This series has now reached the period that followed the death of Karl Marx in 1883; coincidentally, the bulk of the material that will be examined in the following two articles is located in the years between Marx’s death and the passing of Engels, which took place 100 years ago this year. The immensity of Marx’s contribution to the scientific understanding of communism has meant that a considerable part of this series has been devoted to the work of this one great figure in the workers’ movement. But just as Marx did not invent communism (see the second article in this series “How the proletariat won Marx to communism”, in International Review no.69), the communist movement did not cease elaborating and clarifying its historic goals once Marx had died. This task was taken on by the Social Democratic or Socialist parties which began to become a considerable force in the last two decades of the 19th century; Marx’s lifelong friend and comrade Engels naturally played a key role in the continuation of this work. As we shall see, he was not alone in this; but we can certainly offer Engels no more fitting tribute than to show the importance of his own share in defining the communist project of the working class.

There are many currents today who think that to claim the mantle of revolutionary communism means throwing off the garments of Social Democracy - disowning the whole period from Marx’s death until World War I (at least) as a kind of Dark Age, or an evolutionary blind alley in the road that leads from Marx to themselves. Councilists, modernists, anarcho-Bordigists like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste and a host of other swamp-inhabiting sub-species insist that far from adding anything to our understanding of the communist revolution, the Socialist parties were no more than instruments for integrating the proletariat into bourgeois society. They “prove” this in the main by pointing to Social Democracy’s parliamentary and trade union activities, but at the same time they usually inform us that the very goal of these parties - the society which they most frequently referred to as “socialism” - was in reality no more than a form of state capitalism. In short, the parties which call themselves “socialist” today - Blair’s Labour party, Mitterand’s or Gonzales’ Socialist parties - are indeed the legitimate heirs of the Social Democratic parties of the 1880s, 90s and 1900s.

For some of these “anti-social-democratic” currents, authentic communism was only restored by the likes of Lenin and Luxemburg after World War I, the definitive death of the Second International and the betrayal of its parties. Others, more “radical”, have discovered that the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists were themselves no more than left social democrats: the first true revolutionaries of the 20th century were thus the left communists of the 20s and 30s. But since there is a direct line of continuity between the social democratic lefts (ie not only Lenin and Luxemburg, but also Pannekoek, Gorter, Bordiga and others) and the later communist left, our ultra-radicals often play safe by identifying none but themselves as the century’s first real communists. What’s more, this remorseless retrospective radicalism is applied to the precursors of Social Democracy as well: initially to Engels who, we are told, never really grasped Marx’s method and certainly became a bit of an old reformist in later life; then, not infrequently, the axe falls on Marx himself, with his tedious insistence on “bourgeois” notions like science, or historical progress and decline. By a strange coincidence, the final discovery is often this: that the true revolutionary tradition lies with the fiery insurrectionism of the Luddites or ... Mikhail Bakunin.

The ICC has already devoted an entire article to arguments of this type in International Review no.50, in our series in defence of the notion of capitalist decadence. We don’t intend to repeat all our counter-arguments here. Suffice it to say for now that the “method” behind such arguments is precisely that of ahistorical, idealist, moralising anarchism. For anarchism, consciousness is not seen as the product of a collective and historically evolving movement, so that the real lines of continuity and discontinuity in the real movement of the working class are of no interest to it. Thus, revolutionary ideas cease to be the product of a revolutionary class and its organisations, but become, in essence, the brainwave of brilliant individuals or circles of initiates. Hence the pathetic inability of the anti-social-democrats to see that today’s revolutionary groups and concepts have not sprung fully formed like Athene from the brow of Zeus, but are the organic descendants of a long process of gestation, of a whole series of struggles within the workers’ movement: the struggle to form the Communist League against the vestiges of utopianism and sectarianism; the struggle of the marxist tendency in the First International against “state socialism” on the one hand and anarchism on the other; the struggle to form the Second International on a marxist basis and the later struggle of the lefts to keep it on a marxist basis against the development of revisionism and centrism; the struggle of these same lefts to form the Third International after the death of the Second, and the struggle of the left fractions against the degeneration of the Communist International in the reflux of the post-war revolutionary wave; the struggle of these fractions to preserve communist principles and develop communist theory during the dark years of the counter-revolution; the struggle for the reappropriation of communist positions with the historical resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the 1960s. And indeed the central theme of this series has been that our very understanding of the means and goals of the communist revolution would not exist without these struggles.

But an understanding of what communist society is, and the means to reach it, cannot exist in a vacuum, in the heads of privileged individuals. It is developed and defended above all in the collective organisations of the working class: and the struggles listed above were nothing if not struggles for the revolutionary organisation, struggles for the party. The communist consciousness of the present would not exist without the chain of proletarian political organisations that connects us to the very beginnings of the workers’ movement.

For anarchists, by contrast, the struggle that connects them to the past is a struggle against the party, since anarchist ideology reflects the petty bourgeoisie’s despairing resistance against the precious organisational acquisitions of the working class. The marxist combat against the destructive actions of the Bakuninists in the First International took a heavy toll on the latter. But the fact that this combat was a historical, if not an immediate, success, was confirmed by the formation of the Social Democratic parties and the Second International on a more advanced basis than the International Workingmen’s Association. Whereas the latter was a heterogeneous collection of different political tendencies, the Socialist parties were explicitly founded on the basis of marxism; whereas the First International combined political tasks with those of the unitary organisations of the class, the parties of the Second International were quite distinct from the unitary organisations of the class of that time - the trade unions. All this is why, for all their criticisms of its programmatic weaknesses, the main Social Democratic party of the time, the German SPD, received the enthusiastic support of Marx and Engels.

We will not go further into the specific question of organisation here, although, precisely because it is so fundamental, such a sine qua non for any kind of revolutionary activity, it will inevitably reappear in the next phase of this study as it has in previous phases. Nor can we spend much time answering the arguments of the anti-social-democrats about the trade union and parliamentary questions, although we will be compelled to return to the latter in particular later on. The one thing that should be said here is that there is no common ground between the blanket condemnations of our ultra-radicals and the genuine criticisms that have to be made of the practises and theories of the Socialist parties. Whereas the latter come from inside the same movement, the former come from a totally divergent starting point. Thus, the anti-social-democrats will not listen to the marxist argument that trade union and parliamentary activities did have a sense for the working class last century, when capitalism was still in the ascendant and could still grant meaningful reforms, but lost this sense and became anti-working class in the period of decadence, when the proletarian revolution is on the historical agenda. This argument is rejected because the notion of decadence is rejected; the notion of decadence, in an increasing number of cases, is rejected, because it implies that capitalism was once ascendant; and this is rejected because it implies some concession to the notion of historical progress, which in the case of “consistent” anti-decadentists like the GCI or Wildcat, is an utterly bourgeois notion. But by now it has become clear that these hyper-ultra radicals have rejected any notion of historical materialism and have again lined up with the anarchists, for whom the social revolution has been possible for as long as there has been any suffering in the world.

The central aim of the next phase in this study, in order to maintain its continuity with the previous articles in the series, must be to show that the “society of the future” defined by the Socialist parties was indeed a communist society; that despite Marx’s death, the communist vision did not disappear or stagnate during this period, but advanced and deepened. It is only on this basis that we can examine the limitations of this vision and the weaknesses of these parties - particularly when it came to elaborating the “road to power”, the way the working class would arrive at the communist revolution.

Engels’ definition of socialism

In a previous article in this series (International Review no.78, “Communism against state socialism’), we saw that Marx and Engels were extremely critical of the programmatic bases of he SPD, formed in 1875 through the fusion of Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s marxist fraction with the Lassalean General Workers Association. Even the name of the new party irritated them: “Social Democratic” being a completely inadequate term for a party “whose economic programme is not just completely socialist, but directly communist, and whose final goal is the disappearance of the state, and thus also of democracy” (Engels, 1875). More significantly, Marx wrote his thorough-going Critique of the Gotha Programme to highlight the SPD’s shallow grasp of what the communist transformation actually entailed, showing that the German marxists had made altogether too many concessions to the Lassalean “state socialist” ideology. Engels did not water down these criticisms in later years. Indeed, his dissatisfaction with the SPD’s Erfurt Programme of 1891 prompted him to push through the publication of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. The latter had originally been “blocked” by Liebknecht, and Marx and Engels had not pursued the matter for fear of breaking the unity of the new party. But Engels obviously felt that the criticisms of the old programme were still relevant to the new one. We shall return to the question of the Erfurt programme later on, when we pay particular attention to the Social Democrats’ attitude to parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy.

Nevertheless, Engels’ writings on socialism in this period provide the clearest proof that, in the final analysis, the programme of Social Democracy was indeed “directly communist”. Engels’ most important theoretical work during this time was Anti-Dühring, first written in 1878 but revised, republished and translated several times during the 1880s and 90s. A section of the book was also published as a popular pamphlet in 1892, entitled Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; and this was without doubt one of the most widely read and influential marxist works of the day. And of course, Anti-Dühring was eminently a “party” text, since it was written in response to the grandiose claims of the German academic Dr Dühring that he had founded a complete “socialist system” far in advance of any hitherto existing theory of socialism, from the utopians to Marx himself. In particular, Marx and Engels had been concerned that “Dr Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It thus became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle whether we liked it or not” (Introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1892). The first motivation of the text was thus to defend the unity of the party against the destructive effects of sectarianism. This led Engels to dwell at great length on Duhring’s pretentious “discoveries” in the fields of science, philosophy and history, defending the historical materialist method against Duhring’s new brew of stale idealism and vulgar materialism. At the same time, and particularly in the section that appeared as a separate pamphlet, Engels was also obliged to reaffirm a fundamental postulate of the Communist Manifesto: that socialist or communist ideas were not the invention of “would-be universal reformers” like professor Dühring, but were the product of a real historical movement, the movement of the proletariat. Dühring considered himself to be far above this prosaic movement of the masses; but in fact his “system” was an utter regression vis-à-vis the scientific socialism developed by Marx; indeed, even compared to utopians like Fourier, for whom Dühring had only disdain but who was greatly respected by Marx and Engels, Dühring was an intellectual dwarf.

Most pertinent to the context of this study is the fact that, against Duhring’s false vision of a “socialism” operating on the basis of commodity exchange, ie of the existing relations of production, Engels was led to reaffirm certain communist fundamentals, in particular:

- that capitalist commodity relations, once a factor of unprecedented material progress, could ultimately only lead bourgeois society into insoluble contradictions, crises and self-destruction: “the mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange ... On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social productive forces” (Anti-Dühring, Part III, Theoretical, Moscow edition, first printed in 1947, p327-8);

- that the take over of the means of production by the capitalist state was the bourgeoisie’s response to this situation, but not its solution. There could be no question of confusing this bourgeois statification with communist socialisation: “The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head” (ibid, p330-1). Communists today are understandably fond of using this prophetic passage against all the modern varieties of state “socialism” - in fact, state capitalism - propagated today by those who claim to be the heirs of the 19th century workers’ movement - Labourites, Stalinists, Trotskyists, with their endless song and dance about the progressive nature of nationalisations and the need to “defend Clause 4” as the Labour Party’s socialist promise. Engels’ words show that clarity on this question existed in the workers movement a hundred years ago and more;

 - that, against Duhring’s Prussian socialism where all citizens will be happy underneath a paternalistic state, the state has no place at all in a genuinely socialist society [1]: “As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society - the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society [2] - this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then withers away of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It withers away” (ibid, p333);

 - and, finally, against all attempts to manage the existing relations of production, socialism requires the abolition of commodity production: “With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” (ibid, p335-6). In this exalted passage, Engels is clearly looking ahead to a very advanced stage of the communist future. But it certainly shows, against all those who try to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels, that the “General” shared the “Moor’s” conviction that the highest imaginable goal of communism is to cast off the scourge of alienation and begin a truly human life, where man’s social and creative powers no longer turn against him, but serve his true needs and desires. 

But elsewhere in the same work, Engels returns from these “cosmic” reflections to a more earthly issue: the “ground principles of communist production and distribution” as the Dutch left was later to call them. After lambasting Duhring’s neo-Proudhonist fantasy of establishing “true value” and returning to the workers “the full value of what they produce”, Engels explains:

“From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time....Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required for their production, say, a thousand hours of labour in the oblique and meaningless way, stating that they have the value of a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour power. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted “value’” (ibid, “Distribution”, p 367)

This was Engels’ conception of socialist or communist society; but it was not his personal property. His position expressed all that was best in the Social Democratic parties, even if the latter contained elements and currents who did not see things so clearly.

To demonstrate that Engels’ views were not some individual exception, but the patrimony of a collective movement, we intend to examine the positions taken up by other figures in this movement who showed a particular preoccupation with the shape of the future society. And we do not think it accidental that the period we are considering is unusually rich in reflections about what a communist society might look like. We should recall that the 1880s and 1890s were the “swan song” of bourgeois society, the zenith of its imperial glory, the last phase of capitalist optimism before the darkling years that led up to the first world war. A period of tremendous economic and colonial conquests in which the last “uncivilised” areas of the globe were being opened up by the imperialist giants; a period too of rapid technological progress which saw the massive development of electricity, the coming of the telephone, the automobile and much else besides. It was a period in which painting pictures of the future became a stock in trade for numerous writers, scientists, historians ... and not a few out and out hucksters [3]. Although this dizzying bourgeois “progress” fascinated and turned the heads of many elements in the socialist movement, giving rise to the illusions of revisionism, the clearest elements in the movement, as we shall see shortly, were not taken in: they could see the storm clouds gathering in the distance. But while they did not lose their conviction that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would still be a necessity, they did begin to envisage the immense possibilities contained in the productive forces that capitalism had developed. They thus began to inquire into how these potentialities might be realised by socialist society in a more detailed manner than Marx or Engels had ever attempted - to the point indeed, where much of their work has been dismissed as “utopian”. This is a charge that we will consider carefully, but we can state forthwith that, even if there is some truth to the charge, it does not render all these reflections useless to us.

To be more specific, we intend to concentrate on three major figures in the socialist movement: August Bebel, William Morris, and Karl Kautsky. The latter we will look at in a future article, not at all because he is a lesser figure, but because his most important work was written in a slightly later period; and because he, more than the other two, raises the question of the means towards the social revolution. The first two, on the other hand, can be looked at mainly from the angle of determining how the late 19th century socialists defined the ultimate goals of their movement

The choice of these two is by no means arbitrary. Bebel, as we have seen, was a founding member of the SPD, a close associate of Marx and Engels for many years, and a figure of considerable authority in the international socialist movement. His best known political work, Woman and Socialism (first published in 1883, but substantially revised and developed over the next two decades) became one of the most influential documents of the workers’ movement in the late 19th century, not only because it dealt with the woman question, but above all because it contains a clear exposition of how things might operate in a socialist society, in all the main areas of life: not only the relation between the sexes, but also in the areas of work, of education, of the relationship between town and country ... Bebel’s book was an inspiration for hundreds of thousands of class conscious workers, eager to learn and to discuss how life could be lived in a truly human society. It is thus a very precise yardstick for measuring the Social Democratic movement’s understanding of its goals during this period.

William Morris is a far less well-known figure outside of Britain, but we still think it important to include some of his contributions on the question. A very “English” socialist, some marxists have been made wary of him by the fact that he is probably known more widely not as a socialist but as an artist and designer, as a poet and writer of heroic romances; Engels himself tended to dismiss him as a “sentimental socialist” and no doubt many comrades have, like Engels, been put off his book News from Nowhere (1890) not only because it approaches the question of communist society in the form of a “dream journey” to the future, but also by the tinge of mediaevalist nostalgia which hangs over this and much of his other work. But if William Morris began his criticism of bourgeois civilisation form  the point of view of an artist, he became a genuine disciple of marxism and gave the whole of his later life to the cause of the class war and to the building a of a socialist organisation in Britain; and it was on this basis that he was able to develop a particularly strong insight into the alienation of labour under capitalism, and was able to make a real contribution to showing how this alienation might be overcome.

Once again, Socialism against state capitalism

In the next article in this series, we will examine in greater depth the portraits of socialist society painted by Engels, Bebel and Morris, in particular the points they make about the more “social” aspects of the revolutionary transformation, such as the relations between men and women, and humanity’s interaction with the natural environment. But before doing that, it is necessary to add further proof that these mouthpieces of Social Democracy understood the fundamental characteristics of communist society, and that this understanding was in all essential features in accord with that of Marx and Engels.

The basic trick of the anti-social-democrats in their argument that social democracy was an instrument of capitalist recuperation from the start is to identify the Socialist parties with the reformist currents which arose within them. But these currents arose not as their organic product, but as a parasitic growth, nurtured by the noxious fumes of the surrounding bourgeois society. It is well known, for example, that the first thing the revisionist Bernstein “revised” was the marxist theory of crisis. Theorising the long period of capitalist “prosperity” at the end of the last century, revisionism declared crises to be a thing of the past and thus opened the door to the prospect of a gradual and peaceful transition to socialism. Later on in the history of the SPD, some of the former defenders of marxist “orthodoxy” on such questions, such as Kautsky, and Bebel himself, were indeed to make all kinds of concessions to these reformist perspectives. But at the time when Woman and Socialism was being written, this is what Bebel was saying: “the future of bourgeois society is threatened from all sides with grave dangers, and there is no way to escape them. Thus the crisis becomes permanent and international. It is a result of all the markets being overstocked with goods. And yet, still more could be produced; but the large majority of people suffer want in the necessaries of life because they have no income wherewith to satisfy their wants by purchase. They lack clothing, underwear, furniture, homes, food for the body and mind, and means of enjoyment, all of which they could consume in large quantities. But all that does not exist for them. Hundreds of thousands of workingmen are even thrown upon the sidewalk, and rendered wholly unable to consume because their labour power has become “superfluous” to the capitalists. Is it not obvious that our social system suffers of serious aliments? How could there be any “overproduction” when there is no lack of capacity to consume, ie of wants that crave satisfaction? Obviously, it is not production, in and of itself, that breeds these unhallowed conditions and contradictions: it is the system under which production is carried on, and the product is distributed” (Woman and Socialism, chapter VI, p252 of the 1904 English edition, reprinted as a Schocken paperback in 1971).

Far from repudiating the notion of capitalist crisis, Bebel here reaffirms that it is rooted in the basic contradictions of the system itself; furthermore, by introducing the concept of a “permanent” crisis, Bebel anticipates the onset of the historic decline of the system. And, like Engels who, shortly before his death, expressed his fears that the growth of militarism was dragging Europe towards a devastating war, Bebel also saw that the economic downfall of the system must bring about a military disaster:

“The political and military state of Europe has taken a development that cannot but end in a catastrophe, which will drag capitalist society down to its ruin. Having reached the height of its development, it produces conditions that end with rendering its own existence impossible; it digs its own grave; it slays itself with the identical means that itself, as the most revolutionary of all previous social systems, has called into life” (ibid, p 238).

It is precisely capitalism’s course towards catastrophe that makes the revolutionary overthrow of the system an absolute necessity:

“Accordingly, we suppose the arrival of a day when all the evils described will have reached such maturity that they will have become oppressingly sensible to the feeling as to the sight of the vast majority, to the extent of no longer being bearable; whereupon a general irresistible desire for radical change will seize society, and then the quickest will be regarded as the most effective remedy” (ibid, p 271).

Bebel also echoes Engels in making it clear that the statification of the economy by the existing regime is not the answer to the crisis of the system, still less a step towards socialism:

“ ... these institutions (telegraph, railway, post office, etc), administered by the state, are not socialist institutions, as they are mistakenly taken for. They are business plants that are exploited as capitalistically as if they were in private hands ... the socialist guards against allowing the present state ownership being regarded as socialism, as the realisation of socialist aspirations” (ibid, chap VII, p299).

William Morris wrote many diatribes against the encroaching tendencies towards “state socialism”, which in Britain were represented in particular by the reformist Fabian Society of Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, HG Wells and others. And News from Nowhere was written as a riposte to Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, which also purported to describe a socialist future, but one which came about quite pacifically, as the huge capitalist trusts evolved into “socialist” bodies; not surprisingly, this was a “socialism” where every detail of the individual’s life was planned by an omnipotent bureaucracy; in News from Nowhere, by contrast, the great revolution (set in 1952 ...) came about as the workers’ reaction against a long period of “state socialism”, when the latter was no longer able to stave off the contradictions of the system.

Against the apostles of “state socialism”, Bebel and Morris affirmed the basic tenet of marxism that socialism is a society without a state:

“The state is, accordingly, the inevitably necessary organisation of a social order that rests upon class rule. The moment class antagonisms fall through the abolition of private property, the state loses both the necessity and possibility for its existence...” (Woman and Socialism, chap VII, p 273). The old state machine, for Bebel, was to be replaced by a system of popular self-administration obviously modelled upon the Paris Commune:

“As in primitive society, all members of the community who are of age participate in the elections, without distinction of sex, and have a voice in the choice of persons who are to be entrusted with the administration. At the head of all the local administrations stands the central administration - as will be noted, not a Government, with power to rule, but an executive college of administrative functions. Whether the central administration shall be chosen directly by popular vote or appointed by the local administration is immaterial. These questions will not then have the importance they have today; the question is the no longer one of filling posts that bestow special honour, or that vest the incumbent with greater power and influence, or that yield larger incomes; it is then a question of filling positions of trust, for which the fittest, whether male or female, are taken; and these may be recalled or re-elected as circumstances may demand, or the electors may deem preferable. All posts are for given terms. The incumbents are, accordingly, clothed with no special “official qualities’; the feature of continuity of office is absent, likewise a hierarchical order of promotion” (ibid, p276). Similarly, in News from Nowhere, Morris envisions a society operating from a basis of local assemblies where all debate has the aim of achieving unanimity, but which uses the principle of majority rule where this cannot be reached. All this was diametrically opposed to the paternalistic conceptions of the Fabians and other “state socialists”, who, in their dotage, were horrified by the direct democracy of the October 1917 revolution, but found Stalin’s way of doing things quite to their taste: “we have seen the future, and it works”, as the Webbs put it after their trip to a Russia where the counter-revolution had done its work on all that troublesome “rule from below” nonsense.

Equally in accord with Engels’ definition of the new society, both Morris and Bebel affirm that socialism means the end of commodity production. Much of the humour  in News from Nowhere consists in the visitor from the bad old days getting used to a society where neither goods nor labour have any “value”. Bebel puts it as follows: “Socialist society produces not “merchandise” in order to “buy” and to “sell’; it produces necessaries of life, that are used, consumed, and otherwise have no object. In socialist society, accordingly, the capacity to consume is not bounded, as in bourgeois society, by the individual’s capacity to buy; it is bounded by the collective capacity to produce. If labour and instruments of labour are in existence, all wants can be satisfied; the social capacity to consume is bounded only by the satisfaction of the consumers” (Woman and Socialism, chap VII, p 291).

And Bebel goes on to say that “there being no “merchandise” in socialist society, neither can there be any “money””(ibid); elsewhere, he talks about the system of labour time vouchers as a medium of distribution. This expresses a definite weakness in the way that Bebel presents the future society, making little or no distinction between the fully developed communist society and the transitional period towards it: for Marx, (and also for Morris, cf his notes to the Socialist League Manifesto, 1885), labour time vouchers were simply a transitional form towards completely free distribution, and carried certain of the scars of bourgeois society with them (see “Communism against state socialism”, International Review no.78). The full significance of this theoretical weakness will be examined in another article. What is important here is to establish that the Social Democratic movement was basically clear about its overall goals, even if the means to attain them often caused it much deeper problems.

“Revolutionary International Socialism”

In “Communism against state socialism” we noted that, in certain passages, even Marx and Engels made concessions to the idea that communism could, at least for a while, exist within the boundaries of a nation state. But such confusions were not hardened into a theory of “national” socialism; the overwhelming thrust of their thought is towards demonstrating that both the proletarian revolution itself, and the construction of communism, are only possible on an international scale.

The same can be said for the Socialist parties in the period we are considering. Even though a party like the SPD was weakened from the start by a programme which made far too many concessions in the direction of a “national” road to socialism, and even though such conceptions were to be theorised, with fatal consequences, as the Socialist parties became a more “respectable” part of national political life, the writings of Bebel and Morris are informed by an essentially international, and internationalist, vision of socialism:

“The new social system will then rear itself upon an international basis. The peoples will fraternise; they will reach one another the hand, and they will endeavour to gradually extend the new conditions over all the races of the earth” (Woman and Socialism, “Internationality”, p 352).

The Manifesto of Morris’ Socialist League, written in 1885, introduces the organisation as “advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is we seek a change in the basis of society - a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities” (published in EP Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, 1955). The Manifesto goes on to stress that “complete Revolutionary Socialism ... can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation. For us neither geographical boundaries, political history, race nor creed makes rivals or enemies; for us there are no nations, but only varied masses of workers and friends, whose mutual sympathies are checked or perverted by groups of masters and fleecers whose interest it is to stir up rivalries and hatreds between the dwellers in different lands”.

In an article published in The Commonweal, the League’s paper, in 1887, Morris links this international perspective with the question of production for use; in socialist society “all civilised [4] nations would form one great community, agreeing together as to the kind and amount of production and distribution needed; working at such and such production where it could be best produced; avoiding waste by all means. Please to think of the amount of waste which they would avoid, how much such a revolution would add to the wealth of the world!” (“How we live and how we might live”, republished in The Political Writings of William Morris, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973). Production for use can only be established when the world market has been replaced by a global community. It is possible to find passages where all the great socialist militants “forget” this. But these lapses did not express the real dynamic of their thought.

Furthermore, this international vision was not restricted to the distant revolutionary future; as can be seen from the passage from the Socialist League Manifesto, the vision also demanded an active opposition to the bourgeoisie’s present-day efforts to stir up national rivalries between workers. It demanded above all a concrete and intransigent attitude to inter-capitalist war.

For Marx and Engels, the internationalist position taken up by Bebel and Liebknecht during the Franco-Prussian war was the proof of their socialist credentials and convinced them of the  need to persevere with the German comrades for all their theoretical shortcomings. Similarly, one of the reasons why Engels originally supported the group that was to form the Socialist League in their split with Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation in 1884 was the former’s principled opposition to Hyndman’s “Jingo socialism”, which approved of British imperialism’s colonial conquests and massacres under the pretext that they were bringing civilisation to the “barbarous” and “savage” peoples. And as the threat grew that the great imperialist powers would soon be fighting each other directly, Morris and the League took a clear internationalist position on the question of war:

“If war really becomes imminent our duties as socialists are clear enough, and do not differ from those we have to act on ordinarily. To further the spread of international feeling between the workers by all means possible; to point out to our own workmen that foreign competition and rivalry, or commercial war, culminating at last in open war, are necessities of the plundering classes, and that the race and commercial quarrels of these classes only concern us so far as we can use them as opportunities for fostering discontent and revolution; that the interests of the workmen are the same in all countries and they can never really be enemies of each other; that the men of our labouring classes, therefore, should turn a deaf ear to the recruiting sergeant, and refuse to allow themselves to be dressed up in red and taught to form a part of the modern killing machine for the honour and glory of a country in which they have only a dog’s share of many kicks and few halfpence - all this we have to preach always, though in the event of imminent war we may have to preach it more emphatically” (Commonweal, January 1, 1887, cited in EP Thompson, p 684).

There is no continuity whatever between such a declaration and the outpourings of the social-chauvinists who, in 1914, themselves became the recruiting sergeants of the bourgeoisie. Between one and the other there is a class rupture, a betrayal of the working class and its communist mission, which had been defended for three decades by the Socialist parties and the Second International.

CDW
 

To listen to the media, you would think that reason had triumphed at last: the action of the great powers, led by the United States, has made it possible to begin the resolution of the bloodiest conflict Europe has seen since 1945. The Dayton accord means the return of peace in ex- Yugoslavia. Similarly, optimism is uppermost in the Middle East, where Rabin's assassination has only strengthened the determination of the "doves" and their American mentor to take the "peace process" to its conclusion. And Washington's final Christmas present has been the hope of overcoming the oldest conflict in Europe, between the British state and the Republicans in Northern Ireland.

These are cynical lies. When they hear them, workers would do well to remember what the bourgeoisie was promising in 1989, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc: a "new world order", and a "new era of peace". We know what really happened: the Gulf War, the war in Yugoslavia, in Somalia, Rwanda, etc. Today, even less than five years ago, is no era of peace but of an unrestrained war of all against all that characterizes the relations between the planet's major imperialist powers.

The great imperialist powers are not, as the bourgeoisie's hired media hacks present them, "doves of peace" or firemen struggling to put out the fires of war. On the contrary, from Yugoslavia to Rwanda, via Algeria and the Middle East, they are the worst of the warmongers. Through the medium of client cliques or countries, they are waging a war which is no less ferocious for being partly hidden. The famous Dayton accords are only a moment in the war between the world's greatest power and its ex-allies of the defunct American bloc.

Behind the Dayton accords, the success of an American counter-offensive

The imposition of the Dayton accords, and the 30,000 heavily armed troops sent to ex-Yugoslavia, are aimed not at the Serbs or Croats, but at the United States' one-time European allies, who have become the main opponents of its world supremacy: France, Britain, and Germany, The USA's aim is not peace, but the reimposition of its own domination. In the same way, if the French, British and German bourgeoisies are sending their own contingents to ex-Yugoslavia, this is not to impose peace on the warring parties there or to defend the martyred population of Sarajevo, but to defend their own imperialist interests. Under cover of humanitarian action and the so-called peace forces of UNPROFOR, Paris, London and Bonn (the latter more discreetly, but with formidable efficacy) have not ceased to stir up the war by encouraging the action of their proteges. Under the aegis of NATO, I-For (the Implementation Force) will continue the same criminal activity, as we can see from the numbers of men and equipment that have been committed. The territory of ex-Yugoslavia will continue to be the main battle-field for the great imperialist powers in Europe.

The Americans' determination to dominate the situation in ex-Yugoslavia is as great as the strategic stakes involved in this country, placed at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. But more important still, as Clinton has emphasized in speeches justifying the dispatch of US troops, and with the support of the whole American bourgeoisie, is "the assertion of American world leadership". And so that nobody should be in any doubt as to Washington's determination to reach its objective, he stated explicitly that he would "accept entire responsibility for any losses that might be suffered by American soldiers". This openly warlike language, and the firmness which contrasts so sharply with the American bourgeoisie's previous hesitations over ex-Yugoslavia, is explained by the extent of the opposition to US domination by Japan, Germany, and France, but also - a historic change - by its oldest and most faithful ally, Great Britain. Reduced to the role of a mere challenger in ex-Yugoslavia, the USA had to strike a strong blow to put a stop to the most serious contestation of its world superiority since 1945.

We have dealt in detail in International Review no.83 with the strategy set in motion in ex-Yugoslavia; we will not return to it here, but will consider the results of the prime world power's counter-offensive. This has been largely successful. Until now, the British and French bourgeoisie's have occupied the terrain almost alone, which gave them a wide margin of maneuver against their imperialist rivals, and culminated in the creation of the RRF (Rapid Reaction Force). Now that the UN has been pushed aside, to make way for an I-For under the aegis of NATO and so under direct American command, they will have to "coexist" with a powerful American contingent, and will have to submit, willy-nilly, to the dictates of Washington. Even the Dayton negotiations were completely circumscribed by the balance of forces that the Americans imposed on their European "allies". "According to a French source, these negotiations took place in an "intolerable" euro-american atmosphere. According to this source, these three weeks have been nothing but a series of vexations and humiliations inflicted on the Europeans by the Americans, who wanted to lead the dance alone" (Le Monde, 29th November, 1995). In Dayton, the famous "contact group" dominated by the Anglo-French couple was reduced to playing a bit part, and essentially had to accede to the conditions dictated by the USA:

- relegation of the UN to the status of mere observer, with the disappearance of UNPROFOR, the precious tool of French and British imperialist interests, and its replacement by the I-For, dominated and commanded by the Americans;

- the dissolution of the RRF;

- American delivery of weapons and training to the Bosnian army.

As for the French attempts to use the Russians' resistance to the American steamroller, by proposing to put the Russian I-For troops under their own control, thus trying to make a dent in the Russo-American alliance, they were a pitiful failure; in the end, the Russian contingent was placed under American command. Washington hammered the point home by emphasizing that the real negotiations were taking place in Dayton, and that the conference planned for December in Paris was nothing but a sounding-board for decisions taken in the United States ... and by them.

Thanks above all to their military power, and to the fact that might is the only right in the jungle of imperialism, the world's greatest power has not only spectacularly succeeded in re-establishing itself in ex-Yugoslavia; it has also dealt a serious blow to the pretentions of all those who dared to contest its domination, and in particular to the Anglo-French duo. The shock has been all the harder for the French and British bourgeoisies, because with their presence in ex-Yugoslavia, they were defending their status as top rank Mediterranean powers, and hence as powers which, though secondary and in decline, nonetheless intend to continue playing a role on the world stage. The reinforcement of the American presence in the Mediterranean directly threatens their imperialist rank. This vast American counter-offensive is aimed above all at punishing the British and French troublemakers.

Germany is also affected by this strategy. What is at stake for Germany is essentially access, through ex-Yugoslavia, to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Thanks to the victories of its Croat clients, it had begun to achieve this objective. The American presence can only hinder it by limiting its room for maneuver. The fact that Hungary, a country which is tied to Germany, should agree to serve as a base for the American troops can only be a direct threat to the interests of German imperialism. This confirms that the alliance between Germany and America in the spring of 1995 was only temporary. The USA used Germany, via the Croats, to re-establish their position. Once the objective was reached, there was no longer any question of giving a free hand to their most dangerous rival, the only one of the great powers with the ability, eventually, to become the leader of a new imperialist bloc.

The United States have thus given a clear demonstration of who is in charge in the strategically vital Mediterranean region. They have dealt a heavy blow to all their rivals in imperialist banditry, right where the decisive conflicts are played out: in Europe. But this reminder of American determination to use its military strength is also part of a worldwide counter-offensive: for the US, the problem of defending its supremacy against the threat of unbridled self-interest, and the slow rise in power of German imperialism is posed worldwide. In the Middle East, from Iran to Iraq, by way of Syria the USA has increased its pressure to impose the pax americana, isolating and destabilising states which refuse Washington's dictates, and are open to the siren songs of Europe or Japan. It is trying to evict French imperialism from its African hunting grounds. It encourages the action of the Islamic fractions in Algeria, and does not hesitate an instant to use a weapon that until recently was reserved for the poor: terrorism[1]. The USA is certainly not unconnected with the disorder in Ivory Coast and Senegal, and just as Paris is trying to stabilize its relations with the new regime in Rwanda, the immediate result of the inexhaustible Jimmy Carter's latest mission has been a degradation in the relations between Paris and Kigali. In Asia, confronted with a Japan increasingly unwilling to put up with US domination - illustrated by the massive demonstrations against the US bases in Okinawa - and with a China that has every intention of profiting from the end of the blocs to assert its own imperialist pretentions, even when these go against America's, the US has alternated carrot and stick to keep control of all those that contest its domination. It has, for example, succeeded in imposing on Japan the continued presence of its military bases.

But the clearest demonstration of the American bourgeoisie's determination to punish "traitors", and re-establish its position, is undoubtedly Clinton's trip to Ireland. By imposing negotiations with the Irish nationalists on the British bourgeoisie, and by openly showing his sympathies with Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, Clinton is giving Britain a clear message, which basically boils down to the following: "if you don toe the line, and return to a complete loyalty to your American friend, then not even your own territory will be safe from our reprisals". This journey, then, was designed to apply a strong pressure to its British ex-ally, at the same level as the importance of the historic break within the 20th century's oldest and most solid imperialist alliance. However, the very fact that the Americans should be obliged to use such methods to bring what used to be their closest ally back into their orbit shows that despite its undoubted successes, there are limits to the American counter-offensive.

The limits to the counter-offensive

As the diplomats recognize themselves, the Dayton accords have settled none of the fundamental questions, either as to the future of a Bosnia divided into two, or even three parts, or as to the basic antagonism between Belgrade and Zaghreb. This "peace" is thus nothing other than a heavily armed truce, above all because the agreement imposed by Washington is only a moment in the balance of forces between the USA and the other great imperialist powers. For the moment, the balance of forces is clearly in favor of the United States, which has forced its rivals to give way; but the US has still only won the battle, not the war. The slow erosion of its world domination has been halted, but only for the moment.

No imperialism can hope to rival the world's greatest power on the strictly military terrain; this gives the latter a formidable advantage against its opponents, and considerably restricts their margin of maneuver. But the laws of imperialism force them, if only to remain in the imperialist arena, to continue to try by every means to free themselves from American tutelage. Since it is difficult for them to oppose the US directly, they have recourse to more indirect strategies.

France and Britain have thus been forced to accept the eviction of UNPROFOR and the RRF from ex-Yugoslavia, and their replacement with I-For, but the fact that they are taking part in the latter, with forces which, combined, are more numerous that the US contingent, does not in the least mean that they will docilely accept the orders of the American commander. With this kind of force, the Franco-British duo is giving itself the means to defend its imperialist prerogatives, and to counter Washington's activity at the first opportunity. The sabotage will be easier than during the Gulf War, first because of the nature of the terrain, second and most important because this time London and Paris are in the same camp opposing American policy, and lastly because the US contingent is much less imposing than during the "Desert Storm" operation. If France and Britain have increased still further their military presence in ex-Yugoslavia, it is to keep intact their ability to damage the USA and to put as many spanners in its works as possible, while preserving the means to counter the advance of German imperialism in the region.

Equally significant of this indirect strategy is the French bourgeoisie's noisy concern for the Serb districts of Sarajevo, with Chirac's letter to Clinton on the subject, and the support shown for Serb nationalist demonstrations by the French UNPROFOR officers stationed in Sarajevo. Faced with a firm reaction from Washington, Paris retreated, and pretended that this was only clumsiness on the part of a general who has since been relieved of his command, but the contest has only been put off for later. Another example is the successful French operation with the Algerian elections and the comfortable re-election of the French bourgeoisie's man, the sinister Zeroual. Paris' maneuvers around the so-called "failed meeting" between Chirac and Zeroual in New York, allowed France to take up the American demand for "free elections" in Algeria, and the US was thus unable to contest the results of such a well-attended election.

The recent French decision to rejoin NATO, with a permanent presence of its army chief of staff, is another illustration of the same strategy. Knowing that it cannot confront the American bourgeoisie head-on, the French bourgeoisie is doing the same within a US-dominated NATO, as the British are doing in a European Union dominated by Germany: joining in order to counter its policy.

The Euro-Mediterranean summit in Barcelona had also seen France hunting in an American preserve. On the one hand, it has strengthened Europe's ties with the main protagonists of the Middle-Eastern conflict, Syria and Israel, after the US had reduced Europe to the status of mere observer of the "peace process". On the other hand, France has opposed the destabilizing maneuvers directed against it in the Maghreb, by an attempt to coordinate security policy against Islamic terrorism. The results of this summit may have been limited, but their importance should not be underestimated, just as the Americans are strengthening their presence in the Mediterranean, and doing their utmost to impose the pax americana in the Middle East.

But the clearest expression of the US counter -offensive's limitations is the continuation, and even the reinforcement, of the Franco-British alliance. This has developed in recent months on issues as crucial as military cooperation, ex-Yugoslavia, and the coordination of the struggle against Islamic terrorism. After noisily supporting the renewal of French nuclear testing, the British bourgeoisie has directly opposed Washington by agreeing to help France in the struggle against an Islamic terrorism which is largely remote controlled from Washington, thereby emphasizing the extent of its estrangement with the US bourgeoisie.

All this illustrates the scale of the obstacles barring the way to a reassertion of US hegemony. The US can score points against its adversaries, and achieve some spectacular successes, but it cannot build a new order around itself on anything like the scale existing at the time of the American bloc. The disappearance of the two imperialist blocs that dominated the planet for forty years has put an end to the nuclear blackmail that allowed the two leaders to impose their dictates on their respective blocs, and has liberated unbridled self-interest, which has now become the dominant tendency in imperialist relationships. Whenever the US puffs itself up and makes a display of its military superiority, its rivals retreat, but the retreat is only tactical and temporary and in no way represents allegiance and submission. The more the USA tries to reassert its imperialist domination, brutally reminding its rivals who is the strongest, the more determined become the opponents of American order to put it in question, since for them it is a matter of life or death, of their ability to keep their rank in the imperialist arena.

This explains why the US success during the Gulf War has been so ephemeral, and why it was so quickly followed by the contestation of American authority at the world level - the divorce between Britain and the US being the most striking illustration. The operation being mounted by the US in ex-Yugoslavia is only a shadow of the deployment against Iraq, and the important points scored by the US since summer 1995 cannot fundamentally reverse the tendency to a historic weakening of its world supremacy, despite its military superiority.

"Every man for himself" and the instability of imperialist alliances

The unbridled self-interest which increasingly characterizes imperialist relationships lies at the root of the weakening of the American super-power, but it is not alone in suffering the consequences. Every imperialist alliance has been affected, including the most solid. The USA cannot resuscitate an alliance completely under its control, but its German rival, its most dangerous competitor and the only one that can hope one day to lead its own bloc, suffers from the same problem. Germany has scored a number or points on the imperialist scene: in ex-Yugoslavia, it has come closer to its goal of access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East via Croatia; it is solidly installed in Eastern Europe; in Africa, it has not hesitated to stir up trouble in the French sphere of influence; it is trying to develop its positions in the Far East, and in the Middle East where it is an influence to be reckoned with; not forgetting Latin America. Everywhere, German imperialism tends to assert itself as a conquering power against a United States on the defensive, and against the "second raters", France and Britain. Germany uses its economic strength to the hilt, but more and more it is also making discreet use of its military strength. The arsenal of conventional weapons recovered from East Germany has made Germany the world's second arms exporter, far ahead of Britain and France combined. Since 1945, the German army has never played such an important role as now. This advance corresponds to the embryonic tendency towards the formation of a German bloc, but the more German imperialism reveals its power, the more obstacles emerge against this tendency. The more Germany flexes its muscles, the more its most faithful and solid ally, France, takes its distance with its too powerful neighbor. One dispute after another has emerged between the two states: the question of ex-Yugoslavia, the renewal of French nuclear tests - essentially directed against Germany - the future of Europe. By contrast, excellent relations are being established between France and Germany's old and irreconcilable enemy, Great Britain. We should not be deceived by the proliferation of meetings between Chirac and Kohl, and the soothing declarations that follow them: these are more a sign of the degradation of Franco-German relations than of their good health. Within the framework of "every man for himself", the overall political, geographical, and historical factors tend towards a cooling of the Franco-German alliance. This was forged during the Cold War, within the framework of the Western bloc, and on the French side was seen as a way of countering the activity of the USA's Trojan horse in Europe, Great Britain. With the death of the Western bloc and the cooling of relations between the British bourgeoisie and its American mentor, these two factors have disappeared. Frightened by the power of its neighbor, which has defeated it in three wars since 1870, France is being pushed into a rapprochement with Britain, both to resist the pressure from the USA and to protect itself against an over-powerful Germany. France and Britain, the two declining imperialist powers, are trying to pool what is left of their military power to defend themselves against both Washington and Bonn. This is the root of the solidity of the Paris-London axis in ex-Yugoslavia, especially since neither of these Mediterranean powers can see their status diminished by a German advance and an increased American presence.

Given the close and long-standing relations between France and Germany, it is impossible abruptly to cut all the ties between them, especially on the economic level. But the Franco-German alliance looks more and more like a mere memory and this seriously hinders the formation of a future imperialist bloc
around Germany.

The development of unbridled self-interest engendered by the decomposition of the capitalist system, undermines the most solid of imperialist alliances: between Britain and the USA, or between France and Germany, albeit the latter did not have same solidity or age. This does not mean that there will be no more imperialist alliances. Alliances are vital to the survival of any imperialism. But henceforth, they will be less stable, more fragile, more prone to being broken. Some will be relatively solid, like the present Franco-British alliance, but this cannot be compared to the solidity of the almost century-long alliance between London and Washington, or even of that between Paris and Bonn since World War II. Others will be purely circumstantial, like that in the spring of 1995 between Germany and the USA. Still others will have a variable geometry, with one power on one question, with another on a different one.

The result will be a still more dangerous and unstable world, where the war of each against all of the great imperialist powers will bring in its wake ever more war, destruction and suffering for the vast mass of humanity. The use of brute force, on the same lines as the so-called civilized states in ex-Yugoslavia, cannot but intensify. As a new open recession of world capitalism pushes the bourgeoisie to rain new and terrible blows on the proletariat, workers must remember that capitalism is not just poverty, but also war and its train of awful barbarism, which only their struggle can bring to an end.

RN, 11th December 1995

[1] It would not be at all surprising if the USA were involved at some level in the wave of bomb attacks in France since summer 1995.

In the first part of this article (International Review No.81) we endeavoured to reclaim the real historical revolutionary experience of the working class in China. The Shanghai proletariat’s heroic attempted insurrection of 21st March 1927 was both the culmination of the spontaneous movement  of the working class begun in 1919 in China, and the last glimmer of the international revolutionary wave that had shaken the capitalist world since 1917.

However, the combined forces of capitalist reaction - the Kuomintang, the “war lords”, the great imperialist powers, relying on the complicity of the Executive of the rapidly degenerating IIIrd International - completely defeated this movement.

The events that took place after this had nothing at all to do with the proletarian revolution. What official historians call the “Chinese popular revolution” was, in reality, an unbridled succession of struggles for control of the country between antagonistic bourgeois fractions, behind whom were always to be found one or other of the great powers. China was converted into one of the “hottest” regions of the imperialist confrontations that came to a head in World War II.

The liquidation of the proletarian party

The year 1928, distinguished by the official historians as decisive in the life of the Communist Party of China, was the year of the creation of the “Red Army” and the beginning of the “New Strategy” based on the mobilisation of the peasants, the so-called foundations of the “popular revolution”. And, indeed, this was a decisive year for the CPC, although not in the sense the official historians mean. In fact, the year 1928 marked the liquidation of the Communist Party of China as an instrument of the working class. Understanding this event constitutes the point of departure for understanding subsequent events in China.

On the one hand, with the defeat of the proletariat, the party was broken up and decimated. As we have already mentioned, around 25,000 communist militants were killed and many thousands more persecuted by the Kuomintang. The militants constituted the cream of the revolutionary proletariat of the great cities, who, due to a lack of council type organisations, had regrouped inside the party during the previous years. From now on, not only would no new generation of workers be integrated into the party, but its social composition would be as radically changed - as we will see below - as its political principles.

The liquidation of the party was not only physical but, above all, political. The period of the most ferocious persecution against the communist party coincided with the unstoppable rise of Stalinism in the USSR and in the International. These simultaneous events dramatically accelerated the opportunism which had been inculcated in the CPC for many years by the Executive of the International, until it turned into a process of rapid degeneration. Thus, between August and December the party lead a series of  reckless, desperate and chaotic uprisings, this “Autumn Revolt” also included: an uprising by thousands of peasants in certain regions which had fallen under the control of the party, a mutiny of nationalist troops in Nanchang (in which some communists were active); and finally, the so-called Canton “insurrection” - 11/14th December, which in reality was a “planned” attempted assault, which was not supported by the whole of the proletariat of the city and ended in yet another blood-bath. All of these actions ended in disastrous defeats at the hands of the forces of the Kuomintang, accelerating the dispersion and demoralisation of the Communist Party, and they marked the crushing of the last revolutionary impulses of the working class.

These reckless uprisings had been instigated by the elements that Stalin had placed at the head of the PCP, whose objective was to justify Stalin’s thesis about the “promotion of the Chinese revolution”. Later these failures were used to expel his opponents.

The year 1928 marked the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution. The 9th Plenum of the International accepted the “rejection of Trotskyism” as a condition for adhesion and , finally, the 6th Congress of the International adopted the infamous theory of “Socialism in one country”, in other words the definitive abandonment of proletarian internationalism, which marked the death of the International as an organisation of the working class. In this context, the 6th Congress of the CPC, also held in the USSR, took the decision to prepare a team of young leaders who unconditionally supported Stalin, beginning, the “official” Stalinisation of the party, in other words, its transformation into a different party, an instrument of ascendant Russian imperialism. This team of so-called “returned students” were to take over the leadership of the party two years later, in 1930.

The “Red Army” and the modern “Warlords”

Stalinism was not the only road that the CPC took towards degeneration. The defeat of the series of adventures in the second half of 1927 had also lead to the flight of some participating groups towards regions where the governmental forces found access difficult. These groups began to unite into broader military detachments. One of these was that of  Mao Tsetung.

It should be noted, that from his earliest years as a militant, Mao Tsetung had not given much proof of proletarian intransigence. As a representative of the opportunist wing, he had held an administrative post of secondary importance during the period of the alliance with the Kuomintang. When this broke up he fled to his native region of Hunan, where following the Stalinist dictates, he set about leading the “the Autumn peasants’ revolt”. The disastrous end of this adventure obliged him, along with hundreds of peasants, to withdraw even further, until they reached the massive mountain range of Chingkang. There, in order to establish himself, he made a pact with the bandits that controlled the area, whose methods of assault he learnt. Finally, his group fused with the remnants of  a detachment of the Kuomintang under the command of the officer Chu Et, which had fled to the mountains after the failed uprising at Nanchang.

According to the official historians, Mao’s group was at the origins of the so-called “Red Army” or “People’s Army” and the “Red bases” (regions controlled by the CPC). Mao is supposed to have finally “discovered” the “correct strategy” for the Chinese revolution, according to this account. In reality, Mao’s detachment was one amongst many others in dozens of different regions. All of them began a policy of recruiting the peasants, offensives and the occupation of certain regions, which led to the resistance to the Kuomintang’s attacks for some years, until 1934. What is important to remember here is the ideological and political fusion between the opportunist wing of the CPC with parts of the Kuomintang (the party of the bourgeoisie), including mercenaries provided by gangs of déclassé peasants. In fact, the geographic displacement which took place in this historic scenario, from the cities to the countryside, did not correspond merely to a change in strategy, but clearly marked the change of the class character that took place in the Communist Party.

The Maoist historians tell us that the “Red Army” was a peasant army guided by the proletariat. In reality, it was not the working class which headed this army, but militants of the CPC almost all of them from petty-bourgeois backgrounds.These elements had never made the historical perspective of the class struggle completely theirs (a perspective that was definitively abandoned with the defeat of the revolutionary wave). Mixed in with these elements were embittered officials of the Kuomintang. Some years later, this  mixture was further consolidated, by a new displacement of professors, university students, nationalists and liberals towards the countryside: these were to form the cadre of “educators” of the peasants during the war against Japan.

Socially, the Communist Party of China was thus converted into the representative of layers of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie displaced by the prevailing conditions in China: intellectuals, professionals and career soldiers, who could find no place, either with the local governments which could only submit to the nobles, nor in Chiang Kai-Shek’s closed and monopolistic central government.

Consequently, the ideology of the leaders of the “Red Army” became a mixture of Stalinism and Sun Yat-Senism. A language full of pseudo-Marxist phrases about the “proletariat” hardly covered the increasingly openly declared aim of establishing another equally bourgeois, although “democratic”, government (with the support of a “friendly government”), opposed to the “dictatorship” of Chiang Kai-Shek. In the real world of capitalist decadence this meant completely immersing the  new CPC and its “Red Army” in imperialist struggles.

The Chinese peasantry: a special revolutionary class?

One thing is certain however: that the ranks of the “Red Army” were basically formed by poor peasants. This fact (along with the party continuing to call itself “Communist”) is to be found at the base of the creation of the myth of the “Chinese popular revolution”.

From the middle of the 1920’s there already existed in the CPC a theorisation, especially amongst those with the least confidence in the working class, that attributed to the Chinese peasantry the character of being an especially revolutionary class. One could read, for example, that “the great peasant masses have risen up in order to complete their historic mission: breaking down of the rural feudal forces”.[1] [6] In other words, they considered the peasants as an historic class, capable of realising certain revolutionary aims independently of other classes. With the political degeneration of the CPC, these theorisations went even further, attributing to the Chinese peasantry the capacity to substitute itself for the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle![2] [7]

By pointing to the history of peasant rebellions in China, they claimed to demonstrate the existence of a revolutionary “tradition” (however, they do not talk about “consciousness”) amongst the Chinese peasantry. In reality, what this history demonstrates is precisely that the Chinese peasantry have lacked a viable revolutionary historic project of their own, as has been the case for the peasants in the rest of the world, and as Marxism has demonstrated time and time again. In the ascendant period of capitalism, in the majority of cases, they opened the way for the bourgeois revolution, but in the decadent period of capitalism the poor peasants can only carry out a revolutionary struggle if they adhere to the revolutionary aims of the working class, since otherwise they are turned into a tool of the ruling class.

Thus, the Taiping rebellion (the “purest” and most important movement of the Chinese peasantry, which exploded in 1850 against the Manchu dynasty and which was totally crushed by 1864) already demonstrated the limits of the peasant struggle. The Taiping wanted to install the reign of the gods on earth, a society without individual private property, in which an authentic monarch, truly the son of the gods, would dispose of all the riches of the community. That is to say, a recognition that private property was the cause of their ills. However, this didn’t lead to a viable project for a future society, but only a return to a utopia of an idyllic lost dynasty. During the initial years the European powers left the Taiping alone because they destabilised the dynasty and the rebellion spread throughout the reign, but the peasants were incapable of forming a central government and administering the land. The movement reached its culminating point in 1856 with the failure to take Peking the imperial capital and, finally, it began to be extinguished through massive repression in which the great capitalist powers collaborated. In this way, the Taiping rebellion weakened the Manchu dynasty, only in order to open the doors to the imperialist expansion of Great Britain, France and Russia. The peasantry did the bidding of the bourgeoisie.[3] [8]

Decades later, in 1898, a new, less widespread, revolt broke out,  that of the Yi Ho-tuan (Boxers). Initially it was against the dynasty and foreigners. However, this revolt marked the decomposition of the independent peasant movements, since the Empress gained control of it and used it in her own war against the foreigners. With the disintegration of the dynasty and the fragmentation of China at the beginning of the century, an increasing number  from among the floating mass of poor and landless peasants began to enrol in the professional armies of the regional “Warlords”. Finally, the traditional secret societies for the protection of the peasants were transformed into Mafiosi in the service of the capitalists, who used them in the cities to control the labour force and to act as strike-breakers.

It is true that the theorisations about the revolutionary character of the peasantry found a justification in the effective re-animation of the peasant movement, above all in  Southern China. Nevertheless, these theorisations passed over the fact that it was the revolution in the great cities that had provoked this reanimation and that any hope of emancipation for the peasantry only could come from the victorious revolution of the urban proletariat.

But the formation of the Chinese “Red Army” had nothing to do with the proletariat nor with the revolution. Nor did it have anything, as we have said, to do with the formation of revolutionary militias in periods of insurrection. It is certain that the terrible living conditions the peasants suffered pushed them to joined the “Red Army” in the hope of winning and defending their land, but these were the same reasons that caused other peasants to join the armies of the warlords that infested China at the time.

In fact the “Red Army”’s leaders had to issue orders prohibiting the looting of conquered regions. For the proletariat, the “Red Army” was something totally alien, as was shown in 1930, when it took the important city of Changsha and was only able to hold the city for a few days, due fundamentally to the indifferent, if not hostile,  reception it received from the workers of the city, who refused  the call to support it through a new “insurrection”.

The difference between the traditional “warlords” and the leaders of the “Red Army”, was that the new “warlords”, had already established themselves within the social structure of China and were visibly part of the ruling class, while the second had to struggle just to open up the way into it. This allowed them to feed the hopes of the peasants and it also conferred a more dynamic and aggressive character on them, a more clever and flexible disposition in order to make alliances and to sell themselves to the highest imperialist bidder.

In short, the defeat of the working class in 1927 did not catapult the peasants to the head of the revolution but, on the contrary, left them to be tossed about in the storms of the nationalist and imperialist struggles. In these struggles the peasants served only as cannon fodder.

The stage of imperialist conflict

With the defeat of the working class, the Kuomintang, for a while, was turned into the most powerful institution in China, the only one capable of guaranteeing the unity of the country -combating and forming alliances with the regional “warlords”- and, therefore, was converted into the focus of disputes between the imperialist powers.

We have already mentioned, in the first part of this article, how from 1911, the great imperialist powers were to be found behind the struggle to form the national government.  At the beginning of the 1930’s the relations of force between them had been modified in various ways.

On the one hand, the Stalinist counter-revolution initiated a new Russian imperialist policy. The “defence of the Socialist fatherland” of the USSR signified the creation of a zone of influence around it, which would also serve as a protective buffer at the same time. In China’s case, this became support for the “Red bases” formed from 1928 onwards - for which Stalin did not see a great future - and above all the search for an alliance with the Kuomintang government.

On the other hand, the United States, which was increasingly becoming an aspirant for the exclusive domination of  all the regions bordering the Pacific Ocean, was replacing the old colonial domination by the old powers such as Britain and France with its growing financial domination. Moreover, in order to achieve this, it first had to deal with the expansionist dreams of Japan. In fact, at the beginning of the century it was already clear that the Pacific was not big enough for the United States and Japan. And an open confrontation between Japan and the United States broke out (10 years before Pearl Harbour) with the war for the control of China and the Kuomintang government.

Finally, there was Japan, one of the powers meddling most in China, whose increasing need for markets, sources of raw materials, and cheap labour, led it to take the initiative in the imperialist struggles for China. In September 1931 it occupied Manchuria, and from January it began to invade the Northern provinces of China, establishing its bridgehead in Shanghai, after which it carried out “preventive” bombings of the working class areas of the city. Japan formed alliances with some of the warlords and began to install its own puppet régimes. Chiang Kai-Shek only offered a token resistance to the invasion, since he had already entered into a treaty with the Japanese. Then the United States and the USSR reacted, each for their own interests, putting pressure on the government of Chiang Kai-Shek to begin an effective resistance against Japan. The United States, however, took things very calmly, since it hoped that Japan would become bogged down in a long and exhausting war in China (which is what effectively happened).

Stalin, for his part, in 1932 ordered the “Red bases” to declare war on Japan, while simultaneously establishing diplomatic relations with the régime of Chiang Kai-Shek during the same period as this régime was launching savage attacks on the “Red bases”. In 1933, Mao Tsetung and Fang Chimin proposed an alliance with some generals of the Kuomintang that had rebelled against Chiang Kai-Shek because of his policy of collaboration with the Japanese. However, the “Returned students” rejected this alliance in order not break the links between Russia and Chiang’s régime. This episode demonstrates that the CPC was already tied up in the game of inter-bourgeois struggles and alliances. At this time Stalin saw the “Red Army” only as an “element of pressure” and preferred to rely more on a enduring alliance with Chiang Kai-Shek.

The Long March... to imperialist war

It was in the framework of these mounting imperialist tensions during the Summer of 1934 that detachments of the “Red Army” based in the “guerrilla bases” in the South and Centre, began a movement towards the Northwest of China, through the rural regions most remote from the control of the Kuomintang, in order to concentrate themselves in the Shensi region. The movement known as the “Long March” is, for the official historians, the most significant and epic act of the “Chinese popular revolution”. The history books are full of heroic chapters about how detachments crossed rivers, swamps and mountains. However, an analysis of the events shows that hidden behind this movement are sordid bourgeois interests.

Above all, the fundamental aim of the “Long March” was to enrol the peasants in the imperialist war which was brewing between Japan, China, Russia and the United States. In fact, Po Ku (a Stalinist of the group of “returned students”) had already posed the possibility of some units of the “Red Army” being sent to fight against the Japanese. The history books underline that the departure from the “Soviet zone” of the Southern region of Kiangsi was due to the unbearable siege by the Kuomintang, but become ambiguous when they deal with the fact that the forces of the “Red Army” were expelled , in great part, because of a change of tactics ordered by the Stalinists: from  the guerrilla struggles that allowed the “Red Army” to resist for several years, to frontal attacks on the Kuomintang. These confrontations provoked the rupture of the guerrilla zone’s “security” frontier and consequently meant it had to be abandoned. This was not a “grave error” by the “returned students” ( as Mao said later, although he participated in this strategy). This success for the Stalinists forced  the armed peasants to abandon their land, which they had defended with much effort up until then, in order to march North and formed them into a regular army suitable only for the approaching war.

The history books usually confer on the “long march” the character of a kind of social movement or class struggle. The “Red Army” is supposed to have been “sowing the seeds of the revolution”, propagandising and also redistributing the land between the peasants as it went along. In reality, these actions had as their aim the utilisation of the peasants as protection for the rearguard of the “Red Army”. Already at the beginning of the “long march” the civilian population of the “Red bases” had been used as a defence to allow the retreat of the army. This tactic - praised by some historians as “very ingenious” and consisting of turning civilians into targets in order to protect the movement of the regular army - is a tactic of the armies of the ruling classes. Contrary to the history books there is nothing “heroic” about allowing children and old people to be killed in order that the soldiers can save themselves.

The “Long March” was not on the road of the class struggle. On the contrary, it was the road towards accords and alliances with those who up until then had been categorised as “feudal and capitalist reactionaries” and who as if by magic had been turned into “good patriots”. Thus, on the 1st of August 1935, with the detachments of the “long march” stationed in Sechuan, the CPC launched the call for the national unity of all classes in order to drive the Japanese from China. In other words, the CPC called on all workers to abandon the class struggle in order to unite with their exploiters and serve as cannon fodder in their wars. The call was the anticipated application of the resolutions of the Seventh and last Congress of the Communist International, which had taken place during this time, and which launched the infamous slogan of the “anti-fascist popular front”, through which the Stalinised Communist Parties collaborated with the national bourgeoisie, converting them into recruiters of the workers for the second world slaughter that was already approaching.

The “long march” officially ended in October 1935, when Mao’s detachment arrived in Yenan (the Shensi province in the North West of China). In later years, in the Maoist pantheon the “long march” was the exclusive and glorious work of Mao Tsetung. The official histories skip over the fact that Mao arrived at a “Red base” that had already been established before hand, and that his arrival marked a disaster because  only about 7,000 of the 90,000 men who had originally left Kiangsi made it. Thousands had died (victims of nature more than of Kuomintang attacks), and thousands more remained in Sechuan, because of a split amongst the leading cliques. It was only at the end of 1936 that the bulk of the “Red army” was really gathered together with the arrival of the detachments from Junan and Sechuan.

The CPC’s alliance with the Kuomintang

From 1936, the work of recruiting the peasants carried out by the CPC was backed up by hundreds of nationalist students who moved to the countryside after the anti-Japanese movement of the intellectuals at the end of 1935.[4] [9] This does not mean the students became “Communists”, on the contrary, as we said above, the CPC was already an organisation that the bourgeoisie saw as one of their own, sharing the same class interests.

The Chinese bourgeoisie, however, was not unanimous in its opposition to the Japanese. There were divisions in their inclinations towards one or other of the great powers. This was reflected by Generalismo Chiang Kai-Shek who, as we have already seen, was uncertain about launching a frontal attack against the Japanese and tried to wait until the balance of  imperialist forces clearly leant towards one gang or other. The Kuomintang generals and the regional “warlords” were similarly divided.

The so-called “Sian incident” took place in this atmosphere. In December 1936, Chang Hsuehliang - an anti-Japanese Kuomintang - and Yang Hucheng - the “warlord” of Sian -  who were on good terms with the CPC, arrested Chiang Kai-Shek and were going to  prosecute him as a traitor. However, Stalin immediately and incisively ordered the CPC not only to free Chiang Kai-Shek, but furthermore to include his forces in the “popular front”. In the days that followed talks took place between Chou Enlai, Yeh Chienying and Po Ku as representatives of the CPC (in other words of Stalin), Tu Song (the biggest and most corrupt monopolist in China, a relative of Chiang) as the United States’ representative, and Chiang Kai-Shek himself. The result of these negociations was that Chiang was “obliged” to take the United State’s and the USSR’s side - at this time the US and Russia were allied against Japan. In return for doing this he was allowed to remain as head of the national government, while the CPC and the “Red Army” (which would change its name to the “Eighth Army”) were placed under his command. Chou Enlai and other “Communists” took part in Chiang’s government, while the United States and the USSR supplied Chiang Kai-Shek with military support. As for Chang Hsuehliang and Yang Hucheng, they were abandoned to Chiang’s revenge, the first was imprisoned and the second killed.

Thus, the new alliance between the CPC and the Kuomintang was signed.  It was only by means of the most grotesque ideological contortions and the most abject propaganda that the CPC could justify in the workers’ eyes its new treaty with Chiang Kai-Shek, the same butcher that had ordered the crushing of the proletarian revolution and the killing of tens of thousands of workers and communists in 1927. It is true, that from the middle of 1938, the hostilities between the forces of the Kuomintang  led by Chiang and those of the “Red Army” were renewed. This allows the official historians to maintain the idea that the pact with the Kuomintang was only a “tactic” of the CPC in the “revolution”. However, the historical significance of the pact lay not in its disintegration or in the collaboration between the CPC and the Kuomintang, but in the fact that between these two forces there were no class antagonisms but on the contrary, the same class interests. This CPC had nothing in common with the CPC of the 20’s that had confronted capital: it was now nothing but a tool of capital, the number one recruiting sergeant of the peasants for the imperialist massacre.

Bilan: a gleam of light in the darkness of counter-revolution

In July 1937, the Japanese undertook a large-scale invasion of China: this was the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war. Only a handful of Left Communist groups that had survived the counter-revolution, such as the Dutch Internationalist Communist Group or the Italian Left Communist Group that published Bilan in France, were able to forecast and denounce the fact that what was happening in China was no “national liberation” war, still less the “revolution”, but a war for domination between the great powers with interests in the region: Japan, the USSR, and the United States; that the Sino-Japanese war, like the Spanish Civil War and other regional conflicts, was the deafening prelude to the second world imperialist slaughter. By contrast, Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which at its formation in 1928 had also denounced Stalin’s criminal policy of collaboration with the Kuomintang as one of the causes of the defeat of the proletarian revolution in China, was now prisoner of an incorrect analysis of the historic course, which made it see a new revolutionary possibility in each new regional imperialist conflict. Prisoner also of its own growing opportunism, it considered the Sino-Japanese war as “progressive”, and a step forwards towards the “third Chinese revolution”. At the end of 1937, Trotsky shamelessly declared that “if there is such a thing as a just war, then it is the war of the Chinese people against its conquerors... all the Chinese working class organisations, all the progressive forces in China, without giving up anything of their programme or political independence, will do their duty to the utmost in this war of liberation, independently of their attitude to the Chiang Kai-Shek government”.[5] [10] With this opportunist policy of national defence “independently of their attitude to the Chiang Kai-Shek government”, Trotsky opened wide the doors to recruiting the workers in imperialist war behind their governments, and with World War II, to the transformation of the Trotskyist groups into recruiting officers for capital. By contrast, the Italian Communist Left’s analysis of China firmly maintained the internationalist position of the working class. The position on China was one of the crucial points of rupture in its relations with Trotsky’s Left Opposition. For Bilan, “The communist position on the events in China, Spain, and the current international situation can only be fixed on the basis of the rigorous elimination of all those forces acting within the proletariat, and which tell the proletariat to take part in the slaughter of imperialist war”.[6] [11] “The whole problem is to determine which class is conducting the war, and to a establish a policy accordingly. In the present case, it cannot be denied that it is the Chinese bourgeoisie which is waging the war, and whether it be aggressor or victim, the proletariat’s duty is to struggle for revolutionary defeatism in China as much as in Japan”.[7] [12] In the same sense, the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left (allied with Bilan) wrote: “Alongside Chang Kai-Shek, the butcher of Canton, Stalinism is taking part in the assassination of the Chinese workers and peasants under the banner of a “war of independence”. And only a total break with the National Front, their fraternisation with the Japanese workers and peasants, their civil war against the Kuomintang and all its allies, under the leadership of a class party, can save them from disaster”.[8] [13] A defeated and demoralised working class failed to hear the firm voice of the groups of the Communist Left, and allowed itself to be dragged down into a worldwide massacre. However, these groups’ analytical method and positions represented the permanence and deepening of marxism and formed the bridge between the old revolutionary generation which had lived through the proletariat’s insurrectional wave at the beginning of the century, and the new revolutionary generation which emerged with the end of the counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s.

1937 - 1949: with the USSR or the USA?

As we know, World War II ended in 1945 with the defeat of Japan and the Axis powers, and this defeat meant Japan's complete withdrawal from China. However, the end of World War II was not the end of imperialist confrontations, since immediately afterwards a rivalry between the two great powers - the USA and USSR - was established, which lasted for more than 40 years and brought the world close to a third - and last - world war. And China was immediately turned into a terrain of confrontation between the two powers.

The aim of this article is to demystify the so-called “Chinese popular revolution”, not to present the many interests related to the vicissitudes of the Sino-Japanese war. However, these interests highlight two aspects in relation to the policies carried out by the CPC during these years.

The first is related to the rapid expansion of the area occupied by the “Red Army” between 1936-1945. As we have said Chiang Kai-Shek did not engage his forces directly against the Japanese. Faced with the Japanese advance his forces fell back, retreated. On the other hand, the Japanese army’s rapid advance towards the Chinese interior was not backed up by an ability to set up their own administration in all the regions they occupied, and they were rapidly limited to occupying the communication routes and important cities. This situation gave rise to two phenomena: firstly, the regional warlords either remained loyal to the central government but were isolated from it, collaborated with the Japanese in the formation of puppet governments, or else collaborated with the “Red Army” in resisting the invasion. Secondly, the CPC cleverly used the power vacuum in the rural North West of China, created by the Japanese invasion, to establish its own administration.

This administration, known as the “new democracy”, has been praised by historians precisely as a “democratic” régime of a “new kind”. The only novelty about it, was that for the first time in history, a “Communist” party established a government of class collaboration,[9] [14] that is to say, it was concerned about zealously protecting the interests of the capitalists and the great landlords: the maintenance of stable relations of exploitation. The CPC discovered that it was not necessary to confiscate the land and give it to the peasants in order to gain their support. The peasants were so overburdened with levies that it was enough to bring about a small reduction in taxes (so small in fact that the landlords and capitalists agreed with it) for the peasants willingly to accept the CPC’s administration and enrol in the “Red Army”. In accordance with this “new régime” the CPC also established a government of class collaboration (between the  bourgeoisie, the landlords and peasants), known as the government “of three parts”, where a third of posts were held by the “Communists”, a third by peasants’ organisations and another third by the landlords and capitalists. Once again, it was only through the most convoluted ideological contortions by “theoreticians” such as Mao Tsetung that the CPC could explain this “new kind” of government to the workers.

The second aspect of the CPC’s policy is less well known, since for ideological reasons, both the Maoist and pro-US historians want to hide it. The CPC was moving strongly towards the United States for the following reasons:

• the USSR’s involvement in the European war, meant that for some years it was difficult for it to give any serious help to the CPC;
• Chiang Kai-Shek’s new oscilations between the US and Japan from 1938 in the hope of a definite outcome to the world war;[10] [15]
• the USA’s entry into the Pacific war from 1941.

From 1944 the United States government established an observation commission in the main “Red Base” in Yenan, with the aim of sounding out the possibility of collaboration between the USA and the CPC. The leaders of the CPC - in particular Mao Tsetung and the Chu Teh clique - were clear that the United States would be the strongest victorious power at the end of the war and wanted to shelter in its shadow. The correspondence of John Service,[11] [16] one of the agents of the mission, insistently pointed out that the leaders of the CPC said:

• that the CPC considered the installation of a Soviet government to be very remote and, more than that, it wanted to install a Western “democratic” type régime in China, that it was disposed to enter a coalition government with Chiang Kai-Shek in order to avoid a civil war at the end of the war against Japan;
• that the CPC considered that a very long period (of many decades) would be necessary for the development of capitalism in China, before they could think of installing Socialism, and if the day did arrive it woud be done very slowly (and not through violent expropriations). That therefore in order to establish a national régime, the CPC would maintain an “open door” policy towards foreign capital, principally North American.
• that the CPC, seeing the weakness of the USSR on one side and Chiang Kai-Shek’s corruption and propensity for Japan on the other, wanted the political, financial and military support of the United States. That the CPC would be disposed to change its name (as they had already done with the “Red Army”) in order to receive help.

The members of the United States mission insisted to their government that the future was on the side of the CPC. However, the United States never decided to help the “Communists” and, finally one year later in 1945, before the defeat of Japan, Russia rapidly invaded Northern China, leaving the CPC and Mao no other choice than to align themselves (temporarily!) with the USSR.

***

From 1946 to 1949, the confrontation between the two super powers led directly to a war between the CPC and the Kuomintang. During the war other Kuomintang generals went over, along with their arms and men,to the side of the “popular forces”. In this way, we can see four successive stages in which the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie nourished the CPC: the one that followed the defeat of the working class, from 1928; the one rooted in the student movement of 1935; the period of the war against Japan and finally that provoked by the collapse of the  Kuomintang. The “old” bourgeoisie - with the exception of  the great monopolists linked directly with Chiang Kai-Shek, such as Soong - merged into the CPC and founded the “new” bourgeoisie that arose during the war.

In 1949 the Communist Party of China, headed by the Red Army, took power and proclaimed the People’s Republic. But this never had anything to do with Communism. The class character of the “Communist” party that took power in China was completely alien to communism and antagonistic to the working class. From the beginning, the régime was only a form of state capitalism. The USSR controlled China for hardly a decade and this ended with the breaking off of relations between both countries. From 1960, China played an “independent” game from the super powers and saw itself as a great power capable of creating a “third bloc”, although from 1970 it had moved definitively towards the US-dominated Western bloc. Many historians - beginning with the Russians - accused Mao of being a “traitor”. We now know that the China’s journey towards the United states was not  treason by Mao, but the final realisation of his dream.

Ldo

Hundreds of thousands of workers on strike. Public transport completely paralyzed. A strike spreading throughout the public sector: railways first, then the metro and buses, followed by the post office, electricity production and distribution, gas distribution, telecommunications, education, the health service. Some branches of private industry also involved in the struggle, like the miners who violently confront the police. Demonstrations that gather ever growing numbers from different sectors: on 7th December, about one million workers in the main French cities answered the call of various unions[1] to demonstrate against the Juppe plan[2]. On 12th December, there were 2 million.

The movement of workers' strikes and demonstrations unfolds against a background of student agitation, with the latter taking part in some of the workers' demonstrations and mass meetings. References to May 1968 are more and more frequent in the media, which do not hesitate to draw a parallel: a widespread feeling of exasperation, the students in the streets, and the spreading strikes.

Are we in the midst of a new social movement comparable to that of May 68, which started off the first international wave of class struggle after 50 years of counter-revolution? Nothing of the sort. In reality, the French proletariat is the target of a massive maneuver aimed at weakening its consciousness and combativity; a maneuver, moreover, which is also aimed at the working class in other countries, designed at making it draw the wrong lessons from the events in France. This is why the bourgeoisie in France and elsewhere has made sure that there events have been widely reported, whereas the opposite is the case when the working class struggles on its own initiative and its own terrain.

The bourgeoisie is using and reinforcing the difficulties of the working class

The events of May 68 in France were marked by a whole series of strikes, whose major characteristic was a tendency to overflow, or even to confront the trades unions. The situation is nothing like that today, in France or anywhere else.

It is true that the extent and generalization of attacks directed against the working class since the beginning of the 1990s tends to arouse its combativity, as we pointed out in the Resolution on the International Situation, adopted at our 11th International Congress:

"The massive movements in Italy in the autumn of 92, those in Germany in 93 and many others showed the huge potential combativity growing in the workers' ranks. Since then, this combativity has expressed itself slowly, with long moments of quiet; but it has not been refuted. The massive mobilizations in Italy in the autumn of 94, the series of strikes in the public sector in France in the spring of 95, are expressions, among others, of this combativity", (International Review no.82)

However, the development of this combativity is still profoundly marked by the retreat that the working class suffered after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the unleashing of all the campaigns on the "death of communism". This retreat was the worst since the historic recovery of class struggle in 1968: "[The workers' struggles in recent years] are also testimony to the enormous difficulties which it is encountering on this path, owing to the breadth and depth of the reflux. The workers struggles are developing in a sinuous, jagged manner full of advances and retreats".

Everywhere, the working class faces a bourgeoisie on the offensive politically in order to weaken its ability to counter-attack, and to overcome the deep reflux in its class consciousness. And in the front line of this offensive, are the unions:

"However, the unions' present maneuvers have also, and above all, a preventive aim: that of strengthening their hold on the workers before the latter display a lot more combativity, a combativity which will necessarily result from their growing anger faced with the increasingly brutal attacks demanded by the crisis (...) the recent strikes in France, in fact union days of action, have been a success for the latter".

For several months, the working class internationally has been subjected to a veritable bombardment. Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain are only the latest examples. In France, the bourgeoisie has not dared to deal such a blow to the workers since the first Delors plan in 1983: an increase in VAT (a sales tax, ie a tax on consumption which of course means a rise in prices), in income tax, and in the daily charge for hospital care, a wage freeze for state employees, a diminution in pensions, and an increase in the number of years that must be worked in order to benefit from a pension; at the same time, the bourgeoisie's official figures are beginning to reveal a new rise in unemployment. As in other countries, the French bourgeoisie is facing an increasingly serious world capitalist crisis, which forces it into more and more violent attacks on proletarian living conditions. And it is all the more vital for the French bourgeoisie, coming after the years where the left, with Mitterrand and the SP, were in government, which left the social front largely unguarded, and compelled the bourgeoisie to observe a certain caution in its attacks on the workers.

Such an avalanche of attacks could only nourish the workers' combativity, which has already found expression at different times and in different countries: Sweden, France, Belgium, Spain ...

And indeed, the workers cannot remain passive. They have no way out, other than to defend themselves in struggle. But to prevent the working class from entering the combat with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie has taken the lead, and has pushed the workers into a premature struggle, completely under the control of the unions. It has not left the workers time to mobilize at their own rhythm and with their own methods: mass meetings, discussion, participation in other workers' meetings, the strike if the balance of forces is favorable, the election of strike committees, sending delegations to other workers involved in the struggle.

Thus although the recent strike movement in France reveals a deep discontent within the working class, it is above all the result of a maneuver on a very large scale by the bourgeoisie, aimed at leading the workers into a massive defeat, and above all at creating a profound disorientation in their ranks.

A trap for the workers

The bourgeoisie maneuvered masterfully to set its trap, creating an extremely effective cooperation among its different fractions: the right, the left, the media, and the unions, with their radical rank and file made up essentially of militants of the far left.

In the first place, to start the ball roIling, the bourgeoisie had to push one sector of the working class to strike. Although a real discontent was developing within the class in France, aggravated by the recent attacks on the Social Security, it was not yet at the point where it would provoke a massive entry into struggle by the most decisive sectors, especially the industrial ones. This worked in the bourgeoisie's favor, since it could provoke one sector to strike without any risk of the others following spontaneously and escaping from union control. The "chosen" sector was the train drivers. The "contract plan" announced for the national railways (SNCF) threatened the drivers with an extra eight years work before retirement, on the pretext that they were more "privileged" from this point of view than other state employees. This was so gross that the workers did not even stop to think before launching themselves into the conflict. This was precisely what the bourgeoisie wanted: they plunged headfirst into the control prepared by the unions. Within 24 hours, the drivers on the Paris buses and metro, threatened with the loss of similar benefits, were drawn into the same kind of trap. The unions did everything they could to get the strike started, whereas many workers remained perplexed at their haste. The management of the RATP (Paris public transport network) came to the unions' rescue, by closing down some lines and doing everything possible to prevent those who wanted to work from doing so.

Why did the bourgeoisie choose these two categories of workers to engage its maneuver?

Firstly, both categories do indeed have special contractual arrangements, whose modification was a ready-made pretext for unleashing an attack aimed explicitly at them. But most important was the guarantee that once the workers on the railways, metro, and buses came out, the entire public transport system would be paralyzed. Apart from the fact that no worker could fail to notice the event, this gave the bourgeoisie a further, and highly effective means of keeping the movement under control, since the aim was to spread the strike to other branches of the public sector. Without public transport, virtually the only way for workers to get to the demonstrations was to use the coaches laid on by the unions. It became impossible to send massive delegations to meet other striking workers in their own mass meetings. Finally, the transport strike is also a means of dividing workers by setting those who were confronting enormous difficulties in getting to work, against those on strike.

However, the rail workers were not just a means of the maneuver, they were also one of its targets. The bourgeoisie was aware of the advantage to be gained by exhausting and confusing the consciousness of this sector of the working class, which had demonstrated in December 1986 its ability to confront the unions' control in order to engage the struggle.

Once these two sectors were on strike, completely under union control, the next phase of the maneuver could be set in motion: the strike in a traditionally advanced and combative fraction of the working class, the post office, and especially the sorting offices. During the 1980s, the latter had often resisted the unions' traps, confronting the latter without hesitation. By incorporating this sector in the "movement", the bourgeoisie aimed to trammel it in the meshes of the maneuver, and inflict on it the same defeat as on other sectors. Moreover, the maneuver would gain in credibility amongst other sectors not yet on strike, by diminishing any distrust or skepticism about it. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie had to approach this sector with more finesse than it had used on the railway or metro workers. It thus encouraged and organized "workers' delegations", with no outward signs of union membership (and probably made up of sincere workers deceived by the rank-and-file unionists), who came to mass meetings in the sorting offices, to call on their workers to join the strike. Deceived as to the real significance of these delegations, the workers of the main sorting offices let themselves be drawn into the struggle. To give the event maximum media impact, the bourgeoisie dispatched its journalists to the scene, and it was on the front page of Le Monde's evening edition that very day.

At this stage of the maneuver, its size gave the unions a further argument to involve new sectors: workers in the electricity, gas, and telecommunications industries, as well as the teachers. When some workers hesitated to "struggle now", and insisted on first discussing the methods of struggle and their demands, the unions were peremptory in insisting that "we've got to go for it now", and imposing a feeling of guilt on those not yet in the struggle: "we're the last ones not to have joined the strike".

To increase the number of strikers still further, it was necessary to give the impression of a vast, deep-rooted, and developing social movement. To listen to the left, the leftists, and the unions, the movement even provoked an immense hope throughout the working class. In this they were supported by the media's daily publication of the strike's "popularity index", which was always in favor, throughout the "population". It is true that the strike was "popular", and that many workers saw it as a means to prevent the government from pushing through its attacks. But the solicitude of the media, and above all of the TV, is a sure sign that this was just what the bourgeoisie intended.

The students were also used, unwittingly, as part of the show. They were led out into the streets to give the impression of a general rise in discontent, and of a similarity with the events of May 68. At the same time, they were used to drown the workers' demands with the inter-classist demands that are characteristic of students. They were even to be found, with the unions' blessing, in mass meetings in the workplace, "to join the workers' struggle"[3].

The working class, deprived of any initiative, had no alternative but to follow the unions. In the mass meetings called by the unions, the latter's insistence that workers should express themselves had no purpose other than to give a pretense of life to meetings where everything had already been decided elsewhere. Within the assemblies, there was such pressure to join the strike that many workers, dubious to say the least about the nature of the strike, dared not speak out. Others were completely taken in by the euphoria of an artificial unity. In fact, one of the keys' to this maneuver's success was the way in which the unions systematically adopted the working class' aspirations and methods of struggle, only to empty them and turn them against the workers:

- the need to react massively, in closed ranks, against the bourgeoisie's attacks'

- spreading the strike to several sectors, going beyond the boundaries of corporatism;

- daily mass meetings in every workplace, with the responsibility, in particular, of deciding on whether to join or to continue the movement;

- the organization of street demonstrations where masses of workers, from different sectors and different workplaces, can gain a feeling of solidarity and strength[4].

The unions also took care, for most of the movement, to make a show of unity. The media made much of the handshake between the leaders of the two traditionally antagonistic unions: the CGT and FO (which was formed during the Cold War after a split from the CGT, supported by the American trades unions). This trade union "unity", often found on demonstrations in the joint CGT-FO-CFDT-FSU banners, was a means to draw the largest possible number of workers into the strike; for years, the unions' endless bickering had been precisely one of the main reasons for their loss of credibility and for the workers' refusal to follow their slogans. The Trotskyists made their own little contribution in this domain, since they clamored endlessly for union unity, making it almost a precondition for the development of the struggle.

As for the right in power, after an initial display of determination, it pre-all the necessary publicity by the media), giving the impression that the strikers could win, force the withdrawal of the Juppe plan and even - why not? - the downfall of the government. In fact, the government dragged things out, knowing very well that workers who have fought a long strike are not disposed to return to work for nothing. Only after three weeks did it announce the withdrawal of some of the measures which had sparked off the explosion: the "contract plan" on the railways and, more generally, the measures concerning state employees' pensions. However, the essential elements of its policy remained: tax increases, wage freeze for state employees, and above all the attacks on social security.

The unions and the left parties immediately shouted victory, and thereafter set to getting the strikers back to work. They went about it so skillfully that they did not unmask themselves: their tactic consisted in allowing those assemblies in favor of a return to work express themselves freely. The unions trumpeted the railway workers' "victory", and it was the railway workers who, on Friday 15th December, gave the signal for the return to work, just as they had given the signal for the strike. The TV repeated over and over its pictures of the first trains to run again. On Saturday, the unions organized enormous demonstrations which the workers in private industry were urged to join. The movement was buried in great pomp, with a final wave of the flag to sugar the bitter pill of defeat on the workers' most important demands. In depot after depot, the railwaymen voted to end the strike. In the other sectors, this impetus combined with a general fatigue did the rest. By Monday, the return to work was almost complete. On Tuesday, the CGT organized, alone, a day of action and demonstrations: the mobilization was pitiful compared with that of previous weeks, which could only convince the remaining "die-hards" that the time had come to end the strike. On Thursday 21st, a "summit" and unions, which gave the unions the opportunity to denounce the government's proposals, and put themselves forward as "defenders of the workers".

A political attack against the working class

The ruling class has just succeeded in putting over a major attack - the Juppe plan - and exhausting the workers in order to reduce their ability to respond to more attacks in the future.

But the bourgeoisie's ambitions go much further. The way in which the maneuver was organized was designed not only to ensure that the workers would learn no lessons for future struggles from this defeat, but above all to render them vulnerable to the poisoned messages it wants to put over.

The bourgeoisie has provoked the most important mobilization for years, as far as the number of strikers and demonstrators is concerned, and the unions were clearly its architect. All this is designed to give weight to the idea that it is possible to achieve something with the unions. And this idea is lent all the more credit in that throughout the struggle, the unions were never in danger of being unmasked, even partially, as has been the case when they have had to break a spontaneous class movement. Their strategy even took account of the fact that although the majority of the class might follow them, fundamentally it does not trust them. This is why they were so careful to ensure the visible "participation" of non-unionized workers (either the sincere and naive, or the unions' own agents) in the various "organs of struggle", such as the self-proclaimed "strike committees". Thus, just as the maneuver will strengthen the unions' grip on the working class, so will it also diminish for some time to come the workers' confidence in their own strength, in other words in their ability to enter the struggle of their own accord, and to take charge of it themselves. This renewed credibility of the unions was one of the bourgeoisie's fundamental objectives, a vital precondition for dealing blows still more brutal than today's. Only on this condition can it hope to sabotage the struggles which will certainly surge up against these new attacks. It is certainly one of the most important aspects of the political defeat that the bourgeoisie has inflicted on the working class.

Another beneficiary of the maneuver, within the bourgeoisie itself, is the left of capital. The French presidential elections of May 1995 have placed all the forces of the left in opposition. None of them have been directly involved in deciding the present attacks. They have had their hands free to denounce the attacks, and to make workers forget that they themselves - the CP and the SP together have conducted the same anti-working class policy. The maneuver has thus strengthened the policy of the division of labor between the right in power and the left in opposition with the role of mystifying the proletariat, of controlling and sabotaging its struggles, especially through the trades unions.

Another of the bourgeoisie's prime objectives, on the basis of the defeat of a struggle that spread to different sectors, is to make the workers believe that there is no point in extending the struggle. There are large fractions of the working class which think that they have succeeded in extending the struggle to different sectors[5], in other words that they have achieved the tendency of workers' struggles since 1968, and until the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The bourgeoisie even relied on these gains of the struggle since 1968 to draw the sorting office workers into the struggle, as we can see from the arguments used by the unions to persuade them to walk out: "In 1974, the postal workers were defeated because they remained isolated. Just like the railwaymen in 1986, because they did not succeed in spreading their movement. Today, we have to seize the chance that is offered". It was these gains that the maneuver aimed to eradicate.

It is still too early to judge the impact of this aspect of the maneuver (whereas there is no doubt about the unions' renewed credibility). But it is clear that the workers' confusion is likely to be increased by the fact that the railway workers at least have won on the demand that started their struggle, following the withdrawal of the "company plan", and the attacks on pension rights. The illusion that it is possible to win something by struggling alone in one sector will thus develop, and provide a powerful stimulus to the growth of sectoralism. Not to mention the division created in the workers' ranks by the fact that those who followed the railwaymen into the struggle, and have won nothing at all, will feel betrayed.

At this level, there are important similarities with another maneuver: the one used in the health workers' struggle in autumn 1988. Then, it was designed to defuse a rise in combativity throughout the class, by provoking a premature struggle in a specific sector: the nurses. The latter were organized in an ultra-sectoralist coordination, prefabricated by the bourgeoisie to take the place of the discredited unions, and at the end of the struggle were granted a certain number of wage increases (the government had set aside a billion francs for precisely this even before the strike began). The other hospital workers, who had entered the strike at the same time as the nurses, got nothing. In other sectors, the combativity fell back as a result of the workers' disarray in the face of the nurses' elitism and sectoralism.

Finally, by invoking so persistently the supposed similarities with the movement of May 1968, the bourgeoisie hoped, as we have said, to involve as many workers as possible in the maneuver. But it was also a means to attack the workers' class consciousness. For millions of workers, May 68 is still a reference point, even for those who were too young to take part, or were not even born, or lived in other countries but nonetheless were fired with enthusiasm at this first sign of the proletariat's resurgence on its class terrain after forty years of counter-revolution. Those generations of workers, or fractions of the working class, who did not take a direct part in the events of 68, and who are more vulnerable to ideological intoxication around this theme, were a special target for the bourgeoisie, which aimed to give them the impression that there was not much difference between May 68 and today's union controlled strike. This is therefore yet another attack on the very identity of the working class; not as profound as the campaigns on "the death of communism", but a further obstacle on the road to recovery from the reflux that followed the collapse of the Eastern bloc.

The real lessons to be drawn from these events

Tragically, the first lesson that the ICC drew from nurses' struggle in 1988[6] remains true today: "it is important to emphasize the bourgeoisie's ability to take preventive action, and in particular to provoke premature social movements at a time when the proletariat as a whole is still not mature enough to achieve a real mobilization. This tactic has been used often in the past by the ruling class, in particular in situations where the stakes were far higher than in the present period. The most striking example is that of January 1919, when the Berlin workers answered a deliberate provocation by the social-democratic government by launching an uprising, despite the fact that workers in the provinces were not yet ready for insurrection. The massacre of workers which followed (as well as the murder of the German Communist Party's two main leaders: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) dealt a fatal blow to the revolution in Germany, where the working class was finally defeated piecemeal".

Faced with such a danger, it is vital that the working class should learn the lessons of its experience as widely as possible, both at the historic level, and at the level of its struggles during the last decade.

Another important lesson is that the class struggle is a major preoccupation for the international bourgeoisie, and as its reaction to the struggle in Poland during 1980 has shown us, at this level it can put its divisions to one side. A blackout is imposed on movements that take place on a class terrain and run the risk of drawing other workers in their wake, whereas the spotlight is turned on the results of successful maneuvers against the working class, from one country to the next. We can have no illusions that the unleashing of trade wars and imperialist rivalries will prove any barrier to the bourgeoisie's international unity against the class struggle.

The recent strikes in France also show that the extension of the struggle in the hands of the unions is a weapon of the bourgeoisie. The wider the extension, the worse the defeat for the workers. Here again, it is vital that the workers learn to detect the traps of the bourgeoisie. Whenever the unions call for extension, it is either to stick with the movement as it develops, so as not to lose control of it, or to drag as many workers as possible to defeat when the movement enters a downturn. This is what they did with the rail workers in France at the beginning of 1987, when they called for the movement to "spread" and "harden", not as the movement was on the rise (when they actively opposed any extension), but during its decline, with the aim of drawing as many sectors of the working class as possible into the rail workers' defeat. These two situations highlight the absolute necessity for the workers to control their struggle, from beginning to end. Their sovereign general assemblies must take charge of spreading the struggle if it is not to fall into the hands of the unions. Obviously, the latter will not give up without a fight. The confrontation with the unions must be fought out in broad daylight, in general assemblies that elect their own revocable delegates, instead of being mere gatherings manipulated at will by the unions, as has been the case in the present wave of strikes.

But to take charge of their struggle, the workers must necessarily centralize all their assemblies, by sending delegates to a central assembly, which in turn elects a central struggle committee. It is this assembly's job to guarantee the permanent unity of the class, and which makes it possible to coordinate the struggle's action: whether a strike should be declared for such-and-such a day; which sectors should come out, etc. It is also the central assembly which must decide the return to work, and the retreat in good order when the immediate balance of forces makes this necessary. There is nothing abstract about this. The Russian workers created just such an organ - the Soviet - in 1905, then in 1917 during the Revolution. The centralization of the struggle by the Soviet was a vital lesson of the century's first revolutionary movement, which workers will have to reappropriate in their future struggles. This is what Trotsky had to say about them in his book, 1905:

"What was the soviet of workers' deputies? The soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organization which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organizational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control - and most important of all which could be brought out from underground within 24 hours (...) In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, such an organization had to be based on the broadest representation. How was this to be achieved? The answer came of its own accord. Since the production process was the sole link between the proletarian masses who, in the organizational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and businesses"[7].

Although the first example of such living centralization of a class movement comes to us from a revolutionary period, this does not mean that it is only in such a period that the working class can centralize its struggle. The mass strike of Polish workers in 1980, while it did not produce soviets, which are organs for the seizure of power, nonetheless has given us a magnificent example. Very quickly, from the outset of the strike, general assemblies sent their delegates (in general, two for each company) to a central assembly for an entire region, the MKS. This assembly would meet daily in the premises of the leading company - the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk - and the delegates would then return to give an account of the discussions to the assemblies which had elected them, and which would then take position on these deliberations. In a country where previous class struggles had been mercilessly drowned in blood, the movement's strength paralyzed the bloody hand of the government, and forced it to come and negotiate with the MKS on the latter's home ground. Of course, the Polish workers in 1980 were able to adopt this organizational form because the official unions were completely discredited by their role as guardians of the Stalinist state (and the workers were crushed in blood in December 1981 only thanks to the formation of the "independent" union Solidarnosc). This is the best possible proof, not only that the unions are not even an imperfect organization of the workers' struggle, but on the contrary, as long as they are able to sow illusions, are the greatest obstacle to a real organization of the struggle. Their presence and action blocks the class' spontaneous movement towards a self-organization born of the needs of the struggle itself.

Obviously, the weight of trade unionism within the central capitalist countries means that the class' next struggles will not take the form of the MKS, still less of the soviets. Nonetheless, these must serve as a reference-point and a guide, and the workers will have to fight for their general assemblies to be really sovereign, and allow the extension, control and centralization of the movement by the workers themselves.

In fact, the next struggles of the working class, for some time to come, will be marked by the effects of the reflux, which the bourgeoisie will exploit with all sorts of maneuvers. Faced with this difficult situation, which still does not put in question the perspective of decisive class confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the intervention of revolutionaries is irreplaceable. For it to be as effective as possible, and not to aid, even unwittingly, the bourgeoisie's plans, revolutionaries in their analyses and slogans must leave not the slightest opening to the dominant ideology, and must be the first to discern and denounce the maneuvers of the class enemy.

The size of the maneuver set up by the French bourgeoisie, and especially the fact that it has gone so far as to provoke massive strikes which can only help to aggravate its economic problems, is an indication in itself that the working class and its struggle have not disappeared, contrary to all the assertions of the hired academic "experts". It shows that the ruling class knows perfectly well that the increasingly brutal attacks which it will have to unleash will necessarily provoke massive struggles in response. While it has scored a point today, and won a political victory, the battle is far from over. The bourgeoisie, in particular, cannot prevent the increasing collapse of its economic system, or the loss of credibility by the unions, as was the case during the 1980s, the more they sabotaged the workers' struggles. But the working class will only win if it is able to understand fully its enemy's ability, even on the basis of a moribund system, to lay the most subtle and sophisticated obstacles in its path.

BN, 23rd December 1995

[1] The Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), transmission belt for the French "Communist" Party; the "social-democratic" Force Ouvriere (FO); the main teachers' union, the Federation de l'Education Nationale (FEN), close to the Socialist Party; the FSU, closer to the CP and the leftists, which split from the FEN a few years ago.

[2] Named after the Prime Minister called on to put it in motion. Amongst other things, this plan includes a whole series of attacks on Social Security and health insurance.

[3] It is worth noting that in 1968, the unions systematically barred entry to the factories, in order to prevent any contact between workers and students. It is true that, at the time, it was the students that talked most of "revolution", and above all that denounced most strongly the left parties (SP and CP). There was no danger then of the working class taking up the idea of revolution: it was only taking its first steps in struggle after four decades of counter-revolution. Moreover, the idea itself was singularly vague in the minds of the students, who gave it the kind of petty-bourgeois significance characteristic of their "movement". What the unions feared more than anything, was a still greater difficulty in controlling a movement which had begun independently, and which had surprised the entire ruling class.

[4] In his own way, Prime Minister Juppe helped swell the demonstrations by declaring, when announcing his plan, that the government would not survive if 2 million people came out on the streets: after each day of demonstrations, the unions and the media would count the numbers, to show that the figure could be reached. Some sections of the ruling class, including abroad, made believe that Juppe's declaration was a "blunder". In the same way, they reproached him for his "clumsiness" in launching all his attacks at the same moment:

"The strike movements are in large pan due to the fact that the government has behaved clumsily in trying to get all its reforms through at once" (The Wall Street Journal). He was also accused of arrogance: "Public anger is largely directed against Alain Juppe's autocratic style of government (...) This is as much a revolt against the arrogance of Gaullismas against budget rigor" (The Guardian). In reality, Juppe's "clumsiness" and "arrogance" were an important part of the provocation: the right in government was using the most effective means to increase the workers' anger and to make the unions' play easier.

[5] This was expressed clearly by one engine driver: "I joined the fight as a driver. Next day, I considered myself first and foremost a railwayman. Then I took on the pan of a state employee. Now, I just consider myself as a wage earner, just like those in the private sector whom I would like to rally to the cause ... If I were to stop tomorrow, I could never look a postman in the face again" (reported in Le Monde, l2/13th December).

[6] See the article on "The coordinations in the vanguard of sabotaging the struggle" International Review no. 56, and our French-language pamphlet on the nurses' struggle.

[7] See our article on "The Lessons of the 1905 Revolution" in International Review no 43.

Alongside the struggle of Bolshevism against Menshevism at the beginning of this century, the clash between marxism and anarchism within the 1st International is probably the most famous example of the defense of proletarian organizational principles in the history of the workers' movement. It is essential for revolutionaries today, separated from the living organizational history of their own class through half a century of Stalinist counter-revolution, to reappropriate the lessons of this experience. This first article will concentrate on the pre-history of this confrontation, showing how Bakunin came to the concept of taking over the leadership of the workers' movement by means of a secret organization under his own personal control. We will show how this concept led necessarily to Bakunin's manipulation by the ruling class with the aim of destroying the International. And we will demonstrate Bakunin's fundamentally anti-proletarian roots precisely at the organizational level.

The second article will then deal with the struggle which took place within the International itself, showing the radical opposition on the concept of functioning and of militantism between the marxist proletarian and the anarchist petty-bourgeois and déclassé viewpoints.

The historical significance of marxism's struggle against organizational anarchism

The 1st International has gone down in history above all because of the struggle between Marx and Bakunin, which at the Hague Congress in 1872 reached its first conclusion with the exclusion of Bakunin and his right hand man Guillaume. But what bourgeois historians present as a clash of personalities, and the anarchists as a fight between "authoritarian" and "libertarian" versions of socialism, was in reality a struggle of the entire International against those who trampled on its statutes. Bakunin and Guillaume were excluded in The Hague, because they had constructed a secret "brotherhood" within the International, an organization within the organization with its own structures and statutes. This organization, the so-called "Alliance of Socialist Democracy" existed and acted in hiding, with the goal of tearing the International out of the hands of its members and placing it under the control of Bakunin.

A deadly struggle between different organizational visions

The struggle which took place within the International was thus not between "authority and freedom" but rather between two completely opposed and hostile organizational principles.

1) On the one hand there was the position most determinedly defended by Marx and Engels, but which was that of the General Council as a whole and of the vast majority of members, according to which a proletarian organization cannot depend on the will of individuals, on the whims of "leading comrades", but has to function according to binding rules agreed on by all and binding for all, called statutes. These statutes have to guarantee the unitary, centralized, collective character of such an organization, ensuring an open, disciplined form of political debate and decision-making involving all its members. Whoever disagrees with the decisions of the organization, or no longer agrees with points of the statutes etc, has not only the possibility but the duty to present his or her critique openly in front of the whole organization, but within the framework designed for this purpose. This view of the organization, which the International Workingmen's Association developed for itself, corresponded to the collective, unitary, revolutionary character of the proletariat.

2) On the other hand Bakunin represented the elitist, petty-bourgeois vision of "brilliant leaders" whose extraordinary political clarity and determination is supposed to guarantee the revolutionary "passion" and trajectory. This leadership thus considers itself to be "morally justified" in collecting and organizing its disciples behind the back of the organization, in order to achieve control of the organization and assure the fulfillment of its historic mission. Since the membership as a whole is considered to be too stupid to be able to grasp the necessity of such revolutionary messiahs, they have to be brought to do what is "good for them" without them being aware of it, even against their will. The statutes, the sovereign decisions of congresses or elected bodies, are there for the others, but are only in the way of the elite.

This was the point of view of Bakunin. Before he joined the IWA, he explained to his disciples why the International was not a revolutionary organization, the Proudhonists having become reformist, the Blanquists old, the Germans and the General Council which they allegedly dominated being "authoritarian". It is striking how Bakunin considered the International to be the sum of its parts. What was above all lacking, according to Bakunin, was "revolutionary will". It was this which the Alliance intended to provide, by walking roughshod over the International's program and statutes and deceiving its members.

For Bakunin, the organization which the proletariat had constructed through years of hard work was worth nothing. What were everything to him were the conspiratorial sects which he himself created and controlled. It was not the class organisation which interested him, but his own personal status and reputation, his anarchist "freedom" or what is today known as "self realization". For Bakunin and his like the workers' movement was nothing but a vehicle for the realization of his own individual, individualist plans.

Without revolutionary organization, no revolutionary workers' movement

Marx and Engels, on the contrary, knew what the construction of the organization means for the proletariat. Whereas the history books believe that the conflict between Marx and Bakunin was essentially of a general political nature, the real history of the International reveals above all a struggle for the organization. Something which appears to be quite a boring affair to bourgeois historians. For us, on the contrary, its something excitingly important and full of lessons. What Marx shows us is that without proletarian organization there can be neither a revolutionary class movement nor a revolutionary theory.

And indeed, the idea that organizational solidity, development and growth are the prerequisites for the programmatic unfolding of the workers' movement, lies at the very heart of Marx and Engels' entire political activity[1]. The founders of scientific socialism knew only too well that proletarian class consciousness cannot be the product of individuals, but requires a collective, organized framework. This is why the construction of the revolutionary organization is one of the most important, if also one of the most difficult tasks of the revolutionary proletariat.

The struggle over the Statutes

Nowhere did Marx and Engels struggle with such determination, and as fruitfully, for this understanding as in the ranks of the 1st International. Founded in 1864, the International appeared at a time when the organized workers' movement was still mainly dominated by petty-bourgeois and reformist ideologies and sects. The International Workingmen's Association was in the first instance made up of these different tendencies. The opportunist representatives of the English trade unions, the petty-bourgeois reformist Proudhonism of the Latin countries, conspiratorial Blanquism, and in Germany the sect dominated by Lassalle, played a leading role within it. Although the different programs and world views clashed with each other, revolutionaries at that time were under enormous pressure for regroupment, from a working class clamoring for its unity. During the first meeting in London hardly anybody had the least idea how this unification was supposed to take place. In this situation the truly proletarian elements, with Marx at their head, pleaded for temporary postponement of the programmatic clarification between the different groupings. The revolutionaries' long years of political experience, and the international wave of struggle of the whole class should be used above all to forge a unitary organization. The international unity of this organization, embodied through the central organs, especially the General Council, and through the statutes, which had to be accepted by all members, would enable the International step by step to clarify the political divergences and achieve a unified point of view. This large scale regroupment had a chance of success as long as the international class struggle was still on the rise.

Marxism's most decisive contribution to the foundation of the 1st International lay therefore clearly at the level of the organizational question. The different sects present at the founding meeting were not able to concretize the will to international ties which the English and French workers above all had called for. The bourgeois Atto di Fratellanza, the followers of Mazzini, wanted to impose the conspiratorial statutes of a secret sect. The "inaugural address" and the statutes, which Marx, commissioned by the organizational committee, then presented, defended the proletarian and unitary character of the organization, and laid the indispensable basis for the further work of clarification. The International's ability to go further in overcoming utopian, petty-bourgeois, sectarian and conspiratorial visions, was in the first instance due to the fact that its different currents, in a more or less disciplined manner, abided by the common rules.

Amongst these different currents, the Bakuninists' specificity lay in their refusal to respect the statutes. That is why it was the Bakuninist Alliance which came close to destroying the first international party of the proletariat. The struggle against the Alliance has gone down in history as the great confrontation between marxism and anarchism. That was certainly the case. But at the heart of this confrontation were not general political questions such as the relation to the state, but organizational principles.

The Proudhonists, for example, shared many of Bakunin's views. But they were in favor of the clarification of their positions according to the rules of the organization. They also believed that the statutes of the organization should be respected by all members without exception. That is why in particular the Belgian "collectivists" were able to approach marxism on some important questions. Their best known spokesman, De Paepe, was a principled opponent of the kind of secret organization considered necessary by Bakunin.

Bakunin's secret Brotherhood

Precisely this question was at the center of the International's struggle against Bakunin. It is a fact which anarchist historians also accept, that Bakunin, when he joined the IWA in 1869, had a secret fraternity at his disposal, with which he wanted to seize control of the International.

"We are confronted here with a society, which behind the mask of extreme anarchism directs its attacks, not against the existing governments, but against the revolutionaries who do not submit to its orthodoxy and its leadership. Founded by the minority of a bourgeois congress, its members crept into the ranks of the international organizations of the working class, first of all trying to take over its leadership, and working towards its disorganization as soon as they saw that this plan had failed. In the most shameless manner they tried to slip in their own sectarian program and their limited ideas in place of the global program, the great efforts of our organization; it organizes in the public sections of the international its own little secret sections, which, obeying the same slogans, through common action agreed on in advance, in many cases has succeeded in getting control of them; they publically attack in their papers all those who refuse to submit to their leadership; they provoke open war - those are their own words - in our ranks".

These are the words of the report on "A Plot against the International Workingmen's Association" which Marx and Engels were commissioned to write by the Hague Congress of 1872 (Marx-Engels-Werke, Volume 18 Page 333).

The struggle of Bakunin and his supporters against the International was both the product of the specific historic situation at that time, and of more general factors still existing today. At the basis of his activities lay the infiltration of petty-bourgeois individualism and factionalism, incapable of submitting to the will and discipline of the organization. To this was added the conspiratorial attitude of the declasse Bohemian, who cannot do without maneuvers and plots in favor of his own personal goals. The workers' movement has always been confronted with such behavior, since the organization cannot completely shield itself from the influence of other social classes. On the other hand, Bakunin's plot took on the concrete historical form of the secret organization, something which also belonged to the past of the workers' movement of that time. We will have to look at the concrete history of Bakunin, in order also to be able to understand what is more generally valid, what is important for us to understand today.

Bakuninism opposed to the proletariat's break with petty-bourgeois sectarianism

The foundation of the International, signaling the end of the period of counter revolution after 1849, provoked the strongest (according to Marx even exaggerated) reactions of fear and hatred among the ruling classes: the remains of the feudal aristocracy and above all the bourgeoisie as the direct and historic opponent of the proletariat. Spies and agents provocateurs were sent to infiltrate its ranks. Coordinated, often hysterical slander campaigns were whipped up against it in the press. Its activities were wherever possible harassed and repressed by the police. Members were put on trial and in prison. But the ineffectiveness of these measures soon became clear as long as the class struggle and revolutionary movements were on the rise. It was not until the defeat of the Paris Commune 1871 that disarray in the ranks of the association began to get the upper hand.

What alarmed the bourgeoisie most, apart from the international unification of its enemy, was the rise of marxism and the fact that the workers' movement was abandoning the sectarian forms of clandestine organization and becoming a mass movement. The bourgeoisie felt much safer as long as the revolutionary workers' movement took the form of closed sectarian secret groupings around a single leading figure, representing some utopian scheme or plot, more or less completely isolated from the proletariat as a whole. Such sects were much more easily observed, infiltrated, misused and manipulated than a mass organization finding its main strength and security in its anchorage in the working class as a whole. For the bourgeoisie, it was above all the perspective of revolutionary socialist activity towards the proletariat as a class, something the utopian and conspiratorial sects of the prior period could never assume, which posed a danger for its very class domination. The link between socialism and class struggle, between the Communist Manifesto and large strike movements, between the political and the economic aspects of the class struggle of the proletriat - this was what caused the bourgeoisie so many sleepless nights from 1864 on. This was what explains the almost unbelievable savagery with which it slaughtered the Paris Commune, and the force of the international solidarity of all fractions of the exploiting classes with this massacre.

Thus, one of the main themes of bourgeois propaganda against the International was the accusation that in reality a powerful secret organization was behind it, and that the latter was conspiring to bring down the ruling order. Behind this propaganda, which also was an additional excuse for repressive measures, was above all the attempt of the bourgeoisie to convince the workers that what it still feared most were the secret conspirators and not its mass movement. It's clear that the exploiters did all they could to encourage the different sects and conspirers still active in the workers' movement to exert themselves at the expense of marxism and of the mass movement. In Germany Bismarck encouraged the Lassallean sect in its resistance to the strike movements of the class and to the marxist traditions of the Communist League. In France the press, but also the agents provocateurs, tried to whip up the ever present suspicion of the conspiratorial Blanquists against the mass activity of the International. In the Latin and Slavic countries a hysterical press campaign was whipped up against the alleged "German domination" of the International by the "authoritarian state-worshipping marxists".

But it was above all Bakuninism which felt encouraged by this propaganda. Before 1864, Bakunin had, despite himself, at least partly recognized the superiority of marxism over his own petty-bourgeois putschist version of revolutionary socialism. Since the rise of the International, and with it of the bourgeois political onslaught against it, Bakunin felt confirmed and strengthened in his suspicion towards marxism and the proletarian movement. In Italy, which had become the center of his activity, the different secret societies, the Carbonari, Mazzini, the Camorra etc. who had begun to denounce the International and combat its influence on the peninsula, acclaimed Bakunin as a "true" revolutionary. There were public declarations advocating that Bakunin take over the leadership of the European revolution. Bakunin's pan-slavism was welcomed as the natural ally of Italy in its struggle against the Austrian occupation forces. As opposed to this it was recalled that Marx considered the unification of Germany more important for the development of the revolution in Europe than the unification of Italy. Both the Italian and the more farsighted parts of the Swiss authorities began benevolently to tolerate the presence of Bakunin, who prior to this had been the victim of the most brutal European wide state repression.

The organizational debates on the question of conspiracy

Michael Bakunin, the son of small gentry, broke with his milieu and his class above all because of this great thirst for personal freedom, something which at that time could be achieved neither in the army, nor in the state bureaucracy nor on a landed estate. Already this motive shows how far away his political career was from the disciplined, collective character of the working class. At that time there was hardly any proletariat in Russia.

When Bakunin, at the beginning of the 1840s, reached Western Europe as a political refugee, with a history of political conspiracy already behind him, the debates within the workers' movement about organizational questions were already in full swing. Especially in France.

At that time the revolutionary workers' movement was mainly organized in the form of secret societies. This form arose not only because the workers' organizations were outlawed, but also because the proletariat, still numerically small and hardly yet separated from petty-bourgeois artisanry, had still not found its own road. As Marx wrote about the situation in France:

"It is a known fact that until 1830 the liberal bourgeoisie was at the head of the conspiracies against the restoration. After the July revolution the republican bourgeoisie took its place; the proletariat, already educated to conspire under the restoration, moved to the foreground to the extent that the republican bourgeoisie was scared off from conspiracy by the futile street battles. The Societe des Saisons, with which Barbes and Blanqui made the Uprising of 1839, was already exclusively proletarian, and so was the Nouvelles Saisons formed after the defeat (...) This conspiracy of course never embraced the great mass of the Paris proletariat" (Extracts from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx-Engels- Werke Vol 7 page 273).

But the proletarian elements did not restrict themselves to this decisive break with the bourgeoisie. They began to question, in practice, the domination of conspiracies and conspirators.

"To the extent that the Parisian proletariat itself came into the foreground as a political party, the conspirators lost their leading position, were broken up, found a dangerous competition in the proletarian secret societies, which were aimed, not at an immediate insurrection, but at the organization and development of the proletariat. Already the Insurrection of 1839 had a decisive proletarian and communist character. After it the splits began, about which the old conspirators complained so much; splits which arose from the needs of the workers to clarify their class interests, and which expressed themselves partly in the old conspiracies themselves, partly in the new propagandistic groupings. The powerful communist agitation which Cabet began soon after 1839, the controversy which arose within the communist party, soon went over the heads of the conspirators. Both Chemu and De la Hodde admit that the communists at the time of the February revolution were far and away the strongest fraction of the proletariat. The conspirators, in order not to lose their influence over the workers (...) had to follow this movement and adopt socialist or communist ideas" (Marx, ibid, Vol7, page 275).

The intermediate conclusion of this process was the Communist League, which not only adopted the Communist Manifesto, but also the first proletarian statutes of a class party freed of all conspiracy.

"The Communist League was thus no conspiratorial society, but rather a society, which went about the organization of the proletarian party in secret, since the German proletariat igni et aqua was publically outlawed from writing, speech and association. When such a society conspires, this takes place only in the sense in which steam and electricity conspire against the status quo" (Marx, "Revelations concerning the Communist Trials in Cologne", Werke Vol.8 P.461)

It was also this question which led to the split of the Willich-Schapper fraction.

"From the Communist League a fraction split off, or was split off, as you wish, which demanded, if not conspiracy, so at least the appearance of conspiracy, and therefore direct alliance with the democratic heroes of the day - the Willich-Schapper fraction" (ibid).

What made these people dissatisfied was the same thing that separated Bakunin from the workers' movement:

"It goes without saying that such a secret society, which aims at the formation of the future oppositional party and not the future government, is of little attraction for individuals who on the one hand hang the theatrical cloak of conspiracy over their own insignificance, and on the other want to satisfy their parochial ambitions on the day of the next revolution, but above all want to appear important, share in the booty of demagogy and be welcomed by the democratic market hawkers" (ibid).

After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-49 the League demonstrated one last time how far it had gone beyond the sect. It tried through a regroupment with the Chartists in England and the Blanquists in France, to found a new international organization: the Societe Universelle des Communistes Revolutionnaires. Such an organization was to be governed by statutes applicable internationally to all members, abolishing the division between a secret leadership and a base membership seen as a mass to be manipulated. This project, like the League itself, broke up because of the international retreat of the proletariat after the revolutionary defeat. That is why it was only more than a decade later, with the appearance of a new proletarian wave of struggle and the founding of the International, that this decisive blow against sectarianism could be struck.

First principles of proletarian organization

When Bakunin arrived back in Western Europe from Siberia at the beginning of the 1860s, the first main lessons of the proletariat's organizational struggle had already been drawn, and were available to anyone who wanted to assimilate them. These lessons were acquired in years of bitter experience during which the workers had consistently been used as cannon fodder by the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie in its own struggle against feudalism. During this struggle, the proletarian revolutionary elements had separated from the bourgeoisie not only politically but organizationally, developing principles of organization in accordance with their own class nature. The new statutes defined the organization as a united, collective and conscious organism. The separation between the base, composed of workers unaware of the real political life of the organization, and a leadership composed of professional conspirators, was overcome. The new principles of rigorous centralization, including the organization of illegal work, excluded the possibility of a secret organization within the organization or at its head. Whereas the petty bourgeoisie, and above all the radicalized déclassé elements, had justified the necessity of a secret functioning of a part of the organization in relation to the whole as a means of protecting it from the class enemy, the new proletarian understanding showed that precisely this conspiratorial elite led to the infiltration of the class enemy, in particular the political police, into the proletarian ranks. It was above all the Communist League which demonstrated that organizational transparency and solidity is the best protection against destruction through the state.

Marx drew a portrait of the conspirators from Paris before the 1848 revolution which could just as easily be applied to Bakunin. Here we find a clear expression of the critique of the petty-bourgeois nature of sectarianism, which opened the door wide not only to the police but also to the déclassé Bohemian.

"Their wavering existence, dependent in some cases more on luck than on their activity, their life without rules, whose only fixed points of reference are the pubs and wine merchants - the habitual meeting place of the conspirator - their unavoidable acquaintance with all kinds of dubious people, places them in that circle which in Paris is called "Bohemia". This democratic Bohemian of proletarian origin - there is also a democratic Bohemian of bourgeois origin, the democratic dossers and bar props - are either workers who have given up their work and thus become dissolute, or people from the lumpen proletariat, who bring all the dissolute habits of this class into their new existence. One can understand how under these circumstances we find a few jailbirds involved in almost every conspiracy.

The whole life of these professional conspirators expresses the most marked characteristics of the Bohemian. Recruiting officers of conspiracy, they go from one pub to the next, feeling the workers' pulse, picking out their people, cajoling them into their conspiracy, burdening either the society treasury or their new friends with the cost of the inevitable drinks (...) He can at any moment be called to the barricades and fall, at each step the police lay traps for him which can send him to prison or even to the gallows. Such dangers actually comprise the attraction of this craft; the greater the insecurity, the more the conspirator hurries to hold on to the pleasure of the moment. At the same time the habit of danger makes one to the greatest extent indifferent towards life and freedom" (ibid p.273).

It goes without saying that such people "despise most profoundly the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests" (p.272)

"The main characteristic in the life of the conspirator is the struggle with the police, to which they have exactly the same relationship as the thief or the prostitute. The police tolerate the conspiracies, and not only as a necessary evil. They tolerate them as easily observed centers (...) The conspirators constantly maintain feelers to the police, they come into collision with them at every moment; they hunt the informers just as the informers hunt them. Spying is one of their main occupations. It is no wonder, therefore, that the small leap from the artisan of conspiracy to paid police spy, facilitated by misery and prison, by threats and promises, is made so often" (ibid, p.274).

This was the understanding at the basis of the statutes of the International, and which worried the bourgeoisie enough to make it openly express its preference for Bakuninism.

The politics of conspiracy: Bakunin in Italy

In order to understand how Bakunin could end up being manipulated by the ruling classes against the International, it is necessary briefly to recall his political trajectory, as well as the situation in Italy after 1864. Anarchist historians are full of praise for Bakunin's "great revolutionary work" in Italy, where he set up a series of secret sects, and attempted to infiltrate and gain influence over different "conspiracies". They generally agree that it was Italy which hoisted Bakunin onto the pedestal of a "pope of revolutionary Europe". But since they carefully avoid going into the details of the reality of this milieu, we will have to go to the trouble here.

Bakunin earned a reputation for himself within the socialist camp through his participation in the revolution of 1848-49 as a military leader in Dresden. Imprisoned, extradited to Russia, and finally banished to Siberia, Bakunin did not reach Europe again until he fled in 1861. As soon as he arrived in London he went to Herzen, the well-known Russian liberal revolutionary leader. There he immediately began, independently of Herzen, to group the political emigration around his own person. It was a circle of Slavs, which Bakunin attached to himself via a pan-slavism tinged with anarchism. He kept away both from the English workers' movement and from the communist, above all German workers' educational club in London. Lacking an opportunity for conspiracy, (the foundation of the International was approaching) he set off for Italy in 1864, in search of disciples for his reactionary "pan-slavism" and his secret groupings.

"In Italy he found a lot of political secret societies; he found here a déclassé intelligentsia ever ready to get involved in all kinds of conspiracies; a peasant mass always on the verge of famine, and finally a pullulating lumpen proletariat, in particular the Lazzaroni of Naples, where he soon moved from Florence, and where he lived for several years. These classes appeared to him to be the real motor of revolution" (Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of his Life, p.411, 412).

Bakunin fled from the workers of Western Europe to the déclassé of Italy.

The secret societies as vehicles of revolt

In the period of reaction after the defeat of Napoleon, during which the Holy Alliance under Metternich pursued the principle of armed intervention of the great powers against every attempted social upheaval, those classes of society excluded from power were obliged to organize themselves in secret societies. This was not only the case for the workers, the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, but also for parts of the liberal bourgeoisie and even dissatisfied aristocrats. Almost all of these conspiracies, from 1820 on, whether the Decabrists in Russia or the Carbonari in Italy, organized themselves according to the model of freemasonry, which arose in the 17th century in England, and whose goals of "international brotherhood" and resistance to the Catholic church attracted European enlighteners like Diderot and Voltaire, Lessing and Goethe, Pushkin etc. But like so many things in this "century of enlightenment", like the "enlightened despots" Katarina and Friedrich the Great or Marie-Therese, freemasonry possessed a reactionary essence in the form of its mystical ideology, its elitist organization in different "grades of initiation", its aristocratic character and its murkiness, its leanings towards conspiracy and manipulation. In Italy, at that time the Mecca of the non-proletarian, unbridled maneuvering and conspiring secret societies, the Guelfi, Federati, Adelfi and Carbonari were sprawling from the 1820s and 1830s on. The most famous of them, the Carbonari, was a terrorist secret society which advocated catholic mysticism, and whose structures and "symbols" were taken from freemasonry.

But at the time Bakunin came to Italy, the Carbonari were already in the shadow of Mazzini's conspiracy. Mazzinism represented a step forward in relation to the Carbonari, since it struggled for a united, centralized Italian republic. Mazzini not only burrowed underground, but also agitated towards the population. After 1848 workers' sections were even formed. Mazzini also represented a progress organizationally, since he abolished the Carbonari system according to which the base militants had to follow blindly the order of the secret leadership on pain of death. But as soon as the International rose as a proletarian force independent of his control, he began to combat it as a threat to his own nationalist movement.

When Bakunin arrived in Naples, he immediately took up the struggle against Mazzini - but from the point of view of the Carbonari, whose methods he defended! Far from being on his guard, Bakunin plunged himself into this whole murky milieu, in order to take over the leadership of the conspiratorial movement. He founded the Alliance of Social Democracy, and as its leadership the secret International Brotherhood, an "order of disciplined revolutionaries".

A milieu manipulated by the reaction

The déclassé revolutionary aristocrat Bakunin found in Italy, much more even than in Russia, a suitable terrain. It was here that his organizational concept ripened to its fullest flowering. It was a murky swamp which brought forth a whole series of anti-proletarian organizations. These groupings of ruined, often depraved aristocrats, déclassé youth, or even of pure criminals, appeared to him more revolutionary than the proletariat. One of these groupings was the Camorra, which corresponded to Bakunin's romantic vision of revolutionary banditry. The domination of Naples by the Camorra, a secret society which had developed out of an organization of convicts, had become quasi-official after the amnesty of 1860. In Sicily, at about the same time, the armed wing of the dispossessed rural aristocracy infiltrated the local secret organization of Mazzini. From then on it called itself "Mafia" according to the capital letters of its slogan of battle: "Mazzini autorizza furti, incendi, awelenamenti" ("Mazzini allows us to steal, bum and poison"). Bakunin failed to denounce these elements or clearly distance himself from them.

Direct state manipulation was also not missing in this milieu. We can safely assume that this manipulation played a part in the way the Italian milieu celebrated Bakunin as the true revolutionary alternative to the "German dictatorship of Marx". Indeed, this propaganda was absolutely identical to that spread by the police organs of Louis-Napoleon in France. 

As Engels informs us, the Carbonari and many similar groups were manipulated and infiltrated by the Russian and other secret services (see Engels: "The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism", Werke Vo1.22). This state infiltration was reinforced above all after the defeat of the European-wide revolution of 1848. The French dictator, the adventurer Louis Napoleon, who after the defeat of this revolution, became the spearhead of the ensuing counter revolution, allied himself with Palmers ton in London, but above all with Russia, in order to hold down the European proletariat. From 1864 on, the secret police of Louis Napoleon was active above all in order to destroy the International. One of its agents was "Herr Vogt", an associate of Lassalle, who slandered Karl Marx in public as allegedly being the head of a blackmail gang.

But the main axis of the activity of Louis Napoleon's secret diplomacy lay in Italy, where France was trying to exploit the national movement to its own ends. In 1859 Marx and Engels pointed out that the French head of state was himself an ex-member of the Carbonari. ("The monetary policy in Europe; The Position of Louis-Napoleon". In Werke Vol. 13).

Bakunin, who was up to his neck in this swamp, of course believed that he could manipulate this rubbish heap for his own revolutionary purposes. In reality it was he himself who was manipulated. To this day we do not know in detail all the "elements" with whom he "conspired". But there are some indications. For example he wrote his "freemason's manuscripts" in 1865, "a text which aimed at presenting Bakunin's ideas to Italian freemasonry" as the anarchist historian Max Nettlau tells us.

"The freemason's manuscript refers to the infamous Syllabus, the papal damnation of human thought from 1864, and Bakunin wanted to connect up with the rage against the pope whipped up by this, in order to push forward freemasonry or at least that part of it capable of development; he begins by saying: in order to again become a living and useful body, freemasonry must once again seriously take up the service of mankind" (Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchismus, Vol.2 p. 48, 49)

Nettlau even proudly tries to prove, through a comparison of different quotations, that Bakunin had influenced the thought of freemasonry at that time. In reality it was the other way around. It was at this time that Bakunin adopted parts of the reactionary, mystical, secret society ideology of freemasonry. A world view which Engels already perfectly described at the end of the 1840s concerning Karl Heinzen:

"He sees the communist writer as a prophet, priest or vicar, who possesses a secret wisdom of his own, but which he withholds from the uneducated in order to keep them on leash (...) as if the literary representatives of communism would have an interest in keeping the worker ignorant, as if they were simply using them as the Illuminati wanted to use the populace in the last century" (Engels, "The Communists and Karl Heinzen" , Vol.4 Werke, p.321)

Here also lies the key to the Bakuninist Mystery, according to which in the future anarchist society without state and authority a secret society will still be needed.

Marx and Engels, without having thought of Bakunin, expressed this in relation to the English philosopher and once pseudo socialist Carlyle:

"The historically created class difference thus becomes a natural difference, which one has to recognize and honor as part of the eternal laws of nature through bowing before what is noble and wise in nature: the cult of genius. The whole view of the historic process of development flattens into the shallow trivialities of the Illuminati and freemason wisdom of the last century (...) With this comes the old question, who then is supposed to rule, which is broadly discussed with the most self-important staleness and finally answered, that the noble, wise and knowledgeable shall rule" (Extracts from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Werke Vol. 7 p.261).

Bakunin "discovers" the International

From the very outset the European bourgeoisie had attempted to use the swamp of Italy's secret societies against the International. Already at its foundation 1864 in London, Mazzini's supporters had attempted to impose their own sectarian statutes and thereby seize control of the Association. The representative of Mazzini in this action, Major Wolff, was later to be exposed as a police agent. After the failure of this attempt, the bourgeoisie started up the League of Peace and Freedom, using it to attract Bakunin into the cobweb of the underminers of the International.

Bakunin was expecting the "revolution" in Italy. While he was maneuvering in the swamp of the ruined nobility, déclassé youth, and the urban lumpen proletariat, the International Workingmen's Association had, without his involvement, risen to become the leading revolutionary force in the world. Bakunin had to recognize that, in his attempt to become Europe's revolutionary pope, he had backed the wrong horse. It was now, in 1867, that the bourgeois League of Peace and Freedom was founded, very obviously against the International. Bakunin with his "brotherhood" joined the League with the goal of "joining up the League, with the Brotherhood within it as its revolutionary inspiring force, with the International" (Nettlau, ibid, p. 100)

With this step, logically enough, but without even noticing it himself, Bakunin became the spearhead of the ruling classes' attempt to destroy the International.

The League of Peace and Freedom

The League, originally the idea of the Italian guerilla leader Garibaldi and the French author Victor Hugo, was founded in particular by the Swiss bourgeoisie, and supported by part of the Italian secret societies. Its pacifist disarmament propaganda and its demands for a "United States of Europe" were in reality mainly aimed at splitting and weakening the First International. At a time when Europe was split between a western part developing capitalistically, and a feudal part under the Russian knout, the call for disarmament was a favorite demand of Russian diplomacy. The International, like the whole workers' movement, had from the beginning adopted the slogan of the reestablishment of a democratic Poland as a bulwark against Russia, which at that time was the mainstay of European reaction. The League now denounced this policy as "militarist", whereas Bakunin's pan-slavism was presented as being truly revolutionary and directed against all militarism. In this way the bourgeoisie strengthened the Bakuninists against the International.

"The Alliance of socialist democracy is truly of bourgeois origin. It did not originate from the International; it is a branch of the League of Peace and Freedom, a stillborn society of bourgeois republicans. The International was already solidly founded, when Michael Bakunin took it into his head to play the part of emancipator of the proletariat. It could only offer him the field of activity common to all members. In order to acquire a reputation within it, he would first of all have had to win his spurs through consistent and self-sacrificing work; he believed that he would find better prospects and an easier path on the side of the bourgeoisie of the League" ("A Plot Against the IWA - Report on the Activities of Bakunin", Werke Vol. 18, p.335)

The proposal that Bakunin himself made, of an alliance of the League with the IWA, was however rejected by the Brussels Congress of the International. At this time it was also already becoming clear that an overwhelming majority would reject the abandonment of the support for Poland against Russian reaction. Thus there was nothing left for Bakunin but to join the International in order to undermine it from within. This orientation was supported by the leadership of the League, within which he had already set up a power base.

"The alliance between bourgeois and workers should not be limited to an open alliance. The secret statutes of the Alliance (...) include indications, that Bakunin laid the basis, in the midst of the League itself, for a secret society which should rule over the latter. Not only are the names of the leading groups identical with those of the League ... but also it are declared in the secret statutes that the founding members of the Alliance are for the most part ex-members of the Bern Congress" ("A plot..." ibid p.337)

Those who are acquainted with the politics of the League can assume that from the outset it intended to use Bakunin against the International - a task for which Bakunin was well prepared in Italy. Also the fact that several activists in the proximity both of Bakunin and the League were later exposed as police agents, speaks for this. Indeed, nothing could be more dangerous for the International than its corrosion from within by elements who themselves were not agents of the state, and who had a certain reputation in the workers' movement, but who pursued their own personal goals at the expense of the movement.

Even if Bakunin did not want to serve the counter revolution in this manner, he and his like carry the full responsibility for this through the way in which they put themselves close to the most reactionary and murky elements of the ruling class.

It is true that the Workers' International was conscious of the dangers represented by such an infiltration. The London Delegate Conference, for instance, adopted the following resolution:

"In those countries where the regular organization of the International is presently not possible due to governmental interference, the Association and its local sections can reconstruct themselves under some other name. However, any formation of international sections in the form of secret societies is and remains forbidden" (Werke Vol. 17.P.422).

Marx, who proposed this resolution, justified it as follows:

"In France and Italy, where such a political situation exists, that the right of assembly is a penal act, people will be strongly inclined to let themselves get drawn into secret societies, the results of which are always negative. Apart from this, such kinds of organization stand in contradiction to the development of the proletarian movement, because these societies, instead of educating the workers, submit them to authoritarian and mystical laws which hinder their independence and lead their consciousness in a wrong direction" (Intervention by Marx at the London Conference, September 1871).

Nevertheless, despite this vigilance Bakunin's Alliance succeeded in penetrating the International. In the second article in this series we will describe the struggle within its ranks, going to the roots of the different conceptions of organization and militantism between the proletarian party and the petty-bourgeois sect.

Kr, December 1995

[1] Clearly, the starting-point for the formation of a revolutionary organization is agreement on a political program. Nothing is more foreign to marxism, and to the workers' movement generally, than regroupment without programmatic principles. This being said, and contrary to the Bordigist vision, the proletarian program is not given once and for all. On the contrary, it is developed, enriched, and its mistakes corrected through the living experience of the class. When the IWA was formed, in other words in the early days of the workers' movement, the program's essential elements - that which determined an organization's membership of the proletarian camp - came down to a few general principles, contained in the preamble to the International's Statutes. Bakunin and his followers did not call these principles into question. Their attack on the IWA was essentially against the Statutes themselves, the IWA's rules of functioning. However, this does not mean that program and statutes can be separated. The latter express and concretize the essential principles of the working class, and no other, and are therefore an integral part of the program.

The workers' strikes and demonstrations that shook France at the end of autumn 1995 have illustrated both the proletariat's ability to return to the combat, but also the enormous difficulties that it encounters on the way. In the last issue of the International Review, we gave an immediate appreciation of these social movements' significance:

... the workers cannot remain passive [in the face of the brutal attacks that a crisis-ridden capitalism is dealing out to them]. They have no way out, other than to defend themselves in struggle. But to prevent the working class from entering the combat with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie has taken the lead, and has pushed the workers into a premature struggle, completely under the control of the unions. It has not left the workers time to mobilize at their own rhythm and with their own methods (...)

Thus although the recent strike movement in France reveals a deep discontent within the working class, it is above all the result of a maneuver on a very large scale by the bourgeoisie, aimed at leading the workers into a massive defeat, and above all at creating a profound disorientation in their ranks"2.

The importance of the events in France at the end of 1995

The fact that social movements in France were fundamentally the result of a bourgeois maneuver in no way reduces their importance, nor does it mean that the working class is today nothing better than a flock of sheep at the mercy of the ruling class. In particular, these events are a stinging rebuttal of all the "theories" (given abundant publicity at the time of the Stalinist regimes' collapse) on the "disappearance" of the working class, and to the variations that spoke of the "end of working class struggle", or (the "left" variety) of the "recomposition" of the class, which has supposedly dealt a serious blow to the struggle3.

The very fact and extent of the strikes and demonstrations of November-December 1995 is testimony to the class' real potential today: hundreds of thousands of strikers, several million demonstrators. However, we cannot simply be satisfied with this observation: after all, during the 1930s, we saw huge movements like the strikes of May-June 1936 in France, or the workers' insurrection against the fascist coup in Spain, on 18th July of the same year. The fundamental difference between today's class movements and those of the 1930s, is that the latter were part of a long string of working class defeats following the revolutionary wave that began during World War I, defeats which plunged the working class into the deepest counter-revolution of its history. In this context of physical, and above all political defeat, expressions of working class combativity were easily derailed by the bourgeoisie onto the rotten terrain of anti-fascism, in other words the preparation for the second imperialist massacre. We will not return here to our analysis of the historic course4, but it is necessary to state clearly here that the situation today is not the same as in the 1930s. Today's mobilizations of the working class are in no way steps towards the preparation of imperialist war. Their significance lies in the perspective of decisive class confrontations, in a capitalism plunged into irreversible crisis.

This being said, the importance of the French social movements at the end of autumn 1995 lies not so much in the workers' strikes and demonstrations in themselves, as in the size of the bourgeois maneuver that provoked them.

We can often judge the real balance of class forces from the way that the bourgeoisie acts against the proletariat. The ruling class, after all, has many means of evaluating these forces: opinion polls, police reports (in France, for example, one of the jobs of the Renseignements Genereux, ie the political police, is to "feel the pulse" of potentially dangerous sectors of the population, and in particular the working class). But the most important of them is the union apparatus, which is much more effective than all the sociologists, opinion pollsters, or police functionaries. Since this apparatus is responsible above all for controlling the exploited, in the service of capitalist interests, and has 80 years of experience in the matter, it is especially sensitive to the workers' state of mind, their readiness and ability to engage in struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is the unions' job to keep the bourgeoisie's leaders constantly informed as to the extent of the danger represented by the class struggle. And this is the purpose of the periodic meetings between union leaders and the bosses, or the government: plan together the best and most effective strategy for the bourgeoisie's attacks on the working class. In the case of the movements in France at the end of 1995, the size and sophistication of the maneuver organized against the working class are enough in themselves to show how far the class struggle, and the perspective of massive workers' combats, are a central concern for the bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois maneuvers against the working class

The article in the previous issue of this Review described in detail the various aspects of the maneuver, and how all the sectors of the ruling class, from the right to the far left, collaborated in it. Here, we will simply recall the main elements:

- starting in the summer of 1995, an avalanche of attacks (from a brutal tax hike, to a threat to the pensions of state employees, via a wage freeze for the latter, and the whole topped off with a plan for Social Security reform, the "Juppe plan" designed to increase wage earners ' subscriptions, while reducing the reimbursement of medical expenses);

- a veritable provocation directed at the rail workers, in the form of a "contract plan" between the state and the SNCF (the nationalized rail company), imposing an extra 7 years work on drivers before reaching pension rights, and thousands of job cuts;

- use of the rail workers' immediate mobilization as an "example to follow" by the other workers of the state sector: contrary to their usual practice of confining the struggle, this time the unions became zealous propagandists for their extension and succeeded in drawing in many other workers, notably in city transport, the postal service, gas and electricity, and tax offices;

- massive media coverage of the strikes, presented in a highly favorable light on the TV, and even accompanied by intellectuals signing declarations for "an awakening of society", and against "monolithic thought";

- the leftists' contribution to the maneuver, giving their total approval to the unions, reproaching them solely with not having done the same thing earlier;

- then, after three weeks of strikes, the government withdraws the "contract plan" on the railways, and the measures against state employees' pensions: the unions hail their victory and talk of a government "retreat"; despite the resistance of some of the "tough" railyards, the rail workers go back to work, giving the signal for the other sectors to end the strike.

Overall, the bourgeoisie won a victory by pushing through most of the measures which concern every sector of the working class, such as the increase in taxes and the reform of the Social Security, and even some of the measures aimed at specific sectors, such as the wage freeze for state employees. But the bourgeoisie's greatest victory was political: the workers who have just engaged in three weeks of strikes are not ready to launch a new movement when the next attacks fall. Moreover, and above all, these strikes and demonstrations have given the unions the opportunity to polish up their image considerably: whereas previously, the unions in France had the reputation of dispersing the struggle, of organizing worn-out and divisive days of action, now they appeared throughout the movement (especially the two most important of them: the Stalinist CGT and Force Ouvriere led by the Socialists) as indispensable to the movement's extension and unity, to the organization of massive demonstrations, and as responsible for the government's so-called "retreat". As we said in the article in our last Review:

In fact, the considerable importance that the bourgeoisie gave to renewing the unions' credibility was amply confirmed after the movement, especially in the press with numerous articles emphasizing the union "comeback". It is interesting to read, in one of the bourgeoisie's confidential newsheets, that it uses for talking unambiguously: "One of the clearest signs of this union recovery is the way the coordinations have volatilized. They has been seen as a testimony of the unions' inability to represent the workers. The fact that they did not appear this time shows that the unions' efforts to "stick to the terrain", and restore a "unionism close to the workers" have not been in vain"5. The same newsheet is happy to quote a declaration - presented as a "sigh of relief" - from a private sector boss: "At last we've got strong trade unions back again".

A lack of understanding in the revolutionary milieu

This is not a hasty judgment on BC's part, as a result of insufficient information, since in its January 1996 issue, BC returns to the same idea:

"The employees of the state sector mobilized spontaneously against the Juppe plan. And it is good to remember that the workers' first demonstrations took place on the terrain of the immediate defense of class interests, taking the union organizations themselves by surprise, and showing once again that when the proletariat moves to defend itself against the bourgeoisie's attacks, it almost always does so outside and against union directives. It was only in the second phase that the French unions, above all Force Ouvriere and the CGT, caught up with the movement and thus recovered their credibility in the workers' eyes. But the involvement, with such apparent radicalism, of Force Ouvriere and the other unions in fact hid the sordid interests of the union bureaucracy, which can only be understood if one knows the French system of social protection [where the unions, notably Force Ouvriere, manage me funds, which is precisely one of the things called into question by the Juppe plan].

We find a similar idea put forward by BC's sister organization within the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Parry (IBRP), the Communist Workers Organization (CWO). In no. 1, 3rd Series, of its review Revolutionary Perspectives, we read:

In the analysis of the two IBRP groups, there is much insistence on the fact the unions only sought to defend their own "sordid interests" when they called for mobilization against the Juppe plan on Social Security. Obviously, the union leaders are sensitive to their own petty interests, such an analysis of reality comes down to looking at reality through the wrong end of a telescope. It's like seeing the customary disputes between the different unions as nothing more than an expression of the competition that exists between them, without seeing the fundamental aspect: that this is an excellent way of dividing the working class. In reality, these "sordid interests" of the trades unions can only find expression within the framework of their role in capitalist society: that of the social firemen of the capitalist order; the bourgeois state's police within the workers' ranks. And if they should have to renounce their "sordid interests" in order to keep up this role, then they will do so without hesitation: their sense of responsibility in the defense of capitalist interests against the working class is impeccable. At the end of 1995, the union leaders knew perfectly well that letting Juppe put through the major part of his plan would deprive them of some of their financial prerogatives, but they kissed them in the higher capitalist interest. It is far better for the unions to be thought to be fighting their own corner (they can always take refuge behind the argument that their own strength contributes to that of the working class), than to be unmasked for what they really are: cogs in the machinery of the capitalist state.

In fact, while our comrades of the IBRP are perfectly clear on the trade unions' capitalist nature, they still express the idea, nuanced it is true7, that the unions were surprised, even outflanked, by the initiative of the working class. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one example during the last 10 years in France of the unions perfectly anticipating and controlling a social movement, then 1995 is it. This movement was not just controlled by the unions, they systematically provoked it, with the government's complicity, as we have seen above and analyzed at length in our previous article. And the best proof that the bourgeoisie and its union apparatus was neither "surprised" nor "outflanked", is the media coverage that the bourgeoisie in other countries immediately gave to the movement. Especially since the big strikes in Belgium 1983, which heralded the class' emergence from the demoralization and disorientation which accompanied the workers' 1981 defeat in Poland, the bourgeoisie has been careful to organize a complete international blackout around workers' struggles. Only when the struggle corresponds to a maneuver planned in advance by the ruling class, as was the case in Germany 1992, does the blackout give way to a plethora of information. In 1992, the strikes in the public sector, especially in public transport, already had the aim of "presenting the unions, which had systematically organized all the actions and kept the workers completely passive, as the real protagonists of the movement against the bosses"8. From this point of view, the movements in France at the end of 1995 were a "remake" of those stirred up by the bourgeoisie in Germany three and a half years earlier. The intense media bombardment that accompanied these movements (even in Japan, it was daily headline news on the TV) shows not only that they were planned and controlled from start to finish by the unions, but that the ruling class organized the maneuver on an international scale to strike a blow at working class consciousness in the advanced countries.

The best proof lies in the way that the Belgian bourgeoisie maneuvered in the wake of the social movements in France:

- while the media were speaking of a "new May 68" in France, at the end of November 1995, the unions launched movements exactly like those in France against the attacks on the state sector, especially against the reform of social security;

- the bourgeoisie then mounted a brutal provocation by announcing attacks of unprecedented violence against workers on the railways (SNCB) and in the national airline (Sabena); just as in France, the muons resolutely took the lead in mobilizing these two sectors, presented as the example to follow, while the rail workers were invited to follow the example of their French colleagues;

- two days later, the government and the bosses organized a new provocation at the SNCB and Sabena, with the management announcing that its austerity measures were to be maintained: the unions renewed the "hardline" struggle (confrontations between police and strikers blockading Brussels airport), and tried to spread the movement to other branches of the state sector, as well as to the private sectors, with union delegations declaring "solidarity" with the Sabena workers, and declaring that "their struggle is a social laboratory for all the workers";

- finally, at the beginning of January, the bosses once again pretended to retreat, announcing that they would open a "social dialogue" at both the SNCB and Sabena "under the pressure of the movement"; as in France, the movement ended in victory and increased credibility for the unions.

Comrades of the IBRP, do you really believe that this remarkable resemblance between events in France and in Belgium was a mere accident, and that the bourgeoisie and the unions internationally had planned none of this?

Comrades of Battaglia Comunista, when you end up writing such nonsense, then at the least you should try to draw the lessons afterwards. In particular, you should be a little more skeptical at what the bourgeoisie has to stay. If you let yourself be taken in by all the ruling class uses to try to fool the working masses, how can you claim to be the latter's vanguard?

The need for a historical analytical framework

An immediatism which allows us to understand why the groups of the IBRP, for example in 1987-88, swing between complete skepticism and an equally complete enthusiasm at the workers' struggles. In 1987, BC began by putting the struggle in the Italian schools on the same level as that of the magistrates or airline pilots, only to transform it into "a new and interesting phase in the class struggle in Italy". The CWO oscillated in the same way over the strikes in Britain during the same period12.

In January 1996, it was the same immediatism that made BC write that "The strike of the French workers, whatever the opportunist (sic) attitude of the unions, is really an episode of extraordinary importance in the recovery of the class struggle". For BC, what was sadly lacking in this struggle, to avoid its defeat, was a proletarian party. If the party - which must indeed be built for the proletariat to carry out the communist revolution - were to be inspired by the same immediatist approach as BC, than we can only fear for the fate of the revolution.

Only by turning our backs firmly on immediatism, and placing the present moments of the class struggle in their historic context, can we understand them and truly play the part of vanguard of the working class.

Obviously, this framework is the course of history , and we won't go back over it. More precisely, the framework has been defined by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s, which we recalled briefly at the beginning of this article. At the end of the summer of 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ICC set out the new analytical framework which would allow us to understand the evolution of the class struggle:

Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland"13.

The ICC had to integrate further new and extremely important events into this framework:

These tragic events certainly put paid to the lies about the "new world order" announced by the bourgeoisie at the time of the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, which was supposed to be the main source of military tensions in the world (...) But at the same time, the great majority of the working class in the advanced countries, following a new round of bourgeois propaganda campaigns, submitted to this war with a strong sense of powerlessness, which considerably weakened its struggles. The August 1991 putsch in the USSR and the new destabilization it provoked, as well as the civil war in Yugoslavia, contributed in their turn to reinforce this feeling of powerlessness. The breakup of the USSR and the barbaric war unfolding in Yugoslavia are expressions of the advanced decomposition of capitalist society today. But thanks to all the lies spread by the media, the bourgeoisie has managed to hide the real cause of these events and present them as a further manifestation of the "death of communism" or as a question of the "right of nations to self-determination", in the face of which workers have nothing to do but be passive spectators trusting to the wisdom of their governments"14.

The horror and duration of the war in Yugoslavia, unfolding right next to the great proletarian concentrations of Western Europe has been one of major elements that explain the extent of the proletariat's difficulties at the present time. The war combines (though to a lesser extent) the damage done by the collapse of the Eastern bloc - a deep disarray and illusions among the workers - and by the war in the Gulf - a profound feeling of impotence - without, unlike the latter, revealing the crimes and barbarity of great "democracies". The war provides a clear illustration of how capitalism's decomposition, of which it is one of today's most spectacular expressions, acts as a serious obstacle to the development of the workers' struggle and consciousness.

Another aspect which needs to be emphasized, in particular because it concerns the bourgeoisie's main weapon against the workers, the unions, is the fact that we pointed out in our Theses of September 1989: "reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions". This sprang from the fact not that the workers still had any illusions in the "socialist paradise", but that the existence of a supposedly "non-capitalist" society seemed to indicate the possibility of some society other than a capitalist one. The end of these regimes was presented as the "end of history" (a term used quite seriously by certain bourgeois "thinkers"). Inasmuch as trade unionism is supposed to act on the terrain of improving workers' living conditions within capitalism, the events of 1989, aggravated by all the blows suffered by the working class since then, could only strengthen the unions, as we have seen - and which the bourgeoisie has made the most of in the social movements at the end of 1989.

The unions' lost credibility could not be restored all at once. Throughout the 1980s, they had been so discredited by their repeated sabotage of the workers' struggles, that it was difficult for them to set themselves up immediately as the intransigent defenders of the working class. Their return to the limelight was thus conducted in several stages, where they were more and more strongly presented as the vital instrument of the workers' struggle. An example of this progressive return of the unions is given by the situation in Germany, where the grand maneuvers in the public sector during the spring of 1992 still left room for the spontaneous struggles, without union instructions, of autumn 1993 in the Ruhr. By contrast, in the engineering workers' strikes at the beginning of 1995, the unions were much more firmly in the saddle. But the most significant example comes from Italy. In the autumn of 1992, the unions became the target for the great outburst of workers' anger against the Amato plan. A year later, the "mobilization" of the working class and the massive demonstrations throughout the country were led by the "factory council coordinations", in other words by the structures of rank -and- file unionism. Finally, the monster demonstration of 1994 in Rome, the biggest since World War II, was a masterpiece of union control.

To understand this renewed vigor of the trade unions, it is important to emphasize that it has been made possible by the survival of the union ideology, whose ultimate defenders are the "rank-and-file" or "fighting" unionists. In Italy, for example, the latter led the contestation of the official unions (by bringing to demonstrations the ball-bearings and rotten tomatoes that were used against the union leaders), before opening the way to the union recovery of 1994 with their own "mobilizations" during 1993. In the combats to come, once the official unions have once again been discredited by their sabotage in the service of the ruling class, the workers will still have to attack the unionist ideology represented by the rank-and-file unionists.

The bourgeoisie thus confirms what revolutionaries have always said: the crisis is the workers' best ally. It will open their eyes to the dead-end of the world today, and give it the will to overthrow it, despite all the obstacles that the ruling class will not fail to sow in its path.

FM, 12/03/96

1 "Resolution on the International Situation", adopted by the 11th Congress of the ICC, in International Review no.82.

2 International Review no.84, "Struggle behind the unions leads to defeat".

3 See our article "The proletariat is still the revolutionary class" in International Review no. 74.

4 See our article "Report on the course of history" in International Review no.18.

5 Supplement to the bulletin Entreprise et Personnel, titled "The social conflict at the end of 1995 and its probable consequences".

6 This is a mistake. The CFDT - a social-democratic union with Christian origins - approved the Juppe plan for the Social Security.

7 The CWO's tone is a good deal less optimistic than BC's: "The bourgeoisie is so confident that it will control the workers, that the Paris Stock Exchange is rising". We should add that the Franc remained stable during the entire movement. Two proofs that the bourgeoisie welcomed the movement with satisfaction. And with good reason!

8 See International Review no. 70, "Faced with chaos and massacres, only the working class can provide an answer".

9 See our article "The Wind from the East and the Response of Revolutionaries" in International Review no. 61.

10 See in particular our articles "In response to Battaglia Comunista on the course of history" and nature of a historic course: "When we talk about a "historic course and "The confusion of communist groups on the present period: the under-estimation of the class struggle", in International Review nos. 50 and 54.

11 International Review no. 54.

12 On this subject, see our article "Decantation in the proletarian political milieu and the oscillations of the IBRP" in International Review no. 55.

13 "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern bloc countries", International Review no. 60.

14 "Only the working class can take humanity out of this barbarism", International Review no. 68.

15 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, previously director of the Harvard Business Review, quoted by Le Monde Diplomatique of March 1996.

In the three preceding articles we showed how the struggles of the working class forced capital to bring World War I to a close. In order to prevent an extension of the revolutionary struggle, capital did all in its power to divide the working class in Germany from that in Russia, to sabotage any further radicalization. In this article we want to show how revolutionaries in Germany were confronted with the question of building the organization, faced with the betrayal of the social-democracy.

The outbreak of World War I was possible only because the majority of the parties of the Second International submitted to the interests of their various national capitals. Once the unions participated unhesitatingly in the "holy alliance" with the national capital, the approval of war credits came as no surprise; it was the consequence of the whole process of degeneration of the opportunist wing of Social Democracy. Before the war, its left wing had fought with all its strength against this degeneration, so there was an immediate response to this betrayal. From the very beginning of the war the internationalists regrouped around the banner of the group that would soon become known as "Spartakus". They identified their first responsibility as the defense of working class internationalism against the betrayal of the SPD leadership. This meant not only propagandizing in favor of this programmatic position but also, and most importantly, defending the organization of the working class, whose leadership had betrayed it, from being throttled by capitalist forces. Following the betrayal of the party leadership, there was unanimous agreement on the part of all the internationalists not to allow the party to fall into the hands of the traitors. All of them worked to win back the party. None wanted to leave of their own accord, on the contrary they all wanted to work as a fraction within the party with the aim of expelling the social patriotic leadership.

The traitors' bastion was the union representatives, who had been irrevocably integrated into the state, and nothing could be reclaimed for the working class there. The SPD however was a point of resistance. Even the parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag was clearly divided between the traitors and the internationalists. Even though - as we showed in the article in International Review no 81 - it was only with great difficulty and great hesitation that a voice was raised in the Reichstag against the war. But the most potent lever against betrayal developed above all within the rank and file of the party itself.

"We accuse the Reichstag fraction of having betrayed the fundamental principles of the party and, with them, the spirit of the class struggle. The parliamentary fraction has thus placed itself outside the party; it has ceased to be the official representative of German Social-Democracy" (Leaflet of the opposition, quoted by R. Muller).

All the internationalists were agreed not to abandon the organization to the traitors. "This does not mean that immediate separation from the opportunists is desirable, or even possible, in every country. It means that such a separation is ripe historically, that it has become inevitable and that it represents a step forward, a necessity for the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat. It means that the historic turning point, marked by "peaceful" capitalism's entry into its imperialist phase, puts such a separation on the agenda" (Lenin, "Opportunism and the foundation of the Second International", Works, vol 21).

In International Review no 81 we showed that the Spartakists and the "Linksradikale" in other towns aimed at forging a balance of forces that would put the social-patriotic leadership in a minority. How could the organizational break with the traitors be brought about? Obviously the traitors and the internationalists could not coexist in the same party. One had to get rid of the other. The balance of forces had to be reversed in the course of this struggle. As we showed in International Review no 81, the Spartakists' resistance put the leadership in an increasingly difficult situation found itself; the party as a whole followed the traitors less and less. In fact the social-patriots in the leadership were forced to go onto the offensive against the internationalists in order to asphyxiate them. How were they to react to this? By slamming the door and immediately forming a new organization outside the SPD?

There were divergences on this question within the left. The social-patriots began to chase the revolutionaries out of the SPD - first from the parliamentary fraction, then from the party itself; after Liebnecht, who was excluded in December 1915, it was the turn of those deputies who had voted against the war credits to be thrown out of the parliamentary group in spring 1916. At this point there was discussion on how long it was necessary to fight for the organization.

Rosa Luxemburg's attitude was clear: "You can "leave" tiny sects and circles when they no longer suit you, to found new sects and circles. To want to free the proletarian masses from a horribly heavy and damaging yoke simply by "leaving" and to show them by this valiant example the road to follow, is just a childish dream. To have the illusion of freeing the masses by tearing up your membership card is just the other side of the coin to fetishising the party card as an illusory power. These two attitudes are just different sides of organizational cretinism (...) The decomposition of German social-democracy is part of an historic process of the broadest scope, of the general confrontation between bourgeoisie and working class, a battle ground that you cannot abandon out of disgust. We must wage this titanic battle to the bitter end. We must strain with all our united forces to break the deadly knot that official German democracy, the official free unions and the ruling class have slipped over the neck of the masses, who have been duped and betrayed. The liquidation of this pile of organized putrefaction, that today goes under the name of social-democracy, is not a private affair that depends on the personal decision of one or several groups (...) It must be sorted out as a broad public question of power by deploying all our strength" (Rosa Luxemburg, Der Kampf no 31, "Offene Briefe an Geninnungsfreunde. Von Spattung, Einheit und Austritt" , Duisberg, 6 January 1917).

"The slogan is neither split nor unite; it is not for a new party or for the old party. It is to reconquer the party from bottom to top by means of the rebellion of the masses who must take the organizations and their resources into their own hands, not in words but in deeds, by rebellion (...) The decisive combat for the party has began" (Spartakusbriefe, 30th March 1916).

The work of a fraction

While Rosa Luxemburg firmly defended the idea of remaining as long as possible in the SPD and was the most strongly convinced of the need to work as a fraction, the Bremen left began to defend the idea that an independent organization was necessary.

Up to the end of 1916, beginning of 1917. this question was not a focus of disagreement. K. Radek, one of the main representatives of the Bremen left himself said: "To propagandize for a split does not mean that we must leave the party immediately. On the contrary, we must aim to take control of all the organizations and party organs possible (...) It is our duty to remain at our posts as long as possible because the longer we remain, the greater will be the number of workers who will follow us if we are excluded by the social imperialists, who obviously understand quite well what our tactic is even if we do not state it openly (...) One of the tasks of the hour is to unite the local party organizations that are in opposition and establish a provisional leadership of an opposition that is clearly defined" (Radek, Unter eigenem Banner, p327, end of I 916) .

So it is not true that the Bremen left wanted an immediate organizational separation in August 1914. It was only from 1916, when the balance of forces within the SPD began to waver more and more, that the Dresden and Hamburg groups argued for an independent organization - even if they did not have solid organizational conceptions on this question.

An assessment of the first two years of the war showed that the revolutionaries did not allow themselves to be silenced and that none of the groups gave up their organizational independence. That is why, if they had abandoned the organization to the social patriots in 1914, they would have been throwing their principles overboard. Even in 1915, as the pressure of the workers themselves was growing, with an increasing number of acts of resistance, this was still not a reason to set up a new organization independent of and outside the SPD. As long as the balance of forces remained inadequate, as long as there was not the strength necessary to fight within the ranks of the workers and as long as the revolutionaries were still a small minority; in short, as long as the conditions for "the formation of the party" were not fulfilled, it was necessary to work as a fraction within the SPD.

A brief survey of the situation at the time shows that the shock of the party leadership's betrayal in August 1914 continued to be felt, that with the nationalism's temporary victory the working class had suffered a defeat, and that it was consequently impossible to found a new party. It was first necessary to fight for the old party, carry out the difficult work of a fraction and then prepare for the construction of a new party - but to found it immediately in 1914 was unthinkable. The working class had first to recover from the effects of the defeat of 1914. For the internationalists, neither the immediate exit from the SPD, nor the foundation of a new party was on the agenda in 1914.

In September 1916 the party's Executive Committee called a national conference of the SPD. Although the leadership manipulated the mandates given to the delegates, they nevertheless lost their hold over the opposition. The latter decided not to pay dues to the Executive. The Executive replied by excluding all those who refused to pay dues, starting with the Bremen left.

In a situation which rapidly became acrimonious, where the party's Executive Committee was increasingly challenged within the party, where the class offered more and more resistance to the war, and where the Executive had begun to make significant exclusions, the Spartakists were against leaving the SPD "piecemeal" as some of the Bremen comrades advocated with their tactic of refusing to pay dues.

E. Meyer stated: "We remain within the party only as long as we can wage a class struggle against the directive committee of the party. From the moment that we are prevented from doing this, we no longer want to stay. We are not in favor of a split" (quoted Lenin, Wohlegemuth, p 167).

The Spartakist League wanted to form an organization of the whole opposition within the SPD. This was the orientation of the Zimmerwald conference. As Lenin rightly stressed: "The German opposition still greatly lacks a solid basis. It is still dispersed, scattered in autonomous currents which lack above all a common foundation which is indispensable for its ability to act. We consider it our duty to forge the dispersed forces into an organism capable of action" (Lenin, Wohlegemuth, p 118).

As long as the Spartakists remained within the SPD as an autonomous group, they formed a political reference point fighting against the degeneration of the party, against the betrayal of a part of itself. According to the organizational principles of the workers' movement, a fraction does not have a separate existence, does not have organizational independence, it remains within the party. The independent existence of the fraction at an organizational level is only possible if it is excluded from the party.

By contrast, the other left regroupments, especially around Borchardt ("Lichtstrahlen") and in Hamburg, began to declare themselves clearly in favor of the construction of an independent organization in this phase, during 1916.

As we have shown, this wing of the left (especially that of Hamburg and Dresden) used the betrayal of the social patriotic leadership as a pretext for putting into question the need for the party in general. Out of a fear of a new bureaucratism, afraid of seeing the workers' struggle stifled by the left because of the organization, they began to reject all political organization. At the beginning this took the form of distrust in the centralized nature of the organization, a return to federalism. During this phase this was expressed by their deserting the struggle against the social patriots within the party. This was what gave birth to what would later become council communism which was to develop substantially in the years that followed.

The principle of working as a fraction, carrying on the resistance within the SPD, as was applied in Germany by the left in this period was later to serve as an example for the comrades of the Italian left scarcely ten years later, in their fight within the Communist International against its degeneration. This principle which was defended by Rosa Luxemburg and the vast majority of the Spartakists was rejected very early on by the parties of the KPD who left the organization as quickly as possible with the betrayal of the social patriots as soon as divergences arose and before there were any common measures agreed.

The different currents within the workers' movement

For more than two years of the war, the workers' movement in every country was divided into three currents. In The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution, April 1917, Lenin described these three currents in the following way.

- (...) the real internationalists who are best represented by "the Zimmerwald left". Essential distinguishing characteristic: complete rupture with social-chauvinism (...). Intransigent revolutionary struggle against one's own imperialist government and one's own imperialist bourgeoisie";

- between these two tendencies there was a third current that Lenin describes as the ""center", which hesitates between the social-chauvinists and the real internationalists.(...) The "center" swears by its great gods that it is (...) for peace, (...) and for peace with the social chauvinists. The "center" is for "unity ", the center is against a split (...) the "center" is not convinced of the need for a revolution against its own government, does not advocate it, does not carry out an intransigent revolutionary struggle, invents the most banal false perspectives, even if they have an arch-marxist ring to them, in order to avoid it".

This centrist current had no programmatic clarity but was, on the contrary, incoherent, inconsistent, ready to make any concession it could, retreated before any attempt to elaborate a program, tried to adapt itself to any new situation. It was the zone in which petty-bourgeois and revolutionary influences confronted one another. This current was in the majority at the Zimmerwald conference in 1915, and in 1916; in Germany, its numbers were considerable. At the time of the opposition's conference held on 7th January 1917, it represented the majority of the 187 delegates; only 35 delegates were Spartakists.

The centrist current itself contained a right and left wing. The right wing followed more and more closely the social-patriots while the left wing was moreopen to the intervention of the revolutionaries.

In Germany, Kautsky led this current, which united within the SPD in March 1916 under the name of "Socialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft" (SAG: Social-democratic work collective), and which was particularly strong in the parliamentary fraction. Haase and Ledebour were the main centrist deputies in the Reichstag. So there were not only the traitors and the revolutionaries but also a centrist current which drew the majority of the workers to it for some time.

"And those who avoid reality by refusing to recognize the existence of these three tendencies, who refuse to analyze them and to fight in an appropriate way for what is really internationalist, condemn themselves to inertia, impotence and error" (Lenin, "The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution", Works, vol 24, p.68).

Whereas the social patriots went on trying to inject large doses of the nationalist poison into the working class and the Spartakists waged a ferocious battle against them, the centrists oscillated between these two poles. What attitude should the Spartakists adopt towards the centrists? The wing regrouped around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht insisted that "we must hit the centrists politically", that revolutionaries must intervene towards them.

Intervention towards centrism: political clarity first, unity afterwards

In January 1916, during a conference called by those who were against the war, Rosa Luxemburg explained her position in relation to the centrists.

For her, any organizational association with the centrists within the SPD was to be excluded: "Of course unity is strength, but the unity of solid and profound convictions, not that of a mechanical and superficial addition of elements that are fundamentally divergent. Its strength is not in numbers but in the spirit, the clarity, in the determination that animates us" (R. Luxemburg, The policy of the social-democratic minority, spring 1916).

Likewise, in February 1916 Liebnecht stressed: "Not unity at any cost, but clarity above all. The path we must trace is to bring out intransigently and discuss in depth all divergences in order to reach agreement on principles and tactics with the perspective of being able to act, with the perspective of unity. Unity must not be the starting point of this fermentation process, it must be the conclusion" (Spartakusbriefe. p.112).

The cornerstone of the method of Luxemburg and the other Spartakists was the demand for programmatic clarity. By demanding programmatic solidity, refusing to be drowned politically, accepting that they be numerically scarce but remain clear in content, Luxemburg was not being sectarian, she was in continuity with the old marxist method. R. Luxemburg is not the only repository of this rigor and programmatic firmness: the same method would later be used by the comrades of the Italian left when, in analyzing the lessons of the of Russia and in the 30s, they warned against the tendency to make political concessions at a programmatic level with the sole aim of numeric growth. Perhaps Rosa Luxemburg already felt the repercussions of the new situation inaugurated by the decadence of capitalism. In the period of capitalist decadence, there can no longer exist mass parties of the working class, but only numerically smaller parties which must be solid at a programmatic level. This is why this theoretical solidification represents a compass point for the work of revolutionaries in relation to the centrists, who - by definition - oscillate and fear political clarity at the programmatic level.

When in March 1917 the centrists - after their expulsion from the SPD - wanted to found their own organization, the Spartakists recognized the need for an intervention towards them. They took up the responsibility which is that of revolutionaries towards their class. On the basis of the revolutionary development in Russia and the growing radicalization of the working class in Germany itself, the task of the Spartakists was to keep the best elements, who were under the influence of centrism, out of harm's way and push them to go forward and clarify their positions. We must conceive centrist currents such as the "social democratic work collective" (SAG) - just like a number of parties who adhered to the Communist International in March 1919 - as disparate and offering no stability or coherence.

Lenin summed up this task as follows:

"The most important failing of the whole of revolutionary marxism in Germany is the absence of an illegal organization, which follows a systematic line and educates the masses in the spirit of the new tasks: such an organization would have to take a clear position towards both opportunism and Kautskyism" (Lenin, July 1916 in Works, Vol 22).

How was this activity of a pole of reference to be carried out?

In February, the centrists proposed a conference to be held on 6/8th April 1917, with a view to founding a common organization, which would bear the name USPD (Independent Social-Democratic Party). Profound differences emerged among the internationalist revolutionaries as to how to react.

The Bremen Left took position against the revolutionary lefts taking part in this common organization. Radek thought that: "Only a clear and organized nucleus can exert any influence on the radical workers of the Center. Up until now, while we were acting on the terrain of the old party,we could get by with loose links between different left radicals. Now (...) only a radical left party, with a clear program and its own organs can gather dispersed forces, to unite them and make them grow. [We can only do our duty] by organizing the left radicals into their own party" (Karl Radek, Unter eigenem Banner, p414).

The Spartakists themselves were not united on the question. At a preparatory conference of the Spartakist League on 5th April, many delegates took position against entry into the USPD. The Spartakists aimed to attract the best elements out of the new party, and win them for the revolutionary cause.

"The Social-Democratic work collective includes in its ranks many worker elements who are on our side, either politically or by their state of mind, and who only follow the work collective by lack of contact with us, or by lack of knowledge of the real relationships within the opposition, of for some other chance reason ... " (Leo Jogisches, 25th December 1916).

"We must therefore use the new party, which will bring together greater numbers of workers, as a recruiting ground for our ideas, for the determined opposition tendency; we must then contest the work collective's political and moral influence on the masses within the new party itself; finally, we must push forward the party as a whole both by our activity in its organizations, and by our own independent actions, and eventually act against its damaging influence on the class" (Spartakus im Kriege, p184).

There were many arguments, within the Left, both for and against joining. The question posed was: should we carry out fraction work outside the USPD, or act on it from the inside? While the Spartakists' concern to intervene towards the USPD to draw away its best elements was perfectly valid, it was far more difficult to see whether this should be done "from the inside" or "from the outside".

However, the question could only be posed at all because the Spartakists rightly considered the USPD as a centrist current within the working class. It was not a bourgeois party.

We can only understand the significance of the centrist USPD, and the fact that it still possessed a great influence among the working masses, by considering the increasingly turbulent situation within the working class. A wave of strikes swept through north Germany in spring, and the Ruhr in March. In April, a series of mass strikes involving more than 300,000 workers hit Berlin. During the summer, a movement of strikes and protests affected Halle, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Kiel, Wuppertal, Hamburg, and Nuremberg. In June, the first mutinies took place in the fleet. These movements could only be stopped by the most brutal repression.

At all events, the Left was temporarily divided between the Spartakists on the one hand, and the Bremen Left and other revolutionary lefts on the other. The Bremen Left demanded the rapid formation of the Party, whereas the majority of the Spartakists joined the USPD as a fraction.

DV

As we saw in December 1995 with the maneuver orchestrated against the working class in France and more generally against the European proletariat, the bourgeoisie is always able to unite on an international scale to confront the exploited. It is quite a different matter at the level of inter-imperialist relations, where the law of the jungle claims all its rights. The "great victories for peace" which the media feted so noisily at the end of1995, are nothing but a sinister lie since in reality they are episodes in the deadly struggle between the great imperialist powers, which either goes on openly, or, more often, behind the cover of "intervention forces" such as the "Implementation Force" (I-For) in ex-Yugoslavia. The truth is that this final phase of the decline of the capitalist system, the phase of decomposition, is above all marked at the level of inter-imperialist relations by the war of each against all, a tendency which has been so dominant since the end of the Gulf war that it has for the moment almost completely replaced the other tendency inherent in imperialism in decadence the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs. Thus we have seen:

- an exacerbation of that typical expression of capitalism's historic crisis: militarism, the systematic resort to brute force in the struggle against one's rivals, bringing the daily of horror of war to ever-growing fractions of the world population, who are the powerless victims of this deadly imperialist free for all. If the US military superpower is in the vanguard when it comes to the use of force, the "great democracies" like Britain, France and - a fact of historic significance - Germany, are no less determined to follow the same course1;

- the leadership of the world's first power being more and more contested by most of its ex-allies and vassals;

- a questioning or weakening of the oldest and most solid imperialist alliances, as witness the historic break between America and Britain and the cooling of relations between France and Germany;

- the inability of the European Union to constitute an alternative pole to the US superpower, as illustrated strikingly by the divisions between the different European states over a conflict on their very doorstep - ie in ex-Yugoslavia.

It is within this framework that we can understand the evolution of an imperialist situation which is infinitely more complex and unstable than in the epoch of the two great imperialist blocs. The main traits of this situation are:

- the success of the American counter-offensive with its epicenter in ex-Yugoslavia

- the limits of this offensive, marked in particular by Britain's persistence in putting its alliance with America into question;

- the rapprochement between France and Britain at the same time as France distances itself from its German ally.

The success of the US counter-offensive

In the spring of 1995, the situation was indeed dominated by the weakening of the first world power, but it has clearly been altered since then, and since the summer of 1996 has been marked by a vigorous counter-offensive led by Clinton and his team. The formation of the RRF by Britain and France, which reduced the US to the role of a mere challenger on the Yugoslav scene, and, even more fundamentally, the betrayal by their oldest and most faithful lieutenant, Britain, seriously weakened America's position in Europe and made it vital that it respond on a level capable of reversing the decline in its world leadership. This counter-offensive, which has been waged with gusto, has been based on two fundamental assets. First, the USA's status as the only military superpower, capable of rapidly mobilizing its military forces to a degree far beyond the capacities of its rivals. The RRF was completely eclipsed by I-For, with the formidable logistics of the American army at its disposal: transport, sea-air forces, enormous firepower and military observation satellites. It was this demonstration of force which obliged the Europeans to sign the Dayton agreement. Then, solidly supported by this military force, Clinton, on the diplomatic level, played on the rivalries between the European powers most heavily committed in ex-Yugoslavia, in particular making skilful use of the opposition between France and Germany, which has recently been added to the more traditional antagonism between Britain and Germany2.

The direct presence of a strong American contingent in ex-Yugoslavia and in the Mediterranean as a whole has been a rude blow to the two states most involved in contesting American leadership : France and Britain. This is all tile more true in that both of these claim a leading imperialist status in the Mediterranean, and in order to preserve this status, they have done all they could since the beginning of the war in ex-Yugoslavia to prevent an American intervention that could only weaken their position in the Mediterranean.

Since then, the US has clearly shown itself to be master of the game in ex-Yugoslavia. It has had a certain degree of success in pressing Milosevic to loosen his ties with France and Britain, by alternating between the carrot and the stick. It has kept a strong hold over its Bosnian "proteges" by firmly calling them to order whenever they exhibit the least sign of independent behavior, as we saw with a recent coup constructed from start to finish by the USA, in which the latter loudly publicized certain links between Bosnia and Iran. The Americans are also trying to arrange the future by making a definite rapprochement with Zaghreb, since Croatia is the only force able to offer any opposition to Serbia. And, for the moment, they have been able to turn to their advantage the sharp tensions troubling their own creation, the Muslim-Croat Federation in the town of Mostar. All the evidence suggests that they allowed, or even encouraged the Croatian nationalists to seize the German administrator of the town, which led to the hurried departure of the latter and his replacement by an American mediator, a replacement called for by both the Croatian and Muslim factions. By establishing good relations with Croatia, the USA is above all targeting Germany, which is still Croatia's great protector. But even though, in doing this, they are exerting a certain pressure on Germany, they are also acting to accentuate the serious divisions in the Franco-German alliance over ex-Yugoslavia. Moreover, by maintaining a tactical and circumstantial alliance with Bonn in ex-Yugoslavia, they can hope to exert a better control over the activities of Germany, which remains their most dangerous imperialist rival. America's massive military presence severely limits German imperialism's margin of maneuver. Thus, three months after the setting up of I-For, the American bourgeoisie is in solid control of the situation and for the moment has neutralized the "banana skins" thrown down by Britain and France in order to sabotage the machinery of American power. From being the epicenter of the challenge to US world supremacy, ex-Yugoslavia has now become a point of departure for the defense of US leadership in Europe and the Mediterranean, ie in the central battleground of imperialist rivalries. Thus, the American military presence in Hungary can only constitute a threat to the traditional sphere of influence for German imperialism in eastern Europe. It is certainly no accident that significant tensions have arisen recently between Prague and Bonn over the Sudetenland, with tile US clearly supporting the Czechs. Similarly, a traditional ally of France like Rumania is bound to feel the effects of this American installation.

The position of strength acquired by the US in ex-Yugoslavia took a concrete form when tensions mounted in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey. Washington's voice was heard very quickly and almost at once the two antagonists gave way to its injunctions, even if the embers are still smoldering. But apart from the warning to these two countries, the USA above all took advantage of these events to underline the impotence of the European Union in dealing with conflicts in its own back yard, and thus to show who is the real boss in the Mediterranean. All this could hardly fail to be extremely annoying to Her Majesty's foreign minister!

But while Europe still represents the main stake in the preservation of American leadership, the US has to defend this on a more global scale as well. The Middle East in particular is a major field of maneuver for US imperialism. Despite the Barcelona summit initiated by France and the latter's attempts to reintroduce itself on the Middle Eastern scene, despite the success French imperialism has had with the Zeroual's election in Algeria, and the various attempts by Britain and Germany to stir up trouble in this US reserve, Uncle Sam has increased the pressure and has scored important points this last year. By pushing forward the Israel-Palestine agreement, (with the triumphant election of Arafat in the Palestinian regions), and by making the most of the dynamic created by the assassination of Rabin (to accelerate the negotiations between Israel and Syria), the US has tightened its grip on the region, while at the same time leaning more heavily on states like Iran which continue to contest US supremacy in tile Middle East3. We should also note that after an ephemeral and partial stabilization of the situation in Algeria thanks to the election of the sinister Zeroual, the fraction of the Algerian bourgeoisie linked to French imperialism is faced with a series of terrorist attacks behind which, via the "Islamists", lies the hand of the USA.

The world's first power against "every man for himself"

The vigorous counter-offensive of the American bourgeoisie has altered the whole imperialist scene, but it has not changed its essence. The US has clearly managed to demonstrate that it is still the only world superpower and that it will not hesitate to mobilize its formidable military machine to defend its leadership wherever it is under threat. Any imperialist power that seeks to contest American supremacy will find itself exposed to the wrath of the USA. At this level success has been total and the message has been clearly understood. However, despite winning some important battles, the US has not managed to eradicate the phenomenon which has obliged it to deploy such force: the tendency towards every man for himself which predominates on the imperialist arena. Momentarily and partially held back, but in no way eliminated this tendency continues to shake the whole arena, and is fed by the decomposition which affects the entire capitalist system. It remains the dominant tendency, the one which reigns over all imperialist relations, obliging each of the USA's imperialist rivals to challenge it either openly or covertly, even if there is no equality between the contending forces. Decomposition and its monstrous offspring, the war of each against all, has brought to its full flower that typical trait of the decadence of capitalism - the irrationality of war. This is the main obstacle confronting the world's superpower, an obstacle which can only generate more and more problems for the country that aspires to be the "gendarme of the world".

Having seen their margin of maneuver seriously limited in ex-Yugoslavia, France, Britain but also Germany will go elsewhere to continue their efforts to weaken and undermine US leadership. In this respect French imperialism has been particularly active. Almost totally squeezed out of the Middle East, France is using every means at its disposal to reinsert itself into this eminently strategic region. Basing itself on its traditional links with Iraq, it is mediating between the latter and the UN, shedding many a crocodile tear about the terrible consequences for the Iraqi population of the embargo imposed by the US. At the same time it is trying to increase its influence in Yemen and Qatar. It has no hesitation about stepping on Uncle Sam's toes, by claiming a role in the negotiations between Israel and Syria and once again offering its military services in Lebanon. It is still trying to maintain its sphere of influence in the Maghreb and has been very much on the offensive in Morocco and Tunisia, while at the same time defending its traditional spheres of influence in sub-Saharan Africa. And there, now assisted by its new British accomplice - whom it has thanked by allowing the Cameroon to join the Commonwealth, which would have been inconceivable a few years ago - it is maneuvering left, right and center, from the Ivory Coast to Niger (where it recently supported the coup d'etat) and on to Rwanda. Chased out of the latter country by the US, it is now cynically using the Hutu refugees in Zaire to destabilize the pro-American clique running Rwanda.

But the two most significant expressions of the French bourgeoisie's determination to resist the US bulldozer whatever the cost are, first, Chirac's visit to the USA and secondly the decision radically to transform France's armed forces. By going to meet the American godfather, the French president was expressing recognition of the new situation created by the USA's demonstration of force, but he was by no means there to pledge allegiance to Washington. The French president clearly asserted French imperialism's will to be independent by exalting European defense. But recognizing the fact that it is very difficult to openly oppose US military power, he was inaugurating a new strategy, based on the wooden horse trick. This is the whole meaning of the almost total reintegration of France into NATO. From now on, French imperialism will attempt to undermine the USA's "order" from the inside. The decision to transform the French army into a professional army, capable of mobilizing 60,000 men at any moment for external operations, is the other plank of this new strategy, and expresses the French bourgeoisie's determination to defend its imperialist interests, and that includes against those of the US gendarme. Here we should underline an important fact: with this wooden horse tactic, as with the reorganization of its armed forces, France has been studying keenly at the "British school". Britain has a long experience of this strategy. It joined the EEC with the essential aim of sabotaging this structure from within. Similarly, Britain's professional army has amply proved its effectiveness, since, with far fewer troops overall than the French army, during the Gulf war and the war in ex-Yugoslavia, it was able to mobilize numerically superior forces more quickly than the latter. Thus today, behind Chirac's activism on the imperialist scene, we have to recognize the more discrete presence of Britain. The French bourgeoisie's relative ability to defend its rank in the imperialist pecking order no doubt owes a lot to the sage advise of the most experienced bourgeoisie in the world and the close collaboration between these two states over the past year.

But the strength of the tendency of every man for himself, and the limits of the USA's demonstration of force, are shown most patently by the breakdown in the imperialist alliance that has united Britain and the US for nearly a century. Despite the formidable pressure exerted by the US to punish the treachery of "perfidious Albion" and pull it back towards its former bloc leader, the British bourgeoisie has stuck to its policy of distancing itself from Washington, as witness in particular its growing rapprochement with France, even if, through this alliance, Britain is also aiming to counter Germany. This policy is not supported unanimously by the whole British bourgeoisie, but the fraction incarnated by Thatcher, which calls for maintaining the alliance with the US, is for the moment very much in the minority and at this level Major has the total support of the Labor party. This rupture between London and Washington underlines the enormous difference with the situation at the time of the Gulf war when Britain was still Uncle Sam's faithful lieutenant. The defection of its oldest and most reliable ally is a real blow to the world's leading power, which cannot tolerate such an affront to its supremacy. This is why Clinton is using the old question of Ireland as a means to bring the traitor to heel. At the end of 1995, Clinton made a triumphant visit to Ireland during which he treated the world's oldest democracy like a banana republic, openly taking the side of the Irish nationalists and forcing London to put up with an American mediator in the person of Senator Mitchell. The plan concocted by the latter having been turned down by Major, Washington then went onto a higher level, using the weapon of terrorism in the form of the latest bombings by the IRA, which has become the armed wing of US dirty work on British soil. This illustrates the determination of the American bourgeoisie not to shrink from any means to get its former lieutenant to beg for mercy; but more than that, this resort to terrorism is testimony to the depth of the divorce between these two former allies and to the incredible chaos that now characterizes imperialist relations between the former members of the western bloc, despite the facade of "unbreakable friendship" between the two great democratic powers on either side of the Atlantic. For the moment, all this pressure from the former bloc leader only seems to have strengthened British imperialism's will to resist, even if the USA is far from having said the last word and will do everything it can to change the situation.

This development of every man for himself confronting the world's gendarme has recently manifested itself in a spectacular manner in Asia, to the point where we can say that a new front is opening in this region for the US. Thus, Japan is less and less the docile ally, since, freed from the constraints of the blocs, it can aspire to obtain an imperialist rank much more in conformity with its economic power. Hence its demand for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

The demonstrations against the US military presence on the Okinawa archipelago, the nomination of a new Japanese prime minister known for his anti-American diatribes and his intransigent nationalism, are witness to the fact that Japan is increasingly unwilling to put up with the American yoke and wants to assert its own imperialist interests. This can only destabilize a region where there are many latent conflicts over sovereignty, such as the one between South Korea and Japan over the small Tokdo archipelago. But the most revealing sign of the development of imperialist tensions in this part of the world is China's new aggressive attitude towards Taiwan. Looking beyond the internal motives of the Chinese bourgeoisie, which is faced with the delicate question of the succession to Deng Xiao Ping, and beyond even the Taiwan question itself, this warlike stance by Chinese imperialism means above all that it is prepared to challenge its former bloc leader, the USA, in order to defend its own imperialist prerogatives. Thus China has openly rejected Washington's many warnings, which to say the least has strained its ties to the US, with the latter being obliged to flex its muscles and dispatch an armada to the straits of Formosa. In this context of accumulating imperialist tensions and of open or covert challenges to US leadership in Asia. We can see the full significance of the rapprochement between Paris and Peking marked by the visit of H de Charette and Li Pengs invitation to Paris, as well as the holding of the first Euro-Asiatic summit. While there are definite economic motives behind this meeting, it was above all an occasion for the European Union to tread on Uncle Sam's toes, claiming to constitute the" third pole of the Europe-Asia-America triangle".

Thus. despite the firm reassertion of its supremacy, the world's gendarme is again and again faced by this wall of every man for himself. This is a real threat to its global leadership and the USA will be forced more and more to resort to brute force in response; as a result, the gendarme will become one of the main propagators of the chaos it claims to combat. This chaos, engendered by the decomposition of the capitalist system on a world scale, can only cut an increasingly destructive and murderous swathe across the whole planet.

The Franco-German alliance is put to the test

If the USA's world leadership is threatened by the exacerbation of the war of each against the growing chaos that characterizes imperialist relationships has also consigned to a more and more hypothetical future the tendency towards the formation of new imperialist blocs. This is strikingly illustrated by the turbulence through which the Franco-German alliance has been passing.

Marxism has always stressed that an imperialist alliance has nothing in common with a marriage of love or with real friendship between peoples. Self-interest alone governs such alliances and each member of an imperialist constellation aims first and foremost to defend their own interests within it and to draw the maximum profit from it. All this applies perfectly to the "motor of Europe" which the Franco-German couple used to be, and explains why it is essentially France which has been the one to start cooling off. In fact, the vision of this alliance has never been the same on the two sides of the Rhine. For Germany, things are simple. The leading economic power in Europe, handicapped by its weakness at the military level, Germany has every interest in an alliance with a European nuclear power, and this could only be with France, since Britain, despite its break with the US, remains its sworn enemy. Historically, Britain has always fought against the domination of Europe by Germany, and since reunification, the increased weight of German imperialism in Europe has only strengthened Britain's determination to oppose any German leadership of the European continent. France has often hesitated about opposing German imperialism: in the thirties, certain fractions of the French bourgeoisie were rather inclined towards an alliance with Berlin. For its part, however, Britain has always been against any imperialist constellation dominated by Germany. In the face of this historic antagonism, the German bourgeoisie has no other choice in Western Europe and it feels all the more at ease in its alliance with France in that, for all the pretensions of the "Gallic cock", it knows that it is in the stronger position. Hence the pressure it has mounted on a more and more recalcitrant ally can only have the goal of forcing it to remain faithful.

It is a very different matter for the French bourgeoisie, for whom allying itself with Germany was above all a means of controlling the latter, while hoping to exert a kind of co-leadership in Europe. The war in ex-Yugoslavia and more generally the rise of German power shattered this utopia entertained by the majority of the French bourgeoisie, who now beheld the return of the specter of "Greater Germany", haunted as they are by the memory of three wars lost to their too-powerful German neighbor.

This development of a tight collaboration between France and Britain can only weaken of the Franco-German alliance. This may in part correspond to the interests of the USA, by considerably postponing the prospect of a new bloc dominated by Germany, but it is totally against the interests of the latter. The radical reorientation of the army and military industry decided on by Chirac, while expressing the capacity of the French bourgeoisie to draw the lessons of the Gulf war and the serious reverses suffered in ex-Yugoslavia, and thus to respond to the general necessities confronting French imperialism in the world-wide defense of its positions, is also aimed directly at Germany, at several levels:

- despite Chirac's proclamations that nothing would be done without close consultation with Bonn, the German bourgeoisie has been presented with a fait accompli. France has merely communicated its decisions and does not expect any comeback;

- through the creation of a professional army and through giving priority to its external operations forces, France is clearly signaling its desire for autonomy from Germany and has facilitated the conditions for joint interventions with Britain, since while the German army is essentially based on conscription, the French army is going to be based on the British model, built around a professional corps;

- finally, the Eurocorps, symbol par excellence of the Prance-German alliance, is directly ilireatened by this reorganization; the group responsible for defense in the dominant party of the French bourgeoisie, the RPR, is demanding its abolition pure and simple.

The more the capitalist system sinks into decomposition, the more inter-imperialist relations are marked by a growing chaos, breaking up the oldest and most solid alliances and unleashing the war of each against all. The resort to brute force on the part of the world's first power is not only proving powerless to hold back this advance into chaos, but is becoming a supplementary factor in propagating the leprosy which is eating away at the imperialist system. The only real winners in this infernal spiral are militarism and war, which like Moloch demand more and more victims to satisfy their frightful appetites. Six years after the collapse of the eastern bloc, which was supposed to usher in an "era of peace", more than ever the only alternative is the one outlined by the Communist International at its first Congress: "socialism or barbarism".

RN 10.3.96

1 The decline in military budgets which is supposed to be part of the "peace dividend", far from expressing a real disarmament such as that following World War I, is really a gigantic reorganization of military forces aimed at making them more effective, more murderous, in the context of the new imperialist situation created by the formidable development of every man for himself.

2 The USA did not hesitate to tactically get the support of Germany, via Croatia (see International Review no.83).

3 The recent series of bombings in Israel, whoever ordered them, can only play to the advantage of the USA' rivals. The latter was not deceived when it immediately pointed the finger at Iran and summoned the Europeans to break all relations with this "terrorist state", which is no small nerve on the part of a state which is using terrorism very widely, from Algeria to London via Paris! The response of the Europeans was unambiguous: no. In a general way, terrorism, once the classic weapon of the weak, is now more and more being used by the great powers in the deadly struggle amongst themselves. This is a typical expression of the chaos engendered by decomposition.

4 Similarly, concerning the vision of Europe's future, France has clearly distanced itself from the federal vision defended by Germany, moving closer to the schema upheld by Britain.

In part two of this article, we will concentrate on the way Bakunin' s Alliance went about taking over and destroying the International. We will try to show the tactics used against the workers' movement as concretely as possible, basing ourselves on the analysis made by the International itself. We are convinced that the identification of these tactics of the bourgeoisie and of parasitism, the drawing of the lessons of the fight against Bakuninism, are indispensable for the defense of the revolutionary milieu today.

The war of capital against the International

From the outset, the bourgeoisie used its police, courts, prisons, and later its execution squads against the International. But this was not its most dangerous weapon. Indeed, the Hague Congress showed how "the IWA, the representative of labor, grew all the stronger as persecutions increased" (The Hague Congress of the First International,Minutes and Documents, Progress Publishers, Moscow p.146).

The bourgeoisie's most dangerous weapon was precisely the attempt to destroy the International from within, through infiltration, manipulation and intrigue. This strategy consists in provoking suspicion, demoralization, divisions and open splits within a proletarian organization, in order to make it destroy itself. Whereas repression always carries the risk of provoking the solidarity of the working class with the victims, destruction from within is capable, not only of destroying a proletarian party or group, but of ruining its reputation and thus erasing it from the collective memory and traditions of the working class. More generally speaking, it aims at slandering organizational discipline, at presenting the struggle against police infiltration, the fight against the ambitions of the declassed elements of the ruling class to take over and destroy proletarian groups, the resistance against petty bourgeois individualism, as a "dictatorship" or as the "administrative elimination of rivals. "

Before showing how the bourgeoisie with the help of political parasitism, in particular Bakuninism, went about this work of destruction and denigration, we will briefly recall the nature of the fear provoked within the bourgeoisie by the International.

The bourgeoisie feels threatened by the International

Thus, on the eve of the plebiscite with which Louis Napoleon prepared his war against Prussia, the Paris members of the International, under the pretext of having taken part in a plot to assassinate Louis Bonaparte, were arrested on the 23rd of April, 1870. Simultaneous arrests of Internationalists took place at Lyon, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest and other towns.

With the capitulation of Sedan, when the second empire ended as it began, by a parody, the French-German War entered upon its second phase. It became war against the French people ... From that moment she found herself compelled not only to fight the Republic in France, but simultaneously the International in Germany" (Report of the General Council to the Hague Congress, Minutes and Documents, p.213)

"If the war against the International had been localized, first in France (...) then in Germany (...) it became general since the rise, and after the fall, of the Paris Commune. On the 6th of June, 1871, Jules Favre issued his circular to the Foreign Powers demanding the extradition of the refugees of the Commune as common criminals, and a general crusade against the International as the enemy of family, religion, order and property" (ibid p.215).

By the time of the Paris Commune, at the latest, all sectors of the ruling classes had realized the mortal danger which international socialist organization posed to their rule. Although the International could not itself play a leading role during the events of the Paris Commune, the bourgeoisie was perfectly aware that this uprising, the first attempt of the working class to destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with its own class rule, would not have been possible without the political and organizational autonomy and maturity of the proletariat - a maturity which the International represented.

Moreover, it was the political menace which the very existence of the International posed for the long term domination of capital which to a large extent explained the savagery with which the Paris Commune was jointly repressed by the French and German states.

After the Paris Commune: the bourgeoisie tries to break up and discredit the IWA

In fact, as Marx and Engels were just beginning to realize at the time of the famous Hague Congress in 1872, the defeat of the Paris Commune and of the French proletariat as a whole spelled the beginning of the end of the International. The association of the leading sectors of the European and American workers, founded in 1864, was not an artificial creation, but the product of the international upswing of the class struggle at that time. The crushing of the Commune spelled the end of this upsurge, opening a period of defeat and political disarray. Just as the Communist League had fallen prey to a similar disarray after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848-49, with many of its members refusing to recognize that the revolutionary period was over, the International after 1871 was entering a period of decline. In this situation, the principle concern of Marx and Engels became to allow the International to conclude its work in good order. It was with this in mind that, at the Hague Congress, they proposed transferring the General Council of the IWA to New York, where it would be out of the front line of bourgeois repression and internal feuds. They wanted above all to preserve the reputation of the Association, to defend its political and organizational principles, so that they could be passed on to future generations of revolutionaries. In particular, the experience of the First International should serve as a basis for the construction of a Second International as soon as the objective conditions allowed.

For the ruling classes, however, there was no question of allowing the International to conclude its work in good order, to let it pass on the lessons of its first steps in international centralized organization on the basis of statutes to future proletarian generations. The slaughter of the Paris workers was the signal for bringing to a conclusion the whole work of internal undermining and discrediting which had already begun long before the Commune. The most intelligent representatives of the ruling classes feared that the First International would go down in history as a decisive moment in the adoption of marxism by the workers' movement. One such intelligent representative of the exploiters was Bismarck, who throughout the 1860s had secretly, and sometimes openly, supported the Lassalleans within the German workers' movement in order to combat the development of marxism. But there were others, as we shall see, who joined together to disrupt and wreck the political vanguard of the working class.

Bakunin's Alliance, the main weapon in Capital's war against the International

Bakunin had failed in his original scheme to unite the International with the bourgeois League for Peace and Freedom under his own control, his propositions having been refused by the general congress of the whole International in Brussels. Bakunin explained this defeat to his bourgeois friends of the League as follows: "I could not have foreseen that the Congress of the International would reply with an insult as gross as it was pretentious, but this was due to the intrigues of a certain clique of Germans who detest the Russians and everybody except themselves" (Bakunin's letter to Gustav Vogt of the League, quoted in the documents of the Hague Congress p.388).

Regarding this letter, Nicolai Utin, in his report to the Hague Congress, pointed out one of the central aspects of Bakunin 's politics. Instead of openly attacking the program and statutes of a proletarian organization, he makes a personal attack against certain members of its central organs, accusing them of wielding a personal dictatorship.

"It proves that it is to that time, if not earlier, that Bakunin's calumnies date, against citizen Marx, against the Germans, and against the whole of the International, which was already accused then,and a priori - since Bakunin had no knowledge at that time either of the organization or of the activity of the Association - of being a blind tool in the hands of Citizen Marx, of the German clique (later distorted by Bakunin's supporters into an authoritarian clique of Bismarckian minds); to that time also dates Bakunin's rancorous hatred of the General Council and above all of certain of its members" ("Utin's Report to the Hague Congress, presented by the Investigation Commission on the Alliance", Minutes and Documents p.388).

This approach is fundamental to political parasitism. Instead of confronting its opponents openly, and on a political terrain, it spreads personal calumnies behind the back of proletarian organs. These attacks are aimed against certain persons seen as particularly staunch defenders of the statutes of such organizations. More generally, they serve to whip up a general feeling of suspicion within and around the organization under attack. At the same time, this approach reflects the feeling of the likes of Bakunin that since we conspire on the basis of personal politics, our opponents probably do too.

However, the Alliance's first application for membership had to be refused, since its organizational practice did not conform to the statutes of the Association.

"The General Council refused to admit the Alliance as long as it retained its distinct international character; it promised to admit the Alliance only on the condition that the latter would dissolve its special international organization, that its sections would become ordinary sections of our Association, and that the Council should be informed of the seat and numerical strength of each new section formed" (ibid).

This latter point was insisted on by the General Council to prevent the Alliance entering the International secretly, under different names.

The Alliance replied: "The question of dissolution has today been decided. In communicating this decision to the various groups of the Alliance, we have invited them to follow our example and constitute themselves into sections of the International Working Men's Association, and seek recognition as such either from you or from the Federal Councils of the Association in their respective countries" (ibid p.349, quoted by Engels in his report).

However, the Alliance did nothing of the kind. Its sections neither declared their location and numerical strength, nor did they openly apply for membership in their own name.

"The Geneva section proved to be the only one to request admission to the International. Nothing was heard about other allegedly existing sections of the Alliance. Nevertheless, in spite of the constant intrigues of the Alliancists who sought to impose their special program on the entire International and gain control of our Association, one was bound to accept that the Alliance had kept its word and disbanded itself. The General Council, however, has received fairly clear indications which forced it to conclude that the Alliance was not even contemplating dissolution and that, in spite of its solemn undertaking, it existed and was continuing to function as a secret society, using this underground organization to realize its original aim - the securing of complete control" ("Report to the Hague Congress", ibid, p.349).

In fact, at the moment the Alliance declared its dissolution, the General Council did not possess sufficient proofs to justify a refusal to admit it to the International. And it had been "misled by some signatures on the program which gave the impression that the Alliance had been recognized by the Romance Federal Committee" ("The Alliance and the IWA", Minutes and Documents p.522).

But this had not been the case, since the Romance Federal Committee did not trust the Alliancists one inch, and with good reason.

"The secret organization hidden behind the public Alliance now went into full action. Behind the International's Geneva section was the Central Bureau of the Secret Alliance: behind the International's sections of Naples, Barcelona, Lyons and Jura lay the secret sections of the Alliance. Relying on this freemasonry, whose existence was suspected neither by the mass of the International's membership nor by their administrative centers, Bakunin hoped to win control of the International at the Basle Congress in September 1869" (ibid p.522-523).

To this end, the Alliance began to set in motion its secret international apparatus.

"The secret Alliance sent instructions to its adherents in every corner of Europe, directing them whom to choose as delegates and to whom to give a mandate if they could not send one of their own men. In many areas members were very surprised indeed to find that for the first time in the history of the International the selection of delegates was not being carried out in a straightforward, open, matter-of-fact way, and letters reached the General Council asking what was in the wind" (Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, p.31l).

At the Basle Congress. the Alliance failed to achieve its main goal: that of transferring the General Council from London to Geneva, where Bakunin expected to be able to dominate it. The Alliance did not give up: it changed tactics.

"Right from the start the activities of the Alliance fall into two distinct phases. The first is characterized by the assumption that it would be successful in gaining control of the General Council and thereby securing supreme direction of our Association. It was at this stage that the Alliance urged its adherents to uphold the "strong organization" of the International and, above all, "the authority of the General Council and of the Federal Councils and Central Committees"; and it was at this stage that gentlemen of the Alliance demanded at the Basle Congress that the General Council be invested with those wide powers which they later rejected with such horror as being authoritarian" ("Report on the Alliance", Minutes and Documents p.354).

Only after their defeat at Basle did the Bakuninists unfurl the flag of anti-authoritarianism throughout the International. This shows that for the Alliance, taking over control of the International was its essential goal, whereas its "program" was secondary, a mere means to an end. For Bakunin himself, who propagated authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism, peasant revolution and worship of the Russian Czar, proletarian internationalism and rabid pan-slavism, depending on whom he was addressing himself to, questions of programmatic principles were quite irrelevant.

The bourgeoisie assists Bakunin's work of sabotage

In part one of this article, on the pre-history of Bakunin's conspiracy, we have already indicated the class nature of his secret society. Even if the majority of its members were not aware of the fact, the Alliance represented nothing less than a Trojan horse through which the bourgeoisie attempted to destroy the International from within.

Bakunin's attempt to take control of the IWA at the Basle Congress, not even a year after joining it, was only possible because he was assisted by the bourgeoisie. This assistance provided him with a political and organizational power base even before he joined the International.

Fanelli was a long standing member of the Italian parliament with the most intimate connections with the highest representatives of the Italian bourgeoisie.

The second bourgeois origin of Bakunin's power base was thus his linkage to "influential circles" in Italy. In October 1864, in London, Bakunin told Marx he was going to Italy to work for the International, and Marx wrote to Engels to say how impressed he was by this intention. But Bakunin was lying.

"Through Dolfi he was introduced into the society of the Freemasons where the Fee thinking elements of Italy were united", as Bakunin's German aristocratic admirer and biographer Richarda Huch tells us (Huch: Bakunin und die Anarchic, p.147). As we saw in part one of this article. Bakunin, who left London for Italy in 1864 took advantage of the absence of the International in that country to prepare sections there under his own control and after his own image. Those who, like the German Cuno who founded the Milan section, opposed the domination by the secret "brotherhood", were conveniently arrested or deported by the police at decisive moments.

Commenting on this, the report adds: "The Holy Father is right. The Alliance in Italy is not a "workers' union" but a rabble of declasses. All the so-called sections of the Italian International are run by lawyers without clients, doctors with neither patients nor medical knowledge, students of billiards, commercial travelers and other tradespeople, and principally journalists from small papers with a more or less dubious reputation. Italy is the only country where the International press - or what calls itself such - has acquired the characteristics of Le Figaro. One need only glance at the writing of the secretaries of these so-called sections to realize that it is the work of clerks or professional authors. By taking over all the official posts in the sections in this way, the Alliance managed to compel the Italian workers, each time they wanted to enter into relations with one another or with the other councils of the International to resort to the services of declasse members of the Alliance who found in the International a "career" and a "way out"" ("The Alliance and the IWA", Minutes and Documents p.556).

It was thanks to this infrastructure coming from the League that organ of the West European bourgeoisie influenced by the secret diplomacy of the Russian Tsar and from the "free-thinking" and "masonic" Italian bourgeois declassed riff-raff, that Bakunin could launch such a strong attack against the International.

Thus, it was after the Berne Congress of the League of Peace (September 1868) that the above mentioned Fanelli, Italian member of parliament and founding member of the Alliance, was sent to Spain "furnished with references by Bakunin for Garrido, deputy at the Cortes who put him in touch with republican circles,bourgeois and working class alike" in order to set up the Alliance on the Iberian peninsula. ("The Alliance and the IWA", ibid p.537). Here we see the typical methods of the "abstentionist" anarchists allegedly refusing to have anything to do with "politics".

It was through such methods that the Alliance spread itself in those parts of Europe where the industrial proletariat was still extremely underdeveloped: Italy and Spain, the south of France and the Jura mountains in Switzerland. Using such methods, at the Basle Congress "thanks to its dishonest methods, the secret Alliance found itself represented by at least ten delegates including the famous Albert Richard and Bakunin himself ("The Alliance and the IWA", p.523).

But all these Bakuninist sections secretly dominated by the Alliance were not in themselves sufficient. In order to take control of the International, it was necessary for Bakunin and his followers to be accepted by, and take control of, one of the already established, oldest and most important sections of the Association. Coming from the outside, Bakunin realized the need to invest himself with the authority of such a section already widely recognized inside the organization. This is why Bakunin had from the outset moved to Geneva, where he founded his own "Geneva Section of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy". Even before the open conflict with the General Council began, it was here that the first decisive resistance of the International to Bakuninist sabotage began.

The battle for control of the Swiss-Romance Federation

"But in December 1868 the Alliance of Socialist Democracy had just been formed in Geneva and declared itself a section of the IWA. This new section asked three times in fifteen months for admission to the group of Geneva sections, and three times was refused, first by the Central Council of all the Geneva sections and then by the Romance Federal Committee. In September 1869, Bakunin, the founder of the Alliance, was defeated at Geneva when he stood as candidate for the delegation to the Basle Congress. and his candidature was rejected, the Geneva members appointing Grosselin as their delegate. The discussions begun then (...) by Bakunin's supporters led by himself to force Grosselin to resign and give way to Bakunin - these discussions must have convinced Bakunin that Geneva was not a favorable place for his scheming. At their meetings the Geneva workers did not conceal their dissatisfaction. Their scorn for his high sounding words. This fact, together with other Russian matters, provided the motive for Bakunin's voluntary departure from Geneva" ("Utin's Report", ibid p.378).

At a time when the General Council in London was still acting very hesitantly, admitting the Alliance against its own better judgment, the workers' sections in Switzerland were already openly resisting Bakunin's attempts to impose his will in violation of the statutes. Whereas bourgeois historians, true to their vision of history made by "great individuals", portray the struggle in the International as a contest "between Marx and Bakunin", and whereas the anarchists present Bakunin as the innocent victim of Marx, the very first battle against the Bakuninists in Switzerland immediately reveals that this was a struggle by the whole organization in its own defense.

However, this proletarian resistance to Bakunin's open attempts at a takeover did not prevent him from splitting the Swiss sections. Behind the scenes, Bakunin had already begun to gain his own peronal supporters in the country. These he gained mainly through non-political means of persuasion, in particular the charisma of his own personality, with which he conquered the Locle Internationalist section in the Jura watch-making region. Locle had been a center of resistance to the Lassallean policy of support for the conservatives against the bourgeois radicals pursued by Coullery, the opportunist pioneer of the International in Switzerland. Although Marx and Engels were the most prominent opponents of Lassalle in Germany, Bakunin told the artisans in Locle that the rottenness of Coullery's politics was the result of the authoritarianism of Marx within the International, so that a secret society was necessary to "revolutionize" the Association. The local branch of the secret Alliance led by Guillaume became the couspirational center from which the struggle against the Swiss International was directed.

Bakunin's supporters were scarcely represented in the industrial towns, but had a strong presence among the artisan craftsmen of the Jura. They now split the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress of the Romance Federation around their attempts to oblige the Geneva section to admit the Alliance, and to take the Federal Committee and the editorial board of the press away from Geneva to be placed in the hands of Bakunin's right hand man Guillaume in Neuchatel. The Bakuninists completely sabotaged the Congress agenda, admitting discussion on no other point except the matter of the Alliance. Unable to impose their will, the Alliancists broke off from the Congress, moved to a nearby cafe, and immediately entitled themselves "Congress of the Romance Federation" and appointed "their own" Romance Federal Committee - in open breach of articles 53, 54 and 55 of the Federation's statutes.

Face with this coup, the Geneva delegation declared that "it was a matter of deciding whether the Association wished to remain a federation of working men's societies, aiming at the emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves, or whether it wished to abandon its program in face of a plot formed by a few bourgeois with the evident aim of seizing the leadership of the Association by means of its public organs and its secret conspiracies" ("Utin's Report", ibid p.383).

With this, the Geneva delegation had immediately grasped the entirety of what was going on.

Indeed, the split which the bourgeoisie longed for had been achieved.

In Germany there was the struggle between the true Internationalists and the blind followers of Schweizer, but that struggle did not go beyond the borders of Germany, and the members of the International in all countries soon condemned that Prussian government agent, though at first he was well masked and seemed to be a great revolutionary.

In Belgium an attempt to misuse and exploit our Association was made by a certain Mr. Coudray, who also seemed at first to be an influential member, highly devoted to our cause, but in the end turned out to be nothing but a schemer whom the Belgian Federal Council and sections soon dealt with despite the important role which he had managed to assume.

With the exception of this fleeting incident the International was progressing like a real family of brothers animated by the same strivings and having no time to waste in idle and personal disputes.

In the same issue La Solidarite foretold that there would soon be a profound split between the reactionaries (the Geneva delegates to the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress) and several members of the Geneva Building Workers' Section. At the same time posters appeared on the walls in Geneva signed by Chevalley, Cognon, Heng and Charles Perron [well known Bakuninists] announcing that the undersigned had arrived as delegates from Neuchatel to reveal to the Geneva members of the International the truth about the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress. This was logically equivalent to a public accusation against all the Geneva delegates, who were thus treated as liars hiding the truth from the members of the International.

The Swiss bourgeois newspapers then announced to the world that there was a split in the International" ("Utin's Report", Minutes and Documents p.376, 377).

The stakes in this first great battle were enormous for the International, but also for the Alliance, since its failure to be accepted in Geneva "would prove to all the members of the International in other places that there was something abnormal about the Alliance (...) and this would naturally undermine, paralyze the "prestige" that the founder of the Alliance was dreaming of for his creation and the influence which it was to exert above all outside of Geneva.

On the other hand, if it was a nucleus recognized and accepted by the Geneva and Romance group, the Alliance could, according to its founder's plan, usurp the right to speak in the name of the whole of the Romance Federation, which would necessarily give it great weight outside Switzerland ...

Confronted with this situation, Bakunin remained true to his destructive principle: one must split what one cannot take over.

"Nevertheless, the Alliance continued to insist on joining the Romance Federation which was then forced to decide on the expulsion of Bakunin and the other ringleaders. And so there were now two Romance Federal Committees, one at Geneva. the other at La Chaux-de-Fonds. The vast majority of the sections remained loyal to the former, while the latter had a following of only fifteen sections, many of which (...) one by one ceased to exist" ("Utin's Report", ibid p.526).

The Alliance now appealed to the General Council to decide which of the two should be considered as the true central organ, hoping to profit from the name Bakunin and from the ignorance of Swiss affairs assumed to reign in London. But as soon as the General Council pronounced in favor of the original federation of Geneva. calling on the La Chaux-de-Fonds group to transform itself into a local section, London was immediately denounced as "authoritarian" for meddling in Swiss affairs.

The London Conference 1871

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the class struggles in France leading to the Paris Commune of 1871, the organizational struggle within the International receded into the background, without however disappearing. The defeat of the Commune, and the new quality of the attacks of the bourgeoisie, soon made it necessary to redouble all the measures of defense of the revolutionary organization. By the time of the London Conference (September 1871), it was becoming clear that the IWA was being attacked in a coordinated manner from without and within, and that in reality the bourgeoisie was the coordinator.

Only a few months previously, this had been less clear. "When material dealing with the Bakuninist organizations fell into the hands of the Paris police as a result of the arrests in May 1871, and the public prosecutor announced in the press that a secret society of conspirators existed besides the official International. Marx believed it to be one of the usual police forgeries". "Its the old tomfoolery" he wrote to Engels. "In the end the police won't even believe each other any more"" (Karl Marx: Man and Fighter p.315).

In September 1871, the London Conference, held in the teeth of international repression and slanders, proved equal to its task. For the first time ever, the international, internal, organizational questions dominated an international meeting of the Association. The conference adopted the proposition of Vaillant, insisting that the political and the social questions are two sides of the same task of the proletariat to destroy class society. The documents, in particular the resolution "On the Political Action of the Working Class" drawing the lessons of the Commune, showing the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a separate working class party were a blow against the political abstentionists: "those assistants of the bourgeoisie whether consciously or not", as was pointed out at the conference (Die Erste International Vol.2 p.143).

At the organizational level, this struggle was concertized by the reinforcement of the responsibilities of the General Council. giving it the power if necessary, to suspend sections between international congresses. It was concertized by the resolution against secret societies, outlawing their existence within the organization. And it was concertized by the resolution against the activities of Nechayev, a collaborator of Bakunin in Russia. The Russian Nikolai Utin, since he was able to read all the documents of the Bakuninists in Russian, was commissioned by the Conference to draw up a report on this latter question. Since this report threatened to expose the whole Bakuninist conspiracy, much was undertaken to prevent it being drawn up. After an attempt of the Swiss authorities to expel Utin had to be withdrawn in the face of a massive public campaign by the International, an (almost successful) assassination attempt against Utin was made in Zurich by the Bakuninists.

Hand in hand with this bourgeois violence went the Sonvillier circular of the Bakuninist Jura Federation attacking the London Conference. This open attack had become all the more necessary for the Alliance, since the London Conference had brought the manipulations of Bakunin's followers in Spain out into the open.

"Even the most devoted members of the International in Spain were led to believe that the program of the Alliance was identical to that of the International, that this secret organization existed everywhere and that it was almost the duty of all to belong to it. This illusion was destroyed by the London Conference, where the Spanish delegate, himself a member of the Central Council of the Alliance in his country, could convince himself that the contrary was the fact, and also by the Jura circular itself, whose bitter attacks and lies against the Conference and the General Council were immediately taken up by all the organs of the Alliance. The first result of the Jura circular in Spain was the emergence of disagreements within the Spanish Alliance between those who were first and foremost members of the International and those who would not recognize it, since it had not come under Alliance control" ("Report on the Alliance", Minutes and Documents, p.355-356).

The Alliance in Russia: provocation in the interests of reaction

The "Nechayev affair" dealt with at the London Conference risked totally discrediting the International and thus menacing its very existence. During the first public political trial in Russian history, in July 1871, 80 men and women were accused of belonging to a secret society which had usurped the name of the IWA. Nechayev, who claimed to be an emissary of a so-called International Revolutionary Committee allegedly working for the International, obliged Russian youth to engage in a series of frauds, and forced some of them to assist in the murder of one of their members, who had been found guilty of doubting the existence of Nechayev's all powerful committee. This Nechayev, who escaped from Russia leaving these young revolutionaries to their fate, and went to Switzerland where he also engaged in blackmail, and tried to set up a gang to rob foreign tourists, was the direct collaborator of Bakunin. Behind the back of the Association, Bakunin had supplied Nechayev not only with a "mandate" to act in the Association's name in Russia, but also with an ideological justification for his acts. This was the "Revolutionary Catechism" based on the morality of Jesuitism so much admired by Bakunin, according to which the end justifies any means whatever, including lies, murder, extortion, blackmail, the elimination of comrades who "get in the way" etc.

In the fourth part of this series we will come back to Bakunin's Russian activities in more detail. Here, it is essential to understand the role they played in Bakunin's war against the International.

On the practice of sending ultra-radical proclamations by post to Russia, even to unpolitical people, Utin wrote: "Since letters are opened by the secret police in Russia, how could Bakunin and Nechayev seriously suppose that proclamations could be sent to Russia in envelopes to persons, known or unknown, on the one hand without compromising those persons and on the other hand without risking running up against a spy?" (Minutes and Documents, p.416).

We consider the explanation for this given by Utin's report to be the most likely.

In other words, by provoking the arrest of so many people in this way, and thus making Western Europe believe that he was the leader of a vast and audacious revolutionary organization in Russia, Bakunin intended to crown his attempts to present himself as Europe's greatest revolutionary deserving to lead the International.

Since, as Marx and Engels often pointed out, the Russian political police at home, and its "brotherhood" of agents abroad, was internationally the most formidable of its day, with agents in every radical political movement throughout Europe, it can be assumed that this so-called "third department" knew of Bakunin' s plans and tolerated them.

Conclusion

The construction of revolutionary proletarian organizations is not a peaceful process. It is a permanent struggle in the face, not only of the intrusions of petty bourgeois and other intermediate and declassed influences and attitudes, but of planned sabotage organized by the class enemy. The First International's struggle against this sabotage on the part of the Alliance is one of the most important organizational struggles in the history of the workers' movement. This struggle is full of lessons for today. The assimilation of these lessons is more vital than ever if the defense of the revolutionary milieu and the preparation of the class party is to succeed. These lessons are all the more relevant, since they have been formulated in a most concrete manner, and with the direct participation of the founders of scientific socialism, Marx and Engels. The whole struggle against Bakunin is a single lesson in the application of the marxist method to the defense and construction of communist organization. It is in assimilating these examples set by our great predecessors that the present generation of revolutionaries, still suffering from the break in organic continuity with the past workers' movement caused by the Stalinist counter-revolution, can more firmly place themselves in the tradition of this great organizational struggle. The lessons of these struggles waged by the IWA, by the Bolsheviks, by the Italian Left and others are an essential arm in the present struggle of marxism against the circle spirit, liquidationism and political parasitism. This is why we consider it necessary to go into very concrete detail in order to show the reality of this struggle in the history of the workers' movement.

KR

How Revolutionaries saw the question at the end of the 19th Century

In the last article in this series we showed that, contrary to the doubt raised by many self-professed "communists", the fundamental aim of the socialist parties of the late 19th century was indeed socialism - a society without commodity relations, classes, or a state. In this sequel we will examine how the authentic socialists of that time envisaged the way that the future communist society would tackle some of mankind's most pressing social problems: in this case, the relationship between man and woman and between humankind and the nature from which it has sprung. Here, once again in defending the communists of the Second International, we offer a more general defence of marxism against some its more recent "critics", above all the petty bourgeois radicalism that lies at the origins of feminism and ecologism, which have now become fully-fledged instruments of the dominant ideology.

Bebel and the "woman question ", or Marxism against feminism

We have already mentioned that the enormous popularity of Bebel's Woman and Socialism lay to a great extent in the fact that this work took the "woman question" as a point of embarkation for a theoretical journey towards a socialist society, whose geography was to be described in some detail. It was primarily as a guide to this socialist landscape that the book had such a powerful impact on the contemporary workers' movement. But this does not mean that the question of women's oppression was merely a convenient hook or artifice. On the contrary, it was a real and growing concern of the proletarian movement of that period: it is no accident that Bebel's book was more or less coterminous with Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (see the article in this series in International Review no. 81).

It will be necessary to emphasis this point, because for certain crude versions of feminism - particularly the kind that has flowered among the radical intelligentsia in the USA - marxism itself is just another patriarchal ideology, an invention of those "Dead White Males" who have nothing to say about the oppression of women. The most thoroughgoing of these feminist-feminists will even argue that marxism can be dismissed instantly because Marx himself was a Victorian Husband and Father who secretly sired an illegitimate son on his housekeeper. We will not waste any time here refuting the latter argument since it amply reveals its own banality. But the idea that marxism has nothing to say on the "woman question" does need to be dealt with, not least because it has been leant some weight by certain economistic and mechanical interpretations of marxism itself.

We have placed the term "woman question" in inverted commas up till now not because this question does not exist for marxism, but because it can only be posed as a problem for humanity, as the problem of the relationship between men and women, and not as a question apart. From the very beginning of his work as a communist, legitimately inspired by Fourier's insights on this matter, Marx posed the question as follows: "The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman. In this natural species relationship man's relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man's whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man had become, and has understood himself as, a species being, a human being" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, "Private Property and Labour").

Here, the man-woman relationship is placed in its fundamental natural and historical framework. The passage was written against those misconceived notions of communism which argued for (or accused communists of arguing for) a "community of women", the total subordination of women to male lust. On the contrary, a really human life could only be attained when relations between men and women were free of all taint of domination and oppression - and this was only possible in a communist society.

This theme was constantly reiterated throughout the subsequent evolution of rnarxist thought. From the Communist Manifesto's denunciation of the hypocritical bourgeois cant about the eternal values of the family - values which capitalist exploitation was itself constantly undermining - to the historical analysis of the transformation of family structures in different social systems contained in Engels' Origins of the Family, marxism had sought to explain not only that the particular oppression of women was a reality, but also to locate its material and social origins in order to point the way to its supercession (see International Review no. 81). In the period of the Second International, these concerns were taken up by the likes of Eleanor Marx, Klara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin. Opposed to bourgeois feminism which, like its latter day incarnations, aimed to dissolve class antagonisms into the gaseous concept of "sisterhood", the Socialist parties of this period also recognised the need for a particular effort to draw proletarian women, who were often cut off from productive and associated labour, into the struggle for the social revolution.

In tins context, Bebel's Woman and Socialism was a definite landmark in the marxist approach to the problem of women's oppression. The following first-hand account illustrates graphically the impact the book had in challenging the rigidities of the sexual division of labour in the "Victorian" age - rigidities which were also present and operational in the workers' movement itself: "Although I was not a Social democrat I had friends who belonged to the party. Through them I got the precious work. I read it nights through. It was my own fate and that of thousands of my sisters. Neither in the family nor in public life had I ever heard of all the pain the woman must endure. One ignored her life. Bebel's book courageously broke with the old secretiveness. I read the book not once but ten times. Because everything was so new, it took considerable effort to come to grips with Bebel's views. I had to break with so many things that I had previously regarded as correct" (Ottilie Baader, cited in Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, Pluto Press 1983, p 97).

Baader went on to join the party, which is of seminal importance: by laying bare the real origins of their oppression, Bebel's book had the effect of bringing proletarian women (and men) into the struggle of their class, the struggle for socialism. The immense impact the book had in its day can be measured by the number of editions it went through: 50 between 1879 and 1910, including a number of revisions and translations.

In its more developed editions, the book is divided into three parts - woman in the past, in the present and in the future, thereby conveying the essential strength of the marxist method: its capacity to situate all the questions it examines in a broad historical framework which also points the way to the future resolution of existing conflicts and contradictions.

The first part, "Woman in the past" does not add a great deal to what Engels put forward in his Origins of the Family. In fact, it was the publication of Engels' work which led Bebel to revise his first version, which had rather tended towards the idea that women had been "equally" oppressed in all previous societies. Engels, following Morgan, had demonstrated that this oppression had developed in a qualitative manner with the emergence of private property and class divisions. Thus Bebel's revised edition was able to show the link between the rise of the patriarchal family and that of private property: "With the dissolution of the old gentile organisation, the influence and position of women sank rapidly. The mother-right vanished; the father-right stepped into its shoes. Man now became a private property holder: he had an interest in children, whom he could look upon as legitimate and whom he made the heirs of his property: hence he forced upon woman the command of abstinence from intercourse with other men" (Bebel, Schocken paperback edition, 1971, p28).

The most important parts of the book are the next two sections: the third, as we have seen (see International Review no. 84) because it broadened out into a general vista of the future socialist society; the second because, on the basis of extensive research, it aimed to prove concretely how the existing bourgeois society, for all its pretensions about freedom and equality, ensured the perpetuation of woman's subordination. Bebel demonstrated this not only with regard to the immediately political sphere - women were denied the vote even in the majority of the" democratic" countries of the day, let alone in Junker-dominated Germany - but also in the social sphere, in particular the sphere of marriage, where woman was subordinate to the man in all matters - financial, legal, and sexual. This inequality applied to all classes but struck the proletarian wife with added force, since apart from all the pressures of poverty she also frequently suffered the dual obligation of daily wage labour and the unending demands of domestic work and childrearing. Bebel's detailed depiction of how the combined stresses of wage and domestic labour ruthlessly undermined the possibility of harmonious relationships between men and women has a remarkably contemporary feel, even in the age of the so-called "Liberated Woman" and of the "New Man".

Bebel also shows that if "marriage presents one side of the sexual life of the capitalist or bourgeois world, prostitution presents the other. Marriage is the obverse, prostitution the reverse of the medal" (p146). Bebel angrily denounces this society's hypocritical attitude to prostitution; not only because bourgeois marriage, in which the wife - above all in the upper classes - is virtually bought and owned by the husband, is itself akin to a legalised form of prostitution, but also because the majority of prostitutes are proletarian women forced "downwards" out of their class by the economic constraints of capitalism, by poverty and unemployment. And not only this: the respectable bourgeois society, which brings women to this state in the first place, unfailingly punishes the prostitute and protects the "client", especially if he is from the upper reaches of that society. Particularly odious were the police "hygiene" checks on prostitutes which not only humiliated the women under examination but had no worth whatever in halting the spread of venereal diseases.

Between marriage and prostitution, bourgeois society was completely unable to provide human beings with the bases of sexual fulfilment. No doubt some of Bebel's pronouncements on sexual behaviour reflect the prejudices of his day, but their underlying dynamic is definitely towards the future. Anticipating Freud, he argued forcefully that the repression of the sexual drive leads to neurosis: "It is a commandment of the human being to itself - a commandment that it must obey if it wishes to develop normally and in health - that it neglect the exercise of no member of its body, deny gratification to no natural impulse. The laws of the physical development of man must be studied and observed, the same as those of mental development. The mental activity of the human being is the expression of the physiological composition of its organs. The complete health of the former is intimately connected with the health of the latter. A disturbance of the one inevitably has a disturbing effect on the other. Nor do the so-called animal desires take lower rank than the so-called mental ones. This holds good for man as for woman" (p80). Freud, of course was to take such insights onto a much deeper level1. But the particular strength of marxism is that, on the basis of such scientific observations of human needs, it is able to show that a truly healthy human being can only exist in a healthy society, and that the real cure for neurosis lies in the social rather than the purely individual domain.

In the more directly "economic" sphere, Bebel shows that, for all the reforms achieved by the workers' movement, for all its gains in eliminating the early excesses of female and child labour, women workers continue to suffer particular hardships: precariousness of employment, lower wages, employment in unhealthy and dangerous trades. Like Engels, Bebel recognised that the extension and industrialisation of female labour was playing a progressive role in freeing women from the sterility and isolation of domestic chores, creating the bases for proletarian unity in the class struggle. But he also showed the negative side of this process - the particularly ruthless exploitation of female labour and the increasing difficulty faced by proletarian families in the care and education of their children.

Evidently, for Bebel, for Engels, in short for marxism, there is indeed a "woman question" and capitalism is unable to provide the answer to it. The seriousness with which the question was taken up by these marxists amply demonstrates the hollowness of the crude feminist idea that marxism has nothing to say on such matters. But there are much more sophisticated versions of feminism. The "socialist feminists", whose main mission was to draw the "women's liberation movement" of the 60s into the orbit of established leftism are perfectly capable of "recognising the marxist contribution" to the problem of women's liberation - only to "prove" the existence of gaps, flaws or errors in the classical marxist approach, so requiring the subtle admixture of feminism to arrive at a "total critique".

The criticisms such "socialist feminists" make of Bebel's work are fairly indicative of this approach. In Women's Estate, Juliet Mitchell, having acknowledged that Bebel had advanced Marx and Engels' understanding of woman's role by pointing out how her maternal function had served to place her in a position of dependency, then complains that "Bebel too was unable to do more than state that sexual equality was impossible without socialism. His vision of the future was a vague reverie, quite disconnected from his description of the past. The absence of a strategic concern forced him into voluntarist optimism divorced from reality" (p80, Penguin Books, 1971).

A similar charge is levelled in Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women, certainly one of the most sophisticated attempts to find a "marxist" justification for feminism: Bebel's vision of the future "reflects a utopian socialist outlook reminiscent of Fourier and the other early nineteenth-century socialists" (p101); his strategic approach is contradictory, so that Bebel could not "despite his best socialist intentions, sufficiently specify the relationship between the liberation of women in the communist future and the struggle for equality in the capitalist present" (p103). Not only is there no connection between today and tomorrow: even his view of tomorrow is flawed, since "socialism is pictured largely in terms of the redistribution of goods and services already available in capitalist society to independent individuals, rather than in terms of the wholesale reorganisation of production and social relations" (p102). This idea that "even socialism" doesn't go far enough in the direction of women's liberation is a common refrain amongst feminists: Mitchell for example, cites Engels on the necessity for society to collectivise domestic labour (through the provision of communal facilities for cooking, cleaning, childcare and so on) and concludes that both Marx and Engels had an "overly economistic stress" (opcit) to what is fundamentally a question of social relationships and their transformation.

We shall have something to say about the problem of "utopianism" during the period of the Second International. But let us make it perfectly clear that such a charge is inadmissible from the feminists. If a problem of utopianism emerges in the workers' movement of that time, it is because of the difficulties of seeing the link between the immediate defensive working class movement and the future communist goal. But for the feminists this connection is not provided at all by the movement of the proletariat, by a class movement, but by an "autonomous women's movement" which claims to cut across class divisions and provide the missing strategic link between the fight against women's inequality today and the construction of new social relations in the future. This is the most important "secret ingredient" which all the socialist feminists want to add to marxism. Unfortunately, it's an ingredient which can only spoil the dish.

The working class movement of the 19th century did not and could not take exactly the same form as it has in the 20th. Operating within a capitalist society which could still grant meaningful reforms, it was legitimate for the social democratic parties to put forward a minimum programme containing demands for economic, legal, and political improvements for women workers, including the granting of suffrage. It's true that the social democratic movement was not always precise in its distinction between immediate aims and final goals. There are ambiguous formulations in both The Origins of the Family and Woman and Socialism in this respect, and a well-read "socialist feminist" like Vogel does not hesitate to point these out. But fundamentally, the marxists of the day understood that the real significance of the fight for reforms was that it united and strengthened the working class and so schooled it in the historic struggle for a new society. It was for this reason above all that the proletarian movement always opposed bourgeois feminism: not merely because it limited its aims to the horizons of present-day society, but because far from aiding the unification of the working class, it sharpened divisions within it and led it off its own class terrain altogether.

This is truer than ever in the period of capitalism's decay, where bourgeois reform movements can no longer have any progressive content at all. In this period, the minimum programme no longer applies. The only real "strategic" question is how to forge the unity of the class movement against all the institutions of capitalist society in order to prepare for the latter's overthrow. Sexual divisions within the class, like all others (racial, religious, etc), evidently weaken the movement and have to be fought at every level. but they can only be fought with the methods of the class struggle - through unity in struggle and organisation. The feminists' demand for an autonomous women's movement can be seen as a direct assault on such methods; like black nationalism and other so-called "movements of the oppressed", it has become an instrument of capitalist society for exacerbating the divisions within the proletariat.

The perspective of a separate women's movement, seen as the only guarantee of a "nonsexist" future, actually turns its back on the future and ends up fixating on the most immediate and particular "women's" issues such as maternity and childcare - which in fact only have a real future when posed in class terms (for example, the demands of the Polish workers in 1980). It is thus fundamentally reformist. The same goes for that other "radical" feminist critique of marxism: that the marxist emphasis on the need to transfer childcare and domestic chores of all kinds from the individual to the communal sphere is "overly economist".

Throughout this series we have attacked the idea that communism is anything but the total transformation of social relationships. The feminist claim that communism does not go far enough, does not look beyond politics and economics to the true overcoming of alienation, is not merely false: it is a direct adjunct to the leftist programme of state capitalism, since the feminists unfailingly point to the existing "socialist" models (China, Cuba, formerly the USSR, etc) to prove that economic and political changes aren't enough without a conscious struggle for women's liberation. In short: the feminists set themselves up as a pressure group for state capitalism, its "anti-sexist" conscience. The symbiotic relationship between feminism and the "male dominated" capitalist left is proof enough of this.

For marxism, however, just as the political seizure of power by the working class is only the first step towards the inauguration of a communist society, so the destruction of commodity relations and the collectivisation of production and consumption, in short the "economic" content of the revolution, merely provides the material base for the creation of qualitatively new relations between human beings.

In his "Commentaries on the 1844 Manuscripts", Bordiga eloquently explains why this must be the case in a society that has completed the alienation of human relations, not least sexual relations, by subordinating them all to the domination of the market. "The relationship between the sexes in bourgeois society obliges the woman, starting from a passive position, to make an economic calculation each time she accedes to love. The male makes this calculation in an active fashion by making a balance sheet of a sum allotted against a need satisfied. Thus in bourgeois society not only are all needs expressed in money - as in the male's need for love - but, for the woman, the need for money kills the need for love" (Bordiga et la passion du communisme, Spartacus, 1972, p156). There can be no supercession of this alienation without the abolition of the commodity economy and the material insecurity which goes with it (an insecurity felt first and foremost by the female). But this also requires the elimination of all the social-economic structures that reflect and reproduce the market relationship, in particular the atomised family household which has become a barrier to the real fulfilment of love between the sexes: "In communism without money, love will, as a need, have the same weight for both sexes and the act which consecrates it will realise the social formula that the other's human need is my human need, to the extent that the need of one sex is realised as the need of the other. This cannot be proposed simply as a moral relationship founded on a certain physical connection, because the passage to a higher form of society is effected in the economic domain: the care of children is no longer just the concern of the two parents but of the community" (ibid).

Against this materialist programme for the genuine humanisation of sexual relationships, what do the feminists, with their claim that marxism doesn't go far enough, have to offer?By negating the question of revolution - of the absolute necessity for the political and economic overturn of capital - feminism "at best" can offer no more than a "moral relationship founded on a certain physical connection", in short, moralistic sermons against sexist attitudes or utopian experiments in new relationships inside the prison of bourgeois society. The true poverty of the feminist critique is probably best summed up in the atrocities of "political correctness", where the obsession to change words has exhausted all passion to change the world. Feminism thus reveals itself as yet another obstacle to the development of a truly radical consciousness and action.

The landscape of the future

a) False radicalism in green

Feminism is not alone in its "discovery" of marxism's failure to get to the root of things. Its close cousin, the "ecology" movement, makes the same claim. We have already summarised the "green" critique of marxism in a previous article in this Review ("It's capitalism that is poisoning the Earth", International Review no. 63): put simply, the argument is that marxism, like capitalism, is just another ideology of growth, expressing a "productionist" view of man and an alienated view of nature.

This trick is usually performed by assimilating marxism with Stalinism: the hideous state of the environment in the former "Communist" countries is cited as the true legacy of Marx and Engels. There are, however, more sophisticated versions of this trick. Disenchanted councilists, Bordigists and others who are now flirting with primitivism and other greeneries know that the Stalinist regimes were capitalist, not communist; and they are also aware of the profound insights into the relationship between man and nature contained in the writings of Marx, in particular the 1844 Manuscripts. Such currents therefore concentrate their fire on the period of the Second International, a period in which Marx's dialectical vision was allegedly buried without trace, to be replaced by a mechanistic approach which passively worshipped bourgeois science and technology and placed the abstract "development of the productive forces" above any real programme of human liberation. The intellectual snobs of Aufheben specialise in elaborating this view, particularly in their long series attacking the notion of capitalist decadence. Kautsky and Lenin are often cited as the chief offenders, but Engels himself does not escape the whip.

b) The universal dialectic

This is not the place to deal with these arguments in detail, particularly since we want to focus, in this article, not on philosophical issues but on what the socialists of the Second International said about socialism, about the society they were fighting for. Nevertheless, a few observations about "philosophy", about the general world view of marxism, would not go amiss, since it does connect to the way in which the workers' movement dealt with the more concrete question of the natural environment in a socialist society.

In previous articles in this series, we have already showed how Marx viewed the question, both in his early and his more mature work (see International Review nos. 70,71 and 75). In the dialectical view, man is a part of nature, not some" being squatting outside the world". Nature, as Marx put it, was man's body and he could as well live without it as a head without a body. But man was not "just" another animal, a passive product of nature. He was a uniquely active, creative being who alone among the animals was capable of transforming the world around him in accordance with his needs and desires.

It is true that tile dialectical view was not always clearly understood by Marx's followers, and that as various bourgeois ideologies infested the parties of the Second International, these viruses also expressed themselves on the "philosophical" terrain. In a period in which the bourgeoisie was marching triumphantly forward, the notion that science and technology, in themselves, contained the answer to all of humanity's problems became an adjunct to the development of reformist and revisionist theories within the movement. But even the more "orthodox" marxists were not immune: some of Kautsky's work, for example tends to reduce human history to a purely natural scientific process in which the victory of socialism becomes virtually automatic. Similarly, Pannekoek has shown that some of Lenin's philosophical conceptions reflected the mechanical materialism of the bourgeoisie. But, as the comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France pointed out in their series on Pannekoek's Lenin as Philosopher (see International Review nos. 25, 27,28, and 30), even if Pannekoek made some pertinent criticisms of Lenin's ideas about the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world, his basic method was flawed, because he himself made a mechanical link between Lenin's philosophical errors and the class nature of Bolshevism. The same applies to the Second International in general. Those who argue that it was a bourgeois movement because it was influenced by the dominant ideology have no understanding of the workers' movement in general, of its unceasing combat against the penetration of the ideas of the ruling class within its ranks, nor the particular conditions in which the parties of the Second International themselves waged this struggle. The social democratic parties were proletarian in spite of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois influences which affected them to a greater or lesser extent at different moments in their history.

We have already shown, in the previous article in this series, that Engels was certainly the foremost exponent and defender of the proletarian vision of socialism during the early years of social democracy, and that this vision was defended by other comrades against the deviations that evolved later on in this period. The same applies to the more abstract question of man's relationship to nature. From the early 1870s to the end of his life Engels was working on The Dialectics of Nature, in which he tried to encapsulate the marxist approach to this question. The essential thesis in this wide-ranging, but incomplete work, is that both the natural world and the world of human thought follow a dialectical movement. Far from placing humanity outside or above nature, Engels affirms that "at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like something standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature,and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly" ("The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man", which is part of The Dialectics of Nature).

However, for a whole strand of academic "marxists" (the so-called Western Marxists, who are the real mentors of Aufheben and the like), The Dialectics of Nature is the theoretical source of all evil, the scientific justification for the mechanical materialism and reformism of the Second International. In a previous article in this series (see International Review no. 81) we have already given some elements of a response to these charges; that of reformism in particular was dealt with at more length in the article on the centenary of Engel's death in International Review no. 83 (see also the Communist Workers Organisation's rebuttal of the notion of a split between Marx and Engels in Revolutionary Perspectives no. 1, series 3). But restricting ourselves to the terrain of "philosophy", it is worth noting that for "Western Marxists" like Alfred Schmidt, Engels' argument that the "cosmic" and the "human" dialectic are at root one and the same is a species not merely of mechanical materialism but even of "pantheism" and "mysticism" (cf The Concept of Nature in Marx, 1962). Schmidt here was following the example of Lukacs, who also argued that the dialectic was restricted to the "realms of history and society" and criticised the fact that "Engels -following Hegel's mistaken lead - extended the method to apply also to nature" (note 6, p 24, in History and Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1971).

In fact this charge of "mysticism" is groundless. It is true, and Engels himself recognises this in The Dialectics of Nature, that some pre-scientific world outlooks, such as Buddhism, had developed genuine insights into the dialectical movement both in nature and in the human psyche. Hegel himself had been strongly influenced by such approaches. But while all these systems remained mystical in the sense that they could not go beyond a passive vision of the unity between man and nature. Engels' view, the view of the proletariat, is active and creative. Man is a product of the cosmic movement. But, as the above passage from "The part played by labour..." emphasises, he has the capacity - and this moreover as a species and not merely as an illuminated individual - to master the laws of this movement and so to use them to change and direct it.

At this level, Lukacs and the "Western Marxists" are wrong to counter-pose Engels to Marx, since both agreed with Hegel that the dialectical principle "holds good alike in history and natural science" (Marx, letter to Engels, cited in Revolutionary Perspectives, opcit). The inconsistency of Lukacs' criticism can moreover be seen in the fact that in this same work he approvingly cites two of Hegel's key sayings: that "truth must be understood and expressed not merely as substance but also as subject", and that "truth is not to treat objects as alien" (pp39 and 204 of History and Class Consciousness, quoting the preface from The Phenomenology of Mind and Werke, XII, p207). What Lukacs fails to see is that these sayings clarify the real relationship between man and nature. Whereas both pantheistic mysticism and mechanical materialism tend to see human consciousness as the passive reflection of the natural world, Marx and Engels grasped that it is in fact - above all, in its realised form as the self-awareness of social humanity - the dynamic subject of the natural movement. Such a viewpoint presages the communist future where man will no longer treat either the natural or the social world as a series of alien, hostile objects. We can only add that the developments of the natural sciences since Engels' day - particularly in the field of quantum physics - have added considerable weight to the notion of a dialectic of nature.

Civilisation, but not as we know it

As good idealists, the greens often explain capitalism's propensity for destroying the natural environment as the logical outcome of the bourgeoisie's alienated view of nature; for marxists, the latter is fundamentally the product of the capitalist mode of production itself. Thus the battle to "save the planet" from the disastrous consequences of this civilisation is situated first and foremost not at the level of philosophy, but at the level of politics, and demands a practical programme for the reorganisation of society. And even if, in the 19th century, the destruction of the environment had not yet reached the same catastrophic proportions that it has in the later part of the 20th, the marxist movement recognised from its inception that the communist revolution involved a very radical reshaping of the human and natural landscape to make up for the damage inflicted on both by the unrestrained onslaught of capitalist accumulation. From the Communist Manifesto to the later writings of Engels and Bebel's Woman and Socialism, this recognition was summarised in the formula: abolition of the separation between town and country. Engels, whose first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, had railed against the poisonous living conditions that capitalist industry and housing imposed on the proletariat, returned to this theme in Anti-Duhring: " ... abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease. It is true that in the huge towns civilisation has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of. But it must and will be got rid of, however protracted a process it may be. Whatever destiny may be in store for the German Empire of the Prussian nation. Bismarck can go to his grave proudly aware that the desire of his heart is sure to be fulfilled: the great towns will perish" (Anti-Duhring,Part III, third part: "Production", p 351-2 of 1975 Moscow edition).

Furthermore, this "centralised decentralisation" is only possible because "capitalist industry has already made itself relatively independent of the local limitations arising from the location of sources of the raw materials it needs. Society liberated from the barriers of capitalist production can go much further still. By generating a race of producers with an all-round training who understand the scientific basis of industrial production as a whole, and each of whom has the practical experience in a whole series of branches of production from start to finish, this society will bring into being a new productive force which will abundantly compensate for the labour required to transport raw materials and fuel from great distances".

Without putting into question the understanding that this new society will be based on the most advanced technical developments. Bebel also anticipates that "Each community will, in a way, constitute a zone of culture; it will, to a large extent, itself raise its necessaries of life. Horticulture, perhaps the most agreeable of all practical occupations, will then reach fullest bloom. The cultivation of vegetables. fruit trees and bushes of all nature, ornamental flowers and shrubs - all over an inexhaustible field for human activity in a field, moreover, whose nature excludes machinery almost wholly" (ibid, p317).

Thus Bebel looks forward to a society which is highly productive but which produces at a human pace: "The nerve-racking noise, crowding and rushing of our large cities with their thousands of vehicles of all sorts ceases substantially: society assumes an aspect of greater repose" (ibid, p 300).

Here Bebel's portrait of the future is very similar to that of William Morris, who also used the image of the garden and who gave his futuristic novel News from Nowhere the alternative title "An Epoch of Rest". In his characteristically straight-forward style, Morris explained that all the "disadvantages" of the modem cities, their filth, their crazy rush and hideous appearance, were the direct product of capitalist accumulation, and could only be eliminated by eliminating capital: "Again. the aggregation of the population having served its purpose of giving people opportunities of inter-communication and of making the workers feel their solidarity, will also come to an end; and the huge manufacturing districts will be broken up, and nature heal the horrible scars that man's heedless greed and stupid terror have made for it will no longer be a dire necessity that cotton cloth should be made a fraction of a farthing cheaper this year than last" ("The society of the future", Political Writings of William Morris. p 196).

We could add that, as an artist, Morris had a particularly sharp concern to overcome the sheer ugliness of the capitalist environment and to remould it according to the canons of artistic creativity. This is how he posed the question in a speech on "Art under Plutocracy": "And first I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of all the externals of our life. For I must ask you to believe that every one of the things that goes to make up the surroundings among which we live must be either beautiful or ugly, either elevating or degrading to us, either a torment and burden to the maker of it to make, or a pleasure and a solace to him. How does it fare therefore with our external surroundings in these days? What kind of an account shall we be able to give to those who come after us of our dealings with the earth, which our forefathers handed down to us still beautiful, in spite of all the thousands of years of strife and carelessness and selfishness?" (Political Writings of William Morris, p 58).

Here Morris poses the question in the only way a marxist can pose it: from the standpoint of communism, of the communist future: the degrading external appearance of bourgeois civilisation can only be judged with the greatest severity by a world in which every aspect of production, from the smallest household good to the design and laying out of the physical landscape, is carried out, as Marx put it in the 1844 Manuscripts, "in accordance with the law of beauty". In this vision, the associated producers have become the associated artists, creating a physical environment that answers to mankind's profound need for beauty and harmony.

c) The Stalinist perversion

We have mentioned that the ecologists' "critique" of marxism is based on the false identification between Stalinism and communism. Stalinism embodies the capitalist destruction of nature and justifies it with marxist rhetoric. But Stalinism has never been able to leave the basics of marxist theory untouched; it began by revising the marxist conception of internationalism and it has gone on to attack every other fundamental principle of the proletariat, more or less explicitly. It is the same with the demand for abolishing the distinction between town and country. The Stalinist hack who introduces the 1971 Moscow edition of The Society of the Future, an extract from Bebel's Woman and Socialism, explains how Bebel (and thus Marx and Engels) have been proved wrong on this point: "The experience of socialist construction also does not confirm Bebel's statement that with the abolition of the antithesis between town and country, the population will move from the big towns to the country. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country implies that ultimately there will be neither town nor country in the modern meaning of the word. At the same time it is to be expected that big towns, even though their nature will change in developed communist society, will preserve their importance as historically evolved cultural centres".

The "experience of socialist construction" in the Stalinist regimes merely confirms that it is the tendency of bourgeois civilisation, above all in its epoch of decline, to herd more and more human beings into cities which have swelled beyond all human proportions, far outstripping the worst nightmares of the founders of marxist theory, who already thought the cities of their day were bad enough. The Stalinists have turned marxism on its head here as everywhere else: thus Romania's despot Ceaucescu proclaimed that the bulldozing of ancient villages and their replacement by gigantic "workers' tower blocks" was the practical abolition of the antithesis between town and country. The most pertinent answer to these perversions is provided by Bordiga in his "Space against Cement", written in the early 1950s. This text is a passionate denunciation of the sardine-like conditions imposed on the majority of humanity by capitalist urbanism, and a clear reaffirmation of the original marxist position on this question: "When, after the forcible crushing of this ever-more obscene dictatorship, it will be possible to subordinate every solution and every plan to the amelioration of the conditions of living labouraathen the brutal verticalism of the cement monsters will be made ridiculous and will be suppressed, and in the immense expanses of horizontal space, once the giant cities have been deflated, the strength and intelligence of the human animal will progressively tend to render uniform the density of life and labour over the inhabitable parts of the earth; and these forces will henceforth be in harmony, and no longer ferocious enemies as they are in the deformed civilisation of today, where they are only brought together by the spectre of servitude and hunger" (published in Espece Humaine et Croute Terrestre, Petite Bibilotheque Payot, p168).

This truly radical transformation of the environment is more than ever necessary in today's period of capitalist decomposition, where the megacities have not only become more and more swollen and uninhabitable, but have become the nodal points of capitalism's growing threat to the whole of planetary life. The communist programme is, here as in all other domains, the best refutation of Stalinism. And it is also a slap in the face to the pseudo-radicalism of the "greens", which can never go beyond a perpetual dance between two false solutions: on the one hand, the nostalgic dream of a backward flight into the past, which finds its most logical expression in the apocalypses of the "green anarchists" and primitivists, whose "return to nature" can only be founded on the extermination of the majority of mankind; and, on the other hand, the small-scale tinkering "reforms" and experiments of ecology's more respectable wing (tactically supported by the primitivists in any case), who seek purely piecemeal solutions to all the particular problems of modem city life - noise, stress, pollution, overcrowding, traffic jams and the rest. But if human beings are dominated by the machines, transport systems and buildings that they themselves have erected, it is because they are trapped in a society where dead labour dominates living labour at every turn. Only when mankind regains control over its own productive activity can it create an environment compatible with its needs; but the premise for this is the forcible overthrow of the "increasingly obscene dictatorship" of capitalism - in short, the proletarian revolution.

***

In the next articles in this series, we will examine how the late 19th century revolutionaries foresaw the most crucial of all social transformations - the transformation of "useless toil" into "useful work", in other words the practical overcoming of alienated labour. We will then return to the charge that has been levelled at these visions of socialism - that they represent a relapse into pre-marxist utopianism. This in tum will lead us onto the issue that was to become the major preoccupation of the revolutionary movement in the first decade of this century: not so much the problem of the ultimate goal of the movement, but of the means to attain it.

CDW

1 In this passage by Bebel, the relationship between physiology and mental states is presented in a somewhat mechanical manner. Freud took the exploration of neurosis onto a new level by showing that the human being cannot be understood as a closed mental/physical unit, but extends outwards into the field of social reality. But it should be remembered that Freud himself started with a highly mechanical model of the psyche and only later developed towards a more social, and a more dialectical view, of man's mental development.

In April 1996 the section in France of the International Communist Current held its 12th Congress. This was the congress of a territorial section of our international organisation, but the ICC had decided to invest it with a significance beyond that of the merely territorial framework, making it a kind of extraordinary international congress.

The congress was held a few months after we had seen in France a highly significant episode in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: the strikes inthepublicsectorattheendof1995, which were the result of an international manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie aimed at the entire proletariat of the industrialised countries. But these events only constituted one aspect of the general offensive that the bourgeoisie is waging against the working class and its organisations. And it is precisely as a vital moment in the arming of the communist organisation against the different aspects of this offensive that the 12th Congress of the section in France assumes all its importance.

An unprecedented attack by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat

The bourgeoisie is forced to accompany its economic attack against the working class with a political attack. As we saw with the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie at the end of 1995, this attack has both short and medium term aims: its objective is to weaken the proletariat in advance of the struggles which it will have to wage in the years ahead. However, it would be dangerously underestimating the ruling class if we thought that this attack didn't go further than this.

The most lucid sectors of the ruling class knew very well that the impact of the immense campaigns on the "death of communism" and the "definitive victory of capitalism" could not last forever, that it would inevitably be shattered by the aggravation of the capitalist crisis and the consequent revival of workers' struggles. This is why it has had to take precautions for the future.

"... We should underline the recent change in some of the language used by the ruling class. Whereas the first years after the collapse of the eastern bloc were dominated by campaigns around the theme of the "death of communism" and the "impossibility of revolution ", we are now seeing a certain return to fashion of talk about "marxism", "revolution" and "communism" - on the part of the leftists, obviously, but not only them" (Resolution on the International Situation, 11th ICC Congress).

Before a growing number of workers recognise marxism as the theory of the proletarian struggle for emancipation, it is necessary to elaborate and disseminate a false marxism designed to pollute and derail the whole process through which the working class becomes conscious of itself.

But this offensive doesn't end there. It is also necessary to discredit the left communist current, which at the time of the degeneration and death of the Communist International was the real defender of the communist principles which had presided over the October 1917 revolution. Thus, with the publication of the archives of Vercesi, the main animator of the Italian Left Fraction, the academics of Brussels University have presented this current as being anti-fascist, ie the very antithesis of what it really was. The most fundamental issue is to compromise the future of the left communist current, ie the only one which works towards the foundation of the communist party which the proletariat will need in order to carry through its revolution.

And this attack against the communist left isn't limited to the university. The "specialists" of the ruling class are quite aware of the danger represented by the groups of the proletarian political milieu, precisely the ones who claim continuity with the communist left. Obviously, this danger is not an immediate one. Continuing to suffer the effects of the terrible counter-revolution which fell on the proletariat at the end of the 1920s, and which lasted until the middle of the 1960s, the communist left is still marked both by a numerical weakness and by its low impact on the working class as a whole. A weakness that is further exacerbated by the dispersion into several currents (ICC, IBRP, the multiple "Parties" of the Bordigist current). But it would be singularly naive to think that the ruling class and its specialised institutions are not using, right now, all possible means to prevent this current from strengthening itself when the proletariat develops its consciousness, with the ultimate aim of liquidating it altogether. One of these means is obviously police repression. But in the context of the "democracies" which govern the industrialised countries, this is an instrument that the bourgeoisie uses very sparingly, in order to avoid unmasking itself. There is also infiltration by specialist organs of the capitalist state, with the aim of informing the latter and above all of destroying communist organisations from the inside. Thus, in 1981, the ICC unmasked the individual Chenier, whose activities helped to exacerbate the crisis the ICC was going through at the time and to provoke the loss of a number of militants. Finally, and above all, our organisation has exposed the particular role played today by the parasitic milieu as an instrument for the bourgeoisie's attack on the proletarian political milieu.

The attack by parasitism against the proletarian political milieu and against the ICC

This is not a new concern for our organisation. Thus, just after our 11th Congress, one year ago, we wrote:

"It is preferable for the bourgeoisie to erect a wall of silence around the positions and even the existence of revolutionary organisations. This is why the work of denigrating them, and sabotaging their intervention, is undertaken by a whole series of groups and parasitic elements whose function is to drive away individuals who are coming towards class positions, to disgust them with any participation in the difficult task of developing a proletarian political milieu.

All the communist groups have been subjected to the attacks of parasitism, but the latter has paid particular attention to the ICC, because it is today the most important organisation in the proletarian milieu" (International Review 82).

It was thus on the basis of a whole series of attacks by parasitism on the proletarian political milieu and the ICC in particular that the Congress discussed and adopted a resolution from which we will cite certain extracts:

"The notion of political parasitism is not an innovation of the ICC. It belongs to the history of the workers' movement. Thus, in the struggle of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, Marx described Bakunin's Alliance as "parasitic". The parasitic groups do not belong to the proletarian political milieu. In no sense are they an expression of the effort of the class to become conscious. On the contrary, they represent an attempt to abort this effort. In this sense their activity completes the work of the forces of the bourgeoisie in sabotaging the intervention of revolutionary organisations within the class.

What animated the activity and determines the existence of these groups is not at all the defence of the class principles of the proletariat, but at best the spirit of the little sect or "circle of friends", the affirmation of individualism and individuality vis-a-vis the proletarian political milieu. The point of departure of the parasitic approach, which can lead to the formation of a parasitic group, is based on personal scores, resentments, frustrations and other squalid concerns typical of the ideology of the decomposing and futureless petty bourgeoisie. In this sense, what characterises a parasitic group is not the defence of a programmatic platform but essentially a political attitude to revolutionary organisations, and more particularly towards the main pole of regroupment, the ICC.

The function of parasitism is thus:

- to reinforce confusions in the class;

- to develop attacks on marxist organisations with a view to the destruction of the proletarian political milieu;

- to fuel the bourgeoisie's campaigns against communism by spreading the idea that any marxist organisation that lays claim to Lenin's combat for the party is by nature condemned to Stalinist degeneration;

- to ridicule the organisational principles of the proletariat by inoculating the idea that the intransigent defence of these positions can only lead to sectarianism.

All these themes, developed in the offensive of parasitism against the ICC, are a confirmation of the active contribution by the parasitic groups to the bourgeois state's attack on marxism since the collapse of the eastern bloc. They are there to sabotage the efforts of the proletariat to rediscover its revolutionary perspective. In this sense, the parasitic groups are a highly favourable soil for the manipulations of the state".

This doesn't mean that the parasitic groups are simple organs of the capitalist state, as are for example the leftist groups who defend a capitalist programme. Similarly it is certain that most of the elements of the parasitic milieu, whether organised or informal, have no direct link with the organs of the state. But bearing in mind the approach which animates this milieu, the organisational and political laxity which characterises it, the friendship networks that run through it, its predilection for all kinds of intrigues, nothing could be easier than for a few specialists to infiltrate it and guide it in the direction which most favours the action of the bourgeoisie against the communist organisations.

The organisational arming of the ICC

The 12th Congress of the section in France also had to make a balance sheet, one year after the international congress, of its capacity to put into practice the perspectives that the latter had drawn out. We will be brief on this point because, despite all its importance, it was secondary in relation to what has been developed above, and to a large extent subordinated to the latter. The resolution adopted by this Congress says:

" ... the 11th Congress affirmed that the ICC is much stronger than it was at its previous congress, that it is incomparably better armed to confront its responsibilities faced with future upsurges of the class, even if, obviously, it is still in a state of convalescence" (point 11).

"This does not mean that the combat that we have waged now has to end... The ICC must carry it on through being vigilant at all times, through its determination to identify each weakness and deal with it without delay ... In reality, the history of the workers' movement, including that of the ICC, teaches us, and the debate has amply confirmed this, that the combat for the defence of the organisation is permanent and without respite" (point 13).

All this has been fully confirmed in the past year for our section in France. Thus, faced with an event as important as the strikes at the end of 95, it was immediately able to identify the trap which the bourgeoisie had set for the working class and to intervene actively in the class.

The 12th Congress of our section in France has once again shown how the combat for the defence of the organisation is a long term combat, a permanent fight which cannot be relaxed. But for revolutionaries, difficulty is not a factor of demoralisation. On the contrary. As the vanguard of a class which draws from the daily struggles it wages against the capitalist enemy the strength that will allow it to change the world, communists can only strengthen their own conviction, their own determination, through the struggle against the attacks of the enemy class, such as we are seeing today, and against the difficulties
they encounter in their activity.

ICC

12th Congress of Revolution Intemationale
Resolution on the International Situation

1) In the year since the 11th ICC Congress, the state of the world economy has fully confirmed the perspective put forward at the Congress: the bourgeoisie's boasted "recovery" was no "end of the tunnel" for the capitalist economy, but only a moment in its plunge into a crisis without end. The 11th Congress emphasized that one of the main sources of this "recovery" - which we described at the time as a 'jobless recovery" - was a headlong flight into debt, which could only lead to new convulsions in the financial world, and a new dive into open recession. These financial convulsions - dramatic problems in the banking sector, and a spectacular collapse in the dollar - have been affecting capitalism since the beginning of autumn 1995, and have been merely the precursors of a new fall in the growth rates of most of the industrialised countries since the beginning of winter, with even more gloomy forecasts for 1996.

Irreversible deepening of the economic crisis

2) One of the most striking illustrations of the world economy's worsening state, is the difficult situation of the greatest power on the European continent. Germany today is confronted with the worst unemployment (4 million) since World War II, hitting not just the East, but spreading to the more "prosperous" Western regions. It is symbolic of the German economy's unprecedented difficulties that Daimler, one of its leading companies, has just announced that its shareholders will receive no dividends: Daimler has just suffered its first losses (and substantial ones at that) since the war. This has put an end to one of the myths so complacently put about by the bourgeoisie (and believed by some groups in the proletarian milieu) following the Eastern bloc's collapse and the reunification of Germany: the myth of a recovery fuelled by the reconstruction of the backward Eastern regions. As the ICC said, against the reigning euphoria of the time, it was impossible for the Eastern bloc countries emerging from the Stalinist variety of state capitalism to provide any breath of oxygen for the world economy. More particularly, the reconstruction of East Germany demanded a gigantic capital investment. Although this raised the German economy's growth rates for a few years, it was only at the cost of massive debt, which could only lead to an abrupt slowdown, mirroring the capitalist economy as a whole.

3) The plunge into open recession by Germany, which model of economic rectitude, is all the more significant of the depth of the crisis today, in that it is accompanied by the collapse of another "model": Japan's record-breaking dynamism and growth rates. Whereas Japan's growth rates ran at about 4-5% throughout the 80s, they have not risen above 1% since 1992. Five government recovery plans have had no effect: growth rates have continued to fall, reaching 0.3% in 1995. And not only have the recovery plans failed to improve the situation, the debt on which they are based has only made it worse. As we have said for a long time, the "remedies" of the capitalist economy must eventually worsen the disease and kill the patient a little more. The Japanese economy today is facing a mountain of$460 billion of bad debt, as a result of the frenzied speculation of the late 80s and early 90s. This is all the more catastrophic, not just for the world's second economic power but for the entire world economy, in that Japan constitutes the world's savings bank, providing 50% of the OECD countries' finance capital.

4) As for the world's greatest power, whose results last year were less sombre than those of its immediate followers, growth rates for 1996 are forecast at 2%, a clear decline from the rate of the previous year. For example, the 40,000 redundancies announced by ATT - the symbol of one of the economy's leading sectors, telecommunications - signify the American economy's worsening condition. And if, for the moment, the US is managing better than its rivals, this is only thanks to unprecedentedly brutal attacks against the workers (many of whom are forced to hold down two jobs to survive), and to using the advantages conferred by its special status as world super-power: financial, monetary, diplomatic and military pressure all put to the service of the trade war it is waging against its competitors.

Concretely, in a capitalist world stifled by generalised over-production, the strongest can only breathe better at the expense of its rivals: the German and Japanese bourgeoisies are the first to make this bitter observation. And this trade war is getting worse, since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the disappearance of the Western bloc which inevitably followed, have meant that the coordination established for years between the countries of the Western bloc is more and more giving way to the rule of "look after number one", which can only exacerbate capitalism's convulsions.

The logic of "every man for himself" sharpens imperialist rivalries

5) "Every man for himself': this rule finds its most spectacular expression in the field of imperialist antagonisms. At the very moment of the Eastern bloc's collapse, the ICC denounced the bourgeoisie's false prophecies of a "new world order" of peace and prosperity. The division of the world into two blocs was not the cause of imperialist antagonisms, but their consequence, one of the means adopted by the different countries of the planet to confront them. Far from putting an end to antagonisms between states, and military confrontations, the disappearance of the bloc system that had emerged from World War II unleashed antagonisms which the bloc system had previously kept within certain limits. Although this put on the historical agenda the formation of new imperialist blocs - a perspective which could not take immediate effect given the relative weakness of the new potential bloc leader, Germany, in relation to the world's greatest power - in the immediate it led to an explosion of "look after number one", in an imperialist landscape marked by an upheaval of alliances unprecedented since the beginning of the century. The international situation has since only confirmed this perspective. And while the tendency towards the formation of new blocs appeared clearly at the beginning of the 1990s, it has since been replaced by the rule of "look after number one", one of the most significant expressions of capitalist society's general decomposition.

6) The ICC's 11th Congress showed that the effect of an unbridled policy of "look after number one" was "a considerable weakening, even a crisis, of American world leadership", whose most striking expressions were the estrangement between the US and Britain - the world's two most faithful allies since the beginning of the century - and the fact that the world's greatest power was virtually absent from the then most important zone of imperialist conflict, Yugoslavia. Since then, the estrangement between the two Anglo-Saxon powers has not healed - far from it. By contrast, the US has spectacularly improved its position in ex-Yugoslavia. Since last summer, and its support for the Croat offensive in the Krajina, the US has succeeded in radically reversing the situation in its favour. Thanks to its military superiority - its main means of action internationally - the US has completely eclipsed the British and French dominance in the region, which the two powers had exercised for years though UNPROFOR, and were proposing to strengthen with the creation of the Rapid Reaction Force (RRF). The USA's return in strength was not merely a response to the RRF. Whereas the Franco-British tandem's only ally on the spot was Serbia, the USA has succeeded today in bringing onto its side, willingly or not, not only their original Muslim allies, but also the "friends" of Germany, the Croats, and the "enemies" of yesterday, the Belgrade Serbs, thanks to the latter's divorce from the Pale Serbs.

7) The USA's recovery of the initiative is not limited to the situation in ex-Yugoslavia, but also extends to its traditional zones of hegemony, such as the Middle East, and to the Far East. The Sharm El Sheik summit on terrorism in Israel was thus a means for Uncle Sam to remind everybody who is the godfather in the region. The USA's firmness in the defence of Taiwan against China's posturing was the clearest warning to the latter's imperialist ambitions, as well as those of Japan (the resolution of the 11th International Congress already highlighted both powers' efforts at rearmament). Faced with this powerful American comeback, the second fiddles France and Britain have no choice but to keep a low profile. They came reluctantly to the Sharm El Sheik "Clinton show". And it was to avoid being totally side-lined that they reassigned their troops from UNPROFOR to I-FOR, which is a creature under the control of the USA, just as France was forced to take part in "Desert Storm" in 1990-91, despite being fundamentally opposed to it. Similarly, the rapprochement between the world's greatest power and its main rival, Germany, over ex-Yugoslavia has been principally to the benefit of the former. And although Germany's Croatian ally has conquered positions that it has coveted since independence, this apparent success for Germany has been largely thanks to the US, which is an uncomfortable position for an imperialist power, especially when it is posing as a candidate to the leadership of a new bloc. Like France and Britain, and in particular through its participation in I-FOR, Germany is thus obliged to submit to the conditions imposed by the USA.

Resistance to American leadership increases world chaos

8) The return to the limelight of the world's greatest power does not mean that it has definitively overcome the threat to its leadership. This threat, as we emphasized at our last international congress, springs essentially from the fact that today, there no longer exists the essential precondition for any real solidity and stability in alliances between bourgeois states in the imperialist arena: the existence of a common enemy threatening their security. The powers of the ex-Western bloc may be forced, at one time or another, to submit to Washington's diktats, but it is out of the question for them to remain faithful on a durable basis. On the contrary, they will seize any opportunity to sabotage the orientations and dispositions imposed by the USA. So the fact that Britain has been forced to toe the US line in ex-Yugoslavia has in no way re-established the former's allegiance to its transatlantic big brother. This is why the latter has renewed its pressure over the Irish question, notably by foisting the responsibility for the renewed IRA bombing campaign (which it is probably behind) onto London. This is why Chirac's recent journey to Beirut represents France's attempt to go poaching in America's Middle Eastern hunting grounds, after sponsoring the Barcelona conference designed to check US progress in the Mediterranean. In fact, the recent evolution of imperialist relations demonstrates the complete upheaval of alliances, their utter instability, following the end of the cold war bloc system. Old "friendships" of 40 or even 80 years' standing are breaking up. There is a deep rift between London and Washington. Similarly, every day that passes aggravates the differences between France and Germany, in other words the two leading architects of the European edifice.

9) Concerning these last aspects, it is important to emphasize the driving forces behind these imperialist alliances. The new Entente Cordiale between France and Britain can only be based on the estrangement between Washington and London on the one hand, and between Paris and Berlin on the other. The fact that France and Britain are both second-rate, historically declining, powers of essentially equal strength, confronted by the pressure of the two great powers - USA and Germany - confers a certain solidity on this new Entente Cordiale. This is all the more true in that there exists within Europe a fundamental, insurmountable antagonism between Britain and Germany, whereas despite three wars, there has been room for long periods of "friendship" between the latter and France. Indeed, some sectors of the French bourgeoisie rallied to the German alliance even during World War II. However, the rising power of German imperialism in recent years cannot help but revive the French bourgeoisie's old fears of its too powerful neighbour. Even without a complete break between Paris and Berlin, all this leads to a profound degradation in Franco-German relations. Even if France would like to play the umpire between its two great neighbours, such an alliance of the three is in fact impossible. In this sense, any real construction of a political union in Europe is a utopia, and can never be anything but a domain of mystification. The impotence of European institutions, illustrated in ex-Yugoslavia, where it gave the USA the chance to make its comeback in the region, will continue to appear in the future. America will continue to stir up the ant heap, as it did in the Balkans, to prevent any gathering of discontent directed against it. More generally, and as the ICC has said for a long time, the imperialist scene can only be marked by growing instability, with advances and retreats by the USA, and above all the continued and growing use of brute force, the clash of arms, and horrible massacres.

Bourgeois offensive against renewed class struggle

10) As we said in the resolution of the last International Congress, "More than ever, the struggle of the proletariat remains the only hope for the future of human society" (Point 14). And this last year has clearly illustrated the words of this resolution:

"Particularly since 1992, [the workers'] struggles have been testimony to the proletariat's capacity to get back onto the path of struggle, thus confirming that the historic course has not been overturned. They are also testimony to the enormous difficulties which it is encountering on this path, owing to the breadth and depth of the reflux [following the collapse of the stalinist regimes, the accompanying ideological campaigns, and everything that has followed]. The workers' struggles are developing in a jagged, sinuous manner, full of advances and retreats" (ibid). "These obstacles have allowed the unions to get their grip on the workers' combativity, channelling them towards "actions" entirelv under union control. However, the unions' present manoeuvres have also, and above all, a preventative aim: that of strengthening their hold on the workers before the latter deploy far more their combativity, which will necessarily result from their growing anger faced with the increasingly brutal attacks demanded by the crisis" (Point 17).

The French social movements of late 1995: a bourgeois manoeuvre against the international proletariat

The strikes in France at the end of autumn 1995 have thoroughly confirmed this perspective: " ... to prevent the working class from entering the combat with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie has taken the lead, and has pushed the workers into a premature struggle, completely under the control of the unions. It has not left the workers time to mobilise at their own rhythm and with their own methods" (International Review no.84). They have also confirmed that, as we have already pointed out, the bourgeoisie organises and carries out its actions against the working class at an international level:

- through the unprecedented media coverage of these strikes (whereas social movements which really worried the bourgeoisie have suffered from a total media blackout in other countries); a media coverage which tried in particular to exploit the reference to May 68, both to fix workers' attention on the events in France, and to distort their nature, while at the same time distorting the nature of 68 itself;

- the Belgian bourgeoisie's use, with the same success, of an identical repeat of the manoeuvre which trapped the workers in France, on the basis of this media campaign.

11) The renewed strength and credibility of the union apparatus, which was a specific characteristic of the social movements in France at the end of 95, is not a new phenomenon, either in France or internationally. This was already pointed out a year go by the last ICC Congress: " ... it is important to show that the tendencies towards going beyond the unions, which appeared in 1992 in Italy, have not been confirmed - far from it. In 1994 the "monster" demonstration in Rome was a masterpiece of union control. Similarly, the tendency towards spontaneous unification in the street, which appeared (although only embryonically) in autumn 1993 in the Ruhr in Germany, has since given way to large scale union manoeuvres, such as the engineering "strike" of early 1995, which have been entirely controlled by the bourgeoisie" (Point 15). This renewed credibility of the unions was one result of the Eastern bloc's collapse at the end of the 80s: "reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the coming period, making the activity of the unions much easier" ("Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the countries of the Eastern bloc", September 1989). This sprang from the fact, not that the workers still had any illusions in the "socialist paradise", but that the existence of a kind of society presented as "non-capitalist" seemed to mean that something other than capitalism could exist on earth. The end of these regimes was presented as "the end of history". Given that the terrain par excellence of the unions and of unionism is the improvement of the proletariat's living conditions in capitalism, the events of 1989, aggravated by a whole series of blows dealt the working class since then (due to the Gulf War, the explosion of the USSR, the war in ex-Yugoslavia), could only lead to the return to influence of the trades unions, which can be seen in all countries today, and which was particularly highlighted by the events in France at the end of 1995. A return to strength which has not come overnight, but which is the result of a whole process in which "radical" forms of unionism (COBAS etc, in Italy, SUD and FSU in France, etc) have reinforced union ideology, to leave the limelight to the traditional union hierarchies.

What is today's balance of forces between the classes?

12) As a result, in the main capitalist countries, the working class has been brought back to a situation which is comparable to that of the 1970s as far as its relation to unions and unionism is concerned: a situation where the class, in general, struggled within the unions, followed their instructions and their slogans, and in the final analysis, left things up to them. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has temporarily succeeded in wiping out from working class consciousness the lessons learnt during the 80s, following the repeated experience of confrontation with the unions. The ruling class will make the most, for as long as possible, of this strengthening of the unions and unionism, which will force the working class into a long period of confrontation with the latter (as it did during the 70s and up until the end of the 80s, even if this period does not last as long) before it can once again get out of their grip. At the same time, it will have to see through all the ideological campaigns around the question of the "internationalisation of the economy", which the bourgeoisie uses to try to conceal the real cause of its attacks against the proletariat: the dead-end crisis of the capitalist system. The unions will propose to "counter" these campaigns, by dragging the workers onto the rotten ground of nationalism, and competition with their class brothers in other countries.

13) The working class thus still has a long way to go. But the difficulties and obstacles it encounters should not be a factor of demoralisation, and it is up to revolutionaries to combat any such demoralisation resolutely. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, knows perfectly well the potential that the proletariat bears within it. This is why it organises manoeuvres like that at the end of 1995. As revolutionaries have always said, and as the bourgeoisie itself confirms, the crisis of the capitalist economy is the proletariat's best ally, which will open the workers' eyes to the dead-end in which today's world finds itself, and give them the determination to destroy it despite all the obstacles which every sector of the ruling class will not fail to strew in their path.

I CC, June1996

Following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe at the end of the 80s, and with all the media campaigns about the 'death of communism', the 'end of the class struggle', and even the 'disappearance of the working class', the world proletariat suffered a massive ideological defeat, a defeat aggravated by the events that followed, in particular the Gulf war in 1991, which further amplified its feelings of powerlessness. Since then, notably with the big movements in the Autumn of 92 in Italy, the proletariat rediscovered the path of the class struggle; this was undeniable even if it was still fraught with difficulties. What fed this revival of proletarian struggles were the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which the bourgeoisies of all countries were forced to unleash as its system sank deeper into an insoluble crisis. The ruling class knows quite well that it can only get these attacks through, and prevent them provoking a radicalisation of workers' resistance, if it sets up a whole political arsenal aimed at derailing and sterilising the class struggle. To do this, it has to be able to count on the effectiveness of those organs of the bourgeois state in the ranks of the workers: the trade unions. In other words, the bourgeoisie's ability to impose its will on the exploited class depends and will continue to depend on the credibility of the unions and of trade unionism in general. This is demonstrated very clearly by the strikes in France and Belgium at the end of 1995. It is also being demonstrated at the time of writing by the union agitation in the main European country: Germany.

In our two previous issues of the International Review, we examined the means employed by the bourgeoisie, during the strike movement in France at the end of 1995, to take the initiative faced with a perspective of the resurgence of workers' struggles. The analysis which we have developed on these events can be summarised by the following extracts from the article that we published in IR 84, at a time when the movement was not yet over:

"In reality, the French proletariat is the target of a massive manoeuvre aimed at weakening its consciousness and combativity; a manoeuvre, moreover, which is also aimed at the working class in other countries, designed at making it draw the wrong lessons from the events in France"(‘Behind the unions, struggle leads to defeat').

And the first wrong lesson that the bourgeoisie wants the working class to draw is that the unions are genuine organs of the proletarian struggle:

"This renewed credibility of the unions was one of the bourgeoisie's fundamental objectives, a vital precondition for dealing blows still more brutal than today's. Only on this condition can it hope to sabotage the struggles which will certainly surge up against these new attacks "(ibid).

In number 85 of our Review, we indicated how, almost at the same time as the manoeuvre by the French bourgeoisie, the Belgian bourgeoisie, taking advantage of the latter, made a carbon copy which incorporated all its main ingredients:

- a series of capitalist attacks affecting all sectors of the working class (in this case, an attack on social security), but which were especially provocative for a particular sector (in France, the rail way workers and Paris transport workers; in Belgium, the railway workers and the national airline workers); the 'Juppe method' , concentrating in a short space of time an avalanche of attacks, carried out in a cynical and arrogant way, is all part of the manoeuvre: the discontent has to be detonated by;

- very radical appeals by the unions for the extension of the workers' riposte, putting forward the example of the 'vanguard' sector chosen by the bourgeoisie;

- a retreat by the bourgeoisie on the most provocative measures; the unions then cry 'victory' for the mobilisation they have organised, the 'leading' sectors then go back to work and this demobilises the other sectors.

The result of these manoeuvres has been that the bourgeoisie has been able to push through the measures which have the broadest effects, the ones which hit the whole working class, while giving the impression of having had to retreat in the face of the workers' struggle, which lends credit to the idea that they achieved a victory under the leadership of the trade unions. This benefits the government, the bosses and the trade unions. What appears to many workers to have been a 'victory' or a semi-victory (it was not hard for the great mass of workers to see that on the essential questions, like social security, the government did not retreat) and was, in reality, a defeat - a defeat at the material level, of course, but above all a political defeat since the main enemy of the working class, the most dangerous because it presents itself as its ally, the union apparatus, increased its grip and its power of mystification over the workers.

The analyses of the communist groups

The ICC's analyses of the social movements at the end of 1995, presented both in the IR, its territorial press and at public meetings, were met with interest and approval by the majority of its readers and those who came to its meetings. On the other hand, these analyses were not shared by most of the other organisations of the proletarian political milieu. In the previous issue of this Review, we showed how the two organisations who comprise the IBRP, the CWO and Battaglia Comunista, fell into the bourgeoisie's trap precisely because they were unable to identify the manoeuvre. These comrades, for example, made the reproach that our analyses lead to the idea that the workers are imbeciles because they allowed themselves to be taken in by the bourgeoisie's manoeuvres. More generally, they consider that, with our vision, the proletarian revolution is impossible because the workers will always be the victims of mystifications set up by the bourgeoisie. Nothing could be more wrong.

In the first place, the fact that today the workers have fallen into the bourgeoisie's trap does not mean that this will always be the case. The history of the workers' movement is full of examples in which the same workers who allowed themselves to be mobilised behind the flags of the bourgeoisie were subsequently capable of waging exemplary and even revolutionary struggles. It was the same Russian and German workers who had been slaughtering each other under their national banners in 1914 who launched themselves into the proletarian revolution in 1917, and who forced the bourgeoisie to put an end to the imperialist butchery in 1918. More generally, history has taught us that the working class is capable of drawing the lessons from its defeats, of springing the traps in which it has previously been ensnared.

And it is precisely the task of revolutionary minorities, of the communist organisations, to contribute actively to such a development of consciousness in the class, in particular by clearly and resolutely denouncing the traps that the bourgeoisie has laid.

Thus, in July 1917, the Russian bourgeoisie tried to provoke a premature insurrection by the proletariat of the capital. The most advanced fraction of the working class, the Bolshevik party, identified the trap and it is clear that without its far-seeing attitude which aimed to stop the Petrograd workers from rushing into an adventure, the latter would have suffered a bloody defeat, and that this would have blocked the movement that culminated in the victorious insurrection of October 1917. In January 1919 (see our articles on the German revolution in the IR), the German bourgeoisie reissued the same manoeuvre. This time, it was successful: the proletariat of Berlin, isolated, was crushed by the Freikorps, and this dealt a decisive blow to the revolution in Germany and on a world scale. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was able, alongside the majority of the leadership of the newly formed Communist Party, to understand the nature of the trap that the bourgeoisie had laid. On the other hand, Karl Liebknecht, even though he had been hardened by years of revolutionary militancy, notably during the course of the imperialist war, did fall into the trap. Thanks to his prestige, and despite himself, he participated in a tragic defeat of the working class, one which cost him his life and the lives of many of his comrades, including Rosa Luxemburg herself. But even though the latter had done all she could to warn the proletariat and her own comrades against the bourgeoisie's trap, she never thought that those who had fallen into it were idiots. On the contrary, her last article, written on the eve of her death, 'Order reigns in Berlin', insists on an essential idea: that the proletariat must learn from its defeats. Similarly, by affirming that the workers in France and Belgium at the end of 1995 have been the victims of a trap laid by the bourgeoisie, the I CC never thought or implied that the workers were idiots. In fact,
the very opposite is the case.

If the bourgeoisie took the trouble to construct such a sophisticated trap for the working class, the building of which involved the government, the bosses, the unions and even the leftist groups, it is precisely because it does not underestimate the working class. It knows perfectly well that the proletariat today is not the proletariat of the 1930s, that, unlike with the latter, the economic crisis is not driving it deeper into demoralisation but tends to push it towards increasingly powerful and conscious struggles. In fact, in order to understand the significance of the bourgeois manoeuvre at the end of 1995, it is first necessary to have recognised that we are not now in a historic course dominated by the counter-revolution, in which the mortal crisis of capitalism can only result in world imperialist war, but in a course toward class confrontations. One of the best proofs of this reality can be found in the kind of themes and methods used by the unions in these recent manoeuvres. During the 1930s, the ideological campaigns of the left and the unions were dominated by anti-fascism, the 'defence of democracy' and nationalism, and they succeeded in derailing the combativity of the proletariat into a tragic impasse and mobilising it for the imperialist butchery (the best examples of this were the June 1936 strikes in France and the civil war in Spain). If at the end of 1995 the unions were very low key about such themes, if by contrast they adopted a very 'workerist' language, putting forward the classic demands and methods of struggle of the working class, it's because they know quite well that they could not have managed such a massive mobilisation or restored their credibility in the eyes of the workers by making their usual speeches about the 'national interest' and other openly bourgeois mystifications. The national flag or the defence of democracy could be effective in the inter-war period, but now the unions need calls for 'extension', for 'the unity of all sectors of the working class', for sovereign general assemblies. But we should note that if the current discourse of the unions did succeed in deceiving the majority of the working class, it also succeeded in deceiving organisations which claim the heritage of the communist left. The best example of this is probably provided by the articles published in no. 435 of the newspaper Le Proletaire, organ of the International Communist Party ((lCP), which in Italy publishes II Comunista, ie one of the numerous ICP's of the Bordigist tendency.

The digressions of Le Proletaire

This issue of Le Proletaire devotes four pages out of ten to the 1995 strikes in France. Many details about these events are provided, and even false details which prove either that the author was poorly informed, or, and this is more probable, that he has taken his desires for reality[1]. But the most striking thing in this issue of Le Proletaire is the two page article entitled 'The ICC against the strikes'. This title already says a great deal about the tone of the whole article, in which we discover that:

- the ICC is the emulator of Thorez, the French Stalinist leader, who at the end of the second world war declared that "strikes are weapons of the trusts";

- the ICC expresses itself "just like a scab";

- we are "modern Proudhonists" and "deserters (their emphasis) of the proletarian struggle".

Obviously, this article immediately places itself alongside the parasitic milieu, for which everything is fair when it comes to denigrating the ICC. In this sense, Le Proletaire is now making its little contribution (deliberate or unconscious?) to this milieu's attack on our organisation. Of course we are not against polemics between organisations of the revolutionary milieu, and we have always shown this in our press. But a polemic, however vehement, implies that we are in the same camp in the class war. For example, we don't polemicise with the leftist organisations; we denounce them as organs of the capitalist class, something Le Proletaire is incapable of doing since it defines a group like Lutte Ouvriere, the flower of French Trotskyism, as "centrist". Le Proletaire reserves its sharpest arrows for organisations of the communist left like the ICC. If we are "deserters", it means that we have betrayed our class, thank you very much. Thanks also to the parasitic groups for whom the ICC has gone over to Stalinism. Nevertheless, the ICP should one day work out what camp it is in: that of the serious organisations of the communist left, or that of the parasites whose sole reason for existing is to discredit these organisations, to the unique advantage of the bourgeoisie.

Having said that, while Le Proletaire seeks to teach us a lesson about our analyses of the 1995 strikes, what its article demonstrates above all is:

- its lack of clarity, not to say its opportunism, on the question which is so vital for the working class, the question of trade unionism;

- its crass ignorance of the history of the workers' movement, which leads it to an incredible underestimation of the enemy class.

The union question: Achilles Heel of the ICP and Bordigism

The ICP talks about the ICC being "anti-trade union on principle", and in doing so proves that it does not consider the union question to be one of principle Le Proletaire tries to be very radical when it asserts:

"The union apparatuses have become, as the result of a process of degeneration accelerated by the international victory of the counter-revolution, instruments of class collaboration", and, even more, "if the big union organisations obstinately refuse to use these weapons (authentically proletarian methods of struggle) this is not simply because they have a bad leadership whom it would be enough to replace: decades of degeneration and of domestication by the bourgeoisie have emptied these big union apparatuses of their last class vestiges and have transformed them into organs of class collaboration, trading proletarian demands for social peace ... This fact is enough to show the falsity of the traditional Trotskyist perspective of conquering or reconquering for the proletarian struggle these apparatuses of professionals in conciliating workers' interests with the demands of capitalism. On the other hand, there are a thousand examples to show that it is very possible to transform a Trotskyist into a union bureaucrat ..."

In reality, what the ICP shows here is its lack of clarity and firmness on the nature of trade unionism. It doesn't denounce the latter as a weapon of the bourgeois class, but only the "union apparatuses". In doing so, despite its words, it doesn't manage to break free of the Trotskyist vision: nowadays you can find very similar statements in the press of a group like Lutte Ouvriere. What Le Proletaire, which considers itself to be faithful to the tradition of the Italian communist left, refuses to admit, is that any trade union form, whether small or large, legal and openly working at the highest levels of the bourgeois  state, or illegal (as was the case with Solidamosc in Poland for several years, and the Workers' Commissions in Franco's Spain) can be nothing else but an organ for the defence of capitalism. Le Proletaire accuses the ICC of being hostile "to any organisation for the immediate defence of the proletariat". In doing so it reveals either its ignorance of our position or, most likely, its bad faith. We have never said that the working class must not organise itself to wage its struggles. What we do say, in line with that current of the communist left which Bordigism treats with such disdain, the German left, is that, in the present historic period, such an organisation is constituted by the general assemblies of the workers in struggle, by strike committees nominated by these assemblies and revocable by them, by central strike committees composed of delegates from the different strike committees. By their nature, these organisations exist by and for the struggle and are destined to disappear once the struggle is over. Their main difference with the unions in the past is precisely that they are not permanent and thus are not able to be absorbed by the capitalist state. This is precisely the lesson that Bordigism has never wanted to draw after decades of "betrayal" by all the union, whatever their form, their initial aims, their political positions and their founders, whether they see themselves as being for 'reforms' or for 'class struggle', or even as 'revolutionary'. In decadent capitalism, when the state tends to absorb all the structures of society, when the system is incapable of according the least lasting improvement in the living conditions of the working class, any permanent organisation which takes as its aim the defence of these living conditions is destined to be integrated into the state, to become one of its cogs. To quote what Marx said about the trade unions last century, as Le Proletaire does in the hope of shutting us up, just isn't enough to earn the title of 'marxist'. After all, the Trotskyists are very happy to resort to other quotes from Marx and Engels against the anarchists of their era to attack the position that the Bordigists defend today alongside the whole communist left: the refusal to participate in the electoral game. Le Proletaire's method here shows only that it has not understood a vital aspect of marxism - that it is a living and dialectical way of thinking. What was true yesterday, in the ascendant period of capitalism - the necessity for the working class to form trade unions, to participate in elections or to support certain national liberation struggles, is no longer true today, in decadent capitalism. To stick to the letter of quotes from Marx while turning your back on the conditions he was addressing, while refusing to apply the method of this great revolutionary, merely demonstrates the poverty of its own thought.

But the worst of it isn't this poverty in itself, it's that it leads to the sowing of illusions in the class about the possibility of a 'real trade unionism'; it's that it leads straight towards opportunism. And we find expressions of this opportunism in the articles of Le Proletaire when it shows the greatest timidity in denouncing the unions' game:

"What we can and must reproach the present unions with. ...". Revolutionaries don't reproach the unions with anything, any more than they reproach the bourgeoisie with exploiting the workers or the cops with repressing their struggles: they denounce them.

"... the organisations at the head of the movement, the CGT and FO, who to all appearances had been negotiating behind the scenes with the government to put a stop to the movement ...". The union leaders don't 'negotiate' with the government as though they had different interests, they march hand in hand with the latter against the working class. And this is not "to all appearances", it is certain! This is what is indispensable for the workers to know and this is what Le Proletaire is incapable of telling them.

The danger of the opportunist position of Le Proletaire on the union question becomes all the more clear when it writes:

"But if we reject the possibility of reconquering the union apparatuses, we don't draw from this the conclusion that we must reject working in these same unions, as long as this work is done at the base, in contact with the workers and not in the hierarchical organs, and on a class basis". In other words, when in an absolutely healthy and necessary way workers disgusted by union intrigues want to tear up their union cards, there will be a militant of the ICP to speak up like any Trotskyist: "don't do that comrades, we must stay and work in the unions!". What work, other than toiling at the base to restore the image of organs which are the enemies of the working class?

For the choice is clear:

- either you really want to carry out a militant activity "on a class basis", in which case one of the essential points you'd have to defend is the anti -working class nature of the unions, not simply because of their hierarchy, but as a whole; what clarity could the ICP militant bring to his comrades at work by saying: "the unions are our enemies, we have to fight outside and against them, but I'm staying inside them"?[2];

- or you want to stay "in contact" with the union "base", to make yourself "understood" by the workers who compose it, which means opposing the "base" to the "rotten hierarchy", ie the classic position of Trotskyism; certainly this means doing "work", but not on a "class basis", since you are preserving the illusion that certain structures of the union, the enterprise branch for example, can still be organs of the workers' struggle.

We really want to believe that the ICP militant, unlike his Trotskyist colleague, does not aspire to be a union bureaucrat. But he will still be carrying out the same anti-working class "work" of mystifying the nature of the trade unions. Thus, the application of the ICP's position on the union question has once again made a small contribution to demobilising the workers in the face of the danger represented by the unions. But this demobilising activity doesn't stop there. It comes out in broad daylight once again when the ICP shows a complete underestimation of the capacity of the bourgeoisie to carry out elaborate manoeuvres against the working class.

Underestimating the class enemy

In another article in Le Proletaire, 'After this winter's strikes, prepare the struggles ahead', we read:

"The movement this winter shows precisely that if, in these circumstances, the unions have shown an unusual flexibility and allowed the spontaneity of the most combative workers to express itself, rather than opposing it as they normally do, this tolerance allowed them to keep hold of the leadership of the struggle without any great difficulty, and thus to decide to a very great extent its orientation, the way it evolved and its outcome. When they judged that the moment had come, they gave the signal for the return to work, abandoning in the blink of an eye the central demand of the movement, without the strikers being able to come up with any alternative. The rank and file and democratic appearance of the way the movement was conducted was even used against the objective needs of the movement: it wasn't the thousands of daily general assemblies of strikers who gave the movement the centralisation and direction it needed, even if these organs did allow the massive participation of the workers. Only the union organisations could make up for this lack and so the struggle was suspended according to slogans and initiatives launched centrally by the union organisations and passed down through the apparatus to all the general assemblies. The climate of unity reigning in the movement was such that the mass of workers not only did not feel or express disagreements with the orientations of the unions, except with the orientations of the CFDT and their leadership of the struggle, but even saw their actions as one of the most important factors for victory".  

Here Le Proletaire gives us the secret of the attitude of the unions in the strikes of 1995. Perhaps this is the result of reading what the ICC had already written about them. The problem is that when it comes to drawing the lessons from this obvious reality, Le Proletaire, in the same article, tells us that the movement was "the most important of the French proletariat since the general strike of May-June 68", that it salutes the "strength" which imposed a "partial retreat by the government". Decidedly, coherence of thought is not Le Proletaire's strongpoint. Do we have to recall here that opportunism, which is always trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, also avoids it like the plague?

For our part, we concluded that this movement was not able to prevent the government from pushing through its main anti-working class measures and that it had succeeded in restoring the image of the unions, as Le Proletaire shows very clearly. This movement was not initiated against the will of the unions or the government; they wanted it to happen precisely to obtain these objectives. Le Proletaire tells us that the feature of this movement "which must become an acquisition for the future struggles was the general tendency to breakout of sectional barriers and the limits of the enterprise or administration and spread to all sectors". This is quite true. The only thing is that this took place with the blessing, or rather, very often, the direct impulsion of the unions. The fact that workers have rediscovered a proletarian method of struggle no longer constitutes an advance for the working class the moment that this conquest is seen by the majority of the workers as being due to the action of the unions. The working class was bound to rediscover these methods of struggle sooner or later, through a whole series of experiences. But if such a rediscovery had been made through an open confrontation with the unions, this would have struck a mortal blow against the unions when they had already been strongly discredited, and this would have deprived the bourgeoisie of one of its essential weapons for sabotaging workers' struggles. Thus it was far preferable for the bourgeoisie that the rediscovery took place in a way that was poisoned and sterilised by trade unionist illusions.

The fact that the bourgeoisie could manoeuvre in such a way completely escapes Le Proletaire:

"If we are to believe the ICC, 'they' (no doubt the whole bourgeoisie) are extraordinarily tricky: pushing 'the workers' (this is how the ICC baptises all the wage-earners who went on strike) to enter into struggle against the government's decisions in order to control their struggle, to inflict a defeat on them and come back later on with even harder measures, this is a manoeuvre which would have stupefied Machiavelli himself.

The modern Proudhonists of the ICC go even further than their ancestor because they accuse the bourgeoisie of provoking the workers' struggle and allowing it to be victorious in order to derail the workers from the real solution: they hit themselves in order to avoid being hit. If we wait a while longer and look through the ICC's magic lantern we will see the bourgeoisie organise the proletarian revolution and the disappearance of capitalism with the sole aim of preventing the proletariat from doing it"[3].

Le Proletaire likes to think that it is very witty. Good luck to it. The problem is that its tirades show more than anything else the total vacuity of its political understanding. So, to prevent it from falling into total idiocy, we will permit ourselves to recall certain banalities:

1. It is not necessary for the whole bourgeoisie to be "extraordinarily tricky" for its interests to be well defended. In order to assume its defence, the bourgeois class has at its disposal a government and a state (although perhaps Le Proletaire doesn't know this) which defines its policies by relying on the advice of an army of specialists (historians, sociologists, political pundits ... and union leaders). The fact that there are still bosses in existence who think that the unions are the enemies of the bourgeoisie doesn't change anything: they are not the ones who are charged with elaborating the strategies of their class any more than sergeant-majors are given the job of running wars.

2. It is precisely the case that between the bourgeoisie and the working class there is a state of war, the class war. It's not necessary to be a specialist in military matters, but anyone who has a middling intelligence and a little bit of education (but perhaps this isn't the case with the editors of Le Proletaire?) knows that trickery is an essential weapon for any army. In order to defeat the enemy, it is usually necessary to deceive him, unless you enjoy a crushing material superiority.

3. The main weapon of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat is not the material strength of its forces of repression, but precisely its capacity for trickery, for mystifying the workers.

4. Even if Machiavelli, in his day, was laying down the bases of a bourgeois strategy for conquering and exercising power as well as for the art of war, the leaders of the ruling class, after centuries of experience, know a lot more than he did. Perhaps the editors of Le Proletaire think the opposite, but they would do well to spend a bit of time with their history books, particularly those dealing with recent wars, and above all with the workers' movement. They would discover that the machiavellianism which the military strategists are capable of in conflicts between national fractions of the same bourgeois class are nothing compared to what the bourgeoisie as a whole can come up with against its mortal enemy, the proletariat.

5. In particular, they would discover two elementary things: that provoking premature combats is one of the classic weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and that in a war, the generals have never hesitated to sacrifice part of their own troops or their own positions the better to lure the enemy into a trap, by giving him an illusory feeling of victory. The bourgeoisie will not make the proletarian revolution to stop the proletariat doing so. But in order to prevent it, it is quite prepared to make 'retreats', to grant apparent 'victories' to the workers.

6. And if the editors of LeProletaire take the trouble to read the classical analyses of the communist left, they will finally learn that one of the main ways the bourgeoisie inflicted on the proletariat the most terrible counter-revolution in its history was precisely to present its greatest defeats as 'victories': the 'building of socialism' in the USSR, the Popular Fronts, the 'victory over fascism'.

Thus, we can only say one thing to the editors of Le Proletaire: back to the drawing board. And before you do that, try to reflect a little and to overcome your terrible ignorance. Well-turned phrases and witty words are not enough to defend correctly the positions and interests of the working class. And we can give them one last word of advice: listen to what's really happening in the world. Try, for example, to understand what's just happened in Germany.

Union manoeuvres in Germany: a new example of the strategy of the bourgeoisie

If we needed further proof that the manoeuvre concocted by all the forces of the bourgeoisie at the end of 1995 in France had an international scope, the recent union agitation in Germany provides it in the most striking manner. In this country, obviously with its local specificities, we have seen a 'remake' of the French scenario.

At the beginning however, the situation seemed very different. Just after the French unions had been giving themselves an image of radicalism, of being intransigent organs of the class struggle, the German unions, faithful to their traditions of being negotiators and agents of the 'social consensus', signed with the bosses and the government, on 23 January, a 'pact for employment' which among other things contains wage reductions of up to 20% in the most threatened industries. At the end of these negotiations, Kohl declared that "everything must be done to avoid a scenario a la francais". At this point he was not contradicted by the unions who, a few weeks before, had been saluting the strikes in France: the DGB "assured its sympathy to the strikers who were defending themselves against a big attack on social rights"; IG-Metall affirmed that "the struggle of the French is an example of resistance against the blows aimed at social and political rights".

But in reality, the German unions' salute to the strikes in France was not at all Platonic; they are already getting prepared to carry out their own manoeuvres. The scope of these manoeuvres would be revealed in April. This was the moment Kohl chose to announce an unprecedented austerity plan: a wage freeze in the public sector, cuts in unemployment benefit and social security, increase in the working week, increase in the age of retirement, abandoning of the principle of 100% sick pay. And what was most striking was the way this plan was announced. As the French paper Le Monde put it on 20.6.96: "By imposing in such an authoritarian way his plan for economies of 50 million Marks at the end of April, Chancellor Kohl has given up the mantle of moderator, which he made so much of, to take up that of the decisive leader ... For the first time, the 'Kohl method' begins to resemble the 'Juppe method'".

For the unions, this was a real provocation which had to be met with new methods of action: "We have left consensus and are entering into confrontation" (Dieter Schulte, president of the DGB). The scenario 'a la francais', in its German version, was set up. The attitude of the unions hit a crescendo of radicalism: 'warning strikes' and demonstrations in the public sector (like at the beginning of autumn 95 in France): nurseries, public transport, postal services, cleaning services were hit. As in France, the media made a lot of noise about these movements, giving the image of a country paralysed, and making no secret of their sympathy for the strikes. References to the strikes in France became more and more commonplace and the unions even waved French flags in the demonstrations. Schulte invoking the French "hot autumn" promised a "hot summer" in the industrial sector. Then began the preparations for the huge demonstration of 15 June which was already announced in advance as "the most massive since 1945"[4]. Schulte predicted that it would "only be the beginning of sharp social conflicts that would lead to conditions a la francais". Similarly, whereas a few weeks before he had asserted that "there was no question of calling a general strike in the face of a democratically elected government", on June 10 he announced that "even a general strike cannot be ruled out". A few days before the 'march' on Bonn, the negotiations in the public sector gave birth to an accord which finally conceded some flimsy wage increases and the promise not to threaten sick pay, which allowed the unions to make it look like this 'retreat' was the result of their actions, as had been the case in France when the government had 'retreated' on the planned contract on the railways and on retirement in the public sector.

Finally, the immense success of "everyone to Bonn" (350,000 demonstrators), achieved thanks to an unprecedented media barrage and the enormous efforts made by the unions (thousands of coaches and nearly 100 special trains) looked like a show of force by the latter on a scale never seen before, while at the same time it made it possible to push into the background the fact that the government had not made any concessions on the essentials of its austerity plan.

The worldwide character of the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie

Thus, within an interval of a few months, in the two main countries of continental Europe, the bourgeoisie has developed two very similar manoeuvres aimed not only at pushing through a whole train of brutal attacks but also at giving a new image to the trade unions. Of course there are differences in the precise objectives of the two national bourgeoisies. As regards France, it was necessary to restore the image of the unions in the eyes of the workers, an image that has been particularly tarnished by their support for the policies of the left when it was in the government; this is why they had to allow the coordinations to take centre stage in the task of sabotaging the struggles of the railway workers in 1986 and the hospital workers in 1988. As regards Germany, the problem wasn't that the unions were discredited. On the whole, these organs of the bourgeois state still had a considerable standing in the working class. On the other hand, the image they have had for the workers has been that of specialists in negotiation who have succeeded, thanks to the 'round tables' they have taken part in, to preserve something of the gains of the 'social state', a task obviously made easier by the fact that German capital has been better placed to resist the effects of the world crisis. But with the growing difficulties of the German economy (recession in 1995, record rates of unemployment, explosion of state deficits), this image could not have lasted much longer. At the negotiating table the government and the bosses will now only be able to propose increasingly brutal attacks on the workers' living standards and the dismantling of the 'social state'. The prospect of the outbreak of workers' anger is inevitable and this is why it has been necessary for the unions, if they are going to be up to the task of derailing this militancy, to shed their habits as 'negotiators' and take on the mantle of' organs of the workers' struggle'.

But granted the differences in the social situation in the two countries, the important thing is that the points these two episodes have in common should open the eyes of those who think that the strikes in France at the end of 1995 were 'spontaneous' and that they 'surprised the bourgeoisie', that they were not planned and provoked by the latter for its own ends.

Moreover, just as the bourgeois manoeuvre at the end of 1995 in France had an international significance, the different forces of the German bourgeoisie did not carry out their manoeuvre in the spring of 1996 for purely domestic reasons. F or example, in Belgium, if the bourgeoisie organised a copy of the French scenario last winter, it has again shown what an excellent mimic it is by also copying the German episode. Not long after the signing of the of 'pact for jobs' in Germany, a 'contract for the future of employment' was signed in Belgium between the unions, the bosses and the government, and this too proposed to introduce wage cuts in return for promises of jobs. Then the unions did a 180 degree turn and suddenly denounced this accord "after consulting the rank and file". This spectacular about-face, which again was given maximum coverage by the media, allowed the unions to take on a 'democratic' image, to pretend to be "interpreting the will of the workers", while at the same time washing their hands of any responsibility in the plans to attack the working class that have been prepared by the government (which is partly made up of the Socialist Party, the traditional ally of the most 'militant' union, the FGTB).

But if the international dimension of the manoeuvres of the French bourgeoisie at the end of 1995 were not limited to Belgium, as we've just seen with the manoeuvres in Germany in the spring, the significance of the events in Germany is also not restricted to this small country. The social agitation in Germany, well publicised by the TV in a number of countries, have a similar role to that of the strikes in France. Once again, it's a question of reinforcing illusions in the unions. The 'fighting' image of the French unions, spread far and wide by the media, has been used to rejuvenate the unions in other countries. Similarly, the radicalisation of the German unions, their threat to stir up a "hot summer" and the alarmist comments by the media in other countries about "the end of the German consensus" serves to relay the idea that the unions - even where they have a tradition of consultation and negotiation - can be authentic organs of the workers' struggle, and effective organs to boot, capable of defending workers' interests against the austerity of the bosses and the government.

Thus, it is indeed on a world scale that the bourgeoisie is carrying out its strategy against the working class. History has taught us that all the conflicts of interest between national bourgeoisies - commercial rivalries, imperialist antagonisms - fade out when it comes to confronting the only force in society that represents a mortal danger to the ruling class, the proletariat. The bourgeoisie elaborates its plans against the latter in a coordinated and concerted manner.

Today, faced with the workers' struggles that are brewing, the ruling class has to resort to a thousand traps in order to try to sabotage them, exhaust them and defeat them, to prevent them leading to a growth of consciousness in the working class about the ultimate perspective of its struggle: the communist revolution. Nothing would be more tragic for the working class than to underestimate the strength of its enemy, its ability to set such traps, to organise itself on a world scale to make them more effective. Communists have to be able to expose and denounce these traps in front of their class. If they can't do this, they are not worthy of their name.

FM, 24.6.96

[1] One of the most striking examples of this rewriting of the facts is the way the return to work at the end of the strike is dealt with: we are told this only began almost a week after the government announced its 'retreat', which is not true.

[2] It's true that the Bordigists are not lacking in contradictions: towards the end of the 70s, when there was a growing agitation amongst the immigrant workers, we often saw ICP militants explaining to flabbergasted immigrants that they should demand the right to vote in order to be able to ... abstain. You can't get more ridiculous than a Bordigist. It's also true that when ICC militants tried to intervene in a demonstration of immigrants in order to defend the necessity not to get trapped in bourgeois demands, members of the ICP lent a hand to the Maoists in chasing them away.

[3] We should note that issue number 3 of L 'Esclave Salarie, a parasitic bastard of the ex-Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionnaire, gives us an original version of the ICC's analysis of the bourgeoisie's manoeuvre: "We want to congratulate the ICC (ES thinks it's very witty to write the initials of our organisation in lower case) for its remarkable analysis which fills us with admiration and we would like to know how this elite of thinkers managed to infiltrate the bourgeois class to get so much information about its plans and traps. We wonder whether the ice isn't invited to the meetings of the bourgeoisie in order to study its anti-working class plots concocted in secret and through the rites of freemasonry". Marx was not a freemason and he wasn't invited to the meetings of the bourgeoisie, but he did devote a large part of his militant activity to studying, elucidating and denouncing the plans and traps of the bourgeoisie. We can only think that the writers of ES have never read The Class Struggles in France or The Civil War in France. This would be logical for people who have such contempt for thought, which is by no means the monopoly of an 'elite'. Frankly, it wasn't necessary to be a freemason to discover that the strikes at the end of 95 in France were the result of a bourgeois manoeuvre: it was enough to observe the way they were presented and publicised by the media in all the countries of Europe and America, and even as far as India, Australia or Japan. It's true that the presence in these countries of sections or sympathisers of the ICC assisted it in its work, but the real cause of the political poverty of ES does not reside in its weak geographical extension. What is provincial about this group is its political intelligence, which really is set in lower case.

[4] This refrain is a bit worn out: the demonstration of 12 December 95 in France was also presented as "the most massive since the war" in many provincial towns.

In the previous article, we showed how the revolutionaries in Germany had been confronted with the question of building the organisation in the face of the betrayal of social democracy: first by waging to the bitter end the struggle within the old party, carrying out the work of a fraction, and then, when this was no longer possible, preparing the foundation of a new party. It was this responsible attitude that the Spartakists adopted towards the SPD, and which later led them to adhere to the newly formed USPD, unlike the Bremen Left who called for the immediate foundation of the party. In this article we will deal with the foundation of the KPD and the organisational difficulties in the construction of this new party.

The Linksradikalen fail to form the new party

On 5th May 1917, the Bremen and Hamburg Left Radicals reproached the Spartakists for having given up their organisational independence by entering the USPD; they considered that "the time has come to organise the radical left in the Internationale Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands ".

During the summer, they organised preparatory meetings with a view to founding a new party. The founding conference was fixed for 25th August, in Berlin. Only thirteen delegates reached their destination, five of them from Berlin itself. The police had no difficulty in dispersing the conference. Determination is not enough by itself: adequate organisational resources are necessary as well. "It is not enough to brandish the 'banner of purity '. Our duty is to carry it to the masses, to win them over", wrote Rosa Luxemburg in the Duisburg Der Kampf

On 2nd September, a new attempt was made. This time, the organisation took the name "Internationaler Sozialistischer Arbeiterbund". Its statutes planned that the sections should be autonomous.

It considered that "the separation into political and economic organisations is historically out dated". Yet another indication of its great confusion in organisational matters. It would be a travesty of the truth to say that the Bremen Left was the clearest group at the political and practical level during the revolutionary movements in Germany. The Dresden group around Otto Ruhle, amongst other currents, was beginning to develop conceptions hostile to political organisation. The future council communism continued to ripen. Although the council communists did not themselves adopt political organisational forms, their voice nonetheless found an important echo in the class.

While the Spartakists' audience was growing, the Bremen Left and the ISD never succeeded in rising above the stage of a small circle. Although eighteen months of work in the USPD did not bring the Spartakus League all the results it had hoped, it never sacrificed its independence (despite the lSD's initial accusation). Without ever letting itself be gagged, Spartakus developed an active intervention within the USPD.

Whether during the polemics around the Brest-Litovsk negotiations from December 1917, or during the vast wave of strikes in January 1918, when a million workers downed tools and the workers' councils first appeared in Germany, the Spartakus League was more and more in the front line.

Just as German capital prepared to send yet more cannon fodder to the slaughter[1] the Spartakus League increased its organisational strength. It had eight publications, with a print run varying between 25,000 and 100,000 copies - and all this with almost its entire leadership in gaol[2].

Even when the Bremen Left decided to form an independent party, the Spartakus League refused to adopt a sectarian attitude, and continued to work for the regroupment of all the revolutionary forces in Germany.

On 7th October 1918, the Spartakus group called a national conference, with delegates from the various local groups of the Linksradikalen. It was decided that Spartakists and Radicals should collaborate, without the latter being obliged to join the USPD. Nonetheless, despite a developing revolutionary combat by the workers in Germany, the conference still failed to put forward, as a priority for its work, the necessity for the foundation of the party. Lenin emphasised the extreme importance of this question: "Europe's greatest misfortune, its greatest danger, is that there exists no revolutionary party ... Certainly, a powerful revolutionary movement by the masses may correct this defect, but the fact remains a great misfortune and a great danger"[3].

The Spartakists' intervention in the revolutionary struggle

When revolutionary struggles broke out in November 1918, the Spartakists accomplished a heroic labour, and the content of their intervention was of very high quality. They insisted first and foremost on the need to build a bridge to the working class in Russia. They unhesitatingly unmasked the manoeuvres and sabotage of the bourgeoisie. They recognised the role of the workers' councils, and emphasised the need once the war was over, for the movement to attain a higher level, where it could gain strength thanks to the pressure from the factories.

For reasons of space, we cannot deal with this intervention in greater detail. Despite their strength at the level of political content, the Spartakists nonetheless did not have a determining influence in the working class. To be a real party, correct political positions alone are not enough. A corresponding influence within the working class is also necessary. A party must have the strength to lead the movement, like a man at the tiller of a boat, for it to move forward in the right direction.

As the conflict broke, the Spartakists carried out a tremendous work of propaganda, but still remained only a loose regroupment. A closely knit organisation was sorely lacking.

A further difficulty should be pointed out: the Spartakists still belonged to the USPD, and for many workers the difference was still not clear between the centrists and the Spartakists. The SPD made the most of this confused situation, to put forward the indispensable "unity" between workers' parties, to its own benefit of course.

Organisational development only speeded up after the struggle broke out. On 11th November 1918, the "Spartakus Group" became the "Spartakus League", and a Central Committee of twelve members was formed.

Whereas the SPD possessed more than a hundred publications, and could base its counter-revolutionary activity on an extensive apparatus of bureaucrats and the unions, during the decisive week of 11th-18th November 1918, the Spartakists had no press at all: they were unable to publish Die Rote Fahne. They were forced to occupy the offices of a bourgeois paper. The SPD then did everything it could to prevent Die Rote F ahne from being printed on the occupied presses. Only after the occupation of another printing works could Die Rote Fahne appear again.

After failing to win their demand for an extraordinary congress of the USPD, the Spartakists decided on the formation of an independent party. On 24th December, the ISD (which in the meantime had changed its name to IKD) held a national conference in Berlin, with delegates from Wasserkante, the Rhineland, Saxony, Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Berlin. During the conference, Karl Radek argued strongly for a merger between the IKD and the Spartakists. On 30th December 1918, and 1st January 1919, the Kommunistischer Partei Deutschland was formed from a regroupment ofthe IKD and the Spartakists.

The formation of the KPD

The first point on the agenda was an evaluation of the work in the USPD. On 29th November 1918, Rosa Luxemburg had already come to the conclusion that in a period of rising class struggle, "there is no place for a party of ambiguity and half measures"[4]. In a revolutionary situation, centrist parties like the USPD can only break up.

"We were in the USPD to take out of it what could be taken out, to push forward the valuable elements of the USPD, radicalise them, to reach our goal by a process of dissociation, and so to win over the strongest possible revolutionary forces, in order to bring them together in a united and unitary revolutionary proletarian Party ... The results achieved were extraordinarily meagre ... [Since then} the USPD has served as a fig-leaf for Ebert and Schiedemann. They have wiped out among the masses any notion of a difference between the policies of the USPD and those of the majority socialists ... Now, the time has come where all the revolutionary proletarian elements must turn their backs on the USPD in order to form a new, autonomous party, with a clear programme, firm goals, a unitary tactic, inspired by the highest possible degree of revolutionary determination, and conceived as a powerful weapon for the fulfilment of the social revolution which is beginning"[5].

The task of the moment was to regroup revolutionary forces in the KPD, and to make the clearest possible demarcation between them and the centrists.

In analysing the state of the revolutionary struggle, Rosa Luxemburg's Report on the programme and the political situation showed great clarity, in warning against any underestimation of the difficulties facing the new party:

"As I have described it to you, this whole process seems much slower than one would have thought at first sight. I think it is good for us to look clearly at all the difficulties, all the complications of this revolution. For I hope that, like me, none of you will be paralysed in your ardour, your energy, by a review of all the great difficulties and labours that await us".

Moreover, she strongly emphasised the importance of the party's role in the developing movement:

"The present revolution, which is now just beginning, and which has such vast horizons before it as well as problems of a historic and universal dimension to be overcome, must have assure compass, which at every stage of the struggle, whether in victory or in defeat, is able to point unfailingly towards the same supreme goal, the goal of world socialist revolution, of the proletariat's merciless struggle for power, and for the liberation of humanity from the yoke of Capital. To be this sure compass pointing out the road to follow, this spearhead thrusting forwards, this socialist proletarian yeast in the revolution, is the specific task of the Spartakus League in the present confrontation between two worlds"[6].

"We must teach the masses that the workers' and soldiers' councils must be the lever for the overthrow of the state machinery, that they must absorb all the forces of action and channel them into the furrow of socialist transformation. Even those working masses already organised into workers' and soldiers' councils are a thousand miles from carrying out these duties - except of course from a few small minorities who are clearly aware of them.[7]

Lenin considered that the Spartakus programme (What does Spartakus want?), which he received at the end of December, formed the corner-stone for the foundation of the Communist International.

"In this perspective we must: a) draw up the points on principles for the platform I think that we can draw on the theory and practice of Bolshevism; and b) more extensively from 'What does Spartakus want? ' with a + b the platform 's fundamental principles appear clearly enough.[8]

The organisational question at the Congress

At the Congress, 83 delegates were present, representing 46 sections, most of them with no real mandate. Their composition reflected the organisation's immaturity. Alongside the older generation of revolutionary workers who before the war had belonged to the Party's radical left opposition around Rosa Luxemburg, appeared young workers who during the war had become the carriers of revolutionary propaganda and action, but who possessed very little political experience, as well as soldiers marked by all the suffering and privations of war. They were joined by pacifists who had fought courageously against the war, had been pushed towards the left by repression, and who now saw the radical workers' movement as a favourable terrain for action, as well as by artists and intellectuals swept along by the revolutionary tide - in short just the sort of elements that any revolution suddenly sets in motion.

The struggle against the war united different forces in a single front. But at the same time, many leaders were in prison; many experienced workers from the Party were dead or missing, and their place taken by young radical elements with almost no organisational experience. All this goes to show that war does not necessarily create the most favourable conditions for building the party.

As far as the organisational question was concerned, the KPD contained a marxist wing represented by Luxemburg and Jogisches, an anti-organisation wing which would later give birth to the council communist current, and finally an activist wing which remained undecided on the organisational level, embodied by Liebknecht.

The Congress revealed the abyss between, on the one hand, the programmatic clarity (despite important disagreements that did exist) expressed by Luxemburg in her speech on the programme, and, on the other hand, weakness on organisational issues.

Weakness on organisational issues

To start with, organisational questions were given little time at the founding Congress; moreover, by the time the discussion started, some of the delegates had already left. The report for the Congress, drawn up by Eberlein, reflected the KPD' s weaknesses on the issue. Eberlein began with a balance-sheet of the revolutionaries' work to date:

"In name, and in all their activities, the old organisations were "electoral associations" [Wahlvereine}. The new organisation must be, not an electoral club, but a fighting political organisation ... The social-democratic organisations were Wahlvereine. Their whole organisation was based on preparation and agitation for elections, and in reality what little life there was in the organisation only appeared during elections or the preparation for them. The rest of the time, the organisation was empty and lifeless"[9].

This description of the pre-war SPD shows how the reformist gangrene had emptied its local organisations of political life, through the exclusive concentration on parliamentary elections. Parliamentary cretinism and the resulting attachment to bourgeois democracy had given rise to the dangerous illusion that the essential focus for the Party's struggle was its activity in parliament. This situation only began to be questioned in many local organisations after the outbreak of war and the betrayal of the parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag.

During the war, however, " ... we had to work illegally, and because of this illegal activity it was impossible to build a solid form of organisation"[10]. For example, Liebknecht spent the years between the summer of 1915 and October 1918, either in the army or in prison, and was thus forbidden any "free expression" or contact with his comrades. Luxemburg was imprisoned for three years and four months; from 1918, Jogisches was in the same situation. The majority of the Central Committee formed in 1916 was behind bars by 1917. Many only emerged on the very eve of the explosion of revolutionary struggle at the end of 1918.

The bourgeoisie was unable to silence Spartakus. Nonetheless, it dealt a heavy blow to the construction of the party by depriving an organisationally incomplete movement of its leadership.

But although the objective conditions of repression and illegality were serious hindrances to the formation of a revolutionary party, they should still not hide the fact that there existed among the revolutionary forces a serious underestimation of the need to build a new organisation. Eberlein revealed this weakness when he declared:

"You know that we are optimistic that the weeks and months to come will make our discussions on all this superfluous. So given the short time available to us today, I don't want to keep you any longer ... We are in the midst of a political struggle, which is why we have no time to waste on nitpicking over paragraphs ... During these days, we must not and we cannot focus on these little organisational questions. As far as possible, we want to leave you to deal with all that in the local sections during the coming weeks and months ... If we count on having more members, with conviction and ready to enter into action in the days to come, who bend their minds to the action of the coming period, then we will easily overcome the little problems of organisation and organisational form"[11].

Naturally everything was urgent, everything was pressing in the heat of the revolution; the time factor was crucial. This is why it would have been desirable, indeed vital, to have clarified the organisational questions in advance. But while all the delegates were preparing for an acceleration of the revolutionary combat in the weeks ahead, a number of them had developed feelings of distrust towards the organisation and began to think that the party would be superfluous.

In the same way, Eberlein's declarations expressed not only impatience but a dramatic underestimation of the organisation question: "For these last four years, we haven't had the time to spend on looking at the way we want to organise ourselves. During this time, we were, day by day, confronted with new facts and had to take the necessary decisions without asking ourselves whether we would be able to elaborate organisational statutes"[12].

It is doubtless true, as Lenin stressed, that the Spartakists had "accomplished a systematic work of revolutionary propaganda in the most difficult conditions ", but it is clear that there was one danger they were unable to avoid. A revolutionary organisation cannot 'sacrifice' itself for its intervention in the class; however necessary that intervention might be, it must not lead to the paralysis of its organisational activities. In a situation as dramatic as a war a revolutionary organisation may intervene intensively and heroically. But if when the workers' struggle revives it does not have a solid organisational tissue, ie if there is no political organisation at the proletariat's side, the work done previously will be lost. The construction of an organisational framework, the clarification of the organisation's function and way of functioning, the elaboration of organisational rules (statutes) are indispensable foundation stones for the existence, functioning and intervention of the organisation. This work of constructing the organisation must not be obstructed by intervention in the class. The latter can really only bear fruit if it is not carried out to the detriment of the construction of the organisation.

The defence and construction of the organisation is a permanent responsibility of revolutionaries, whether the class struggle is in deep reflux or at its highest points.

Furthermore, within the KPD, there was a tendency to react like a scalded cat to the experience of the SPD. The latter had developed a huge bureaucratic apparatus which, in the process of opportunist degeneration, allowed the party leadership to block local initiatives. Thus, out of fear of being stifled by a new Centrale, part of the KPD became the mouthpiece of federalism. Eberlein clearly joined this choir:

"It will be necessary in this form of organisation for the organisation as a whole to allow the greatest possible freedom for the different sections, to make sure that there are no schematic instructions from above ... We also think that the old system of subordinating local organisations to the Centrale must be abandoned, that the different local organisations, the different factory organisations must have a total autonomy. .. They must have the possibility of moving into action without needing instructions from the Centrale "[13].

The appearance of a wing hostile to centralisation, which would later give birth to the council communist current, led to a regression in the organisational history of the revolutionary movement.

The same went for the press: "We also think that the question of the press cannot be regulated at the central level; we think that the local organisations must have the possibility of creating their own papers ... Some comrades have attacked us (the Centrale) and said to us: 'You are bringing out a paper, what should we do? We can't use it, we will bring out our own paper'"[14].

This lack of confidence in the organisation, and above all in centralisation, manifested itself above all with the old Linksradikale of Bremen[15]. Starting from the correct understanding that the KPD could not be a simple continuation of the old SPD, they tended to fall into the opposite extreme of denying all continuity: "We have no need at all to plunge into the old organisational statutes in order to choose what bits we can use"[16].

Eberlein's declarations show the heterogeneity of the newly formed KPD on the organisational question.

The marxist wing in a minority on the organisational question

Only the wing grouped around Luxemburg and Jogisches intervened in a resolutely marxist manner during the Congress. Directly opposed to them was the council communist wing, which fundamentally underestimated the role of political organisations in the class, above all rejecting centralisation out of distrust of organisation, which led them to call for complete autonomy for the local sections. Otto Ruhle was their main representative.[17] Another wing, without a clear organisational alternative, was the one grouped around Karl Liebknecht. This wing was notable for being extremely combative. But to act as a party it's not enough to want to participate in workers' struggles; on the one hand, programmatic clarity and solidity are indispensable. Liebknecht and those who followed him orientated their activities almost exclusively towards intervention in the class.

This appeared clearly on October 23rd 1918 when he was released from prison. Around 20,000 workers came to welcome him at Anhalt station in Berlin. His very first action was to go immediately to the factory gates to agitate among the workers. However, in October 1918, with the temperature rising within the working class, the most pressing duty of revolutionaries was not simply to carry out agitation but to commit all their strength to the construction of the organisation, all the more so because the Spartakists still only formed a loose organisation, without solid structures. Liebknecht's attitude to organisation was very different from Lenin's. When Lenin arrived at the Petrograd station in April 1917 and was given a triumphal reception, he immediately made known the April Theses and did everything he could to pull the Bolshevik party out of the crisis it was in and to equip it with a clear programme through the convening of an extraordinary Congress. Liebknecht's first concern, by contrast, was not really the construction of the organisation. What's more, he seemed to be developing a conception of the organisation in which the revolutionary militant had to be a hero, a pre-eminent individual, rather than seeing that a proletarian political organisation lives above all by its collective strength. The fact that, subsequently, he continued to push for action off his own bat is the proof of his erroneous view of organisation, Luxemburg often complained about his attitude: "Karl is always rushing from one workers' meeting to another; he doesn't often come to editorial meetings of Die Rote Fahne. In general it's difficult to get him along to meetings of the organisation".

Liebknecht's image was that of the lone fighter. He never managed to understand that his main contribution was to participate in the construction of the organisation.

The weight of the past

The SPD had for years been steeped in the parliamentary tradition. The illusions created by the predominance of parliamentary-reformist activity had lent weight to the idea that the struggle in the framework of bourgeois parliament was the main weapon of the working class, rather than a transitory tool for taking advantage of the contradictions between the different factions of the ruling class in order to obtain momentary concessions from capital. Pampered by parliamentarism, there was a tendency to measure the strength of the struggle by the yardstick of votes obtained by the SPD in parliamentary elections.

This was one of the main differences between the conditions of struggle for the Bolsheviks and those of the left in Germany. The Bolsheviks had been through the experience of 1905 and were intervening in conditions of illegality and repression. They did intervene in the Russian parliament but through a much smaller group of deputies; in any case, their centre of gravity was not in the parliamentary and trade union struggle . While the SPD had become a powerful mass party deeply infected by opportunism, the Bolshevik party was relatively small and had more effectively resisted opportunism despite the crises it had been through. And it was no accident that, in the KPD, the marxist wing on questions of organisation, that of Luxemburg and Jogishes, had emerged from the Polish-Lithuanian party - the SDKPiL, that is a fraction of the revolutionary movement which had direct experience of the struggles of 1905 and had not been bogged down in the parliamentary swamp.

The construction of the party can only succeed on an international scale

The founding Congress of the KPD expressed another weakness of the revolutionary movement. While the bourgeoisie in Germany had immediately obtained help from the bourgeoisie of countries with whom it had just been at war, while capital was uniting at an international level in its struggle against the revolutionary working class (the White Armies of 21 countries had joined together to wage civil war against the new proletarian power in Russia), revolutionaries were way behind at this level. To some degree, this was due to conceptions inherited from the Second International. The parties of the Second International were built in a federalist manner. The federalist conception developed tendencies towards 'everyman for himself' in the organisation and prevented the question of organisation being posed in an international and centralised way. Thus the components of the left wing fought separately from each other in the different parties of the Second International.

"Lenin's fractional work was earned out uniquely within the Russian party, without him trying to take this onto the international level. To be convinced of this it's enough to read his interventions at the different Congresses, and we can affirm that this work was completely unknown outside the Russian sphere".[18]

Thus Karl Radek was the only foreign delegate at the founding Congress. And it was only through luck and perseverance that he was able to get through the net of controls set up by the German government run by the SPD. This Congress would surely have had a very different outcome if it had been attended by other important leaders of the revolutionary movement, such as Lenin or Trotsky from Russia, Bordiga from Italy or Gorter and Pannekoek from Holland.

We can today draw the lesson that the party can't be built in one country if revolutionaries don't carry out this task simultaneously at an international level, and in a centralised manner.

The parallel with the task of the working class is clear: communism can't be built in one isolated country. Likewise, the construction of the party demands that it be carried out on an international level.

The KPD was born as a very heterogeneous party, divided on the programmatic level, and with the marxist wing on organisational matters in a minority. Distrust towards organisation and in particular towards centralisation was already widespread among the delegates. The KPD did not yet have sufficient influence to decisively stamp its presence in the movement.

The experience of the KPD shows that the party must be built on solid organisational foundations. The elaboration of organisational principles, functioning on the basis of the party spirit, aren't things that can be created by decree but are the result of years of practice based on these principles. The construction of the organisation demands a lot of time and patience. It's obvious that revolutionaries today must draw the lessons from the weaknesses of the revolutionaries in Germany.

DV

[1] Between March and November 1918, Germany lost some 200,000 killed, 450,000 prisoners or missing in action, and 860,000 wounded on the Western Front.

[2] After Liebknecht's arrest at the beginning of the summer of 1916, a conference of the Left Social-Democracy was held on 4th June 1916. A five member action committee was formed to reconstitute the links between revolutionary groups, broken by repression. The committee included Dunker, Meyer, and Mehring, with Otto Ruhle as chairman. The fact that such a responsibility should be given to a comrade like Ruhle, who rejected centralisation and the construction of the organisation, shows just how difficult repression had made things for the Spartakists.

[3] Lenin, writing in Pravda, 11th October 1918.

[4] Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Congress of the Independent Socialist Party' in Die Rote Fahne, no.14.

[5] Karl Liebknecht, in Proceedings of the KPD founding Congress.

[6] Rosa Luxemburg, "National Conference of the Spartakus League", in Die Rote Fahne no.43, 29th December 1918.

[7] Rosa Luxemburg, Speech on the programme and the political situation", 30th December 1918.

[8] Lenin, Correspondence, December 1918.

[9] Eberlein's report on the organisation question to the KPD's founding Congress.

[10] idem

[11] idem

[12] idem

[13] idem

[14] idem

[15] Paul Froelich, a member of the Bremen Left during the war, elected to the Centrale by the founding Congress, thought that "in all their actions, the local organisations must have a complete right to self-determination. It follows that there must be a similar right of self-determination in all the rest of the party's work, within the framework of the programme and the resolutions adopted by the Congress" (11 January 1919, Der Kommunist). J Knief, a member of the Bremen left, defended the following conception:

"Without denying the necessity for a Centrale, the communists (of the IKD) demand, in conformity with the present revolutionary situation, the greatest autonomy and liberty for the local and regional organisations" (Arbeiterpolitik No 10, 1917).

[16] idem

[17] Already in 1917 J. Borchardt was declaring: "The important thing for us is the abolition of any form of leadership in the workers movement. What we need to reach socialism is pure democracy among comrades, that is to say equal rights and autonomy, free arbitration and the means for the personal activity of each individual. We don't need leaders, but only organs of execution, which instead of imposing their will on comrades, act simply as their mandates." (Arbeiterpolitik number 10, 1917)

[18] G. Mammone, Bilan 24, page 814, "La fraction dans les parties socialistes de la Seconde Internationale"

We have become used to the politicians, economists and media using the most extraordinary theories to hide the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and to justify the interminable growth of the attacks on the working class's living conditions.

25 years ago, Nixon, an American president of the most rank conservatism, proclaimed to the whole world that "We are all Keynesians". In that period faced with the aggravation of the crisis the bourgeoisie offered "state intervention", the development of a "social and egalitarian state", as the solution. And in the name of this policy asked the workers for sacrifices in order to "reach the end of the tunnel".

In the 80s, confronted with the economic stagnation, the bourgeoisie changed horses. Now "less state" was the cure-all for all the problems of the state. These were the hard years of "Reaganomics" which meant the largest world-wide wave of state organised lay-offs since the 30's.

At present, the crisis of capitalism has reached such a serious level that the order of the day for all the industrialised states is purely and simply the liquidation of the minimum social guarantees (unemployment benefits, pensions, health and education spending: also length of the working day, job security etc.), that the workers still receive under the ideological disguise of the "welfare state".

This merciless attack, a qualitative leap in the tendency to the absolute pauperisation of the working class, announced by Karl Marx, a tendency which today is justified and accompanied by a new ideology: the "globalisation of the world economy".

The servants of capital have discovered the moon. 150 years after Engels demonstrated in the Principles of Communism (written in 1847): "That things have reached such a point that a new machine invented now in England can, in the space of a year, condemn millions of workers in China to starvation. In this way, big industry has linked all the peoples of the world to each other, it has united all of the local markets into one world market, everywhere it has prepared the ground for civilisation and progress and has organised things in such a way that what happens in the civilised countries must necessarily have repercussions in all the others" (Principles of Communism).

Capitalism had to expand across the world imposing its regime of wage slavery into every comer of the Earth. The integration into the world market, by the beginning of the century, of the most significant territories of the planet and the difficulty of finding others capable of satisfying expanding capitalism's ever growing needs, marked the decadence of the bourgeoisie order, as revolutionaries have said for 80 years.

In this framework of the chronic saturation of the world market, the XXth century has witnessed an unprecedented deepening of competition between the different national capitals. Faced with this ever increasing need to realise surplus value the markets have become increasingly smaller. This forces a double imperative on every national capital: on the one hand, to protect with all kinds of measures (monetary, legislative, etc) its own products faced with the assault of its rivals. On the other hand, to try to convince the other national capitals to open their doors to its commodities (trade treaties, bilateral accords etc.).

When bourgeois economists talk of "globalisation" they are trying to give the impression that capitalism can be consciously controlled and unified by the rules that mark the world market. What really happens is just the opposite: the realities of the world market impose their own laws, but in a framework dominated by the desperate efforts of each national capital to escape them and to push all their weight onto their rivals. The present "globalised" world market is not a framework for progress and unification but of anarchy and disintegration. The tendency of decadent capitalism is towards the break-up of the world market, under the powerful centrifugal forces of the national economies structured by hypertrophied states which try to protect with all means (including military) the product of their exploitation of the workers against the assault of their competitors. While in the last century competition between nations contributed to the formation and unification of the world market, in the XXth century, the organised competition between each national state tends just to the opposite: to the disintegration and decomposition of the world market.

It is exactly for this reason that "globalisation" is something that can only be imposed by force. In the world of Yalta, the United States and Russia, created very structured organisms, using the advantages given to them by the discipline of imperialist blocs, to regulate (in their favour, obviously) world trade: GATT, the IMF, the Common Market, Comecon in the Russian bloc etc. These organisms, the expression of the bloc leaders' military and economic strength, were never able to overcome the tendencies to anarchism and organise the world market in a harmonious and unified way. The collapse of the two old imperialist blocs after 1989[1] has considerably accelerated competition and the chaos on the world market.

But perhaps "Globalisation" will stop this tendency? According to the apostles of "globalism" the part of the world market which is "already unified" is going to have a "salutary effect" on all economies and is going to permit the entire world to come out of the crisis by freeing themselves from "national egotism".

If we examine each of the features that the economists identify with "Globalism" none of them will "overcome" the chaos of the world market nor the crisis it is aggravating. To begin with, "electronic transactions via the Internet" are going to considerably accentuate the already very high risk of non-payment, adding to the growing burden of insupportable debt. As for the globalisation of the monetary and financial markets we have already analysed this in International Review No 81 (Financial Storms: Madness?): "A financial crisis is inevitable. Indeed, in some respects it is already happening. Even from capitalism's point of view, a strong "purge" of the "speculative bubble" is vital " ... Today, the speculative bubble, and above all state indebtedness have increased fanatically. In these circumstances, nobody can tell where the violence of such a purge would stop. But at all events, it will involve a massive destruction of fictitious capital which will hurl whole areas of world capital into ruin".[2]

In reality, that which is presented as "globalism" is something very different from the celestial music that its enthusiasts sell us. It is a response to the two pressing problems that are posed by the present state of the capitalist crisis:

-the reduction of production costs

- the destruction of protective barriers in order that the most competitive capitalisms can make full use of the increasingly reduced markets.

In respect of the reduction in production costs we have already pointed out that "The intensification of competition between capitalists, exacerbated by the crisis of overproduction and the scarcity of solvent markets, pushes the capitalists to modernise continually the process of production, replacing men by machines, in a frenzied search for cost reductions. The same race obliges them to shift part of production to countries where labour power is cheaper (China and South East Asia today, for example)".[3]

This second aspect of the reduction of costs (transferring of certain parts of production to countries with low labour costs) has accelerated in the 90's. We can see how the "democratic" states, have made good use of the services of the Chinese regime in order to produce compact disks, sports shoes, hard disks, modems etc., at absurdly low cost. The take-off of the famous "Asiatic dragons" based on the manufacture of computers, steel, electronic components, fabrics etc. has transferred to these "low labour costs" paradises.

Capitalism, forced by the crisis, has to take full advantage of the differences in wage costs: "the total wage costs (including taxes) in the industry of the different countries on the road to development which produce and export manufactured goods as well as services, vary between 3% (Madagascar, Vietnam) to 40% in respect to those of the richest European countries. China is situated between 5-16% and India around 5%. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc there now exists on the doorstep of the European Union a labour reserve whose costs do not surpass 5% (Rumania) or 20% (Poland and Hungary) of those in Germany".[4]

This is the first aspect of "globalisation".

Its consequences are forcing a world-wide reduction in wages. In the second place, it is provoking massive lay-offs in the great industrial centres without these jobs being replaced, in the same numbers, through the supply of jobs in the new ultra-automated factories. Thirdly, far from remedying the chronic illness of capitalism (the saturation of the market) it has made it worse through reducing demand in the great industrial countries without an equivalent growth of consumption in the "emerging countries"[5]

As for the destruction of customs barriers, the pressure of the "great powers" have certainly made countries like India, Mexico and Brazil reduce their import duties at the price of a considerable indebtedness (repeating the same formulas employed in the 70' s and which led to the catastrophe of the 1982 debt crisis). The relief supplied to the whole of world capital however, is completely illusory: "the recent financial collapse of another "exemplary" country, Mexico, whose money lost half of its value overnight, necessitating an urgent injection of close to $50 billion of credit (by far the largest "rescue" operation in capitalism's history), sums up the reality of the mirage of the "emergence" of certain Third World countries"[6]. Under the pressure of "globalisation" we are not seeing a reduction in protectionism or of state intervention in respect to commercial exchange, what we are seeing is a recourse as much to the traditional means as to newer ones:

- the same Clinton who in 1995 obliged the Japanese to open their frontiers to American products, who never tires of asking his "associates" for "free trade" demonstrated this by ordering the increase of duties on planes, steel and agricultural products and limiting state agencies acquisition of foreign products.

- the famous Uruguay Round which led to the substitution of the old GATT by the new World Trade Organisation obtained a really derisory accord: only eliminating tariffs on 10 industrial products and reducing the percentage in 8 of these products by around 30% and that over a 10 year period!

- a massive expression of neo-protectionism is found in the environmental, health and even "welfare" standards, that the most industrialised nations use to impose unattainable criterion's on their competitors; "in the new WTO, industrial groups, union organisations and militant greens plead that the collective benefits from the environment, social welfare etc. and the standards they involve shouldn't be regulated by the market but, by national sovereignty which cannot share responsibility on this terrain".[7]

The formation of "regional areas" (European Union, The North American Free Trade Agreement, etc) do not contradict this tendency because they obey the necessity for groups of capitalist countries to create zones of protection from which to confront their most powerful rivals. Faced with the European Union the US responded with the Free Trade Agreement, while Japanese capital confronted with both promoted an accord with the Asiatic dragons. These "regional groups" try to protect from competition what at times looks like areal vipers nest where commercial confrontations between partners grow daily. It's enough to look at the edifying spectacle of the "harmonious" European Union rocked by the continuous litigation between its 15 member countries.

There is no effort to deceive anyone here, the most aberrant tendencies that express the decomposition of the world market constantly affirm this: "Today, international currency insecurity has reached such a point that we are seeing the resurgence of the most archaic form of exchange, in other words the direct exchange of commodities without having recourse to money as an intermediary."[8] Another type of weapon that capitalist states, even the richest, have at hand, is the devaluation of their currency which automatically permits them to sell their goods at a lower price and increases those of its rivals. All the straightjackets that have been used to stop the generalisation of this practice have in the majority of cases ended in fiascos and this was borne out by the collapse of the European Monetary System.

"Globalisation" an ideological attack on the proletariat

We can see therefore that "globalisation" is an ideological smoke screen used to hide the reality of capitalism's collapse into generalised crisis and the subsequent growth of chaos on the world market.

Nevertheless, "globalism" is very ambitious. It proclaims nothing less than the overcoming and even the "destruction" (in the words of the most daring of the globalists) of the nation state. One of them, the well-known Japanese business guru Kenichi Ohmae, says that: "In a few words, in terms of the real flows of economic activity, the nation state has lost its role as a significant participant in the frontierless economy of the present world."[9]. Further on he calls nation states "brutal filters" and promises us the paradise of a "global" economy: "due to the growth of the number of individuals who pass through the brutal filter which separates geographical areas through the old fashioned customs of the world economy,' power over economic activity will be inevitably transferred from the central governments of the nation states to the frontierless network of innumerable individual decisions, based on the maket."[10]

Up until now the only social class that fought the nation state was the proletariat. But we can see that the audacity of bourgeoisie ideologists is limitless: they set themselves up as the standard bearers of the "struggle against national interests". At the height of delirium two authors of this genre, Misters Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, have called their book "The First World Revolution".

However, the most dangerous aspect of this anti-nation "phobia" is the role that it plays in the bourgeoisie's ideological offensive against the whole proletariat. One part of this offensive is to entrap the proletariat in a false dilemma:

- on the one hand, the political forces that strongly defend "globalism" (in Europe they are the partisans of Maastricht), underlining the necessity to "overcome backwards national egotism" in order to integrate the "whole world" which will allow the crisis to be overcome;

- on the other, the parties of the left (above all when they are in opposition) and the unions that link the defence of worker's interests to that of the national interest supposedly trampled underfoot by "traitorous" governments.

The tenants of "Globalism", completely serve the national interest with their fulminations against so-called "minimum social guarantees", which means Social Security, redundancy pay, unemployment benefits, pensions, support for education and housing, and labour regulations that stipulate the length of the working day, the rhythm of production, the working age, etc. All the "horrors" forced on the nation state taken prisoner by "sinister" pressure groups formed by the workers .

Here we have the heart of globalism, stripped of its tinsel (about "overcoming the crisis" or "the internationalism of the free individual in a free market"). What we are presented with is the new alibi for the attacks imposed on all nation states by the crisis of capital: which means finishing with "minimum social guarantees", all social costs and labour legislation which with the development of the crisis are no longer insupportable.

And here, another pole of the bourgeoisie's ideological attack comes in to play: the unions and the Left. Over the last 50 years this "minimum social guarantee" has been the flagship of the "welfare state". This forms the "beautiful face" of state capitalism. The "social state" is presented to the workers as "evidence" that capitalist exploitation has been sweetened and has been placed within limits, as "proof" that within the national state class conciliation is possible and that their respective interests will be taken into account.

The unions and the Left (particularly when they are in opposition) pose as the greatest defenders of the "social state". They maintain that the conflict is between the "national interests" that demands the maintenance of a "social minimum" and "traitorous cosmopolitanism". This aspect played a very important role in the French bourgeoisie's manoeuvre through the strikes in the Autumn of 95. The movement was presented as a demonstration against Maastricht, as a an expression of the general populations' resentment against the demands of "convergence", into which the unions channelled this "movement".

The contradictions of Battaglia Comunista faced with "globalisation"

The task of the groups of the Communist Left (the basis for the future World Party of the proletariat) is to denounce, without concessions, the ideological poison of the dilemma between "savage globalisation" and "globalisation with guarantees". Faced with these new attacks the working class cannot choose between the spokesmen for the "national interest" or the standard bearers of "globalism". Its demands are not situated on the terrain of the defence of the "welfare state", but on the intransigent defence of its class interests. The perspective for the struggles is not in the false dilemma between "social-patriotism" and "globalisation", but in the destruction of the capitalist state in all countries.

The question of "globalisation" has been dealt with several times by Battaglia Comunista, through articles in its quarterly review Prometeo. BC firmly defends a series of positions of the Communist Left that we want to highlight:

- they unconditionally denounce "globalisation" as a powerful attack on the working class showing that it is based "on the progressive impoverishment of the world proletariat and the most violent forms of exploitation."[11]

- they reject the idea that "globalisation" represents an overcoming of capitalism's contradictions: "Here it is noteworthy to point out that even the most recent changes in the system of the world economy can be entirely reduced to the ambit of capital's concentration-centralisation process. Whilst a new phase in capital's history is undoubtedly underway this doesn't mean that the inherent contradictions of capital accumulation process have been overcome."[12]

- they recognise that the restructuring and "technological innovations" that capitalism introduced in the 80's and 90's do not represent a widening of the world market:

"Unlike the powerful economic growth of monopoly capitalism's first period; restructuring did not lead as expected to a 'virtuous circle' of new productive activity which would compensate for the manpower replaced by new technology. For the first time additional investments were leading, not to an expanded productive base and an overall growth in the productive labour force, but to their relative and absolute diminution."[13]

- they refuse any idea that sees "globalisation" as a way of creating an ordered and harmonious world production, instead they make it clear that "Thus we have a paradox of a system which pursues, via monopolies, the maximum rationality but which brings with it the highest level of irrationality: all against all; each capital against all the others; all capitals against each."[14]

- they record that: "the downfall (of the capitalist system) is not the mathematical result of the contradictions of the economic world, but the work of the proletariat which is conscious that this is not the best of all possible worlds."[15]

We support these positions and based on them we want to combat a series of insufficiencies and contradictions which, in our judgment, affect BC. This polemic has a clear militant aim: confronted with the aggravation of the crisis it is vital to denounce "theories" about "globalisation" whose aim is to obstruct the development of consciousness about the fact that the capitalist system is today "the worst of all possible worlds" and the necessity to destroy it world-wide.

What surprises us first of all is that BC thinks that: "Thanks to developments in microelectronics, both in the sphere of telecommunications and in relation to the actual organisation of the productive cycle the planet have really been unified."[16]. BC has been carried away by all the bourgeoisie's nonsense about telecommunications and the Internet supposedly being the "miracle unifier" and have forgotten that : "since the internationalisation of capitalist interests expresses only one side of the internationalisation of economic life, it is necessary also to review its other side, namely, that process of the nationalisation of capitalist interests which most strikingly empresses the anarchy of capitalist competition with the boundaries of the world economy, a process that leads to the greatest convulsions and catastrophes, to the greatest waste of human energy, and most forcefully raises the problem of establishing new forms of social life."[17]

Another weak flank that BC offers us is the strange discovery according to which:

"When Nixon, then President of the United States, took the historic decision to denounce the Bretton Woods Agreement and declared the dollars inconvertibility he had not the remotest idea that this was making way for one of the most gigantic transformations in the history of the capitalist mode of production, a period of extreme disturbance which in less than twenty years would change the shape of the world and push the relations of imperialist domination to their maximum limits."[18]

One cannot see as a cause (the famous decision in 1971 to declare the none-convertibility of the Dollar) what was nothing more than a simple effect of the aggravation of the capitalist crisis and in no way had enough importance to alter "the dominant imperialist relation", no less! We have already criticised the economism of BC which leads it to attribute effects that have no relevance to the confrontation between the previous imperialist blocs (Soviet and Western).

Nevertheless, the main danger is that they will open to door to the bourgeois mystification about capitalism's ability to "change and transform itself". In the past, BC has had a tendency to be dazzled by the "great transformations" that the bourgeoisie have dangled in front of our noses. It was seduced by the "innovations" of the "technological revolution", and then by the fabulous markets that would be opened up by "liberation" of the Eastern European countries. Today, they have taken at face value all the noise about "globalisation":

"The passing to the centralised management of the economic variables on a continental basis or through monetary zones has forced a change in the distribution of capital in different productive and financial sectors. It is not only small and medium sized businesses, but also large scale groups that are threatened with marginalisation or being taken over with the subsequent decline of their relative position of power. For many countries this could bring with it the danger of the fracturing of its national unity as the events in Yugoslavia or the ex-Soviet bloc have demonstrated. The balance of power between the different fractions of the world bourgeoisie is going to suffer profound mutations and will generate for a long time an aggravation of tensions and conflicts, with effects on the process of economic globalisation reflected that could slow down or even block it".[19]

To our amazement, we discover that imperialist tensions, the collapse of nations, the Yugoslavian conflict, are not explained by capitalism's decadence and decomposition, by the aggravation of the historic crisis of the system, but because they are internal phenomena of the process of "globalisation". Here BC slips away from the Communist Left's framework of analysis (decadence and the historic crisis of capitalism) and towards the bourgeoisie's framework of mystification's based on twaddle about "globalisation".

It is essential that the groups of the Communist Left make no concession to these mystification's and resolutely defend the revolutionary position according to which in decadence, and more concretely in the phase of crisis opened up at the end of the 60's, capitalism's attempts to try and stop its collapse will only aggravate and accelerate it and can produce no real change[20]. In our reply to the IBRP (International Review No 82) we make it clear that the question is not to ignore these attempts but to analysis them within the framework of the Communist Left and not to be hooked by the bait that bourgeois ideology dangles in front of us.

"Globalisation" and the nation state

However, where the contradictions of BC have their most dangerous consequences is in its position on the role of the nation state. BC believes that "globalisation" will profoundly alter the role of the nation state and imply a certain weakening of it. Certainly, they don't claim, as the samurai Kenichi Ohmea does, that the nation state is on the decline, and they recognise several important points:

- the class nature of the nation state has not changed

- the nation state is an active agent of the "changes" that capitalism is undergoing

- the nation state is not in crisis. Nevertheless, the comrades do say: "surely one of the most interesting aspects of the globalisation of the economy is expressed by the tendency to transversal and transnational integration of the great industrial and financial concentrations which, through their size and power, far surpasses that of the national states"[21]

What can be deduced from these "interesting aspects" is that under capitalism the famous "multinationals" can form entities superior to the nation state. This is a defence of the revisionist thesis that negates the Marxist principle according to which the highest and maximum unity of capitalism is the Nation State, the National Capital. Capitalism can never go beyond the framework of the nation state and even less can it be internationalist. As we have previously seen, it is limited to the aim of dominating its rival nations and gaining the largest possible share of the world market.

In the Editorial to Prometeo No 9 this revision of Marxism is confirmed when they say: "The productive and/or financial multinationals due to the economic interests and power they have surpass the different state formations they traverse. The fact that the central banks of the different states are incapable of controlling or counteracting the wave of speculation, that a monstrous handful of financial groups daily unleash, speaks volumes about the profound change in relations between states".

Is it really necessary recall that it is precisely these poor little, impotent national states that own (or at least strictly control) these mastodons of finance? Is it really necessary to show BC that this "monstrous handful" is formed by respectable banking and savings institutions whose responsibilities are designated either directly or indirectly by their respective national states?

BC is not only hooked by the bait about the supposed opposition between nation states and the monstrous multinationals, but goes even further, revealing that: "Thus, ever-larger capitals ... have given birth to those giants which now control the entire world economy. Indicative of this is the change in the so-called Big Three - the world's three largest companies. From the thirties right up until the seventies these were US car companies: General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. Today, they are three pension funds, again from the US: Fidelity Investments, Vanguard Group and Capital Research and Management. The cumulative power of these finance companies is enormous and extends beyond the individual states which have actually lost some of their capacity to control the world economy over recent years."[22]

In the 1970's the myth of the famous multinational oil companies was very fashionable. The Leftists told us that capital was "transnational" and due to this the "main demand" of the workers should be the defence of the national interest against this "stateless handful".

BC certainly rejected this mystification forcefully, nevertheless, they admit its "theoretical" justification, that is, they believed there was a possibility of an opposition, or at least, fundamental differences of interest, between the national state and the monopolies "traversing the national states" (this is their definition).

The multinationals are tools of the nation state. IBM, General Motors, Exxon, etc are tied to the American state by a whole series of channels: an important percentage of their production (40% in the case of IBM) is brought directly by the American state. It directly or indirectly influences the nomination of directors[23]. A copy of all new information technology products are sent straight to the Pentagon.

It is incredible that BC falls for the idea that there is a world superpower constituted by 3 investment funds! In the first place, the investment funds have no real autonomy, they are nothing but instruments of the banks, building societies, or state institutions such as syndicates, etc. Their direct and indirect bosses are their respective national states. Secondly, they are subject to strict state regulations which fix the percentage they can invest abroad in: shares, government bonds, etc.

"Globalisation" and State Capitalism

This brings us to an essential question: that of state capitalism. A fundamental feature of decadent capitalism is the concentration of the national capital in the hands of the state which has been converted into the pole around which the national capital organises its combat as much against the proletariat as other national capitals.

States are not the tools of enterprises, no matter how big they are, in fact, just the opposite has happened in decadent capitalism: the great monopolies, large enterprises, banks etc have submitted to the dictates of the national state and serve its designs as loyally as possible. Therefore, it is an error to think that in capitalism super-national powers exist which "cross" national states and dictate the policies they follow. On the contrary, the so-called multinationals are used by their mother-states as tools in the service of commercial and imperialist interests.

In no way, do we want to say that companies such as Ford or Exxon, are simply the puppets of their respective national states. They try to defend their particular interests, which on occasions clash with those of the national state. However, under "Western" state capitalism the complete fusion of private and state capital is organised in such a way that globally both, apart from the conflicts and contradictions that arise, act coherently in the defence of the national interest of Capital and under the protection of the totalitarian state.

BC says that it is difficult to know which state, for example Shell (Anglo-Dutch capital) or other multinationals which have multiple share capital, belong to. However, even if there are exceptional examples, these do not significantly nullify the reality of world capitalism, which is that property titles don't determine the control of a business. Under state capitalism it is the state that directs and determines the running of business, through whatever means necessary. It regulates prices, collective contracts, export quotes, level of production, etc. It determines the running of business when, as in the majority of productive sectors, it is the principle client. It controls "free trade" through its political, monetary, credit policies.

This essential aspect of the revolutionary analysis of decadent capitalism is not taken into consideration by BC. They prefer to loyally follow a partial aspect of Lenin's, and other revolutionaries of that period, efforts to understand the full magnitude of the problem of imperialism: Lenin's theory on financial capital, takes up that of Hilferding. In his book on imperialism, Lenin clearly sees that proletarian revolution is the order of the day in the epoch of capitalism's decadence. But this epoch is linked to the development of finance capital as a monstrous parasite arising out of the process of the concentration of capitalism, as a new phase in development of monopolies.

However, "many aspects of Lenin's definition of imperialism are inadequate today, and were even at the time he was elaborating it. Thus the period in which capital could be seen to be dominated by an oligarchy of "finance capital" and by "international monopolist combines" was already giving way to a new phase during the First World War- the period of state capitalism, of permanent war economy. In the epoch of chronic inter-imperialist rivalries on the world market, the entire national capital tends to be concentrated around the state apparatus, which subordinates and disciplines all particular fractions of capital to the needs of military/economic survival."[24]

What constitutes an error by Lenin linked to the process of understanding imperialism and all its consequences, is converted into a dangerous aberration by BC. The theory of "concentration in transnational super-monopolies" closes the door, in the first place, to the Marxist position on the concentration of the national capital in the state, the tendency to state capitalism, which subordinates all fractions of the bourgeoisie not matter what links or influence they may have at the international level. Secondly, this theory opens the door to the Kautskyist theory of "super-imperialism". All of which results in BC only criticising this theory as regards the impossibility of overcoming the anarchy of capital and not the crucial point: the selling of the myth that capitalism can unite across national frontiers. This difficulty leads BC to correctly reject the extreme thesis of the "fusion of nations", while at the same time admitting the existence of super-national entities. Thirdly, BC develop a speculation according to which: the nation state, within the framework of "globalisation", will have two aspects: one serving the interests of the multinationals and, the other, subordinated to the service of the national interest: "it is going to become increasingly evident that the state's intervention in the economic world is carried out at two levels: at one level it will offer to the super-national centre the centralised management of the monetary mass and the determination of macro-economic variables according to monetary area and at the other the local control of the comparability of this latter with national variables"[25]. BC turns the world upside down. A quick look at what happens in the European Union shows just the contrary: the interests of the national capital are entirely managed by the national state and no way is it a kind of "subordination" to "European interests", as the ambiguities of BC would lead us to understand.

Mounted on the speculative theory of "transnational" interests, it draws incredible conclusions: imperialist conflicts will not degenerate into generalised imperialist war because: "The ending of the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs with the implosion of the former has not clearly delineated the foundations of a new strategic confrontation. Up until now, the strategic interests of the great and real centres of economic power have not been expressed in strategic confrontations between states, because they move transversely to them."

This is a very serious confusion. Imperialist war is no longer a confrontation between national capitals armed to the teeth (as Lenin made clear) but the result of confrontations between transnational groups using national states as their tools. National states are no longer the focus and cause of the conflagration but mere agents of the monstrous transnationals which "cross them". Fortunately, BC don't draw all the conclusions of this aberration, because this would lead them to say that the struggle of the proletariat against imperialist war is no longer the struggle against national states but the struggle "to free them" from submission to the interests of the transnationals. In other words, the vulgar mystifications of the Leftists. If BC wants to be serious it has to cohere to the positions of the Communist Left. It has to make a systematic critique of its speculations about monopolies and financial monsters. It must eradicate its aberrant slogans such as "a new era has been inaugurated characterised by the dictatorship of the financial market" (Prometeo No 9).[26] These weaknesses open up its flank to the penetration of bourgeois mystifications concerning "globalisation" and the supposed opposition between transnational and national interests, between Maastricht and popular interests, between Maastricht and the interests of the oppressed peoples.

This could lead BC to defend certain theses and mystifications of the ruling class, therefore to participate in the weakening of the working class's consciousness and struggle. This is surely not the role to be played by a proletarian revolutionary organisation.

Adalen, 5 June 1996.

[1] See "The impossibility of a "United Europe", in International Review No 73, 2nd Quarter of 1993, where we highlight the aggravation of competition and anarchy in the world market.

[2] "Financial Storms: Madness?", International Review No 81, 2rd Quarter. 1995.

[3] "The Cynicism of a Decadent Ruling Class", International Review No 78, 3rd Quarter, 1994.

[4] The World Annual 1996: "Relocation, Employment and Inequality".

[5] "This means that this economic development cannot but effect the production of the most advanced countries, whose states, increasingly, protest against the "dishonest commercial practices" of these emerging countries" ("International Situation Resolution", International Review No 82, 3rd Quarter 1995.)

[6] Idem.

[7] The World Annual 1996: "What is going to change with the WTO".

[8] "An Economy Undermined by Decomposition", International Review No. 75, 4th Quarter. 1993.

[9] Kenichi Ohmae "The End of the Nation State, The rise of regional economies".

[10] Idem.

[11] The quotes from this article are taken from the English translation of the original Prometeo  article (no 9, June 1995) published in Internationalist Communist, No 14. This is the theoretical journal of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, a joint organisation of BC and the Communist Workers Organisation.

[12] Idem, page.13.

[13] Idem page 14.

[14] Idem page 19.

[15] Idem page 14.

[16] Idem page 14.

[17] N. Bukharin, "Imperialism and the World Economy", page 62.

[18] "Capitals Against Capitalism" page 13.

[19] Prometeo No 10, "Two Dimensions of the State: the globalisation of the economy and the State"

[20] BC's incoherence is made clear when they say "In reality capitalism is the same as ever and is doing nothing other than reorganising itself in the interests of self-preservation along the lines dictated by the tendential fall in the average rate of profit". ("Capitals Against Capitalism", Internationalist Communist No 14).  

[21] Prometeo No 10, "The Two Dimensions of the State: the G1obalisation of the economy and
the State".

[22] "Capitals Against Capitalism" Internationalist Communist No 14.

[23] It is common practise that many American politicians after they have left the Senate or their positions in the administration move into the leadership of the large Multinationals. The same takes place in Europe.

[24] "On Imperialism", International Review No 19, 4th quarter 1979.

[25] Prometeo No 10, "The Two Dimensions of the State: the globalisation of the economy and the state".

[26] Prometeo No 9, "Editorial".

In the previous article in this series, we showed how the authentic socialists of the end of the 19th century had envisaged the way that a future communist society would tackle some of mankind's most pressing social problems: the relationship between man and woman, and between humankind and the nature from which it has sprung. In this issue, we examine how the late 19th century revolutionaries foresaw the most crucial of all social transformations - the transformation of "useless toil" into "useful work" - in other words, the practical overcoming of alienated labour. In doing so, we will answer the charge that these visions represent a relapse into pre-marxist utopianism.

In a London of the future, much has been dismantled and replanted; you can pass from Kensington to Trafalgar Square by way of a woodland path. But some familiar buildings are still there: the old Houses of Parliament, now mainly used for storing manure, and the British Museum, which still retains many of its ancient functions. It is here that William Guest, time traveller from the late nineteenth century, meets old Hammond, a former librarian who has a profound historical knowledge and is thus best placed to explain the workings of a communist society which has been established for several centuries. After discussing several aspects of "the way things are managed", ie the methods of social organisation, they turn to the question of work:

"The man of the nineteenth century would say that there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work".

"Yes, yes", said Hammond, "I know the ancient platitude - wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at, understood the matter better".

"Why is it meaningless to you?" said I. He said: "because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from thinking that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain."

"Yes", said I, "I have noticed that, and I was going to ask you about that also. But in the meantime, what do you positively mean to assert about the pleasurableness of work amongst you?"

"This, that all work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as is the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our work is of this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists."

"I see", said I. "Can you now tell me how you have come to this happy condition? For, to speak plainly, this change from the conditions of the older world seems to me far greater and more important than all the other changes you have told me about as to crime, politics, property, marriage."

"You are right there," said he. "Indeed you may say rather that it is this change which makes all the others possible. What is the object of Revolution? Surely to make people happy. Revolution having brought its foredoomed change about, how can you prevent the counter-revolution from setting in except by making people happy? What! Shall we expect peace and stability from unhappiness? ... .And happiness without happy daily work is impossible".

Thus William Morris, in his visionary novel News From Nowhere, seeks to describe the attitude to work that might exist in a developed communist society. The poetic method of this description should not blind us to the fact that he is only defending a fundamental postulate of marxism here. As we have shown in previous articles in this series (see in particular International Reviews 70 and75), Marxism begins with the understanding that labour is "man's act of self-genesis" as Marx put it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where he credited Hegel with having recognised this, albeit in a formal and abstract way. In 1876, Engels was able to make use of the most recent discoveries in the field of physical anthropology to confirm that "labour created man himself" ('The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man'). The powerful human brain, the dexterous human hand, language and the specifically human consciousness of self and world, are born through the process of tool-making, the shaping of the external environment; in short, through labour, which is the act of a social being working in common. This dialectical approach to human origins, which can only be defended consistently by a labouring class, is opposed both to the idealist view (humanity either as the product of an external supernatural being, or of its own intellectual powers conceived in isolation from practice) and the vulgar materialist view which reduces human intelligence to purely mechanical factors (the size of the brain for example).

But Marx also criticised Hegel because "he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man's coming to be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man". (EPM, 'Critique of Hegelian Philosophy'). Under conditions of material scarcity, and in particular of class domination, the labour which creates and reproduces man has also resulted in man's own powers escaping his control and ruling over him. Engels again confirms this standpoint in 'The Part Played by Labour', showing that despite man's unique capacity for purposeful and planned action, the material conditions under which he has laboured so far have led to results very different to his plans. The dimension of alienation in this text is covered in Engels' references to the ecological catastrophes of past civilisations, but also to the emergence of religion, "that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind".

Man's estrangement from himself is situated first and foremost in the sphere through which he creates himself, the sphere of labour. Overcoming the alienation of labour is thus the key to overcoming all the alienations that plague humanity, and there can be no real transformation of social relations - whether the creation of new relationships between the sexes, or a new dynamic between man and nature - without the transformation of alienated labour into pleasurable creative activity. Old Hammond thus stands by Marx - who in turn also defended Fourier on this point - when he insists that happiness is impossible without happy daily work.

Communism is not 'anti-work'

Certain modernist sects, not least those like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste who used to enjoy displaying their knowledge of Marx, have taken this critique of alienated labour to mean that communism means the abolition not only of wage labour - the last form of alienated labour in history - but of labour as such. Such attitudes to labour are typical of the disintegrating petty bourgeoisie and declassed elements who look down on the workers as mere slaves and think that the individual "refusal of work" is a revolutionary act. Indeed, such views have always been used to discredit communism. This charge was answered by August Bebel in Woman and Socialism, when he pointed out that the very starting point of the socialist transformation is not the immediate abolition of work but the universal obligation to do it:

"As soon as society is in possession of all the means of production, the duty to work, on the part of all able to work, without distinction of sex, becomes the organic law of socialist society. Without work society cannot exist. Hence, society has the right to demand that all who wish to satisfy their wants shall exert themselves, according to their physical and mental faculties, in the production of the requisite wealth. The silly claim that the Socialist does not wish to work, that he seeks to abolish work, is a matchless absurdity, which fits our adversaries alone. Non-workers, idlers, exist in capitalist society only. Socialism agrees with the Bible that 'he who will not work, neither shall he eat '. But work shall not be a mere activity; it shall be useful, productive activity. The new social system will demand that each and all pursue some industrial, agricultural or other useful occupation, whereby to furnish a certain amount of work towards the satisfaction of existing wants. Without work no pleasure, no pleasure without work" (chapter VII, p275).

In the initial stages of the revolution, the universal obligation of labour, as Bebel implies, contains an element of restraint. The proletariat in power will certainly rely first and foremost on the enthusiasm and active participation of the mass of the working class, who will be the first to see that they can only rid themselves of wage slavery if they are prepared to labour in common to produce and distribute life's necessities. Already in this phase of the revolutionary process, labour has its own reward, in that it is immediately seen as socially useful - work for a real and observable common good and not for the inhuman demands of the market and of profit. In such circumstances, even the hardest work takes on a liberating and human character, since "in your use or enjoyment of my product I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need ... In the individual expression of my own life. I would have brought about the immediate expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my authentic nature, my human, communal nature" (Marx, 'Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy'). Nevertheless, a gigantic social and political upheaval will at first inevitably call for very great material sacrifices, and such feelings alone would not be enough to convince those used to idling and living off the toil of others to voluntarily submit to the rigours and discipline of associated labour. The use of economic constraint - he who will not work, neither shall he eat - is thus a necessary weapon of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only in a more developed socialist society will it be plain and obvious to all that it is in the interests of every individual to play his full part in social production.

At the same time, it is not at all the goal of the communist movement to remain at a stage where work's only reward is that it is benefiting someone else. If it does not become pleasurable in itself, the counter-revolution will indeed set in, and the proletariat's willing sacrifices for the common cause will become sacrifices for an alien cause - as witness the tragedy of the defeated Russian revolution. This is why immediately after the passage cited above, Bebel adds:

"All being obliged to work, all have an equal interest in seeing the following three conditions of work in force:

First, that work should be moderate, and shall overtax none;

Second, that work shall be as agreeable and varied as possible;

Third, that work shall be as productive as possible, seeing that both the hours of work and fruition depend upon that".

In distinguishing between "Useful Work" and "Useless Toil" William Morris makes a very similar threefold definition:

"What is the difference between them, then? This: one has hope in it, the other has not .... What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?

It is threefold, I think: hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work" ('Useful Work Versus Useless Toil', Political Writings of William Morris, London, 1973, p 87)

Hope of Rest

In Morris's definition of useful work cited above, and in Bebel's three conditions for work being made pleasant, the element of rest, of leisure and relaxation, is elaborated very concretely: they insisted on the possibility of reducing the working day to a fraction of what it then was (and still is). This is surely because, faced with a capitalist society which stole the best hours, days and years from the worker's life, it was an elementary duty of revolutionaries to demonstrate that the very development of capitalist machinery made this theft historically unjustifiable. This was also the theme of Paul Lafargue's sardonic pamphlet The Right to be Lazy, published in 1883. By then it was already abundantly evident that one of the most striking contradictions in capitalism's development of technology was that while it brought with it the possibility of freeing the worker from drudgery, it seemed to be used only to sweat him more intensively than ever. The reason for this was simple: under capitalism, technology is not developed for the benefits of humanity, but for the needs of capital:

"Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use.

They are called 'labour saving' machines - a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, to increase the number of the 'reserve army of labour' - that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves their masters). All this they do by the way, while they pile up the profits of the employers of labour, or force them to expend those profits in bitter commercial war with each other. In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would be for the first time used for minimising the amount of time spent in unattractive labour, which by their means might be so reduced as to be but a very light burden on each individual. All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would 'pay' the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community" ('Useful Work. . .', p106).

In a similar vein, Bebel cites contemporary calculations by bourgeois scientists that with the technology already existing in his time, the working day could be reduced to one and a half hours! Bebel was particularly optimistic about the possibilities being opened up by the development of technology in that period of startling capitalist expansion. But this optimism was not a blanket apologia for capitalist progress. Writing about the enormous potential contained in the application of electricity, he also argued that "only in socialist society will electricity attain its fullest and most widespread application" (Woman and Socialism, ch. VII, p286). Even if today capitalism has 'electrified' most (though not all) of the planet, the full significance of Bebel's qualification can be grasped when he remarks a little further on that "our water courses, the ebb and tide of the sea, the winds, the sunlight - all furnish innumerable horse-powers, the moment we know how to utilise them in full" (ibid). The methods that capitalism has adopted for generating electricity - the burning of fossil fuels, and nuclear energy - have brought forth numerous harmful side-effects, notably in the form of pollution, while the needs of profit have led to the neglect of 'cleaner', and ultimately more abundant sources - such as the wind, the tides and the sun.

But the reduction of the working day for these socialists would not only be the result of the rational use of machinery. It would also be made possible by eliminating the gigantic waste of labour power inherent in the capitalist mode of production. As early as 1845 Engels, in one of his 'Speeches in Elberfeld' , had drawn attention to this reality, pointing to the way capitalism could not avoid squandering human resources in its employment of profiteers and financial middlemen, of policemen and prison guards to deal with the crimes it inevitably provoked amongst the poor, of soldiers and sailors to fight its wars, and above all in its forced unemployment of millions of labourers denied access to all productive work by the mechanisms of the economic crisis. The socialists of the late nineteenth century were no less struck by this wastefulness and showed the connection between overcoming it and ending the drudgery of the proletariat:

"As things are now, between the waste of labour-power in mere idleness and its waste in unproductive work, it is clear that the world of civilisation is supported by a small part of its people; when all were working usefully for its support, the share of work which each would have to do would be but small, if our standard of life were about on the footing of what well-to-do and refined people now think desirable" ('Useful Work ... ', p 96). Such sentiments are more true than ever today, in a decadent capitalism where waste production (arms, bureaucracy, advertising, speculation, drugs etc) have reached unprecedented proportions, and where mass unemployment has become a permanent fact of life, while the working day is for the majority of employed workers longer than it was for their Victorian ancestors. Such contradictions offer the most striking proof of the absurdity that capitalism has become, and thus of the necessity for the communist revolution.

Hope of pleasure in the work itself

Describing the pleasures of work to his nineteenth century visitor, old Hammond did not lay much emphasis on the need for rest, for leisure; and yet the subtitle of the novel is 'An epoch of rest'. Evidently, after several generations, the rigid separation between 'free time' and 'labour time' has been superseded, as Marx said it must. For the aim of the revolution is not simply to relieve human beings of unpleasant work: "labour is also to be made pleasant" as Bebel puts it. He then elaborates some of the conditions for this to be the case, echoed by Morris on each point.

The first condition is that work should be carried out in pleasant surroundings:

"To that end practical and tastefully contrived workshops are required; the utmost precautions against danger; the removal of disagreeable odours, gases and smoke - in short of all sources of injury or discomfort to health. At the start, the new social system will carry on production with the old means, inherited from the old. But these are utterly inadequate. Numerous and unsuitable workshops, disintegrated in all directions; imperfect tools and machinery, running through all the stages of usefulness - this heap is insufficient both for the number of the workers and for their demands of comfort and of pleasure. The establishment of a large number of spacious, light, airy, fully equipped and ornamented workshops is a pressing need. Art, technique, skill of head and hand immediately find a wide field of activity. All departments in the building of machinery, in the fashioning of tools, in architecture and in the branches of work connected with the internal equipment of houses have the amplest opportunity" (Woman and Socialism, ch. VII, p284). For Morris, productive activity might be carried out in a variety of surroundings, but he argues that some kind of factory system would "offer opportunities for a full and eager social life surrounded by many pleasures. The factories might be centres of intellectual activity also", where "work might vary from raising food from the surrounding country to the study and practice of art and science". Naturally Morris is also concerned that these factories of the future would not merely be clean and pollution-free, but aesthetic constructions in themselves: "beginning by making their factories, buildings and sheds decent and convenient like their homes, they would infallibly go on to make them not merely negatively good, inoffensive merely, but even beautiful, so that the glorious art of architecture, now for some time slain by commercial greed, would be born again and flourish" ('Useful Work ... ', p 103-4).

The factory is quite often described in the marxist tradition as being a true realisation of hell on earth. And this is true not merely of the ones that it is respectable to abhor - those of the dim distant days of the 'industrial revolution' with its admitted excesses - but equally the modem factory in the age of democracy and the welfare state. But for marxism, the factory is more than this: it is the place where the associated labourers come together, work together, struggle together, and is thus an indication of the possibilities of the communist association of the future. Thus, against the anarchist prejudice against the factory as such, the late nineteenth century marxists were quite correct to envisage a factory of the future, now transformed into a centre of learning, experiment, and creation.

For this to be the case, it is evident that the old capitalist division of labour, its reduction of virtually all jobs to a mind-numbing and repetitive routine, would have to be done away with as soon as possible. "To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning life into a prison-torment" ('Useful Work. . .', p 101I). Thus our socialist writers, again following Marx, insist on work being varied, changing, and no longer crippled by the rigid separation of mental from physical activity. But the variety they proposed - based on the acquisition of a number of different skills, on a properly established balance between intellectual activity and bodily exertion - was much more than a mere negation of capitalist over specialisation, more than a simple distraction from the boredom of the latter. In its fullest sense it involved the development of a new kind of human activity which is finally in conformity with mankind's deepest needs:

"An aspiration, deeply implanted in the nature of man, is that of freedom in the choice and change of occupation. As uninterrupted repetition renders the daintiest of dishes repulsive, so with a daily treadmill-like recurring occupation; it dulls the senses. Man then does only mechanically what he must do; he does it without swing or enjoyment. There are latent in all men facilities and desires that need but to be awakened and developed to produce the most beautiful results. Only then does man become fully and truly man. Towards the satisfaction of this need of change, socialist society offers the fullest opportunity" (Woman and Socialism, ch. VII, p288).

This variation has nothing in common with the frenetic search for innovation for its own sake that has become more and more a hallmark of decaying capitalist culture. It is founded on a human rhythm of life where disposable time has become a measure of wealth: "we have now found out what we want, so we make no more than we want; and as we are not driven to make a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and resources enough to consider our pleasure in making them" (News from Nowhere, London, 1970 edition, p82).

Working with swing and enjoyment; the awakening of suppressed facilities and desires. In short, as Morris put it, work as consciously sensuous activity.

Morris did not have access to Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but his use of this phrase shows that the late 19th century revolutionary movement was familiar with the basic conception of free human activity which Marx developed in these early texts. They knew, for example, that Marx had endorsed Fourier's insistence that labour, to be worthy of human beings, had to be based on "passionate attraction", which is surely another term for the "Eros" later investigated by Freud.

Freud once remarked that primitive man "made his work agreeable, so to speak, by treating it as the equivalent of and substitute for sexual activities" (General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York 1953, p 175). In other words, in the first forms of primitive communism, labour has not yet become what Hegel defined it to be in The Phenomenology of Mind: "desire checked and retrained ". In Marxist terms, the alienation of labour does not fully begin until the advent of class society. The communism of the future thus achieves a generalised return to erotic, sensuous forms of labour which in class society have generally been the privilege of the artistic elite.

At the same time, in the Grundrisse, Marx criticises Fourier's idea that work can become play, in the sense of "mere fun or amusement". This is because scientific communism has understood that utopianism is always dominated by a fixation on the past. A man cannot become a child again, as Marx notes in the same work. But then he goes on to emphasise that man can and indeed must recapture the spontaneity of childhood; the labouring, future seeing adult must learn to reintegrate the child's erotic connection to the world. The awakening of the senses described in the EPM requires a return to the lost kingdom of play; but the one who returns is no longer lost within it, like children are, because he has now acquired the conscious mastery of the fully developed, social human being.

A utopian vision?

We can no further in examining the vision of socialism elaborated by the late 19th century revolutionaries without facing the question: was their strenuous effort to describe the society of the future merely a new variety of utopianism, a kind of wish fulfilment unconnected to the real movement of history?

In the previous article in this series we considered the charge made against Bebel by the feminists - that his approach is indeed utopian because it fails to make the link between the socialist future, where the oppression of women has disappeared along with other forms of oppression and exploitation, and the struggle against this oppression in present day society. We can also hardly ignore the fact that Morris subtitled his News from Nowhere "a utopian romance". Nevertheless we rejected this charge, at least in the manner formulated by the feminists. The idea that any attempt to describe communism in anything but negative terms is equivalent to utopianism is common to most forms of leftism, which is always anxious to conceal the fact that its vision of socialism is nothing but a rejigging of present day exploitation. Of course it's true that communists cannot repeat the error of Fourier, drawing up day to day, even hour to hour prescriptions for what the future society will be like and how life will be lived. But as Bordiga once remarked, the real difference between utopian and scientific socialism resides not so much in the latter's refusal to describe and define communism, but in its recognition that the new society can only come about through the unfolding of a real movement, a real social struggle that is already taking place at the heart of bourgeois society. While the utopians dreamed up their "recipes for the cook books of the future" and appealed to benevolent philanthropists to provide the kitchen space and the cookers, the revolutionary communists identified the proletariat as the force that alone could bring the new society into being by taking its unavoidable struggle against capitalist exploitation to its logical conclusions.

The feminists, in any case, have no right to pass judgment on the 19th century socialists because for them the 'real movement' that leads to the revolutionary transformation is not a class movement at all, but an amorphous, interclassist alliance which can only serve to take the proletariat away from its own terrain of struggle. In this sense there is no utopianism at all in Morris, or Bebel, or the social democratic parties in general, because they based all their work on the clear recognition that it would be the working class and no other social force which would be compelled, by its own historic nature, to overthrow capitalist relations of production.

And yet a problem remains, because in this period, the apogee of capitalist development, the mountaintop that preceded the downward slope, the precise contours of this revolutionary overthrow began to get blurred. The late nineteenth century socialists were certainly able to see the communist potentialities revealed by the tremendous growth of capitalism, but since this growth removed the revolutionary action of the class from the foreseeable horizon, it became increasingly difficult to see how the existing defensive struggles of the class would mature into a full-scale onslaught on capital.

It's true the Paris Commune was not very far away in time, and indeed the socialist parties continued to celebrate its memory every year. The organisational forms that Bebel envisaged for the new society were certainly influenced by the experience of the Commune, and when Morris, in News from Nowhere, describes the transition from the old society to the new, he makes no bones about portraying it as the result of a violent civil war. The fact remains that the lessons of the Commune began to fade very quickly, and while Bebel's great work contains many important elaborations about the socialist future, there is very little clarification about the way that the working class would move towards taking power, or about the initial phases of the revolutionary confrontation with capital. As Victor Serge noted, during this period an "idyllic" vision of the socialist revolution began to take hold of the workers' movement:

"At the end of the last century, it was possible to entertain the great dream of an idyllic social transformation. Broadminded people went in for this, scorning or twisting Marx's science. They dreamed of the social revolution as the virtually painless expropriation of a tiny minority of plutocrats. Why should the proletariat in its magnanimity not break up the old blades and the modern firearms and grant an indemnity to its exploiters of yesterday? The last of the rich would peaceably die out, at leisure, surrounded by an atmosphere of healthy distrust. The expropriation of the treasures accumulated by capitalists, together with the rational organisation of production, would instantly procure well-being and security for the whole of society. All pre-war working class ideologies were to some degree penetrated by these false ideas. The radical myth of progress dominated. In the Second International, a handful of revolutionary marxists alone discerned the great outlines of historical development ..." (What Everyone Should Know about State Repression, chap 4, XI, first written in 1926)

This over-optimistic vision took different forms. In Germany, where the social democratic party grew into a mass party with a commanding presence not only in the trade unions but also in parliament and local councils, this notion of power falling like a ripe fruit into the hands of a movement that had already established its organisational bases inside the old system became more and more prevalent. The revolution was less and less seen as the old mole that erupts to the surface, the act of an outlaw class that has to bring down all the existing institutions and create a new form of power, and more and more understood as the culmination of a patient work of building, consolidating and canvassing inside the existing social and political institutions. And as we shall see when we look at the evolution of this conception in the work of Karl Kautsky, there was no Chinese Wall between this 'orthodox' view and the openly revisionist one of Bernstein and his followers, since if socialism can come about through gradually accumulating its forces inside the shell of capitalism, there may be no need for any final revolutionary overthrow at all.

In Britain, where out and out reformism, 'nothing but' trade unionism and parliamentary cretinism had in any case been more endemic within the workers' movement, the reaction of revolutionaries like Morris was rather one of retreating into a purist sectarianism that poured scorn on the fight for "palliatives" and insisted at all times that socialism was the only answer to the proletariat's problems. But since the defensive struggle was effectively dismissed, all that was left was the task of preaching socialism: "I say for us to make socialists is the business at present, and at present I do not think we can have any ·other useful business" ('Where are we now?', Commonweal, November 15, 1890), as though revolutionary consciousness would spread through society simply by more and more individuals being won over to the logic of socialist arguments. In fact towards the end of his life, Morris began to rethink his reservations about the fight for reforms, since the inability of his Socialist League to deal with this question helped bring about its demise and disappearance; but the sectarian vision continued to weigh heavily on the revolutionary movement in Britain. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, sterile from its very birth in 1903, is a classic embodiment of this trend.

Utopianism emerges in the workers' movement whenever the connection between the present-day struggles of the class and the future communist society disappears from sight. But we can't reproach the revolutionaries of this period too harshly for this. It was above all the objective conditions of the late nineteenth century which interfered with their vision. In the period that followed, the period in which capitalism began its descent down the mountain-side, changes in these objective conditions, and above all in the methods and forms of the class struggle, allowed the best elements in the social democratic movement to see the perspective more clearly. In the next articles in this series, we will therefore examine the debates which animated the social democratic parties in the 1900s, and particularly after the 1905 revolution in Russia - debates which were to centre not so much on the goal to be obtained, but on the means to obtain them.

CDW

(1) We cite this passage partly to refute the oft-repeated charge that Morris was 'anti-technology', which was raised as early as 1902, by Kautsky in his book The Social Revolution. Morris certainly thought that socialist society would witness a return of many of the skills and pleasures of handicraft production, but for him this would be a choice made possible by the fact that advanced machinery would substantially free the producers of repetitive and unattractive forms of labour.

**********

Morris as a revolutionary militant

William Morris had many political weaknesses. His rejection of parliament as a vehicle for socialist revolution was also accompanied by a refusal to apply any tactic of intervention in the parliamentary arena, which at that time was still on the historic agenda for workers' parties. Indeed, the Socialist League's lack of clarity on the problem of the immediate struggles of the working class led it towards a sectarian dead-end, where it was fully exposed to the destructive intrigues of the anarchists who entered it and soon interred it, with more than a little help from the bourgeois state.

Nevertheless, when the League was constituted, the result of a split with the Social Democratic Federation led by the 'Jingo Socialist' Hyndman, it had been supported by Engels as a step towards the development of a serious marxist current in Britain - and thus as a possible moment in the formation of a class party. And it is this aspect of Morris's socialism that the bourgeoisie most wants us to forget. Here it becomes plain that the attempt to reduce Morris to a kind of 'designer socialist', a harmless purveyor of art to the masses, is itself far from harmless. For Morris the socialist was not an isolated dreamer, but a militant who courageously broke with his class origins and willingly gave the last ten years of his life to the difficult labour of building a revolutionary organisation within the proletariat of Britain. And not only in Britain: the Socialist League saw itself as part of the international proletarian movement which gave birth to the Second International in 1889.

In his own day, Morris's devotion to the cause of socialism was ridiculed by the bourgeoisie who branded him a hypocrite, a fool and a traitor. Today the ruling class is even more determined to prove that committing one's life to the communist revolution is the purest folly. But the 'foolish' revolutionaries the 'crazy' communist organisations, are the only ones who can defend - and have the right to criticise - the political heritage of William Morris.

Amos (extract from 'The many false friends of William Morris' in World Revolution 195)

The following letter was sent to the ICC and to other groups and individuals in reply to a polemic in the paper in Britain of the ICC, World Revolution, entitled "The CWO falls victim to political parasitism". This polemic argued that the demise of the Communist Workers' Organisation's paper Workers' Voice, their apparent regroupment with the Communist Bulletin Group (CBG), and their refusal to help defend a public meeting of the ICC in Manchester from attack, were concessions to parasitism. Such concessions can be traced back to the inadequate bases of the CWO's formation and the organisational weaknesses of its regroupment with the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista).

CWO to World Revolution

"We have read your attack on us in World Revolution 190 with some astonishment. The ferocity of the polemic came as no surprise nor are we disputing the importance of the issue (revolutionary organisation) raised but from the fact that the entire basis for this polemic rests on a series of factual errors which could easily have been avoided by simply asking us what the situation was. When we read your very confusing account of your Eleventh Congress we did not launch into a polemic on the latest splits in the ICC on the basis of its supposed Stalinism. On the contrary the IBRP discussed this report with comrades of RI in Paris last June and were reassured by them that the ICC was merely ensuring that its future internal operation would be within the norms of principled proletarian politics. We entirely agree that the existence of "clans" (based on personal loyalties), unlike the existence of factions (based on political differences over new issues), are something that a healthy organisation has to avoid. However, we think your subsequent treatment of this question has led you into caricaturing the issue of political organisation for the present day. We will be dealing with this in a future article in our press. In the meantime we would like you to print this letter, by way of correction, for your readers to judge for themselves.

1. We will be writing a history of the CWO for our own members and sympathisers but we can assure your readers that long before the CWO or the ICC came into being the issue of federal rights had been settled in favour of a centralised international organisation. The request for federal rights FS refers to, is a single letter written before either the CWO or ICC existed, when Revolutionary Perspectives (RP) consisted of one person!

2. It was a condition of entering the CWO in September 1975 that the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was recognised as proletarian and remained so for the next three and half years.

3. The CWO's re-evaluation of the German and Italian Lefts contribution to the present day clarity of the international communist left did not take place overnight. It took five years of often difficult, and sometimes painful, argument with constantly changing factions as the issues themselves developed. The CWO's texts on this debate are to be found in Revolutionary Perspectives nos 18, l9 and 20. Our discussions with Il Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista) began when they fraternally criticised our Platform in September 1975 and we did not form the Bureau until 1984. Hardly a quick opportunist fix!

4. The Iranian "Maoists" you speak of were the Student Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants. They could not have been Maoists since the ICC would not have conducted (unbeknown to us at the time) secret discussions with them for months before we met them. They could not have been Maoists because they accepted all the criteria fixed as the basic proletarian criteria by the International Conferences of the Communist Left. Their subsequent evolution led them into the Communist Party of Iran which was formed on counter-revolutionary principles. Our critique of that organisation is to be found in Communist Review No. 1 .

5. The Communist Bulletin Group was not solely made up of ex-CWO members as all your articles try to maintain. They included those who had never been in the CWO including one founder-member of World Revolution (who had been, like all the other founders, in the Cardanite group Solidarity). It may also have escaped your readers notice but the CBG no longer exists except in the pages of WR.

6. The CWO has no regroupment, formal or informal with the ex-CBG or any of its individual members. In fact, apart from receipt of the announcement of their demise we have had no direct contact with the CBG since we sent them a text on organisation in June 1993. This seems to have precipitated their final crisis.

7. Members of the CWO did take part in the Sheffield Study Group which initially included anarchists, left communists of no affiliation, Subversion and one ex-CBG member. However as ICC members from London also attended (after requesting invitations from the anarchists rather than us!) we were not too worried about being swamped by parasites. This ended in the spring of 1995 when it was clear that only the CWO was interested in further study work. The Sheffield Study Group has since been superseded by a CWO Education Meeting which is open to all those who are sympathetic to the politics of the communist left and are prepared to study on the themes for each meeting. So far noone from any other organisation has attended.

8. We have never excluded the ICC from any one of our initiatives. When we invited them to take part in joint meetings of all groups of the communist left they refused on the grounds that they "would not share a platform with parasites" (but attended the meeting nonetheless). Far from fearing political confrontation with the ICC we were the ones to initiate the series of debates held in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the past we have attended dozens of ICC meetings in London and Manchester despite the geographical problems. The ICC has only once ever attended one of our Sheffield public meetings (and then only to sell WR) in fifteen years.

9. As a matter of fact there were no CWO members at the Manchester meeting around which your whole tawdry attack is based. A CWO sympathiser was the entire public until the other two individuals arrived. Nearly every word about the meeting is a gross exaggeration. Our sympathiser acted absolutely correctly in the meeting. He specifically dissociated himself from any criticism of the ICC as "Stalinist" but waited until the rest of the "public" had gone before criticising the behaviour of the Praesidium - the same FS who has woven the tissue of untruths we are now responding to.

1O. We have not liquidated our paper but adopted a new publications strategy which we think will allow us to reach more potential communists. The CWO has not abandoned any organisational existence "seemingly" or otherwise. On the contrary 1996 has opened with our organisational strengthening. With the present condition of World Revolution, as evidenced by this unprecedented sectarian polemic, it is clearly more necessary than ever that we continue our work for the emancipation of our class. This naturally includes serious debate amongst revolutionaries.

Reply to the CWO

To respond to the CWO's letter and to make our mutual disagreements intelligible to the proletarian political milieu, we have to go beyond a blow by blow answer to the above rectifications. We don't believe that our polemic was based on factual errors, as we shall show. We think that the CWO's factual rebuttals only obscure the very contentious issues. Their reply tends to give the impression that the debates between revolutionary organisations are simply pointless squabbles, and thus plays into the hands of the parasites who say that an organised confrontation of divergences is pointless.

We argued in our polemic that the weakness of the CWO towards parasitism was based on a fundamental difficulty in defining the proletarian political milieu, the process of regroupment that must take place within it and even the basis of their own existence as a separate group within this milieu. These organisational confusions are confirmed in the events of the CWO's birth and in its political behaviour with Battaglia Comunista at the Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left (1977-1980). Unfortunately the CWO doesn't take up these arguments - which are not new and have been developed in the International Review over the last twenty years - in its letter, preferring to hide behind the smokescreen of accusing us of factual errors.

The foundations of the CWO: incomplete regroupment

The CWO was formed on the basis of programmatic positions, and the theoretical framework developed by the Communist Left, and therefore it is a real expression of the development of class consciousness and organisation in the period since the end of the counter-revolution. But the CWO was formed in 1975, at the same time that another organisation - with whom it had been in close discussion hitherto - was created on the basis of the same class positions and framework: the International Communist Current. Why was a separate organisation created with the same politics? How could such a duplication of revolutionary forces be justified when their unity and regroupment are of paramount importance for their vanguard role in the working class? For the ICC the process of regroupment had to be continued whatever the difficulties. For the CWO a policy of separate development was necessary because of certain important but secondary differences with the ICC. The CWO had a different interpretation to the ICC of when the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was completed. The comrades considered, as a result, that the ICC was not a communist group at all, but a counter-revolutionary one.

Such a confusion about the basis on which a separate revolutionary organisation should be created, and how to relate to other organisations, inevitably reinforced the pressure of the chapel spirit that has been so pervasive during the re-emergence of communist forces since 1968.

One of the illustrations of this sectarian spirit was the request for federal rights within the ICC by the CWO-to-be.

In their letter the CWO comrades assert their belief in international centralisation and rejection of federalism. This is of course very commendable but doesn't answer the issue: was such a request (which the comrades don't deny having made) an expression of the sectarian mentality? Wasn't it an attempt to artificially preserve the identity of the group in spite of its fundamental agreement on the main principles of revolutionary marxism with the ICC? The real mistake of the letter was not in its concessions to federalism as such but in the attempt to keep the shop-keeper mentality alive.

We can see that such a sectarian spirit can lead to the weakening of certain principles that the organisation may otherwise be striving to uphold. Despite its firm belief in internationally centralised organisation the CWO's regroupment with Battaglia Communista in 1984 leading to the formation of the IBRP (i.e. at least 9 years after the issue of federal rights had been settled) allowed the CWO to keep a separate platform both from Battaglia and the IBRP, to keep its own name and determine its own national activity.

The issue here is not that the CWO don't believe in the spirit of international centralisation but that confusion on the organisational problems of regroupment makes the flesh weak.

It's true that this proposal of federal rights was probably not the most important sign of confusion on problems of regroupment. But we think the CWO are wrong to dismiss its significance altogether.

If the ICC had not firmly rejected this proposal, then it seems quite possible, judging by the federalist nature of the regroupment with Battaglia Comunista, that this request for federal rights would not have remained ink on paper.

It is silly of the comrades to complain that the letter was written before either the CWO or the ICC existed and is therefore hardly relevant. Such a letter could not have been written after the formation of the CWO since one of the bases of the latter was that the ICC had crossed into the camp of capital!

In another tangential rectification of our original polemic the CWO comrades insist that the recognition of the proletarian nature of the October Revolution of 1917 was a condition of membership of the CWO since September 1975.

We were aware of this comrades, and we did not argue the opposite in our polemic. The ICC well remembers the lengthy discussions it had to have from 1972-4 to convince the elements who were to found the CWO of the proletarian nature of October.[1] [49] We mentioned, in our polemic, that the Workers' Voice group of Liverpool with whom Revolutionary Perspectives joined in 1975 to form the CWO was not homogenous on this vital question, to further illustrate that this new regroupment was at best contradictory. This seemed to be confirmed when the CWO split into its two constituent parts a year later, and then split again in two not long after. Not only did the CWO elevate secondary questions to class frontiers, but also minimised fundamental questions.

The CWO, the International Conferences, and the IBRP

The problems of understanding what the proletarian political milieu is, and how it can be unified was also found at the International Conferences. The calling for such a forum by Battaglia Comunista and the positive responses given to it by the ICC, the CWO and others undoubtedly expressed the desire for the elimination of false divisions in the revolutionary movement. Unfortunately the attempt eventually ran aground after three of the conferences.

The principal reason for this was serious political errors concerning the conditions and process of the regroupment of revolutionaries.

The criteria of invitation by BC to the first conference was not clear since leftist grouplets of the time like Combat Communiste and Union Ouvrière were included in the list. Organisations that are part of the revolutionary camp like Programma Comunista were not included. Neither was it clear what the function of the gathering of communist groups was to be. In its original document of invitation BC proposed the turn of the European CPs toward social democracy as the theme.

From the beginning the ICC campaigned for a clear delimitation of who was eligible to attend such conferences. At this time the ICC (International Review no11) published a Resolution on Proletarian Political Groups from the second congress of the ICC. In International Review no17 the ICC published a Resolution on the Process of Regroupment that it submitted to the 2nd Conference. A clear idea of who was in the revolutionary milieu was necessary to pursue the process of regroupment. The ICC also insisted that the conference discussions should be devoted to examining the fundamental political differences which existed between the groups, and the progressive elimination of false divisions, particularly those created by sectarianism.

A measure of the different conceptions of what the conferences should be can be seen from an opening discussion at the 2nd Conference (November 1978). The ICC proposed a resolution that would include a criticism of the groups like Programma and the FOR that refused in a sectarian manner to participate. This resolution was rejected by both BC and the CWO, who said:

"We may regret that certain of these groups judged it not worthwhile to attend. However, it would be counter-productive to spend our time in condemning them. Possibly certain of these groups will change their mind in the future. In addition, the CWO is discussing with certain of these groups, and it would hardly be diplomatic to make such a resolution" (2nd Conference of groups of the Communist Left, Vol. 2, p3).

Here was the problem of the Conferences. For the ICC they had to continue according to clear organisational principles at the heart of the regroupment process. For the CWO and BC the latter was a question of... diplomacy, even if only the CWO was clumsy enough to spell this out.[2] [50]

Initially the CWO and BC were unclear who should be at the Conferences. Later they veered towards a sharp increase in the criteria, which they insisted on suddenly at the end of the 3rd Conference. The debate on the role of the party, which remained a major area of debate between the different groups, was closed. The ICC, which did not agree with the position adopted by BC and the CWO, was excluded.

The error of this manoeuvre was compounded when, at the 4th Conference, the CWO and BC again relaxed the criteria and the place of the ICC was taken by the Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants, whose break with Iranian leftism was merely a matter of appearance.

However, according to the CWO letter, the SUCM were not Maoists because the ICC had already discussed with them secretly and because they accepted the criteria for participation in the conferences.

The CWO seem to be adopting an unfortunate argument here - our mistakes were your mistakes - that is hardly an appropriate method for getting to the facts. We will return to this argument later.

"11. The domination of revisionism over the Communist Party of Russia has resulted in the defeat and retreat of the world working class from one of its important bulwarks".[3] [51]

By revisionism these Iranian Maoists, as they explain elsewhere in their program, meant the Krushchevite revision of Marxism-Leninism, i.e. of Stalinism. According to them the proletariat was finally defeated not when Stalin announced the building of socialism in one country, but on the contrary after Stalin had died: after the crushing of the Russian working class in the gulags and on the imperialist battlefields, the destruction of the Bolshevik Party, the smashing of the German, Spanish, and Chinese working class, after throwing twenty million human beings into the abattoir of the 2nd World War...

At its inception the CWO deemed the ICC to be counter-revolutionary, because it considered that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was not completed by 1921. Seven years later, the CWO held comradely discussions to form the future party with an organisation that considered the revolution had ended in... 1956!

According to the SUCM it was not socialist revolution that was on the historical agenda in Iran, as everywhere else, but the democratic revolution as a supposed stage toward it.

Denying the imperialist nature of the Iran/Iraq war, the SUCM offered the most sophisticated arguments for the proletariat to be sacrificed on the altar of national defence. The SUCM seemed to agree with BC/CWO on the role of the party. But the organising role it had in mind for the party was to mobilise the masses behind its bid for bourgeois power.

At the 4th Conference the CWO nevertheless had some insights into their real nature:

"Our real objection is however to the theory of the aristocracy of labour. We think this is the last germ of populism in UCM and its origin is in Maoism".[4] [52]

"The theory of revolutionary peasantry [of the SUCM] is reminiscent of Maoism, something we totally reject".[5] [53]

So much for an organisation that the CWO now says could not have been Maoists.

The great interest and pseudo-fraternity the SUCM showed toward the proletarian political milieu in Britain, and its disguise of its Stalinism behind a screen of verbal radicalism, certainly begins to explain how the CWO and BC could be taken in by such an organisation. Indeed the ICC section in Britain, World Revolution, initially believed the SUCM, considering it to be a possible expression of the workers' upsurge in Iran at the time (1980) before realising the SUCM's counter-revolutionary nature. But this alone does not provide a satisfactory explanation of the CWO's self-deception, particularly since WR warned the CWO what the SUCM was and criticised its own initially open-minded assessment. It also tried to denounce this organisation at a CWO Conference, but was shouted down by the CWO before it could finish.[6] [54]

Debate between revolutionaries cannot be based on the philistine morality of shared blame. There are mistakes and mistakes. World Revolution managed not to fall into any major errors, and drew the lessons. The CWO/BC made a tragic blunder, whose negative effects on the proletarian political milieu are still felt today. The grotesque farce of the 4th Conference finished the Conferences off as a point of reference for emerging revolutionary forces. And still the CWO refuses to recognise the disaster and the origins of it. We believe the origins of this disaster lie in a blindness to the nature of the proletarian political milieu that has led to a policy of regroupment based on diplomacy.

The formation of the IBRP.

In the WR polemic we argue that the regroupment between the CWO and the IBRP suffered from similar weaknesses as the International Conferences.

In particular this regroupment did not occur as a result of a clear resolution of the differences that separated the groups of the communist left, nor those between BC and the CWO.

On the one hand the IBRP affirmed that it was not a unified organisation since each group had its own platform. The IBRP has quite a few platforms: that of BC, of the CWO, and that of the IBRP that is the aggregate of the first two minus their disagreements. In addition the CWO has a Platform of Unemployed Workers Groups and a Platform of Factory Groups. It was also in the process of writing a "popular platform" with the Communist Bulletin Group as we shall see below.

The IBRP is for the party but already contains an organisation, BC, which claims to be the Party: Partito Comunista Internazionalista.

On the other hand, we have never seen in the press of these organisations or in the common press the least debate on their disagreements. And important differences remain on the possibility of revolutionary parliamentarism, and on the trade union and national questions.

In this respect the IBRP is in marked contrast to the ICC, which is a unified, centralised international organisation, and, following the tradition of the workers' movement, opens its internal debates toward the outside.

On the problem of their link-up with BC, the CWO letter asserts that the regroupment of the IBRP did not take place overnight and therefore cannot be seen as a quick opportunist fix.

Our polemic however doesn't mention the speed with which this regroupment took place, but criticises the solidity of its political and organisational basis.

The IBRP was based on a self-appointed selection of "leading forces" for the party of the future. Yet in the 12 years between its formation and today the IBRP has not even managed to unify its two founding organisations.

The attempted regroupment by the CWO with the CBG

The CWO's policy on regroupment - characterised by the lack of serious criteria for defining the proletarian political milieu and its enemies - again led to potentially catastrophic difficulties at the beginning of the 1990s. The lessons of its unhappy adventure with the Iranian leftists had not been drawn.

The CWO let itself be drawn into a rapprochement with the parasitic groups, the CBG and the EFICC (the so-called "External Fraction" of the ICC), announcing a possible New Beginning within the revolutionary milieu in Britain.

The CWO letter tells us however that it has no regroupment with the CBG, and has had no direct contact with this group since 1993. We are glad to hear it. But when the polemic in World Revolution no190 was written this information had not been made public and we therefore based ourselves on the most recent information from Workers' Voice on the subject:

"Given the recent practical cooperation between members of the CWO and CBG in the pit closure campaign the two groups met in Edinburgh in December to discuss the implications of this cooperation. Politically the CBG accepted that the Platform of the IBRP did not stand as a barrier to political work whilst the CWO clarified what it meant to be a centralised organisation in the present period. A number of misunderstandings were cleared up on both sides. It was therefore decided to make the practical cooperation more formal. An agreement was drawn up which the CWO as a whole will have to ratify in January (after which a more complete report will be issued) and included the following points:

1 The CBG were to make regular agreed contributions to Workers' Voice and receive all editor's reports (the same went for leaflets etc).

2 CWO quarterly meetings to be opened to CBG members after January.

3 The two groups to discuss a popular platform being drafted by a CWO comrade as an instrument of intervention. CBG to give a written response before a meeting in June 1993 to monitor progress in joint work.

4 The Leeds comrades of both organisations to prepare this meeting.

5 Joint public meetings to continue with all other groups of the Communist Left based in the UK welcome to join in.

6 This agreement to be at least briefly reported in the next WV".[7] [55]

Since no agreement (or disagreement) was reported in the next Workers' Voice, brief or otherwise, or any subsequent issue, and since a common activity was already taking place, it was surely valid to assume that some sort of regroupment had taken place between the CWO/CBG. The CWO rectification wrongly gives the impression that this regroupment was a pure invention on our part.

Just as the CWO believed it was possible to turn a Maoist organisation into the proletarian vanguard, so it thought it could turn parasites into militant communists. Just as it took the SUCM's acceptance of basic proletarian criteria at face value, so it believed the CBG when it accepted the IBRP platform, even though most of the members of this group, led by an element known as Ingram, split the CWO in 1978, and then attempted to destroy the British section of the ICC in 1981.

The CWO believed that it had clarified centralised organisation with a group that helped form a secret tendency within the ICC, with the aim of turning its central organs into a letter box (just as Bakunin's Alliance had tried to do with the General Council of the 1st International). It thought it could trust a group that had stolen material from the ICC and then threatened the latter with the police if it was recovered!

The CWO's initiative with the parasites, clearly enemies of revolutionary organisation, had the effect of dignifying the parasitic groups as authentic members of the Communist Left and of legitimising their slanders against the organisations of this milieu. The damage done by the CWO's attempted regroupment with the CBG thus includes that done to its own organisation. We are particularly convinced of this for the following reasons.

Firstly parasitism is not a political current in the proletarian sense. It doesn't define itself as a coherent organisation around a political program. On the contrary its very objective is to undermine such coherence in the name of anti-sectarianism and freedom of thought. Their work of denigrating revolutionary organisations and promoting disorganisation and confusion can be continued informally by ex-members even after they have dropped the pretence - as in the case of the CBG - of a formal existence.

Secondly parasitism, insofar as it is accepted as part of the revolutionary milieu, softens the vertebrae of the existing organisations, reducing their capacity to define themselves and others in a rigorous way. The results of this can be catastrophic, even if it might lead temporarily to numerical growth.

Even if the regroupment with the CBG was aborted serious questions nevertheless remain for the CWO. Why it did develop relations with such a group, when this group had no other reason to exist than to denigrate organisations of the proletarian political milieu? Why, instead of keeping quiet, did it not put forward seriously and openly the weaknesses and incomprehensions that had led it to such a political error?

Consequences of the adventure with the CBG

The polemic in World Revolution with the CWO was written in direct and immediate response to try and explain two recent worrying events: the failure to defend a WR public meeting from sabotage by the parasitic group Subversion and the liquidation of its newspaper Workers' Voice.

This indicated in our view a dangerous blindness to the enemies of the proletarian political milieu and even a tendency to take on some of the activity of political parasitism in place of communist militancy.

Unfortunately, the CWO letter doesn't consider the arguments of the polemic on this question as on the others.

As far as the public meeting was concerned there is nothing to answer according to the CWO because the ICC account of it is a gross exaggeration.

The fundamental question that the CWO avoids answering is: was the meeting sabotaged by parasites or not? The ICC has provided evidence in two issues of its monthly paper in Britain, World Revolution, of this sabotage. It consisted of: interrupting the meeting, repeated verbal and physical provocations against ICC militants, including all the typical parasitic slanders of Stalinism, authoritarianism etc, creating a climate where discussion was impossible and finally bringing the meeting itself to a premature halt. The CWO sympathiser failed to fight this sabotage at the meeting, and instead reserved his criticism for the ICC defence of it. The CWO would have done the same. They refuse to admit or deny that such sabotage took place let alone denounce it - and admonish the ICC for its unspecified gross exaggerations.

Likewise on Workers' Voice. The letter tells us that the CWO has not liquidated its paper but adopted a new publications strategy with Revolutionary Perspectives.

But the CWO has stopped publishing its newspaper Workers' Voice and replaced it with a theoretical magazine, Revolutionary Perspectives.

The letter doesn't respond to our argument that behind this new strategy is a serious concession to political parasitism. The CWO declared that Revolutionary Perspectives was for the reconstitution of the proletariat. Equally it suggested, without going into details, that the collapse of the USSR has created a whole new set of theoretical tasks.

This last point is certainly correct. But does it justify abandoning the paper?

Just when it is important to insist that revolutionary theory can only develop in the context of militant intervention in the class struggle, the CWO makes concessions to the ideas being peddled by certain academically inclined parasitic groups, which dress up their impotence and absence of militant conviction with the pretence of devoting themselves to new theoretical questions. Certainly, the CWO has not gone that far, but precisely because it is a group of the proletarian political movement, its weaknesses can serve as a figleaf for those groups that live parasitically off the movement. Moreover, we should note that the CWO's great preoccupation with the reconstitution of the proletariat bears a certain resemblance to the EFICC's hobby horse - a hobby horse that the latter got from doctors in sociology like Alain Bihr, the subtle spokesman (and well paid by the bourgeois media) for the idea that the proletariat no longer exists, or is no longer the revolutionary class.[8] [56] The purpose of such questioning by the parasites is of course not to arrive at a definite orientation for the working class, but to denigrate the militant organisational approach of Marxist theory and undermine its foundations. This is not what the CWO wants, but abandoning its paper and restricting its intervention to the publication of a theoretical review is hardly coherent with the crying need for the revolutionary newspaper as a collective propagandist, collective agitator, and collective organiser.

In its new publication the CWO, until the third issue failed to print its basic principles or give any idea of itself as an organisation. This is not accidental - it represents a serious weakening of its militant presence in the working class.

The CWO and the ICC

The CWO's difficulty with the question of the proletarian political milieu has led to a dangerous openness to the enemies of this milieu, both leftists and parasites. On the other hand it has ended up in an equally harmful policy of sectarian hostility toward the ICC.

In Britain it has tried to avoid any systematic confrontation of political differences with World Revolution, and tried to pursue a tactic of separate development particularly through discussion groups whose criterion for participation is extremely unclear except on the question of the exclusion of the ICC.

The CWO, according to their letter, participated in the Sheffield Study Group with anarchists, left communists, parasites like Subversion and an ex-member of the CBG. Recently this study group has been superseded by a CWO Education Meeting.

No, the CWO organised this Sheffield Study Group as a club without any clear political criteria as to participation or purpose, and seems to have killed it in a similarly confused way.

The CWO Education Meeting doesn't seem to have changed much: does it now exclude anarchists, parasites, or only those who don't want to study? By contrast the ICC's non-attendance continues to be a condition of its existence. At its last meeting, apparently on the Russian Left, the ICC as an organisation was specifically uninvited, even though a member of the ICC was invited - but only on the basis that she was the companion of one of the privileged participants! Naturally, since ICC militants are responsible to the organisation and not freelancers, this gracious invitation was turned down.

The ICC still hasn't been informed of any subsequent Education Meetings, despite what it says in the CWO letter, and until we are we can assume that they are intended, not as a reference point of political/theoretical confrontation within the proletarian political milieu, but as a sectarian get-together, where discussion is fuelled by the needs of diplomacy rather than clear principles.

It is quite true that the CWO has never admitted its policy of separate development as far as political meetings are concerned and claims, against all the evidence, that it has maintained an openness to the ICC restricted only by geographic or other contingent difficulties.

In over two decades since the formation of a communist left trend in Britain, the CWO may have attended dozens of ICC public meetings. But over this period, the number of the latter has run into the hundreds.

Since the CWO wrote their letter to us, the ICC has held a public meeting on Ireland in London and one in Manchester on the strikes in France at the end of last year, both subjects on which the CWO has written short polemics in its press. But they failed to attend the meetings to defend their point of view! Nor did the CWO attend an ICC meeting in London in January on the defence of revolutionary organisations. In the same period the CWO has held one open meeting in Sheffield on Racism, Sexism and Communism advertised in Revolutionary Perspectives no3, which hit the bookshops and the WR post box a week or so after the meeting had taken place.

The sectarian attitude of the CWO toward the ICC is hardly explained by geographic difficulties, unless we are to believe that internationalists like the CWO are incapable of overcoming the geographic problems of travelling the 37 miles from Sheffield to Manchester, or the 169 miles to London on a regular basis.

Here is the real reason. According to the CWO: "Debate is impossible with the ICC, as the CWO found out at a recent Manchester public meeting because the comrades cannot understand any fact, argument or theoretical idea which cannot be twisted into their framework. But this framework is an idealist one and, as one of our comrades stated at that same meeting, consists of the four walls of a madhouse".

So, debate is impossible with the ICC - but possible with leftists, anarchists, the SPGB, and parasites? It is time the CWO reconsidered its rudderless policy toward the regroupment of revolutionaries.

What is sectarianism?

According to the CWO letter, the ICC polemic is unprecedentedly sectarian. But profound and serious criticism by one revolutionary organisation of another, which even puts into question its very foundations, is not sectarian. Revolutionary organisations have a duty to confront their differences, to eventually eliminate the confusion and dispersal in the revolutionary camp and hasten the unification of revolutionary forces in the future single world party of the proletariat.

Sectarianism is rather characterised by an avoidance of such confrontation, whether by isolation or through opportunist manoeuvring to preserve the existence of one's separate group at any price.

Michael

On 26th May 1996, the New York Stock Exchange feted the 100th anniversary of its oldest economic indicator: the Dow Jones Index. With a 620% rise over the last fourteen years, the Dow Jones has beaten all its previous records: that of the 1920s (+ 468%), which preceded the Great Crash of October 1929 that led to the terrible crisis of the 30s; and that of the years of post-war "prosperity" (+487 % between 1949 and 1966), which preceded sixteen years of stagnation and "Keynesian management of the economy". "The longer this speculative madness lasts, the higher will be the price to pay later" warned the analyst B.M. Biggs: "the share prices of American companies no longer bear any relation to their real value" (Le Monde, 27th May 1996). Scarcely one month later. Wall Street fell abruptly for the third time in eight days, dragging all the European stock exchanges down in its wake. These new financial tremors have put all the talk about the "American recovery" and "the coming prosperity of Europe thanks to the single currency in its place: along with all the other baubles designed to deceive "the people" as to the real gravity of capitalism's crisis, and what is at stake in it. At regular intervals, these tremors return to confirm the currency of the marxist analysis of the capitalist system's historic crisis, and especially highlight the explosive nature of its accumulating tensions. And with good reason! Since the open reappearance, at the end of 1960s, of its inescapable crisis of overproduction, capitalism has survived essentially thanks to a colossal injection of credit. It is this huge indebtedness which explains the growing instability of the economic and financial system, and which engenders frantic speculation and repeated financial scandals: when the profits to be made from productive activity are too meagre, then "easy financial profits" take over.

For marxists, this new financial tremor was thus inevitable, given the situation. In our resolution on the international situation of April 1996, we wrote: "The 11th Congress emphasized that one of the main sources of this "recovery" - which we described at the time as a "jobless recovery" - was a headlong flight into debt, which could only lead to new convulsions in the financial world, and a new dive into open recession" (International Review no 86). Exhaustion of growth, plunge into recession, headlong flight into growing debt, financial destabilisation and speculation, development of pauperisation, a massive and worldwide attack on the living conditions of the proletariat: these are tile well-known ingredients of a crisis situation which is reaching explosive proportions.

Increasing deterioration of the economy

In the industrialised countries, annual growth rates are with difficulty stagnating at about 2%, in sharp contrast to the average 5% of the post-war years (1950-70). This represents a decline that has continued since the end of the 60s: 3.6% during the 1970s, and 2.9% between 1980-93. With the exception of some South-East Asian countries, whose economic overheating heralds new crashes of the Mexican variety, this tendency for growth rates to decline is both continuous and worldwide. This reality has been masked by massive debt, which has regularly boosted the illusory hopes of a "light at the end of the tunnel": the "recoveries" at the end of the 70s and 80s in the industrialised countries, the "development of the third world and the Eastern bloc" during the second half of the 70s, and more recently the illusions as to me opening up and "reconstruction" of the ex-Soviet bloc countries. Today, the last remnants of this fiction are collapsing. The "Third World" countries are bankrupt, and the East European countries are plunged in depression. Now, it is the turn of the last two "model countries": Germany and Japan. Long presented as models of economic virtue, for the former, and of dynamism for the latter, they have finally been caught by recession. Although the German economy was doped for a while by reunification, the illusion of a return to growth thanks to East German reconstruction has not lasted long. The myth of recovery thanks to a take-off of the ruined East European economies has thus been definitively laid to rest (see International Review nos 73 and 86).

As we have already said many times, the "cures" being applied to the capitalist economy, in the long run can only make its sickness worse.

The Japanese caste is significant in this respect. The economy of the world's second economic power represents 17% of global product. With a foreign trade surplus, Japan has become the world's banker, with foreign assets greater than $1000 billion. Japanese methods of organisation in the workplace have been taken as an example the world over, and according to the new theoreticians have become a new means of regulation which is supposed to allow an emergence from the crisis thanks to a "formidable increase in labour productivity". In fact, the Japanese recipes have served everywhere to justify a series of austerity measures such as increased labour flexibility ("just in time" manufacturing, "total quality", etc), and of pernicious ideological poisons like company corporatism, economic nationalism and the like.

Indeed, until recently Japan seemed to be miraculously spared the effects of economic crisis. After the heady 60s, with growth rates around 10 %, growth remained at 5% during me 70s and 3.5 % during the 80s. However, since 1992 growth has failed to exceed 1%. Like Germany, Japan has returned to the feeble growth rates of the other main developed countries. Only idiots or the worst ideological lackeys of the capitalist system could believe or pretend to believe in a Japanese "special case". Its performance is easily explained. Certainly, some special domestic factors may have played a part, but fundamentally Japan benefited from a singularly favourable situation at the end of World War II. Above all, and even more than other countries, it has long used and abused its credit. As a central element in the US opposition to Russian expansionism in Asia. Japan enjoyed exceptional economic and political support from the United States (institutional reforms overseen by the American, cheap credit, opening the US market to Japanese goods, etc). Another factor which is not emphasized often enough is the fact that Japan is certainly one of the most indebted countries on the planet. Today, me accumulated debt of all non-financial agents (households, companies, and the state) represents 260% of GNP; in a decade, it is expected to reach 400%) (see table). In other words, Japanese capital has advanced itself two and a half - soon to be four - years of production in order to stay afloat.

This mountain of debt is a real powder-keg, whose fuse is already burning slowly. The danger is all the greater, not just for the country itself but for the rest of the world economy as well, because Japan is the world's savings bank, providing 50% of the OECD countries' financing needs. All this puts into proportion the recent Japanese announcement of a slight upward movement in growth figures, after four years of stagnation. The bourgeois media represented this as a piece of encouraging news, whereas in reality it only illustrates the gravity of the crisis since the result was only achieved with difficulty, after massive cash injections by five separate recovery plans. This expansion of the budget - in the purest Keynesian tradition - bore fruit at last...but only at the cost of debts still more gigantic than those which lay behind the original recession. The "recovery" is thus extremely fragile, and in the end is doomed to collapse like an overcooked soufflé. At 60% of GDP, Japan's public debt is now larger than the USA's. Given the credits already committed, and the snowball effect, in ten years this figure will rise to 200% of GDP, or two year's average salary for every Japanese citizen. In 1995, the budget deficit was already 7.6% of GDP, which is well above Europe's Maastricht criteria, and the USA's 2.8%. Nor do these figures take into account the consequences of the bursting of the bubble of property speculation at the end of the 80s, whose effects are yet to be felt in an extremely fragile banking system. The latter is still struggling to absorb its enormous losses; many financial institutions have gone bankrupt or are about to do so. In this domain alone, the Japanese economy is confronting a mountain of $460 billion of bad debt. One sign of the sector's extreme fragility is the country's classification by the specialist in risk analysis, Moody's: Japan is the only OECD country with a "D" classification, which puts it at the same level as China, Mexico, or Brazil. Of the eleven merchant banks classified by Moody's, only five have assets greater than their bad debts. Twenty-nine of the world's 100 largest banks are Japanese (including the top 10), whereas the USA only has nine, and starts at the 29th position. If we add the debts of these financial organisms to those of other economic agents (see above), we have a monster alongside which Tyrannosaurus Rex is no more menacing than a domestic cat.

Doped capitalism creates a casino economy

Contrary to myth - a myth carefully maintained to justify a succession of austerity plans - capitalism's health is not improving. The bourgeoisie would like us to believe that we must pay today for the follies of the 70s, in order to make a new start on a healthy basis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Debt is still capitalism's only means of retarding the explosion of its own contradictions, and it has no choice but to use it. In fact, the increase in debt is the means of mitigating the effects of a level of demand which has been historically inadequate ever since World War I. The conquest of the entire planet at the turn of the century represents the moment from which the capitalist system has been constantly confronted with a shortfall of solvent outlets necessary for it to function "well". Unable to sell all that it produces on the market, capitalism cannibalises itself at regular intervals in a growing and infernal spiral of crises (1912-1914, 1929-39, 1968-today), wars (1914-1918, 1939-1945), and reconstructions (1920-1928, 1946-1968).

Today, the falling rate of profit and the frantic competition between the main economic powers are driving an ever-increasing productivity, which only increases the mass of products to be realised on the market. However, these cannot be considered as commodities representing a certain value unless they are sold. The problem is that capitalism does not create its own markets spontaneously: it is not enough that a commodity should be produced for it to be sold. As long as a product has not been sold, labour remains incorporated within it; only once production has been recognised as socially useful through sale, can products be considered as commodities, and tile labour incorporated within them converted into value.

Debt is thus not a choice, an economic policy that the world's leaders can decide to use, or not. It is a constraint, a necessity forced on them by the very functioning and contradictions of the capitalist system (see our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism). This is why the debt of all the economic actors has grown continuously, and especially during the last few years.

This gigantic indebtedness of the capitalist system, which has reached levels, and ratios, unknown in its entire history, is the real source of the world financial system's growing instability. It is also significant that for some time now, the stock exchange seems to have integrated into its own functioning the irreversible decline of the capitalist economy; this gives some idea of the capitalist class' confidence in the future of its own system! Whereas under normal circumstance, share values rise when the health and prospects of quoted companies are good, and fall when they are poor, today shares rise when news is bad, and fall it is good. Thus we saw the Dow Jones index rise 70 points in one day when the USA's unemployment figures showed a rise for July 1996. Similarly, ATT's shares shot upwards at the announcement of 40,000 redundancies, while those of Moulin ex in France rose by 20 % the day it was decided to lay off 2,600 workers, etc. Conversely, when official figures show unemployment in decline, the same is true of share values! It's a sign of the times, that profits are no longer expected from capitalism's growth, but from its "rationalisation".

George Soros, who made some £600 million by speculating against sterling in 1992, recently declared that "There is something perverse in the system, if a man like me can break a currency". But this perversion of the system is not due, as the media like to tell us, to the greed or "lack of civic spirit" of a few speculators, nor to capital's new international freedom of circulation, nor to progress in computing and telecommunications. Patchy growth, and a general difficulty to sell, creates an excess of capital which can no longer find productive investments. The crisis is thus also expressed in the fact that profits made from production no longer find enough outlets in profitable investment to increase productive capacity. "Crisis management" thus means finding other outlets for this excess of floating capital, to avoid their abrupt devalorisation. States and international institutions are thus working to create the conditions which would make this possible. Hence the new financial policies being put in place, and the new "freedom" of capital.

"outlets" in speculation, financial operations and dubious international loans. Today, annual world trade is worth some $3,000 billion, while international capital movements are estimated at $100,000 billion (30 times more!). Had there been no removal of exchange controls, or floating currency, this dead weight of capital would have made the crisis still worse.

Capitalism in a dead-end

C.Mcl

Sources

* The data concerning company and household debt is taken from Michel Aglietta's book Macroeconomic financiere, Ed La Decouverte, collection Reperes no 166. His source is the OECD's calculations on the basis of national accounts.

* The data on state debt is drawn from the annual L'etat du monde 1996, Ed La Decouverte.

* The data cited in the text comes from the papers Le Monde and Le Monde Diplomatique.

Since the events in South Lebanon last spring, inter-imperialist tensions have gone on accumulating in the Middle East. Thus, once again, the bourgeoisie's speechifying about the advent of a new "era of peace" in this region, one of the main imperialist powder-kegs on the planet, has been given the lie. This zone, which for forty years was a major stake in the conflict between the two blocs, is now at the centre of the bitter struggle between the great imperialist powers that used to make up the western bloc. Behind this hotting up of imperialist tensions, there is a major challenge being mounted to the world's leading power in what has been one of its principal hunting grounds, and this challenge has even involved its closest allies and lieutenants.

The world's leading power challenged in its Middle East hunting ground

But without doubt one of the most spectacular symptoms of the new imperialist reality emerging in the region is the evolution of the policies of the Saudi state (which served as the main base for the US army during the Gulf war) towards its American tutor. Whoever was actually behind it, the terrorist attack on US troops in Dahran was a direct strike at the American military presence and already expressed a clear weakening of the USA's grip over what has been one of its Middle East strongholds. But if we add to that the particularly warm greeting given the visit of Chirac, head of a country which is spearheading the challenge to US leadership, we can get some idea of the deterioration of American positions in what was up till very recently a state totally submissive to Washington's diktats. It is evident that the domination of "Uncle Sam" is less and less tolerable to certain fractions of the Saudi ruling class, who are trying to squirm away from the US by moving towards certain European countries. The fact that prince Abdallah, the heir to the throne, is at the head of these fractions shows the strength of the anti-American tendency which is emerging.

The fact that once docile allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia can show such a reticence to obey the commands of Uncle Sam, that they are not hesitating to tighten their links with the main challengers to the American "order" such as France, Britain and Germany[2] clearly signifies that we are seeing an important modification in the imperialist balance of forces in an area which not long ago was the USA's exclusive hunting ground. In 1995, while the Americans were faced with a difficult situation in ex-Yugoslavia, they still reigned as absolute masters in the Middle East. After the Gulf war, they had managed to boot the European powers right out of the region. France had seen its presence in Lebanon reduced to zero, and at the same time it had lost its influence in Iraq. Britain had been given no reward for its loyalty and very active participation in the Gulf war; Washington merely tossed it a few crumbs in the reconstruction of Kuwait. During the Israel-Palestinian peace talks, Europe had a miserable walk-on part while the USA was conductor of the orchestra. This situation more or less lasted until the Clinton show at the Sharm EI Sheikh summit. But since then, Europe has made a new thrust into the region, at first discretely but then more openly and powerfully, taking advantage of the fiasco of the Israeli operation in South Lebanon, skilfully exploiting the difficulties this posed to the USA.

The latter has found it harder and harder not only to put pressure on traditional mavericks like Syria but also on some of its most solid allies, as the example of Saudi Arabia shows. The fact that this is happening in the Middle East, which is so key to the upkeep of American global leadership, is in itself a clear symptom of the serious difficulties confronting the US superpower. The fact that Europe has managed to re-insert itself into the Middle East arena, to defy the US in one of the regions of the world which it controlled the most tightly, undoubtedly expresses a weakening of the world's leading power.

US leadership runs into trouble on the world arena

The reverse suffered in the Middle East by the US world cop is all the more significant in that it has taken place only a few months after the victorious US counter-offensive in ex-Yugoslavia. This offensive had as its principal aim that of disciplining America's European ex -allies who had gone over to open rebellion. In no. 85 of this Review, while we stressed the set -back this meant for tile Franco-British tandem in particular, we also noted the limits of the USA's success by showing that if the European bourgeoisies had been forced to retreat in ex-Yugoslavia, they would look for another terrain on which to reply to American imperialism. This prognosis has been clearly verified by recent developments in the Middle East. While the US maintains an overall control of the situation in ex-Yugoslavia - which doesn't mean no longer has to deal with the underhand manoeuvres of the European powers there - we can see that in the Middle East, which the US used to run without any real challenge, its domination is more and more being put into question.

But the world's leading power is not only confronted with this challenge to its leadership in the Middle East, and its difficulties aren't limited to this part of the world. We could say that in the terrible free for all between the great powers - which is the main expression of the moribund nature of the system - the US is faced with more and more open challenges to its leadership all over the planet.

In North Africa, the USA's efforts to chase out, or at least seriously reduce the influence of French imperialism have met with considerable difficulties and at the moment is more or less a failure. In Algeria, the Islamic movement which has been used by the USA to destabilise the existing regime and its backer, French imperialism, is in open crisis. The recent actions by the CIA should be seen more as the despairing acts of a movement that are cracking up than tile expression of a real force. The fact that the main source of supplies to the Islamic fractions, Saudi Arabia, is more and more reluctant to go on financing them is weakening the USA's capacity to keep up the pressure. While the situation in Algeria is far from stable, the fraction which holds power with the support of the army and of France has clearly strengthened its positions with the re-election of the sinister Zaroual. At the same time, France has managed to restore its links with Tunisia and Morocco, which in recent years had become increasingly open to the siren-songs of the USA.

In black Africa, after the success it enjoyed in Rwanda when it kicked out the clique linked to France, the USA now faces a much more difficult situation. While French imperialism has reinforced its credibility through its muscular intervention in the Central African Republic, American imperialism has suffered a setback in Liberia where it has had to abandon its protégés. The USA tried to regain the initiative in Burundi by repeating what it did in Rwanda, but here again it has been met by a vigorous riposte from France. The latter, with Belgian support, has fomented the Bouyaya coup d'état, which has pulled the carpet from under tile feet of the "African Intervention Force" which the US was trying to set up under its own control. We should underline that these successes for French imperialism - which not long ago was pinned up against the wall by American pressure - are to a large extent due to Its tight collaboration with that other former colonial power in Africa,· Great Britain. The Americans have not only lost the latter's support but now find it standing against them.

In Asia, US leadership is also being contested. China doesn't miss any opportunity to strike out for its own imperialist interests even if they are antagonistic to those of the USA, while Japan has also shown a will to win greater autonomy from Washington. New demonstrations against US military bases take place at regular intervals and the Japanese government has declared that it wants closer political ties with Europe. Even a country like Thailand which was once a veritable bastion of American imperialism is also taking its distance by stopping support for the Khmer Rouge, who were the USA's mercenaries, thus assisting France's efforts to recover its influence in Cambodia.

Europe and Japan rushed to take advantage of the tensions stirred up by the harsh penalties imposed on several Latin American countries for flouting this law. The warm welcome reserved for the Colombian president Samper when he visited Europe, at a time when the US is trying hard to get rid of him, was a new illustration of where things stand. The French paper Le Monde wrote on 4.9.96: Whereas up till now, the USA has studiously ignored the Group of Rio (an association regrouping nearly all the South American countries), the presence in Cochabamba (the place where this group meets) of M Albright, tile US ambassador to the UN, has been widely noted. According to certain observers, it's the political dialogue taking place between the Group of Rio and the European Union and Japan which explains the USA's change of attitude.

The disappearance of imperialist blocs and the triumph of "every man for himself"

How are we to explain this weakening of the US superpower and the challenge to its global leadership, even though it remains the greatest economic power on the planet, and above all has an absolute military superiority over all Its European rivals? Unlike the USSR, the USA did not collapse with the disappearance of the blocs which had ruled over the planet since Yalta. But this new situation nevertheless profoundly affected the only remaining superpower. We gave the reasons for this in the resolution on the international situation from the 12th Congress of Revolution Internationale, published in International Review no 86: "This threat (...) springs essentially from the fact that today there no longer exists the essential precondition for any real solidity and stability in alliances between bourgeois states in the imperialist arena: the existence of a common enemy threatening their security. The powers of the ex-western bloc may be forced, at one time or another, to submit to Washington's diktats, but it is out of the question for them to remain faithful on a durable basis. On the contrary, they will seize any opportunity to sabotage the orientations and dispositions imposed by the USA".

All the blows struck against US leadership in the past few months have to be seen in this context: the absence of any common enemy means that American displays of force become less and less effective. Thus, Desert Storm, despite the very considerable political, diplomatic and military means deployed by the US to impose its "New World Order" did not even hold back its "allies" strivings towards independence for one year. The outbreak of the war in Yugoslavia in the summer of 92 meant, in effect, the failure of this "US world order". Even the USA's success in ex -Yugoslavia at the end of 95 was not able to prevent die rebellion that took place in the spring of 96! To a certain extent, the more the US resorts to displays of strength, die more it reinforces die determination of its rivals to step up their challenge and the more it draws others into their wake, including some of the USA's once most docile clients. Thus, when Clinton tried to pull Europe into a crusade against Iran in the name of anti-terrorism, France, Britain and Germany gave him the cold shoulder. Similarly, the attempt to punish states trading with Cuba, Iran or Libya has only served to provoke a wall of shields against the USA, as we have seen in die case of Latin America. This aggressive attitude has also had its effects on a country as important as Italy which is in the balance between the USA and Europe. The sanctions imposed by Washington on some big Italian enterprises for their dealings with Libya have merely strengthened the pro-European forces in Italy.

This situation expresses the impasse facing the world's leading power:

- either it does nothing, renounces the use of force (which is its only way of exerting pressure today), which would give a free hand to its rivals;

- or it asserts its superiority through an aggressive policy (which it is tending to do more and more), and this quickly rebounds against it, further isolating it and stirring up the anti-American reactions which are spreading all over the world. However, in conformity with the utter irrationality of inter -imperialist relations in the period of capitalism's decadence, a characteristic which has been exacerbated in the current phase of accelerating decomposition, the USA can only make use of force to try to preserve its status on the imperialist arena. We are thus seeing it resort more and more to the methods of trade war, which are not simply the expression of the ferocious economic competition which is tearing through a capitalist world deep in the pits of the crisis but are also a weapon for the defence of imperialist prerogatives against all those who challenge US leadership. But faced with a challenge on such a scale trade war is not enough and the USA is increasingly forced to let die guns speak, as we saw recently with its intervention in Iraq.

By launching 44 cruise missiles against Iraq, in reply to the incursions into Kurdistan by Saddam Hussein's army, the USA has shown its determination to defend its positions in the Middle East, and more generally to remind everyone that it intends to maintain its role as world leader. But the limits of this new demonstration of force appeared straight away:

- at the level of the means deployed, which were a pale replica of Desert Storm;

- but also via the fact that tins new "punishment" which the USA was attempting to inflict on Iraq had very little support in the region. The Turkish government refused to allow the Americans to use the forces based on its territory, while Saudi Arabia didn't allow US planes to take off from its territory to go and bomb Iraq; it even called on Washington to stop the operation. The majority of Arab countries openly criticised this military intervention. Moscow and Peking clearly condemned the American initiative, while France, followed by Spain and Italy, overtly disapproved of it. All this shows how far we have come from tile unanimity the US was able to impose during die Gulf war. Such a situation reveals lie degree to which US leadership was been weakened since then. The US bourgeoisie would have liked no doubt to have made a much more striking show of force, and not only in Iraq but also, for example, against the regime in Iran. But given the lack of support, including in the region itself, they were forced to let the guns speak at a much lower level.

However, while this operation in Iraq had a limited impact, we should not underestimate the benefits it has brought to the US. Apart from being a low-cost demonstration of their absolute superiority at the military level, notably in the Middle East, they have above all succeeded in sowing divisions among their main European rivals. The latter have often been able to mount a united front against Clinton and his diktats about Iran, Libya or Cuba. The fact that Britain has rallied loyally to the intervention in Iraq, to the point where Major has "saluted the courage of the USA", that Germany seems to share this position while France, supported by Rome and Madrid, has been questioning the whole reason for these bombings, is evidence of a spanner thrown in the works of the European union! The fact that Bonn and Paris are yet again not on the same wave-length is not new. The divergences between the two sides of the Rhine have been accumulating since 1995. The same cannot be said about the wedge placed between French and British imperialism on this occasion. Since the war in ex-Yugoslavia, France and Britain have continually strengthened their cooperation (recently they signed a very important military agreement, to which Germany was associated, involving the joint construction of cruise missiles), and their "friendship", to the point where British planes took part in the last 14 July parade in Paris. Through this project London was clearly expressing its will to break with a long tradition of military cooperation with and dependence on Washington. Does the support given by London to the US intervention in Iraq signify that "perfidious Albion" is finally bowing to the sustained pressure the US has been bringing to bear on it, with the aim of pulling it back under its control? Is Britain about to become the faithful lieutenant of the USA once again? No, because this support is not an act of allegiance to the American Big Boss but the defence of the particular interests of British imperialism in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. This country was once a British colony but under the reign of Saddam Hussein London has lost all influence. France, on the other hand, had gained a solid footing there; following the Gulf war it lost many of its positions but had been about to recover some of them thanks to the weakening of US hegemony over the Middle East. In these conditions Britain's only hope of regaining any influence in this region lies in the overthrow of tile Butcher of Baghdad. This is also the reason why London has always taken the same hard line as Washington over the UN resolutions about Iraq, whereas Paris has always pleaded for the US-imposed embargo on Iraq to be lightened.

While "every man for himself" is a general tendency which undermines American leadership, it also manifests itself amongst the USA's rivals and makes all imperialist alliances highly fragile; even when they have a relative solidity, like the one between London and Paris, they are much more variable than the ones which prevailed during the period when the existence of a common enemy made it possible for blocs to exist. And while the USA is the main victim of this new historical situation engendered by the decomposition of the system, it can only try to exploit the reigning tendency towards "every man for himself for its own ends. The Americans already did this in ex-Yugoslavia when they didn't hesitate to make a tactical alliance with their most dangerous rival, Germany, and they are now trying the same manoeuvre vis-a-vis the Anglo-French tandem. Despite its limitations, the blow struck against Anglo-French unity represents an undeniable success for Clinton, and the American political class had no hesitation in giving its unanimous support to the Iraqi operation.

However, this American success will have very limited effects and will not put an end to the development of "every man for himself", which is profoundly undermining the hegemony of the world's first power; nor will it free the USA from its current impasse. In some ways, even if the USA, thanks to its economic and financial power, has a strength which the leader of the eastern bloc never had, it is possible to draw a parallel between the current situation of the USA and that of the USSR in the days of the eastern bloc. At root, it too can only resort to brute force to preserve its domination, and this always expresses a historic weakness. This exacerbation of "every man for himself" and the impasse facing the world cop actually express the historic impasse of the capitalist mode of production. In this context, imperialist tensions between the great powers can only move towards a crescendo, bringing death and destruction to more and more regions of the planet and aggravating the frightful chaos which is already the lot of entire continents. There is only one force that can stand against this sinister extension of barbarism, by developing its struggles and calling the whole world capitalist system into question: the proletariat.

RN, 9.9.96

[1] Relations between France and Egypt are particularly warm and Germany's Kohl was received there with much ceremony. As for the Secretary General of the UN, Boutros-Ghali, who the Americans want to replace at all costs. Throughout the war in ex- Yugoslavia he continuously blocked American action and defended a pro-French orientation.

[2] The fact that a meeting between emissaries of the Israeli and Egyptian governments took place in Paris is no accident; it sanctions the reintroduction of France into the Middle East, but also the will of the Israelis to address a message to the USA: if the Americans put too much pressure on the new government, Israel will not hesitate to look for support from among its European rivals.

[3] While Germany is compelled to be prudent about the danger of exacerbating the incredible chaos in Russia, the fact that Poland and ex-Czechoslovakia are more "stable" means that there is a kind of buffer zone between themselves and this danger. This gives it more leeway to pursue its historic goal of gaining access to the Middle East With the help of Iran and Turkey. It also allows it to put pressure on Russia with the aim of weakening its ties with the USA. Thus oh-so-democratic Germany is feeding on the chaos in Russia in order to defend its imperialist interests.

In the first two parts of this series, we have shown the origins and development of Bakunin's Alliance, and how the bourgeoisie supported and manipulated this sect as a war machine against the First International. We have seen the absolute priority which Marx and Engels, and all the healthy proletarian elements in the International, gave to the defence of working class principles of functioning in the struggle against organizational anarchism. In this article; we will draw the lessons of the Hague Congress, one of the most important moments in the struggle of marxism against political parasitism. Socialist sects, which no longer had any place in a still young, but developing working class movement, began to devote their main activity to fighting, not the bourgeoisie, but the revolutionary organisations themselves. All these parasitic elements, despite their own political divergences, rallied around Bakunin's attempts to destroy the International.

The lessons of this struggle against parasitism at the Hague Congress are particularly relevant today. Due to the break in organic continuity with the past workers' movement, there are many parallels between the development of the revolutionary milieu after 1968 and that at the beginning of the workers movement. In particular, there is, if not an identity. a strong parallel between the role of political parasitism at the time of Bakunin and today.

The tasks of revolutionaries after the Paris Commune

The Hague Congress of the First International in 1872 is one of the most famous congresses in the history of the workers' movement. At this congress the historic "showdown" between Marxism and Anarchism took place. This congress marked a decisive step in overcoming the sectarian phase which had marked the early days of the workers' movement. At the Hague the groundwork was laid for overcoming the separation between the socialist organisations on the one hand and the mass movements of proletarian class struggle on the other. The congress firmly condemned the petty bourgeois anarchist "rejection of politics", as well as its aloofness from the daily defensive struggles of the class. Above all, it declared that the emancipation of the proletariat required its organisation into an autonomous political class party in opposition to all the parties of the propertied classes. (Resolution on the statutes, Hague Congress).

In fact, by the time of the Hague Congress the best representatives of the workers' movement were realising that the weight of the Proudhonists, Blanquists, Bakuninists and other sectarians within the leadership of the insurrection had been the principle political weakness of the Commune. This was linked to the incapacity of the International to influence the events in Paris in the centralized and coordinated manner of a class party.

Thus, after the fall of the Paris Commune, the absolute priority for the workers' movement became to shake off the weight of its own sectarian past, to overcome the influence of petty bourgeois socialism.

Thus, the delegates came to The Hague, not only to repel the international repression and slanders against the Association, but also and above all to defeat the attack against the organisation from within. These internal attacks were led by Bakunin, who was now openly calling for the abolition of organizational centralization, for the non-respect of the statutes. The non-payment of membership dues to the General Council, and the rejection of the political struggle. Above all, he opposed all the decisions of the London Conference of 1871, which, drawing the lessons from the Paris Commune, defended the need for the International to play the role of the class party. At the organizational level, this conference had called on the General Council to assume without hesitation its role of centralization, embodying the unity of the International between congresses. And it condemned the existence of secret societies within the International, ordering the preparation of a report on the scandalous activities of Bakunin and Nechayev in the name of the International in Russia.

Bakunin's arrogance was partly an attempt to brazen out the discovery of his activities against the International. But it was above all a strategic calculation. The Alliance reckoned to exploit the weakening and disorientation of many parts of the organisation after the defeat of the Paris Commune, with the aim of wrecking the International at the Hague Congress itself, under the watching eyes of the whole world. Bakunin's attack against the "dictatorship of the General Council" was contained in the Sonvilliers Circular of November 1871, sent to all the sections, and skilfully aimed at rallying all the petty bourgeois elements who felt threatened by the thorough proletarianisation of the organizational methods of the International advocated by the central organs. Long extracts of the Sonvilliers circular were republished in the bourgeois press under the title "The International monster is devouring itself". "In France, where everything in any way connected with the International was wildly persecuted, it was posted up on the houses" (Nicolaievsky: Karl Marx P.380).

The alliance between parasitism and the ruling classes

More generally speaking, not only the Paris Commune, but the foundation of the International itself, were both expressions of one and the same historical process. The essence of this process was the maturation of the emancipation struggle of the proletariat. Since the mid-1860s, the workers' movement had begun to overcome its own "childhood disorders". Drawing the lessons of the revolutions of 1848, the proletariat, no longer accepted the leadership of the radical wing of the bourgeoisie, and was now fighting to establish its own class autonomy. But this autonomy required that the proletariat overcome the domination, within its own organisations, of the theories and organizational concepts of the petty bourgeoisie, Bohemian and declassed elements etc.

Thus, the struggle to impose the proletarian approach within its organisations, which after the Paris Commune reached a new stage, had to be waged not only towards tile outside, against tile attacks of the bourgeoisie, but within the International itself. Within its ranks, the petty bourgeois and declassed elements waged a ferocious struggle against the imposition of these proletarian political and organizational principles, since this meant the elimination of their own influence over the workers organisation.

In this way, these sects, "at the beginning levers of the movement, become a hindrance, as soon as they are rendered obsolete by it; they then become reactionary" (Marx/Engels: The Alleged Splits in the International).

The Hague Congress thus set itself the goal of eliminating the sabotage of the maturation and autonomy of tile proletariat by the sectarians. A month before the congress, the General Council declared in a circular to all members of the International that it was high time to finish once and for all with the internal struggles caused by "the presence of this parasitic body". And it declared: "By paralyzing the activity of the International against the enemies of the working crus, the Alliance magnificently serves the bourgeoisie and its governments".

The Hague Congress revealed that the sectarians, who were no longer a lever of the movement, but had become parasites living off the back of proletarian organisations, had organized internationally to coordinate their war against the International. They preferred to destroy the workers' party rather than accept that the proletariat emancipate itself from their influence. It was revealed that political parasitism, in order to prevent itself landing on the famous "rubbish dump of history" where it belonged, was prepared to form an alliance with the bourgeoisie. The basis of this alliance was a common hatred of tile proletariat, even if this hatred was not for the same reason. One of the great achievements of The Hague was its capacity to show the essence of this political parasitism, that of doing the job of the bourgeoisie, participating in the war of the propertied classes against communist organisations.

The delegates prepare to confront Bakuninism

The written declarations sent to The Hague by different sections, especially in France where the Association worked in clandestinity and many delegates could not attend the congress, show the mood within the International on the eve of the Congress. The main points to be dealt with were the proposed extension of the powers of the General Council, the orientation towards a political class party, and the confrontation with Bakunin's Alliance and other blatant violations of tile statutes.

Marx's decision to attend the congress in person was only one of many signs of tile determination within the ranks of the organisation to uncover and destroy the different plots being developed within the Association, all of which were centred around Bakunin's Alliance. This Alliance, a hidden organisation within the organisation, was a secret society set up according to the bourgeois model of freemasonry. The delegates were well aware that behind these sectarian manoeuvres around Bakunin stood the ruling class.

"Citizens, never was a congress more solemn and more important than the one whose sittings bring you together in The Hague. What indeed will be discussed will not be this or that insignificant question of form, this or that trite article of the Regulations, but the very life of the Association.

Impure hands stained with Republican blood have been trying for a long time to sow among us a discord which would be profitable only to the" most criminal of monsters, Louis Bonaparte; intriguers expelled with shame from our midst - the Bakunin's, Malons, Gaspard Blancs and Richards - are trying to found we know not what kind of ridiculous federation intended in their ambitious projects to crush the Association. Well, citizens, it is this germ of discord, grotesque in its arrogant designs, but dangerous in its daring manoeuvres, which must be annihilated at all costs. Its life is incompatible with ours and we rely on your pitiless energy to achieve a decisive and brilliant success. Be without pity, strike without hesitation, for should you retreat, should you weaken, you would be responsible not only for the disaster suffered by the Association, but moreover for the terrible consequences which this would lead to for the cause of the proletariat" (Paris Ferre section to the Hague Delegates: Minutes and Documents (M+D) of Hague Congress P. 238).

Against the Bakuninist demand for the autonomisation of the sections and the virtual abolition of the General Council, the central organ representing the unity of the International, the Paris sections declared:

"If you claim that the Council is a useless body, that the federations could do without it by corresponding among themselves (...) then the International Association is dislocated. The proletariat goes back to the period of the corporations (...) Well, we Parisians declare that we have not shed our blood in floods at every generation for the satisfaction of parochial interests. We declare that you have understood nothing at all about the character and the mission of the International Association" (Paris Sections: M + D P. 235). The sections went on "We do not want to be transformed into a secret society, neither do we want to sink into the bog of purely economic evolution. Because a secret society leads to adventures in which the people is always the victim" (P.232).

The question of mandates

Thus, Serrailler, the correspondent for France of the General Council, had never heard of the Marseilles sections which mandated an Alliance member.  

Nor had he ever received membership dues from them. "Moreover he has been informed that sections have recently been formed for the purpose of sending delegates to the Congress" (M+D P.124). The congress had to vote on whether these sections existed or not!

Finding itself in a minority at the Congress, the supporters of Bakunin tried in turn to contest different mandates, and thereby also waste time.

The Alliance member Alerini claimed that the authors of the "Pretended Splits" - i.e. the General Council - should be excluded. Their crime: defending the statutes of the organisation. The Alliance also wanted to violate the existing voting rules by forbidding General Council members from voting as delegates mandated by the sections.

Another enemy of the central organs, Mottershead "asks why Barry, who is not one of the leaders in England and carries no weight, has nevertheless been delegated to the Congress by a German section". Marx declared in reply that "it does credit to Barry that he is not one of the so-called leaders of the English workers, since these men are more or less bribed by the bourgeoisie and the government; attacks are made on Barry only because he refuses to be a tool in the hands of Hales" (M+D P.124). Hales and Mottershead supported the anti-organizational tendency in Britain.

Having no majority, the Alliance tried to make a putsch against the rules of the International in the middle of the congress - corresponding to their vision that rules were only there for others, not for the Bakuninist elite.

In proposal Number 4 to the congress, the Spanish Alliance put forward that only the votes of those delegates would count at the congress, which had an "imperative mandate" from their sections. The votes of the other delegates would only count after their sections had discussed and voted on the congress motions. As a result, the resolutions adopted would only come into force two months after the congress. (M+D P. 180).

This proposal was aimed at nothing less than the destruction of the Congress as the highest instance of the organisation.

Morago then announced" that the delegates from Spain have received definite instructions to abstain from voting until voting is carried out according to the number of electors represented by each delegate".

The reply of Lafargue was recorded in the minutes - "Lafargue states that although he is a delegate from Spain, he has not received such instructions". This reveals the essence of the functioning of the Alliance. Delegates of different sections, some of them claiming to have an "imperative" mandate from their sections, were in reality obeying the secret instructions of the Alliance, a hidden alternative leadership opposed to the General Council and to the statutes.

To enforce their strategy, the Alliance members proceeded to blackmail the Congress. Bakunin's right hand man, Guillaume, in face of the refusal of the congress to break its own rules to please the Spanish Bakuninists, "announces that from now on the Jura Federation will no longer take part in the voting" (M+D P.143).

Not stopping there, threats were also made to leave the congress.

In reply to this blackmail, "The Chairman explains that the Rules were made not by the General Council or by individual persons but by the IWA and its congresses, and that therefore anyone who attacks the Rules is attacking the IWA and its existence!".

As Engels pointed out "It is not our fault that the Spaniards are in the sad position of not being able to vote, nor is it the fault of the Spanish workers but of the Spanish Federal Council, which is composed of members of the Alliance" (M + D P. 142, 143).

Confronting the sabotage of the Alliance, Engels formulated the decision facing the Congress.

"We must decide whether the IWA is to continue to be managed on a democratic basis or ruled by a clique (cries and protests at the word "clique") organized secretly and in violation of the Rules" (M+D P.122)

"Ranvier protests against the threat made by Splingard, Guillaume and others to leave the hall, which only proves that it is they and not we who have pronounced in advance on the question under discussion; he wishes all the police agents in the world would thus take their departure" (M+D P. 129).

"If Morago says so much about possible despotism on the part of the General Council, he must realize that his and his comrades' way of speaking is most tyrannical since they want to force us to yield to them under the threat of their breaking away" (Intervention of Lafargue, M+D P.153).

The Congress also replied on the question of imperative mandates, which means turning the congress into a simple ballot box, where the delegations present the votes already taken. It would be cheaper not to hold the congress and send the votes by post. The congress is no longer the highest instance of the unity of the organisation, which reaches its decisions sovereignly, as a body.

"Serrailler says that he is not tied down here like Guillaume and his comrades, who have already made up their minds about everything in advance since they have accepted imperative mandates which oblige them to vote in a certain way or withdraw".

The true function of the "imperative mandate" in the Alliance strategy is revealed in Engels article "The Imperative Mandate and the Hague Congress".

mandate. The mandate of their allies will all be identical. Those of the sections, which are not under the influence of the Alliance, or which rebel against it, will contradict each other, so that often the absolute majority, and always the relative majority will belong to the secret society; whereas at a congress without an imperative mandate, the common sense of the independent delegates will soon unite them to a common party against the party of the secret society. The imperative mandate is an extremely effective means of domination, and that is why the Alliance, despite all its Anarchism, supports its authority" .

The question of finances: the "sinews of war"

Since the finances, as the material basis of political work, are vital for the construction and defence of revolutionary organisation, it was inevitable that attacking these finances would be one of the main ways of undermining the International through political parasitism.

On the "rebel" Second Section in New York:

"Ranvier is of the opinion that the Regulations are being made into a toy. Section No. 2 has separated from the Federal Council, has fallen into lethargy, and, at the approach of the world congress, has wished to be represented at it and to protest against those who have been active. How, by the way, has this section regularized its position with the General Council? It only paid its subscriptions on August 26. Such conduct borders on comedy and is intolerable. These petty coteries, these sects, these groups independent of one another and having no common ties, resemble freemasonry and cannot be tolerated in the International" (M + D P.45)

The congress rightly insisted that only delegations of sections which had paid their dues could participate at the Congress.

Here is how Farga Pellicier "explained" the absence of the dues of the Spanish Alliancists. "As for the subscriptions, he will explain: the situation was difficult, they had to fight the bourgeoisie, and almost all the workers belong to trade unions. They aim at uniting all the workers against capital. The International is making great progress in Spain, but the struggle is costly. They have not paid their subscriptions, but they will do it".

In other words they are keeping the money of the organisation for themselves. Here is the reply of the treasurer of the International.

"Engels, secretary for Spain, finds it strange that the delegates arrive with money in their pockets and have not yet paid. At the London Conference all the delegates settled up immediately, and the Spaniards should have done the same here, for this was indispensable for the validation of their mandates" (M + D P. 128). Two pages on, we read in the minutes "Farga Pellicer finally rises and hands to the Chairman the treasury accounts and the subscriptions from the Spanish Federation except for the last quarter" i.e. the money they allegedly did not have.

Hardly surprising that the Alliance and its supporters, to weaken the organisation, then proposed the reduction of membership subscriptions. The proposal of the Congress was to increase them.

"Brismee is in favour of diminishing the subscriptions because the workers have to pay to their sections, to the federal council and it is very burdensome for them to give ten centimes a year to the General Council".

To this, Frankel replied in defence of the organisation.

"Frankel himself is a wage-worker and precisely he thinks that in the interest of the International the subscriptions absolutely must be increased. There are federations which only pay at the last minute and as little as possible. The council has not a sou in the treasury (...) Frankel is of the opinion that with the means of propaganda which an increase of subscriptions will allow, the divisions in the International would cease, and they would not exist today if the General Council had been able to send its emissaries to the different countries where these dissentions occurred" (M+D P. 95)

On this question the Alliance obtained a partial victory: the dues were left at the old rate.

Finally, the Congress firmly rejected the slanders of the Alliance and the bourgeois press on this question.

"Marx observed that whereas the members of the Council have been advancing their own money to pay the expenses of the International, calumniators have accused those members of living on the Council (...) of living on the pennies of the workers". "Lafargue says that the Jura Federation has been one of the mouthpieces of those calumnies" (M+D P.98, 169).

The defence of the General Council: at the heart of the defence of the International

"The General Council (...) places on the order of the day, as the most important questions to be discussed by the Congress of The Hague, the revision of the General Rules and Regulations" (General Councils resolution on the Agenda of the Hague Congress, M+D P. 23-24).

At the level of functioning, the central issue was the following modification of the general Rules:

"Article 2. The General Council is bound to execute the Congress Resolutions, and to take care that in every country the principles and the General Rules and Regulations of the International are strictly observed (...)

Article 6. The General Council has also the right to suspend Branches, Sections, Federal Councils or committees, and federations of the International, till the meeting of the next Congress" (Resolution Relative to the Administrative Regulations P. 283).

"Brismee wants the rules to be discussed first, because it is possible that there might not be a General Council anymore and therefore no powers would be needed for it. The Belgians want no extension of the General Councils powers, on the contrary, they carne here to take away from it the crown which it usurped" (M+D P.141).

Sauva, USA: "His mandatories want the Council to be preserved, but first of all they want it to have no rights and that this sovereign should not have the right to give orders to its servants (laughter)".

The Congress rejected these attempts to destroy the unity of the organisation, adopting the enforcement of the General Council, thus giving a signal which marxists have followed to this day. As Hepner declared during the debate: 

"Yesterday evening two great ideas were mentioned: centralization and federation. The latter expressed itself in abstentionism, but this abstention from all political activity leads to the police station" (Statutes P. 160)

And Marx: "Sauva has changed his opinion since London. As regards authority, at London he was for the authority of the General Council (...) here he has defended the opposite" (M+D P.89)

"Marx says that in discussing the powers of the Council it is not us, but the institution. Marx has stated that he would rather vote for the abolition of the Council than for a council which would be only a letterbox" (M+D P.73).

Against the stirring up of the petty bourgeois fears of "dictatorship" by the Bakuninists, Marx argued.

"But whether we grant the General Council the rights of a Negro prince or of the Russian tsar, its power is illusory as soon as the General Council ceases to express the will of the majority of the IWA. The General Council has no army, no budget, it is only a moral force, and it will always be powerless if it has not the support of the whole Association" (P. 154)

The Congress also made the link between the other major change in the statutes which it adopted, that on the need for a political class party, and the question of proletarian principles of functioning. This link is the struggle against "anti-authoritarianism" as a weapon both against the party and against party discipline.

"Here we have talk against authority: we also are against excesses of any kind, but a certain authority, a certain prestige will always be necessary to provide cohesion in the party. It is logical that such anti-authoritarians have to abolish also the federal councils, the federations, the committees and even the sections, because authority is exercised to a greater or lesser degree by all of them; they must establish absolute anarchy everywhere, that is, they must turn the militant International into a petty bourgeois party in a dressing gown and slippers. How can one object to authority after the Commune? We German workers at least are convinced that the Commune fell largely because it did not exercise enough authority!" (M+D P. 161).

The inquiry into the Alliance

On the last day of the Congress, the report of the commission to investigate the Alliance was presented and discussed.

Cuno declares: "It is absolutely indisputable that there have been intrigues inside the Association; lies, calumnies and treachery have been proved, the commission has carried out a superhuman job, having sat for 13 hours running today. Now it seeks a vote of confidence by the acceptance of the demands set forth in the report". 

In fact the work of the investigation Commission appointed was enormous throughout the Congress. A mountain of documents had been examined. A series of witnesses were called to give evidence on different aspects of the question. Engels read out the General Council's report on the Alliance. Significantly one of the documents presented by the General Council to the Commission was the "General Rules of the International Working Men's Association after the Geneva Congress, 1866". This fact illustrates that the problem menacing the International was not the existence of political divergences, which can be dealt with normally in the framework laid down by the statutes, but systematic violations of the statutes themselves. Trampling on die organizational class principles of the proletariat always constitutes a mortal danger for the existence and reputation of communist organisations. The presentation of the secret statutes of the Alliance by the General Council was proof enough that this was the case here.

The commission elected by the Congress did not take its job lightly. The documentation of its work is as lengthy as all the other documents of the Congress put together. The longest of these documents. Utin's report, commissioned by the London Conference the previous year, contains almost 100 pages. At the end, the Hague Congress commissioned the publication of an even longer report the famous "Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association". Revolutionary organisations, having nothing to hide from the proletariat have always wanted to inform the proletariat on such questions to the extent that the security of the organisation permits.

The Commission established without doubt that Bakunin had dissolved and refounded the Alliance at least three times in order to deceive the International, that it was a secret organisation within the Association working against the statutes behind the back of the organisation, aiming at taking over or destroying that body.

The Commission also recognised the irrational, esoteric character of this formation.

"It is obvious from the whole organisation that there are three different grades, some of which lead the others by the nose. The whole affair seems to be so exalted and eccentric that the whole Commission is constantly rolling with mirth. This kind of mysticism is generally considered as insanity. The greatest absolutism is manifested in the whole organisation" ("Minutes of the Commission to Investigate the Alliance". M+D P. 339).

The work of the Commission was hampered by different factors. One was the absence of Bakunin himself from the Congress. After declaring beforehand in his loud-mouth manner that he would come to the Congress to defend his honour, he preferred to leave his defence to his disciples. But he gave then a strategy to follow, aimed at sabotaging the investigations. Firstly, his followers refused to divulge anything about the Alliance or secret societies in general "for security reasons", as if their activities had been aimed against the bourgeoisie and not against the Alliance, Guillaume repeated what he had already defended at the Swiss Romance congress of April 1970: "Every member of the International has the full and complete right to join any secret society, even the Freemasons. Any inquiry into a secret society would simply be equivalent to a denunciation to the police" (Nicolaievsky: Karl Marx, P.387)

Secondly, the written imperative mandate to the Jura delegates for the Congress stipulated that "the Jura delegates will eliminate all personal questions and will hold discussions in that field only when they are forced to do so, proposing to the congress oblivion of the past and for the future the election of courts of honour, which will have to take a decision every time an accusation is levelled against a member of the International" (M + D P. 325).

This is a document of political evasion. The clarification of the role of Bakunin as the leader of a plot against the International is dismissed as a personal question, not a political one. Investigations should be reserved "for the future" and take the form of a permanent institution to settle squabbles in the way of a bourgeois court. A proletarian investigation commission or court of honour are completely emasculated.

Thirdly, the Alliance poses as the "victim" of the organisation. Guillaume contests the "General Council's power to establish an Inquisition over the International" (M+D P. 84). He affirms "the whole process is to kill the so-called minority, in reality the majority (...) it is the federalist principle which is being condemned here" (p. I72).

"Alerini is of the opinion that the commission has only moral convictions and no material proofs; he was a member of the Alliance and proud of it (...) But you are a holy Inquisition; we demand a public investigation and conclusive, tangible proofs" (P. 170).

The Congress appointed a sympathizer of Bakunin, Splingard, as member of the commission. This Splingard had to admit that the Alliance had existed as a secret society within the International, even if he did not understand the function of the commission. He saw his role as a kind of "lawyer defending Bakunin" (who however should have been old enough to defend himself), rather than part of a collective body of investigation.

"Marx says that Splingard behaved in the Commission like an advocate of the Alliance, not as an impartial judge".

Marx and Lucain replied to the other accusation that there are "no proof".

Splingard "knows quite well that Marx gave all those documents to Engels. The Spanish Federal Council itself provided proofs and he (Marx) adduced others from Russia but cannot divulge the name of the sender; in this matter in general the commission has given its word of honour not to divulge anything of what is dealt with, in particular any names; its decision on this question is unshakable".

Lucain "asks whether they must wait until the Alliance has disrupted and disorganized the International and then come forward with proofs. But we refuse to wait so long, we attack evil where we see it because such is our duty" (P. 171).

The Congress strongly supported the conclusions of its Commission, except for the Bakuninist minority. In reality, the commission demanded only 3 expulsions, Bakunin, Guillaume and Schwitzguebel. Only the first two were accepted by the Congress. So much for the legend about the International wanting to eliminate an uncomfortable minority by disciplinary means! As opposed to what anarchists and councilists claim, proletarian organisations have no necessity of such measures; they have no fear of, but a complete interest in total political clarification through debate. And they expel members only in very exceptional cases of grave indiscipline and disloyalty. As Johannard said at The Hague "expulsion from the IWA is the worst and most dishonourable sentence that can be passed on a man; such a man could never belong to an honourable society again" (P. 171).

The parasitic front against the International

We will not deal here with the other dramatic decision of the Congress, the transfer of the General Council from London to New York. The motive behind the proposition was the fact that although the Bakuninists had been defeated, the General Council in London would have fallen into the hands of another sect, the Blanquists. The latter, refusing to recognize the international reflux of the class struggle which the defeat of the Paris Commune had caused, risked destroying the workers' movement in a series of pointless barricade confrontations. In fact, whereas Marx and Engels hoped at that time to bring the General Council back to Europe later, the defeat in Paris marked the beginning of the end of the First International (see part 2 of our series).

Instead, we will conclude this article with one of the great historic achievements of the Hague Congress. This achievement, which posterity mostly ignored or completely misunderstood (e.g. by Franz Mehring in his biography of Marx), was the identification of the role of political parasitism against workers' organisations.

The Hague Congress showed that Bakunin's Alliance did not act alone, but was the coordinating centre of a parasitic opposition to the workers' movement supported by the bourgeoisie.

One of the main allies of the Alliance in its fight against the International was the group around Woodhull and West in America, who were hardly "anarchists".

"West's mandate is signed by Victoria Woodhull, who has been intriguing for years already to become president of the United States, is president of the spiritualists, preaches free love, has a banking business etc". It "issued the notorious appeal to the English speaking citizens of the United States in which all kinds of nonsense were ascribed to the IWA and on the basis of which various similar sections were formed in the country. Among other things the appeal mentioned personal freedom, social freedom (free love), manner of dressing, women's franchise, a world language etc (...) They place the women's question before the workers question and refuse to recognize that the IWA is a workers organisation" (Intervention of Marx P. 133).

The connection of these elements to international parasitism was revealed by Sorge.

"Section No.12 received the correspondence of the Jura Federation and the Universal Federalist Council in London with the greatest pleasure. Section No.12 was always carrying on intrigues furtively and importuning to obtain the supreme leadership of the IWA, it even published and interpreted to its own benefit the General Council's decisions which were not in its favour. Later it excommunicated the French Communists and German atheists. Here we demand discipline and submission not to persons, but to the principle, to the organisation; to win over America we absolutely need the Irish and they will never be on our side if we do not break off all connections with Section No. 12 and the 'free lovers '" (P. 136).

This international coordination of attacks against the International, with the Bakuninists at the centre, was further clarified in the discussion.

"Le Moussu reads from the Bulletin de la Federation Jurassienne a reproduction of a letter addressed to him by the Spring Street Council in reply to the order suspending Section No.12" concluding "in favour of the formation of a new Association by uniting dissident elements in Spain, Switzerland, and London. Thus, not content with disregarding the authority which the General Council holds from Congress and instead of deferring their grievances, as the Rules lay down, until today, these individuals, intending to form a new society, openly break with the International".

"Le Moussu draws the attention of the Congress to the coincidence between the attacks on the General Council and its members made by the Jura Federation's bulletin and those made by its sister federation published by Messrs. Vesinier and Landeck, the latter paper having been exposed as a mouthpiece of the police and its editors expelled as police agents from the Refugees' Society of the Commune in London. The aim of this falsification is to represent the Commune members on the General Council as admirers of the Bonapartist regime, while the other members, these wretches keep on insinuating, are Bismarckists, as if the real Bonapartists and Bismarckians were not those who, like all these hack-writers of all the various federations, trail along behind the bloodhounds of all governments to insult the true champions of the proletariat. That is why I say to these vile insulters: You are worthy henchmen of the Bismarck, Bonapartist and Thierist police" (P. 50, 51).

On the link between the Alliance and Landeck: "Dereure informs the Congress that hardly an hour earlier Alerini told him that he (Alerini) was an intimate friend of Landeck, who was known as a police spy in London" (P. 472).

German parasitism, in the form of Lassalleans expelled from the German Workers' Educational Association in London, were also linked to this intemational parasitic network via the above mentioned Universal Federalist Council in London, where they collaborated with other enemies of the workers' movement such as French radical Freemasons and Italian Mazzinists.

"The Bakuninist Party in Germany was the General Association of German Workers under Schweitzer, and the latter was finally unmasked as a police agent" (Intervention of Hepner P. 160).

The congress also showed the collaboration between the Swiss Bakuninists and the British reformists of the British Federation under Hales.

In reality, apart from infiltrating and manipulating degenerated sects which had once belonged to the working class, the bourgeoisie also set up organisations of its own to oppose the International. The Philadelphians, and Mazzinians, located in London, attempted to take over the General Council directly, but were defeated when their members were removed from the General Council subcommittee in September 1865.

"The principle enemy of the Philadelphians, the man who prevented the First International from becoming a front for their activities, was Karl Marx" (Nicolaevsky: Secret Societies and the First International P. 52). The direct link claimed by Nicolaevsky between this milieu and the Bakuninists, is more than probable, given their open identification with the methods and organisations of Freemasonry.

The destructive activity of this milieu was continued by the terrorist provocations of the secret society of Felix Pyat, the "Republican Revolutionary Commune". This group, having been excluded and publicly condemned by the International, continued to operate in its name, constantly attacking the General Council.

In Italy, for instance, the bourgeoisie set up a Societa Universale dei Razionalisti under Stefanoni to combat the International in that country. Its paper published the lies of Vogt and the German Lassalleans against Marx, and ardently defended Bakunin's Alliance.

The goal of this network of pseudo-revolutionaries was to "calumniate members of the International in a way which made the bourgeois papers, whose vile inspirers they are, blush with shame, that is what they call appealing to the workers to unite" (Intervention of Duval P. 99).

This was why the vital necessity to defend the organisation against all these attacks was at the heart of the interventions of Marx at this congress, whose vigilance and determination must guide us today in face of similar attacks.

"Anyone who smiles sceptically at the mention of police sections must know that such sections were formed in France, Austria and elsewhere, and the General Council received a request from Austria not to recognize any section which was not founded by delegates of the General Council or the organisation there. Vesinier and his comrades, whom the French refugees recently expelled, are naturally for the Jura Federation (...) Individuals like Vesinier, Landeck and others, in my opinion, form first a federal council, and then a federation and sections; agents of Bismarck could do the same, therefore the General Council must have the right to dissolve or suspend a federal council or a federation (...) In Austria, brawlers, Ultramontanes, Radicals and provocateurs form sections in order to discredit the IWA; in France a police commissary formed a section" (P.154-154).

"There was a case for suspending a federal council in New York; it may be that in other countries secret societies wish to get influence over federal councils, they must be suspended. As for the facility to form federations freely, as Vesinier, Landeck and a German police informer did, it cannot exist. Monsieur Thiers makes himself the lackey of all governments against the International, and the Council must have the power to remove all corrosive elements (...) Your expressions of anxiety are only tricks, because you belong to those societies which act in secret and are the most authoritarian" (P. 47-45).

***

In the fourth and last part of this series, we will deal with Bakunin the political adventurer, drawing general lessons from the history of the workers' movement.

Kr

With the following article on the struggle of Marxism against Freemasonry, the ICC is firmly placing itself in the best traditions of Marxism and the workers' movement. As opposed to anarchist political indifferentism, Marxist has always insisted that the proletariat, in order to fulfil its revolutionary mission, must understand all the essential aspects of the functioning of its class enemy. As exploiting classes, these enemies of the proletariat necessarily employ secrecy and deception both against each other and against the working class. This is why Marx and Engels, in a series of important writings, exposed to the working class the secret structures and activities of the ruling classes.

In his Revelations of the diplomatic history of the 18th century, based on an exhaustive study of diplomatic manuscripts in the British Museum, Marx exposed the secret collaboration of the British and Russian cabinets since the time of Peter the Great. In his writings against Lord Palmerston, Marx revealed that the continuation of this secret alliance was directed essentially against revolutionary movements throughout Europe. In fact, during the first sixty years of the 19th century, Russian diplomacy, the bastion of counter-revolution at that time, was involved in "all the conspiracies and uprisings" of the day, including the insurrectional secret societies such as the Carbonari, trying to manipulate them to its own ends (Engels: The Foreign Policy of Czarist Russia).

In his pamphlet against Herr Vogt Marx laid bare the way in which Bismarck, Palmerston and the Czar supported the agents of Bonapartism under Louis Napoleon in France in infiltrating and denigrating the workers' movement. The outstanding moments of the combat of the workers' movement against these hidden manoeuvres were the struggle of  the Marxists against Bakunin in the First International, and of the "Eisenachers" against the Bismark's use ofLassalleanism in Germany.

Combating the bourgeoisie's fascination for the hidden and mysterious, Marx and Engels showed that the proletariat is the enemy of every kind of policy of secrecy and mystification. As opposed to the British Tory Urquhart, whose Struggle over 50 years against Russia's secret policies degenerated into a "secret esoteric doctrine" of an "almighty" Russian diplomacy as the "only active factor in modern history" (Engels), the work of the founders of Marxism on this question was always based on a scientific, historical materialist approach. This method revealed the hidden "Jesuitic order" of Russian and western diplomacy and the secret societies of me exploiting classes as me product of the absolutism and enlightenment of the 18m century, during which me crown imposed a collaboration between me declining nobility and the rising bourgeoisie. This "aristocratic-bourgeois International of Enlightenment" referred to by Engels articles on Czarist foreign policy, also provided the social basis for freemasonry, which arose in Britain, me classical country of compromise between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Whereas the bourgeois aspect of freemasonry attracted many bourgeois revolutionaries in the 18th and early 19th century, especially in France and the United States, its profoundly reactionary character was soon to make it a weapon above all against the working class. This was the case after the rise of the working class socialist movement, prompting the bourgeoisie to abandon me materialistic atheism of its own revolutionary youth. In the second half of the 19th century, European freemasonry, which until then had been above all an amusement of a bored aristocracy which had lost its social function, increasingly became a bastion of the new anti-materialistic "religiosity" of the bourgeoisie, directed essentially against the workers' movement. Within this masonic movement, there developed a whole series of anti-  marxist ideologies, which were later to become the common property of 20th century counter-revolutionary movements. According to one of these ideologies, Marxism itself was a creation of the "illuminati" wing of German freemasonry, against which the "true" freemasons had to mobilise. Bakunin, himself an active freemason, was one of the fathers of another of these allegations, that Marxism was a Jewish conspiracy: "This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states but of political opinion, this world is now, at Least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothchild on the other. (...) This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found." (Bakunin, quoted by R. Huch : Bakunin und die Anarchie).

This weakness is all the more dangerous, since the employment in this century of mystical sects and ideologies has reached dimensions going far beyond the simple question of freemasonry posed in the ascendant phase of capitalism. Thus, the majority of anti-communist secret societies which were created between 1918-1923 against the German revolution, did not originate in freemasonry at all, but were set up directly by the army, under the control of demobilised officers. As direct instruments of the capitalist state against the communist revolution, they were disbanded as soon as the proletariat had been defeated. Equally, since the end of the counter-revolution in the late 1960s, classical freemasonry has been only one aspect of a whole apparatus of religious, esoteric and racist sects and ideologies developed by the state against the proletariat. Today, in the framework of capitalist decomposition, such anti-marxist sects and ideologies, declaring war on materialism and the concept of progress in history and with a considerable influence in the industrial countries, constitute an additional weapon of the bourgeoisie against the working class.

The First International against secret societies

Already the First International was the target of furious attacks mounted by occultism. The supporters of the Carbonari's Catholic mysticism and of Mazzinism were the declared opponents of the International. In New York, the occultist supporters of Virginia Woodhull tried to introduce feminism, "free love" and "para-psychological experiments" into the International's American sections. In Britain and France, left wing masonic lodges, supported by Bonapartist agents, organised a series of provocations aimed at discrediting the International and justifying the arrest of its members, obliging the General Council to exclude and publicly denounce Pyat and his supporters. Most dangerous of all was Bakunin's Alliance, a secret organisation within the International, which with its different levels of "initiation" of members into its "secrets" and its methods of manipulation (Bakunin's "revolutionary catechism") exactly copied the example of freemasonry (see International Reviews nos. 84 and 85 for the struggle against Bakuninism in the First International).

Marx and Engel's enormous personal commitment in repelling these attacks, in uncovering Pyat and his Bonapartist supporters, combatting Mazzini, excluding Woodhull's American sections, and above all in revealing the plot by Bakunin's Alliance against the International, are well known. Their full awareness of the occultist menace is documented by the resolution proposed by Marx himself, and adopted by the General Council, on the necessity to combat the secret societies.

At the London Conference of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) , September 1871, Marx insisted that "this kind of organisation stands in contradiction to the development of the proletarian movement, since these societies, instead of educating the workers, submit them to authoritarian and mystical laws, which hinder their independence and direct their consciousness in a wrong direction" (Marx-Engels Werke Vol. 17, p655).

The bourgeoisie also tried to discredit the proletariat through media allegations that both the International and the Paris Commune were "organised" by a secret Freemason-type leadership. In an interview with the newspaper The New York World which suggested that the workers were the instruments of a "conclave" of "daring conspirators" present inside the Paris Commune, Marx declared: "Dear sir, there is no secret to be cleared up (...) unless it's the secret of the human stupidity of those who stubbornly ignore the fact that our Association acts in public, and that extensive reports on its activities are published for all who want to read them". The Paris Commune, according to The World's logic, "could equally have been a conspiracy of the freemasons, since their individual share was not small. I would really not be amazed if the Pope were to put the whole insurrection down to them. But let us look for another explanation. The insurrection in Paris was made by the Paris workers" (MEW Vol. 17, S.639-370).

The fight against mysticism in the Second International

With the defeat of the Paris Commune and the death of the International, Marx and Engels supported the fight to shake off the grip of freemasonry over workers' organisations in countries like Italy, Spain or the USA (eg the Knights of Labour). The Second International, founded in 1889, was at first less vulnerable to occultist infiltration than its predecessor, since it excluded the anarchists. The "very scope" of the programme of the First International had allowed "the declassed elements to worm their way in and establish, at its very heart, secret organisations whose efforts, instead of being directed against the bourgeoisie and the existing governments, would be directed against the International itself" (Report to the Hague Congress on the Alliance, 1872).

The Third International against Freemasonry

Determined to overcome the organisational weaknesses of the Second International which facilitated its collapse in 1914, the Comintern fought for the complete elimination of "esoteric" elements within its ranks.

In 1922, in response to the French Communist Party's infiltration by elements belonging to freemasonry, who had gangrened the party since its foundation at the Tours Congress, the 4th Congress of the Communist International, in its "Resolution on the French question", reaffirmed class principles in the following terms:

"The incompatibility between freemasonry and socialism was considered to be evident in most of the parties of the Second International (...) If the Second Congress of the Communist International, in its conditions for joining the International, did not formulate a special point on the incompatibility between communism and freemasonry, it was because this principle found its place in a separate resolution unanimously voted by the Congress."

The fact, unexpectedly revealed at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, that a considerable number of French communists belong to masonic lodges is, in the eyes of the Communist International, the most clear and at the same time the most pitiful proof that our French Party has conserved not only the psychological heritage of the epoch of reformism, of parliamentarism and patriotism, but also liaisons that are very concrete, very compromising for the leadership of the party, with the secret, political and careerist organisations of the radical bourgeoisie ...

The International considers that it is indispensable to put an end, once and for all, to these compromising and demoralising liaisons between the leadership of the Communist Party and the political organisations of the bourgeoisie. The honour of the proletariat of France demands that it purifies all its organisations of elements who want to belong to both camps in the class struggle.

"The Congress charges the Central Committee of the French Communist Party to liquidate, before 1st January 1923, all liaisons between the Party, in the person of certain of its members and groups, and freemasonry. Those who, before 1st January, have not declared openly to their organisation and in public through the Party press, their complete break with freemasonry, will be automatically excluded from the Communist Party without any right to join it again at any time. Anyone who hides their membership of freemasonry will be considered to be an agent of the enemy who has penetrated the party and the individual in question will be treated with ignominy before the proletariat".

Similarly, the KPD's delegate at the 3rd Congress of the Italian CP in Rome, referring to the Theses on Communist Tactics submitted by Bordiga and Terracini, could report: "The evident irreconcilability of belonging at the same time to the communist party and to another party, applies, not only to political parties but also to those movements which, despite their political character, do not have the name and the organisation of a party (...) here in particular freemasonry" ("Die ltalienische Thesen", by Paul Butcher in Die Internationale 1922.)

Capitalism's entry into its decadent phase since World War I has led to a gigantic development of state capitalism, in particular of the military and repressive apparatus (espionage, secret police etc). Does this mean the bourgeois need for its "traditional" secret societies disappears? This is partly the case. Where decadent state capitalist totalitarianism has taken a brutal, undisguised form as in Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, or Stalin's Russia, masonic and other "lodges" or secret groupings were always forbidden.

However, even these brutally open forms of state capitalism cannot completely dispense with a secret or illegal, officially non-existent apparatus. State capitalist totalitarianism implies the dictatorial control of the bourgeois state, not only over the entire economy, but over every aspect of life. Thus, in Stalinist regimes the "mafia" is an indispensable part of the state, since it controls the only part of the distribution apparatus which really works, but which officially is not supposed to exist: the black market. In western countries, organised criminality is a no less indispensable part of the state capitalist regime.

But under the so-called "democratic" form of state capitalism, the unofficial as well as the official repression and infiltration apparatus expands tremendously.

Under this dictatorial fake democracy, the state imposes its politics on the members of its own class, and combats the organisations of its imperialist rivals and of its proletarian class enemy in a no less totalitarian manner then under the Nazis or Stalinists. Its official political police and spy apparatus is just as omnipresent as that of any other state. But since the ideology of democracy does not allow this apparatus to proceed as openly as the Gestapo or the GPU in Russia, the western bourgeoisie redevelops its old traditions of freemasonry and the "polit-mafia", but this time under the direct control of the state. The western bourgeoisie with whatever it cannot do legally and openly, illegally and in secret.

Thus, when the US army invaded Mussolini's Italy in 1943, they did not bring back with them the mafia alone.

"In the wake of the motorised American divisions pushing north, masonic lodges appeared out of the ground like mushrooms after rain. This was not only the result of the fact that Mussolini banned them and persecuted their members. The mighty American masonic groupings had their share in this development, immediately taking their Italian brothers under their wing"[1].

Here lies the origin of one of the most famous of the many illegal organisations of the western, American led imperialist bloc, the "Propaganda 2" Lodge in Italy. These unofficial structures coordinated the struggle of the different national bourgeoisies of the American block against the influence of the rival Soviet bloc. The membership of such lodges includes leaders of the "left wing" of the capitalist state: stalinist and leftist parties, trade unions.

Through a series of scandals and revelations (linked to the break-up of the western block after 1989) we know quite a lot about tile workings of such groupings against the imperialist enemy. But a much more carefully kept secret of the bourgeoisie is tile fact that in decadence, its old tradition of masonic infiltration of workers organisations has also become part of the repertoire of tile democratic totalitarian state apparatus. This has been the case whenever the proletariat has seriously menaced the bourgeoisie: above all during the revolutionary wave 1917-23, but also since 1968 with the resurgence of workers' struggles.

An illegal counter revolutionary apparatus

As Lenin pointed out, the proletarian revolution in Western Europe at the end of World War I was confronted with a much more powerful and intelligent ruling class than in Russia. As in Russia, the western bourgeoisie, in face of the revolution, immediately played the democratic card, bringing left wing, former workers' parties to power, announcing elections and plans for "industrial democracy" and for "integrating" the workers' councils into constitution and state.

But unlike Russia after February 1917, the western bourgeoisie immediately began to construct a gigantic, illegal counter-revolutionary apparatus.

To this end they made use of the political and organisational experience of the masonic lodges and right wing volkish orders which had specialised in combatting the socialist movement before the World War, completing their integration into the state. One such pre-war organisation was the "Germanic Order" and the "Hammer League" founded in 1912 in response to the looming war and to the electoral victory of the Socialist Party, declaring in its paper its goal of "organising the counter-revolution". "The holy vendetta shall liquidate the revolutionary leaders at the very beginning of the insurrection, not hesitating to strike the mass criminals with their own weapons"[2].

Victor Serge refers to the intelligence services of Action Francaise and of the Cahiers de l'Antifrance which spied on the vanguard movements in France already during the war; the espionage and provocateur service of the Fascist party in Italy; and the private detective agencies in the USA who "provide the capitalists with discreet informers, expert provocateurs, riflemen, guards, foremen and also totally corrupt trade union militants", "supposedly employing 135,000 people".

"In Germany, since the official disarming of the country, the essential forces of reaction have been concentrated in extremely secretive organisations. The reaction has understood that, even in parties supported by the State, clandestinity is a precious asset. Naturally all these organisations take on the functions of virtual undercover police forces against the proletariat"[3].

In order to preserve tile myth of democracy, the counter-revolutionary organisations in Germany and other countries were officially not part of the state, were financed privately, often declared illegal, and presented themselves as the enemies of democracy. With their assassinations of "democratic" bourgeois leaders like Rathenau and Erzberger, and their right-wing putsches (Kapp Putsch 1920, Hitler Putsch 1923) they played a vital role in luring the proletariat towards the terrain of defence of the counter-revolutionary Weimar "democracy".

The network against the proletarian revolution

It is in Germany, the main centre of the revolutionary wave 1917-23 outside of Russia, that we can best grasp the vast scale of counter -revolutionary operations, once the bourgeoisie feels its class rule threatened. A gigantic network was set up in defence of the bourgeois state. This network employed provocation, infiltration and political murder in order to supplement tile counter-revolutionary policies of the SPD and the trade unions, as well as the Reichswehr and the privately financed unofficial "white army" of the Freikorps.

Even more famous is of course the NSDAP, founded in Munich against the revolution in 1919 as the "German Workers' Party". Hitler, Goering, Rohm and other Nazi leaders began their political careers as informers and agents against the Bavarian Workers' Council.

These illegal coordinating centres of the counter-revolution were in reality part of the state. Whenever their assassination specialists, such as the murderers of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and hundreds of other Communist leaders, were put on trial, they were found not guilty, given token sentences, or allowed to escape[4]. Whenever their secret arms caches were discovered by the police, the army intervened to claim back these weapons, which had allegedly been stolen.

The "Teno", allegedly a technical service in case of public catastrophes, was in reality an armed troop, 170,000 strong, mainly used as strike breakers.

The Anti-Bolshevik League, founded on 1st December 1918 by industrialists, aimed its propaganda mainly at workers. "It followed the development of the KPD [German Communist Party] very closely and tried to infiltrate it with its informers. It was above all to this end that it maintained an intelligence and spy network camouflaged as a 4th department. It had links to the political police and to army units"[6].

In Munich, the occult Thule Society, linked to the above mentioned pre-war Germanic Order, set up the White Army of the Bavarian bourgeoisie, the Freikorps Oberland, and coordinated the struggle against the 1919 council republic, including the murder of the USPD leader Eisner, in order to provoke a premature insurrection. "Its second department was its intelligence service, which organised an extensive activity of infiltration, espionage and sabotage. According to Sebottendorff every member of the combat league soon had a membership card of the Spartakus Group under a different name. The spies of the combat league also sat in the committees of the council government and the Red Army and reported every evening to the centre of the Thule Society about the planning of the enemy"[7].

The main weapon of the bourgeoisie against the proletarian revolution is not repression and subversion, but the presence of the ideology and the organisational influence of lie "left" organs of the bourgeoisie within the ranks of the proletariat. This was essentially the job of social democracy and the trade unions. But the importance of the assistance which infiltration and provocation can lend to lie efforts of the left of capital against the workers struggle is underlined by the example of "National-Bolshevism" during the German revolution. Under the influence of the pseudo anti-capitalism, the extreme nationalism, anti-semitism and "anti-liberalism" of the illegal secret organisations of the bourgeoisie, with whom they held secret meetings, the Hamburg so-called "Left" around Laufenberg and Wollfheim developed a counter-revolutionary version of "left communism" which contributed decisively to splitting the young KPD in1919, and to discrediting the KAPD in 1920[8].

The work of bourgeois infiltration of the Hamburg section of the KPD began to be uncovered by the party already in 1919, including over 20 police agents directly connected to the GKSD, a counter-revolutionary regiment in Berlin. "From here it was repeatedly attempted to get Hamburg workers to launch armed assaults on prisons and other adventurist actions"[9].

The organiser of this undermining of the Communists in Hamburg, Von Killinger, was a leader of the Organisation Consul, a secret terror and murder organisation financed by the Junkers and aimed at infiltrating and uniting the struggle of all the other right wing groups against communism.

The defence of the revolutionary organisation

In the first part of this article, we saw how the Communist International drew the lessons of the collapse of the 2nd International at the organisational level by opening a much more rigorous struggle against freemasonry and secret societies.

As we have seen, the Second World Congress in 1920, had adopted a motion of the Italian party against the freemasons, officially not part of the "21 conditions" for membership of the Comintern, but unofficially known as the "22 condition"[10].

In fact, the famous 21 conditions of August 1920 obliged all sections of the International to organise clandestine structures, to protect the organisation against infiltration, to investigate the activities of the illegal counter-revolutionary apparatus of the bourgeoisie, and to support the internationally centralised work against capitalist repression.

The KPD, for example, regularly published lists of agents provocateurs and police spies excluded from its ranks, complete with their photos and descriptions of their methods. "From August 1921 to August 1922, the Information department uncovered 124 informers, agents provocateurs and swindlers. These were either sent into the KPD by the police or right wing organisations, or had hoped to exploit the KPD financially on their own account"[11]. Pamphlets were prepared on this question. The KPD also found out who had murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg and published their photos, asking for the help of the population in hunting them down. A special organisation was established to defend the party against the secret societies and para-military organisations of the bourgeoisie. This work included spectacular actions. Thus, in 1921, KPD members, disguised as policemen, searched the premises and confiscated papers of a Russian White Army office in Berlin. Undercover raids were undertaken against secret offices of the criminal "Organisation Consul".

Above all, the Comintern regularly supplied all workers' organisations with concrete warnings and information about lie attempts of the occult arm of the bourgeoisie to destroy them.

After 1968: the revival of occult manipulation against the proletariat

With the defeat of the communist revolution after 1923, the elements of the bourgeoisie's secret anti-proletarian network were either dissolved, or given other tasks by the state. In Germany, many of these elements were later integrated into the Nazi movement.

But when the massive workers' struggles of 1968 in France put an end to the counter-revolution and opened a period of rising class struggle, the bourgeoisie began to revive its hidden anti-proletarian apparatus. In May 1968 in France, the masonic Grand Orient greeted with enthusiasm the "magnificent movement of the students and workers" and sent food and medication to the occupied Sorbonne[12].

This "greeting" was lip-service. In France, already after 1968, the bourgeoisie was using its "neo- Templar", "Rosicrucian" and "Martinist" sects in order to infiltrate leftist and other groups, in collaboration with the SAC services. For example, Luc Jeuret, the guru of the "Sun Temple" began his career by infiltrating Maoist groups (L 'Ordre du Temple Solaire, from page 145 on).

In fact, the following years saw the appearance of organisations of the type used against the proletarian revolution in the 20s. On the extreme right, the Front Europeen de Liberation has revived the "National-bolshevik" tradition. In Germany, the Sozialrevolutionare Arbeiterfront (Social Revolutionary Workers' Front), following its motto "the frontier is not between left and right but between above and below" is specialised in infiltrating different "left wing" movements. The Thule Society has also been refounded as a counter revolutionary secret society[13].

To the modem right wing private political intelligence services belong the World Anti-Communist League, as well as the National Caucus of Labour and the European Labour Party, whose leader La Rouche is described by a member of the US National Security Council as having "the best private intelligence organisation in the world"[14].

Left-wing versions of such counter-revolutionary organisations are no less active. In France, for instance, new sects have been established in the tradition of "Martinism", a variant of freemasonry historically specialised in the infiltration and subversion of workers' organisations. Such groups put forward the idea that communism can best be achieved by the manipulations of an enlightened minority. Like other sects, they are specialised in the art of manipulating people.

More generally, the development of occult sects and esoteric groupings in the past years is not only an expression of the petty bourgeoisie's hopelessness and hysteria at the historic situation, but is encouraged and organised by the state. The role of these sects in inter-imperialist rivalries is known (e.g the use of Scientology by the US bourgeoisie against Germany). But this whole "esoteric" movement is equally part of the bourgeois ideological onslaught against marxism, especially after 1989 with the alleged "death of communism". Historically, it was in face of the rising socialist movement that the European bourgeoisie began to identify with the mystical ideology of freemasonry, especially after the 1848 revolutions. Today, the unbridled hatred of esotericism for materialism and marxism, as well as for the proletarian masses considered "materialistic" and "stupid", is nothing else but the concentrated hatred of the bourgeoisie and parts of the petty bourgeoisie for an undefeated proletariat. Unable itself to offer any historical alternative, the bourgeoisie opposes marxism with the lie that stalinism was communist, but also with the mystical vision that the world can only be "saved" when consciousness and rationality have been replaced by ritual, intuition and hocus-pocus.

In the face of today's decomposition of capitalist society, it is the task of revolutionaries to draw the lessons of the experience of the workers movement against what Lenin called "mysticism as a cloak for counter-revolutionary moods". And it is our task to reappropriate the vigilance of the workers' movement of the past against the manipulations and infiltration of the occult apparatus of the bourgeoisie.

Kr

[1] Kowaljow/Malyschew: Terror, Drahizieher und Attentater, ("Terror Manipulators and Assassinators"). The East German edition of this Soviet book was issued by the military publishers of the GDR).

[2] Rose: Die Thule-Gesellschaft ; P.19/20

[3] Serge: What Everyone Should Know About State Repression, P.49/50.

[4] Beyer: Von der Novemberrevolution zur Ruterepublik ill Munchen, P.130/131. See also Frohlich: Bayerische Ruterepublik.

[5] Nachrichtendienst, P.43. (See also the books of the expert on questions of political murder during the Weimar Republic, Emil Gumbel).

[6] Der Nachrichten dienst der KPD ("The Intelligence Service of the KPD") published in 1993 by ex-historians of the East German secret police, the "Stasi".

[7] Thule-Gesellschaft. P.55.

[8] Bock: Syndlkalismus und Linkskommunismus 1918- 23 ("S ynd icalism and Left Communism 1918-23").

[9] Nachrichtendienst, P. 21 and 52/54.

[10] See Zinoviev's report to the CI's Third Congress.  

[11]Nachrichterdienst

[12] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Supplement (18.05.96).  

[13] Konkret: Drahtzieher imbraunen Netz ("String pullers in the brown network")  

[14] Quoted in Roth/Ender: Geschafte und Verbrechen der Politmafia P.85 ("Business and Crimes of the Political Mafia").