require 5000 men. The USA sent 30,000...   

[7] Close to 500,000 wounded and dead under the bombing.

[8] This scandal so named by its analogy with Watergate which brought Nixon' down, and then Irangate which rocked Reagan, reveals the importance of the financial aid given to the USA to Iraq through the intermediary of an Italian bank in the course of the year preceding the Gulf War. Aid used by this country to develop its research and infrastructure for creating atomic weapons ...

[9] See the article on the crisis in this issue.

[10] See the constitution of a Franco-German army corps as well as the project for an Italo-Franco-Spanish aero-naval force.

[11] On the war in Yugoslavia and the responsibility of the great powers see International Review nos 70 and 71.

[12] As for the economic agreements they are nothing to do with a real cooperation or agreement between national bourgeoisies, but economic competition does not mechanically engender political and military divergences. Before the breakup of the eastern bloc the US and Germany were very serious competitors on the economic terrain, which did not prevent them, being totally allied on the political and military level. The USSR has never been a serious rival of the US on the economic level, but their military rivalry nevertheless threatened the destruction of the planet for forty years. Today Germany can very well pass agreements with Great Britain, on the economic level in the framework of Europe, sometimes to the detriment of French interests. But that does not prevent Great Britain and Germany finding themselves in complete opposition on the political and military level, while France and Germany follow the same policy.

[13] See International Review no 70.

Far from going into the much prophesied 'recovery', the world economy continues to sink into the mire. At the heart of the industrialized world, the self-destructive ravages of capitalism in crisis have produced millions more unemployed and an even greater decline in the living conditions of those workers who still have jobs.

In spite of this however they are now claiming to have found a new way out. Confronted with the fact that all the old recipes to stimulate productive activity have proved useless, the governments of the big industrialized countries (with Clinton at the head) are proclaiming a 'new' doctrine: a return to "more state intervention". "Public works", financed by the nation states, this is to be the new magic formula to put new life into the decrepit machine of capitalist exploitation.

What lies behind this change in the way the western governments are talking? What chance of success do their 'new' policies have?

We ought to be well into the recovery of the world economy by now. For the last two years, the 'experts' have repeatedly promised it for "within six months"[1]. However 1992 has brought to fruition a truly catastrophic situation. At the heart of the system (that part of the globe which had been comparatively spared previously) those of the major economies who have been hit by the recession since 1990 - the United States, Great Britain and Canada - have never really managed to pull themselves out of it[2], while the economies of the other powers, Japan and the countries of mainland Europe, are being sucked into it.

Since 1990, the number of unemployed has risen by three and a half million in the United States and by one and a half million in Great Britain. The latter has experienced its deepest and longest recession since the thirties; the number of bankruptcies has increased by 40% during 1992. Japan has just 'officially' gone into recession for the first time in 18 years[3]. The same is true for Germany, where Kohl too has just' officially' recognized that the country is in recession. Government forecasts predict half a million more unemployed in 1993, while in what was East Germany it is estimated that 40% of the population who are in work do not have a stable job.

But leaving aside official predictions, the perspective for the coming years is clearly shown in the massive job losses announced in central sectors such as the steel or car industry, or in advanced sectors like computing or aeronautics. Eurofer, the EEC body responsible for steel, has announced that this sector is to shed 50,000 jobs in the next three years. General Motors, the leading industrial company in the world, which has already announced the closure of 21 of its factories world-wide, has just made it known that it has increased the number to 25. IBM, the giant of the computer industry internationally, which has already cut 20,000 jobs in 1991 and at the beginning of 1992 announced the loss of20,000 more, has just stated that it will in fact be 60,000. All the main civil aviation companies have announced redundancies (Boeing, one of the least affected by the crisis, has forecast the loss of 9,000 jobs in 1992 alone).

The reality of the crisis is making its relentless presence felt in every country[4] and in every sector, the basic ones and the more peripheral ones, in industry and in the services. The capitalist world is engulfed in a recession that is without precedent in its depth, geographic scope and in its duration. A recession which, as we have often demonstrated in these pages, is qualitatively different from the four that have preceded it since the 60s. A recession which reveals beyond doubt the chronic inability of capitalism to transcend its fundamental, historic contradictions (its inability to create sufficient outlets for its productive capacity). But this recession also reveals new difficulties for the bourgeoisie, difficulties that are the product of 'remedies' applied throughout two decades of a flight into credit and massive debt[5].

For the last two years the American government has had to get the economy going again by applying the old policy of facilitating credit by lowering interest rates. The interest rate of the Federal Bank of the United States has now been reduced 20 times and it has reached the point that, taking account of inflation, a private bank can borrow money and pay scarcely any interest in real terms. In spite of all these efforts, all signs of life in terms of growth remain horribly absent. The American economy is so hugely in debt that the private banks use these 'free' loans to repay a small part of their previous debts rather than using them for fresh investments[6].

Never has the economic perspective for capitalism been so bleak. Never has its impotence been so blatant. The miracle of 'Reaganomics', the miraculous return to 'pure' capitalism wallowing triumphant amid the ruins of 'communism' has culminated in a total fiasco.

More state intervention?

This is how the new, young democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States is presented with his new solution for the United States and the world.

"The only solution for the president (Clinton) is the one he's outlined throughout his campaign. That is, to boost the economy by increasing public spending on the infrastructure (road network, ports, bridges), on research and training. This will create jobs. What is just as important, this spending will contribute to accelerating growth in productivity in the long term and to real wages." (Lester Thurlow, one of the most noted economic advisors in the American Democratic party)[7]. Clinton has promised that the state would inject between 30 and 40 billion dollars into the economy in this way.

In Great Britain, the very conservative Major, responding to the first signs that the combativity of the working class is returning, and weighed down by economic bankruptcy, has suddenly abandoned his liberal creed 'against statification'. He too is chanting the same Keynesian refrain by announcing a "strategy for growth" and the injection of 1.5 billion dollars into the economy. Then it is turn of Delors, representative of the EEC, who goes further by insisting on the need to accompany the new policy with a strong dose of "co-operation between states": "This initiative to stimulate growth is not a classic Keynesian boost to the economy. It isn't simply a matter of putting money into circulation. We want above all to send the message that cooperation between states is on the agenda."[8]

At the same time, the Japanese government has decided to supply a massive amount of aid to the main sectors of its economy (90 billion dollars, which is the equivalent of 2.5 % GDP).

What is the significance of all this exactly?

The democratic propaganda in the United States, like that of some of the left parties in Europe, presents it as a change from the excessively 'liberal' policies of the Reagan period. After the verbiage of 'less state involvement' in that period, they are now claiming to return to greater fairness through the activity of that institution which is supposed to represent 'the common interests of the whole nation'.

In fact all it is, is the continuation of the tendency that is characteristic of decadent capitalism. The tendency, that is, to rely on the power of the state to keep the economic machine turning over, when left to itself the economy is increasingly paralyzed by the heightening of its internal contradictions.

The truth is that the capitalist economy has constantly increased the level of state control, ever since the First World War when each nation's survival began to depend upon whether it was able to carve a place for itself by force on a world market that had grown definitively too small. In decadent capitalism the tendency towards state capitalism is a universal tendency. It may be concretized at a different rate or in a different form, depending on which country and the historic period. But it never has stopped progressing, to the point where it has turned the state machine into the very heart of social and economic life in every country.

German militarism at the beginning of the century, Stalinism, fascism in the 30s, the public works of the New Deal in the United States that followed the economic depression of 1929, or those of the Popular Front in France in the same period, are simply manifestations of the same movement towards the statification of social life. This development did not stop after the Second World War. Quite the reverse. And 'Reaganomics', which were supposed to constitute a return to a 'liberal', less statified capitalism, did not interrupt this tendency either. The 'miracle' of the American recovery in the 80s was founded on the doubling of state debt and a spectacular increase in armaments expenditure. By the beginning of the 90s, after three Republican terms of office, the gross public debt represented nearly 60 % of American GDP (the figure was 40% at the beginning of the 80s) and the financing of this debt alone absorbs half of the national savings[9].

The policies of "deregulation" and "privatization" that were carried out throughout the 80s in all the industrialized countries did not produce a lessening of the role of the state in managing the economy[10]. These policies mainly served as a justification for redirecting state aid towards the more competitive sectors, eliminating less viable companies by reducing certain state grants and concentrating capital to an incredible degree (which has inevitably led to a growing fusion between the state and large 'private' capital in terms of management). At the social level, they inaugurated a trend towards redundancies and a tendency for jobs to become generally more insecure, as well as the reduction of so-called 'social' expenditure. After a decade of 'anti-statist liberalism', the state's grip on the economic life of society has not lessened. On the contrary, it has grown stronger because it has become more effective.

By the same token, the talk of "more state involvement" that is being put about today does not represent a reversal but a strengthening of this tendency.

What does the proposed change mean then?

Throughout the 80s, the capitalist economy went through the greatest orgy of speculation in its history. Now that the whole bubble has burst, the damage can only be limited by the iron hand of bureaucracy.[11]

But it also means that the state will constantly increase the amount of paper money it chums out. As the 'private' financial system cannot expand credit because it is so horrendously in debt and so totally devoid of speculative value, the state intends to get the machine going again by injecting money, by creating an artificial market. The state is to buy up "infrastructures" (road network, ports, bridges, etc), with the aim of orienting economic activity towards sectors more productive than speculation. It is to pay with ... paper, with money issued by the central banks without any cover whatsoever. In short, it means a further increase in the state deficit.

In fact, the policy of "public works" put forward today, is essentially the policy that Germany has been carrying out for the last two years in an attempt to 'reconstruct' the old GDR. And we can get some idea of the effect of this policy by considering what it has accomplished there. It has had a particularly marked effect in two areas: inflation and external trade. In 1989 Federal Germany had one of the lowest inflation rates in the world; it was in the forefront of the industrial countries. Today inflation there is the highest of the seven leading nations[12], with the exception of Italy. Two years ago West Germany had the biggest trade surplus globally, surpassing even that of Japan. Today it is cracking under the weight of a 50 % increase in imports.

Moreover in financial terms, Germany is one of the strongest and most 'stable' economies in the world[13]. This same policy applied in a country like the United States especially will have far more devastating effects in the short or medium term[14]. The state deficit and trade deficit, the two chronic ills that the American economy has suffered from for the last two decades are much higher than in Germany. Even if these deficits are at present lower than they were at the start of "Reaganomic" policies, their increase will have dramatic repercussions not only for the United States but also for the world economy, especially in terms of inflation and the anarchy in the exchange rates. On the other hand, the fragility of the American financial apparatus is such that an increase in the state deficit runs the risk of bringing about its' definitive collapse. In fact over the years the state has systematically taken responsibility for the bankruptcy of increasingly important and numerous banks and savings banks that have been unable to repay their debts. By giving a new boost to a policy of state debt the government is debilitating the last, and already feeble, guarantee of a financial order that everyone knows to be falling apart.

More cooperation between states?

It is no accident that Delors is insisting that the policy of public works ought to be accompanied by greater "cooperation between states". As the German experience shows, increased state expenditure is bound to result in an increase in imports and therefore worsen the trade imbalance. During the 30s the policy of public works was accompanied by a savage increase in protectionism - to the point of autarchy in Hitler's Germany. The same tendency is emerging today. No country wants to increase its own deficit in order to boost the economies of its neighbors and competitors. The statements of Clinton and his advisors, demanding a strong reinforcement of American protectionism, are particularly clear on the point.

Delors's appeal is no more than a pious wish. In the face of the aggravation of the world economic crisis, it is not the tendency towards more "co-operation between states" that is the order of the day; on the contrary it is an economic war waged by each against all. All the policies of co-operation, which are really aimed at making partial alliances to better confront other competitors, always work towards the strengthening of all these internal centrifugal forces. The heightening of the convulsions which are tearing the EEC apart, the most spectacular demonstration of which was the recent collapse of the EMS, bears witness to this. The same can be said of the tensions within the Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico, or the still-born attempts to establish a common market between the countries of the southern tip of Latin America or the countries of the "Andean pact".

Protectionism has developed unceasingly throughout the 80s. In spite of all their talk about "the free circulation of goods", in spite of this principle that western capitalism has trumpeted abroad as an expression of the "rights of man" (bourgeois man), the fetters on world trade have gone on and on multiplying[15].

The tendency is towards the exacerbation, rather than the attenuation, of the relentless trade war facing the large commercial powers, of which the GAIT negotiations are just a small part. The strengthening of the tendency towards state capitalism, aggravated by the policy of "public works" , can only make it all the more acute.

Obviously governments can never remain inactive in the face of the catastrophic state of their economies. For as long as the working class has not managed to definitively destroy the political power of the international bourgeoisie, the latter will go on running the machine of capitalist exploitation in one way or another, however decadent and decomposed it may be. Exploiting classes do not commit suicide. But the' solutions' that they are able to come up with are inevitably characterized by two things. Firstly, they resort more and more to intervention by the state that organized instrument of force controlled by the dominant class. It is the only instrument able to ensure by coercion the survival of mechanisms which tend towards paralysis and self-destruction. That is what all the current talk of "more state intervention" means. Secondly, these 'solutions' become increasingly aberrant and absurd, as we can see in the current GATT negotiations. Different fractions of world capital, bunched around their respective states, confront each other to decide how many million hectares of agricultural land is to be left barren in Europe (the 'solution' to the problem of agricultural overproduction). In the meantime every television screen in the world covers the numerous famines in Africa, Somalia, for the purpose of war propaganda.

Decades of Stalinist and 'socialist' ideology has inculcated workers with the lie that statification of the economy is synonymous with an improvement of workers' conditions of existence. But the state that exists within a capitalist society can only be a state that represents capital, the state of the capitalist class (rich owners or big bureaucrats, that is). The inexorable strengthening of the state that they are talking about will bring nothing to the working class except more misery, more repression, more wars.

RV

[1] In December 1991, no 50 of Economic perspectives for the OECD reads:

"Every country should experience an increase in demand as a similar expansion takes place more or less simultaneously in other countries; the recovery of world trade is in sight ... The acceleration in activity should be confirmed in Spring 1992 ... This development will produce a progressive growth in employment and a recovery in business investment ..." We should note that even at the time the same 'experts' had to conclude that, "Growth in activity within the OECD in the second quarter of 1991 seems weaker than the Economic perspectives predicted in July ..."   

[2] The few signs of recovery that have been manifested up to now in the United States are very fragile and do not indicate a real reversal of the tendency. They have more the appearance of a temporary slowdown in the decline, a product of the desperate attempts on the part of Bush during the electoral campaign.

[3] The technical definition of entry into recession (according to the American criteria) is two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP (gross domestic product, which means all production including the salary of the state bureaucracy which is taken as producing the equivalent of its salary). In the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 1992 Japanese GDP fell by 0.2 and 0.4%. But in the same period the fall in industrial production in relation to the previous year was more than 6%.  

[4] We will not return here to the development of the situation in the 'third world' countries whose economies have been steadily sinking with no remission since the beginning of the 80s. However it is interesting to make some remarks about the development of the countries once called "communist", those countries whose entry into the "world market" was supposed to make them prosperous and turn them into a rich market for the western economies. The dislocation of the old USSR has been accompanied by an economic disaster that has no equal in history. By the end of 1992 the number of unemployed has already reached 10 million and inflation is increasing at an annual rate of 14,000% - a figure which surpasses all comment. As for the countries of Eastern Europe, the economies of all of them are in recession and Hungary, the most advanced, which was the first to implement "capitalist reforms" and which ought to find it easiest to enjoy the benefits of liberalism, is being swept by a devastating wave of bankruptcies. The unemployment rate has already reached 11 % officially and is forecast to double throughout next year. As for Cuba, the last bastion of so-called "real socialism", annual production in 1992 has fallen to half that of 1989! The only exception remaining is China which starts at a level which is already exceptionally low (industrial production in People's China is not much higher than that of Belgium). Its present rate of growth is relatively high because of the expansion of areas "open to the capitalist economy" where they burn the massive credits that Japan grants them.

As for the four little dragons of "capitalist" Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), their exceptional growth is beginning to fall in its turn.

[5] See in particular, 'A recession unlike the others' and 'Economic catastrophe at the heart of the industrialized world', in International Review, nos 70 and 71.

[6] The total debt of the American economy (the government plus businesses plus individuals) is equivalent to nearly two years' national product.

[7] Le Monde, 17 November 1992.

[8] Liberation, 24 November 1992.

[9] The development of the public debt is a phenomenon that has characterized this decade in particular. What it means concretely is that the state takes on the responsibility of supplying a regular return, a part of social surplus value, in the form of interest on an increasing volume of capital, which is invested in "treasury bonds". This means that a growing number of capitalists no longer derive their income from exploitation at businesses belonging to them but from taxes raised by the state.

We should note that the increase in the public debt for the EEC, as a percentage of GDP, is more than that of the United States (62%).

[10] Even if we look at it from a purely quantitative point of view, measuring the involvement of the state in the economy by the proportion of the gross national product that public administration costs represent, this rate is higher at the beginning of the 90s than at the beginning of the 80s. When Reagan was elected, the figure was in the order of 32 %; when Bush left the presidency it was over 37%.

[11] American banks and savings banks going bankrupt, Japanese banks in difficulties, the collapse of the Tokyo stock exchange (already equal to the 1929 crash), the bankruptcy of a growing number of finance companies, etc, these are the first direct consequences of the crazed speculation of yesterday. Only the state can cope with the financial catastrophes that are taking place.

[12] United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Canada.

[13] What is more, the German government is committed to financing the state deficit by means of international loans while attempting to keep inflation under control by restricting (with diminishing success, to be sure) the expansion of the monetary mass and keeping interest rates very high.

[14] In the case of countries like Italy, Spain or Belgium the state debt has reached such heights (over 100% of GDP in Italy, 120% in Belgium) that such a policy is quite simply unthinkable.

[15] These fetters on trade do not take the form of customs duties so much as restrictions pure and simple: import quotas, agreements on self-limitation, "anti-dumping" legislation, rules governing the quality of products, etc. " ... the proportion of commercial exchanges accompanied by non-tariff measures has greatly increased in the United States as well as in the European community, which together represent nearly 75% of imports within the OECD (excluding combustibles) n OECD, The development of structural reform: a view of the whole, 1992.

In the first part of this article (International Review 71 [37]), we saw how the Russian revolution was not, as the bourgeoisie's propaganda says, a ‘mere coup D'Etat', but constituted the most gigantic and conscious movements of the exploited masses in history - rich in experience, initiative and creativity. It was - despite its later defeat - the clearest proof that the working class is the only revolutionary class in society, the only one that is capable of saving humanity from the catastrophe which decomposing capitalism is rushing towards.

October 1917 gave us a fundamental lesson: the bourgeoisie will not stand aside faced with the revolutionary struggle of the labouring masses. On the contrary, it will try to sabotage it by any mean possible. Therefore, apart from the carrot and stick, it uses a very dangerous weapon: sabotage from the inside carried out by the bourgeoisie's forces dressed up in ‘working class' and ‘radical' clothes - then the ‘Socialist' parties, today the parties of the ‘left' and ‘extreme left', and the unions.

The sabotage of the Soviets by the Social-Traitor parties which allowed the apparatus of the bourgeois state to remain standing represented the principle threat to the revolution begun in February. In this second part we will elaborate on this problem and the means by which the proletariat overcame it through the renovation of the Soviets, the Bolshevik party and the insurrec­tion.

The bourgeoisie sabotages the soviets

The bourgeoisie present the February Revolution as a movement towards ‘democracy' violated by the Bolshevik coup. This myth consists in opposing February to October, presenting the first as an authentic ‘democratic' festival and the second as a coup d'Etat ‘against the popular will.'

This lie expresses the fury felt by the bourgeoisie because events between February and October did not work out in the way they wanted. The bourgeois thought that as time passed after the convulsions associated with the overthrow of the Czar in Febru­ary, the masses would quietly return to their homes and leave the bourgeoisie to manage politics at their own leisure, legitimised from time to time by ‘democratic' elections. However, the proletariat did not take the bait. Instead it initiated an immense activity, became increasingly conscious of its historic mission and provided itself with the means to carry out its struggle: the Soviets. In this way it posed a situation of dual power, "either the bourgeoisie took hold of the old state apparatus, using it to its own ends, in which case the Soviets would have had to withdraw from the stage, or these would convert it into the basis of a new state, liquidating not only the old political apparatus but the regimen of the ruling classes for whose service it was founded" (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution. Vol. 1, ‘The new power').

The ruling class used the card of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary Parties, former workers' parties which with the war had crossed over to the bourgeois camp, in order to destroy the Soviets and to impose the authority of the bourgeois state. At the beginning of the February Revolution, these parties gained an immense confidence in the workers' ranks, which they utilised in order to control the executive organs of the Soviets and to conceal the actions of the bourgeoisie: "Wherever a bourgeois minister could not appear in defence of the government before the revolutionary workers or in the Soviets, Stobelev, Tsereteli, Chernov or some other ‘socialist' minister appeared (or to be precise, was sent by the bourgeois) and faithfully performed their assignment; he would do his level best to defend the cabinet, whitewash the capitalists and fool the people by making promise after promise and by advising people to wait, and wait" (Lenin, ‘Lessons of the Revolution' Selected Works, Vol. 2, page 163).

From February an extremely dangerous situation developed for the working masses: they struggled (with the Bolsheviks in the vanguard) to end the war, to solve the agrarian problem, and for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. In order to do this they created the Soviets and had limitless confidence in them. How­ever, the Soviets, which sprang from within the proletariat, were captured by the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary dema­gogues, who negated their most essential needs, using all kinds of sabotaging tactics.

1. They continually promised peace, while leaving the Provi­sional Government to continue the war.

On the 27th of March the Provisional Government tried to unleash the Dardanelles offensive whose objective was the conquest of Constantinople. On the 18th of April Miliukov, the foreign Minister, ratified the famous note confirming Russia's adhesion to the Entente gang (France and Great Britain). In May, Kerensky undertook a campaign at the front to raise the soldiers' moral and to make them fight, a campaign which plumbed the depths of cynicism: "you will bring peace on the point of your bayonets". Again in June and in August, the Social Democrats, in close collaboration with the hateful Czarist generals, tried to drag the workers and soldiers into a new military slaughter.

In the same way, these great peddlers of ‘human rights' tried to re-establish brutal military discipline in the army, restoring the death penalty, and persuading the soldiers' committees not to provoke the officers. For example, when the Petrograd Soviet published its famous ‘order no 1' that prohibited corporeal punishment for soldiers and defended their rights and dignity, the social traitors of the executive "sent to the printer, by way of antidote, an appeal to the soldiers, which under the pretence of condemning lynch law for officers, demanded the soldiers' subordination to the old commanding staff" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol. 1, ‘The Ruling Group and The War', page 265).

2. They endlessly spouted on about the "solution of the agrarian problem" while leaving the landlords' power intact and crushing the peasant revolts.

Thus, they systematically blocked even the most timid orders about the agrarian question - for example, the one which would have stopped the transferring of land. Instead they returned the land spontaneously occupied by the peasants to the landlords; punitive expeditions were sent to crush the peasants' revolts with blood and fire and the knout was restored to the headmen.

3. They blocked the application of the 8 hour day, and permitted the owners to dismantle the factories.

The bosses were allowed to sabotage production with the aim of, on the one hand, starving the workers to death and on the other, dispersing and demoralising them "Taking advantage of modern capitalist production's close relationship with the national and international banks and with the other organisations of unified capital (employers unions, trusts, etc.) the capitalists began to carry out carefully worked-out and widespread, systematic sabo­tage. They used whatever means they could, starting with the absence of administration in the factories, the artificial disor­ganisation of industrial activity, the hiding and flight of materi­als, finishing with the burning and closure of firms devoid of resources" (Ana M Pankratova, Los consejos de fabricas en Ia Rusia en 1917 ‘The development of the struggle between capital and labour and the first conference of factory committees').

4. They unleashed a ferocious repression of the workers' struggles.

"In Kharkov thirty thousand coal miners organised, adopting the preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World's constitu­tion: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common". Dispersed by Cossacks, some were locked out by the mine owners, and the rest declared a general strike. Minister of Commerce and Industry Konovalov appointed his assistant, Orlov, with plenary powers, to settle the trouble. Orlov was hated by the miners but the Central Executive Committee not only supported his appointment, but refused to demand that the Cossacks be recalled from the Don Basin" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World, page 63).

5. They deceived the masses with empty words about "revolu­tionary democracy" while sabotaging the measures of the Soviets.

They tried to liquidate the Soviets from the inside: through not carrying out their resolutions; postponing plenary meetings and leaving it all to the conspiracy of small committees. They sought to divide and confront the exploited masses: "Already in April the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had begun to appeal to the provinces against Petrograd, to the soldiers against the workers, to the cavalry against the machine-gunners. They had given the troops' representatives privileges in the Soviets above the factories; they had favoured the small and scattered enter­prises as against the giants of the metal industry. Themselves representing the past, they sought support in backwardness of all kinds. With the ground slipping under their feet, they were now inciting the rear-guard against the advance guard" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol. 2, ‘The "July Days": Culmination and Rout', page 65).

They tried to get the Soviets to hand over their powers to the ‘democratic' organs: the Zemstvos - local organs setup under the Czar; the Moscow ‘democratic' conference of August, a real nest of vipers which united such ‘representative' forces as the nobles, military, old Black Hundreds, Kadets etc - all of whom blessed Kornilov's military coup.

In September they tried to regulate the Soviets through the calling of the Pre-Democratic Conference in which the delegates of the bourgeois and nobility had, through the express desire of the social traitors, 683 representatives compared to the Soviets' 230. Kerensky promised the American Ambassador "We will make the Soviets die a natural death. The centre of gravity of political life will progressively move from the Soviets to the new democratic organs of autonomous representation".

The Soviets that called for the proletariat to take power were ‘democratically' crushed by force of arms: "The Bolsheviks, having secured a majority in the Kaluga Soviet, set free some political prisoners. With the sanction of the Government Commis­sar the Municipal Duma called in troops from Minsk, and bombarded the Soviet headquarters with artillery. The Bolsheviks yielded, but as they left the building Cossacks attacked them crying ‘this is what we'll do to all the other Bolshevik Soviets, including those of Moscow and Petrograd" (Reed, op cit, page 63).

The workers saw how their class organs were being confis­cated, denatured and chained to a policy that was against their interests. Thus, as we saw in the first part of this article, the political crises of April, June and, above all July posed the necessity to take decisive action: to renovate the Soviets in order to orientate them towards the taking of power.

The Soviets were - as Lenin said - organs based "on the direct initiative of the people from below" (Lenin, ‘Dual Power', Selected Works Vol. 2, page 34). This enabled the masses to rapidly change them from the moment they realised that they were not responding to their interests. From the middle of August the life of the Soviets accelerated at a dizzying pace. Meetings took place day and night without interruption. Workers and soldiers conscientiously dis­cussed, passed resolutions, voted at various times throughout the day. In this climate of the masses' intense self-activity numerous Soviets (Helsingfors, the Urals, Kronstadt, Reval, the Baltic Fleet etc) elected revolutionary majorities formed by Bolsheviks, Internationalist Mensheviks, Maximalists, Left Social Revolu­tionaries, Anarchists etc.

On the 31st of August the Petrograd Soviet adopted a Bolshe­vik motion. Its leaders - the Mensheviks and Social Revolution­aries - refused to apply it and dismissed it. On the 9th of September the Soviet elected a Bolshevik majority. Moscow followed immediately afterwards and this continued throughout the rest of the country. The masses elected the Soviets they needed and thus prepared themselves for the taking and exercising of power.

The role of the Bolshevik party

In the masses' struggle for the control of their organisations against the sabotage of the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks played a decisive role.

The centre of the Bolsheviks' activity was the development of the Soviets: "The Conference repeats that it is necessary to carry out a many-sided activity within the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies, to increase the number of Soviets, to consoli­date their power and to weld together our party's proletarian internationalist groups within the Soviets" (Resolutions of the 8th Bolshevik Conference, April 1917).

This activity had as its central axis the development of class consciousness which "requires a patient work of clarification of proletarian class consciousness and of the cohesion of the proletarians of the city and country side" (idem). This meant having confidence, on the one hand, in the critical and analytical capacity of the masses[1]: "Where as the agitation of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionaries was scattered, self-contradictory and oftenest of all evasive, the agitation of the Bolsheviks was distinguished by its concentrated and well thought-out character. The Compromisers talked themselves out of difficulties; the Bolsheviks went to meet them. A continual analysis of the objective situation, a testing of slogans upon facts, a serious attitude to the enemy even when he was none too serious, gave special strength and power of conviction to the Bolshevik agita­tion" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol. 2, page 295). On the other hand, in its capacity for unity and self-organisation: "Don't put your trust in words. Don't be misled by promises. Don't overestimate our forces. Organise in every factory, in every regiment and every company, in every residential block. Work at your organising every day, every hour, do that work yourselves, for this is something you cannot entrust to anybody else" (Lenin, Introduc­tion to the Resolutions of the 7th (April) All Russian Confer­ence of the RSDLP(B) [38]).

The Bolsheviks did not try to force the masses to submit to a preconceived plan of action, leading them like a sergeant major leads his troops. They understood that the revolution was the work of the masses' direct action and that it was through this direct action that they carried out their historical mission: "The chief strength of Lenin lay in his understanding the inner logic of the movement and guiding his policy by it. He did not impose his plan on the masses, he helped the masses to recognise and realise their own plan" (Trotsky, op cit, vol. 1, ‘Re-arming the Party', page 306).

The party did not develop its role as the vanguard by saying to the class "here is the truth, on your knees". On the contrary, it was affected by all the uncertainties and worries that ran throughout the class; and as with the rest of the class, although in a different way, it was exposed to the destructive influence of bourgeois ideology. It was able to carry out its role as the motor in the development of class consciousness because, through a whole series of political debates, it overcame the errors and insufficien­cies of its old positions and fought a life and death struggle to eradicate the opportunist deviations which could have pulled it down.

From the beginning of March an important section of the Bolsheviks had posed the necessity of reuniting with the Socialist parties (Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries). They put for­ward an apparently infallible argument, which in the first mo­ments of general euphoria, and given the masses' lack of experience, had quite an impact on them: at a time when they are marching side by side why don't the Socialist parties unite? Why confuse the workers with 2 or 3 distinct parties claiming to represent the proletariat and socialism?

In fact this argument posed a serious threat to the revolution: the party which from 1902 had fought opportunism and reformism, which from 1914 had been the most consistent and dedicated in defending the international revolution against the First World War, was running dangerously close to diluting itself into the turbid waters of the social traitor parties. How was the proletariat to overcome within itself the confusions and illusions that it suffered? How was it going to combat the manoeuvres and traps of the enemy? How was it going to keep its struggles in the right direction faced with moments of vacillation or defeat? Lenin and the base of the party victoriously fought this false unity which really meant uniting itself behind the bourgeoisie.

To begin with the Bolshevik party was a small minority. Many workers had illusions in the Provisional Government and saw it as an emanation of the Soviets, when in reality it was their worst enemy. In March and April the leading Bolshevik organs in Russia adopted a conciliatory attitude to the Provisional Govern­ment, leading them to fall into open support for the imperialist war.

A movement at the base of the party (the Vyborg Committee) arose against this opportunist deviation, and it found its clearest expression in Lenin and his April Theses. For Lenin the key position was "No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding ‘demand' that this government, a government of capitalists should cease to be an imperialist government" (Lenin, The April Theses [39], no. 3, Selected Works, Vol 2, page 30).

Lenin similarly denounced the activities of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries against the Soviets: "The ‘mistake' of the leaders I have named lies in their petty-bourgeois position, in the fact that instead of clarifying the minds of the workers, they are befogging them; instead of dispelling petty-bourgeois illusions, they are instilling them; instead of freeing the people from bourgeois influence, they are strengthening that influence" (Lenin, The Dual Power [40], Selected Works Vol. 2, page 35).

Against those who said this work of denunciation was of "little practical use" Lenin argued "In reality it is most practical revolutionary work; for there is no advancing a revolution that has come to a standstill, that has choked itself with phrases, and that keeps ‘marking time'... because of the unreasoning trust of the people.

"Only by overcoming this unreasoning trust (and we can and should overcome it only ideologically, by comradely persuasion, by pointing to the lessons of experience) can we set our selves free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrase-mongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the masses in general, as well as their bold and determined initiative in the localities" (Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution [41], Selected Works, Vol. 2, page 42).

The defence of the proletariat's historical experience, of its class positions, means that one is in a minority inside the workers on many occasions. This is because "The masses vacillate between confidence in their old masters, the capitalists, and hatred for them; between confidence in the new class, which opens the road to a bright future and a continuing lack of confidence in its own world-historic role" (Lenin, ‘The Lessons of the Crisis', April 1917).

In order to help overcome these vacillations, "It is not a question of numbers, but of giving correct expression to the ideas and policies of the truly revolutionary proletariat" (Lenin ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution').

As with all authentic proletarian parties, the Bolsheviks were an intransigent part of the class movement. Bolshevik militants were the most active in the struggles, in the Soviets, in the factory councils, in meetings. The July Days made clear the party's unyielding commitment to the class.

As we saw in the first part of this article, at the end of June the situation was made intolerable by hunger, war, and chaos, exacerbated by the hidden policies of the bourgeoisie and by the fact that the Central Executive Committee, still in the hands of the social traitors, did nothing but sabotage the Soviets. The workers and soldiers, above all those in the capital, began to suspect the social traitors. Impatience, desperation, rage became stronger and stronger in the workers' ranks, pushing them towards taking power straight away. However, the conditions were not yet ripe:

- the workers and soldiers in the provinces were not at the same political level as their brothers in the capital;

- the peasants still had confidence in the Provisional Govern­ment;

- amongst the workers of the capital the dominant idea was not really to take power but to use an act of force to make the ‘Socialist' leaders "take real power". In other words, to ask the bourgeoisie's fifth column to take power in the workers' name.

In such conditions to launch a decisive confrontation with the bourgeoisie and its hirelings was to embark on an adventure that could have gravely compromised the destiny of the revolution. It was an action that could have led to a definitive defeat.

The Bolsheviks warned against such an action, but when they saw that the masses were not heeding their warning and carried on, they did not stand to one side and say "it's your funeral". The party participated in the action, trying to stop it being turned into a disastrous adventure, and trying to allow the workers to draw the maximum number of lessons from it, in order to prepare for the authentic moment of insurrection. It fought with all its might in order to ensure that the Petrograd Soviet, through serious discussion and by giving itself adequate leaders, would place itself in agreement with the political orientation that reigned in the masses.

However, the movement was unsuccessful and suffered a defeat. The bourgeoisie and its Menshevik and Social Revolu­tionary acolytes launched a brutal repression against the workers, and above all the Bolsheviks. The proletariat paid a heavy price: arrests, executions, exile... Nevertheless, the sacrifice decisively helped the class to limit the effects of the defeat it suffered and to pose the question of insurrection in a more conscious and organised way, in better conditions.

The party's commitment to the class allowed it, throughout August, once the worst moments of the bourgeoisie's reaction were over, to complete the party/class synthesis which was indispensable for the triumph of the revolution: "During the February overturn all the many preceding years' work of the Bolsheviks came to fruition, and progressive workers educated by the party found their place in the struggle, but there was still no direct leadership from the party. In the April events the slogans of the party manifested their dynamic force, but the movement itself developed independently. In June the enormous influence of the party revealed itself, but the masses were still functioning within the limits of a demonstration officially summoned by the enemy. Only in July did the Bolshevik Party, feeling the pressure of the masses, come out into the street against all the other parties, and not only with its slogans, but with its organised leadership, determine the fundamental character of the movement. The value of a close-knit vanguard was first fully manifested in the July Days, when the party - at great cost - defended the proletariat from defeat, and safeguarded its own future revolution" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol. 2, ‘Could the Bolsheviks have seized the Power in July?', page 91).

The insurrection carried out by the soviets

The situation of dual power which dominated the whole period from February to October was an unstable and dangerous time. Its excessive prolongation, due to neither class being able to impose itself, was above all damaging for the proletariat: if the impotence and chaos that marked this period accentuated the unpopularity of the ruling class, it at the same time exhausted and disorientated the working masses. They were getting drained in sterile struggles and all this began to alienate the sympathies of the intermediate classes towards the proletariat. This, therefore, demanded the taking of power through the insurrection to decant and decide the situation: "either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, breaking all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it will quite soon be thrown backwards behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by the counter-revolution" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution [42]).

Insurrection is an art. It has to be carried out at a precise moment in the evolution of the revolutionary situation, neither too soon, which would cause it to fail, nor too late, which would mean an opportunity being missed, leaving the revolutionary movement to become a disintegrating victim of the counter­revolution.

At the beginning of September the bourgeoisie, through Kornilov, tried to carry out a coup - the signal for the bourgeoi­sie's final offensive to overthrow the Soviets and to fully restore its power.

The proletariat, with the massive cooperation of the soldiers, thwarted the bourgeoisie's plan and at the same time accelerated the decomposition of the army: soldiers in numerous regiments pronounced themselves in favour of the expulsion of officers and of the organisation of soldiers' councils - in short, they came out on the side of the revolution.

As we have previously seen, the renewal of the Soviets from the middle of August was clearly changing the balance of forces in favour of the proletariat. The defeat of the Kornilov coup accelerated this process.

From the middle of September a tide of resolutions calling for the taking of power flooded in from the local and regional Soviets (Kronstadt, Ekaterinoslav etc). The Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region held on the 11-13th of October openly called for the insurrection. In Minsk the Regional Congress of Soviets decided to support the insurrection and to send troops of soldiers loyal to the revolution. On the 12th "Workers of one of the most revolutionary factories of the capital (the old Parviainen) made the following answer to the attacks of the bourgeoisie: "We declare that we will go into the street when we deem it advisable. We are not afraid of the approaching struggle, and we confi­dently believe that we will come off victorious" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 3, ‘The Military Revolutionary Committee', page 91). On the 17th October the Petrograd Soldiers' Soviet decided that "The

Petrograd garrison no longer recognises the Provisional Government. Our government is the Petrograd Soviet. We will only carry out the orders of the Petrograd Soviet issued through its Military Revolutionary Committee" (J Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World [43]). The Vyborg district Soviet called a demonstration in support of this resolution, which sailors joined in. A Moscow Liberal paper - quoted by Trotsky - described the atmosphere in the city thus: "In the districts, in the factories of Petrograd, Novsld, Obujov and Putilov, Bolshevik agitation for the insurrec­tion has reached its highest level. The animated state of the workers is such that they are disposed to carry out demonstrations at any time".

The increase of peasants' revolts in September constituted another element in the maturation of the necessary conditions for the insurrection: "It would be sheer treachery to the peasants to allow the peasant revolts to be suppressed when we control the Soviets of both capitals. It would be to lose, and justly lose every ounce of the peasants' confidence. In the eyes of the peasants we would be putting ourselves on a level with the Lieberdans and other scoundrels" (Lenin, ‘The Crisis Has Matured', SW Vol. 2, page 348).

However, the international situation was the key factor for the revolution. Lenin made this clear in his letter to the Bolshevik comrades attending the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region (8-10-17): "Our revolution is passing through a highly critical period. This crisis coincides with the great crisis - the growth of the world socialist revolution and the struggle waged against it by world imperialism. A gigantic task is being presented to the responsible leaders of our party, and failure to perform it will involve the danger of a complete collapse of the internation­alist proletarian movement. The situation is such that, in truth, delay would be fatal" (Lenin, SW, vol. 2, page 395). In another letter (1.10.17) Lenin made it clear that "The Bolsheviks have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets, they must take power at once. By so doing they will save the world revolution (for otherwise there is danger of a deal between the imperialists of all countries, who, after the shootings in Germany, will be more accommodating to each other and will unite against us), the Russian revolution (otherwise a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are) and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at the front" (Lenin, SW, vol. 2, page 391).

This understanding of the international responsibility of the Russian proletariat was not confined to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, many sectors of workers recognised it:

- on the 1st of May 1917, "throughout Russia, side by side with soldiers, prisoners of war were taking part in the processions under the same banners, sometimes singing the same song in different voices ... The Kadet minister Shingarev, during one of the Conferences with the trench delegates, defended the order of Guchkov against ‘unnecessary indulgence' towards prisoners of war... this remark did not meet with the slightest sympathy. The Conference decisively expressed itself in favour of relieving the conditions of the prisoners of war" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol. 2, pages 313, 269);

- "A soldier from the Romanian front, thin, tragical, and fierce cried: "comrades! we are starving at the front, we are stiff from cold. We are dying for no reason. I ask the American comrades to carry word to America that the Russians will never give up their revolution until they die. We will hold the front with all our strength until the peoples of the world rise up and help us! Tell the American workers to rise and fight for the social revolution" (J Reed, op cit, page 52).

The Kerensky government intended to disperse the most revolutionary regiments of Petrograd, Moscow, Vladimir, Reval etc. to the front or to remote regions in order to behead the struggle. At the same time, the Liberal and Menshevik press launched a campaign of calumnies against the soldiers, accusing them of "smugness" of "not giving their lives for the Motherland" etc. The workers of the capital responded immediately: numerous factory assemblies supported the soldiers, called for "all power to the Soviets" and passed resolutions calling for the arming of the workers.

In this atmosphere, the meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on the 9th of October decided to create a Military Revolutionary Committee with the initial aim of controlling the government. However, it was soon transformed into the centre for the organisation of the insurrection. It regrouped representatives of the Petrograd Soviet, the Sailors' Soviet, the Finlandia region Soviet, the railway union, the congress of factory councils and the Red Guard.

The latter was a workers' body that was "formed for the first time during the 1905 revolution and was reborn during the March days of 1917, when there was a necessity for a force to maintain order in the city. In this period the Red Guard were armed and the Provisional Governments efforts to disarm them came to nothing. In each crisis that arose during the course of the revolution, detachments of the Red Guards appeared in the streets. They had no military training or organisation, but were overflowing with revolutionary enthusiasm" (J Reed, op cit).

On the foundations of this regroupment of class forces, the Military Revolutionary Committee (from now on referred to as the RMC) convoked a conference of regimental committees which on the 18th of October openly discussed the question of the insurrection. The majority of the committees, apart from 2 which were against and 2 that declared themselves neutral (there were another 5 regiments which did not agree with the Conference), pronounced in favour of the insurrection. Similarly the Confer­ence passed a resolution in favour of the arming of the workers. This resolution was already being put into practice: en masse the workers went to the state arsenals and demand all the arms. When the government prohibited the handing over of arms, the workers and employees of the Peter and Paul Fortress (a reactionary bastion) decided to place themselves at the disposal of the RMC, and along with other arsenals organised the distribution of arms to the workers.

On the 21st of October the Conference of regimental commit­tees adopted the following Resolution: "1) The garrison of Petrograd and its environs promises the RMC its full support in all its actions. 2) The garrison appeals to the Cossacks: we invite you to our meeting to-morrow. You are welcome, brother Cossacks! 3) The All-Russian Congress of Soviets must take power. The garrison promises to put all its forces at the disposal of the Congress. Rely upon us, authorised representatives of the power of the soldiers, workers and peasants, you can count on us. We are all at our posts to conquer or die" (Trotsky, op cit, vol. 3, page 108-109).

Here we have the characteristic features of a workers' insurrec­tion: the creative initiative of the masses, straight forward and showing admirable organisation; discussions and debates which give rise to resolutions that synthesise the level of consciousness that the masses have reached; reliance on persuasion and convic­tion, as in the call to the Cossacks to abandon the government gang or the passionate and dramatic meeting of the soldiers of the Peter and Paul Fortress which took place on the 23rd of October, where it was decided to obey no one but the RMC. These characteristic features are, above all, expressions of a movement for the emancipation of humanity, of the direct, passionate, creative initiative and leadership of the exploited masses.

The "Soviet day" on the 22nd of October, which was called by the Petrograd Soviet, definitively sealed the insurrection: in all the districts and factories meetings and assemblies took place all day, which overwhelmingly agreed on the slogans "down with Kerensky" and "all power to the Soviets". This was a gigantic act where workers, employees, soldiers, many Cossacks, women, and children openly united in their commitment to the insurrec­tion.

It is not possible within the outline of this article to recount all of the details (we recommend reading Trotsky's and Reed's books, which we have mentioned). What we want to make clear is the massive, open and collective nature of the insurrection "The insurrection was thus set for a fixed date, the 25th of October. And this was not agreed on in some secret session, but openly and publicly, and the revolution was victoriously carried out on the 25th of October precisely (6th of November), as had been established beforehand. World history has known a great many revolts and revolutions, but could one find another insurrection by the oppressed class that had been openly and publicly set for a precise date and which had been triumphantly carried out on the day nominated beforehand. For this reason and various others, the November Revolution is unique and without comparison" (Trotsky, The November Revolution, 1919).

The Bolsheviks had clearly posed the question of the insurrec­tion in the workers' and soldiers' assemblies from September; they occupied the most combative and decisive positions in the RMC and the Red Guard; it was they who swung the barracks where there were doubts or which were for the Provisional Government. This was done through convincing the soldiers: Trotsky's speech was crucial in bringing over the soldiers of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They also untiringly denounced the manoeuvres, accusations and traps of the Mensheviks, and struggled for the calling of the 2nd Congress of Soviets against the sabotage of the social traitors.

Nevertheless, it was not the Bolsheviks, but the whole prole­tariat of Petrograd who decided on and carried out the insurrec­tion. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had repeatedly tried to delay the holding of the 2nd Congress of Soviets. It was through the pressure of the masses, the insistence of the Bolshe­viks, the sending of thousands of telegrams from the local Soviets demanding its convocation, that finally obliged the CEC - the lair of the social traitors - to call it for the 25th.

"After the revolution of the 25th of October, the Mensheviks, and above all Martov, talked a lot about the seizure of power behind the Soviets' and workers' backs. It is hard to imagine a more shameless deformation of the facts. When the Soviets - in session - decided by a majority to call the 2nd Congress on the 25th of October, the Mensheviks said "you have decided the Revolution"; when in the Petrograd Soviet, by an overwhelming majority, we decided to refuse to allow the dispersal of the regiments away from the capital, the Mensheviks said: "This is the beginning of the revolution", when in the Petrograd Soviet we created the RMC the Mensheviks made it clear that "this is the organism of the armed insurrection". But when the insurrection, which had been planned, created and "discovered" beforehand by this organ, exploded on the decisive day, the same Mensheviks cried: "a plot by conspirators has provoked a revolution behind the workers' backs!"" (Trotsky, ibid).

The proletariat provided itself with the means of force - the general arming of the workers, the formation of the RMC, the insurrection - in order that the Congress of Soviets could effectively take power. If the Congress of Soviets had decided "to take power" without first carrying out these measures such a decision would have been an empty gesture easily ripped apart by the revolution's enemies. It is not possible to see the insurrection as an isolated formal act: it has to be seen within the overall dynamic of the class and, concretely, within a process on the international level where the conditions for the revolution were developing, and within Russia where innumerable local Soviets were calling for the effective taking of power: the Petrograd, Moscow, Tula, the Urals, Siberia, Jukov Soviets simultaneously carried out the triumphant insurrection.

The Congress of Soviets took the definitive decision, com­pletely confirming the validity of the initiative of the proletariat in Petrograd: "Based upon the will of the great majority of workers, soldiers, and peasants, based upon the triumphant uprising of the Petrograd working men and soldiers, the congress as­sumes power ... The congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of workers', soldiers' and peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order". (J Reed, op cit)

Adalen, 5/10/92.

[1] We have never denied the errors the Bolshevik Party committed, nor its degeneration and transformation into the spinal column of the odious Stalinist dictatorship (we will deal with this process in future articles of this series). The role of the Bolshevik Party, as well as an implacable critique of its errors and its degeneration, have been made in various articles in our International Review: ‘The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution' and ‘The Lessons of Kronstadt' (no. 3); ‘Defence Of The Proletarian Nature of The October Revolution' (nos. 12 and 13). The essential reason for the degeneration of proletarian political organisations and parties is due to the weight of bourgeois ideology in their ranks, a weight which constantly creates tendencies towards opportunism and centrism (see the ‘Resolution on Centrism and Opportunism' in International Review no 44).