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] [1] 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] [2]

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] [3]

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] [4]

"The theory of revolutionary peasantry [of the SUCM] is reminiscent of Maoism, something we totally reject".[5] [5]

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] [6]

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] [7]

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] [8] 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").