Following eight years of the most gigantic propaganda campaign in human history, devoted to the alleged "death of Communism", the world bourgeoisie responded to the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution 1917 with a carefully prepared, internationally coordinated display of indifference. In most countries, including Russia itself, this question was only dealt with as the second or third item of the main evening TV news broadcasts. The commentaries in the bourgeois press the next morning declared that the question of the Russian Revolution, having lost all relevance for the world of today, remains of interest only for the historian. Commenting on workers' protests taking place at about the same moment (such as the 150,000 demonstration in Prague against the savage anti-proletarian attacks by the Klaus government which emerged from the Czech "velvet revolution" of 1989) the German media noted with demonstrative satisfaction that the class struggle itself had now been "freed from ideological clutter and the pursuit of dangerously utopian final goals".
In reality, this pretended dismissal of the proletarian revolution into the dispassionate hands of bourgeois "historical science" represents a new, qualitatively superior stage of the capitalist attack against Red October. Under the cover of reviewing the results of the research of its historians, the ruling class has organised a world-wide public debate about the "crimes of Communism". This "debate" not only blames the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism for the crimes of the Stalinist counter-revolution, but also, at least indirectly, for the crimes of Nazism, since "the degree and the techniques of mass violence were inaugurated by the communists and (...) the Nazis inspired themselves from this ..." (Stephane Courtois in Le Monde 09110.11. 97). For the bourgeois historians, the fundamental crime of the Russian Revolution was the replacement of "democracy" by a totalitarian ideology leading to the systematic extermination of the "class enemy". Nazism, we are told, appeared only in reaction to this undemocratic tradition of the Russian Revolution, replacing the "class war" of the former with the "race war" of the latter. The bourgeois lesson drawn from the barbarism of its own decadent system is that bourgeois democracy, precisely because it is not a "perfect system", but allows "room for individual freedom" is best suited to human nature, and that any attempt to challenge it can only end in Auschwitz and the Gulag.
Since 1989, the bourgeois attack against Communism and the Russian Revolution was mainly carried by the momentum of the impact of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the east, and the sheer scale of the propaganda making this the collapse of Communism. At that time, the bourgeoisie did not even have to pretend to advance any historical arguments in defence of these lies. But since then, the impact of these campaigns has been eroded by the failure of "western" style capitalism and bourgeois democracy to halt economic decline and mass pauperisation either in the east or in the west. Although the combativity, and above all the consciousness of the proletariat were hit badly by the events and propaganda which followed the- fall of the Berlin Wall, the working class remains undefeated. Its combativity is slowly recovering. Within politicised minorities of the class there is the beginning of a new interest in the history of the working class in general, and in the Russian Revolution and the Marxist struggle against its degeneration in particular. Although the bourgeoisie has the immediate social situation comfortably under control, its extreme anxiety in face of it's progressively collapsing economy and the still intact potential of its class enemy obliges it to constantly intensify its ideological attacks against tile proletariat. This is why the bourgeoisie for instance organises movements such as the French Autumn of 1995 or the UPS strike in the United States in1997 specifically to strengthen the authority of its trade union control apparatus.
""class" genocide joins up with "race" genocide: the death through famine of the child of a Ukrainian Kulak deliberately left to starve by the Stalinist regime is "equal" to the death of a Jewish child left to starve in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Regime". Some of his collaborators, on the other hand, but also the French Prime minister J ospin, consider that Courtois is going" too far" by putting in question the "uniqueness" of the crimes of Nazism. In parliament, Jospin "defended" the "honour of Communism" (which he identified with the honour of his ministerial colleagues from the Stalinist PCF) by arguing that although "Communism" had killed more people than Fascism, it was less evil since motivated by "good intentions". The international controversies provoked by this book - from the question whether its authors exaggerated the number of victims to have a "round figure" of 100 million, to the difficult ethical question whether or not Lenin was "as evil" as Hitler, all serve to discredit Red October, the most important milestone on the road to the liberation of the proletariat and humanity. The protests, across Europe, of the Stalinist veterans of the Resistance opposed to Germany in World War IT against being compared to the Fascists serve no other purpose today, than to consolidate the lie that the Russian Revolution is responsible for the crimes of its mortal Stalinist enemy. Both the "radical" Courtois and the "reasonable" Jospin, like the entire bourgeoisie, share the same capitalist lies at the heart of the whole "Black Book". These include the lie, constantly affirmed without the slightest proof, that Lenin was responsible for the Stalinist terror, and the lie that bourgeois democracy is the only "safeguard" against barbarism. In reality, this whole display of democratic pluralism of opinion and humanitarian indignation only serves to hide the historic truth that all the great crimes of this century share the same bourgeois class nature - not only those of fascism and Stalinism, but also those of democracy, from Hiroshima and Dresden to the starvation inflicted on a quarter of humanity by "liberal" decadent capitalism. In reality, the whole moralistic debate on which of these crimes of capitalism is more condemnable is itself as barbarous as it is hypocritical. In reality, all the participants in this fake bourgeois debate are out to demonstrate the same thing: that any attempt to abolish capitalism, to challenge bourgeois democracy, no matter how "idealistic" and "well intentioned" it may originally be, is bound to end up in bloody terror.
In fact, the roots of the "largest and longest reign of terror" in history, and the "paradoxical tragedy" of Communism lie, according to Jospin and the chancellor-historian Doktor Helmut Kohl, in the utopian vision of World Revolution of the Bolshevism of the original October Revolution period. The reviews of the French "Black Book" in the German bourgeois press defended the responsible anti-fascism of Stalinism against the "mad Marxist utopia" of October and the World Revolution. This madness consisted in surmounting the capitalist contradiction between internationally associated labour on a single world market and the deadly competition of the bourgeois nation states over the product of that labour, now identified as the "original sin" of Marxism, violating the "human nature" about which the bourgeoisie cares so much.
The bourgeoisie regurgitates the old Kautskyist lies
Whereas during the Cold War many western historians used to deny the continuity of Stalinism with the October Revolution, in order to prevent their eastern imperialist rival profiting from the prestige of that great event, today the target of their hatred is no longer Stalinism but Bolshevism. Whereas the threat of the imperialist rivalry of the USSR has disappeared, the threat of the proletarian revolution has not. It is against this threat that bourgeois historians are today warming up all the old lies produced by the panic-stricken bourgeoisie during the revolution itself, that the Bolsheviks were paid German agents, and October a Bolshevik Putsch etc. These lies, produced at the time by the likes of Kautsky[1] and used by the German bourgeoisie to justify the murder of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and thousands of revolutionary Communists, could exploit the bourgeois media black-out on what was really happening in Russia. Today, with more documentary evidence at their disposal than ever, the paid whores of the bourgeoisie pour out the same white-terror garbage.
These lies are reproduced today, not only by the open enemies of the Russian Revolution, but also by its alleged defenders. In the fifth Annual on Communism produced by the Stalinist historian Herman Weber, and devoted to the October Revolution (Jahrbuch fur Historische Kommunismusforschung 1997) the old Menshevik idea that the Revolution was premature is revamped by Moshe Lewin, who has discovered that Russia in 1917 was not ripe for socialism or even for bourgeois democracy due to the backwardness of Russian capitalism. This explanation for the alleged backwardness and barbarism of Bolshevism is also dished up in the new book, A People's Tragedy by the "historian" Orlando Figes, which has created a furore in Britain. He not only affirms that October was basically the work of one wicked man: a dictatorial act of a Bolshevik Party itself under the personal dictatorship of the "bully" Lenin and his henchman Trotsky ("The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began", p.481). He above "discovers" that the social basis of this "coup d'état" was not the working class but the lump en proletariat. After preliminary remarks about the poor level of education of the Bolshevik soviet delegates (whose knowledge about revolution had admittedly not been acquired at Oxford or Cambridge), Figes concludes. "It was more the result of the degeneration of the urban revolution, and in particular of the workers' movement, as an organised and constructive force, with vandalism, crime, generalised violence and drunken looting as the main expressions of this social break-down. (...) The participants in this destructive violence were not the organised 'working class' but the victims of the breakdown of that class and of the devastation of the war years: the growing army of urban unemployed; the refugees from the occupied regions, soldiers and sailors, who congregated in the cities; bandits and criminals released from the jails; and the unskilled labourers from the countryside who had always been the most prone to outbursts of anarchic violence in the cities. These were the semi-peasant types whom Gorky had blamed for the urban violence in the spring and to whose support he had ascribed the rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks." (p495). This is how the bourgeoisie today "rehabilitates" the working class from the charge of having a revolutionary history. In its cold blooded ignoring of the overwhelming facts proving that October was the work of millions of revolutionary workers organised in workers councils, the famous soviets, it is the class struggle of today and tomorrow which the bourgeoisie is targeting.
More than ever before, the leaders of the October Revolution have become the object of the hatred of 'the ruling class denigrations. Most of the books and articles appearing recently are above all indictments of Lenin and Trotsky. The German historian Helmut Altrichter, for instance, begins his new book "Ruland 1917" with the following words: "At the beginning was not Lenin". His whole book, while pretending to show that the masses, not the leaders made history, poses as a "passionate defence" of the autonomous initiative of the Russian workers: until, alas, they fell for the "suggestive" slogans of Lenin and Trotsky, who tossed democracy onto what they scandalously called the "rubbish dump of history".
Thousands of pages have been filled to "prove" that Lenin, although the last great struggle of his life was directed against Stalin and the social layer of state bureaucrats supporting him, calling for his removal in his famous "testimony", designated Stalin as his "successor". Particularly striking is the insistence of the "anti-democratic" attitude of against Trotsky. Whereas the Trotskyist movement joined the bourgeois ranks during World War Il, the historical figure of Trotsky is particularly dangerous for the bourgeoisie. Trotsky symbolises at once the greatest "scandal" in human history - that an exploited class toppled it's rulers (October), attempted to extend its rule across the globe (foundation of the Communist International), and organised the military defence of that rule (The Red Army in the Civil War) - as well as the Marxist struggle against the bourgeois, Stalinist counter-revolution. These are the two facts which the exploiters curse most of all, which they at all costs must eradicate from the collective memory of the working class: the fact that the proletariat toppled the bourgeoisie and became the ruling class in October 1917, and the fact that Marxism was the spearhead of the proletarian fight against the Stalinist counter-revolution supported by the world bourgeoisie. It was through the combined efforts of the western and the Stalinist counter-revolutionaries that the British General Strike 1926, the Chinese working class 1926/27, the Spanish working class during the Civil War of the 30s were defeated, that-the German revolution was finally defeated 1923 and it's proletariat crushed in 1933 through the combined efforts of the western and Stalinist counter-revolutionaries. The world bourgeoisie supported the Stalinist destruction of the vestiges of proletarian rule in Russia, in its destruction of the Communist International. Today the bourgeoisie hides the fact that the 100 million victims of Stalinism, the horrific toll compiled in capitalist book keeping manner in its "Black Book of Communism" are crimes of the bourgeoisie, and that the real, internationalist Communists were its first victims.
The bourgeois democratic intellectuals who have now put themselves at the head of the attack against Red October, apart from advancing their careers and boosting their earnings, have a specific interest of their own in imposing an historical tabula rasa. It is their interest in hiding the contemptible grovelling of the bourgeois intelligence at the feet of Stalin from the 1930s on. Not only Stalinist writers like Gorky, Feuchtwanger, Brecht[2] but the whole wretched rabble of bourgeois democratic historians and moralists from the Webbs to the "pacifist" Romain Rolland deified Stalin, defended the Moscow show trials tooth and nail, and supported the witch-hunt against Trotsky[3].
The attack on the aims of an undefeated proletariat
The attack against the revolutionary history of the working class is in reality an attack against the contemporary class struggle. By attempting to demolish the historic goal of the class movement, the bourgeoisie declares war against that class movement itself. Already Bernstein's separation of goal and movement at the turn of the century was a first full scale attempt to liquidate the revolutionary character of the proletarian class struggle "... since the socialist final goal is the only decisive moment distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism, transforming the whole workers' movement from a futile repair work towards the salvation of capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, to abolish this order ..." (Rosa Luxemburg: Social Reform or Revolution).
In the history of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat, periods of the upsurge of class struggle and development of class consciousness within the proletariat have always been periods of a difficult, uneven, heterogeneous, but real clarification concerning the final goal of the movement. Periods of defeat have always seen the abandonment of that goal by the broad masses. Although the working class displayed considerable combativity in the years before 1914, for instance, it was the replacement of the socialist revolutionary goal by reformist illusions, nourished by decades of economic expansion, in the heads of the majority of workers which made their mobilisation for World War possible. During the 1930s this is particularly clear: despite the combativity of the French, Spanish, Belgian, American proletariat, the acceptance by the masses of the bourgeois goals of defence of democracy or of Stalinist Russia against "fascism" was at the centre of their mobilisation for imperialist war. Similarly, the almost insurrectional movements of the Eastern European workers during the 1950s (East Germany 1953, Poland and Hungary 1956), taking place in the midst of the longest counter-revolution in history, failed to develop any long term perspective beyond bourgeois nationalism and democracy.
As opposed to this, periods of the massive development both of struggles and class consciousness, such as the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 opened up by the Russian Revolution, and the present epoch beginning in 1968, were characterised from the onset by the appearance of debates about the final goal of the proletarian struggle. The international wave of struggles opened up by May-June 1968 in France was characterised precisely by the confrontation of an undefeated generation of workers both with the left apparatus of capital (unions and "left" parties), and with the bourgeois definition of socialism given by this apparatus. This ending of 50 years of Stalinist counter-revolution was thus necessarily, inevitably marked by the appearance of a new generation of revolutionary minorities.
These historic examples of the extremely complicated, but inseparable link between the historic course of the class struggle (towards world war or towards decisive class confrontations) and the goal of communism, remind that the present bourgeois campaign against communism, against the October Revolution, far from being an academic question, is a central issue of the class struggle today. An issue requiring in particular the most determined response of revolutionary minorities, of Left Communism throughout the world. But this issue is all the more important today in view of the present period of capitalist decomposition. This period of decomposition is determined above all by the fact that since 1968, neither of the decisive classes of modern society has been able to take a decisive step towards its historic goal: the bourgeoisie towards world war, the proletariat towards revolution. The most important single result of this historic stalemate, opening a phase of horrific rotting of the capitalist system, has been the internal collapse of the Stalinist ruled eastern imperialist bloc. This event has in turn delivered the bourgeoisie unexpected ammunition with which to attack the communist revolution, slanderously identified with Stalinism. In 1980, in the context of an international development of combativity and consciousness spearheaded by the western proletariat, the mass strikes in Poland opened the perspective of the proletariat itself confronting and eventually defeating Stalinism, and thus removing this obstacle blurring the class perspective of communist revolution. Instead of this, the fall of the Stalinist regimes through decomposition has had the opposite effect: blurring the historic memory and perspective of the class, undermining its self-confidence, weakening its capacity to organise its own struggle towards real confrontations with the left control organs of capital, lessening the immediate impact of revolutionary intervention towards the struggles. Given the decisive importance of self-confidence for the first exploited revolutionary class in history, given the key role of the self-organised class confrontation with the bourgeois state and of the intervention of revolutionaries in demonstrating that the proletariat is a class capable of founding society anew, this set-back has made the road to revolution even longer and more difficult than it already was.
But this road towards revolution remains open. The bourgeoisie has not been able to mobilise its class enemy behind capitalist class goals as in the 1930s. The very fact that after eight years of celebrating the "death of communism" the bourgeoisie is obliged to intensify its ideological campaign, to more directly attack Red October, itself proves this. The flood of publications on the Russian Revolution, if they are first and foremost a mystification against the workers, is also intended as a warning of the bourgeois ideologists to their own class: a warning never again to underestimate the proletarian class enemy. One of the central messages of all these publications is that in moments of great social crisis, such as 1917 in Russia, a tiny minority of audacious, disciplined, consistent revolutionaries can "suddenly" win a majority and apparently fuse with the interests and aspirations of the mass workers organisations - can "easily mislead the masses" as the bourgeoisie prefers to put it. Indeed a timely warning, even if there is never anything "sudden" or easy about such processes, which can take decades to mature before reaching fruition. Capitalism is inexorably approaching the greatest economic and social crisis in its history - in the history of humanity in fact - and the working class remains undefeated. No wonder the learned bourgeois publications of today on the Russian Revolution are full of warnings! Never again must a "monster" like Lenin be allowed to travel to his meeting with revolutionary history! Never again should revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Trotsky be allowed to walk about freely (how this problem can be dealt with is shown by the fate of Liebknecht, Luxemburg and of Trotsky himself)! Never again must the working class be allowed to fall prey to dangerous "revolutionary utopias"!
The Perspective of October is still alive
The ideological blow being struck against the proletarian revolution is not decisive. After decades of a campaign of silence, the bourgeoisie is today obliged to attack the history of the Marxist movement, and thus to admit the existence of this history. Today it attacks not only Red October, not only Lenin and Trotsky, but also Bordiga, one of the founders of Left Communism. It is obliged to attack the internationalists who defended Lenin's revolutionary defeatism during World War II. Its accusation that these internationalists must have been apologists for fascism is a lie equally as monstrous as the ones produced against the Russian Revolution. The present day awakening of militant interest in Left Communism concerns only a tiny minority of the class. But was not Bolshevism itself, this spectre of Communism still haunting Europe and the world, for many years but a tiny minority of the class? The proletariat is an historical class, its consciousness is an historical consciousness. Its revolutionary character is not a passing whim, as that of the once revolutionary bourgeoisie, but flows from its decisive place in the capitalist mode of production.
The decades of struggle and proletarian reflection lying ahead, precisely because they will be so difficult, will be years of the torturous but real development of the political culture of the proletariat. If it is to advance in its fight against unheard of material attacks, growing layers of an undefeated class will eventually be obliged to confront the legacy of its own history, to consult the treasure chest of Marxist theory. Under the present historical conditions, it will be impossible for the future struggles to regain a scale and momentum comparable to France 1968 or Poland 1980 without the development of a political culture, without the re-acquisition of past lessons and traditions at least among the most advanced workers, at a superior scale to anything witnessed between 1968-1989. The bourgeois onslaught against Communist October makes this process longer and more difficult. But at the same time it makes this work of re-acquisition all the more important in fact obligatory for the advanced sectors of the class in the defence of its immediate material interests.
The glorious perspective opened in October 1917, that of the world proletarian revolution, is anything but dead. It is the recognition of this fact which motivates the present bourgeois campaign.
ICC
[1] The main arguments of Lenin ("Renegade Kautsky") and Trotsky ("Terrorism and Communism") against Kautsky are today, in face of the present bourgeois campaign, more timely and valid than ever.
[2] Brecht, who secretly sympathised with Trotsky at the time, wrote his Galileo Galilei in order to justify his own cowardice in not opposing Stalin. The martyrdom of Giordano Bruno, who as opposed to Galileo refused to retract in face of the inquisition, symbolises for Brecht the alleged futility of the resistance of Trotsky.
[3] The shamefulness of the bourgeois democratic intelligence is not removed, but made all the more wretched, by the lonely example of the American philosopher Dewey who presided over the tribunal to judge the case of Trotsky. By supporting the duty of a revolutionary to publicly defend his reputation, Dewey showed a greater respect and understanding for proletarian behaviour than the hysterical petty bourgeoisie today campaigning against the ICC's defence of this same principle of a "'jury of honour. Indeed, with its present "anti-Leninist" prostration at the feet of the present anti-communism of the "triumphant" western bourgeoisie today, the disgrace of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia has reached new depths.
In no.13 of Prometeo (June, 1997), the Partito Comunista Internazionahsta - Battaglia Comunista (PClnt) - has published the documents prepared from its 6th Congress.
This awareness of a "new phase" in the political life of the PCInt and the ommunist left has led the PCInt to replace its original, specific platform with an adhesion to the common platform of the IBRP. This in itself is a substantial advance: whereas previously the IBRP's two constituent organisations (PCInt and CWO) each maintained their own platform, as well as that of the IBRP, the IBRP platform alone now serves as a single political foundation. We welcome this as a contribution to the clarity and political cohesion of the revolutionary movement as a whole.
In a revised version of its platform published in 1994, the IBRP had already been led to modify certain elements and criteria for regroupment[1]. These changes already, at the time, represented a clarification for the whole revolutionary milieu. However, the fact that they are now adopted unambiguously by both the IBRP and its member groups, gives their publication in 1997 an added importance. This is why we consider that this Congress has reinforced the whole of the communist left in its struggle for its defence and its development.
Obviously, the fact that we welcome and support these positive aspects of the Congress does not mean that we intend to sweep under the carpet our disagreements with and criticisms of the Congress documents, where these exist. In this article, we will mention some of these disagreements, but our main aim is to set out what we consider to be a contribution to whole communist vanguard, and a strengthening of the common positions of the communist left. Only from this framework can we then go on to develop our divergences and criticisms.
Denunciation of the democratic mystification
The history of the workers' movement in the 20th century has shown clearly that so-called "democracy" is the bourgeoisie's main weapon against the proletariat. The democratic charade allows the capitalist state to deceive and divide the workers, to turn them away from their class terrain, and once this is done to organise an implacable repression which generally is no less brutal than the crudest forms of capitalist dictatorship (Stalinism or Nazism).
In the present situation, because of the disorientation of the working class (as a result of the collapse of the supposedly "communist" regimes and the anti-communist campaign organised by the world bourgeoisie), the democratic mystification is enjoying a revival. This is why the state is laying down a barrage of propaganda to derail workers onto the rotten ground of the defence of "democracy".
From this point of view, as far as the denunciation of the democratic mystification is concerned, the old IBRP platform of 1984[2] contains some ambiguities and omissions. The IBRP remained silent about the questions of elections and parliamentarism. Moreover, it declared that "the democratic revolution is no longer practicable. It should be considered (and this has been the case for a long time) as definitively closed in the imperialist citadels, and impossible to repeat elsewhere in the period of decadence". We agree entirely with that, but although the "democratic revolution" was denounced as "impossible" , the PClnt did not take position clearly on the possibility or otherwise of conducting a "tactical" struggle for "democracy"[3], since elsewhere it spoke of "the possibility of taking up demands for certain elementary freedoms in revolutionary political agitation" .
The new version of the platform contains an important clarification:
- on the one hand, the IBRP does not just denounce" democratic revolutions"; it attacks "the struggle for democracy": "The era of democratic struggles ended a long time ago and they cannot be repeated in the present imperialist epoch".
- Moreover, the IBRP has added a sentence which explicitly rejects elections: "communist party tactics aim for the overthrow of the state and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communists have no illusions that workers' freedom can be won through electing a majority in parliament".
- More concretely, the IBRP has added a paragraph where it declares that: "Parliamentary democracy is only the fig leaf to disguise the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The real organs of power in democratic capitalist society lie outside Parliament".
The IBRP has taken up the "Theses on Democracy" from the First Congress of the Communist International, and has gone over its analyses and perspectives in depth. In our opinion, however, there is still missing an explicit condemnation of the use of elections. For example, the IBRP does not denounce the CI's theory of revolutionary parliamentarism. This theory recognised that parliament is a fig leaf for bourgeois rule, and that it is not possible to take power by the electoral, parliamentary road. However, it was in favour of the "revolutionary" use of parliament as an agitational tribune and a means of denunciation. This position was clearly wrong at the time, and today is counter-revolutionary, being used by the Trotskyists to bring the workers back into the electoral game.
Moreover, the IBRP has retained the paragraph which refers to the "demand for certain elementary freedoms [as a part of] revolutionary agitation". To what is the IBRP referring? Does it support the idea - as the FOR[4] used to - that there are certain "elementary freedoms" of assembly, association, etc, that the working class should try to conquer legally as a first step in its struggle? Does it believe, as some radical Trotskyist groups claim to do, that these "minimal freedoms" are a tool for agitation, which even if they cannot be won under capitalism nonetheless serve to "advance consciousness". It would be good if the IBRP could clarify its position on this question.
The union question
The PCInt already defended a fairly clear position on the union question, in rejecting the traditional bourgeois position which sees the unions as somehow "neutral" organs whose orientation towards either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat depends on their leaders. This position was clearly condemned in the 1984 platform: "It is impossible to conquer or to change the unions: the proletarian revolution must necessarily pass over their corpse".
The positions adopted in 1997 contain modifications which might appear minimal at first sight. The IBRP has removed a paragraph which contradicted in practice the clarity in theory: "In the framework of these principles [ie the affirmation cited above rejecting any possibility of conquering or changing the unions], the possibility of different concrete actions as far as communist work in the unions is concerned, is a question for the tactical elaboration of the party" . It seems to us quite correct to have removed this paragraph, since its effect was to relegate the declarations of principle against the unions to the realm of "strategy", to leave the IBRP's hands free for the elastic "tactical" imperatives of "work in the unions".
In the same sense, the IBRP has modified the paragraph in the 1984 platform, which stated that "the union is not and cannot be the organ of the mass of the working class in struggle" by removing the term "in struggle", which suggested without saying so openly that the unions could be organs of the mass of the working class when it was not in struggle. This correction is strengthened in the document adopted by the 1997 congress entitled "The unions today and communist action", which states "It is impossible for the workers really to defend even their immediate interests other than outside and against the union line" (Thesis 7, in Prometeo no. 13). By including this precision, tile IBRP closes the door to the Trotskyist lie as to the "dual nature" of the unions, supposedly favourable to the workers during periods of social calm, and reactionary during moments of struggle and the rise of the revolution. This is a sophistry to justify the return to the union prison, of a kind used by the Bordigist current. We think that the removal of the term "in struggle" means that the IBRP condemns such a position, even if it might have been said more clearly.
In the same way, the IBRP in the same text makes a clear demarcation between itself and rank and file unionism, the radicalised variation on trades unionism which specialises in making virulent attacks on the union leadership and bureaucracy, the better to defend the supposedly "working class" nature of the union. In Thesis 8, the IBRP states that "the various attempts to build new trades unions have all come to grief in a motley array of rank and file unionist acronyms, many of which are now trying to get legal recognition as contractual partners, allowing in the footsteps of the official unions".
We also welcome the fact that the IBRP has replaced the paragraph stating that "the trades union is the organ for the mediation between capital and labour" with the much clearer: "Unions arose as negotiators of the terms of sale of workers' labour power". The old formulation was dangerous for two reasons:
- On the one hand, it ascribed to the unions a timeless character as organs of mediation between capital and labour, both in the ascendant and the decadent periods of capitalism, whereas now the platform states that they "arose as negotiators ... of labour power", which differentiates the IBRP's position from the typical Bordigist view of the unions as something unchanging.
On the other, the very idea of an "organ for the mediation between capital and labour" is erroneous, since it opens the door to a vision of the unions as organs situated between the two opposing social classes. In the ascendant period of capitalism, the unions were not organs of mediation between the classes but instruments of proletarian combat, created by the workers' struggle and violently persecuted by the bourgeoisie. It is thus clearer to speak of organs born as "negotiators of the terms of sale of workers' labour power", since this was one of their functions during this period of history, derived from the possibility of winning lasting reforms and improvements in workers' conditions. However, the IBRP forgets another dimension of the unions, emphasised by Marx, Engels and other revolutionaries: their role as "schools of communism", of instruments of organisation, and to an extent also of clarification, for large layers of the working class.
Finally, the IBRP has significantly altered the point on the intervention of communists in the class struggle, in the form of the "communist factory groups". The 1984 platform said that "the possibility of encouraging the development of struggles on the immediate level at which they are born to the broader level of the anti-capitalist political struggle, depends on the operational presence of communist factory groups", while the 1997 version states that "The possibility of the favourable development of struggles away from the immediate level from which they spring onto the wider arena of a political struggle against capital depends on the active presence of communists inside the workplaces" (the Italian version includes the phrase "to provide a stimulant to the workers, and to indicate the perspective to follow"). We fully share the IBRP's preoccupation with the development of means of revolutionary intervention within the concrete process of tile struggle and the politicisation of the struggle. But while the concern is correct, tile response seems to us to be limited.
On the one hand, the IBRP has rightly eliminated the notion that the politicisation of the workers' immediate struggle depends on the "operational presence of communist factory groups"[5], but on the other it continues to maintain that the anti-capitalist politicisation of the workers' struggle is "conditioned by the operational presence of communists within the workplace". Revolutionaries must develop a political presence in the struggles of the working crass through an intervention via their press, leaflets, speaking in meetings in strikes, demonstrations, and assemblies, in short wherever such intervention is possible, and not only in workplaces where a revolutionary presence exists already as the IBRP's formulation seems to imply.
According to the text "The unions today and communist action", communists should form around them "organisms for intervention in the class", which could be ''factory based" or "territorial".
Here again, the form seems to us somewhat vague. Different organisms can appear within the proletariat, depending on the different moments in the balance of forces between the classes:
- in moments when the struggle is developing, what we call struggle committees appear, which are organisms that regroup combative elements whose aim is to contribute to the extension of the struggle, and their control by the workers through mass meetings, and elected and revocable committees of delegates; rather than being factory based, they tend to regroup workers from different sectors;
- in less crucial moments, or during an ebb following a period of intense struggle, small minorities create workers' groups or discussion circles, tied more to the need to draw the lessons of the struggle, and oriented towards the more general problems of the working class.
Faced with these tendencies within the class, the revolutionary position rejects any "spontaneism" which "waits for the class to create them by itself, and in an isolated manner". Revolutionaries intervene in these organisms and do not hesitate to propose and encourage their creation if the conditions are ripe. However, that does not make these "organisms for the intervention of communists", they are organisations of the class and in the class, whose intervention is distinct from that of the communist political organisation. This is why we think that the IBRP's formulation remains ambiguous, and leaves the door open to the conception of intermediary organisations between the working class and communist organisations.
The role of the party and the struggle to build it
The world communist party is a vital tool of the proletariat. As the experience of October 1917 has shown, the proletariat cannot achieve victory in the revolutionary process, and seize power, without forming a party which intervenes, and gives a political leadership and impulse to the revolutionary action of the class.
With the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the degeneration of the communist parties, the groups of the communist left tried to draw the concrete lessons of this experience, on the question of the party:
- Firstly, they concentrated on the programmatic question: the criticism of, and the going beyond the weak points in the programme of the Communist International which contributed to its degeneration, particularly on the union, parliamentary, and so-called "national liberation" questions.
- Then, they turned to a critique of the conception of the mass party linked to the proletariat's tasks in the ascendant period of capitalism (organisation and education of the class, given its origins in the peasant and artisan classes; participation in parliament, given the possibility of the struggle for reforms and improvements in the workers' condition).
This old conception led to a vision of the party representing, organising the class, and taking power in its name - an incorrect vision which was revealed as dangerous and damaging in the revolutionary period of1917-23. For the most advanced groups of the communist left, their critique led to the conclusion that the party is vital to the class, not as a mass organisation, but as a minority force with the job of concentrating on developing its consciousness and political determination[6]; not as an organ to exercise power on behalf of the class, but as the most dynamic and advanced factor which contributes, through its intervention and its clarity, to the class ability to exercise power collectively and massively through the workers' councils.
The position adopted by the IBRP in its 1984 platform, while it certainly demonstrates a clarification on the programmatic questions (which as we have seen above, has been further developed in the 1997 congress), also expressed an ambiguous position, full of general and vague affirmations, on the crucial question of the party, its relations with me class, its form of organisation and the process of its construction. By contrast the documents of the recent Congress are more precise on these questions, and reveal a much clearer conception of the process of the party's construction, and the concrete steps that must be taken by communist organisations in the present period.
In the 1984 platform, the IBRP said: "The class party is the specific and irreplaceable organ of the revolutionary struggle for it is the political organ of the class". We agree with the idea that the party is a specific organ (it cannot be confused with or dissolved into the class as a whole), and that it is indeed irreplaceable[7]. However, the formulation "it is the political organ of the class" can imply, without saying so openly as the Bordigists do, that the party is the organ which takes power in the name of the class.
The 1997 version provides an important precision, which moves towards the most coherent definitions of the communist left: "The class party - or the political organisations which precede it - comprises the most conscious part of the proletariat who are organised to defend the programme for the emancipation of the entire working class". On the one hand, even if this passage says so indirectly and implicitly[8], the IBRP rejects the Bordigist vision of a party self-proclaimed by a minority, independently of the historic situation and the balance of class forces, becoming the party for ever. Moreover, the IBRP has eliminated the formulation "the political organ of the class", to replace it with the much clearer "most conscious part of the proletariat which organises to defend the revolutionary programme".
Obviously, abandoning the 1984 formulation does not mean denying the political nature of the party. The proletarian party's role cannot be the same as that of bourgeois parties, whose function is to exercise political power in the name of those they represent. As an exploited class, deprived of all economic power, the proletariat cannot delegate to a minority, however faithful, the exercise of its political power.
On the other hand, the IBRP has introduced into its programmatic corpus the lessons of the Russian Revolution, which were completely missing in the 1984 version: "The lesson of the last revolutionary wave is not that the working class can do without organised leadership, or that the party is the class (a metaphysical abstraction of latter-day Bordigists) Rather, that leadership and its organisational form (the party) is the most important weapon that the revolutionary working class has. Its task will be to fight for a communist perspective in the mass organs of proletarian power (soviets). The party, however, will remain a minority of the working class and is not a substitute for the class in general. The task of establishing socialism is one for the working class as a whole. It is a task which cannot be delegated, not even to the class conscious vanguard".
The IBRP has introduced explicitly this essential lesson of the Russian Revolution (which in itself was no more than a confirmation of that motto of the Ist International, "The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves"). At the same time, it has gone on to reflect on the development of the relationship between revolutionaries and the class, the role of the party, and its links with the class.
In the 1997 platform we find the following: "the experience of the counter-revolution in Russia obliges revolutionaries to deepen their understanding of the relationship between the state, the party and the class. The role played by what started out as the revolutionary party has led many potential revolutionaries to reject the whole idea of the class party en bloc". Instead of avoiding the problem with declamatory phrases on the 'importance" of the party, the IBRP poses the question in historical terms: "During the revolution, the party will tend to conquer the political leadership of the movement by distributing and upholding its programme within the mass organs of the working class. Just as it is impossible to imagine a process of growing consciousness in the absence of a revolutionary party, it is equally impossible to imagine that the most conscious part of the proletariat could control events independently of the soviets. The soviets are the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and their decline and side lining from the Russian political scene contributed to the collapse of the soviet state and the victory of the counter-revolution. The Bolshevik Commissars, isolated from an exhausted and starving working class, found themselves forced to manage power within a capitalist state, and behaved like those that govern a capitalist state".
The IBRP draws a conclusion which we agree with: "In the future world revolution, the revolutionary party will have to try to lead the revolutionary movement solely through the mass organs of the class, which will give an impetus to its emergence. There is no recipe which guarantees victory, neither the party nor the soviets in themselves represent a certain defence against the counter-revolution, the only guarantee of victory is a living class consciousness within the working masses".
Debate and regroupment among revolutionaries
Continuing with this clarification, the IBRP has added a series of precisions, which were absent from the 1984 texts, concerning the relationship between today's revolutionary groups and the concrete manner of contributing in the present period to the process that will lead to the formation of the revolutionary party.
Confronted with the bourgeoisie's present campaign against the communist left - expressed, for example, in the "anti-negationist" campaign - revolutionaries must establish a common line of defence. On the other hand, the development in the four comers of the earth of little minorities of the class looking for contact with revolutionary positions demands that the communist groups abandon sectarianism and isolation, and on the contrary offer these elements a coherent framework for them to come to grips with both the common heritage of die communist left, and the divergences within it.
Rightly responding to these concerns, the IBRP has added a complement to the criteria for participating in the International Conferences (which are to be found in the 1984 platform), which states: "We consider the Bureau to be a force situated within the proletarian political camp, which includes those who struggle for the independence of the proletariat against capital, who have nothing to do with nationalism in any form whatever, who see nothing socialist in Stalinism or the ex-USSR, and who at the same time recognise October 1917 as the point of departure for a vaster European revolution".
The PClnt recognises that "among the organisations which belong to the said camp, there are still important political differences, among which is the nature and function of the revolutionary organisation", and that it is necessary to undertake a discussion on these differences. This is the right method, and undoubtedly represents an important change of attitude relative to the IBRP's position during the Third International Conference of the Communist Left, a position which was maintained in the texts of 1984. Let us recall that during the Conference's final session, with the support of the CWO, the PCInt proposed to introduce an additional criterion for participation, on the role of the party as a "political leadership". As we said afterwards[9], this criterion seemed to us to have no other purpose than to exclude the ICC from the International Conferences, since the PCInt refused to discuss the counter-proposal of the ICC. This counter-proposal put forward the party's role as a political leadership, but within the framework of the exercise of power by the workers' councils. It is this question which the IBRP has returned to with clarity in its 1997 platform. Moreover, and above all, at the Third Conference the PCInt rejected a draft resolution calling for an in-depth and enlarged discussion on the conception of the party, its function, its nature, and its relations with the class as a whole. With this complement, the IBRP is today proposing a systematic discussion of the question, which seems to us an unequivocal opening to programmatic clarification within the communist left. In the framework of this article, we cannot respond in depth to all the points put forward by the IBRP. However, we do want to emphasise particularly Point 2 (which we agree with wholeheartedly, like the Point 6 which we have just examined): "The IBRP tends towards the formation of the World Communist Party from the moment when there will exist sufficient strength and a political programme for its constitution. The Bureau is for the Party, but does not claim to be its sole originating nucleus. The future party will not be the fruit of the growth of just one organisation".
From this correct vision, the IBRP leads on to Point 3, which is also correct: "before the revolutionary party is formed, all the details of its political programme must be clarified through discussions and debates between its constituent parts to be"[10].
This declaration reveals the IBRP's commitment to a rigorous discussion among the revolutionary groups, with a view to clarification throughout the communist left, and the new generation of elements secreted by the class, and attracted by the former's positions. We welcome this commitment, we urge the IBRP to concretise it, and to develop it by concrete attitudes and forward steps. For our part, we will contribute to its development with all our strength.
Adalen. 16th November 1997
[1] IBRP: International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, composed of the PClnt and the Communist Workers' Organisation (UK). Note that the quotations from the 1984 IBRP platform are translated from the French version published in the first issue of the IBRP's Revue Communiste (no longer published in French, but still available in English), while quotations from the 1997 platform have been taken from the English version available on the Internet. In some cases (in particular on the trades union question, where the Internet version still contains the formulation "Trades unions are organs of mediation between labour and capital", which no longer appears in Italian), there appear to be differences between the English Internet and the Italian version. In this case, we have stuck to the Italian original published in Prometeo no.13.
[2] A delegation from the CWO also took part in this Congress.
[3] Such precision is all the more necessary in that the left of capital and especially the Trotskyists and other leftists recognise that the "struggle for democracy" is not" revolutionary", but consider it "vital" for "tactical" reasons, or as a first "step towards socialism".
[4] Fomento Obrero Revolucionario, a group of the proletarian political milieu, today sadly defunct, led by G. Munis, and whose origins lay in a break with Trotskyism in 1948.
[5] This position is similar to that of the KAPD in the 1920s which worked for the formation of "Unionen" - organisms which were half-way between the general organisation of the class and the political organisation, with platforms that included both political positions and contingent elements. In reality, the Unionen turned out to be a handicap for the class by their concessions to trades unionism.
[6] In his polemic in 1903 and throughout the Bolsheviks' struggle right up to 1917, Lenin defended the need for a clear break with the conception of the mass party, although he did not develop this idea in all its implications.
[7] See amongst other articles, "The function of the revolutionary organisation" in International Review no.29. "The party and its relations with the class" in International Review no. 35.
[8] The IBRP is much more precise in the explanation that it has added to the criteria for the International Conferences: "the proclamation of the revolutionary party, or its initial nucleus, solely on the base of the existence of little groups of activists, does nor represent much of a step forward for the revolutionary movement".
[9] See our position in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference, available from our address, and also our evaluation of the Conferences and the attitude of Battaglia Comunista, in the International Review no.22.
[10] Of course, this globally correct view should not lead 10 a schematic interpretation according to which the party cannot be formed until "all the details are clarified". For example, in March 1919 it was urgent to found the Third International (which was already late), and the founding Congress followed the advice of Lenin, rather than that of the German delegate who wanted to delay it on the (real) grounds that points remained to be clarified.
What was the nature of the system that existed in our country during the "soviet" period?
This is certainly one of the most important questions for history, and to an extent for the other social sciences. And it is not at all an academic question - it is very closely tied to the present epoch, for it is impossible to understand the reality of today without understanding that of yesterday.
And yet this question can be summed up as follows: what was the nature of the central actor of the "soviet" system, which determined the country's development, ie the ruling bureaucracy? What were its relations with other social groups? What motives and needs determined its activity?
It is impossible to study these problems seriously without knowing the works of Leon Trotsky, one of the first writers to try to understand and analyse the nature of the "soviet" system and its ruling strata. Trotsky devoted several works to this problem, but his most general and concentrated view of the bureaucracy is set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed, published 60 years ago[1].
Principal characteristics of the bureaucracy
Let us recall the main characteristics of the bureaucracy that Trotsky gives in his book:
1) The upper levels of the social pyramid of the USSR are occupied by "a ruling caste in the proper sense of the word" (p 117), and this caste "does not do any directly productive work, but directs, orders, commands, pardons and punishes". According to Trotsky, this stratum comprises between 5 and 6 million people.
2) This stratum which rules everything is removed from any control by the masses who produce social commodities. The bureaucracy reigns, the toiling masses "obey and are silent".
3) This stratum maintains relations of material inequality in society: "Limousines for the "activists", fine perfumes for "our women", margarine for the workers, stores "de luxe" for the gentry, a look at delicacies through the store windows for the plebs" (P120). In general, the living conditions of the ruling class are analogous to those of the bourgeoisie: "the ruling stratum comprises all gradations, from the petty bourgeoisie of the backwoods to the big bourgeoisie of the capitals" (P 140).
4) This stratum rules not only objectively, but subjectively, for it considers itself sole master of society: according to Trotsky it "possesses the specific consciousness of a ruling class" (p135).
5) The domination of this stratum is based on repression, and its prosperity on "the masked appropriation of the fruits of other's labour". "The privileged minority", notes Trotsky, "lives at the expense of the non-privileged majority".
6) There is a latent social struggle between this ruling caste and the oppressed majority of workers.
Trotsky in fact is describing the following picture: there exists a fairly numerous social stratum which controls production, and therefore its produce, in a monopolistic manner, and which appropriates a large part of production (in other words, exercises a function of exploitation), which is united around an
understanding of its common material interests, and is opposed to the producing class.
What do marxists call a social stratum that displays all these characteristics? There is only one answer: this is the ruling social class in every sense of the term.
Trotsky leads his reader to the same conclusion. But he does not come to it himself, even though he notes that in the USSR the bureaucracy "is something more than a bureaucracy" (P249). Something more ... but what? Trotsky does not say. Moreover, he devotes a whole chapter to refuting the notion of the bureaucracy's bourgeois class nature. Trotsky starts with "a", but after describing the exploiting ruling class, Trotsky hesitates at the last moment, and refuses to go on to "b".
Stalinism and capitalism
Trotsky demonstrates the same reticence when he compares the Stalinist bureaucratic system with the capitalist system.
"Mutatitis mutandis, the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the same position as the capitalist does in relation to the single enterprise" (p43), says Trotsky in Chapter 2 of Revolution Betrayed. In Chapter 9, he says:
"The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically [my emphasis - AG]. In reality he is compelled to live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage (...) The workers lost all influence whatever in the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a "free workman". In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state the employer" (p241/2).
In the same chapter, Trotsky notes that the nationalisation of property does not liquidate the social difference between the ruling and subject strata: the former enjoy every possible luxury, while the latter live in poverty as before and sell their labour power. He says the same thing in Chapter 4: "state ownership of the means of production does not turn manure into gold, and does not surround with a halo of sanctity the sweat-shop system" (p82).
These theses seem to observe very clearly phenomena that are elementary from a marxist viewpoint. For Marx always emphasised that the principal characteristic of a social system was not its laws and "forms of property", whose analysis as things in themselves leads to a useless metaphysics[2]. The decisive
factor is the real social relations, and principally the position of social groups in relation to society's social product.
A mode of production can be based on different forms of property. The example of feudalism shows this well. During the Middle Ages, it was based on private feudal ownership of the land in the west, and on state feudal ownership in the east. Nonetheless, social relations were feudal in both cases, since they relied on the feudal exploitation of the class of peasant producers.
In Volume III of Capital, Marx defines the principal characteristic of any society as "the specific economic form in which free labour is directly extracted from the producers themselves". Consequently, what is decisive is the relationship between those who control the process and the fruits of production, and those who carry it out. The attitude of the owners of the means of production towards the producers themselves: "This is where we discover the most profound mystery, the hidden foundation, of every society"[3].
We have already shown how Trotsky described the relationship between the ruling stratum and the producers. On the one hand, the real "owners of the means of production" embodied in the state (ie the organised bureaucracy), on the other the de jure owners, in fact the workers deprived of any rights, the wage workers, from whom "free labour is extracted". We can only draw one logical conclusion: there is no fundamental difference in nature between the Stalinist bureaucratic system and "classical" capitalism.
Here again, Trotsky starts with "a" by demonstrating the essential identity between the two systems, but does not go on to "b". On the contrary, he sets himself firmly against any identification of Stalinist society with state capitalism, and puts forward the notion of the existence in the .USSR of a specific form of "workers' state", where the proletariat remains the ruling class from the economic viewpoint, and is not subjected to exploitation despite being "politically expropriated" .
Trotsky supports this thesis by referring to the nationalisation of the land, the means of production and exchange, and transport, and the monopoly of foreign trade. In other words, he uses the same "juridical" argumentation which he has already convincingly refuted (see the quotations above). On page 82 of Revolution Betrayed, he denies that state property can "turn manure into gold", while on page 248 on the contrary, he declares that the sole fact of nationalisation is enough to make the oppressed workers into the ruling class.
The schema that replaces reality
How is this to be explained? Why does Trotsky the publicist, the merciless critic of Stalinism who cites the facts proving that the bureaucracy is a ruling class and a collective exploiter, contradict Trotsky the theoretician when he tries to analyse these facts?
Obviously, we can name two major factors which prevented Trotsky from overcoming this contradiction, one theoretical and one political.
In Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky tries to refute theoretically the thesis of the bureaucracy's bourgeois class nature with arguments as weak as the fact that it "has neither stocks nor bonds" (p249). But why should the ruling class necessarily possess them? For it is obvious that the possession of stocks and bonds is of no importance in itself: the important thing is whether this or that appropriates to itself a surplus product of the direct producers. If yes, then the function of exploitation exists whether the distribution of the appropriated product is done via dividends on shares, or through a salary and privileges attached to a job. The author of Revolution Betrayed is just as unconvincing when he says that the representatives of the leading stratum cannot bequeath their privileged status (P249). It is highly unlikely that Trotsky thought that children of the elite could become workers or peasants.
In our opinion, it is not worth considering superficial explanations like this to determine a serious reason for Trotsky's refusal to consider the bureaucracy as a social ruling class. Instead, it is to be found in his firm conviction that the bureaucracy could not become the central element of a stable system, that it was only capable of "expressing" the interests of other classes, but by distorting them.
During the 1920s, this conviction had already become the basis for Trotsky's schema of the social antagonisms of "soviet" society. For him, the framework for all these antagonisms was reduced to the strict dichotomy between the proletariat and private capital. There was no place in this schema for a "third force". The rise of the bureaucracy was seen as the result of the pressure of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie on the Party and the state. The bureaucracy was seen as balancing between the interests of the workers and those of the "new owners", unable to serve one or the other. Such a regime dominated by an unstable group "between the classes" could only fall, and the group itself split, at the first serious threat to its stability. This is what Trotsky predicted at the end of the 1920s[4].
And yet in reality, events developed quite differently. After the most violent conflict with the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy had neither fallen nor split. After easily obtaining the capitulation of an insignificant internal "right", it set about liquidating the NEP and "the kulaks as a class", and establishing a regime of forced collectivisation and industrialisation. All this came as a complete surprise to Trotsky and his supporters, convinced as they were that the "centrist" apparachiks would by nature are incapable of it! It is not surprising that the bankruptcy of the Trotskyist opposition's political calculations should be followed by its catastrophic capitulation in Russia, and its political bankruptcy at the international level[5].
Trying in vain to find a way out, Trotsky sent letters and articles from exile where he proved that the bureaucracy had only one option, and that it would "inevitably collapse long before achieving any serious results"[6]. Even when the leader of the opposition saw the practical incoherence of his idea of a role dependent on the "centrist" bureaucracy, he obstinately stuck to his bankrupt schema. At the time of the "great turn", his theoretical reflection is striking for its remoteness from reality. For example, at the end of 1928, he writes: "Centrism is an official line of the apparatus. The bearer of this centrism is the party functionary. The functionaries do not form a class. So what class line is represented by centrism?". Since Trotsky denied the possibility of the bureaucracy having its own line, he arrived at the following conclusion: "The rising owners of property find their expression, though a cowardly one, in the right fraction. The proletarian line is represented by the Opposition. What is left for centrism? When we remove the above social strata, all that is left is ... the middle peasant"[7]. And he writes all this at the same time as the Stalinist apparatus is conducting a violent campaign against the middle peasantry, and preparing its liquidation as an economic formation!
As time went on, Trotsky continued to expect an imminent split in the bureaucracy between the proletarian and bourgeois elements, and those "who would be left to one side". He predicted the "centrists ", fall from power, first after the failure of a "complete collectivisation", then as the result of an economic crisis at the end of the first Five Year Plan. In his Draft Platform for the International Left Opposition on the Russian Question written in 1931, he even envisaged the possibility of a civil war when the elements of the state and party apparatus would be divided "on the two sides of the barricades"[8].
Despite all these predictions, the Stalinist regime survived, the bureaucracy not only remained muted but even strengthened its totalitarian power. Trotsky nonetheless continued to consider the bureaucratic system in the USSR as extremely precarious. And during the 1930s, he thought that the bureaucracy’s power could collapse at any moment. In other words, it should not be considered as a class. Trotsky expressed this idea most clearly in his article The USSR at War (September 1939): "Would we not be mistaken to describe the Bonapartist oligarchy as a new ruling class a few years or even months before its shameful fall?"[9].
All Trotsky's predictions of the "Soviet" bureaucracy's imminent fall have been refuted, one after the other, by events themselves, Despite everything, he did not want to change his ideas. For him the attachment to a theoretical schema was worth more than anything else. But this is not the only reason, since Trotsky was more a politician than a theoretician, and generally preferred the "concrete political" approach to a problem than that of "abstract sociology". We will look here at another important reason for his obstinate refusal to call things by their real names.
Terminology and Politics
If we examine the history of the Trotskyist Opposition during the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s, we can see that his entire political strategy was based on the imminent disintegration of the USSR's governing apparatus. Trotsky thought that an alliance between a hypothetical "left tendency" and the Opposition would be necessary for the reform of the party and the state. At the end of 1928, he wrote: "A bloc with the centrists [ie the Stalinist apparatus] is admissible and possible in principle. Moreover, only such a regroupment in the party can save the revolution"[10]. Because they counted on such a bloc, the leaders of the Opposition tried not to put off the "progressive" bureaucrats. This tactic explains the highly equivocal attitude of the Opposition leaders towards workers' class struggle against the state, their refusal to create their own party, etc.
Even after his exile from the USSR, Trotsky continued to place his hopes in a rapprochement with the “centrists". His hope to gain the support of a part of the ruling bureaucracy was so great that he was prepared to compromise (under certain conditions) with the Secretary General of the CP's Central Committee. The story of the slogan "Stalin resign!" is a striking example. In March 1932, Trotsky published an open letter to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR where he launched an appeal: "It is necessary at last to carry out Lenin's final, insistent advice: make Stalin resign"[11]. However, a few months later he had already gone back on this, explaining: "What matters is not Stalin as an individual, but his fraction... The slogan "Down with Stalin!" could be (and inevitably would be) understood as a call for the overthrow of the fraction which is today in power, and more widely of the regime. We do not want to overthrow the system, but to reform it"[12]. Trotsky made the question of his attitude towards the Stalinists completely explicit in an unpublished article-interview written in December 1932: "Today, as before, we are ready for co-operation in many forms with the present ruling fraction. Question: Are you as a result ready to co-operate with Stalin? Answer: Without any doubt"[13].
During this period, Trotsky linked a possible turn of a part of the Stalinist bureaucracy towards a "multiform cooperation" with the opposition, to an imminent "catastrophe" for the regime, which as we have said above, he considered inevitable because of the "precariousness" of the bureaucracy's social position[14]. As a result of this catastrophe, the leaders of the Opposition were ready to consider an alliance with Stalin in order to save the party, nationalisation, and the "planned economy", from the bourgeois counter-revolution.
And yet, the catastrophe did not happen. The bureaucracy was much stronger and more firmly consolidated than Trotsky thought. The Politburo did not respond to his appeals to ensure "an honest cooperation between the historic fractions" in the CP[15]. Finally, in the autumn of 1933 and after many hesitations, Trotsky abandoned any hope - which was utopian anyway - in a reform of the bureaucratic system with the participation of the Stalinists, and called for a "political revolution" in the USSR.
However, this change to the Trotskyists' principal slogan did not mean any radical revision of their view of the nature of the bureaucracy, the Party, and state, any more than it meant a definitive rejection of their hoped-for alliance with its "progressive" wing. When Trotsky wrote Revolution Betrayed, and afterwards he still considered the bureaucracy theoretically as a precarious formation devoured by growing antagonisms. In the IVth International's TransitionaL Programme (1938), he declared that the state apparatus in the USSR comprised all political tendencies, including a "truly Bolshevik" one. Trotsky thought of the latter as a minority within the bureaucracy, but nonetheless a significant one: he was not talking of a few apparachiks, but of a fraction within a social stratum of 5-6 million people. According to Trotsky, this “truly Bolshevik" fraction was a potential reserve for the left opposition. Moreover, the leader of the IVth International still thought it admissible to form a "united front" with the Stalinist part of the apparatus, in the case of a capitalist counter-revolution, which he considered "imminent" in 1938.[16]
It is this political orientation, first towards co-operation and the bloc with the "centrists" - ie the majority of the ruling" Soviet" bureaucracy - (in the late 20s and early 30s), then towards an alliance with the "truly Bolshevik" fraction and a "united front" with the ruling Stalinist fraction (after 1933), that we must bear in mind when we examine Trotsky's ideas on the nature of the bureaucratic oligarchy and social relations in the USSR, expressed in their most complete form in Revolution Betrayed.
Let us suppose that Trotsky had recognised in the totalitarian "Soviet" bureaucracy the exploiting ruling class and bitter enemy of tile proletariat. What would have been the political consequences? In the first place, he would have had to reject the idea of uniting with a part of this class - the very idea of the existence of a "truly Bolshevik fraction" within the exploiting bureaucratic class would have been as absurd as its existence within the bourgeoisie, for example. Secondly, a supposed alliance with the Stalinists to fight the "capitalist counter-revolution" would have become a “popular front", a policy categorically rejected by the Trotskyists because it would have amounted to a bloc of enemy classes instead of a "united front" within the same class, an idea well within the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition. In short, understanding the class essence of the bureaucracy would have dealt a heavy blow to the foundations of Trotsky's political strategy. Naturally, he did not want to accept this.
Thus the problem of determining the nature of the bureaucracy was much more important than a mere matter of theory or terminology.
The destiny of the bureaucracy
To do Trotsky justice, towards the end of his life he began to revise his vision of the Stalinist bureaucracy. We can see this in his book on Stalin, the most mature of his works, although incomplete. Examining the decisive events at the turn of the 20s and 30s, when the bureaucracy completely monopolised power and property, Trotsky already considered the state and Party apparatus as one of the main social forces in struggle to "control the nation's surplus product". In declaring all-out war on the "petty bourgeois elements" they were not driven by the "pressure" of the proletariat, nor were they "pushed by the opposition" (as Trotsky had once claimed)[17]. Consequently, the bureaucracy did not "express" anyone else's interests, and was not "balancing" between two poles, but appeared as a social group conscious of its own interests. After beating all its competitors, it had won in the battle for power and profits. It alone disposed of surplus product (ie, the function of a real owner of the means of production). Admitting this, Trotsky could no longer neglect the question of tile bureaucracy's class nature. Indeed, speaking of the 1920s, he writes: "The essence of the [Soviet] Thermidor ... has crystallised new privileged strata, and has led to the birth of a new substratum of the ruling class in the economic sense [my emphasis]. There were two pretenders to this role: the petty-bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself”[18]. Thus this substratum nourished two pretenders to the role of ruling class. It only remained to see who would win - and the winner was the bureaucracy. The conclusion is very clear: it is the bureaucracy that has become the new ruling social class. In reality, although he prepared for this conclusion, Trotsky did not in fact reach it, preferring not to complete his reflections politically. But he had taken a great step forward.
In his article The USSR at war, published in 1939, Trotsky took one more step in this direction: he thought it possible in theory that "the Stalinist regime may be the first stage of a new society of exploitation". Certainly, as always he emphasised that there was another viewpoint: the "Soviet" system, and its ruling bureaucracy, were only an "episode" in the process of transformation of bourgeois into a socialist society. Nonetheless, he declared his willingness to revise his opinions in certain circumstances, notably should the bureaucratic government in the USSR enter the world war which had already begun, and should this spread to other countries[19].
We know what happened thereafter. According to Trotsky, the bureaucracy had no historic mission, was situated "between the classes", had no autonomy, was precarious, and so constituted an "episodic event". In reality, the bureaucracy did nothing less than radically alter the social structure of the USSR by proletarianising millions of peasants and petty-bourgeois, carry out an industrialisation based on the super-exploitation of the workers, transform the country into a great military power then subject it to a terrible war, and export its form of domination to Central and Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. After all that, would Trotsky have changed his view of the bureaucracy? It is hard to say: he did not survive World War II, and never saw the formation of a "socialist camp". But for decades after the war, his political adepts continued to repeat word for word the theoretical dogmas contained in Revolution Betrayed.
The march of history has obviously refuted all the main points of the Trotskyist analysis of the social system in the USSR. To understand this, only one fact is necessary: none of the "successes" of the bureaucracy fall within Trotsky's theoretical schema. And yet even today, some savants (not to mention the representatives of the Trotskyist movement) continue to claim that his conception of the ruling "caste", and forecasts as to its destiny, have been confirmed by the collapse of the CPSU regime and the events which followed in the USSR and the "Soviet bloc". Here they are talking about Trotsky's prediction that the power of the bureaucracy would inevitably fall, either as a result of a "political revolution" by the working masses, or after a social coup d’état by the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie[20]. For example, V.Z. Rogovin[21], writes that the "counter-revolutionary variant" of Trotsky's predictions "has been carried out 50 years late, but with extreme precision"[22].
Where are we to find this precision, especially "extreme precision"?
The essence of the "counter-revolutionary variant" of Trotsky's forecasts lies above all in his predictions as to the bureaucracy's fall as a ruling stratum. "The bureaucracy is inseparably linked to the ruling class in the economic sense [he means the proletariat], is nourished by the same social roots, stands and falls with it [my emphasis)"[23]. Supposing that a social counter-revolution did take place in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, and that the working class did lose its economic and social power, then according to Trotsky the ruling bureaucracy should have fallen with it.
In reality, did it fall, to give way to a bourgeoisie come from somewhere else? According to the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, more than 75 % of the Russian "political elite" and more than 61 % of the "business elite" have their origins in the Nomenklatura of the "Soviet" period[24]. Consequently, the same people are in the same ruling economic, social, and political positions in society. The origins of the other part of the elite can easily be explained. O. Krychtanovskaya writes: "Apart from direct privatisation ... whose principal beneficiaries were the technocratic part of the Nomenklatura (economists, professional bankers, etc.), we saw the quasi-spontaneous creation of commercial structures which appear to have no ties to the Nomenklatura. At the head of such structures are to be found young people, whose biographies reveal no links with the Nomenklatura. Their great financial success can only be explained in one way: although not part of the Nomenklatura, they were in its confidence, its "trusted agents", in other words its plenipotentiaries [emphasis in the original]"[25]. All this shows very clearly that it was not some "bourgeois party" (where could this have come from in the absence of a bourgeoisie under the totalitarian regime?) which took power and succeeded in using a few individuals from the previous ruling "caste" as its servants. It was the bureaucracy itself which organised the transformation of the economic and political forms of its rule, while remaining master of the system.
Thus, contrary to Trotsky's forecast, the bureaucracy did not fall. What about the other side of his predictions: the imminent split of the ruling social "stratum" between proletarian and bourgeois elements, and the formation within it of a "truly Bolshevik" fraction. Indeed, today the leaders of the "communist" parties formed from the debris of the CPSU claim to play the part of "true" Bolsheviks and to defend the interests of the working class. But it is unlikely that Trotsky would have recognised in a Zhuganov or an Ampilov[26] his "proletarian elements", since the aim of their "anti-capitalist" struggle is nothing other than the restoration of the old bureaucratic regime in its classic Stalinist, or "patriotic statist" form.
Finally, Trotsky saw the "counterrevolutionary" version of the bureaucracy's fall from power in almost apocalyptic terms: "In the unlikely event of capitalism being restored in Russia, this could only be done through a cruel counter-revolutionary coup d’état, which would claim ten times more victims than the October revolution and the civil war. Should the soviet regime fall, its place could only be taken by Russian fascism, compared to whose cruelty the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler would look like philanthropic institutions"[27]. This prediction should not be seen as a fortuitous exaggeration, for it springs inevitably from Trotsky's whole theoretical vision of the nature of the USSR, and above all from his firm conviction that the "soviet" bureaucratic system served the mass of the workers, in its own way, by guaranteeing their "social conquests". Such a vision naturally considered that a counter-revolutionary transition from Stalinism to capitalism would be accompanied by a rising of the proletarian masses to defend the "workers" state and their "own" nationalised property. And surely only a ferocious fascist regime could defeat and crush the workers' powerful resistance to a "capitalist restoration".
Obviously, Trotsky could not have known that in 1989-90 the working class would not only fail to defend nationalised property and the "communist" state apparatus, but would actively contribute to their abolition. Since the workers saw nothing in the old system to justify its defence, the transition to the market economy and the denationalisation of state property led to no bloody class struggle, and no fascist or semi-fascist regime proved necessary. Trotsky's predictions cannot be said to have been confirmed in this domain either.
If the "soviet" bureaucracy were not a ruling class, but as Trotsky put it only a "policeman" of the distribution process, the restoration of capitalism in the USSR would have required a primitive accumulation of capital. And indeed, contemporary Russian commentators often use the expression "initial capital accumulation". In doing so, they generally mean the enrichment of this or that person, the accumulation of money, the means of production, or other goods, in the hands of the "new Russians". However, this has nothing to do with scientific understanding of primitive capital accumulation uncovered by Marx in Capital. In analysing the genesis of capital, Marx emphasised that "so-called primitive accumulation is nothing but the historic process of separating the producer from the means of production"[28]. The formation of an army of wage workers by the confiscation of the producers' property is one of the main conditions for the formation of a ruling class. In the countries of the ex-USSR during the 1990s, did the "restorers of capitalism" need to form a class of wage workers by expropriating the producers? Obviously not: this class existed already, the producers had no control whatever over the means of production - there was nobody to expropriate. Consequently, the time for capital's initial accumulation had already passed.
Trotsky was doubtless right to link primitive accumulation with a cruel and bloody dictatorship. Marx also writes that "new-born capital sweats blood from every pore", and that in its first stages needs a "regime of blood"[29]. Trotsky's mistake was not in linking primitive accumulation to the counter-revolution, but in failing to see how that counter-revolution was taking place under his very eyes, with all its characteristics of massacres and monstrous political tyranny. The millions of despoiled peasants dying of poverty and hunger, the workers deprived of every right and forced to work beyond endurance, whose tombs were the foundations of the buildings constructed according to the Stalinist 5- Year Plans, the innumerable prisoners of the gulag: these are the real victims of primitive accumulation in the USSR. Today's property owners do not need to accumulate capital, they need only redistribute it amongst themselves by transforming state capital into private corporate capital[30]. But this operation did not mean a change in society, nor in the ruling classes, nor did it demand any great social cataclysm. If we do not understand this, then we will understand neither "soviet" history, nor Russia today.
To conclude. The conception of the bureaucracy contained in Trotsky's fundamental theoretical views and political perspectives is incapable of explaining the realities of Stalinism or its evolution. We can say the same of the other elements of the Trotskyist analysis of the social system in the USSR (the "workers" state, the "post-capitalist" nature of social relations, the "dual role" of Stalinism, etc.). Nonetheless, Trotsky did succeed in resolving one problem: this remarkable commentator directed a crushing critique against the claims of "socialist" construction in the USSR. And that was not too bad for his day.
AG
[1] All quotations from Revolution Betrayed are taken from the New Park edition of 1973.
[2] See Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chap 2.
[3] Marx, Capital, Book III.
[4] See the article Towards the New Stage in the Russian Centre of Collections of Documents for New History (RCCDNH), drawer 325, list I, folder 369, p1-11.
[5] By about 1930, the Opposition had lost two thirds of its members, including almost all its "historical leadership" (ten out of the thirteen who had signed the Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists).
[6] RCCDNH. drawer 325,1.1…folder 175, p4, 32-34.
[7] Bioulleten oppositsii (Bulletin of the Opposition), 1931, no.20, p.10.
[8] Bioulleten oppositsii (BO), 1931, no.20, p.10.
[9] ibid. 1939, no.79-89, p.6
[10] RCCDNH, drawer 325, 1.1, folder 499, p2.
[11] BO, 1932, no. 27, p.6.
[12] ibid., 1933, no.33, p9-10.
[13] See Broue, "Trotsky et Ie bloc des oppositions de 1932". Cahiers Leon Trotsky. 1980, no.5, p22.
[14] See Trotsky, Dnevniki i pisma, (Letters and Correspondence). Moscow. 1994. p54-55.
[15] ibid.
[16] BO, 1938, no.66-67. p.15
[17] Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. 2
[18] ibid.
[19] The USSR in the war, Trotsky, 1939.
[20] Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, p290.
[21] During the "soviet" epoch, Vadim Rogovin, professor at the Russian Institute of Sociology , was one of the main official propagandists and commentators on the social policy of the CPSU. During Perestroika, he converted himself into an "anti-Stalinist" and an unconditional admirer of Trotsky. He is the author of several apologetics for Trotsky and his ideas.
[22] Rogovin, Stalinski neonep, (The Stalinist NeoNEP), Moscow, 1994, p.344.
[23] BO, 1933. no.36-37, p.7
[24] O. Krychtanovskaya, "Finansovaya oligarkhia v Rossii", (The Financial Oligarchy ill Russia), Izvestia, 10101/96.
[25] ibid.
[26] Zhuganov is the leader of the "renovated" Communist Party and Yeltsin's main rival in the last presidential elections. Victor Ampilov is the main leader of the hard-line Stalinist movement in Russia, and the founder of the "Russian Communist Workers' Party". He calls for the restoration of the "classical" totalitarian regime of the 1930s.
[27] BO, 1935, no.41, p3.
[28] Marx, Capital, Book I, p663.
[29] ibid.
[30] Arriving at a similar conclusion after concrete sociological studies, O. Krychtanovskaya writes: "If we analyse carefully the situation in Russia in the 1990s, we see that the only "primitive accumulation” was the work of unlucky doctors turned stock-broker, or engineers buying a kiosk. This stage of accumulation almost always ended in the purchase of shares in MMM [a failed financial "pyramid"] (the result is well-known), and was rarely transformed into "secondary accumulation?" (Izvestia, 10/01/1996)
We are publishing here the report on the crisis adopted by the 12th Congress of the ICC. This report was written in January 1997, and its discussion throughout our organisation was the basis for the adoption, at the same Congress, of the Resolution on the International Situation published in no.90 of this Review. Since these two texts were written, the development of capitalism economic crisis has been dramatically illustrated by the financial upheavals that have hit, first the now ex-dragons - of Asia from the summer of 1997, then the entire world's money markets, from Latin America to Eastern Europe, from Brazil to Russia, all the way to the great industrial powers: the USA, but first and foremost Japan.
Marxist theory against the lies and blindness of bourgeois economists
The point to which both texts were able both to forecast the open crisis in the Asian countries and above all to explain its underlying causes, is striking. However, we have no intention of bragging over the concretisation of our perspectives in so short a time. The fact that these forecasts were so quickly proved correct is not the most important thing. Had they been verified some time later, the validity of the analysis would not have been diminished by one iota. Similarly, we consider it a secondary matter that our forecasts were confirmed precisely in the Asian countries. In effect, these latter only express a general tendency, which appeared in Mexico in 1994-95, and which is appearing in Russia and Brazil as we write. What is important is the concretisation, sooner or later, of a tendency which only marxism is able to understand and to foresee. Whatever its pace or place, it confirms the validity, the seriousness, and the superiority of marxism over all the inept ideas, often incomprehensible, always incomplete and contradictory, never impartial, with which we are supplied by the economists, journalists, and politicians of the bourgeoisie.
Anyone who lifts their head for a while above the successive themes of media propaganda, designed either to hide the reality of the economic crisis or to give it a reassuring explanation, cannot but be staggered by the variety and contradictory nature of the explanations proposed by the bourgeoisie for the catastrophic development of the economy since the late 1960s and the end of the reconstruction period that followed World War II.
What is left of explanations that attributed the crisis to "excessive rigidity in the monetary system"[1], now that the anarchy of exchange rates has become a factor of world economic instability? What is left of all the talk of "oil shocks"[2] now that oil prices are drowning in overproduction? What is left of "liberalism" and the "miracles" of the "market economy"[3] now that economies are collapsing in a savage trade war for an ever more rapidly contracting world market? And what credibility can we give to today's explanations, based on the sudden discovery of the "dangers of debt" , but which ignore the fact that this suicidal level of debt has been the only way of prolonging the life of an economy in its death-throes[4]?
By comparison, marxism has continued to stand by the same explanation, developing it and improving its precision where necessary, through each new open expression of the crisis. This explanation is still there, in the report that follows. It has been taken up, defended, developed and made more precise many times in the revolutionary press, and in our publications in particular. A marxist understanding is historical; it has continuity and coherence.
"The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them". "In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production (...) And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented"[5].
These characteristics and tendencies revealed by Marx and Engels have been verified throughout capitalism's history. They have become stronger still in the period of decadence, which marks the end of "new" markets and the exhaustion of the old. The tendency to massive destruction of productive forces has become a permanent and dominant one during the 20th century, in particular during the world wars. We have seen "crises appear as a result of the contradiction between the capacity for expansion, the tendency of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity" and that "credit is precisely the means of making this contradiction break out as often as possible". But credit also "paves the way for [the] more extensive and destructive crises" forecast by the Manifesto: "After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked over-production, credit (as a mediator of the process of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it itself created"[6]).
The fall in shares and currencies, along with the bankruptcy of the Asian countries, illustrates both the historical dead-end that capitalism finds itself in - expressed in the over-production mentioned in the Manifesto, and in the unlimited use of credit - and an endless fall into social and economic catastrophe into which the whole planet is being dragged. It confirms what we have said about the incompetence, not to say the utter vacuity, of the bourgeoisie's propagandists and economists. It confirms what we have said about the clear-sightedness and profound validity of the marxist method for analysing and understanding social reality, and, in the case which concerns us here, the irreversible and insoluble crisis of the capitalist mode of production. A brief reminder will suffice to illustrate our condemnation, without right of appeal, of capitalism's zealous defenders.
Thailand? "An Eldorado (...) a bubbling market"[7]. Malaysia? "an insolent success"[8], "a real locomotive [which] will soon be one of the world's top fifteen economic powers"[9]; the country plans to become, "like Singapore, a high-tech paradise"[10]; "explosive Malaysia, which sees big, really big (...) the most fortunate Asian financial market"[11]. "The Asian miracle is not over", insisted an expert consultant in February 1997 ... [12].
We could have gone on, and doubtless found other "pearls" of the same variety. They are endless, and their purpose is always the same: to deny or hide the irreversible reality of the crisis. We might have hoped that there would be no more George Bush coming to promise the "era of peace and prosperity" that the collapse of the Eastern bloc was supposed to bring; no more Jacques Chirac predicting the "end of the tunnel" . .. in 1976! But they are still there, more numerous than ever, assuring us that "the fundamentals are good" (Bill Clinton), and that "the correction [ie the fall on the world's stock markets] was a healthy one" (Alan Greenspan, president of the US Federal Reserve), or that "the recent disturbances on the financial markets could bring benefits in the long term for the American economy", and that "this does not mean the end of the boom and of growth in Asia " (Greenspan again)[13]. Nonetheless, the latter began to correct his over-optimistic words two weeks later, faced with the evidence of multiple collapses and bankruptcies affecting Japan and South Korea in particular: "the consequences of the Asia crisis will be non-negligible". Certainly, the words spoken at the high point of the crisis on the stock exchange were designed to reassure the latter, and to avoid a generalised panic; even so, they reveal both the blindness and the impotence of their authors.
What a slap in the face the Asian collapse has given to all those triumphant pronouncements about the wonders of the capitalist mode of production! How it has shown up all those pompous declarations about the exemplary success of these "emerging countries"! How it has given the lie to the speeches about the submission, discipline, sense of sacrifice in the service of the national economy, low wages and "flexibility" of the working class in these countries, as a source of success and prosperity for all!
The bankruptcy of Asia is a product of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production
Since July, the Asian "tigers" and "dragons" have collapsed. By 27th October, in one week the stock exchange had lost 18 % of its value in Hong Kong, 12.9% in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), 11. 5 % in Singapore, 9.9 % in Manila (Philippines), 6 % in Bangkok (Thailand), 5.8% in Jakarta (Indonesia), 2.4% in Seoul (South Korea) and 0.6% in Tokyo. Over the last year, the same countries have recorded falls of respectively 22 %, 44%, 26.9%, 41.4%, 41 %, 23 %, 18.5%, and 12 %[14]. The fall has continued up to the time of writing this article.
In the wake of this collapse, and despite all the calming talk about its lack of effect on the world economy, Wall Street and the European stock markets have been hit by a serious crash. Only the intervention by governments and central banks, plus the regulations of the stock exchanges - which cut off trading automatically when prices fall too quickly - have halted the movement of panic. By contrast, in the Latin American countries stock markets and currencies have plunged. Most concern has been expressed over Brazil. Moreover, the same phenomenon is now appearing in the "emerging" countries of Eastern Europe: Budapest has fallen by 16%, Warsaw by 20%, Moscow by 40 %. The decline in the stock exchange has been accompanied by the depreciation of local currencies, as in Asia and Latin America.
"The experts fear that Eastern Europe will undergo a financial crisis similar to Asia's [which would be] one of the worst threats to the recovery of the economies of the European Union" (15). As if the recession had not been hitting the whole of capitalism for a decade: "If we leave aside the euphoria of globalisation, the situation in every region of the globe since 1987 can best be defined as stagnation".
As if the origins of capitalism's bankruptcy lay in the peripheral countries, and not in the capitalist mode of production itself. As if its epicentre did not lie at the centre of capitalism, in the industrialised countries. At the end of the post-war reconstruction period in the late 1960s, it was the world's great industrial centres that were hit by open crisis. The bourgeoisie in these countries used domestic and foreign debt to the hilt to create artificially the markets it lacked. Since the end of the 1970s, there has thus been an explosion of debt, which has led first to the bankruptcy of the Latin American countries, then to the collapse of the Stalinist state capitalisms in Eastern Europe. Now it is Asia's turn. At first, the central countries had succeeded in pushing bankruptcy and recession away onto the peripheral countries. Now they are returning with tenfold strength to the central countries, which have themselves used and abused the poisonous medicine of debt: the USA is heavily in debt, while none of the European countries is capable of meeting the criteria of the Maastricht agreement on the single currency.
Events have accelerated during this financial crisis. South Korea, the world's 11th economic power, is deeply affected. Its financial system is completely bankrupt. Bank and company closures are spreading, and tens of thousands of redundancies have already been announced. This is only the beginning. Japan, the world's second economic power, "has become the sick man of the world economy"[15]. Here too, company closures are announced and redundancies are growing. What a cruel end for all those triumphant and definitive declarations about the Korean and Japanese "models"!
And what a refutation also for the pitiful explanations given for the swathe of stock market falls since the summer! First of all, the bourgeoisie tried to explain the collapse in Thailand as a purely local phenomenon ... an explanation which was obviously refuted by the facts. Then it was supposed to be a crisis of growth in the Asian countries. Finally, it was supposed to be necessary cure for the speculative bubble, which would have no real effect on the real economy... a claim immediately refuted by the bankruptcy of hundreds of heavily indebted financial establishments, a wave of closures of equally indebted companies, and the announcement of drastic austerity plans that herald recession, redundancies by the thousand, and increased pauperisation for the local population.
Capitalism's generalised indebtedness
What are the mechanisms that underlie these events? The world economy, especially during the last two decades, has been running on debt, and even on "super-debt". In particular, the development of the so-called emerging economies of South-East Asia, like those of Latin America and Eastern Europe, has been built essentially on the investment of foreign capital. Korea, for example, has a debt of $160 billion, of which almost half must be repaid in the coming year - just as its currency has lost 20 % of its value. In other words, this gigantic debt will never be repaid. We do not have space here for an examination of the debt of other Asian states - colossal debts, like those of the world's other "emerging countries" , and whose size no longer has much meaning - whose currencies are all falling relative to the dollar. Most of these debts will never be repaid either. All these "bad debts" are lost to the industrialised countries, which will in turn aggravate their own level of debt[16].
What is the bourgeoisie's response to these enormous collapses, which threaten the entire world financial system with bankruptcy? More debt! The IMF, the World Bank, and the central banks of the richest countries have clubbed together to provide bail-outs of $57 billion to Korea, $17 billion to Thailand, and $23 billion to Indonesia. These new loans will be added to the old, and "the danger is already looming on the horizon of a collapse of the Japanese banking system, riddled with bad, and even irrecoverable debt, including $300 billion loaned to ten SE Asian countries, and to Hong Kong. And if Japan should fail, then the USA and Europe will find themselves in the heart of the storm"[17].
Japan is indeed at the centre of the financial crisis. Its bad debts are of roughly the same order of magnitude as its assets in US Treasury Bonds. At the same time, the increase in the government's budget deficit in recent years has added still further to its overall level of debt. It goes without saying that despite the 'Keynesian" policy of increasing the level of debt, there has been no recovery in the Japanese economy. By contrast, bankruptcies are proliferating amongst Japan's most heavily indebted financial institutions. In order to avoid a Korean-style collapse, the Japanese state is getting still further into deficit and debt. The possibility of Japan suffering a cash-flow crisis - which is what is happening - fills the world bourgeoisie with alarm: "Will the world's number one creditor, which for years has financed without counting the American balance of payments deficit, be able to go on playing the same role with a sick economy, eaten away by bad debt and a financial system drained of its resources? The worst case scenario would see Japan's financial institutions making massive withdrawals of their investments in US bonds"[18]. This would bring the financing of America's economy to an abrupt halt, in other words it would open up a brutal recession. The catastrophic consequences of the economic crisis exported to the capitalist periphery during the 1970s, by the massive use of credit, have returned to strike the central countries, and the worst of their effects are still to come.
It is difficult to say, today, whether these extra loans will succeed in calming the storm and putting off widespread bankruptcy for later, or whether the chips are finally down. As we write, it seems more and more unlikely that the $57 billion that the IMF has scraped together for Korea will be enough to stop the rout. There have been so many calls for help that the IMF's own funds, only recently increased by all the great powers, have already proved inadequate, so much so that the IMF is thinking of ... borrowing in its own right! But whatever the outcome of this particular financial crisis, the tendency is always the same, and can only get worse in the economic crisis. At best, the problem can only be put off till later, when its consequences will be still more profound and dramatic.
Capitalism's crisis is irreversible
This massive and growing use of debt illustrates the saturation of the market: when economic activity is based on debt, that means that the market has been created artificially. Today, the bubble of deception has burst. The saturation of the world market has prevented the "emerging countries" from selling as they need to. The present crisis will reduce sales further, and aggravate the trade war. We can already see an indication of this in the pressure the Americans are putting on Japan to maintain the value of the yen and open its domestic market, and in the conditions imposed by the IMF on Korea - and the other "assisted" countries. The Asian collapse, and their increased commercial aggressiveness, will affect all the developed countries, which are already calculating how much their growth rates will be reduced.
Once again, the bourgeoisie is at last forced to recognise the facts, and sometimes even to reveal a reality (in this case the saturation of the market) constantly affirmed by marxism:: "last August, the Wall Street Journal revealed that many industrial sectors were being confronted by a long-forgotten danger: too much productive capacity, and not enough customers", while "according to an article published on 1st October in the New York Times, over-production today threatens not just America, but the entire world. The global glut is even thought to be at the root of the Asian crisis"[19].
Recourse to credit to counter over-production and the saturation of the market only delays their effects, and in its turn becomes an aggravating factor in their development, as marxist theory has explained. Even if the IMF's new loans, which are out of all proportion to anything that has gone before (more than $100 billion to date), succeed in calming the situation, there is still a bill to be paid, to which these new loans must now be added. Capitalism is still in a dead-end. And the consequences are catastrophic for the whole of humanity. Even before this crisis, which will reduce millions more workers to misery and unemployment, and degrade the living conditions of billions of human beings, the International Labour Organisation revealed that "unemployment now affects almost a billion people throughout the world, almost a third of the working population"[20]. Before this crisis, UNICEF stated that 40,000 children die every day around the world from hunger. Every day, the economic, political, and social blockage of the capitalist mode of production imposes on billions of human beings a living hell of exploitation, hunger, poverty, wars and massacres, and generalised decomposition. And the most recent events will only accelerate this fall into barbarism on every continent and in every country, rich or poor.
These dramatic events herald a brutal decline in the living conditions of the whole world population. They mean a further deterioration of an already wretched situation for the working class, whether in work or unemployed, whether in the poorer countries of the periphery (Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia) or in the industrialised countries, including in the main bastions of the world proletariat in Japan, North America and Western Europe. The disaster taking place under our very eyes, and whose effects are beginning to appear in mass layoffs in Japan and Korea amongst others, demands a response from the proletariat. The world proletariat must throw back in the face of the ruling class and its states all the talk about the Japanese and Korean "models", cited as an example for more than a decade in order to justify attacks on workers' living and working conditions: sacrifices and submission do not bring prosperity, just more sacrifices and poverty. The capitalist world is plunging humanity into catastrophe. It is up to the proletariat to respond, with a massive and united struggle against sacrifices, and against the very existence of capitalism.
RL, 7th December 1997
[1] When Nixon decided to float the dollar in 1971.
[2] As a cause of the crisis in the 1970s.
[3] The fashionable theme during the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher.
[4] International Review no.69, March 1992.
[5] Communist Manifesto, 1848 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1970).
[6] Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, in Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
[7] Investir, 3rd February 1997.
[8] Les Echos, 14th April 1997.
[9] Usine Nouvelle, 2nd May 1997.
[10] Far Eastern Economic Review, 24th October 1996.
[11] Wall Street Journal, 12th July 1996.
[12] From Jardine Fleming Investment Management (Option Finance no.437). Quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique of December 1997.
[13] International Herald Tribune, 30th October 1997.
[14] Figures taken from Courier International of 30th October 1997.
[15] Le Monde, 14th November 1997.
[16] On the level of debt in the industrialised countries, see International Review nos.76, 77, and 87.
[17] Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1997.
[18] Le Monde, 26th November 1997.
[19] Le Monde, 11th November 1997.
[20] Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1995.
Ever since 1989, the bourgeoisie's clamour about the end of marxism has been deafening. Not only have we been told over and over again about how the collapse of the "Communist" regimes showed the impossibility of creating a higher form of society than capitalism; we have also been asked to believe that marxism's predictions about the inevitable disintegration of the capitalist economy have not only been proved wrong, but have been proved right only about itself. After all, history has witnessed the collapse not of capitalism, but of socialism!
Marxists have the duty to fight these ideological campaigns, it is worth recalling that such refrains are by no means new. Almost 100 years ago, the "revisionists" in the Second International, dazzled by the achievements of a bourgeois society that had just reached its pinnacle, tried to argue that the marxist theory of crisis was obsolete, thus obviating the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
The left wing of social democracy, with Rosa Luxemburg in the forefront, were not afraid to stand by the "old" principles of marxism and reply to the revisionists by reasserting that capitalism could not escape disaster; and the events of the first three decades of the twentieth century proved them right in spectacular fashion. The 1914-18 war proved the falsity of theories about the possibility of capitalism peacefully evolving towards socialism; the reconstruction period that followed the war was short-lived and mainly confined to the USA, giving little time for the ruling class to congratulate itself on the success of its system; while the crash of '29 and the profound world-wide depression that followed gave even less basis for the bourgeoisie to argue that Marx's economic predictions were wrong, or better still, valid only for the 19th century.
It was rather different in the reconstruction period that followed the Second World War. The unprecedented rates of growth during this period gave rise to a whole industry churning out theories about the "bourgeoisification" of the working class, the consumer society, the arrival of a new, "organised" capitalism and the final end of the system's tendency towards crisis. Once again the obsolescence of marxism was proclaimed with the utmost assurance.
The crisis that opened up at the end of the 60s revealed, once again, the emptiness of all this propaganda. But it did not reveal it in a self-evident manner, in a way that could be grasped very quickly by large numbers of proletarians. Capitalism since the mid-1930s, but above all since 1945, had indeed been an "organised" capitalism in the sense that the state power had taken the responsibility for staving off its tendencies towards collapse; and the formation of "permanent" imperialist blocs made it possible to extend this "management" of the system onto the global arena. If state capitalist forms of organisation facilitated the post-war reconstruction boom, they also made it possible to slow down the crisis, so that instead of the spectacular dive of the 1930s, we have now been through almost thirty years of irregular, uneven descent, punctuated by numerous "recoveries" and "recessions" which have served to mask the underlying trend of the economy towards a total impasse.
Throughout this period, the bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of the slow pace of the crisis to develop all kinds of "explanations" about the difficulties of the economy. In the seventies, inflationary pressures were first put down to the rise in oil prices, and to the excessive demands of the working class. At the beginning of the 80s, the triumph of "monetarism" and Reaganomics put the blame on the excessive state spending of the left wing governments that had preceded them. Meanwhile, the left could point to the explosion of unemployment that accompanied the new economic policies and blame them on bad management by the likes of Thatcher, Reagan and Co. Both arguments were based on a certain reality: that the modem capitalist system, in so far as it is managed at all, is managed by the state apparatus. What they all obscure is the fact that this "management" is essentially crisis management. Nevertheless, the fact is that practically all the economic "debates" offered to us by the ruling class turn around this issue of how to manage the economy; in other words, the reality of state capitalism has been used to hide the reality of the crisis, since the uncontrollable nature of the crisis is never admitted. And this ideological use of state capitalism was given a further twist in l 989, when the collapse of the Stalinist model of state capitalism was, as we have already mentioned, held up as proof that the main crisis of present day society was not the crisis of capitalism, but the crisis of .... communism.
The collapse of Stalinism and the campaigns about the end of marxism also gave rise to the most extravagant promises about the new age of peace and prosperity that would inevitably follow. The seven years which followed have punctured large holes in these promises, above all the ones about "peace". But although, on the economic level, marxists can offer masses of evidence to show that these have been lean years rather than fat ones, they should not underestimate the capacity of the bourgeoisie to hide the truly catastrophic nature of the crisis from the exploited class, and thus to hinder the development, within the latter, of an understanding of the necessity to overthrow it.
Thus, at the XIth Congress of the ICC, our resolution on the international situation was obliged to begin its section on the economic crisis by refuting the bourgeoisie's claims that we were seeing the beginnings of a new economic recovery, particularly in the "Anglo-Saxon" countries. Two years later the bourgeoisie still talks about the recovery, even if it admits to numerous falterings and exceptions. Here, we will try therefore to avoid the mistake - often made by revolutionaries, out of an understandable enthusiasm to see the advent of the revolutionary crisis - of lapsing into an immediatist assessment of the prospects of world capitalism. But at the same time we will seek to use the most trenchant tools of marxist theory to reveal the shallowness of the bourgeoisie's claims and to underline the significant deepening of tile historic crisis of its system.
The hollow recovery
The resolution on the international situation at the XIth ICC Congress (April 95) analysed the reasons for the increased growth rates in certain important countries as follows:
"The official speeches on the "recovery " make a big thing out of the evolution of the indicators for industrial production, or the improvement in company profits. While we have indeed, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon countries, seen such a phenomenon recently, the foundation on which these rest must be pointed out:
- the recovery of profits is very often, especially for the big companies, the result of speculative windfalls; its counterpart is a new upsurge of public debts; it also flows from the elimination of "dead wood" by the big companies, in other words of their less productive sectors;
- the progress of industrial production results to a large extent from a very substantial increase in the productivity of labour based on the massive utilisation of automation and information technology.
It is for these reasons that one of the major characteristics of the present "recovery" is that it has not been able to create employment, to significantly reduce unemployment or temporary employment, which, on the contrary, can only increase, since capital constantly wants to keep a free hand in order to be able to its throw its superfluous workforce onto the streets at any moment" (International Review no.82).
The resolution goes on to emphasise that "the dramatic indebtedness of states has reached a new crescendo" and that "if they were to be subjected to the same laws as private companies, they would already have been declared officially bankrupt". This recourse to debt is a measure of the real bankruptcy of the capitalist economy, and can only presage catastrophic convulsions of the whole financial apparatus. One indication of this was the crisis of the Mexican peso. Mexico had been considered one of the models of third world "growth", but when the peso began to collapse, it needed a massive £50 billion dollar rescue operation to prevent a real disaster on the world's money markets. This episode revealed not only the fragility of the much-vaunted growth in some of the third world economies (with the Asian "tigers" being the most vaunted of all), but also the fragility of the entire global economy.
One year later, the resolution on the international situation from the 12th RI Congress reviewed the perspectives for the world economy drawn out at the XIth ICC Congress. The latter had predicted new financial convulsions and a new dive into recession. The resolution from the RI congress pointed to the factors which confirned this overall analysis: dramatic problems in the banking sector and a spectacular fall in the dollar at the financial level; and, at the level of the tendency towards recession, the increasing difficulties of those former models of economic growth, Germany and Japan. These indications of the real depth of the capitalist crisis have become even more significant over the past year.
Debt and capitalist irrationality
In December 96, Alan Greenspan, head of America's central bank, got up at a posh diner party and began talking about the "irrational exuberance" of the stock markets. Taking this to be warning of a financial crash, investors around the world were caught up in a selling panic and billions were wiped off share prices around the world - £25 billion in Britain alone, resulting in one of the steepest drops in share prices since 1987. The world's stock markets quickly recovered from this mini -crash, but the episode is a telling reminder of the fragility of the whole financial system. And indeed Greenspan was not at all wrong to talk about irrationality. The capitalists themselves have noted the absurdity of a situation in which Wall Street prices now tend to take a tumble when the rate of unemployment falls too low, since this revives fears of an "overheating" of the economy and new inflationary pressures. Bourgeois commentators can even see that there is an increasing divorce between the massive speculative investments carried out through the world's stock markets and not only real productive activity, but even "real" buying and selling. As we pointed out in our article "The Casino Economy" (IR 87), written just before the December mini-crash, the New York Stock Exchange had recently celebrated its 100th anniversary by announcing that the Dow Jones Index, with a 620% increase over the past 14 years, had beaten all previous records, including the "irrational exuberance" that had preceded the 1929 crash. And several capitalist experts met this announcement with profound misgivings: "Share prices of American companies no longer bear any relation to their real value" said Le Monde; "the longer this speculative madness lasts, the higher will be the price to pay later" said the analyst B M Biggs (both cited in IR 87). The same article in the Review also pointed out that while annual world trade is worth some $3,000 billion, international capital movements are estimated at $100,000 - 30 times more. In sum, there is a growing divorce between stock market prices and real value, the bourgeoisie is aware of this, and so deeply worried about it that a few hints from a leading US economics guru can trigger a huge crisis of confidence around the world's money markets.
What the capitalists can never understand, of course, is that "speculative madness" is merely a symptom of the impasse facing the capitalist mode of production. The underlying instability of the capitalist financial apparatus is based on the fact that a vast proportion of all economic activity today is not "really" being paid for, but is maintained by an ever-increasing mountain of debt. The wheels of industry, indeed of all branches of the economy, are being turned by debts that can never be repaid. The resort to credit has been a fundamental mechanism not only of the post-war reconstruction, but also of the "management" of the economic crisis since the 1960s. It is a drug that has kept the capitalist patient alive for decades; but as we have said many times, the drug is also killing the patient.
Indeed, in her answer to the revisionists in 1898, Rosa Luxemburg explained with great clarity why the resort to credit, while appearing to ameliorate things for capital in the short term, could only exacerbate the crisis of the system in the long term. It is worthwhile quoting her at length on this point since it sheds a great deal of light on the situation facing world capitalism today.
"Credit, through share-holding, combines in one magnitude of capital a large number of individual capitals. It makes available to each capitalist the use of other capitalists' money - in the form of industrial credit. As commercial credit it accelerates the exchange a/commodities and therefore the return of capital into production, and thus aids the entire cycle of the process of production. The manner in which the two principal functions of credit influence the formation of crises is quite obvious. If it is true that crises appear as a result of the contradiction existing between the capacity of extension, the capacity of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity of the market, credit is precisely, in view of what was stated above, the specific means that makes the contradiction break out as often as possible. To begin with, it increases disproportionately the capacity of the extension of production and thus constitutes an inner motive force that is constantly pushing production to exceed the limits of the market. But credit strikes from two sides. After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked overproduction, credit (as a factor of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive force it itself created. At the first symptom of the crisis, credit melts away. It abandons exchange where it would still be found indispensable, and appearing instead ineffective and useless, there where exchange still continues, it reduces to a minimum the consumption capacity of the market.
Besides having these two principal results, credit also influences the formation of crises in the following ways. It constitutes the technical means of making available to an entrepreneur the capital of other owners. It stimulates at the same time the bold and unscrupulous utilisation of the property of others. That is, it leads to speculation. Credit not only aggravates the crisis in its capacity as a dissembled means of exchange, it also helps to bring and extend the crisis by transforming all exchange into an extremely complex and artificial mechanism that, having a minimum of metallic money as a real base, is easily disarranged at the slightest occasion.
We see that credit, instead of being an instrument for the suppression or the attenuation of crises, is on the contrary a particularly mighty instrument for the formation of crises. It cannot be anything else. Credit eliminates the remaining rigidity of capitalist relationships. It introduces everywhere the greatest elasticity possible. It renders all capitalist forces extensible, relative, and mutually sensitive to the highest degree. Doing this, it facilitates and aggravates crises, which are nothing more or less than the periodic collision of the contradictory forces of capitalist economy" (Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, Part One).
But now, in contrast to the days that Luxemburg was writing about, credit no longer disappeared in a crisis, eliminating the weakest capitals in good old Darwinian manner and adjusting prices downwards to reflect the fall in demand: on the contrary, credit became more and more the only mechanism for keeping capitalism afloat. So now we have the unprecedented situation whereby not only are the large capitals lending to the smaller capitals so that they can buy their goods from them: the world's main creditors have themselves been compelled to become debtors. TIle present situation of Japanese capital demonstrates this very succinctly. As we pointed out in "The Casino Economy", "with a foreign trade surplus, Japan has become the world's banker, with foreign assets greater than $1000 billion ", it is "the world's savings bank, providing 50% of the OECD countries financing needs" But the same article also points out that "Japan is certainly one of the most indebted countries on the planet. Today the accumulated debt of all non-financial agents (households, companies, the state), represents 260% of GNP; in a decade, it is expected to reach 400% ". Japan's budget deficit stood at 7.6% for 1995, compared to the USA's 2.8 %. As for the banking institutions themselves, "the Japanese economy is confronting a mountain of $460 billion of bad debts". All this has led to the specialists in risk analysis, Moody's, giving Japan a "D" classification, in other words, it is as big a financial risk as countries like China, Mexico and Brazil!
If Japan is the world's creditor, where does it get its credits from? Not even a Zen-trained Japanese businessman-samurai could unravel this koan. The same question could be asked about American capitalism, which is also simultaneously a global banker and a global debtor, even if its rulers have made a song and dance about tile reduction of the US deficit (in October 1996, government and opposition both rushed to claim credit for the fact that the US budget deficit was, at 1.9 percent of GDP, the lowest for 15 years).
The fact is that this absurd situation demonstrates that, for all the talk of sound economies and balancing the books that both governments and opposition like to indulge in, capitalism can no longer function according to its own rules. Against the bourgeois economists of his day, Marx went to great lengths to show that capitalism cannot create an unlimited market for its own commodities; the enlarged reproduction of capital depended on the capacity of the system to constantly extend the market beyond its own confines. Rosa Luxemburg demonstrated the concrete historical conditions in which this extension of the market would no longer be able to take place, thus plunging the system into irreversible decline. But capitalism in this epoch has learned to live with its own death agony, flouting its own rules in tile most shameful manner. No new markets you say? Then we'll create them even if it means that everyone, including the richest states on the planet, are, strictly speaking, bankrupt. In this manner, capitalism since the late sixties has avoided the kind of sudden deflationary crashes which it knew in the 19th century and which was still the form taken by tile crisis of 1929. In the current period, periodic recessions and financial splutterings have the function of letting off some of the steam that global debt is building up inside the capitalist pressure cooker. But they also presage the far more serious explosions that lie ahead. The collapse of the eastern bloc should serve as a warning to the bourgeoisie everywhere: you can only flout the law of value for so long. Sooner or later it will reassert itself, and the more you have flouted it, the more devastating will be its revenge. In this sense, as Rosa Luxemburg insisted, "credit is far from being a means of capitalist adaptation. It is on the contrary, a means of destruction of the most extreme revolutionary significance" (Social Reform or Revolution).
The limits to growth: the crisis in the US, Britain, Germany and Japan
It is all the more important to bear this in mind at the present juncture, where a number of apparently contradictory elements present themselves. The "recovery" centred in the "Anglo-Saxon" countries has faltered somewhat in the bourgeoisie's own terms, but most of the pundits are at least "quietly optimistic" about the prospects for growth. For example, The Sunday Times of 29/12/96 made a tour of the predictions US experts were making for the American economy in 1997, based on its performance in 96:
"Our tour of American prognosticators begins with the Business Week survey of the 50 top practitioners of that art. On average, those seers expect 1997 to be a repeat of 1996. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is forecast to grow steadily at a 2.1 % annual rate, and consumer prices to rise 3 %... The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a low 5.4 % and the interest rate on 30-year Treasuries to stay close to current levels at 6.43%". Indeed, the main debate among American economists at the moment seems to be whether continued growth will result in excessive inflation, a question we will come back to later on.
The British bourgeoisie, or at least its governing team (ie the Major government, when this report was written), has swapped styles with the Americans, and instead of being cautiously optimistic, is shooting its mouth off at every opportunity. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British economy is "in its best shape for a generation". Speaking on 20.12.96, he quoted figures from the Office for National Statistics which "prove" that real disposable income has risen by 4.6% over the year; consumer expenditure was up by 3.2 %; overall economic growth was put at 2.4 %, while the trade deficit has also fallen. In the same month, official unemployment, in general descent since 1992, fell below 2 million for the first time in five years. In January, various forecasting institutes, such as Cambridge Econometrics and Oxford Economic Forecasting predicted that 1997 would bring more of the same, with growth rates of around 3.3%. In Britain too the most talked about concern of the experts is that the economy will "overheat" and provoke a new surge of inflation.
As we have seen, the ICC has already analysed the reasons for the relatively strong performance of the Anglo-Saxon countries in recent years. Apart from the factors cited by the resolution from our Xlth Congress, we have also pointed, in the case of the US, to "unprecedentedly brutal attacks against the workers (many of whom are forced to hold down two jobs to survive), and to using the advantages conferred by its special status as world superpower; financial, monetary, diplomatic and military pressure all put to the service of the trade war it is waging against its competitors" (resolution on the international situation, 12th Congress of RI, published in International Review no.86). In the case of Britain, the report to the 12th WR Congress (see World Revolution no.200) confirmed the degree to which the "recovery" has been based on debt, speculation, the elimination of dead wood and the massive utilisation of automation and information technology. It also points to the specific advantages Britain obtained by withdrawing from the ERM in 1992 and the resulting devaluation of sterling, which greatly increased its exports. But the report also details the real impoverishment of the working class that this "recovery" has been based upon (increasing rates of exploitation, decline in social services, growth of homelessness and so on), while exposing the bourgeoisie's lies about falling unemployment: since 1979, the British bourgeoisie has altered the criteria for its unemployment statistics 33 times. Current definitions, for example, ignore all those who have become "economically inactive", ie those who have finally given up looking for employment. This fraud was even owned up to by the Bank of England:
"Almost the entire net improvement in unemployment performance in the 1990s compared with the 1980s was accounted for by the rise in inactivity" (Financial Times, 12.9.96). So much for the "highest living standards for a generation" claimed by Mr Clarke.
But while marxists are always obliged to show the real costs of capitalist growth to the working class, merely pointing to the misery of the workers does not in itself prove that the economy is in bad shape. If this were the case, then capitalism would never have had an ascendant phase, since the exploitation of the workers in the 19th century was, as everyone knows, absolutely ruthless. To show that the bourgeoisie's optimistic forecasts are based on sand, we need to look at the deeper trends of the world economy. And here we must examine those countries whose economic difficulties provide the clearest indications of where things are going. As the resolution of the 12th Congress of Revolution Internationale points out, the most significant developments at this level in the last few years has been the decline of those two "powerhouse" economies, Germany and Japan.
The recent territorial conference of Welt Revolution identified a number of elements confirming this decline as regards Germany. These include:
- the shrinking of the internal market: for decades, the Germany economy provided a big market for the European and world economy. With the growing impoverishment of the working class, this is ceasing to be the case. In 1994, for example, expenditure on food shrank by 6 % to 20%. More generally internal investments will be 8 % lower this year; investment in buildings and equipment are some 30 % below the peak of 1992. Real turnover fell by 2 % in 1995. But the most significant figure in this respect is certainly the fact that unemployment now stands at well over 4 million: according to Germany's Labour Office, it could reach 4.5 million over the next few months. This is the clearest evidence for the pauperisation of the German working class and its decreasing ability to serve as a market for German and world capital.
- the growing burden of debt: in 1995 the state deficit (federal, Lander and municipalities) reached 1,446 billion DM. When another 529 billion DM of "hidden" debt is included, the total sum amounts to about 2,000 billion DM, corresponding to 57.6 % of the GNP. Over the past ten years, public debt has risen by 162 % .
- the increasing cost of maintaining the working class: tile growth of unemployment further increases the insolvency of the state, which is confronted with an undefeated working class and cannot simply allow the unemployed to starve. Despite all the famous austerity measures introduced by the Kohl government this past year, tile state still has a massive bill for maintaining the unemployed, the old age pensioners and the sick. Some 150 billion out of a federal budget of 448 billion DM are spent on social payments to the working class. The Federal Unemployment Office has a budget of 104.9 billion DM, and is already bankrupt.
- the failure of the German bourgeoisie to build up an "industrial landscape" in the east: despite the gigantic amounts of money spent in the east after reunification, the economy there has not taken off. Much of the money has gone into infrastructure, telecommunications and housing, but little into new industries. Instead all of the former, obsolete plants have gone bankrupt; and if new, modernised plants have been set up, they have absorbed less than 10 % of the old workforce. The army of the unemployed remains, but now has the "benefit" of sophisticated telecommunications and smart new roads!
All these factors are severely hampering German competitiveness on the world market and are compelling the bourgeoisie to make savage attacks on all aspects of working class living conditions: on wages, social benefits and jobs. The end of the German" social state" is the end of many capitalist myths: tile myth that hard work and social passivity give workers higher living standard, the myth of the necessary and profitable collaboration between bosses and workers, the myth of a German model of prosperity that can show other countries the way forward. But it is also the end of a reality for world capital: Germany's ability to act as a locomotive for the European and indeed the world economy. Instead, the very overt decline of German capital, and not the superficial "recovery" boasted by the US and British bourgeoisie, shows the real prospects of the system as a whole.
Equally significant is the wearing out of the Japanese economic "miracle". This had already became apparent in the early 90s, when growth rates - which had soared up to 10% in the 1960s - slumped to no more than 1 %. Japan was now "officially" in recession. A slight improvement in 1995 and 96 led some commentators to wax enthusiastic about the prospects for the year ahead. An article published in The Observer in January 1996 pointed to Japan's "unstoppable" export performance (a 10 % increase on 1994 meaning that Japan had now overtaken the US as the world's biggest exporter of manufactured goods). It confidently announced that "Japan is back in the global economic driving seat".
Our recent article "The Casino Economy" poured cold water on such hopes. We have already mentioned the mountain of debt weighing down the Japanese economy. The article goes on to insist that "this puts into proportion the recent Japanese announcement of a slight upward movement in growth figures, after four years of stagnation. The bourgeois media represent this as a piece of really 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 souffle".
The latest OECD report on Japan (2.1.97) fully confirms this analysis. Although the report predicts increased growth rates for 1997 (around 1.7%), it places all its emphasis on the need to tackle the debt problem. "The report concludes that, while the fiscal stimulus of the past year and a half was crucial in offsetting the impact of the recession, in the medium term Japan must control its budget deficit to reduce accumulated government debt. That debt is 90% of the economy's yearly output ... " (The Guardian, 3.1. 97). The OECD calls for increased sales taxes but above all largescale public spending cuts. Its concern about Japan's longer term economic health is openly announced. In short, this leading bourgeois think-tank makes no attempt to disguise the fragile nature of any "recovery" in Japan, and is clearly worried about the economy borrowing its way into even bigger problems in the future.
When it comes to countries like Germany and Japan, the bourgeoisie's worries are well founded. It was above all the reconstruction of these two war-shattered economies that provided the stimulus of the great boom of the 50s and 60s; it was the completion of that reconstruction in these two countries that provoked the return to the open crisis of overproduction at the end of the 60s. Today, the increasingly evident failure of these two economies constitutes a qualitative shrinking of the world market and is the sign that the global economy is tottering towards a new stage in its historic decline.
The wounded "dragons"
Disillusioned by Japan's difficulties, the bourgeoisie and its media tried to generate new false hopes by pointing to the performance of the east Asian "tigers", economies like Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, whose staggering growth rates were heralded as the wave of the future. China too has been presented as being on the road to "economic superpower" status in place of Japan.
The fact is that, like previous third world "success stories" like Brazil and Mexico, the growth of the Asian tigers is a debt-fuelled bubble that could burst at any time. The big western investors, including the IMF, are already becoming aware of this:
"Among the reasons the richest industrial countries have been so anxious to double the IMP's emergency credit lines to 850 billion is that a new Mexico-style crisis is feared, this time in the Far East. The upsurge in the Pacific economies has stimulated enormous private sector capital flows, which have been substituted for domestic saving, lending to an unstable financial situation. The question has been which Asian tiger would be the first to fall.
Certainly the situation in Thailand is starting to look dicey. The finance minister, Bodi Chunnananda, has resigned amidst slumping investor confidence and shrinking demand in key sectors, including construction, property and finance - all symbols of a bubble economy. Similarly there has been a focus on recent uncertainty in Indonesia, as the stability and human rights record of the Suharto regime has become an issue" (Guardian, 16.10.96).
Most striking of all is the current social and economic situation in South Korea. The bourgeoisie here, learning from its European cohorts, has certainly drawn the workers into a large-scale manoeuvre: in December 96, tens of thousands of workers came out on strike against new labour laws which were presented above all as an attack on democracy and trade union rights, thus allowing the unions and opposition parties to take the workers off their own terrain. But behind the government's provocative attack is a real response to the crisis facing the South Korean economy: the central feature of the law is that it makes it far easier for businesses to lay-off workers and set working hours, and is clearly seen by the workers as a preparation for attacks on their living conditions.
As for China becoming the new powerhouse economy, this has never been more than a sinister farce. True, the capacity of the Stalinist regime there to adapt and survive when so many others have collapsed is remarkable in itself. But no amount of economic liberalisation, "opening up to the west", nor exploitation of tile new outlets that will be offered by the handing over of Hong Kong will transform the foundations of the Chinese economy, which remains desperately backward in industry, agriculture and transport, and, like all Stalinist regimes, chronically hampered by the weight of a bloated bureaucracy and military sector. As in the de-Stalinised regimes, liberalisation has indeed blessed China with western-style benefits... such as mass unemployment. On 14 October the state-run China Daily admitted that the number of unemployed could rise by more than half the present figure to 268 million in four years. With millions of rural migrants flooding the cities and bankrupt state enterprises desperate to shed "surplus" workers, tile Chinese bourgeoisie is deeply concerned about the danger of a social explosion. According to official figures, 43 % of state enterprises were losing money in 95, while in the first three months of 96, the entire state sector was running at a loss. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of state enterprise workers have been paid no wages for months (The Economist, 14-20 December 96). It is true that an increasing proportion of China's industrial output derives from private or mixed-ownership enterprises, but even if these sectors prove to be more dynamic, they could hardly compensate for the huge burden of bankruptcy in the directly state-owned sector.
Perspectives
1. A sharpening trade war
We have already pointed out that America's capacity to use its muscle internationally has been a big factor in the relative strength of the US economy in the past few years. But this also highlights another feature of the current situation: the growing intimacy between trade war and inter-imperialist competition.
Evidently, this intimacy is a product both of the general conditions of decadence, in which economic competition is increasingly subordinated to military and strategic rivalries, and of the specific conditions prevailing since the collapse of the old bloc system. The period of the blocs highlighted the subordination of economic rivalries to military ones, since the two main superpowers were not the main economic rivals. By contrast, the imperialist fissures that have opened up since 1989 correspond much more closely to direct economic rivalries. But this has not overthrown the domination of imperialist-strategic considerations; on the contrary, the trade war is more and more revealed as an instrument of the latter.
This is very clear with the Helms-Burton law passed by the US. This law makes unprecedented incursions into the "trading rights" of America's main economic and imperialist rivals, forbidding them to trade with Cuba on pain of sanctions. This is very clearly a provocative response by the US to the challenge to its global hegemony by the European powers, a challenge being mounted not only in "far away" regions like the Balkans and the Middle East, but also in America's "back yard", the Latin American countries, including Cuba itself.
The European powers have not remained passive in the face of this provocation. The European Union has taken the USA to the new World Trade Organisation court at Geneva, demanding the lifting of the Helms-Burton law. This confirms what we said in our article on globalisation - that the formation of regional trading conglomerations like the EU corresponds to "the necessity for groups of capitalist countries to create zones of protection from which to confront their most powerful rivals" (IR 86). The EU is thus an instrument of the global trade war, and the recent moves towards a single European currency have to be seen in this light. But it has more than purely "economic" functions: as we saw over the war in ex-Yugoslavia, it can also serve as a more direct instrument of inter-imperialist confrontation.
Of course, the EU is itself wracked by deep national-imperialist divisions, as illustrated recently by the disagreements between Germany and France on the one hand, and Britain on the other, over the single European currency. In the general context of "every man for himself", we can expect to see both trade and imperialist rivalries taking an increasingly chaotic form, aggravating the instability of the world economy; and, as each nation is forced to place barricades around its national capital, this will further accelerate the contraction of the global market.
2. Inflation and depression
Thus, whatever straws the bourgeoisie tries to cling to, world capitalism is inching towards the edge of vast economic convulsions, on a scale that will dwarf all those seen in the past thirty years. This is certain. What cannot be so clear to revolutionaries is not only the exact timescale of such convulsions (and we will not enter into the forecasting game here), but also tile precise form they will take.
After the experience of the 1970s, inflation has been presented by the bourgeoisie as the great dragon to be slain at all costs: the wholesale policies of deindustrialisation and cuts in public spending advocated by Thatcher, Reagan and the other monetarists were founded on the argument that inflation was the number one danger for the economy. By tile early 90s, inflation, at least in the main industrial countries, appeared to have been tamed to tile point that some economists began to talk about the historic conquest of inflation. One might ask whether we are not in fact seeing a partial return to the kind of deflationary crisis of the early 30s: a "classical" crisis of over-production in which prices tumbles with the sudden shrinking of demand.
Moreover, we should note that this tendency began to be reversed after 1936, when the state intervened -massively in the economy: the growth of the war economy, the boosting of demand by government spending- gave rise to inflationary pressures. This modification was even more apparent with the crisis that opened up in the late 60s. The first response of the bourgeoisie was to pursue the "Keynesian" policies of the previous decades. This had the effect of slowing down the pace of tile crisis but resulted in dangerous levels of inflation.
Monetarism presented itself as a radical alternative to Keynesianism; as a return to classical capitalist values of only spending money that had really been made, "living within our means" and so on. It claimed to be dismantling the bloated state apparatus and some revolutionaries were hoodwinked, talking about the "rolling back" of state capitalism. In reality, capitalism could not return to the forms and methods of its youth. Senile capitalism cannot keep going without the crutch of a hugely swollen state apparatus, and while the Thatcherites cut state spending in some sectors - especially those relating to tile social wage - they have hardly touched the war economy, the bureaucracy, or the machinery of repression. Furthermore, the trend towards deindustrialisation has increased the weight of unproductive sectors on the economy as a whole. In short, the "new" policies of the bourgeoisie could not remove the factors underlying the inflationary tendencies of decadent capitalism: the necessity to maintain a huge unproductive sector (see in this regard "Overproduction and inflation" in World Revolution no.2 and Revolution Internationale no.6, December 1973).
Another factor of the greatest importance in this equation is the system's growing dependence on credit, which we have already looked at. The huge extent of government borrowing shows how little the bourgeoisie has been able to break from the "Keynesian" policies of the past. In fact, it is the lack of solvent markets which makes it impossible for tile bourgeoisie, whatever the ideological varnish of its governing teams, to escape the necessity to create an artificial market. Today debt has become the principal artificial market for capitalism, but the original measures proposed by Keynes led straight in this direction.
If we want to find a model for the collapse of an economy which has turned the law of value inside out - the collapse, that is to say, of a state capitalist economy - we should look at what is happening in the former eastern bloc countries. What we are seeing here is not only a collapse of production on a far greater scale than in the crisis of 1929, but also a tendency towards uncontrollable inflation and the gangsterisation of the economy. Is this the shape of things to come in the west?
In no.28 of its review, dated May 1995, Internationalist Perspective (IP) offered us a panegyric on capitalism's strengths since the beginning of the century, and more particularly throughout the East Asian region. Not even the most ideological of World Bank reports has yet dared utter such paeans of praise: "capitalism has continued to develop the productive forces throughout the period of decadence - and moreover at an extremely rapid pace (...) the most prodigious rates of growth (sic!) in world industrial production have occurred since the end of the 1960s (...) the ICC also speaks of a geographically uneven development: according to its conception of decadence, no country newly arrived on the world market can industrialise and rival the old powers (...) And yet, since World War II Japan has become the world's second economic power; China is rapidly becoming a major economic power in its own right; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc have recently joined the ranks of the industrialised countries (...) In 1962, the Western Pacific only accounted for 9% of world GNP; in 1982 the figure was 15 %; and by the end of the century it will probably be 25 % - greater than Europe or North America. This capitalisation of the Far East, the entry into the ranks of the industrialised world of a region which before World War II was totally marginal from the industrial viewpoint, simply cannot be explained by the ICC's concept of decadence". While IP was lauding the radiant future of capitalism, our diagnostic forecast increasingly frequent and serious financial tremors, as a result of the growing recourse to debt as a means of putting off the effects of the crisis[1]. At the same time, we analysed historically and in depth the supposed prosperity of South-East Asia, and while we were at it put paid to all the bourgeoisie's tired old refrains on the subject[2], refrains which have been adopted, broadcast, and amplified by IP.
We have not had to wait more than two years for the facts to pronounce their verdict: South-East Asia is in intensive care, the IMF has had to act with utmost energy in order to impose the most drastic measures ever taken to try to "recover" a terrible economic situation. To accompany these measures, which are likely to lead to a major economic collapse, it has had to make available the biggest loan in its history. As for the other end of the planet, damage has been limited in the Western economies only by high level manipulation by governments and the major financial institutions.
IP is clearly more concerned to oppose the ICC than the bourgeoisie... This is where the worst kind of parasitism leads: objectively to play the game of the class enemy, to spread about the most inept drivel produced by the bourgeoisie's propaganda machine.
IP is going the same way on many other political questions, and it would be tedious to go through them all. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile nailing one more of its "theoretical exploits" of the last decade.
Just as the bourgeois campaigns after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes were at their most deafening to identify Lenin with Stalin, the Russian Revolution with the Gulag and Nazism, IP brought its own contribution to the edifice. In the editorial of IP no.20 (summer 1991), illustrated with a head of Lenin from which emerged little heads of Stalin, we could read the following: "Revolutionaries (...) must destroy their own icons, the statues of "glorious leaders" (...) [they] must get rid of the tendency to consider the Bolshevik revolution as a model". Here is IP's fundamental theoretical contribution to help spring the traps of a bourgeois ideological campaign whose prime objective is to eradicate from the consciousness of the working class its entire history and historic perspective (see the article in this issue). IP's persistence in adopting ludicrous positions, damaging to the development of proletarian consciousness, its constant desire to elaborate "theories", as absurd as they are incoherent and pedantic, is to be explained entirely by the group's origins and nature: as one of the most concentrated expressions of political parasitism.
C.Mcl
[1] Article on the financial situation in International Review no. 81, "Resolution on the International Situation" in International Review no. 82, "A casino economy" in International Review no. 87, "Resolution on the International Situation" in International Review no. 90.
[2] "The Asian dragons run out of steam" in International Review no.89.
[3] The reader may find our position on IP (or "External Fraction of the ICC" as it used to be called) in International Review nos.45, 64, and 70.
[4] Logically, IP should have abandoned the position of the communist left, which it still officially holds, on the impossibility of real national liberation struggles in decadence.
In the wake of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, there arose in Russia a committee for the study of the legacy of Leon Trotsky. This committee held a number of conferences on different aspects of the work of that great marxist revolutionary. In the course of the study of the contribution of Trotsky, it became clear not only that Trotsky himself had not been the only nor the most radical and resolute representative of the "Trotskyist" Left Opposition, but that there had been other oppositional currents inside and outside Russia, situated much further to the left. More particularly, it emerged that another, alternative tradition existed within the proletarian struggle against Stalinism, that of Left Communism representatives of which still exist today. On the initiative of Russian members of the committee, our organisation, the International Communist Current, was invited to the 1996 Conference in Moscow, devoted to an appraisal of Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed. On the proposition of the ICC, other groups of the Communist Left were also invited to participate, but either failed to come, as in the case of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, or refused out of a deep-seated sectarianism, as in the case of the "Bordigists". However, the intervention of the ICC was far from being the only expression of the life of the proletariat at that conference. The critique of Trotsky's refusal to recognise the state capitalist character of Stalinist Russia, which was presented to the conference by a Russian member of the organising committee, and which we are publishing in this issue of our International Review, is proof of that. A year later, moreover, the presence of groups of the Communist Left at the 1997 conference on Trotsky and the October Revolution was greatly reinforced by the participation, alongside the ICC, of another representative of the proletarian milieu: the Communist Workers Organisation, which alongside Battaglia Comunista forms the above mentioned International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (lBRP).
The legacy of Trotsky and the tasks of the present period
The conferences on the legacy of Trotsky took place in response to events of world historic importance: the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the Eastern Bloc (and thus the whole post-World War II world order of Yalta) and of the USSR itself. The fact that Stalinism was not toppled by the class struggle of the proletariat, but decomposed under the weight of the historic crisis of world capitalism, and of its own specific weaknesses as an economically and politically backward fraction of the bourgeoisie, allowed the ruling lass to present these events as the bankruptcy not of Stalinism, but of Communism and in particular of marxism. As a result, by presenting its own historical decomposition as that of marxism, Stalinism, the mortal enemy of the proletariat, was able even in its foundering to render yet another great service to world capitalism. For these events were used to attack the consciousness of the workers of the world on a most crucial question: that of the historic goal of their struggle - communism itself. But if the world historic events of 1989-1992 thus resulted in a massive retreat in the level of class consciousness within the proletariat as a whole, they did not signify an historic defeat of the working class, whose combativity and capacity for collective reflection remained intact. Thus, while causing a retreat in the consciousness of the mass of proletarians, these events also contained the perspective of a quantitative development, and of a qualitative maturation of small revolutionary minorities of the class. By brazenly equating Stalinism with communism, the bourgeoisie obliges those searching proletarian minorities who reject this equation to pose the following questions: which political currents in the history of the working class opposed the Stalinist counter-revolution in the name of communism and of the proletariat, and which part of this heritage can serve as the basis for revolutionary activity today? Now, it is a central thesis of marxism that the class consciousness of the proletariat is above all an historic consciousness, and that therefore revolutionary minorities can only fulfil their tasks by making the assimilation and critical synthesis of all the contributions of past generations of marxists the point of departure of their struggle. In particular, the marxist conception of the role of a fraction, which in a period of defeat of the proletariat has the irreplaceable responsibility of drawing all the lessons of that defeat and passing them on to future revolutionary generations (Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the defeat of the 1905 revolution in Russia; Luxemburg and the Spartakists after the defeat represented by the Social Democratic support for World War I in 1914; the Italian Fraction around the publication Bilan after the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 etc), is a central concretisation of this understanding. Of the many thousands of revolutionary elements who appeared internationally under the impulsion of the mass proletarian struggles of a new and undefeated generation of the class after 1968, impregnated as they were by impatience and a one-sided faith in the "spontaneity" of the class struggle to the detriment of long term theoretical and organisational work, most of them disappeared without trace, precisely because they failed to anchor themselves in the positions and traditions of the past workers' movement. Although the conditions for the development of revolutionary minorities in the phase after 1989 have in some ways become much more difficult, lacking in particular the immediate example of mass proletarian struggles which inspired the post-1968 generation, the fact that searching proletarian elements today feel obliged to seek and link themselves to past revolutionary traditions in order to withstand that bourgeois campaign about the "death of communism" opens the perspective of a broader and deeper rediscovery of the great marxist legacy of the Communist Left. In Russia itself, the very centre and the foremost victim of the Stalinist counter-revolution, it was only with the break -up of the rule and hegemony of Stalinism that a new generation of revolutionaries could begin to emerge - over 30 years after the same process began in the west: Moreover, the devastating world-wide effects of that half a century long counter-revolution - the destruction of the organic link to past revolutionary generations, the burial of the real history of that movement under mountains of corpses and lies - weighed particularly heavily in the country of the October Revolution. The emergence of questioning proletarian elements in Russia today confirms what the resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s, not only in the west, but also in Poland, Rumania, China, even Russia itself, already demonstrated: the end of the Stalinist counter-revolution. But if the conditions for re-discovering the true history of the proletarian movement are particularly difficult there, it was also inevitable that in a country in which there is hardly a working class family which did not lose at least one member in the Stalinist terror, uncovering the historical truth would constitute the point of departure. If, from the Perestroika on, the question of "rehabilitation" of the victims of Stalinism became the slogan of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dissident opposition, for the representatives of the proletariat a very different task emerged: the restoration of the revolutionary tradition of the best of these victims, the sworn class enemies of Stalinism. It is therefore anything but a coincidence that the first faltering attempts of Russian revolutionaries to define and debate the interests of their class, and to establish contact with Left Communist organisations abroad, emerged in relation to the question of the heritage of the proletarian struggle against Stalinism in general, and the heritage of Trotsky in particular. Of all the leaders of the opposition against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International, Trotsky was far and away the most famous. His role in the foundation of the Third International, in the October Revolution itself, and in the ensuing Civil War, was so gigantic (comparable to that of Lenin himself) that even in the USSR the Stalinist bourgeoisie was never able to completely eradicate his name from the history books, or from the collective memory of the Russian proletariat. But just as inevitably, the heritage of Trotsky became the focal point of a political, a class struggle. This is because Trotsky, the courageous defender of Marxism, was the founder of a political current which, after a whole process of opportunist degeneration, finally betrayed the working class by abandoning the proletarian internationalism of Lenin, participating' actively in the second imperialist world war. The Trotskyist current which emerged from this betrayal had become a fraction of the bourgeoisie, with a clearly defined (statist) programme for national capital, with a bourgeois foreign policy (generally in support of "Soviet" imperialism and the Eastern bloc) and a specific task of "radically" sabotaging workers' struggles and the marxist reflection of emerging revolutionary elements. Behind Trotsky, there is therefore not one heritage but two: the proletarian heritage of Trotsky himself, and the bourgeois, "critically" Stalinist heritage of Trotskyism.
The antagonisms within the conferences over Trotsky's heritage
During Perestroika, the Stalinist CP began to allow access to the historical archives of the country. This measure, part of Gorbachev's policy of mobilising public opinion against the resistance to his "reform" policy within the state bureaucracy, soon revealed itself to be one expression of the loss of control and general decomposition of the Stalinist Regime. Once the Yeltsin regime established itself in power, it quickly restored a more restricted access to state archives, in particular regarding Left Communism and the opposition to the left of Trotsky. Although it was Yeltsin's government which re-introduced private capitalist ownership alongside the already existing state capitalist ownership in Russia, it understood much better than Gorbachev that any historical putting in question of its predecessors, from Stalin to Brezhnev, and any rehabilitation of the proletarian struggle against the USSR state, could only undermine its own authority.
As opposed to this, parts of the present day Russian bourgeoisie are sympathetic to the idea of exploiting an iconised, bourgeois falsification of Trotsky, presented as the "critical supporter" of a slightly "democratised" Nomenclatura, to brush up their own historical image. This concern was reflected in the presence at the conference of Stalinist Party dissidents, including an ex-member of Zhuganov's Central Committee.
The 1996 conference on The Revolution Betrayed
Against the bourgeois canonisation of the mistakes of Trotsky, the ICC quoted his declaration at the beginning of The Revolution Betrayed: "We need no longer argue with the gentlemen bourgeois economists: Socialism has proven its right to victory, not in the pages of Capital, but in an economic arena covering a sixth of the globe, proved it not in the language of the dialectic, but in the language of iron, cement and electricity." If this were true, the disintegration of the Stalinist economies would oblige us to admit the superiority of capitalism over "socialism" - a conclusion the world bourgeoisie is now happy to draw. Indeed, towards the end of his life, desperately trapped by his own incorrect definition of the USSR, the "historic failure of socialism" was a hypothesis which Trotsky himself began to take into consideration.
It is no coincidence that an important part of the argumentation of The Revolution Betrayed is devoted to "disproving" that Stalin's Russia is state capitalist - this position was constantly advanced, not only within Left Communism, but within the Left Opposition itself, both in Russia and abroad. The contribution of comrade AG from Moscow published here represents a fundamental refutation of Trotsky's position on the USSR from the standpoint of revolutionary marxism. This contribution not only demonstrates the state capitalist nature of Stalinist Russia. It uncovers the fundamental weakness of Trotsky's understanding of the degeneration of Red October. Whereas Trotsky expected the counter-revolution, if it did not triumph through an invasion from abroad, to come from the peasantry, which is why he saw the Bukharinists and not the Stalinists as the main danger in the 20s, and initially saw Stalin's break with Bukharin as a move towards revolutionary politics, he was blind to the main instrument of counter-revolution from within: the" Soviet" state which had wiped out the soviets. In fact, already his debate with Lenin on the trade union question, where Lenin defended and Trotsky denied the right of the workers to strike against "their own" state, revealed Trotsky's weakness on this question. As opposed to Trotsky's uncritical belief in the "workers' state", Lenin already pointed out in 1921 that the state also represented other classes antagonistic to the proletariat, and was "bureaucratically deformed". To this can be added another important incomprehension of Trotsky - his belief in "economic acquisitions" and the possibility of at least beginning the transformation to socialism in one country - which helped prepare the way for the betrayal of Trotskyism through support for Soviet imperialism in World War II.
This debate was not academic. During the Conference the Trotskyists, by calling for the defence of the " still remaining socialist acquisitions" in a struggle against "private capitalism" which they judged "still unresolved", were in fact calling on the Russian workers to spill their blood in defence of the interests of that part of the Stalinist Nomenclatura which had lost out through the collapse of their regime. Moreover, by presenting the wars in ex-Yugoslavia as a means of "restoring capitalism" in that country, they denied the imperialist nature of this conflict, calling on workers to support the so-called "anti-capitalist" side (in general the pro-Russian Serb fraction, which is also supported by British and French imperialism). During the open forum at the end of the conference, the ICC intervened to denounce the imperialist character of the USSR, of the wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya, and of the left of capital. But ours was not the only voice raised in defence of proletarian internationalism. One of the young Russian anarchists also intervened, firstly to denounce the manoeuvring policy of collaboration with other left, but also right wing tendencies, on the part of the Russian branch of the Militant tendency within Trotskyism. But above all, the comrade denounced the imperialist character of World War II, and of Russia's participation in it - probably the first, and thus an historic internationalist public declaration of this kind by a new generation of revolutionaries in Russia.
The 1997 conference on Trotsky and the Russian Revolution
This conference was mainly dominated by a much more direct confrontation between Trotskyism and Left Communism. The impact of the latter was greatly enhanced by the presence and the courageous interventions of the Communist Workers Organisation, but also by another contribution of Comrade G. This contribution recalled not only the existence of Left Communist currents in Russia such as the Communist Workers' Group of Gabriel Miasnikov, which opposed the Stalinist degeneration much earlier and more resolutely than Trotsky. He also demonstrated, on the basis of historically researched documents, the existence within the Left Opposition of a massive dissatisfaction and even open hostility towards Trotsky's half-hearted policies, calling instead for a social revolution to topple the Stalinist bourgeoisie.
The CWO and the ICC recalled that the Communist International had essentially been founded by the Bolsheviks and the Communist Left to spread the world revolution. The best known members of Dutch Left Communism, Pannekoek and Gorter, were put in charge of the Western European bureau of the International (in Amsterdam) by Lenin and Trotsky. The main Communist Parties there were founded by the Left Communists: the KPD by the Spartakists and the Bremen Left, and the Italian Party by the comrades around Bordiga. Moreover, the Comintern was founded in 1919 on the positions of the Communist Left. The Manifesto of the founding congress, written by Trotsky, is the clearest expression of this, showing that in the epoch of decadent state capitalism the trade union and parliamentary struggle, national liberation and the defence of bourgeois democracy are no longer possible, and that Social Democracy has become the left wing of the bourgeoisie. If, as opposed to Left Communism, Lenin and Trotsky did not remain loyal to these positions, then it was mainly because they became entangled in the defence of the interests of the Russian transitional state after 1917. This is why Left Communism is the true defender of the great revolutionary heritage of Lenin and Trotsky from 1905 and 1917. This is proven by the fact that the Communist Left remained loyal to the internationalist position of Lenin during World War Il, when Trotskyism betrayed.
The CWO and the ICC defended the gigantic contribution of Rosa Luxemburg to Marxism against the British neo-Trotskyist Hillel Tiktin, who in order to prevent Russian militants from studying her works, claimed that she had died because she had "no conception of the Party", in other words it was her own fault that she was murdered by the Social Democratic counter -revolution.
This conference revealed above all to the Russian comrades that Trotskyism cannot tolerate the voice of the proletariat. During the conference itself they repeatedly tried to prevent the presentations and interventions of the CWO and the ICC. After the Conference they attempted to exclude the "enemies of Trotskyism" from future meetings, and to remove from the organisational bureau of the committee those Russian members who defend the participation of non-Trotskyist political currents at the conferences. Beforehand they had already sabotaged the publication in Russian of the ICC contributions to the 1996 conferences on the pretext that they were of "no scientific interest".
Perspectives
We need hardly develop on the international and historic importance of the slow and difficult development of proletarian positions in the country of the October Revolution. It is evident that the development of such a process of clarification is faced with enormous obstacles and dangers. As a result in particular of over half a century of Stalinist counter-revolution centred precisely in that country, and the extreme manifestation of the capitalist crisis there, the searching proletarian elements in Russia are still isolated and inexperienced, continue to be cut off from much of the real history of the proletariat and the marxist movement, and face enormous material difficulties and the great danger of impatience and demoralisation. To this we must add the certain fact that the left of capital will continue to sabotage this process for all they are worth.
The real task of revolutionaries in Russia today, after decades of the most terrible counter-revolution in history, which has not only wiped out two generations of proletarian revolutionaries, but "stolen" the real history of our class, is that of political clarification of positions. The development of a revolutionary perspective for the working class today can only be an extremely long term, difficult task. The proletariat does not need revolutionaries who disappear after a short time, but organisations able to develop an historic work and perspective. This is why above all a maximum of clarity and firmness on proletarian positions, and a capacity to defend the real traditions of the working class is required of revolutionaries.
The ICC pledges itself to continue supporting all efforts in this direction. In particular we encourage the Russian comrades to study the contributions of Left Communism, which they themselves recognise as a genuine and important expression of the historic struggle of our class.
In our opinion the kind of conferences which have taken place to date have been an important moment of debate and confrontation, but have given rise to a proess of decantation as a result of which it is no longer possible to continue clarification in the presence of the kind of sabotage and falsifications we have seen from the Trotskyists. But the clarification process itself can and must go on, and this is only possible in an international framework.
Not only the Russian revolutionaries, but the international proletariat will benefit from this process. The text published below gives a clear indication how rich this contribution can be.
ERRATUM
Due to an oversight, the following footnotes were left out of the article 'Moscow conferences, 1997: A proletarian debate begins in Russia' in International Review 92. The second note is particularly important because it serves as an introduction to the text 'The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky' written by a comrade from the emerging milieu in Russia.
1. The Trotskyist (and Stalinist) lie that the German revolution of 1918-23 failed because of Rosa Luxemburg's alleged underestimation of the party and her negligence in founding it in time was not shared by Trotsky who gave a marxist explanation for the lateness and weakness of the political vanguard in Germany at the time: "History once again exhibited to the world one of its dialectical contradictions; precisely because the German working class had expended most of its energy in the previous epoch upon self-sufficient organisational construction, occupying the first place in the Second International both in party as well as trade union apparatus - precisely because of this, in a new epoch, at the moment of its transition to open revolutionary struggle for power the German working class proved to be extremely defenceless organisationally" ('A creeping revolution' in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol 1, p45). In reality the fraction work undertaken by Luxemburg and the Spartacusbund within the Social Democratic Party against the treason of its leadership, and with the aim of preparing the future class party, is not only one of the most audacious and most resolute combats for the class party in history, but is located in the same excellent tradition of fraction work carried out by Lenin.
2. We are in general agreement with the analysis and the main arguments developed in this document. This said, we don't fully share all its formulations. Thus, the idea that "in 1989-90 the working class would not only fail to defend nationalised property and the 'Communist' state apparatus, but would actively contribute to their abolition" seems to us to be wrong. In no manner did the working class, as a class, appear as an actor in the convulsions which hit the so-called 'socialist' countries in this period. The fact that a majority of the workers, victims of democratic illusions, were pulled in behind the objectives of the "liberal" faction of the bourgeoisie against the Stalinist faction did not at all mean that it was the working class in action. The world imperialist wars mobilised tens of millions of workers, but this doesn't mean that the working class contributed actively to the massacres. When the working class did act as a class, for example in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918, it was to fight the war and put an end to it. But despite certain unfortunate formulations, this text seems to us to be excellent and we salute it.
[1] Thus, the French Trotskyist Krivine took a TV crew from the French-German Arte Channel to the conference, and only stayed for a few sessions to pose for the camera.
"A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe has entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies."
These opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, written exactly 150 years ago, are today more true than ever before. A century and a half after the Communist League adopted its famous declaration of war of the revolutionary proletariat against the capitalist system, the ruling class is still busy with the spectre of communism. The Pope, along with his Stalinist friend Fidel Castro, still crusades in defence of the God given right of the ruling class to live from the exploitation of wage labour. The Black Book of Communism, the latest monstrosity of the "French Radicals", falsely blaming marxism for the crimes of its Stalinist foe, is presently being translated into English, German and Italian[1]. As for the German police, mobilised as ever against revolutionary ideas, they are presently being officially granted, through an alteration of the bourgeois democratic constitution, the right to electronically survey and eavesdrop on the proletariat at anytime, anywhere[2].
1998, the year of the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, represents in fact a new climax of the historical war of the propertied classes against communism. Still benefiting enormously from the collapse of the eastern European Stalinist regimes in 1989, which it presents as the "end of communism", and in the aftermath of the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917 last year, the bourgeoisie is attaining new production records for anti-communist propaganda. One might have imagined that the question of the Communist Manifesto would have offered a new opportunity to intensify this propaganda.
The opposite is true. Despite the evident historical significance of the date January 1998 - alongside the bible, the Communist Manifesto is worldwide the most frequently published book of the 20th century - the bourgeoisie has chosen to almost completely ignore the anniversary of the first truly revolutionary communist programme of its class enemy. What is the reason for this sudden deafening silence?
On January 10 1998, the German bourgeoisie published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a statement on the Communist Manifesto. After claiming that the workers of the east had "shaken off their chains of communism", and that the "dynamic flexibility" of capitalism will continue to overcome all crises, thereby disproving Marx, the statement concludes "A hundred and fifty years after the appearance of the Manifesto, we no longer have to fear any ghosts."
This article, hidden away on page 13 in the economics and stock exchange supplement, is a not very successful attempt of the ruling class to reassure itself. Alongside it, on the same page, there is one article on the terrible economic crisis in Asia, and another on the new German official post-war unemployment record of almost 4.5 million. The pages of the bourgeois press themselves disprove daily the alleged refutation of Marxism by history. In reality there is no document existing today which troubles the bourgeoisie more profoundly than the Communist Manifesto - for two reasons. Firstly because its demonstration of the temporary historical character of the capitalist mode of production, of the insoluble nature of its own internal contradictions, confirmed by present day reality, continues to haunt a deeply anxious ruling class. Secondly because the Manifesto, already at that time, was specifically written to dispel working class confusions about the nature of communism. From a present day point of view, it can be read as a modern denunciation of the lie that Stalinism had anything to do with socialism. But this lie is today one of the principle ideological cards of the ruling class against the proletariat.
For these two reasons, the bourgeoisie has a vital interest in avoiding any kind of publicity which could draw too much attention to the Communist Manifesto and what is actually written in this famous document. In particular, it wants nothing to be said or done which might make workers curious enough to go and read it themselves. Basing itself on the historic impact of the collapse of stalinism, the bourgeoisie will go on claiming that history has refuted marxism. But it will be careful to avoid any close public examination of the communist goal identified by marxism, or of the historical materialist method employed to that end. Since Stalin's bourgeois "socialism in one country" is refuted in advance by the Communist Manifesto, and since its claims to overcome the capitalist crisis have worn thin, it will go on as long as possible ignoring the overpowering argumentation of this document. It will feel safer combating the "spectre" of Stalin's bourgeois "socialism in one country" presented as the horrible "fulfilment" of marxism and the October Revolution.
For the proletariat, on the contrary, the Communist Manifesto is the compass towards the future of humanity, showing the way out of the lethal dead end in which decadent capitalism has trapped humanity.
The bourgeois "spectre of communism"
The Communist Manifesto was written at a decisive moment in the history of the class struggle. The moment when the class representing the communist project, the proletariat, began to constitute itself as an independent class in society. To the extent that the proletariat developed its own struggle for its conditions of existence, communism ceased to be an abstract ideal elaborated by utopian currents, to become the practical social movement leading to the abolition of class society, and the creation of an authentic human community. As such, the principle task of the Manifesto was the elaboration of the real nature of the communist goal of the class struggle, as well as the principle means to achieve that goal. This also explains the gigantic importance of the Manifesto today in face of the bourgeois denigrations of communism and the class struggle. A relevance which the bourgeoisie today seeks to hide.
Thus, it is today not generally realised what is meant by the famous opening reference of the Manifesto to the "spectre of communism". It meant that at the time - as today - not the communism of the proletariat, but the false and reactionary "communism" of other social layers, including that invented by the ruling classes, dominated public attention. It meant that the bourgeoisie, not daring to openly combat, and thus publicly recognise, the communist tendencies already existing within the proletarian class struggle itself, benefited from this confusion in order to combat the development of an autonomous working class struggle. "Where is the opposition which has not been accused of communism by its opponents in power?" asks the Manifesto. "Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?"
Already in 1848, to a certain extent, it was this fake "spectre of communism" at the centre of public controversy which made it particularly difficult for the young proletariat to realise that communism, far from being something separate from and opposed to its daily class struggle, is nothing but the very nature, the historic meaning, and the final goal of that struggle. That, as the Manifesto wrote: "The theoretical conceptions of communism ... are but the general expression of real conditions of an existing class struggle, of an historic movement unfolding before our very eyes."
Herein lies the dramatic actuality of the Communist Manifesto. One and a half centuries ago, just as today, it shows the way forward by cutting through the anti-proletarian distortions of the nature of communism. In face of entirely new historical phenomena - mass unemployment and mass pauperisation in industrialised Britain, the shaking of a still semi-feudal Europe by periodic trade crises, the international spread of mass revolutionary discontent on the eve of 1848 - the most conscious sectors of the working class were already groping towards a clearer understanding that, by creating a new class of dispossessed producers, internationally bound together in associated labour by modern industry, capitalism had created its own potential grave diggers. The first major collective workers' strikes in France and elsewhere, the appearance of a first proletarian political mass movement in Britain (Chartism), and the socialist programmatic efforts above all of German workers' organisations (from Weitling to the Communist League) expressed these advances. But to establish the proletarian movement on a solid class basis, it was above all necessary to throw light on the communist goal of that movement, and thus consciously combat the "socialism" of all other classes. The clarification of this question was urgent since Europe in 1848 stood on the verge of revolutionary movements which, in France, were to reach their summit with the first head on, mass confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat.
This is why the Communist Manifesto devotes a whole chapter to exposing the reactionary character of non-proletarian socialism. These included in particular the very expressions of dominant classes directly opposed to the working class:
- Feudal Socialism partly aimed at mobilising the workers behind the reactionary resistance of the nobility against the bourgeoisie;
- Bourgeois Socialism, the expression of a "part of the bourgeoisie in search of remedies for social anomalies, in order to consolidate bourgeois society ".
It was thus first and foremost in order to combat these "spectres of communism" that the Communist Manifesto was written. As the foreword declares: "It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself."
The essential elements of this exposition were the materialist conception of history, and the classless communist society destined to replace capitalism. It is the brilliant solution of this historic task which makes the Manifesto today the indispensable point of departure of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeois ideological rubbish left behind by the Stalinist counter-revolution. The Communist Manifesto, far from being the out dated product of a past age, was far ahead of its time in 1848. At the time of its publication, it mistakenly believed the demise of capitalism arid the victory of the proletarian revolution to be close at hand. It is not until the 20th century that the realisation of the revolutionary vision of marxism is placed on the agenda of history. Reading it today, one has the impression that it has only just been written: so precise are its formulations of the contradictions of present day bourgeois society, and of their necessary resolution through the proletarian class struggle. This almost overpowering actuality is the proof that it is the genuine emanation of a truly revolutionary class carrying the future of humanity in its hands, equipped with an at once gigantic and realistic long term vision of human history.
The Manifesto: an invaluable weapon against Stalinism
Of course it would be wrong to compare the naive feudal and bourgeois "socialism" of 1848 with the Stalinist counter-revolution of the 1930s, which in the name of marxism destroyed the first victorious proletarian revolution in history, physically liquidated the communist working class vanguard, and subjected the proletariat to the most barbarous capitalist exploitation. Nevertheless, the Communist Manifesto already uncovered the common denominator of the "socialism" of exploiting classes. What Marx and Engels wrote about "conservative or bourgeois socialism" at the time applies fully to 20th century Stalinism.
"Under transformation of the material conditions of life, this socialism does not at all understand the abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, which is only possible through revolutionary means, but only the realisation of administrative reforms on the basis of those very bourgeois productive relations, reforms which, consequently do not at all change the relation between wage labour and capital, but at best reduce for the bourgeoisie the price of its rule and simplify the state budget."
Stalinism proclaimed that despite the persistence of what it called "socialist" wage labour, the product of this labour belonged to the producing class, since the personal exploitation by individual capitalists had been replaced by state ownership. The Manifesto, as if in reply, asks "Does wage labour, the labour of the proletarian, create property for him?" and replies: "Certainly not. It creates capital, in other words the property which exploits wage labour, and which can only increase on condition that it produces still more wage labour, in order to exploit it anew. Property in its present form moves within the opposition between capital and wage labour ...To be a capitalist is to occupy not only a purely personal, but above all a social position in production. Capital is a collective product: it cannot be brought into motion except through the common activity of many members, and even in the last analysis of all the members of society. Capital is therefore not a personal power; it is a social power."
This fundamental understanding of the Manifesto, that the juridical replacement of individual capitalists by state ownership in no way - contrary to the Stalinist lies - alters the capitalist nature of the exploitation of wage labour, is formulated even more explicitly by Engels in Anti-Duhring:
"But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces (...) The modem state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head."
But it is above all by defining the fundamental difference between capitalism and communism that the Manifesto reveals clearly the bourgeois character of the former Stalinist countries:
"In bourgeois society living labour is merely a means of multiplying accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but the means towards the enlargement, enrichment and embellishment of the existence of the worker. In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present; in communist society the present dominates the past."
This is why the industrialisation successes of Stalinism in Russia in the 1930's at the expense of a savage reduction in the living conditions of the workers is the best proof of the bourgeois nature of this regime. The development of the productive forces to the detriment of the consumption power of the producers is the historic task of capitalism. Humanity had to go through this inferno of capital accumulation in order that the material preconditions for a classless society could be created. Socialism, on the contrary, and each and every real step towards that goal, is characterised first and foremost by the quantitative and qualitative growth in consumption, in particular of foodstuffs, clothing and housing. This is why the Manifesto identified the relative and absolute pauperisation of the proletariat as the main characteristic of capitalism, which becomes "incapable of ruling, because it is incapable of securing the existence of its slaves within their slavery, because it is obliged to let it sink to the point of having to feed it instead of being fed by it. Society can no longer live under its domination."
And this in a double sense: because impoverishment drives the proletariat to revolution; and because this mass impoverishment means that the extension of capitalist markets cannot keep pace with the extension of capitalist production. The result: the mode of production rebels against the mode of exchange; the productive forces rebel against a mode of production which they have outgrown; the proletariat rebels against the bourgeoisie; living labour against the rule of dead labour. The future of humanity affirms itself against the domination of the present by the past.
The Manifesto: the marxist demolition of "socialism in one country"
Capitalism has indeed created the preconditions of classless society, giving humanity for the first time the possibility of overcoming the struggle for survival, of man against man, by producing an abundance of the principal means of subsistence and human culture. It is for this reason alone that the Manifesto sings the praises of the revolutionary role of bourgeois society. But these preconditions - in particular the world market and the world proletariat itself - only exist on a world scale. The highest form of capitalist competition (itself but the modem version of the age old struggle of man against man for survival under the rule of scarcity) is the economic and military struggle for survival between bourgeois nation states. This is why the overcoming of capitalist competition, and the establishment of a truly collective human society, is only possible through the overcoming of the nation state, through a world proletarian revolution. The proletariat alone can assume this task since, as the Manifesto declares, "the workers have no country." The rule of the proletariat, we are told, will make national demarcations and antagonisms between peoples disappear more and more. "Its common action, at least in the civilised countries, is one of the first conditions of its emancipation."
Already before the Manifesto, in Principles of Communism Engels answered the question if the socialist revolution can be restricted to one country, as follows:
"No. Big industry already through the creation of the world market has placed all the peoples of the earth, and particularly the most civilised ones, in such an intercourse with one another, that each nation is dependent on what happens to the others (...) The communist revolution will therefore be no mere national affair, it will be a revolution incorporating simultaneously all the civilised countries i.e. at least England, America, France and Germany."
Here we have the final deadly blow of the Manifesto against the bourgeois ideology of the Stalinist counter-revolution: the so-called theory of socialism in one country, The Communist Manifesto was the compass guiding the world revolutionary wave of 1917-23. It was the glorious slogan of the Manifesto "workers of the world, unite!" which guided the Russian proletariat and the Bolsheviks in 1917 in their heroic struggle against the imperialist war 01 the capitalist fatherlands, in the proletariats seizure of power to begin the world revolution. It was the Communist Manifesto which formed the point of reference of the famous programmatic speech of Rosa Luxemburg at the founding congress of the KPD, at the heart of the German revolution, and of the founding Congress of the Communist International 1919. It was equally the uncompromising proletarian internationalism of the Manifesto, of the whole Marxist tradition, which inspired Trotsky in his struggle against "socialism in one country", which inspired the Communist Left in its over half a century of struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The Communist Left honours the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 today, not as a leftover from a distant past, but as a powerful weapon against the lie that stalinism was socialism, and as an indispensable guide towards the necessary revolutionary future of humanity.
Kr
[1] Le livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreur, repression.
[2] The so-called "grosse Lauschangriff" (great eavesdropping attack) of the German bourgeoisie, allegedly aimed against organised crimes, but which specifies 50 different offences, including different forms of subversion, as its target.
The ruling class cannot entirely bury the memory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, where for the first time in history an exploited class took power at the level of an entire and immense country, Instead, as we have shown on numerous occasions in this International Review[1], it uses all the considerable means at its disposal to distort the meaning of this epochal event by conjuring up a great fog of lies and slanders. It is rather different with the German revolution of 1918-23. Here it has applied the policy of the historical blackout. Thus, casting a glance at the standard school history books, we will find that the October revolution is dealt with up to a point (with a hefty stress on its Russian peculiarities). The German revolution, however, is normally restricted to a few lines about "hunger riots" at the end of the war, or, at most, about the efforts of a shadowy band called the "Spartacists" to seize power here and there. This silence will probably be all the louder during the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of revolution in the Kaiser's Germany. The majority of the world's working class has probably never heard that there was a revolution in Germany at this time, and the bourgeoisie has very good reasons for maintaining this ignorance. Communists, on the other hand, the heirs of those "Spartacist fanatics", have no hesitation in saying loud and clear that these "unknown" events were so crucial that they determined the entire subsequent history of the 20th century.
When the Bolsheviks urged the Russian proletariat to take power in October 1917, it was not at all with the intention of making a purely "Russian" revolution. They understood that if revolution was possible in Russia, it was only because it was the product of a world-wide movement of the working class against the imperialist war, which had opened up an epoch of social revolution. And the insurrection in Russia could only prevail if it was the first act of the world-wide proletarian revolution.
The German revolution, then, was proof that the revolution was and could only be worldwide. The ruling class itself understood this very well: if Germany fell to "Bolshevism", the terrible disease would spread rapidly throughout Europe. It was proof that the working class struggle not only knows no national boundaries, but is the only antidote to the nationalist, imperialist frenzy of the bourgeoisie. Its "least" achievement was that it ended the slaughter of the first world war, because as soon as the revolutionary movement broke out, the world bourgeoisie recognised at once that it was time to stop its bickering and unite against a far more dangerous enemy, the revolutionary working class. The war was rapidly terminated and the German bourgeoisie - though almost stripped naked by the terms of the peace treaty - obtained from the other bourgeoisies all the means it required to deal with the enemy within.
Communism was possible and it was necessary in 1917. If the communist movement had been successful then, the world proletariat would still no doubt have faced gigantic tasks in constructing a new society. It would no doubt have made many mistakes that later generations of the working class can avoid thanks to bitter experience. But at the same time, it would not have had to undo the accumulating effects of capitalist decadence, with its dreadful legacy of terror and destruction, of material and ideological poisoning.
Founding Congress of the KPD: revolution, not reform
The grandeur and tragedy of the German revolution is in many ways encapsulated in Rosa Luxemburg's speech to the founding congress of the Communist party of Germany (KPD) in late December 1918.
In our on-going series on the German revolution[2], we have already written about the importance of this congress from the point of view of the organisational questions facing the new party - above all, the necessity for a centralised organisation capable of speaking with one voice throughout Germany. We have also touched upon some of the general programmatic issues which were hotly debated at this congress, in particular the parliamentary and trade union questions. We have seen that while Luxemburg and the Spartacus group - the real nucleus of the KPD - did not always defend the clearest position on questions of the latter type, she did tend to embody marxist clarity on the problem of organisation, as opposed to some of the more left wing strands who often expressed a distrust of centralisation. And in her speech - on the adoption of the party's programme - this same clarity shines through despite the secondary weaknesses that can be found within it. The profound political content of this speech was a reflection of the strength of the proletariat in Germany as a vanguard in the worldwide movement of the class. And at the same time, the fact that this towering speech was also her last, that the young KPD was soon to be decapitated following the failure of the Berlin uprising a mere two weeks later, also expresses the tragedy of the German proletariat, its inability to assume the gigantic historical tasks imposed upon it.
The reasons for this tragedy are, however, beyond the scope of this article. Our aim in this series is to show how the historical experience of our class has deepened its understanding both of the nature of communist society and the road towards it. In other words, it is to trace a history of the communist programme. The programme of the KPD, generally known as The Spartacus Programme, since it was originally published under the title ''What does Spartacus want?" in Die Rote Fahne, 4 December 1918[3] was a highly significant landmark in this history, and it was certainly no accident that the task of introducing it to the congress was conferred upon Luxemburg, given her unrivalled status as a marxist theoretician. Her opening words plainly affirm the importance of the adoption by the new party of a clear revolutionary programme in a historical juncture which was nothing if not revolutionary:
"Comrades: our task today is to discuss and adopt a programme. In undertaking this task we are not actuated solely by the consideration that yesterday we founded a new party and that a new party must formalise a programme. Great historical movements have been the determining causes of today's deliberations. The time has arrived when the entire socialist programme of the proletariat has to be established upon a new foundation "("On the Spartacus Programme", published as a pamphlet along with "What does Spartacus want?" by Merlin Press, London, 1971).
In order to establish what this new foundation has to be, Luxemburg then reviews the previous efforts of the workers' movement to formalise its programme. Arguing that "We are faced with a position similar to that which was faced by Marx and Engels when they wrote the Communist Manifesto seventy years ago ", she recalls that, at that moment, the founders of scientific socialism had considered the proletarian revolution to be imminent, but that the subsequent development and expansion of capitalism had proved them wrong - and, because their socialism was scientific, Marx and Engels had realised that a long period of organisation, of education, of fighting for reforms, of building the proletarian army was necessary before the communist revolution could be put on the agenda of history. From this realisation came the period of social democracy, in which a distinction was established between the maximum programme of social revolution and the minimum programme of reforms attainable within capitalist society. But as social democracy gradually accommodated itself to what appeared to be an eternally ascending bourgeois society, the minimum programme first detached itself from the maximum, and then more and more began to replace it altogether. This divorce between the immediate and the historical goals of the class was to a large extent already embodied in the Erfurt Programme of 1891, and - precisely at the time when the material possibility of winning durable reforms from capitalism was beginning to wear thin - reformist illusions of various shades increasingly took hold over the workers' party. Indeed, as we have seen in a previous article in this series[4], it is in this very speech that Luxemburg demonstrates that even Engels was not immune to the growing temptation to believe that with the conquest of universal suffrage, the working class could come to power through the bourgeois electoral process.
The imperialist war and the outbreak of proletarian revolution in Russia and Germany had definitively put paid to all illusions in a gradual, peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. These were the "great historical movements" that required the socialist programme to be "established upon a new foundation". The wheel had gone full circle:
The onset of capitalist decadence, signalled by the great imperialist war, and the proletariat's revolutionary rising against the war, necessitated a definitive break with the old social democratic programme; "Our programme is deliberately opposed to the leading principle of the Erfurt programme; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate and so-called minimum demands formulated for the political and economic struggle, from the socialist goal regarded as the maximal programme. It is in deliberate opposition to the Erfurt programme that we liquidate the results of seventy years' evolution; that we liquidate, above all, the primary results of the war, saying we know nothing of minimal and maximal programmes; we know only one thing, socialism; this is the minimum we are going to secure ".
In the remaining part of her speech, Luxemburg does not go into details about the measures put forward in the draft programme. Instead, she focuses on the most urgent task of the hour: the analysis of how the proletariat can bridge the gap between its initial spontaneous revolt against the privations of war and the conscious implementation of the communist programme. This requires above all a ruthless critique of the weaknesses of the revolutionary mass movement of November 1918.
This critique was not at all tantamount to dismissing the heroic efforts of the workers and soldiers who had paralysed the imperialist war machine. Luxemburg recognised the crucial importance of the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils across the length and breadth of the land in November 1918. "That was the key notion in this revolution which ... immediately gave it the stamp of a proletarian socialist revolution." And since the "alphabet" of this revolution, the call for workers' and soldiers' councils was learned from the Russians, its international and internationalist nature was also established from the fact that "the Russian revolution created the first watchwords for the world revolution ". But contrary to so many of her critics, even some of her "friendliest", Luxemburg was far from being a worshipper of the instinctive spontaneity of the masses. Without a clear class consciousness, the first spontaneous resistance of the workers cannot help but succumb to the wiles and manoeuvres of the class enemy. "It is characteristic of the contradictory aspects of our revolution, characteristic of the contradictions which attend every revolution, that at the very time when this great, stirring and instinctive cry was being uttered, the revolution was so inadequate, so feeble, so devoid of initiative, so lacking in clearness as to its own aims, that on November 10th our revolutionists allowed to slip from their grasp nearly half the instruments of power they had seized on November 9th ". Luxemburg denounced above all the workers' illusions in the slogan of "socialist unity" - the idea that the SPD, the Independents and the KPD should bury their differences and work together for the common cause. This ideology obscured the fact that the SPD had been placed in government by the German bourgeoisie precisely because it had already demonstrated its loyalty to capitalism during the war, and was now in fact the only party that could deal with the revolutionary danger; it also obscured the treacherous role of the Independents, who served mainly to provide a radical cover to the SPD and prevent the masses from making a clear break with it. The net result of these illusions was that the councils were almost immediately handed over to their worst enemies - the Ebert-Noske-Scheidemann counter-revolution, which garbed itself in the red robes of socialism and claimed to be the councils' surest defender.
The working class would have to wake up from such illusions and learn to soberly distinguish its friends from its enemies. The repressive, strike-breaking policies of the new "socialist" government would certainly educate it in this regard, opening the door to an open conflict between the working class and the pseudo-workers' government. But it would be another illusion to think that merely toppling the social democratic government at its focal point could secure the victory of the socialist revolution. The working class would not be ready to take and hold political power until it had passed through an intensive process of self-education by its own positive experience - through the tenacious defence of its economic interests, through mass strike movements, through the mobilisation of the rural masses, through the regeneration and extension of the workers' councils, through a patient and systematic combat to win them away from the nefarious influence of social democracy and over to the understanding that they were true instruments of proletarian power. The development of this process of revolutionary maturation would be such that, "the overthrow of the Ebert-Scheidemann or any similar government will be merely the final act in the drama ".
This part of Luxemburg's perspective for the German revolution has frequently been criticised for making concessions to economism and gradualism. These charges are not entirely without foundation. Economism - the subordination of the political tasks of the working class to the struggle for its immediate economic interests - was to prove itself a real weakness of the communist movement in Germany[5], and it can already be discerned in certain passages of Luxemburg's speech, as for example when she claims that as the revolutionary movement develops, "strikes will become the central feature and the decisive factors of the revolution, thrusting purely political questions into the background". Luxemburg was of course right to argue that the immediate politicisation of the struggle in November had not been a guarantee of its real maturity, and that the struggle would certainly have to flow back onto the economic terrain before it could reach a higher political level. But the experience in Russia had also shown that once the movement did begin to reach the point where the question of power was really being posed in the most important battalions of the working class, then strikes tended to be "thrust into the background" in favour of "purely political questions". It appears at this point that Luxemburg is forgetting her own analysis of the dynamic of the mass strike, in which she argues that the movement passes from economic to political questions and vice-versa in a continuous ebb and flow.
More serious is the charge of gradualism: In his text Allemagne: de 1800 aux "annees rouges" (1917- 23), December 1997, Robert Camoin writes that "the programme (of the KPD) seriously evades the question of the insurrection; the destruction of the state is formulated in localist terms. The conquest of power is presented as a gradual action, little by little wresting parcels of state power "(P63). And he quotes that section of Luxemburg's speech which argues that "for us, the conquest of power will not be affected at one blow. It will be a progressive act, for we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state, defending tooth and nail each one that we seize ".
What Spartacus wanted
A revolutionary party needs a revolutionary programme. A small communist group or fraction, which does not have a decisive impact on the class struggle, can be defined around a platform of general class positions. But while a party certainly requires these class principles as the foundation stone of its politics, it also needs a programme which translates these general principles into practical proposals for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, and for the initial steps towards a new society. In a revolutionary situation, the immediate measures for the establishment of proletarian power obviously take on a primary importance. As Lenin wrote in his "Greetings to the Bavarian Soviet Republic", in April 1919:
"We thank you for your message of greeting and in turn we heartily salute the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. We would immediately like you to inform us more often and more concretely about the measures you have taken in your struggle against the bourgeois executioners, Scheidemann and Co: if you have created soviets of workers and household servants in the districts of the town; if you have armed the workers and disarmed the bourgeoisie; if you have made use of the warehouses of clothes and other articles as widely and as immediately as possible, to help the workers and above all the day-labourers and small peasants; if you have expropriated the factories and goods of the Munich capitalists as well as the capitalist agricultural enterprises in the surrounding area; if you have abolished the mortgages and rent of small peasants; if you have tripled the wages of day-labourers and workmen; if you have confiscated all the paper and print-works in order to publish leaflets and newspapers for the masses; if you have instituted the six hour day with two or three hours dedicated to the study of the art of state administration; if you have crowded the bourgeoisie together in order to immediately install workers in the rich apartments; if you have taken overall the banks; if you have chosen hostages from among the bourgeoisie; if you have established a food ration which gives more to workers than to members of the bourgeoisie; if you have mobilised all the workers at once for defence and for ideological propaganda in the surrounding villages. The most rapid and widespread application of these measures as well as other similar measures, carried out on the initiative of the soviets of workers and day-labourers and, separately, of small peasants, must reinforce your position."
The document "What does Spartacus want", offered as the draft programme for the new KPD, goes in the same direction as Lenin's recommendations. It is presented by a preamble which reaffirms the marxist analysis of the historic situation facing the working class: the imperialist war has confronted humanity with the choice between world proletarian revolution, the abolition of wage labour and the creation of a new communist order, or a descent into chaos and barbarism. The text does not underestimate the magnitude of the task facing the proletariat: "the establishment of the socialist order of society is the greatest task that ever fell to the lot of a class and of a revolution in the course of human history. This task involves the complete reconstruction of the state and an entire change in the social and economic foundations of society ". This change cannot be accomplished "by a decree issued by some officials, committee, or parliament". Previous revolutions could be carried through by a minority, but "the socialist revolution is the first revolution which can secure victory for and through the great majority of the workers themselves ". The workers, organised in their councils, had to take this whole immense social, economic, and political transformation into their own hands.
Furthermore, while calling for the "iron hand" of an armed and self-organised working class to put down the plots and resistance of the counter-revolution, the preamble argues that terror is a method alien to the proletariat: "the proletarian revolution requires no terror for the realisation of its aims: it looks upon manslaughter with hatred and aversion. It has no need for such means because the struggle it conducts is not against individuals but against institutions ". This critique of the "Red Terror" has itself been much criticised by other communists then and now. Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote the draft, and who made similar criticisms of the actual Red Terror in Russia, has been accused of pacifism, of advocating policies that would disarm the proletariat in the face of the counter-revolution. But the preamble shows no naive illusions in the possibility of making the revolution without encountering and indeed suppressing the ferocious resistance of the old ruling class, who "will sooner turn the country into a smoking heap of ruins than voluntarily relinquish its power to exploit the working class ". What the draft programme does do, however, is enable us to make the distinction between class violence - based on the massive self-organisation of the proletariat - and state terror, which is necessarily carried out by specialised minority bodies and always contains the danger of turning against the proletariat. We will return to this question later on, but we can certainly say here, in line with the arguments put forward in our text "Terrorism, terror and class violence"[6], that the experience of the Russian revolution has indeed confirmed the validity of this distinction.
The immediate measures that follow the preamble are the concretisation of its general perspective. We reprint them in full here:
"I. As Immediate Means for Making the Revolution Secure.
The disarming of the entire police force, of all officers, as well as of the non-proletarian soldiers.
The seizure of all supplies of arms and ammunition, as well as of all war industries, by the workers' and soldiers' councils.
The arming of the entire adult male population as the workers' militia. The formation of a red guard of the workers as the active part of the militia, for the effective protection of the revolution against counter-revolutionary plots and risings;
The removal of all officers and ex-officers from the soldiers' councils.
Substitution of authorised representatives of the workers' and soldiers' councils for all political organs and authorities of the old regime.
Creation of a revolutionary tribunal to try the men chiefly responsible for the war and its prolongation, namely, the two Hohenzollems, Ludendorff, Hindenberg, Tirpitz, and their fellow criminals, as well as all conspirators of the counter-revolution.
Immediate seizure of all means of subsistence to secure provisions for the people.
Abolition of all separate states; a united German Socialist Republic.
Removal of all parliaments and municipal councils, their functions to be taken over by the workers' and soldiers' councils and by the committees and organs of the latter bodies;
Election of workers' councils all over Germany by the entire adult working population of working people, of both sexes, in cities and rural districts, along the lines of industries, and election of soldiers' councils by the soldiers, excluding the officers and ex-officers. The right of workers and soldiers to recall their representatives at any time;
Abolition of all class distinctions, titles, and orders; complete legal and social equality of the sexes.
Radical social legislation, reduction of working hours to avoid unemployment and to conform to the physical exhaustion of the working class occasioned by the world war; limitation of the working day to six hours.
Immediate, thorough change of the policy with regard to food, housing, health, and education in the spirit of the proletarian revolution.
Further Economic Demands.
Annulment of the state debts and other public debts, as well as all war loans, except those subscribed within a certain limited amount, this limit to be fixed by the Central Council of the workers' and soldiers' councils.
Expropriation of the land held by all large and medium sized agricultural concerns; establishment of socialist agricultural cooperatives under a uniform central administration all over the country. Small peasant holdings to remain in possession of their present owners, until they voluntarily decide to join the socialist agricultural cooperatives.
Nationalisation by the Republic of Councils of all banks, ore mines, coal mines, as well as all large industrial and commercial establishments.
Confiscation of all property exceeding a certain limit, the limit to be fixed by the Central Council.
Election of administrative councils in all enterprises, such councils to regulate the internal affairs of the enterprises in agreement with the workers' councils, regulate the conditions of labour, control production, and, finally, take over the administration of the enterprise.
Establishment of a Central Strike Committee which, in constant cooperation with the industrial councils, shall secure for the strike movement throughout the country uniform administration, socialist direction, and most effective support by the political power of the workers' and soldiers' councils.
International Problems.
Immediate establishment of connections with the sister parties abroad in order to place the socialist revolution upon an international basis and to secure and maintain peace through international brotherhood and the revolutionary rising of the international working class."
arming the workers and disarming the counter-revolution. Equally important is its insistence on the fundamental role of the workers' councils as organs of proletarian political power, and on the centralised character of this power. In calling for the power of the councils and the dismantling of the bourgeois state, the programme is already the fruit of the gigantic proletarian experience in Russia; at the same time, on the question of parliament and municipal councils, the KPD takes one step further than the Bolsheviks had in 1917, when there was still confusion in the party about the possible coexistence of the soviets with the Constituent Assembly and municipal dumas. In the KPD programme, all these organs of the bourgeois state are to be dismantled without delay. Similarly, the KPD programme sees no role at all for the trade unions: alongside the workers' councils and red guards, the factory committees are the only other workers' organs it mentions. Although there were differences in the party on these latter two questions, the clarity of the 1918 programme was a direct expression of the revolutionary élan that animated the class movement at that time.
Inevitably, some of the elements in the programme were specific to the form that this collapse took in 1918: the imperialist war and its aftermath. Hence the importance of the questions of soldiers' councils, the reorganisation of the army, and so on - questions that would not have the same significance in a situation where the revolutionary situation is the direct result of the economic crisis, as is most likely in the future. More importantly, it was inevitable that a programme formulated at the commencement of a great revolutionary experience should contain weaknesses and lacunae precisely because so many crucial lessons. could only have been learned by living through that very experience; and it is worth noting that these weaknesses were common to the whole international workers' movement and were not, as is so often claimed, limited to the Bolshevik party which, because it alone faced the concrete
problems of the organisation of the proletarian dictatorship, suffered most cruelly from the consequences of these weaknesses.
This passage is imbued with the same proletarian spirit that runs through the work of Lenin between April and October 1917: the rejection of putsch ism, the absolute insistence that the party cannot call for the seizure of power until the mass of the proletariat has been won to its programme. But along with the Bolsheviks, the Spartacists also held the mistaken view that the party which has a majority on the councils then becomes the governing party - a conception that was to have very serious consequences once the revolutionary tide went into reflux.
But perhaps most striking of all is the paucity of the section dealing with the international revolution. The section "International Problems" almost has the air of being tacked on as an afterthought, and is extremely vague about the proletarian attitude to imperialist war and to the international extension of the revolution, even though without such an extension, any revolutionary rising in one country is doomed to defeat[8].
For all their importance, none of these weaknesses were critical, and could have been overcome if the revolutionary dynamic had continued to advance. What was critical was the immaturity of the German proletariat, the chink in its armour which rendered it vulnerable to the sirens of social democracy, and thus to be picked off in a series of isolated uprisings rather than concentrate its forces for a centralised assault on bourgeois power. But that is a story that we have taken up elsewhere.
The next article in this series takes us to the year 1919, the zenith of the world revolution, and to an examination of the platform of the Communist International and of the programme of the Communist Party in Russia, where the dictatorship of the proletariat was not merely a demand but a practical reality.
CDW
[1] See the article "The great lie: communism = Stalinism = Nazism in International Review 92
[2] For our series on the German revolution, see International Review nos 81-86 and 88-90 and this issue.
[3] The text was presented as a draft to the founding congress, and was adopted formally at the Berlin congress of December 1919.
[4] "1895-1905: Parliamentary illusions hide the perspective of revolution", International Review 88)
[5] see for example our book on the German and Dutch communist left)
[6] International Review 15
[7] For an analysis both of the strengths and the historically conditioned limitations of the Communist Manifesto see the article in the first volume of this series, International Review 72.
[8] It is worth pointing out that this weakness, along with some others, was substantially rectified in the 1920 programme of the KAPD: its section of revolutionary measures begins with the proposal that a council republic in Germany should immediately fuse with Soviet Russia.
The offensive the ruling class has launched against communism and against the dispersed revolutionary minorities which are around today is a question of life or death. The survival of a system that is prey to even more profound internal convulsions depends on the elimination of any possibility of a revolutionary movement maturing out of the revival of proletarian struggles - a movement consciously aimed at destroying this system and establishing a communist society. In order to attain this objective, the bourgeoisie has to discredit, isolate and thus politically, if not physically, annihilate the revolutionary vanguards which are so indispensable to the success of the proletariat's mission.
At this level, there have been in the last few months some important and significant advances made by different political formations. We will only cite two of them as examples, ones already mentioned in our press:
- the denunciation by all the main components of the proletarian milieu of the bourgeoisie's campaign of mystification against the International Communist Party's pamphlet Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, which is accused of denying the reality of the Nazi gas chambers, whereas in fact this pamphlet denounces both democracy and Nazism as two sides of the same coin[1];
- the common defence of the Russian revolution and its lessons in the public meeting held jointly by the Communist Workers Organisation and the ICC in November 1997[2].
Even if the groups who claim continuity with the work of Amadeo Bordiga, and whom we refer to as Bordigists[3], don't recognise the existence of a proletarian political milieu - though they do sometimes in an implicit way[4] - they are an important part of it because of the tradition they come from. This part of the revolutionary camp, the major part up until the beginning of the 1980s, was hit in 1982 by an explosion unprecedented in the history of the workers' movement, giving rise to new Bordigist formations alongside the splits that already existed, all of them claiming to be the true heirs and most of them calling themselves the International Communist Party. This situation, the result of the fact that the various groups who came out of the explosion have never made a serious re-examination of the causes of the crisis of 1982, has represented an important weakness for the whole proletarian milieu.
In this article, we will not be entering into all the elements of a debate which promises to be rich and interesting, and which even includes a group outside the Bordigist milieu like the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista) to the extent that such a debate goes back to the very formations of the party in 1943-5, i.e. before the 1952 split between the Bordigist wing and the group led by Onorato Damen which has kept the name of their publication Battaglia Comunista to this day[5]. It is however important to point to certain elements which confer such value to this debate.
The first aspect is that the organisational question is at the heart of the discussion: if one reads the different articles of the groups involved, one can see how much this concern runs through them. Leaving aside for the moment the basic polemic between II Comunista, Le Proletaire and Programma Comunista, which to be honest we are not at this stage in a position to make any categorical statements about, the two groups, when they talk about what happened in the old Programme Communiste before 1982, both analyse a confrontation between an immediatist and voluntarist component on the one hand[6], and, on the other hand, a component more connected to the long term maturation of the class struggle. And both also show the central importance of the question of organisation: of a "partyist" type organisation against any "movementist" idea that the movement of the class is in itself sufficient for a successful revolution.
In its January 1997 issue, Programma Comunista refers to the necessity to understand the importance of patience, of not being immediatist, a general principle which we can but share.
The second aspect which gives value to this debate is the tendency to finally confront the question of the political roots of the crisis:
"We have to get down to work on the balance sheet of the crisis of the party, to draw up a balance sheet of all the questions which the last explosive crisis left unresolved: we will list them - the union question, the national question, the question of the party and its relations with other political regroupments as well as with the class, the question of the internal organisation of the party, the question of terrorism, the question of the revival of the class struggle and the immediate organisations of the proletariat ... the question of the course of imperialism" (Ibid.).
On this level, the group Le Proletaire-Il Comunista, in an article on the Kurdish question published in the French theoretical review Programme Communiste, devotes a long article to the critique of Programma Comunista (the Italian group) concerning an article the latter had written in 1994 which gives critical support to the PKK: "This fantasy recalls the illusions into which numerous comrades fell, including the international centre of the party, at the time of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and which led to the outbreak of the crisis which blew our organisation apart ... Programma thus manages to fall into the same error committed yesterday by the liquidators of our party, EI Oumami and Combat. Perhaps if it had agreed to draw a serious balance sheet of the crisis of the party and its causes, instead of taking flight into beliefs about always being right, Programma would have been able to make a real qualitative leap and overcome its theoretical, political and practical disorientation, to find the correct orientation so that such a misadventure would not have happened to it" (Programme Comuniste 95).
This polemic is particularly important because beyond the fact that it represents a clear position on national liberation struggles, it seems to have finally recognised that this question was at the basis of the explosion of Programme Communiste in 1982[7]. This recognition augurs well for the future because as the nature of the debate shows, it will no longer be possible for Bordigism to begin again as if nothing had happened: the lessons of the past will have to be drawn. And this past can't be arbitrarily fixed at a given period.
We have already made allusion to the fact that, in the polemic, the different groups have gone all the way back to the constitution of the first organisation in the years 1943-45. Thus, Programme Communiste 94 raised the question as follows: "the reconstituted party ... did not remain immune from the influence of the positions of the anti-fascist Resistance and of a rebellious anti-Stalinism ... these weaknesses were to lead to the split of 1951-2, but this was a beneficial crisis, a crisis of political and theoretical maturation". We can find this kind of criticism of the party of the 1950s within the other branch of the split, i.e. Battaglia Comunista (see our article on the history of Battaglia in International Review 91).
In the same issue, Programme Communiste also makes a reference to the difficulties encountered by this group after May 1968:
"the negative effects of post-68 touched our party ... to the point of leading to its break-up ... The party was assaulted by positions which were a melange of workerism, guerrillarism, voluntarism, activism ... There was a widespread illusion that, after 1975, Bordiga's predicted date of a 'revolutionary crisis, the party would soon emerge from its isolation and acquire a certain influence ".
Programma Comunista goes further, and in a remarkable effort of reflection on its past difficulties, it goes back over the same period[8]: "The more the party found itself facing political and practical problems that varied in their nature, their dimension and their urgency (such as the woman question, questions like housing, unemployment, the appearance of new organisations outside the big traditional unions or the problems raised by the weight of national factors in certain countries), the more there was a tendency to entrench oneself in a fixed declaration of principles, to stiffen ideologically".
This observation has to be welcomed: it is a sign of political and revolutionary vitality to try to find answers to new problems posed by the class struggle. This reflection on the past of the old International Communist Party, and notably on the organisation question, by comrades who have maintained an activity after the explosion of the early 80s, is very important for the communist left.
We won't take things any further in this article. We simply want to welcome and underline the importance of this debate developing in the Bordigist camp. In previous articles we have tried to analyse the origins of the political currents which constitute the present proletarian political milieu, by raising two fundamental questions - 'The Italian Fraction and the Communist Left of France' (IR 90) and 'The formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista' (IR 91). We are convinced that the whole political milieu must go into these historical questions and come out of the retreat imposed by the counter-revolution in the 1950s, the future of the construction of the class party, of the revolution itself, depends strongly on this.
Ezechiele
[1] See for example 'Bourgeois attacks against the communist left: we support the response of the Parti Communiste Internationale (Le Proletaire) in World Revolution 200 and Internationalism 97.
[2] See 'Joint public meeting of the communist left: In defence of the October revolution', in WR 209, Internationalism 102 and in the CWO's own publication Revolutionary Perspectives 9.
[3] The main Bordigist formations which exist today and to whom we refer in this article are, with their publications: the International Communist Party which published Le Proletaire and Programme Communiste in France; and Il Comunista in Italy; the International Communist Party which publishes Programma Comunista in Italy, Cahiers Internationalistes in France and Internationalist Papers in English; the International Communist Party which publishes Il Partito Comunista in Italy and Communist Left in Britain.
[4] Programme Communiste 95 for example takes the defence of the communist left against the criticisms of our book The Italian Communist Left by a British Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History (vol. 5 no. 4).
[5] There is a pamphlet by Battaglia on the 1952 split and a more recent one called Among the shadows of Bordigism and its epigones which intervenes explicitly in the recent debate between Bordigist groups.
[6] Two of these groups which were to some extent representative of this component of the old Programme Communiste ended up in leftism - in Italy Combat and in France EI Oumami - and both have happily disappeared from the social and political scene.
[7] See the articles we devoted to the crisis of Programme Communiste in 1982 and which the ICC analysed as the expression of a more general crisis in the proletarian political milieu, in particular the articles in IRs 32-36.
[8] Programme Communiste 94 'In memory of a comrade of the old guard, Ricardo Salvador'.
Thirty years ago in France, nearly 10 million workers were engaged for a month in a great movement of struggle. For young comrades coming towards revolutionary positions today, it is very difficult to know what happened during that far-off month of May 1968. And this is not their fault. The bourgeoisie has always deformed the profound importance of these events, and bourgeois history (right or left, it is all the same) has always presented them as a "student revolt", when in reality it was the most important phase in a class movement which spread to Italy, the United States, and throughout the industrialised world. It is not surprising that the ruling class should try to hide the proletariat's past struggles. When unable to do so, it distorts them, presents them as something other than the signs of the historic and irresolvable antagonism between the main exploited class of our epoch, and the ruling class responsible for this exploitation. Today the bourgeoisie continues its work of mystifying history by trying to present the October revolution as a coup d'état by bloodthirsty, power-hungry Bolsheviks, the opposite to reality: the greatest attempt in history by the working class to "storm the heavens", to seize political power in order to begin transforming society into communism, in other words to abolish the exploitation of man by man. The bourgeoisie is trying to exorcise the danger of historical memory as a weapon of the working class. And precisely because the knowledge of its own past experience is vital to the working class in preparing the battles of today and tomorrow, it is up to the revolutionaries, the class' political vanguard, to recall this past experience.
On the 3rd May thirty years ago, a meeting of several hundred students was held in the courtyard of the Sorbonne in Paris, called by the UNEF (student union) and the "22nd March Movement" (formed a few weeks previously at the faculty of Nanterre in the Paris suburbs). There was nothing particularly exciting in the theorising speeches by the leftist "leaders". But there was a persistent rumour: the Occident will attack". This far-right movement gave the police an excuse to intervene to "separate' the demonstrators. The aim above all was to smash the student agitation which had been going on for several weeks at Nanterre. This agitation was simply an expression of student frustration, driven by such diverse motives as the contestation of academic mandarins or the demand for greater individual and sexual freedom in the daily life of the University.
And yet, "the impossible happened": agitation continued for several days in the Latin Quarter. It stepped up a level every evening: each demonstration, every meeting, attracted a few more people than the day before: ten, then thirty, then fifty thousand people. Clashes with the police became more violent. In the street, young workers joined the fight. Despite the open hostility of the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais), which slandered the "enrages" (literally, "the angry ones") and the "German anarchist" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the CGT (the Stalinist-controlled union) was forced to avoid losing control of the situation by "recognising" the strikes, which had broken out unofficially and were spreading rapidly: ten million strikers disturbed the torpor of the 5th Republic, and marked the reawakening of the world proletariat.
The strike begun on 14th May at Sud-Avia-tion, and spread spontaneously. It was from the outset a radical departure from the "actions" organised hitherto by the unions. In the vital engineering and transportation sectors, the strike was almost total. The unions were overtaken by a movement which set itself apart from their traditional policies. The movement went beyond the control of the unions, marked from the start by an extended and often imprecise character, and often inspired by a profound, even if "unconscious" anxiety.
The unemployed, labelled as "declassed" by the bourgeoisie, played an important part in the confrontations. In fact, these "declassed", "misled" individuals were entirely proletarian. The proletariat consists, not just of workers and those who have already held down a job, but also of those who have not yet been able to work, and are already unemployed. They are the pure products of capitalism's decadent epoch. In mass youth unemployment, we can see one of the historic limits of capitalism, which because of generalised overproduction has become incapable of integrating new generations into the productive process. The unions, however, were to do everything in their power to regain control of this movement, which had started without them, and to some extent against them.
On Friday 17th May, the CGT distributed a leaflet which made quite clear the limits it intended to impose on its action: on the one hand, traditional demands coupled with agreements like those of Matignon in June 1936, guaranteeing the rights of union sections in companies; on the other, they called for a change of government, in other words for elections. Although they had been suspicious of the unions before the strike, had started the movement over the unions' heads, and had extended it on their own initiative, the workers behaved during the strike as if it was normal that it should be taken to its conclusion by the unions.
After being forced to follow the movement so as not to lose control of it, the unions finally pulled off a double coup with the precious help of the PCF: on the one hand, conducting negotiations with the government, while on the other calling the workers to stay calm, so as not to upset the serene holding of the new elections demanded by the PCF and the Socialists; at the same time they discreetly circulated rumours about the possibility of a coup d'état, and troop movements around the capital. In reality, although surprised and alarmed by the movement's radicalism, the bourgeoisie had no intention of using military repression. It knew very well that this could start the movement off again, forcing the union "conciliators" out of the game, and that a bloodbath would only have been much more expensive later on. It was not so much the CRS (Compagnie Republicaine de Securite, riot police) who attacked the demonstrations and dispersed demonstrators, but the much more skilful and dangerous union cops within the factories, who carried on their dirty work of dividing the workers.
The unions carried out their first police operation by encouraging the factory occupations, succeeding in shutting the workers up in their work place, thus preventing them from meeting, discussing, confronting each other in the street.
On the morning of the 27th May, the unions appeared before the workers with a compromise signed with the government (the Grenelle agreements). At Renault, the biggest company in the country and "barometer" of working class feeling, the CGT general secretary was shouted down by workers, who considered that their struggle had been sold out. Workers adopted the same attitude elsewhere. The number of strikers went on rising. Many workers tore up their union cards. This was when the unions and the government shared out the job of breaking the movement. The CGT, which had immediately disowned the Grenelle agreement - which it had itself signed - declared that "negotiations should be opened branch by branch in order to approve [the agreement)". The government and the bosses played along, making major concessions in some industries, which made it possible to begin a move back to work. At the same time, on 30th May, De Gaulle gave in to the demands of the left-wing parties: he dissolved parliament and called new elections. The same day, hundreds of thousands of his supporters marched down the Champs Elysees, It was a motley gathering of all those with a gut hatred for the working class and the "communists": the inhabitants of the wealthy districts, retired military men, nuns and concierges, shopkeepers and pimps. All this good society marched behind De Gaulle's ministers, led by Andre Malraux (the anti-fascist writer, well-known since his participation in the war in Spain in 1936).
The unions divided the work up amongst themselves: the minority CFDT took on a "radical" look, in order to keep control of the most combative workers. The CGT distinguished itself as a strike-breaker. In mass meetings, it would propose to bring the strike to an end, on the grounds that workers in neighbouring factories had already gone back to work: this was a lie. Above all, along with the PCF, it called for "calm" and a "responsible attitude" (even bringing up the bogey of civil war and repression by the army), so as not to disturb the elections to be held on 23rd and 30th June. The elections, when they came, resulted in a right-wing landslide, only adding to the disgust of the most combative workers who had continued their strike until they were held.
Despite its limitations, the general strike's immense élan helped the world-wide recovery of the class struggle. Coming after an uninterrupted series of retreats following the revolutionary events of 1917-23, the events of May 68 were a decisive turning point not only in France but in the rest of Europe and throughout the world. The strikes shook not only the state power, but also its most effective rampart, and the one most difficult to break: the left and the unions.
A "student" movement?
Once it had recovered from its surprise and its initial panic, the bourgeoisie set to finding explanations for these events which had disturbed its peace. It is therefore hardly surprising that the left used the student agitation to exorcise the real spectre that rose before the gaze of a frightened bourgeoisie - the proletariat - and that it limited the social events to a mere ideological quarrel between generations. May 68 was presented as the result of youthful boredom in the face of the modern world's dysfunctional changes. It is obvious that May 68 was marked by a definite decomposition of the values of the dominant ideology, but this "cultural" revolt was not the real cause of the conflict. In his preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx showed that "with the change of the economic foundations the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical - in short ideological - forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out".
All the expressions of the ideological crisis have their roots in the economic crisis, not the other way round. It is this state of crisis which determines the course of things. The student movement was thus indeed an expression of the general decomposition of bourgeois ideology. It was a straw in the wind announcing a more fundamental social movement. But because of the very place of the university in the system of production, it is only very exceptionally that it has any connection with the class struggle.
May 68 was not a movement of students and young people, it was above all a movement of the working class which was raising its head after decades of counter-revolution. The radicalisation of the student movement was precisely the result of this presence of the working class.
Students are not a class, still less a revolutionary social stratum. On the contrary, they are specifically the vehicles of the worst kind of bourgeois ideology. If in 1968 thousands of young people were influenced by revolutionary ideas, it was precisely because the only revolutionary class of our epoch, the working class, was in the streets.
This resurgence put an end to all the theories about the "bourgeoisification" of the working class, its "integration" into the capitalist system. How else can one explain how all these theories, which had been so dominant in the university milieu where they had been elaborated by the likes of Marc use and Adorno, melted away like snowdrops in the sun and that the students turned towards the working class like moths to a flame? And how else can one explain that, in the following years, while continuing to agitate in the same way, the students stopped proclaiming themselves revolutionaries?
No, May 68 was not a revolt of youth against the "inadequacies of the modern world", it was not merely a mental revolt; it was the first symptom of social convulsions whose roots lay much deeper than the superstructure, in the crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Far from being a triumph for the theories of Marcuse, May 68 was their death sentence, sending them back to the world of chimeras whence they had come.
No, the beginning of the historic resurgence of the class struggle
The general strike of 10 million workers in a country at the heart of capitalism meant the end of a period of counter-revolution that had opened up with the defeat of the revolutionary wave of the 1920s, and had continued and deepened through the simultaneous action of fascism and Stalinism. Just before this, the middle of the 1960s had marked the end of the period of reconstruction following the Second World War and the beginning of a new open crisis of the capitalist system.
The first blows of this crisis hit a generation of workers who had not known the demoralisation of the defeat that came in the 20s and who had grown up during the "economic boom". At that point the crisis was only touching them lightly, but the working class began to feel that something was changing:
"A feeling of insecurity about tomorrow is developing among the workers and above all among the younger ones. This feeling is all the sharper for having been unknown to the workers in France since the war ... More and more the masses feel that all this fine prosperity is coming to an end. Attitudes of indifference and 'I couldn't care less' among the workers, so characteristic and so widely decried, are giving away to a growing disquiet ... It has to be admitted that an explosion of this kind is based on a long accumulation of discontent in the masses about their economic situation, even if a superficial observer might have noticed nothing (Revolution Intemationale, 2, old series, 1969).
And indeed a superficial observer can grasp nothing of what's happening in the depths of the capitalist world. It's no accident that a radical group with no solid Marxist basis like the Situationist International could write about the events of May 68 " You could not observe any tendency towards economic crisis ... the revolutionary eruption did not come out of an economic crisis ... what was frontally attacked in May was a capitalist economy functioning well" (Enrages and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, Situationist International, 1969).
Reality was very different and the workers were beginning to feel it in their bones.
After 1945, US aid made it possible to get production going again in Europe, which paid back a part of its debts by ceding its enterprises to American companies. But after 1955 the US stopped their "free" aid. The commercial balance of the US was positive while that of most of the other countries was negative. American capital continued to be invested more rapidly in Europe than in the rest of the world, which assisted the balance of payments in these countries, but soon unbalanced it for the US. This situation led to growing debts for the American Treasury, since the dollars invested in Europe or the rest of the world constituted debts for the latter towards the holders of all this money. From the 1960s, this external debt went beyond the gold reserves of the US Treasury, but this inability to cover the dollar did not yet put the US in difficulty as long as the other countries were indebted to the US. The US could thus continue to appropriate capital from the rest of the world by paying in paper. This situation only turned around with the end of the reconstruction in the European countries. The European economies were now able to launch products onto the world market in competition with those of the US: towards the middle of the 60s, the trade balance of most of the countries that had been assisted by the US became positive while after 1964 that of the US deteriorated more and more. This marked the completion of the reconstruction of the European countries. The productive apparatus now faced a saturated market obliging the national bourgeoisies to intensify the exploitation of their proletariats in order to confront the exacerbation of international competition.
France did not escape this situation and in 1967 France had to undertake unavoidable measures of restructuration: rationalisation, improved productivity, leading to an increase in unemployment. Thus, at the beginning of 1968, the number of unemployed went beyond 500,000. Partial unemployment appeared in many factories and led to reactions from the workers. A lot of strikes broke out, limited and still controlled by the unions, but expressing a certain malaise. The growth of unemployment was received badly by a generation produced by the demographic explosion that followed World War Two, and which was accustomed to full employment.
In general the bosses sought to reduce workers' living standards. The bourgeoisie and its government were mounting a growing attack on living and working conditions. In all the industrial countries, there was a tangible development of unemployment, economic perspectives were becoming more sombre, international competition sharper. At the end of 1967 Britain made its first devaluation of the pound in order to make its products more competitive. But this measure was annulled by the devaluations that took place in all the other countries. The austerity policies imposed by the Labour government of the day were particularly severe: massive cuts in public spending, withdrawal of British troops from Asia, wage freezes, the first protectionist measures.
The US, main victim of the European offensive, could only react severely and, from the beginning of January 1968, President Johnson announced a number of economic measures, while in March 1968, in response to devaluations of rival currencies, the dollar also fell.
These were the essentials of the economic situation prior to May 68.
A movement for immediate demands, but not just that
It was in this situation that the events of May 68 took place: a worsening economic situation which engendered a reaction in the working class.
Certainly, other factors contributed to the radicalisation of the situation: police repression against the students and the workers' demonstrations, the Vietnam War. Simultaneously all the post-war capitalist myths entered into crisis: the myths of democracy, economic prosperity, peace. This situation created a social crisis to which the working class gave its first response.
It was a response on the economic level, but not only on that level. The other elements of the social crisis, the discredit suffered by the unions and the traditional left forces, led thousands of young people and workers to pose more general questions, to look for answers about the underlying cause of their discontent and disillusionment.
Thus was produced a new generation of militants who were approaching revolutionary positions. They began to re-read Marx, Lenin, to study the workers' movement of the past. The working class not only rediscovered the dimension of its struggle as an exploited class but also began to reveal its revolutionary nature.
These new militants for the most part got derailed by the false perspectives of the different leftist groups and so were soon lost. While trade unionism was the weapon which allowed the bourgeoisie to block the mass movement of the workers, leftism was the weapon which broke the majority of militants formed in the struggle.
But many others managed to find authentically revolutionary organisations, those which represented the historic continuity with the past workers' movement - the groups of the communist left. While none of the latter were able to fully grasp the significance of the events, remaining on the side lines and thus leaving the field free to the leftists, other small nuclei were able to gather these new revolutionary energies together, giving rise to new organisations and a new effort towards the regroupment of revolutionaries, the basis for the future revolutionary party.
A long and tortuous historic resurgence
The events of May 68 represented the beginning of the historic resurgence of the class struggle, the break with the period of counter-revolution and the opening of a new historic course towards a decisive confrontation between the antagonistic classes of our time: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
It was a striking debut, which found the bourgeoisie momentarily unprepared; but the ruling class recovered quickly and was able to get the better of an inexperienced generation of workers.
This new historic course was confirmed by the international events which followed May 68.
In 1969, there broke out in Italy the great strike movement known as the Hot Autumn, a season of struggle which was to continue for several years during which the workers tended to unmask the unions and build their own organs for the direction of the struggle. A wave of struggles whose main weakness was to remain isolated in the factories with the illusion that a "hard" struggle in the factories was enough to make the bosses retreat. These limitations were to enable the unions to get their place back in the factories by presenting themselves in their new guise of "base organs", drawing in all the leftist elements who, in the ascendant phase of the movement, had played at being revolutionaries and who now found jobs as union hacks.
The 1970s saw other movements of struggle all over the industrial world: in Italy (the unemployed, the hospital workers); in France (LIP, Renault, the steelworkers of Longwy and Denain), in Spain, in Portugal and elsewhere. The workers were increasingly coming up against the unions who, despite their new "rank and file" garments, continued to look like the defenders of capitalist interests and saboteurs of workers' struggles.
In 1980 in Poland, the working class drew profit from the bloody experience it had been through in the previous confrontations of 1970 and 1976, organising a mass strike which blocked the whole country. This formidable movement of the workers in Poland, which showed the entire world the strength of the proletariat, its capacity to take control of its struggles, to organise itself through general assemblies and strike committees (the MKS) in order to extend the struggle across an entire country, was an encouragement for the working class everywhere. It was the trade union Solidarnosc, created by the bourgeoisie (with the aid of the western unions) to contain, control and derail the movement, which finally handed the workers over to the repression of the Jaruzelski government. This defeat led to a deep disarray in the world proletariat. It took it more than two years to digest this defeat.
During the 1980s, however, the workers began to draw on all the experience of union sabotage from the previous decade. New struggles broke out in the main countries and the workers began to take charge of their struggles, creating their own organs of struggle. The railway workers in France, the school workers in Italy, waged struggles based on organs controlled by the workers through strikers' general assemblies.
Faced with this maturation of the struggle, the bourgeoisie was forced to renew its own union weapons: it was in these years that a new form of "base unionism" was developed (the coordinations in France, the COBAS in Italy), disguised unions which copied the forms of the organs which the workers had created for the struggle, in order to drag the workers back into the union corral.
We have only touched upon what happened in these two decades after the French May. We think that it is enough to show that the latter was no mere passing incident, something specifically French, but really was the beginning of a new historic phase in which the working class had broken with the counter-revolution and had again appeared on the scene of history, starting out on the long road towards the confrontation with capital.
A difficult historic resurgence
If the new post-war generation of the working class managed to break with the counter-revolution because it had not directly known the demoralisation of defeat in the 1920s, it was lacking in experience and this historic resurgence of the struggle was to prove long and difficult. We have already seen the difficulties of settling scores with the unions and their role as defenders of capital. But an important and unforeseen historic event was to make this resurgence all the longer and more difficult - the collapse of the eastern bloc.
An expression of the erosion produced by the economic crisis, this collapse led to a reflux in the consciousness of the proletariat, a reflux which has been amply exploited by the bourgeoisie which has been trying to make up the ground it lost in the preceding years.
By identifying Stalinism with communism, the bourgeoisie presents the collapse of Stalinism as the death of communism, aiming a simple but powerful message at the working class: "the workers' struggle has no perspective, because there is no viable alternative to capitalism. It's a system with many faults, but it is the only one possible".
The reflux provoked by this campaign has been much more profound than the ones which took place in the previous waves of struggles. This time it was not a question of a movement that finished badly, of union sabotage succeeding in blocking a movement of struggle. This time, what was in question was the very possibility of having any long term perspective for the struggle.
However, the crisis which had been the detonator of the historic revival of the class struggle is still with us, resulting in ever more violent attacks on the workers' living standards. This is why in 1992 the working class was compelled to return to the fight, with the movement of strikes against the Amato government in Italy, followed by other struggles in Belgium, Germany, France, etc. A revival of combativity in the class which has not yet overcome the reflux in consciousness. This is why this revival has not yet gone back to the level it had reached at the end of the 80s.
Since then the bourgeoisie has not stood around with its arms folded. It has not allowed the proletariat to get on with its struggles and regain confidence through them. With even more strength and capacity to manoeuvre, the bourgeoisie organised the public sector strike in the autumn of 1995 in France: through a massive international press campaign, this strike was used to prove that the unions can organise the struggle and defend the interests of the proletariat. Similar manoeuvres took place in Belgium and Germany, resulting in a boosting of union credibility on an international scale, providing them with a renewed capacity to sabotage workers' militancy.
But the bourgeoisie does not only manoeuvre on this terrain. It has launched a series of campaigns aimed at keeping the workers stuck behind the defence of democracy (and thus of the bourgeois state): the "dirty hands" campaign in Italy, the Dutroux affair in Belgium, anti-racism in France - all these events had a lot of media publicity in order to convince the workers of the whole world that their problem was not the vulgar defence of their economic interests, that they should pull in their belts within their respective national states and rally to the defence of democracy, justice and other inanities.
But during these last two years, the bourgeoisie has also been trying to destroy the historic memory of the working class, discrediting the history of the working class and the organisations which refer to it. The communist left itself has been under attack, presented as the main inspiration for "negationism".
The bourgeoisie has equally been trying to distort the real meaning of the October revolution, which it presents as a Bolshevik coup, thus seeking to wipe out the memory of the great revolutionary wave of the 1920s in which the working class, though defeated, showed that it is capable of attacking capitalism as a mode of production and not only of defending itself against exploitation. In two enormous books originally written in France and Britain, but already translated into other languages, they are carrying on with the mystification that communism equals Stalinism, and is in fact responsible for all of Stalinism's crimes (see International Review 92).
But the future still belongs to the proletariat
If the bourgeoisie is so preoccupied with undermining the struggle of the working class, with distorting its history, with discrediting the organisations which defend the proletariat's revolutionary perspective, it is because it knows that the proletariat is not defeated; that, despite all its current difficulties, the road is still open to massive confrontations in which the working class will once again put the power of the bourgeoisie into question. And the bourgeoisie also knows that the aggravation of the crisis and the sacrifices it imposes on the workers will more and more force them to embark upon the struggle. It is through this struggle that the workers will rediscover confidence in themselves, that they will learn the real nature of the unions and find their own autonomous forms of organisation.
A new phase is opening up in which the working class will rediscover the road that was opened up 30 years ago by the great general strike of the French May.
Helios
In the previous article in this series, dealing with the Kapp Putsch in 1920, we underlined that having been through the defeats of 1919, the German working class returned to the offensive. But at the international level, the revolutionary wave was about to go into decline.
The ending of the war had already, in a number of countries, cooled revolutionary ardour, and above all had allowed the bourgeoisie to exploit the division between the workers of the "victorious" countries and those of the "defeated" countries. Furthermore, the forces of capital were succeeding in isolating more and more the revolutionary movement in Russia. The victories of the Red Army over the Whites - who had been strongly supported by the western democracies - did not prevent the ruling class from pursuing its offensive on an international scale.
In Russia itself the isolation of the revolution and the growing integration of the Bolshevik party into the state were making their effects felt. In March 1921 came the revolt of the workers and sailors of Kronstadt.
Against this background, the German proletariat was exhibiting a much stronger combativity than in other countries. Everywhere revolutionaries were facing the question: how to react to the offensive of the bourgeoisie when the world revolutionary wave is entering into reflux?
Within the Communist International (Cl), a political turnaround was taking place. The 21 Conditions for admission adopted by the Second Congress of the CI in the summer of 1920 expressed this clearly. In particular they imposed work within the trade unions and participation in parliamentary elections. The CI was thus returning to the old methods used during the ascendant period of capitalism, with the hope of reaching wider layers of the working class.
This opportunist turn was manifested in Germany particularly through the "Open Letter" addressed to the KPD in January 1921 to the trade unions and the SPD as well as to the anarcho-syndicalist FAUD, the KAPD and the USPD proposing "that all the socialist parties and trade union organisations should wage common actions to impose the most urgent economic demands of the working class". This appeal, which was addressed most particularly to the unions and the SPD, was to give rise to the "united front in the factories": "The VKPD wants to set aside the memory of the bloody responsibility of the majority of Social Democratic leaders. It wants to set aside the memory of the services rendered by the union bureaucracy to the capitalists during the war and in the course of the revolution." (Die Rote Fahne, 8 January 1921). Through this kind of opportunist flattery, e Communist Party was trying to draw the parties of Social Democracy to its side.
Simultaneously it theorised, for the first time, the necessity for a proletarian offensive: "If the parties and the unions to whom we are addressing ourselves refuse to initiate the struggle, the Unified Communist Party of Germany will then be forced to wage it alone, and it is convinced that the masses will follow" (ibid).
The unification between the KPD and the USPD, in December 1920, gave rise to the VKPD and had brought back the conception of the mass party. This was reinforced by the fact that the party now had 500,000 members. The VKPD also allowed itself to be blinded by the percentage of votes it won in the elections to the Prussian Landtag in February 1921 (almost 30%)[1].
Thus the party increasingly thought that it could "heat up" the situation in Germany. Many of its members dreamed that another right-wing putsch, like the one that had happened the year before, would provoke a workers' uprising with the perspective of taking power. Such ideas were to a large extent due to the increased influence of the petty bourgeoisie in the party since the Unification between the KPD and the USPD. The USPD, like any centrist current within the workers' movement, was strongly influenced by the conceptions and behaviour of the petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, the numerical growth of the party tended to accentuate the weight of opportunism as well as petty bourgeois impatience and immediatism.
It was in this context of a retreat in the international revolutionary wave, and of deep confusions in the revolutionary movement in Germany, that the bourgeoisie launched a new offensive against the proletariat in March 1921. The main target of this attack was the workers of central Germany. During the war a huge proletarian concentration had been formed in this area around the Leuna factories in Bitterfeld and in the Mansfeld basin. The majority of the workers there were relatively young and militant but had no great experience of organisation. The VKPD alone had 66,000 members there, the KAPD 3,200. In the Leuna factories 2,000 out of the 20,000 workers were members of the Workers' Unions.
Seeing that, following the confrontations of 1919 and the Kapp Putsch, many workers were still armed, the bourgeoisie badly wanted to pacify the region.
The bourgeoisie tries to provoke the workers
On 19 March 1919 a powerful military police force arrived in Mansfeld with the aim of disarming the workers.
This order did not come from the extreme right wing of the ruling class (the right parties and their forces within the army) but from the democratically elected government. Once again it was democracy which played the role of executioner to the working class, using any means necessary.
For the bourgeoisie, the aim was to disarm and defeat a relatively young and militant fraction of the German proletariat in order to weaken and demoralise the working class as a whole. More particularly, the ruling class wanted to strike a crucial blow at the proletariat's vanguard, its revolutionary organisations. By forcing the workers into a decisive but premature struggle in central Germany, the state would have the opportunity to isolate the communists from the rest of the working class. It wanted to discredit them first in order to then subject them to repression. In particular, it aimed to prevent the newly formed VKPD from consolidating itself and to prevent the growing rapprochement between the VKPD and the KAPD. In doing so, German capital was acting in the name of the world bourgeoisie in order to increase the isolation of the Russian revolution and weaken the CI.
At the same moment the International was impatiently waiting for the movements of struggle that would support the Russian revolution from outside. In a way it was waiting for the bourgeoisie to launch an offensive so that the working class, placed in a difficult situation, would react in strength. A number of violent minority actions -like the KAPD's blowing up of the Victory Column in Berlin on 13 March - had the explicit aim of provoking workers' combativity.
Paul Levi made this report of the intervention of the Moscow envoy, Rakosi, at a meeting of the VKPD Centrale: "The comrade explained that Russia was in an extraordinarily difficult situation. It was absolutely necessary for Russia to be relieved by movements in the west, and on this basis, the German party had to push for immediate action. The VKPD now had 500,000 members and it could count on of allowing of 1,500,000 workers, which was enough to overthrow the government. It was thus necessary to immediately engage in the battle with the slogan of overthrowing the government" (Levi, Letter to Lenin, 27 March 1921 ).
"On 17 March the KPD Central Committee held a meeting in which the directives of the comrade sent by Moscow were adopted as orientation theses. On 18 March Die Rote Fahne took up a new resolution and called for armed struggle without first saying what its objectives were, and it maintained the same tone for several days" (ibid)
The long awaited government offensive took place the next day with the entry of police troops into central Germany.
Can you force the revolution?
The police forces sent to central Germany on March 19 by the Social Democratic minister Horsing had been ordered to search houses in order to ensure that the workers were disarmed. The experience of the Kapp Putsch had dissuaded the government from using Reichswehr troops.
The same night a general strike for the region was decided, to begin on 21 March. On 23 March the first clashes took place between the Reich security police (SiPo) and the workers. The same day the workers of the Leuna factory in Merseburg proclaimed a general strike. On 24 March the KAPD and the VKPD launched a joint appeal for a general strike throughout Germany. In response to this there were sporadic demonstrations and exchanges of fire between strikers and police in several towns. In the whole country, about 300,000 workers came out on strike.
On the initiative of the KAPD and the VKPD there were dynamitings in Dresden, Freiberg, Leipzig, Plauen and elsewhere. The newspapers Hallische Zeitung and Saale Zeitung, which were being particularly provocative against the workers, were reduced to silence by explosives.
Although the repression in central Germany had pushed workers into spontaneous armed resistance, they were not able to fight the government forces in a coordinated way. The combat organisations set up by the VKPD and led by H Eberlein were militarily and organisationally ill-prepared. Max Holz, who led a workers' combat troop of 2,500 men, managed to get to within a few kilometers of the Leuna factory besieged by the government troops and tried to reorganise the workers' forces. But his troops were wiped out on 1 April, two days after the taking of the Leuna factories. Although there was little fighting spirit in other cities, the VKPD and the KAPD called for an immediate armed response against the police forces:
"The working class is called upon to enter into active struggle for the following objectives:
1. the overthrow of the government;
2. the disarming of the counter-revolution and the arming of the workers"
(Appeal dated 17 March 1921).
In another appeal on 24 March the VKPD wrote: "Remember that last year you defeated in five days the white guards and the scum of Baltikum's Freikorps thanks to the general strike and the armed uprising. Fight with us, like last year, to beat the counter-revolution! Begin the general strike everywhere! Break the violence of the counter-revolution with your own violence! Disarming of the counter-revolution, formation and arming of local militia on the basis of cells of workers, employees and functionaries!
Immediate formation of local proletarian militia! Take power in the factories! Organise production through factory councils and trade unions! Create work for the unemployed!"
However, locally the combat organisations of the VKPD as well as the workers who had armed themselves spontaneously were not only poorly prepared, but the local organs of the party were not in contact with the Centrale. The different combat groups, the best known of which were those under Max Holz and Karl Plattner, fought in different places in the zone of the uprising, isolated from each other. Nowhere were there any workers' councils to coordinate their actions. On the other hand, the government's troops were in close contact with the headquarters which directed them.
After the fall of the Leuna factories, the VKPD withdrew on 31 March its call for a general strike. On 1 April, the last armed workers' groups in central Germany dissolved themselves.
Bourgeois order reigned once more! Once again repression was unleashed. Once again workers were subjected to police brutality. Hundreds were shot, more than 6,000 arrested.
The hopes of the great majority of the VKPD and the KAPD - that provocative action by the apparatus of state repression would produce a dynamic response from the workers - crashed to the ground. The workers of central Germany had remained isolated.
The VKPD and the KAPD had quite clearly pushed for the battle without taking the whole of the situation into account. They thus found themselves completely isolated from the hesitant workers who were not ready to go into action, and they created divisions within the working class by adopting the slogan "Whoever is not with me is against me" (Die Rote Fahne, editorial of 20 March).
Instead of recognising that the situation was not favourable, Die Rote Fahne wrote:
"It's not only on the head of your leaders but on the head of each of you that bloody responsibility lies, when you tolerate in silence or protest without acting against the terror and the white justice unleashed on the workers by Ebert, Severing, Horsing and Co ... Shame and ignominy to the worker who is still not at his post".
In order to artificially provoke combativity, there were attempts to use the unemployed as a spearhead: "The unemployed were sent forward like assault troops. They occupied the gates of factories. They forced their way into the factories, lit fires here and there and tried to force the workers outside with cudgels ... it was a terrible spectacle to see the unemployed themselves getting chased out of the factories, weeping under the blows they received, and then fleeing from those who had sent them there" (Levi, ibid).
The fact that the VKPD, from before the beginning of the struggle, had had a false appreciation of the balance of forces, that afterwards it was incapable of revising its analyses, all this was tragic enough, but it did even worse by launching the slogan "Life or Death" according to the false principle that communists never retreat:
"In no case can a communist, even if he is in a minority, return to work! The communists have left the factories. In groups of 200, 300 men, sometimes more, sometimes less, they left the factories: the factory continued to operate. They are now unemployed, since the bosses seized the opportunity to purge the factories of communists at a time when a large part of the workers were on their side" (Levi, ibid).
What was the balance sheet of the March Action?
Although this struggle was forced on the working class by the bourgeoisie, and it was impossible to avoid it, the VKPD "committed a series of errors, the main one being that instead of clearly bringing out the defensive character of this struggle, through its call for an offensive it provided the most unscrupulous enemies of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the Social Democratic Party, the Independents, a pretext for denouncing the Unified Party as a maker of putsches. This error was further exacerbated by a certain number of party comrades who represented the offensive as the essential method of struggle for the Unified Party in the current situation" (Theses on Tactics, Third Congress of the CI, June 1921).
For communists to intervene to reinforce the workers' combativity is an elementary duty. But they don't do this at any price.
"The communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement" (Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto of 1848). This is why communists have to be characterised vis-a-vis the working class by their capacity to analyse correctly the balance of forces between the classes. To push a weak or insufficiently prepared class into decisive struggles, to lead it into the traps laid by the bourgeoisie, is the height of irresponsibility, for revolutionaries. Their first responsibility is to develop their capacity for analysing the level of consciousness and combativity within the class as well as the strategy being used by the ruling class. This is the only way that revolutionary organisations can really take up their leading role in the class.
Immediately after the March Action, violent debates developed within the VKPD and the KAPD.
False organisational conceptions: an obstacle to the party's ability to make a self-critique
In an orientation article on 4-6 April 1921, Die Rote Fahne affirmed that "the VKPD has inaugurated a revolutionary offensive" and that the March Action constituted "the beginning, the first episode of decisive struggles for power".
On 7 and 8 April its Central Committee met and instead of making a critical analysis of the intervention, Heinrich Brandler sought above all to justify the party's policy. For him the main weakness resided in a lack of discipline among the local militants of the VKPD and in the failures of military organisation. He declared that "we have not suffered any defeat. It was an offensive".
In response to this analysis, Paul Levi made the most virulent criticism of the party's attitude during the March Action.
Having resigned from the Central Committee in February 1921 along with Clara Zetkin, for, among others, divergences over the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy, Levi once again showed himself unable to take the organisation forward through criticism. The most tragic thing about this was that "Levi is basically right on many points in criticising the March Action in Germany" (Lenin, Letter to German Communists, 14 August 1921, Collected Works, Vol. 32). But instead of making his critique in the framework of the organisation, on 3 and 4 April he wrote a pamphlet which he published on the outside on 12 April without first submitting it for discussion within the party[2].
In this pamphlet, Levi not only spat at organisational discipline, he exposed all kinds of details about the internal life of the party. He thus broke a proletarian principle and put the organisation in danger by publicly revealing its mode of functioning. He was excluded from the party on 12 April for behaviour threatening the security of the organisation.[3]
As we showed in our previous article on the Heidelberg Congress of October 1919, Levi tended to see any criticism as an attack on the organisation, but also as an attack on his own person. He thus sabotaged any possibility of collective functioning. His point of view clearly expressed this: "Either the March Action was valid, which means that I should be excluded from the party. Or the March Action was an error and my pamphlet was justified" (Levi, letter to the VKPD Centrale). This attitude was harmful to the organisation and was repeatedly criticised by Lenin. After Levi's resignation from the VKPD Centrale in February, he wrote "And the resignation from the Central Committee? That is quite simply the greatest of errors. If we tolerate a state of affairs where members of the Central Committee resign as soon as they find themselves in a minority, the development and purification of the Communist Parties will never follow a normal course. Instead of resigning, it would have been better to have had a number of discussions about the litigious questions with the Executive Committee ... It is indispensable to do everything possible, and even the impossible - but, at all costs, to avoid resignations and not to exaggerate divergences" (Lenin, Letter to Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi, 16 April 1921, CW, Vol. 45).
The partly exaggerated charges which Levi made against the VKPD (which was virtually seen as the only one at fault, thus ignoring the responsibility of the bourgeoisie in provoking the March struggles) were based on a rather distorted view of reality.
After being expelled from the party, Levi edited for a short period the review The Soviet which became the mouthpiece of those who opposed the direction taken by the VKPD.
Levi tried to expound his criticisms of the VKPD's tactics in front of the Central Committee but it refused to let him into its meetings. Clara Zetkin did it in his place. He argued that "communists are not able to undertake actions in place of the proletariat, without the proletariat, and, in the final analysis, even against the proletariat" (Levi, ibid).
Clara Zetkin then proposed a counter-resolution to the position taken up by the party. The session of the Central Committee, in its majority, rejected the criticisms and underlined that "to avoid this action ... was impossible for a revolutionary party and would have meant a pure and simple renunciation of its calling to lead the revolution". The VKPD "must, if it is to fulfil its historic mission, hold firmly to the line of the revolutionary offensive which was at the basis of the March Action and march with determination and confidence in this direction" ('Leitsatze uber die Marzaktion', Die Internationale 4, April 1921).
The Centrale persisted with the tactic of the offensive and rejected all the criticisms, In a proclamation of6 April 1921, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) approved the party's attitude and declared: "The Communist International says to you: 'you acted well ' ... Prepare yourselves for new combats" (published in Die Rote Fahne, 14 April 1921).
It was at the Third Congress of the CI that the disagreements about the events in Germany began to be expressed. The group around Zetkin in the VKPD was strongly attacked in the first part of the discussion. But the interventions and the authority of Lenin and Trotsky led to a turnaround in the debates and cooled the hotheads.
Lenin, absorbed by the Kronstadt events and the affairs of state, had not had the time to follow the events in Germany or the debates about the balance sheet to be drawn. He had only just begun studying the situation more closely. On the one hand he very firmly rejected Levi's breach of discipline; on the other, he announced that the March Action, because of "its international importance and significance, must be submitted to the Third Congress of the Communist International". Lenin's concern was that discussion in the party should be as broad and unhindered as possible.
W Koenen, the VKPD's representative in the ECCI, was sent to Germany to ensure that the Central Committee of the German party would not take a definitive decision against the opposition. In the party press, it became possible for criticisms of the March Action to appear. Discussions on tactics opened up.
However, the majority of the Central Committee continued to defend the position adopted in March. Arkady Maslow called for a new approval of the March Action. Guralski, an envoy the ECCI, even declared that "we are not concerned with the past. The coming political struggles of the party are the best response to the attacks of the Levi tendency". At the Central Committee meeting of 3-5 May, Thalheimer intervened to call for unity in action by the workers. F Heckert pleaded for strengthening work in the trade unions.
On 13 May Die Rote Fahne published theses which developed the objective of artificially accelerating the revolutionary process. The March Action was cited as an example. The communists "must, in particularly grave situations where the essential interests of the proletariat are threatened, take a step ahead of the masses and seek by their initiative to draw them into the struggle, even at the risk of not being followed by a part of the working class". W Pieck, who in January 1919 had, against the decisions of the party, thrown himself along with Karl Liebknecht into the Berlin uprising, thought that confrontations within the working class "would take place more and more frequently. Communists must turn against the workers when they don't follow our appeals".
The reaction of the KAPD
While the VKPD and the KAPD had taken a step forward by carrying out joint actions, unfortunately these took place in unfavourable circumstances. The common denominator of the approach of the VKPD and the KAPD in the March Action was the desire to come to the aid of the working class in Russia. At this time the KAPD was still defending the revolution in Russia. The councilists who were to emerge from it took up an opposing position.
However the KAPD's intervention was beset by internal wrangling. On the one hand the leadership launched a joint appeal for a general strike with the VKPD and sent two representatives of the Centrale to central Germany, F Jung and F Rasch, to support the coordination of combat actions; on the other hand the local leaders of the KAPD, Utzelmann and Prenzlow, on the basis of their knowledge of the situation in the industrial region of central Germany, considered that any attempt at an uprising was insane and did not want to go any further than a general strike. They also intervened towards the Leuna workers, calling them to stay in the factory and prepare for a defensive struggle. The KAPD leadership acted without consulting the local party organs.
As soon as the movement was over, the KAPD timidly began a critical analysis of its own intervention. This analysis was also contradictory. In a reply to Levi's pamphlet, it highlighted the fundamentally erroneous approach of the VKPD Centrale. Hermann Gorter wrote:
"The VKPD has, through parliamentary activity - which in the conditions of bankrupt capitalism has no other meaning than the mystification of the masses - diverted the proletariat from revolutionary action. It has gathered up hundreds of thousands of non-communists and become a 'mass party '. The VKPD has supported the trade unions by the tactic of creating cells within them ... When the German revolution, having become more and more powerless, began to retreat, when the best elements of the VKPD became more and more dissatisfied and began calling for action, suddenly the VKPD decided on an grand enterprise for the conquest of political power. This is what it consisted of before the provocation by Horsing and the SiPo, the VKPD decided on an artificial action from above, without the spontaneous impulse of the broad masses; in other words it adopted the tactics of the putsch.
The Executive Committee and its representatives in Germany had for a long time been insisting that the party should strike out and show that it was a true revolutionary party. As if the essential aspect of a revolutionary tactic consisted simply of striking with all one's forces! On the contrary, when instead of affirming the revolutionary strength of the proletariat, a party undermines this same strength and weakens the proletariat by supporting parliament and the trade unions, and then after such preparations suddenly resolves to hit out by launching a great offensive action in favour of the same proletariat it has just been weakening, this can be nothing other than a putsch. That is to say, action decreed from above, having no source in the masses themselves, and thus doomed to failure from the start. And this attempt at a putsch has nothing revolutionary about it: it is opportunist in exactly the same way as parliamentarism or the tactic of union cells. Yes, this tactic is the inevitable other side of the coin of parliamentarism and the tactic of union cells, of collecting up non-communist elements, of the policy of leaders substituting for the policy of the masses, or, more precisely, the policy of the class. This weak and intrinsically corrupt tactic must inevitably lead to putsches" (Gorter, 'Lessons of the March Action', Afterword to the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, Der Proletarier, May 1921).
This text by the KAPD puts its finger on the contradiction between the tactic of the United Front, which reinforced workers' illusions in the unions and social democracy, and the simultaneous and sudden call for an assault on the state. But at the same time, we find contradictions in the KAPD's own analysis: while on the one hand it talks about a defensive action by the workers, on the other it characterises the March Action as "the first conscious offensive by the revolutionary German proletarians against bourgeois state power" (F Kool, Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft). In this respect, the KAPD even noted that "large masses of workers remained neutral, if not hostile, towards the combative vanguard". At the extraordinary congress of the KAPD in September 1921, the lessons of the March Action were not examined any further.
It was against this background of virulent debates within the VKPD and contradictory analyses by the KAPD, that the Communist International held its Third Congress, at the end of June 1921.
The International's attitude towards the March Action
Within the International, different tendencies had begun to form. The ECCI did not have a unified position on the events in Germany and did not speak with one voice. For a long time the ECCI had been divided on the analysis of the situation in Germany. Radek had developed many criticisms of the positions and behaviour of Levi and other members of the Centrale had seized upon them. However, these criticisms were not publicly and openly expressed within the VKPD at congresses or elsewhere.
Instead of publicly debating the analysis of the situation, Radek did a lot of damage to the functioning of the party. Often criticisms were not expressed openly and fraternally, but in a covert manner. Often debates were not centred round political errors but around the individuals responsible for them. The tendency towards the personalisation of political positions developed. Instead of building unity around a position and a method, instead of struggling as a body that functions collectively, the organisational tissue was destroyed in a completely irresponsible manner.
More generally the communists in Germany were themselves profoundly divided. On the one hand, at this moment, the two parties, the VKPD and the KAPD, which was also part of the CI, began to clash violently on the orientation to be followed.
Vis-a-vis the CI, before the March Action, parts of the VKPD had kept quiet about certain information about the situation; at the same time, divergences of analysis were not brought to the knowledge of the CI in all their breadth.
Within the CI itself, there was no real common reaction or unified approach to this situation. The Kronstadt uprising completely monopolised the attention of the Bolshevik party leadership, preventing it from following the situation in Germany in more detail. The way in which decisions were made in the ECCI was often not very clear and it was the same with the mandates given to the delegations. Certainly the mandates given to Radek and other ECCI delegates to Germany do not seem to have been decided with much clarity[4].
Thus, in this situation of growing divisions, notably within the VKPD, the ECCI members - in particular Radek - officiously entered into contact with tendencies within the two parties, unbeknownst to the central organs of the two organisations, with the aim of preparing for putschist actions. Instead of pushing the organisations towards unity, mobilisation and clarification, divisions were exacerbated and the tendency to take decisions outside the responsible organs was accelerated. This attitude, taken in the name of the ECCI, fuelled within the VKPD and the KAPD behaviour that could only damage the organisation.
Levi criticised this approach: "More and more frequently the envoys of the ECCI are overstepping their powers, and it is being shown later that these envoys have not been given such far-reaching powers" (Levi, Unser Weg, wider den Putschismus, 3 April 1921).
The structures of functioning and decision-making, as defined in the statutes both of the VKPD and the KAPD, were being bypassed. At the time of the March Action, in both parties, the appeal for the general strike was made without the whole organisation being involved in the reflection and decision. In reality it was the comrades of the ECCI who made contact with elements or certain tendencies within each organisation and who pushed for taking action. In this way the party as such was being bypassed.
Thus it was impossible to arrive at a unified approach by each party, still less at real joint action between the two parties.
To a large extent activism and putschism gained the upper hand in both organisations, accompanied by individual behaviour that was very destructive for the party and for the class as a whole. Each tendency began to carry out its own policies and to create its own informal, parallel channels. The concern for party unity, for a functioning in conformity with the statutes, was to a considerable extent lost.
Although the CI was weakened by the growing identification between the Bolshevik: party and the interests of the Russian state, and by the opportunist turn towards the tactic of the United Front, the Third Congress of the International still contained a collective and proletarian critique of the March Action.
For the Congress, the ECCI, with a correct political concern under Lenin's impulsion, ensured that there was a delegation representing the opposition within the VKPD. While the delegation from the VKPD Centrale was still trying to muzzle any criticism of the March Action, the Political Bureau of the Russian Communist Party, on Lenin's proposition, decided that "as a basis to this resolution it is necessary to examine in precise detail, to bring to light the concrete errors committed by the VKPD during the March Action and to even more energetically be on guard against repeating them".
What attitude to adopt?
In the introductory report to the discussion on 'The world economic crisis and the new tasks of the Communist International', Trotsky underlined that "Today, for the first time, we don't see and feel ourselves so immediately close to our goal, the conquest of power. In 1919, we said: 'It's a question of months'. Today we are saying: 'It's perhaps a question of years '". The combat may last a long time, it will not progress so feverishly as we would have liked, it will be excessively difficult and will demand numerous sacrifices".
Lenin: "This is why the Congress must make a clean sweep of leftist illusions that the development of the world revolution will continue at the same mad pace as it did in the beginning, that without any interruption it will be carried along by a second revolutionary wave and that victory depends solely on the will of the party and its action" (Zetkin, Memories of Lenin).
The VKPD Centrale, under the responsibility of Thalheimer and Bela Kun, sent to the Congress draft theses on tactics which called on the CI to embark upon a new phase of action. In a letter to Zinoviev of 10 June 1921, Lenin considered that "the theses of Thalheimer and Bela Kun are radically false on the political level" (Lenin, Letters, Vol. 7).
The Communist Parties had nowhere conquered the majority of the working class, not only at the level of organisation, but also at the level of communist principles. This is why the tactic of the CI was the following:
"We must ceaselessly and systematically struggle to win over the majority of the working class, first of all inside the old unions" (ibid).
In discussion with the delegate Heckert, Lenin thought that "the provocation was as clear as day. And instead of mobilising the working masses behind defensive aims in order to push back the attacks of the bourgeoisie and prove that you had the right to do this, you invented your 'theory of the offensive', an absurd theory which provides all the reactionaries and police authorities with the opportunity of presenting you as aggressors against whom the people had to be defended!" (Heckert, 'My encounter with Lenin', Lenin as he was, Vol. 2).
The VKPD delegation and the specially invited delegation from the opposition within the VKPD clashed at the Congress.
The Congress was aware of the danger to the unity of the party. This is why it pushed for a compromise between the leadership and the opposition. The following arrangement was obtained: "The Congress considers that any splintering of the forces within the Unified Communist Party of Germany, any formation of fractions, without even talking about splits, would constitute the greatest danger for the whole movement". At the same time the resolution adopted warned against any vengeful attitudes: "the Congress expects the leadership of the Unified Communist Party of Germany to have a tolerant attitude towards the old opposition, provided that it loyally applies the decisions taken by the Third Congress" (Resolution on the March Action and the Unified Communist Party of Germany, Third Congress of the CI).
During the debates at the Third Congress, the KAPD delegation hardly expressed any self-criticism about the March Action. It seemed to be concentrating its efforts on the questions of work in the trade unions and parliament.
Although the Third Congress managed to be very self-critical about the putschist dangers that appeared at the time of the March Action, to warn against them and to eradicate this "blind activism", it unfortunately embarked upon the tragic and pernicious path of the United Front. While it rejected putschism, the opportunist turn inaugurated by the adoption of the 21 Conditions was confirmed and accelerated. The grave errors identified by Gorter for the KAPD, i.e. the CI's return to work in the unions and parliament, were not corrected.
Encouraged by the results of the Third Congress, from the autumn of 1921 the VKPD involved itself in the policy of the United Front. At the same time, this Congress posed an ultimatum to the KAPD: either fuse with the VKPD or be excluded from the CI. In September 1921, the KAPD left the CI. Part of the KAPD rushed into the adventure of immediately founding the Communist Workers' International. A few months later it was rent by a split.
For the KPD (which again changed its name in August 1921), the door towards opportunism was wide open. As for the bourgeoisie, it had obtained its objectives: thanks to the March Action it had managed to continue its offensive and weaken the working class still further.
While the consequences of the putschist attitude were devastating for the working class as a whole, they were even more so for the communists. Once again they were the main victims of the repression. The hunt for communists was stepped up. A wave of resignations hit the KPD. Many militants were deeply demoralised after the failure of the uprising. At the beginning of 1921, the VKPD had between 350-400,000 members. By the end of August it had only 160,000. In November it had no more than 135-150,000.
Once again the working class had fought in Germany without a strong, consistent communist party.
DV
[1] At the elections to the Prussian parliament in February 1921, the VKPO won 1.1 million votes; the USPD 1.1 million; the SPD, 4.2 million. In Berlin, the VKPD and the USPD put together obtained more votes than the SPD.
[2] Clara Zetkin, who agreed with Levi's criticisms, exhorted him in several letters to avoid behaviour that would damage the organisation. Thus on 11 April she wrote to him: "You must withdraw the personal note from the preface. It seems to me politically beneficial for you not to make any personal judgement on the Centrale and its members, whom you declare to be fit for a lunatic asylum and whose revocation you demand, etc. It would be more reasonable to keep solely to the politics of the Centrale and leave aside the people who are only its mouthpieces". Only the personal excesses should be suppressed". Levi would not be convinced. His pride and his penchant for always wanting to be right, as well as his monolithic conception of organisation, were to have grim consequences.
[3] "Paul Levi did not inform the party leadership of his intention to publish a pamphlet nor did he bring to its knowledge the main elements of its content. He had his pamphlet printed on 3 April, at a time when the struggle was still going on in several parts of the Reich and when thousands of workers were being hauled before special tribunals. so that his writings could only excite them to pronounce the most bloody sentences. The Centrale fully recognises the right to criticise the party before and after the actions that it leads. Criticism on the terrain of the struggle and complete solidarity in the combat is a vital necessity for the party and a revolutionary duty. Paul Levi's attitude does not go towards the strengthening of the party but towards its dislocation and destruction" (VKPD Centrale, 16 April 1921).
[4] The ECCI delegation was composed of Bela Kun, Pogany and Guralski. Since the foundation of the KPD Radek had played the role of "liaison" between the KPO and the CI. Without always having a clear mandate, he above all practiced the politics of informal and parallel channels.
"The USA is faced with a world dominated by 'every man for himself', where its former vassals are trying to withdraw as much as possible from the tight grip of the world cop, which they had to put up with as long as the threat from the rival bloc existed. In this situation, the only decisive way the US can impose its authority is to resort to the area in which they have a crushing superiority over all other states: military force. But in doing so, the US is caught in a contradiction:
- on the one hand, if it gives up using or extending the use of its military superiority, this will only encourage the countries contesting its authority to contest even more;
- on the other hand, when it does use brute force, even, and especially when this momentarily obliges its opponents to rein in their ambitions towards independence, this only pushes the latter to seize on the least occasion to get their revenge and squirm away from America's grip" (Resolution on the international situation from the 12th ICC congress, International Review 90).
In trying to repeat the Gulf war of 1990-91, the American bourgeoisie found itself isolated. Except for Britain, none of the important world powers fully supported the US initiative[1]. In 1990, the invasion of Kuwait provided the perfect argument for forcing all these countries to support them in the war. In 1996, the US again succeeded in launching missiles against Iraq, despite the opposition of most of the other powers and of the main Arab countries. In 1998, the threats and preparations for massive bombardments appeared to be completely out of proportion to the Iraqi action of limiting the scope of the UN inspectors. The pretext was thus easy to reject. But in addition to this, Clinton's hands were tied and - in contrast to 1990 - this time he gave a considerable margin of manoeuvre both to Sad dam Hussein and to the rival imperialisms. Taking advantage of America's isolation, Hussein was able to accept the reimposition of the UN inspections at the time, and under the conditions, most convenient to him. Even before the signing of the agreement between the UN and Iraq, significant factions of the US bourgeoisie had begun to realise what a mistake Clinton had made. As the American press pointed out after the accord "President Clinton didn't really have any choice" (International Herald Tribune, 25.2.98).
Saddam Hussein didn't inflict this set-back on the US all by himself. Without the support and advise proffered to Hussein by Russia and France, without the approval of the anti-American policy of these two powers by most of the European countries and by China and Japan, the Iraqi population - which suffers daily not only from Saddam's terrible yoke, but also from the effects of the economic embargo which ensures that a child dies every six minutes (see Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1998) - would once again have been subjected to the terror of US and British bombs.
The official and media reactions were very revealing about this set-back for the Americans. Instead of hearing exalted proclamations about the "saving of the peace" and the "triumph of civilised values", we heard two types of speeches: triumphal and satisfied from Russia and France, disappointed and vengeful from the American bourgeoisie. France's self-satisfaction was expressed in diplomatic terms by the former Gaullist minister Peyrefite, who considered that France "had helped Clinton to avoid a terrible faux pas by leaving the diplomatic option open to him "(Le Figaro cited by International Herald Tribune, 25.2.98). To this the Americans responded with bitterness and threats: "while the accord was a success to the extent that the French drew benefits from it, the latter have a particular responsibility to ensure that it is strictly adhered to in the weeks ahead" (ibid).
So this time the Americans had to retreat and call off "Desert Storm II": "The negotiations with the general secretary of the UN. Kofi Annan, makes it impossible for Clinton to go ahead with the bombing. This is why the US didn't want Annan to go to Baghdad" (Daily Telegraph, 24.2.98). And this is why France and Russia pushed for and sponsored the general secretary's trip. A number of significant and highly symbolic facts testify to this: Kofi Annan's trips between New York and Paris in the French Concorde; between Paris and Baghdad in Chirac's presidential plane; and above all, both before and after going, the "preferential" interviews between the general secretary of the UN and the latter. The conditions under which this whole journey took place were a slap in the face for the US and a failure for the US bourgeoisie.
This situation can only aggravate imperialist tensions, because the US is not going to allow its authority to be flouted like this without reacting.
What has just happened is the latest demonstration of the tendency towards "every man for himself' which typifies the present historical phase of decadent capitalism - its phase of decomposition. Saddam Hussein's ability to set a trap for the Americans in contrast to 1990 and 1996, is due essentially to the growing difficulty of the US to maintain its authority and a certain discipline behind its imperialist policies. This applies both to the small local imperialisms - in this case the Arab countries (Saudi Arabia for example refused the use of its air bases to American troops), or Israel which is challenging the whole Pax Americana in the Middle East - and America's big imperialist rivals.
The American bourgeoisie can't let this affront go. At stake is its hegemony in all continents, particularly the Middle East. It is already preparing the "next crisis" in Iraq:
"Very few in Washington believe that the last chapter in this story has been written" (New York Times, quoted by International Herald Tribune, 25.2.98). The rivalries between the major imperialisms over Iraq will centre around the question of the UN inspections, of who will control them, and around whether the embargo against Iraq is to continue or not. On this latter point, Russia and France are being opposed fiercely by the US, which is maintaining its armada in the Persian Gulf - a real pistol pointing at the Iraqis' heads. It has also made it quite clear that it will not tolerate the Europeans, especially France and Germany, getting mixed up in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The American bourgeoisie is preparing the "next crisis" in Africa and ex-Yugoslavia as well. It has clearly announced that it is carrying on its offensive in Africa, aimed at undermining the presence of France and European influence in general. It has also announced that it will maintain its military presence in Macedonia at a time when military tensions are growing in neighbouring Kosovo. In this province, it is clear that the recent confrontations between the Albanian populations and the Serbian police forces have a significance which goes well beyond the limits of the region. Behind the Albanian nationalist cliques stands Albania of course, and to a certain extent other Muslim countries like Bosnia and also Turkey, which has been the traditional bridgehead for German imperialism in the Balkans. Behind the Serbian forces we find the Russian "big brother" and, more discretely, the traditional allies of Serbia, France and Britain; meanwhile America has addressed a solemn warning to Serbia. Thus, despite the Dayton agreements of 1995, there is no definitive peace in the Balkans. This region remains a powder keg, where the different imperialisms and notably the most powerful amongst them will not give up pressing forward their strategic interests as we saw them do between 1991 and 1995.
The US reverse over Iraq is therefore the harbinger of sharpening imperialist tensions in every part of the world, bringing in their wake more massacres, more terror for the populations of the planet.
Capitalism's historic impasse is the cause of the bloody conflicts multiplying everywhere today, and of the continuation and dramatic deepening of those which are already there. All the great tirades about peace and the virtues of democracy are just a way of reassuring the population, and above all, of hindering the international proletariat from becoming aware of the warlike reality of capitalism. This reality is that every imperialism is merely preparing itself for the future conflicts that are bound to arise.
RL, 14 March
[1] The fact that Kohl at the Munich "Security Conference" in early February announced that Germany would put its air bases at the disposal of the US (something which would have gone without saying a few years ago) should not be seen as a sign of real German support for the US. On the one hand, sending planes from Germany to bomb Iraq is far from the best strategy given the distance and the number of "neutral" countries they would have to fly over. Thus Germany's proposal was a highly platonic one. At the same time, the policy of German imperialism is to move its pawns without overtly defying the US. Having opposed the big boss at the conference by supporting the French position on the question of the European arms industry (towards which the Americans are hostile), German diplomacy then had to show some "good will" on a question which didn't bother them that much.
Several times during the winter, Europe's two largest countries have witnessed mobilisations around the question of unemployment. In France, street demonstrations and occupations of public buildings (especially the offices of the unemployment agencies, the ASSEDIC) took place over several months in the country's main towns and cities. In Germany on 5th February, unemployed organisations and trades unions called a series of demonstrations across the country. The mobilisation was less extensive than in France, but it was reported at length by the media. Should we see these demonstrations as expressions of workers' combativity? We will see later that this is not the case.
However, the question of unemployment is fundamental for the working class, since it is one of the most important attacks to which it is subjected by a capitalism in crisis. At the same time, the rise of permanent unemployment is one of the best proofs of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. And it is precisely the importance of this question which lies behind the mobilisations that we have seen lately.
Before we go on to analyse the meaning of these demonstrations, we must understand the importance of unemployment for the world working class, and its future perspectives.
Unemployment today and its perspectives
Today, unemployment affects enormous sectors of the working class, in most countries of the world. In the Third World, the proportion of the population without a job often varies between 30% and 50%. Even in a country like China, which in recent years has been presented by the "experts" as one of the great champions in the race for growth, there will be 200 million unemployed in two years[1]. In the East European countries of the ex-Russian bloc, economic collapse has thrown millions of workers onto the streets, and although some countries like Poland have been able to limit the damage, thanks to fairly sustained growth and wretched wage levels, in most of them, and especially in Russia, huge masses of workers have been reduced to utter penury, forced to survive in sordid "little jobs" like selling plastic bags in the corridors of the Metro[2].
In the more developed countries, the situation is less tragic. Nonetheless, mass unemployment has become a running sore in the social fabric. For the European Union as a whole, the official figure for "job seekers" relative to the population of working age is around 11 %. In 1990, just as the Russian bloc disintegrated and the American President George Bush promised an "era of peace and prosperity", the figure was 8%.
The following figures give some idea of the extent of the scourge of unemployment today:
Country | 96 rate | 97 rate |
Germany | 9.3 | 11.6 |
France | 12.4 | 12.3 |
Italy | 11.9 | 12.3 |
Britain | 7.5 | 5.0 |
Spain | 21.6 | 20.5 |
Holland | 6.4 | 5.3 |
Belgium | 9.5 |
|
Sweden | 10.6 | 8.4 |
Canada | 9.7 | 9.2 |
USA | 5.3 | 4.6 |
Source: OECD, UN
The figures are in need of some commentary.
In the first place, these are official figures, calculated according to criteria which hide a considerable part of the problem. They do not take into account (amongst other things): young people who are still in education because they cannot find work;
-the unemployed who are forced to accept underpaid jobs or lose their benefits;
-those who are sent on "training" schemes supposed to introduce them to the labour market, but which in fact are useless;
-older workers who are forced to accept early retirement.
Similarly, these figures take no account of partial unemployment, in other words all those workers unable to find stable full-time work (for example, temporary workers whose numbers have grown uninterruptedly for the last 10 years).
All these facts are well-known to the "experts" of the OECD who are obliged to admit, in their review for specialists, that: "The classic rate of unemployment... does not measure the totality of underemployment"[3].
Secondly, we need to understand the meaning of the figures for the "top of the class": the USA and Britain. For many experts, these figures prove the superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon model" over other models of political economy. And so today they din into our ears the fact that unemployment in the US has reached its lowest point for 25 years. It is true that the American economy currently enjoys higher growth rates than those of other developed countries, and that it has created 11 million jobs during the last five years. However, it should be clear that most of these new jobs are "MacDonalds jobs", in other words all sorts of precarious and very badly paid jobs, which keep poverty at levels unknown since the 1930s, with hundreds of thousands of homeless and millions of poor, deprived of all social insurance.
All this is clearly admitted by someone who can hardly be suspected of denigrating the USA, since he was Secretary for Labour in Clinton's first administration, and is a long-standing personal friend of the President: "For 20 years, a large part of the American population has seen real wages stagnate or fall, as a result of inflation. For the majority of workers, the decline has continued despite the recovery. In 1996, the average real wage was lower than in 1989, before the previous recession. Between mid-1996 and mid-1997, it rose by just 0.3%, while the lowest incomes continued to decline. The proportion of Americans considered as poor, according to the official definition and statistics, is higher today than it was in 1989"[4].
of 16 and 55, the official rate of unemployment only includes 37% of the unemployed as being without a job; the 63% that remain are classed as being "outside the working population ", despite being of working age"[6].
Similarly, the official publication of the American Department of Labour explained:
"The official rate of unemployment is convenient and well-known; nonetheless, if we focus too much on this measure alone, we can get a distorted view of the economies of other countries compared to the United States ... Other indicators are necessary if we want to interpret intelligently the respective situations on the different labour markets"[7].
In reality, on the basis of studies like these - hardly the products of some terrible "subversives" - we can estimate that the rate of unemployment in the USA is much closer to 13% than to the 5% which is put forward as the proof of the "American miracle". How could it be otherwise, when (according to the criteria of the International Labour Bureau), only the following are considered as unemployed:
- those who have worked for less than an hour during the week in question;
- those who have actively sought employment during the week
- those who are immediately available for work.
Thus in the USA, most youngsters who have some kind of casual job, someone who had mowed their neighbours' lawns or looked after their children for a few dollars, would not be considered as unemployed. The same is true for the man who has given up looking for work after months or years of rejections from hypothetical employers, or the single mother who is not "immediately available" because of the lack of creches.
The British "success story" is still more deceitful than that of its trans-Atlantic cousin. The naive observer is confronted with a paradox: between 1990 and 1997, the level of employment fell by 4%, and yet during the same period the rate of unemployment fell from 10% to 5%. In fact, as one thoroughly "serious" international financial institution puts it: "the fall in British unemployment seems to be due entirely to the increase in the proportion of the inactive"[8].
And to understand the mystery of this transformation of the unemployed into the "inactive", we can read the words of a journalist on the Guardian, a British newspaper which is hardly classified as a revolutionary publication: "When Margaret Thatcher won her first election, in 1979, there were officially 1.3 million unemployed in Britain. If the method of calculation had remained the same, there would today be just over 3 million. A recently published report by the Midland Bank even estimated the number at 4 million, or 14% of the working population - more than in France or Germany.
(...) the British government does not count the unemployed, but only those entitled to an increasingly targeted unemployment benefit. Having changed the method of calculation 32 times, it decided to exclude hundreds of thousands of unemployed from the statistics thanks to the new roles on unemployment benefit, which ends the right to benefit after 6 months instead of 12.
The majority of the jobs created are part time, which for many is not a choice. According to the work inspectorate, 43% of jobs created between winter 1992-93 and autumn 1996 were part time. Almost a quarter of the 28 million workers taken on, were for jobs of this kind. In France and Germany, the proportion is only one in six"[9].
The large-scale trickery which has allowed the bourgeoisie of the two Anglo-Saxon "employment champions" to give themselves such airs encounters a silence of complicity amongst the numerous "specialist" economists and politicians, and especially among the mass media (the deception is revealed only in confidential publications). The reason is simple: the aim is to anchor the idea that the policies applied with particular brutality during the last decade in these countries - reduction in wages and social protection, development of "flexibility" - are effective in limiting the damage of mass unemployment. In other words, the aim is to convince the workers that sacrifice "payoff", and that they have every interest in accepting the dictates of capital.
And since the ruling class never puts all its eggs in one basket, and since it wants to sow confusion in the working class by consoling them with the idea that a "capitalism with a human face" exists, some of its ideologues are now referring to the "Dutch model"[10]. We need therefore to say a word about the "good student" of the European class: the Netherlands.
Here again, official unemployment figures are meaningless. As in Great Britain, a fall in unemployment goes hand in hand with ... a fall in employment. Thus the rate of employment (i.e. the proportion of the working population actually in work) fell from 60% in 1970 to 50.7% in 1994.
The mystery disappears when we consider that: "In 20 years, the number of part time jobs as a proportion of the total has risen from 15% to 36%. And the phenomenon is accelerating, since (...) nine tenths of the jobs created in the last ten years total between 12 and 36 hours per week"[11]. Moreover, a considerable proportion of the surplus labour force has disappeared from the unemployment statistics to reappear in the still higher ones for invalidity. This is noted by the OECD, when it writes that: "The estimates of the number of unemployed hidden in the invalidity statistics vary widely, from a little over 10% to nearly 50%"[12].
As the article cited above from Le Monde Diplomatique says, "Unless we imagine a genetic weakness that only affects the Dutch, how else are we to explain that this country has more people unable to work than unemployed?". Obviously this method, which allows the bosses to "modernise" on the cheap by getting rid of their older and "inflexible" personnel, was only possible thanks to one of the world's most "generous" systems of social security. But as this system is more and more radically called into question (as it is in all the advanced countries), it will be more and more difficult for the bourgeoisie to go on hiding unemployment in this way. Moreover, the new law requires that it is companies that pay the first five years of in validity benefit, which will singularly discourage them from declaring the employees they want to get rid of "unable to work". In fact, the myth of the Low Countries' "social paradise" has already taken a serious knock from a European study cited in The Guardian (28/04/97), which found that 16% of Dutch children live in poor families, compared to 12% in France. As for Britain, the "miracle" country, the figure is 32%!
There are thus no exceptions to the rise of mass unemployment in the developed countries. In these countries, the real rate of unemployment (which needs to take account in particular of all the unwanted part-time jobs, and those who have given up looking for work) ranges from 13% to 30% of the working population. These figures are getting closer and closer to those experienced during the great depression of the 1930s: 24% in the USA, 17.5% in Germany, and 15% in Britain. Apart from the case of the USA, we can see that other countries are not far from reaching these sinister "records". In some, the rate of unemployment has even overtaken that of the 1930s. This is true in particular for Spain, Sweden (8% in 1933), Italy (7% in 1933), and France (5% in 1933), although this figure is probably an under-estimate[13].
Finally, we should not be deceived by the slight fall in unemployment rates for 1997, which appear in the table above. As we have seen, the official figures are highly misleading, and above all this small drop is due to the "recovery" in world production in recent years. It will soon be reversed as soon as the world economy again faces an open recession, as we have seen in 1974, 1978, at the beginning of the 1980s and the 1990s. The recession is inevitable, since the capitalist mode of production is absolutely incapable of overcoming the cause of all the convulsions it has undergone for the last 30 years: generalised over-production, a historic inability to find adequate markets to absorb its output[14].
Moreover, Bob Reich, Clinton's friend who we have already met above, is quite clear on the subject: "Expansion is a temporary phenomenon. For the moment, the USA benefits from a very high growth rate, which is pulling a large part of Europe with it. But the disturbances in Asia, with the increasing debt of us consumers, lead us to think that the vitality of this phase of the cycle cannot last much longer".
This "specialist", without of course daring to take his reasoning to its logical conclusion, has indeed put his finger on the fundamental elements in the world economy's present situation:
- capitalism has only been able to continue its "expansion" during the last 30 years, at the cost of an ever more astronomical debt on the part of every possible purchaser (especially households and companies; the under-developed countries in the 1970s; states, and especially the United States, during the 1980s;
the "emerging" Asian countries at the beginning of the 1990s ... );
- the bankruptcy of the latter, which became known at the beginning of the summer 1997, has a significance that extends well beyond their frontiers; it expresses the bankruptcy of the entire system, and will make it still worse.
Mass unemployment, which is the direct result of capitalism's inability to overcome the contradictions imposed on it by its own laws, is not going to disappear, nor even decline. It can only get inexorably worse, whatever tricks the ruling class tries to hide it with. It will continue to hurl growing masses of proletarians into the most intolerable poverty.
The working class faced with the question of unemployment
Unemployment is a scourge for the whole of the working class. It affects not just those without a job, but all workers. On the one hand, it is a serious blow to the increasing numbers of families with one or even several unemployed members. On the other, its effects are distributed through taxes on wages to pay for unemployment benefit. Finally, the capitalists use unemployment to blackmail workers over their wages and working conditions. In fact, during the decades since the open crisis put an end to capitalism's illusory "prosperity" of the thirty years of reconstruction, it is largely through employment that the ruling class has attacked the living conditions of the exploited. Ever since the strikes that shook Europe and the world in the wake of 1968, it has known that open wage reductions could only provoke extremely massive and violent reactions from the proletariat. Its attacks have thus been concentrated on reducing the indirect wage paid by the Welfare State and reducing social services, all in the name of "solidarity with the unemployed"; and at the same time, has reduced the cost of wages by throwing millions of workers on the street.
But unemployment is not just the spearhead of the attacks that a capitalism in crisis is forced to make on those it exploits. Once it has become massive and lasting, and has irrevocably thrown immense proportions of the working class out of wage labour, it becomes the most obvious sign of the definitive bankruptcy of a mode of production whose historic task was precisely to transform a growing proportion of the world's population into wage workers. In this sense, although for tens of millions of workers unemployment is a real tragedy, combining economic and moral distress, it can become a powerful factor in developing the class' consciousness of the need to overthrow capitalism. Similarly, while unemployment prevents workers from using the strike as a means of struggle, it does not necessarily condemn them to impotence. The proletariat's class struggle against the attacks of crisis-ridden capital is the essential means whereby it can regroup its forces and develop its consciousness with a view to overthrowing the system. The street demonstration, where workers come together despite their division into different companies and industrial branches, are an important means of struggle, which has been widely used in revolutionary periods. This is one place where unemployed workers can play a full part. As long as they are able to regroup outside the control of bourgeois organs, the unemployed can mobilise in the street to prevent evictions or the cutting off of electricity, they can occupy town halls and public buildings in order to demand the payment of emergency benefits, As we have often said, "when they lose the factory, the unemployed gain the street", and they can therefore more readily overcome the divisions into branches that the bourgeoisie maintains within the working class, notably through the trades unions. This is not abstract conjecture, but comes from the real experience of working class, especially during the 1930s in the USA, where many unemployed committees were set up outside the control of the unions.
This being said, despite the appearance of mass unemployment during the 1980s, nowhere have we seen the formation of significant unemployed workers' committees (apart from a few embryonic attempts, quickly stripped of their content by the leftists and long since defunct), still less mass mobilisations of unemployed workers. And yet, important workers' struggles developed during these years, where the workers proved more and more able to disengage themselves from the unions' grip. Several reasons explain why, unlike the 1930s, we have not yet seen a real mobilisation of unemployed workers.
For one thing, the rise in unemployment since the 1970s has been much more gradual than it was during the Great Depression. Then, the beginning of the crisis was like a rout, and witnessed an unparalleled explosion in unemployment (in the US, for example, unemployment rose from 3% in 1929 to 24% in 1932). In today's acute crisis, although we have seen periods of rapidly increasing unemployment (especially in the mid-1980s and in recent years), the bourgeoisie's ability to slow down the rhythm of economic collapse has allowed it to spread out the attacks against the proletariat, especially in the form of unemployment. Moreover, in the advanced countries the bourgeoisie has learned to confront the problem of unemployment much more adroitly than in the past. For example, by replacing abrupt redundancies with "social plans" (sending workers for a time of "retraining" before they find themselves out in the street, or giving them temporary pay-offs which help them to survive at first), the ruling class has largely succeeded in defusing the unemployment bomb. In most of today's industrialised countries, a laid-off worker often has 6 months before finding himself completely without any resources. Once he has already found himself isolated and atomised, it is much more difficult for him to regroup with his class brothers to act collectively. Finally, the fact that even massive sectors of the unemployed working class have proven unable to regroup, springs from the general context of capitalism's social decomposition, which encourages despair and an attitude of "looking after number one":
That said, the ICC has never considered that the unemployed could never join the struggle of their class. In fact, as we wrote in 1993:
"The massive workers' combats will constitute a powerful antidote against the noxious effects of decomposition, allowing the progressive surmounting, through the class solidarity that these combats imply, of atomisation, of "every man for himself", and all the divisions which weigh on the proletariat: between categories, branches of industry, between immigrants and indigenous workers, between the unemployed and workers with jobs. In particular, although the weight of decomposition has prevented the unemployed from entering the struggle (except in a punctual way) during the past decade, and contrary to the 30s, and while they will not be able to playa vanguard role comparable to that of the soldiers in Russia in 1917 as we had envisaged, the massive development of proletarian struggles will make it possible for them, notably in demonstrations on the street, to rejoin the general combat of their class, all the more so in that the numbers of unemployed who already have an experience of associated labour and of struggle at the workplace, can only grow. More generally, if unemployment is not a specific problem of those without work but rather a real question affecting and concerning all of the working class, notably as a clear and tragic expression of the historic weakness of capitalism, it is this same combat to come that will allow the proletariat to become fully conscious of if"[16].
It is precisely because the bourgeoisie has understood this threat that today it is promoting the mobilisation of the unemployed.
The real meaning of the "unemployed movements"
To understand the events of the last few months, we need first to highlight a crucial element: these "movements" were in no way an expression of a real mobilisation of the proletariat on its class terrain. We need only consider how the bourgeois media have given these mobilisations maximum coverage, even puffing up their size on some occasions. This held true, not just in the countries where they took place, but internationally. Since the beginning of the 1980s, experience - especially at the beginning of the struggles in autumn 1983, with the public sector strikes in Belgium - has shown that whenever the working class takes to the struggle on its own terrain, and really threatens the interests of the bourgeoisie, then a media blackout is applied. When we see the TV news devoting a considerable part of its time to cover the demonstrations, when the German television shows French unemployed marching, while French TV returns the compliment for the German unemployed marches shortly afterwards, we can be sure that the bourgeoisie has an interest in giving these events maximum publicity. In fact, what we had this winter was a small-scale "remake" of the events in France during the autumn of 1995, which received extensive world-wide media coverage. The aim was to set up an international manoeuvre to renew the trades unions' credibility before they were called on to intervene as "social firemen" with the outbreak of massive new workers' struggles. Just how much of a manoeuvre this was, appeared clearly when the Belgian unions organised a carbon copy of the French strikes, referring explicitly to "the French example". This was confirmed again a few months later, in May-June 1996, when the German union leaders openly called workers to "follow the French example" as they prepared ''the biggest demonstration since the war" on 15th June 1996[17]. This year, the German unions and unemployed organisations once again referred explicitly to "the French example", by coming to the 6th February demonstration carrying tricolour flags.
The question is thus not whether the unemployed movements in Germany and France correspond to a real workers' mobilisation, but rather what is the aim of the bourgeoisie in organising and publicising them.
The bourgeoisie is certainly behind the organisation of these movements. Evidence? In France, one of the demonstrations' main organisers was the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail), the union run by the French "Communist" Party, which has three ministers in the government whose responsibility is to manage and defend the interests of the national capital. In Germany, the traditional unions, which cooperate openly with the bosses also took part. Alongside the unions, there are more "radical" organisations: for example in France, the AC group (Action contre le Chomage) largely led by the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, a Trotskyist organisation which sees itself as a sort of "loyal opposition" to the Socialist government.
What was the ruling class' aim in promoting these movements? Was it to forestall an immediate threat of mobilisation by unemployed workers? In fact, as we have seen, such mobilisations are not on the agenda today. In reality, the bourgeoisie had a double objective.
On the one hand, the aim was to create a diversion among the employed workers, whose discontent can only increase with the more and more brutal attacks to which they are subjected, and to make them feel guilty towards workers "who aren't lucky enough to have a job". In France, the agitation around unemployment was an excellent means of trying to interest workers in the government's proposal to introduce the 35-hour week, which is supposed to allow the creation of numerous jobs (and which will, above all, make it easier to freeze wages and increase work rates).
On the other hand, the bourgeoisie aimed, as in 1995, to forestall a situation which it will have to confront in the future. Although today we are not witnessing mobilisation and struggle by unemployed workers, as in the 1930s, this does not mean that the conditions of proletarian struggle are less favourable now than they were then. Quite the contrary. In the 1930s (for example in May-June 1936 in
The ruling class is very well aware of this. It knows that it will have to confront new class struggles against more and more brutal attacks on the workers. It knows that these future struggles by those in work, are likely to draw in increasing numbers of unemployed workers. And to date, the union organisations have only exercised a feeble degree of control over the unemployed. It is important for the bourgeoisie that when the unemployed join in the struggle, in the wake of the employed, they should not escape from the control of those organisations whose task is to regiment the working class and sabotage its combat: the trades unions of every description, including the most "radical". In particular, it is important that the unemployed workers' formidable combative potential, and their lack of illusions in capitalism (which today are expressed as despair) should not "contaminate" those in work when they launch themselves into the struggle. The mobilisations this winter began the bourgeoisie's policy of developing its control over the unemployed through the trades unions and the organisations like AC.
Even if they were the result of bourgeois manoeuvres, these mobilisations are thus a further indication that not only the ruling class itself has no illusions as to its ability to reduce unemployment, still less to overcome the crisis, but that it expects to engage in increasingly powerful struggles with the working
class.
Fabienne
[1]"... surplus labour in the countryside oscillates between 100 and 150 million people. In the cities, there are between 30 and 40 million people wholly or partially unemployed. Not to mention, of course, the crowds of young people about to enter the labour market" ("Paradoxale modernisation de la Chine", in Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1997).
[2] Unemployment statistics in Russia mean absolutely nothing. The official figure was 9.3% in 1996, when the country's GNP had fallen by 45% between 1986 and 1996. In reality, large numbers of workers spend their days at the workplace doing nothing (for lack of any orders for the company's goods), in return for pitiful wages (comparatively much lower than unemployment benefit in the Western countries), which force them to hold down a second job in the black economy just to survive.
[3] Perspectives de l'emploi, July 1993.
[4] Robert B. Reich: "Une economie ouverte peutelle preserver la cohesion sociale?", in Bilan du Monde 1998.
[5] "Unemployment and non-employment" in American Economic Review, May 1997.
[6] "Les sans-emploi aux Etats-Unis", L 'etat du monde 1998, Editions La Decouverte, Paris.
[7] "International Comparisons of Unemployment Indicators", Monthly Labor Review, Washington, March 1993.
[8] Bank of International Settlements, Annual Report, Basle, June 1997.
[9] Seamus Milne, "Comment Londres manipule les statistiques", Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1997.
[10] "France should take the Dutch economic model as its inspiration" (Jean-Claude Trichet, governor of the Bank of France, quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique of September 1997). "The example of Denmark and Holland show that it is possible to reduce unemployment while maintaining relative wages fairly stable" (Bank of International Settlements, Annual Report, Basle, June 1997).
[11] "Miracle ou mirage aux Pays-Bas?", Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1997.
[12] "The Netherlands 1995-96", Economic Studies of the OECD, Paris 1996.
[13] Sources: Encyclopaedia Universalis, article on the economic crises, and Maddison, Economic Growth in the West, 1981.
[14] See the International Review no.92, "Report on the Economic Crisis, 12th ICC Congress".
[15] "Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism", in International Review no.62.
[16] "Resolution on the International Situation", point 21, no.74.
[17] See our articles in International Review nos. 84-86.
[18] See the article on May 1968 in this issue.
Resolution on the International Situation
During the last year, the evolution of the international situation has fundamentally confirmed the analyses contained in the resolution, adopted by the 12th Congress of the Ice in April 1997. In this sense the resolution published below is simply a complement to its predecessor. It does not repeat those analyses, but verifies them and provides the updates demanded by the situation today.
The economic crisis
1) One of the points of the preceding resolution which has been confirmed most clearly is the part on the crisis of the capitalist economy. Thus, in April 97 we said that:
"Among the lies which have been spread far and wide by the ruling class to buttress belief in the viability of its system, a special place has been given to the example of the South East Asian countries, the "dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and the "tigers" (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia) whose current growth rates (sometimes in double figures) are the envy of the western bourgeoisies .... The debts of most of these countries, both external and at state level, has reached considerable levels, which subjects them to the same dangers as all the other countries ... Though they have up till now represented an exception, like their big Japanese neighbour, these countries cannot indefinitely escape the contradictions of the world economy which have transformed other 'success stories' into a nightmare, as in the case of Mexico" (point 7).
It took only four months for Thailand's difficulties to inaugurate the biggest financial crisis' since the 1930s, a financial crisis which spread to all the South East Asian countries and which required the mobilisation of more than $140 billion (much more than double the already exceptional Mexican loan in 1994/95) to prevent a much larger number of states declaring themselves bankrupt. The most spectacular case was obviously South Korea, a member of the OECD (the "rich man's club"), which could no longer make any repayments on a debt of more than $200 billion. At the same time, this financial collapse shook the biggest country in the world, China, whose "economic miracle" was also being boasted about not long ago, as well as the second economic power on the planet, Japan itself.
3) Marxists have to see beyond the speeches of the "experts" of the ruling class. If we were to believe them, the conclusion would be that things are going in the right direction for capitalism since they have announced a recovery for the world economy, and the repercussions of the Asian financial crisis have appeared less devastating than certain people might have thought a few months ago. Today, we are even seeing the world's main stock exchanges, beginning with Wall Street, beating all their records. In reality, recent events do not at all contradict any of the analyses made by marxists concerning the gravity and insoluble nature of the present crisis of capitalism. Behind the financial collapse of the "tigers" and "dragons", and the languorous illness of the Japanese economy, lies the astronomical indebtedness into which world capitalism has been sinking more and more with each day that passes.
"In the final analysis, far from enabling capitalism to overcome its crises, credit merely extends their force and gravity, as Rosa Luxemburg showed by applying marxism. Today the theses of the marxist left (...) at the end of the last century remain fundamentally valid. No more than before can credit enlarge solvent markets. However, faced with the definitive saturation of the latter (...), credit has become the indispensable condition for absorbing commodities, substituting itself for the real market" (Point 4).
" ... it has been mainly through the use of credit, of growing debt, that the world economy has managed to avoid a brutal depression like the one in the 1930s" (Point 5).
4) The most significant characteristic of the economic convulsions presently hitting Asia lies not so much in their immediate effects on the other developed countries as in the fact that they expose the total impasse facing the capitalist system today, a system forced into a permanent headlong plunge into debt (which will be further aggravated by the loans granted to the tigers and dragons). At the same time, the convulsions which have hit the "champions of growth" with such force are the proof that there is no recipe that will enable any group of countries of escape the crisis. Finally, because the financial storms are on a much greater scale than any of those in previous years, they reveal the continuing deterioration of the world capitalist economy.
Faced with the failure of the dragons, the bourgeoisie has shown, by mobilising enormous amounts of money on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, that despite the trade war between its different national fractions it is determined to avoid a situation similar to that of the 1930s. In this sense, the spirit or "every man for himself", which is so much a part of capitalist society in decomposition, is being limited by the necessity for the ruling class to avoid a general debacle that would drag the entire world economy into a total disaster. State capitalism, which developed with capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence, and particularly since the second half of the 1930s, has had the aim of guaranteeing a minimum of order between the different capitalist factions within -national frontiers. After the disappearance of the imperialist blocs that followed the collapse of the Russian bloc, the continuation of a concerted economic policy between the different states has made it possible to preserve this kind of "order" on an international scale[1]. This does not call into question the continuation and intensification of the trade war but allows it to be fought under certain rules that will allow the system to survive.
In particular, it has allowed the most developed countries to push the most dramatic expressions of the crisis towards the peripheral areas (Africa, Latin America, countries of the former Eastern bloc), even though the origins of the crisis lie at the heart of the capitalist system (Western Europe, USA, Japan). It also makes it possible to establish zones of relative stability, which is one reason behind the establishment of the Euro.
5) However, the application of state capitalist measures, all the co-ordination of economic policy between the most developed countries, all the "salvage plans" cannot save capitalism from a growing bankruptcy, even if they do enable it to slow down the pace of the catastrophe. The system may go through short-lived remissions, as has happened many times in the past, but after the "recovery" there will be new open recessions and more and more financial and economic convulsions.
- a fall in average growth rates (for the 24 OECD countries: 5.6% between 1960 and 1970; 4.1% for 1970-80; 3.4% for 1980-90; 2.9% for 1990-95);
- a general and dizzying rise in debt, particularly state debts (for the developed countries this now represents between 50 and 130% of a year's production);
- a growing fragility and instability of national economies, with increasingly brutal bankruptcies of industrial or financial sectors; - the ejection of ever-growing sectors of the working class from the productive process (for the OECD, 30 million unemployed in 1989, 35 million in 1993, 38 million in 1996).
And this process can only inexorably continue. In particular, permanent unemployment, which expresses the historic bankruptcy of a system whose reason for existing was to extend wage labour, cannot fail to grow, even if the bourgeoisie goes through all sorts of contortions to hide it and even if, for the moment, it has achieved a certain degree of stabilisation at this level. Alongside all sorts of other attacks - on wages, social benefits, health, working conditions - it will more and more be the principal way that the ruling class makes the exploited pay for the failure of its system.
Imperialist tensions
6) While the different national sectors of the bourgeoisie, in order to prevent the world economy from exploding, have managed to obtain a minimum level of co-ordination in their economic policies, things are very different in the domain of imperialist relations. The events of the past year fully confirm the resolution of the 12th congress of the ICC: "this tendency towards 'every man for himself', towards chaos in the relations between slates, with its succession of circumstantial and ephemeral alliances, has not been called into question. Quite the contrary" (point 10).
"In particular, since the end of the division of the world into two blocs, the USA has been faced with a permanent challenge to its authority by its former allies" (Point 11).
Thus we have seen the continuation and even the aggravation of Israel's lack of discipline in relation to its American patron, a lack of discipline illustrated recently by the failure of the Middle East mission by the negotiator Dennis Ross who was not able to do anything to re-establish the Oslo peace process, cornerstone of the Pax Americana in the Middle East. The tendency already noted in preceding years has thus been fully confirmed:
"Among other examples of this contesting of American leadership we can mention the loss of a monopoly of control over the situation in the Middle East, a crucial zone if ever there was one" (Point 12).
By the same token, we have seen Turkey taking its distance from its "great ally" Germany (which it has blamed for preventing it entering the European Union), while at the same time trying to establish, for its own reasons, a special military cooperation with Israel.
Finally, we have seen the confirmation of another point noted by the 12th congress:
" ... in company with France, Germany is exerting heavy diplomatic pressure on Russia, whose main creditor is Germany and which has not drawn any decisive advantages from its alliance with the US" (Point 15).
The recent Moscow summit between Kohl, Chirac and Yeltsin put the seal on a "Troika" which involves two of the USA's main European allies during the Cold War period, plus the power which, had demonstrated its allegiance to the world's gendarme for several years after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Although Kohl claimed that this alliance was not directed against anyone, it is clear that these three thieves have got together behind America's back.
8) Thus, recent months have fully confirmed what we said earlier:
"As regards the international policy of the USA, the widespread use of armed force has not only been one of its methods for a long time, but is now the main instrument in the defence of its imperialist interests, as the ICC has shown since 1990, even before the Gulf war. The USA is faced with a world dominated by "every man for himself", where its fanner vassals are trying to withdraw as much as possible from the tight grip of the world cop, which they had to put up with as long as the threat from the rival bloc existed. In this situation, the only decisive way the US can impose its authority is to resort to the area in which they have a crushing superiority over all other stales: military force. But in doing so, the US is caught in a contradiction:
- on the one hand, if it gives up using or extending the use of its military superiority, this will only encourage the countries contesting its authority to contest even more;
- on the other hand, when it does use brute force, even, and especially when this momentarily obliges its opponents to rein in their ambitions towards independence, this only pushes the latter to seize on the least occasion to get their revenge and squirm away from America's grasp.
The assertion of its military superiority by a superpower works in a very different way depending on whether the world is divided into blocs, as before 1989, or whether there are no blocs. In the first place, the assertion of this superiority tends to reinforce the vassals' confidence in their leader, in its ability to defend them, and is thus an element of cohesion around the leader. In the second case, the display of force by the only remaining superpower has the opposite ultimate result of aggravating "every man for himself" even more so when there is no other power that can compete with it at the same level. This is why the success of the present US counter-offensive cannot be considered to be definitive to have overcome its crisis of leadership. Brute force, manoeuvres aimed at destabilising its rivals (as in Zaire today), with their procession of tragic consequences, will thus continue to be used by this power, serving to accentuate the bloody chaos into which capitalism is sinking" (point 1 7).
While the US has not recently had the opportunity to use its armed might and to participate directly in this "bloody chaos", this can only be a temporary situation, especially because it cannot allow the diplomatic failure over Iraq to pass without a response.
Besides which, the capitalist world, on the basis of antagonisms between the great powers, has indeed gone on sinking into military barbarism and massacres, illustrated in particular by the situation in Algeria and, most recently, by the confrontations in Kosovo which have re-Iit the fires in the Balkans powder-keg. In this part of the world, the antagonisms between Germany on the one hand, and Russia, France and Britain, traditional allies of Serbia, on the other, will not give the Dayton peace accord a long respite.
Even if the Kosovo crisis does not degenerate immediately, it is a clear indication that there can be no solid and stable peace today, particularly in this region which, owing to its place in Europe, is the main flashpoint in the world.
Class struggle
9) "This generalised chaos, with its train of bloody conflicts, massacres, famines, and more generally, the decomposition which invades all areas of society and which in the long run threatens to destroy it, is the result of the total impasse which capitalist society has reached. But at the same time, this impasse, with the permanent and increasingly brutal attacks that it provokes against the class that produces the vast majority of social wealth, obliges the latter to react and thus raises the perspective of a revolutionary upsurge" (Point 19).
Provoked by the first expressions of capitalism's open crisis, the historic revival of the working class at the end of the 1960s put an end to four decades of counter-revolution and prevented capitalism from bringing about its own response to the crisis: generalised imperialist war. Despite moments of retreat, workers' struggles exhibited a general tendency to detach themselves from the grip of the state's organs of control, notably the trade unions. This tendency was brutally halted with the campaigns that accompanied the collapse of the so-called "socialist regimes" at the end of the 80s. The working class suffered an important reverse, both at the level of its militancy and at the level of its consciousness: " ... in the main capitalist countries, the working class has been brought back to a situation which is comparable to that of the 1970s as far as its relation to unions and unionism is concerned: a situation where the class, in general, struggled within the unions, followed their instructions and their slogans, and in the final analysis, left things up to them. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has temporarily succeeded in wiping out from working class consciousness the lessons learnt during the 80s, following repeated experience of confrontations with the unions" (Resolution on the international situation, 12th congress of the ICC's section in France, Point 12).
Since 1992, the proletariat has returned to the path of struggle but because of the scale of the retreat it has been through, and the weight of the general decomposition of bourgeois society, its consciousness is still being held back and the rhythm of this revival is very slow. However, its reality is being confirmed not so much by workers' struggles themselves, which for the moment remain very weak, but by all the manoeuvres which the bourgeoisie has been deploying for several years:
"For the ruling class, which is fully aware that its growing attacks on the working class will provoke wide-scale reactions, it is vital to get in the first blow at a time when combativity is still at an embryonic stage and when the echoes of the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes still weigh very heavy on the workers' consciousness. The aim is to 'wet the powder' and to reinforce to the maximum its arsenal of trade unionist and democratic mystifications" (resolution from the 12th ICC congress, Point 21).
This policy of the bourgeoisie was illustrated once again during the summer of 1997 by the UPS strike in the US which ended in a "great victory" for the trade unions. It has also been confirmed by the big manoeuvres which, in several European countries, have surrounded and continue to surround the question of unemployment.
10) Once again, it has been by co-ordinating its actions in different countries that the ruling class has been taking charge of the growing discontent provoked by the inexorable rise of the scourge of unemployment. On the one band, in countries like France, Belgium and Italy they have been launching big campaigns around the theme of the 35-hour week, which is supposed to be able to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. On the other hand, in France and Germany, we have seen, under the auspices of the unions and different "committees" inspired by the leftists, the development of movements of the unemployed, with the occupation of public places and street demonstrations. In fact, these two policies are complementary. The campaign around the 35-hour week, and the actual application of this measure as decided on by the left government in France, makes it possible:
- to "demonstrate" that you can "do something" to create jobs;
- to put forward an "anti-capitalist" demand, since the bosses have declared themselves to be opposed to it;
- to justify a whole series of attacks against the working class which will be the counter-part to the reduction in hours (intensification uf productivity and line speeds, wage freezes, greater "flexibility", especially through the calculation of working hours on a yearly basis.
The mobilisation of the unemployed by different bourgeois forces also has several objectives:
- in the short term, it creates a diversion for the sectors of the working class who are still at work, and above all, tends to make them feel guilty;
- in the longer term, and above all, it has the aim of developing organs for controlling the unemployed workers who, up till now, have been relatively less policed by specialised bourgeois organs;
In fact, through these well publicised manoeuvres, which have been displayed by the media internationally, the bourgeoisie proves that it is conscious:
- of its inability to resolve the problem of unemployment (which means it has few illusions about its system seeing "light at the end of the tunnel");
- that the present situation, marked by a low level of militancy among the workers at work and by the passivity of the unemployed, will not last for long.
The ICC has shown that, owing to the weight of decomposition and the gradual way that capitalism has put tens of millions of workers on the dole over the last few decades, the unemployed have not been able to organise themselves and take part in the class struggle (as they did in some countries during the 1930s). However, we also showed that even if they will not be able to constitute a vanguard of the workers' struggle, they will be led to join other sectors of the working class when the latter begin to move on a masive scale, bringing to the movement a powerful combativity resulting from their miserable situation, their lack of sectionalist prejudices and of illusions in the future of the capitalist economy. In this sense, the current manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie towards the unemployed show that it is expecting to have to deal with struggles of the whole working class, and is doing all it can to ensure that the participation of unemployed workers in these struggles will be sabotaged by appropriate organs of control.
11) In this manoeuvre, the ruling class has called upon the classical trade unions but also on more "left" elements of its political apparatus (anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyists, "operaists" and "autonomists") because, faced with the unemployed and their immense anger, it needs a more "radical" language than that usually spoken by the official unions. This fact also illustrates a point that was already in the resolution of the 12th ICC congress: we are today between two stages in the process of the revival of the class struggle, a moment where the action of classical unionism which dominated in the years 1994-96, although far from being discredited, will have to be complemented in a preventive manner by a more "radical", "rank and file" type of unionism.
12) Finally, the continuation of bourgeois ideological campaigns:
- on communism, fraudulently identified with Stalinism (notably the noise made about the Black Book of Communism, which has been translated into several languages) and against the communist left, via the anti-revisionist propaganda;
- in defence of democracy as the only alternative to all the expressions of capitalist decomposition and barbarism are the proof that the ruling class, aware of the potential contained in the present and future situation, is already preoccupied with sabotaging the long term perspectives of the proletarian combat, the road towards the communist revolution.
Faced with this situation, revolutionaries have the duty:
- to put forward the real communist perspective against all the falsifications spread far and wide by the defenders of the bourgeois order;
- to show the cynical nature of the bourgeois manoeuvres which call on the proletariat to defend democracy against the so-called "fascist" or "terrorist" danger;
- to denounce all the manoeuvres aimed at restoring strength and credit to all the union machinery whose function is to sabotage the future struggles of the class;
- to intervene towards the small minorities in the class who are raising questions about the crisis of capitalism and the ceaseless deterioration of living standards;
- to prepare to intervene in the ineluctable development of the class struggle.
[1] At the beginning of this period there was a tendency for these international organs of economic coordination and regulation to be boycotted, but the bourgeoisie very quickly drew the lessons about the dangers of "every man for himself".
Programme Communiste no.95 (PC)contains a serious polemic with the Programma Comunista/ Internationalist Papers group on the Kurdish question, criticising them for making grave concessions to nationalism; and what is particularly noteworthy is that the article argues that it was errors of exactly the same type that led to the explosion of the ICP in the early 80s. This willingness to discuss the crisis of the main Bordigist organisation in that period is a new and potentially fertile development. The same issue also contains a response to the review of the ICC's book on the Italian Left published by the UK Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History. Here, Programme Communiste show an awareness that the attack on the ICC contained in this review is also an attack on the whole tradition of the Italian communist left.
We refer our readers to the article in International Review no.93 for further commentary on these articles. In this issue, we want to respond to another text in Programme Communiste no.95 - a polemic with the Florence-based Il Partito group, criticising the latter for falling into mysticism.
Marxism against mysticism
At first sight this might seem to be a strange subject for a polemic between revolutionary groups, but it would be a mistake to think that the most advanced fractions of the proletarian movement are immune from the influence of religious and mystical ideologies. This was certainly the case in the struggle to found the Communist League, when Marx and Engels had to combat the sectarian, semi-religious visions of communism professed by Weitling and other; it was no less true during the period of the First International, when the marxist fraction had to confront the masonic ideologies of sects like the Philadelphians, and above all of Bakunin's "International Brotherhood".
But it was above all once it ceased to be a revolutionary class, and even more when it entered its epoch of decadence, that the bourgeoisie more and more abandoned the materialist outlook of its youth and relapsed into irrational and semi-mystical world-views: the case of nazism is a concentrated example. And the final phase of capitalist decadence - the phase of decomposition - has exacerbated such tendencies still further, as witness phenomena such as the upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism and the proliferation of suicidal cults. These ideologies are increasingly all-pervasive and the proletariat can by no means escape them.
The fact that the proletarian political milieu itself has to be on guard against such ideologies has been demonstrated clearly in the recent period. We can cite the case of the London Psychogeographical Association and similar "groups", which have concocted a snake-oil mixture of communism and occultism and have been busily trying to sell it in the milieu. Within the ICC itself, we have seen the activities of the adventurer JJ, expelled for seeking to create a clandestine network of "interest" in the ideas of freemasonry.
Moreover, the ICC has already briefly criticised ll Partito's efforts to create a "communist mysticism" (see the article on communism as the overcoming of alienation in International Review no.71) and Programme Communiste's more detailed criticisms are perfectly justified. The quotations from II Partito's press contained in the article in Programme Communiste show that the group's slide into mysticism has become quite overt. For II Partito, "the only society capable of mysticism is communism" in the sense that "the species is mystical because it knows how to see itself without a contradiction between the here and now ... and its future". Moreover, since mysticism, in its original Greek meaning, is defined here as "the capacity to see without eyes", the party too "has its mystique, in the sense that it is capable of seeing ... with its eyes closed, that it can see more than the individual eyes of its members" " ... the only reality which can live [the mystical] mode of life during the domination of class society is the party". And finally, "it is only in communism that the Great Philosophy coincides with being in an organic circuit between the action of eating (today seen as trivial and unworthy of the spirit) and the action of respiring in the Spirit, conceived sublimely as truly worthy of the complete being, that is to say, God".
Programme Communiste is also aware that the struggle of marxism against the penetration of mystical ideologies is not new. They cite Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism, through which a combat was waged against the development of idealist philosophy in the Bolshevik party in the 1900s, and in particular against attempts to turn socialism into a new religion (the "God-building" tendency of Lunacharsky). Lenin's book - although suffering from certain important weaknesses[2] - drew a line in the sand not only against the relapse into religiosity that accompanied the retreat in the class struggle after the 1905 revolution, but also against the concomitant danger of liquidating the party, of its fracturing into clans.
Roots of the Bordigist Mystique
For a critique to be radical, however, it must go to the roots. And a striking weakness of PC's polemic is its inability to the roots of Il Partito's errors - admittedly a difficult task since these roots are to a greater or lesser extent common to all the branches of the Bordigist family tree.
This is apparent early on when Programme Communiste upbraids Il Partito for its claim to be "the true and only continuators of the party". But if Il Partito is the most sectarian of the Bordigist groups, sectarian withdrawal, the practice of ignoring or dismissing out of hand all other expression of the communist left, has always been a distinguishing feature of the Bordigist current, and certainly well before the appearance of Il Partito in the 1970s. And even if we can understand the origins of this sectarianism as a defensive reaction in the face of the profound counter-revolution that prevailed at the time of Bordigism' s birth in the 40s and 50s, it is still a fundamental flaw of this current and has caused no end of damage to the proletarian milieu. The very fact that we are now confronted with the existence of three groups all claiming to be the "International Communist Party" is proof enough of this, since it tends to cast discredit on the very notion of a communist organisation.
But even on the question of mysticism and religion, it must be admitted that Il Partito did not pick its ideas out of a clear blue sky. In fact, we can find some of the roots of "Florentine mysticism" in Bordiga himself. The following passage is from Bordiga's "Commentary on the 1844 Manuscripts", a text that first appeared in Il Programma Comunista in 1959 and was republished in Bordiga et La passion du communisme, edited by Jacques Camatte in 1972):
"When, at a certain point, our banal contradictor ... says that we are building our mystique, himself posing as a mind who which has gone beyond all fideism and mysticism, when he holds us in derision for kneeling down to the Mosaic or talmudic tablets of the Bible or the Koran, to gospels and catechisms, we reply to him .... that we do not consider as an offense the assertion that we can indeed attribute to our movement - as long as it has not triumphed in reality (which in our method precedes any ulterior conquest of human consciousness) - the character of a mystique, or, if you want, a myth.
Myth, in its innumerable forms, was not the delirium of minds which had their physical eyes shut to reality - natural and human in an inseparable manner as in Marx - but was an irreplaceable stage in the single road to the real conquest of consciousness .... ".
Before proceeding, it is necessary to put this passage in its proper context.
The currents of the communist left outside Bordigism have also criticised the inter-linked notions of internal monolithism and of the "great leader" which developed in the post-war party (see the reprint of the text by the Gau he Comrnuniste de France in International Review nos.33 and 34), and the use of the theory of "organic centralism" to justify elitist practices within the party[3]. These conceptions are all coherent with the semi-religious notion of the party as the guardian of a once and for all revelation accessible only to a select few; given this background, it is not altogether surprising that II Partiito should claim that the only true way of living the mystical life today is to join the Bordigist party!
Finally, we should also point out that all these conceptions of the party's internal functioning are profoundly linked to the Bordigist article of faith that the task of the party is to exert the dictatorship of the proletariat on behalf of, and even against, the mass of the proletariat. And the communist left - most particularly its Italian branch, in the days of Bilan, but also in the work of the GCF and the Damen tendency - have abundantly criticised this notion as well.
We thus think that Programme Communiste's criticisms of Il Partito must go deeper, to the real historical roots of its errors and in doing so, engage with the rich heritage of the entire communist left. We are convinced that we are not preaching to the deaf: the new spirit of openness within the Bordigist milieu testifies to that. And Programme Communiste even gives some important signs of movement on the party question itself, because at the end of their article, while still retaining the idea of the party as the "general staff" of the class, they insist that "there is no place in its functioning and its internal life for idealism, mystics, the cult of leaders or superior authorities, as is the case with parties who are about to degenerate and go over to the counter-revolution". We can only agree with these sentiments, and hope that the current debates in the Bordigist milieu will enable its components to take these developments to their logical conclusion.
Amos
[1] See the article on the joint public meeting of the Communist Left in defence of the October Revolution, published in World Revolution no.210, as well as in the CWO's Revolutionary Perspectives no.9.
[2] Programme Communiste neglect to mention that the historical communist left has made some serious criticisms of certain of the "philosophical" arguments contained in Lenin's book. In his Lenin as Philosopher, written during the 1930s, Pannekoek showed that in his effort to affirm the fundamentals of materialism, Lenin ignores the distinction between bourgeois materialism - which tends to reduce consciousness to a passive reflection of the external world - and the marxist dialectical standpoint which, while affirming the primacy of matter, also insists on the active side of human consciousness, its capacity to shape the external world. In the early 1950s the Gauche Communiste de France wrote a series of articles which recognised the validity of these criticisms, but in turn showed that Pannekoek himself was guilty of a kind of mechanical materialism when he tried to prove that Lenin's philosophical errors demonstrate that Bolshevism was no more than the representative of the bourgeois revolution in backward Russia. See the reprint of the 1948 article by Intemationalisme criticising Pannekoek's Lenin as Philosopher in International Review nos.25, 27, 28, and 30, and also our book on The Dutch Left, chapter 7 part 5.
[3] See Un chiarimento, Fra Ie ombre del bordighismo e dei suoi epigoni, supplement to Battaglia Comunista no. 11 , 1997.
In previous articles, we have outlined the history of the proletarian revolution in China (1919-1927), and clearly distinguished this from the period of counter-revolution and imperialist war which followed it (1927-1949)[1] [29]. We have shown that the so-called “Chinese people’s revolution”, built on the defeat of the working class, was nothing but a bourgeois mystification, designed to enrol the Chinese peasant masses into the service of the imperialist war. In this article, we will focus on the central aspects of this mystification: Mao Zedong himself as a “revolutionary leader”, and Maoism as a revolutionary theory, and one which claims to be a “development” of marxism to boot. We intend to demonstrate that Maoism has never been anything but a bourgeois ideological and political current, born from the guts of decadent capitalism.
Mao Zedong’s political current within the Communist Party of China (CPC) only appeared in the 1930s, in the midst of the counter-revolution when the CPC had been first defeated and physically decimated, then had become an organ of capital. Mao formed one of the numerous coteries which fought for control of the party, and so revealed its degeneration. Maoism, right from the start, had nothing to do with the proletarian revolution, except that it emerged from the counter-revolution that crushed the working class.
In fact, Mao Zedong only took control of the CPC in 1945, when “Maoism” became the official doctrine of the party, after the liquidation of the previously dominant coterie of Wang Ming, and while the CPC was fully involved in the sinister game of world imperialist war. In this sense, the rise of Mao Zedong’s gang is the direct product of his complicity with the great imperialist gangsters.
All this might astonish anyone who only knows the history of 20th century China through Mao’s writing, or bourgeois historiography. It has to be said that Mao took the art of falsifying the history of China and the CPC (he benefited from the experience of Stalinism and the gangs that preceded him in power from 1928 onwards) to such a level, that simply to recount events as they happened takes on the air of a fairy-tale.
This immense falsification is founded on the bourgeois and profoundly reactionary nature of Mao Zedong’s ideology. In rewriting history, in order to appear to the world as the eternal and infallible leader of the CPC, Mao was of course motivated by the ambition to strengthen his own political power. Nonetheless, he also served the fundamental interests of the bourgeoisie: in the long term, it was vital to wipe out the historic lessons that the working class could learn from its experience during the 1920s; in the short term, the working and peasant masses had to be brought to take part in the imperialist slaughter. Maoism perfectly satisfied these two objectives.
The tissue of lies that surrounds the legend of Mao Zedong begins with the veil cast over his obscure political origins. Maoist historians may repeat endlessly that Mao was one of the CPC’s “founders”; they nonetheless remain very discreet about his political activity throughout the period of rising working class struggle. They would otherwise have to admit that Mao was part of the CPC’s opportunist wing, which blindly followed all the orientations of the degenerating Executive Committee of the Communist International. More precisely, they would also have to admit that Mao was a member of the CPC group which in 1924 joined the Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, the National Popular Party of the big Chinese bourgeoisie, on the fallacious pretext that this was not a bourgeois party but a “class front”.
In March 1927, on the eve of the bloody suppression of the Shanghai rising by Kuomintang troops, and while the CPC’s revolutionary wing was desperately calling for an end to the Kuomintang alliance, Mao was in the opportunist chorus, singing the praises of the butcher Chang-kai-shek, and approving the actions of the Kuomintang [2] [30].
Shortly afterwards, one of Mao Zedong’s companions in the Kuomintang, Qu Qiubai, was nominated leader of the CPC under the pressure of Stalin’s henchmen recently arrived in China. His main mission was to lay the responsibility for the crushing of the proletarian insurrection at the door of Chen Duxiu - who was to become a sympathiser of Trotsky, and symbol of one of the currents struggling against the opportunist decisions of the CI [3] [31] - by accusing him of having fallen into opportunism and having underestimated the peasant movement! The corollary of this policy was a series of disastrous adventures, in which Mao Zedong participated fully throughout the second half of 1927, and which only accelerated the dispersal and annihilation of the CPC.
If we are to believe history as corrected by Mao in 1945, he criticised the “left opportunist sliding” defended by Qu Qiubai. The truth is that Mao was one of this policy’s most stalwart partisans, as we can see from the Report on Hunan, which predicts “the impetuous uprising of hundreds of millions of peasants”. This prediction was concretised in the “Revolt of the Autumn Harvest”, one of the most significant fiascos of Qu Qiubai’s “insurrectionist” policy. The working class was crushed, and any possibility of a victorious revolution had disappeared with it; in such conditions, any attempt to provoke a peasant uprising could only be disastrous, and lead to new massacres. The famous “impetuous uprising of hundreds of millions of peasants” in Hunan was in fact reduced to the grotesque and bloody adventure of some 5,000 peasants and lumpens led by Mao, which ended in a rout, with the survivors fleeing into the mountains and their leader being pushed out of the Party’s Politburo.
During the period of the proletarian revolution, Mao Zedong was part of the CPC’s opportunist wing, actively contributing to the defeat of the working class and the annihilation of the CPC as a proletarian organisation.
In our previous articles, we have seen how the Communist Party of China was physically and politically exterminated by the combined action of Stalinism and Chinese reaction. From 1928, workers no longer joined the party en masse. Then, when the party was no longer Communist in anything but name, began the formation of the famous Red Army, bringing the peasantry and lumpen-proletariat increasingly into its ranks. Within the CPC, elements began to come to the fore, who had been the furthest from the working class, and needless to say closest to the Kuomintang. The party grew with the arrival of all sorts of reactionary dross, from Stalinists indoctrinated in the USSR, to Kuomintang generals, via warlords in search of territory, patriotic intellectuals, and even of “enlightened” members of the upper bourgeois and feudal classes. Within the new CPC, all this scum were ready for a fight to the death to gain control of the party and the Red Army.
As with all the parties of the Communist International, the counter-revolution was expressed in the degeneration of the CPC and its conversion into an instrument of capital. These parties became a terrible source of mystification for the whole working class, misleading it on such fundamental questions as that of the revolutionary organisation, in both its function and its internal functioning. The bourgeoisie’s official ideologues have only spread and amplified this work of mystification. Official historians present the CPC from 1928 to today as the model of a communist party: for the defenders of Western democracy, the internecine wars within the CPC are proof of the dubious behaviour of communists and marxism’s falsehood; for the unconditional defenders of Maoism, these same struggles were the means to defend the “politically correct line of the brilliant Chairman Mao”. These two categories of ideologue, though apparently opposed, in fact work in the same direction: the mendacious identification of the proletariat’s revolutionary organisations with their absolute opposite - the organisations born of capitalism’s decadence and the bourgeois counter-revolution. One thing is certain. Mao Zedong could only develop his full “potential” in the rotten setting of a CPC turned bourgeois. Mao had already tried out the gangster methods which were to serve him in controlling the party and the army during his “epic” retreat into the Xikang mountains - a disastrous rout if ever there was one. He took control of the region by making alliances with the leaders of the armed gangs that controlled it, only to eliminate them afterwards. This was the period which saw the birth of Mao’s gang, through his alliance with Zhu De, a rival general to Chiang-kai-shek, who was to become his inseparable companion. Mao knew how to kow-tow to better placed rivals, at least until he could supplant them in the party hierarchy. When Qu Qiubai was replaced by Li Lisan, Mao supported the latter’s “political line”, which in fact was nothing but a continuation of his predecessor’s “putschist” policy. Mao’s rewritten version of history tells us that he rapidly opposed Li Lisan. In reality, he participated fully in one of the disastrous coups attempted under the impetus of Bukharin in the CI’s “third period” (see letter from the CI, October 1929), and led by Li Lisan in the 1930s. The aim of these coups was to “take the cities” with a peasant guerrilla army. In 1930, Mao Zedong changed sides again, when the clique led by Wang Ming - known as “the returned [ie from Russia] students”, or the “28 Bolsheviks”, who had spent two years being trained in Moscow - began a clean-up to take control of the party, and removed Li Lisan. This was the time of the obscure “Fujian incident”. Mao Zedong undertook a large scale punitive expedition against the CPC in control of the Fujian region. The members of this section of the party were accused, depending on the version, of being either lackeys of Li Lisan, part of an anti-Bolshevik league, or members of the Socialist Party. Part of the truth only came out years after Mao’s death. In 1982, a Chinese review revealed that “the purges in western Fujian, which lasted several months and resulted in massacres throughout the Soviet zone, began in December 1930 with the Fujian incidents. Many leaders and militants of the Party were accused of being members of the Socialist Party and executed. The number of victims is estimated at between four and five thousand. In reality, there was not the slightest trace of a Socialist Party in the region...” [4] [32].
This purge was the price for Mao’s partial return to the good graces of the “returned students”. Despite being accused of having followed the Li Lisan line, and of having committed excesses in Fujian, he was neither liquidated nor deported like so many others. And although he was removed from his military command, he had the consolation of being made “President of the Soviets”, during the pompously named “First Congress of Soviets in China” at the end of 1931: this was an administrative role, under the control of the Wang Ming clique.
From this moment onwards, Mao tried both to strengthen his own clique, and to sow division in the ruling clique of “returned students”. But he remained under their heel, as we can see from the rejection by Wang Ming of Mao’s proposal of an alliance with the “Fujian government” (made up of generals in revolt against Chiang-kai-shek). Wang Ming did not want to prejudice his existing treaties with the USSR and Chiang-kai-Shek. Mao had to back down publicly, and accuse this “government” of “deceiving the people” [5] [33]. This also shows that although Mao was made President in 1934, the real strong man of the party remained Chang Wentian, prime minister of the “Soviets”, and one of the “returned students”.
The legend of the “Chinese people’s revolution” has always presented the Long March as the greatest “anti-imperialist” and “revolutionary” epic in history. We have already shown that its real objective was to transform a force of peasant guerrillas, scattered in a dozen regions around the country and occupied in struggle against the great landlords, into a regular centralised army capable of engaging in a war of positions. The aim was to create an instrument of Chinese imperialist policy. The legend also tells us that the Long March was inspired and led by President Mao. This is not entirely true. To start with, Mao was ill, and politically isolated by the Wang clique throughout the period of preparation for the Long March, unable to “inspire” anything at all. Furthermore, the March could not be “led” by anybody, even Mao, for the simple reason that the Red Army had no centralised command, but was made up of a dozen more or less independent regiments isolated from each other (the formation of a centralised General Staff was in fact one of the objectives of this campaign). The only element of cohesion in both the CPC and Red Army was the imperialist policy of the USSR, represented by the “returned students”. The latter’s strength was wholly due to the political, diplomatic, and military support of the Stalin regime. The legend also “teaches” us that it was during the Long March that Mao’s “correct line” overcame the “incorrect line” of Wang Ming and Zhang Kuo Tao. The truth is that the concentration of forces sharpened the rivalries within the leadership for control of the Red Army. Out of respect for the truth, we should also say that if Mao gained in influence during these sordid struggles, he did so in the shadow of the Wang clique. Two anecdotes are significant in this respect.
The first of these concerns the Zunyi meeting of January 1935. Maoists describe this meeting as “historic” because it supposedly marks the moment where Mao took command of the Red Army. In reality, this meeting was a plot (set in motion by the various cliques of the detachment in which Mao was travelling), in which Cheng Wentian (one of the “returned students”) was named Party Secretary, while Mao recovered the position he had held before his removal from the Military Committee. These nominations were disputed shortly afterwards by much of the party, since the Zunyi meeting did not have the status of a Congress. They were one of the underlying causes of the later split in the CPC.
The second anecdote concerns the events in the Sichuan region a few months later. Several Red Army regiments had concentrated here, and Mao tried to take overall command, with the support of the “returned students”. Mao’s nomination was opposed by Zhang Kuo Tao, an old member of the CPC, who had commanded one of the “red bases”, and led a more powerful regiment than that of Mao and Cheng Wentian. This led to a violent quarrel, which ended with a split in the Party and the Red Army, led by two different Central Committees. Zhang held his position in the Sichuan region, with most of the troops already concentrated there. Even Mao’s companions, like Liu Bocheng and the faithful Zhu De (who had followed him like a shadow since the rout of 1927 in Xikang), went over to Zhang Kuo Tao. Mao Zedong and Cheng Wentian fled the region and took refuge in the “red base” of Yanan, which was the final point of concentration for the regiments of the Red Army.
The troops that stayed in Sichuan remained isolated, and were decimated little by little, which obliged the survivors to join the army in Yanan. Zhang’s fate was sealed: he was immediately removed from his functions and went over to the Kuomintang in 1938. From these events sprang the Maoist legend of “the combat against the traitor Zhang Kuo Tao”. In reality, Zhang had no choice: if he was to escape the purges launched by Mao in Shangxi and stay alive, he needed the support of another faction of the bourgeoisie. But there was not the slightest class difference between Mao and Zhang, any more than there was between the CPC and the Kuomintang.
It is also worth remembering that it was during this period of military concentration in Sichuan that the CPC echoed the USSR’s imperialist policy (proclaimed by the 7th Congress of the Stalinised Communist International in 1935) by calling for a national united front against Japan: or in other words, calling for the exploited to put themselves at the service of their exploiters’ interests. This confirmed, not just the CPC’s bourgeois nature, but also its role as principal supplier of cannon-fodder for the imperialist war.
In Yanan, during the war with Japan between 1936 and 1945, Mao Zedong used cunning, trickery and purges to take control of the CPC and the Red Army. There were three phases in the Yanan clan war which marked Mao’s rise: the elimination of the Yanan base’s founding group, the consolidation of the Mao clique, and the first open conflict with the Wang Ming clique which was to lead to the latter’s elimination.
Maoism extols the expansion of the Red Army in Shangxi as a product of the peasants’ revolutionary struggle. We have shown that this expansion was based both on the CPC’s methods of enrolment of the peasantry (an inter-classist alliance, whereby the peasants obtained a reduction in rent — small enough to be acceptable to the landed proprietors — in exchange for their mobilisation in the imperialist slaughter), and on its alliances with regional warlords and with the Kuomintang itself. The events of 1936 are revealing in this respect, and they also show how the old Yanan leadership was liquidated.
When the regiment of Mao Zedong and Chang Wentian reached Yanan in October 1935, the region was already prey to factional struggles: Liu Shidan, founder and leader of the base since the beginning of the 1930s, had fallen victim to the purges and had been imprisoned and tortured. He received the immediate support of the newly arrived regiment. He was freed, in exchange for his subordination to Mao and Chang.
At the beginning of 1936, Liu Shidan’s troops were ordered to launch an expedition to the east, towards Shansi, to attack the local warlord Yan Jishan and the Kuomintang troops supporting him. The expedition was defeated and Liu Shidan killed. Another expedition towards the West met the same fate. These events, in particular Liu Shidan’s death, made it possible for Mao and Chang to take control of the Yanan base. The method is reminiscent of Mao’s seizure of the Jinggang mountains a few years previously: he began by allying himself with the zone’s leaders, but later on their supposed “tragic deaths” left him in sole command.
While the expeditions to East and West went to their defeat, Mao was setting up an alliance with another warlord. The Sian region, south of Yanan, was controlled by the mercenary Yang Hucheng, who had given shelter to the governor of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang, and his regiments, after their defeat by the Japanese. Mao contacted Yang Hucheng in December 1935, and their non-aggression pact was established a few months later. This pact was the background to the “Sian incident” (see International Review no.84): Chang-kai-shek was taken prisoner by Yang Hucheng and Zhang Xueliang, who wanted to try him for collaboration with the Japanese. Under pressure from Stalin, his capture was used solely to negotiate a new alliance between the CPC and the Kuomintang.
Needless to say, the Maoists have tried to portray the CPC’s alliances with the warlords and with the butcher of Shanghai — in which Mao took a direct part — as skilful manoeuvres intended to profit from the divisions existing in the ruling classes. It is true that the traditional bourgeoisie of landed proprietors and the military were divided, but not because they had different class interests, nor even because some were reactionary and others progressive, nor even because some were — as Mao would have it — “intelligent”, and others were not. Their divisions were based on their defence of particular interests, some favouring Chinese unity under Japanese control because this would gain or preserve their local power; while those, like the governor of Manchuria, who had been unseated, sought the support of other imperialist powers opposed to Japan.
In this sense, the alliance between the CPC and the Kuomintang was clearly bourgeois and imperialist, and went as far as to conclude a military aid agreement between the government of the USSR and Chiang-kei-shek, which included the supply of fighters and bombers and a convoy of 200 lorries, which remained the Kuomintang’s main source of supply until 1947. At the same time, the CPC was established in its own zone (the legendary Shanxi-Ganxu-Ningxia); it integrated the main regiments of the Red Army (the 4th and the 8th) into the army of Chiang-kai-shek, and had one of its commissions participating in the Kuomintang government.
At the level of the CPC’s internal life, we should point out that the commission which negotiated with, and then entered, the Chiang government, represented both the “returned students” (Po Ku and Wang Ming himself), and the Mao clique (Chou Enlai), which confirms that Mao did not yet control the party or the army, and that at least in appearance he was still allied with Stalin’s henchmen.
The rivalry between Mao and the “returned students” first came into the open at the CPC Central Committee’s plenary session of October 1938. Mao took advantage of the Wuhan fiasco (the seat of the Kuomintang government, which was attacked by the Japanese, and for whose defence Wang Ming was responsible) to undermine Wang Ming’s authority in the party. He nonetheless had to accept the nomination of Chang Wentian as General Secretary, and wait a further two years until the imperialist war made it possible to turn the situation to his advantage, against the clique of the “returned students”.
In 1941, the German army invaded the USSR. To avoid opening a new front, Stalin opted for a non-aggression pact with Japan. Its immediate consequence was the end of Russia’s military aid to the Kuomintang, but also the paralysis and fall of Wang Ming’s Stalinist faction in the CPC, obliged as it was to collaborate with the Japanese enemy. In December, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour brought America into the war for control of the Pacific. These events prompted a move towards the US by both the Kuomintang and the CPC, Mao’s faction in particular.
Mao launched an all-out attack on the “returned students” and their acolytes. This was the meaning of the punitive “rectification campaign”, which lasted from 1942 to 1945. Mao began by attacking the party leaders, especially the “returned students”, accusing them of being “dogmatic and incapable of applying marxism in China”. Mao made the most of the rivalries within the Wang clique, and succeeded in winning over some of its members, including Liu Chaichi who became party General Secretary, and Kang Cheng, who became the inquisitor in charge of Mao’s dirty work — the same position that Mao himself had held in Fujian in 1930.
The Wang clique’s press was suspended, while only that under Mao’s control was authorised to publish. The Mao clique took control of the party schools and militants’ reading. The purge continued, with arrests and persecutions spreading from Yanan throughout the party and the army. Some, like Chou Enlai, remained faithful to Mao. The “recalcitrants” were sent to the combat zones where they fell into the hands of the Japanese, or simply eliminated.
The purge reached its height in 1943, coinciding with the official dissolution of the Third International, and the USA’s mediation between the CPC and the Kuomintang. Some 50-60,000 people were liquidated during the purge. The leading “returned students” were eliminated: Chang Wentian was exiled from Yanan, Wang Ming narrowly escaped an attempted poisoning, Po Ku died mysteriously in an “air accident”.
Within the framework of the imperialist war, the “rectification campaign” corresponds to the CPC’s turn towards the United States. We have already examined this aspect in International Review no.84. We should simply point out that the impetus for this turn came from Mao and his clique, as we can see from the official correspondence of the US mission to Yanan at the time [6] [34]. And it was no accident that the struggle against the Stalinist clique coincided with a rapprochement with the USA. Of course, this does not make Mao a traitor to the “Communist camp”, as Wang Ming and the ruling clique in Russia were later to claim. It merely demonstrates the bourgeois nature of his policies. For Chiang-kai-shek, as for the whole Chinese bourgeoisie, Mao included, their chances of survival depended on their ability to calculate coldly which imperialist power they should serve: the USA or the USSR.
Nor is it an accident that the tone of the “rectification” became more moderate as the likelihood of a Soviet victory over Germany increased. The purge “officially” came to an end in April 1945, two months after the signature of the Yalta treaty, where the Allied imperialist powers decided, amongst other things, that Russia should declare war on Japan, just as it was preparing to invade northern China. This is why the CPC had to follow Russian orders. Mao’s temporary return to the Stalin camp was not made of his own free will, but because of the new division of the world between the great imperialist powers.
Nonetheless, the end result of the “rectification” was the control of the CPC and the army by Mao and his gang. Mao created for himself the title of Party President, and proclaimed Maoism, or “Mao Zedong thought”, to be “marxism applied to China”. Since then, the Maoists have resorted to legend to explain how Mao came to the leadership thanks to his theoretical and strategic genius, and to his struggle against the “incorrect lines”. They would have us believe that Mao founded the Red Army, created the agrarian reform programme, triumphantly led the Long March, created the red bases, etc. And it is all untrue! This is how the cunning parvenu Mao Zedong passed himself off for a Messiah.
Maoism, then, became a dominant theory during the world imperialist war, in a party which already belonged to the bourgeoisie, despite continuing to call itself communist. At the outset, Maoism aimed to justify and consolidate the grip of Mao and his gang on all the controls of the party. He also had to justify the party’s participation in the imperialist war, alongside the Kuomintang, the nobility, the warlords, the big bourgeoisie, and all the imperialist powers. To do so, he had to hide the real origins of the CPC. Maoism could not be satisfied with putting a particular “interpretation” on the clan war within the party: it had to deform completely the history of both the party and the class struggle. The defeat of the proletarian revolution and the degeneration of the CPC were carefully wiped out; the CPC’s new identity as an instrument of capital was justified “theoretically” by Maoism.
On this false foundation, Maoism demonstrated its abilities as another instrument of bourgeois propaganda used to mobilise the labouring masses, especially the peasantry, under the patriotic banners of imperialist war. Once the CPC had finally conquered power, Maoism became the official “theory” of the Chinese “People’s State”, in other words of the state capitalism set up in China.
Despite its vague references to a pseudo-marxist language, “Mao Zedong thought” cannot hide its sources in the bourgeois camp. When he took part in the coalition between the CPC and the Kuomintang, Mao considered already that the interests of the peasantry should be subordinated to the interests of the national bourgeoisie represented by Sun Yat Sen: “The defeat of the feudal forces is the real goal of the national revolution (...) The peasants have understood what Dr Sun Yat Sen wanted, but was unable to achieve during the forty years that he devoted to the national revolution” [7] [35]. In fact, the references to Sun Yat Sen’s principles remained at the centre of Maoist propaganda to enrol the peasants for imperialist war: “As far as the Communist Party is concerned, the whole policy that it has followed these last ten years corresponds to the revolutionary spirit of the Three Principles of the People and the Three Great Policies of Dr Sun Yat Sen” [8] [36]. “Our propaganda must conform to this programme: carry out the testament of Dr Sun Yat Sen by awakening the masses to resistance against Japan” [9] [37].
In the first article in this series, we already showed how during his “forty years devoted to the national revolution”, Sun Yat Sen was constantly seeking alliances with the great imperialist powers, Japan included. His “revolutionary nationalism”, as early as the “revolution” of 1911, was nothing but a vast mystification to hide the imperialist interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie. Maoism limited itself to adopting this mystification, in other words to putting itself in tune with the old ideological campaigns of the Chinese bourgeoisie.
Indeed, the “brilliant Mao Zedong thought” is little more than a vulgar plagiarism of the official Stalinist manuals of the day. Mao adulated Stalin, and made him out to be a “great continuator of marxism”, if only to ape the shameless falsification of marxism conducted by Stalin and his henchmen. Maoism’s so-called application of marxism to Chinese conditions is nothing other than the application of the ideological themes of the Stalinist counter-revolution.
We will now examine some of the main aspects of the supposed application of marxism, as revised by “Mao Zedong thought”.
On the proletarian revolution
A study of Chinese history on the basis of Mao’s works would leave the reader in complete ignorance of the repercussions within China of the proletarian revolutionary wave set off in 1917. Maoism (and so official history, whether Maoist or not) has buried the proletarian revolution in China lock, stock, and barrel.
When Mao does mention the proletarian revolution, it is only to include it within the “bourgeois revolution”: “The revolution of 1924-27 was carried out thanks to the collaboration of two parties - the CPC and the Kuomintang - on the basis of a well-defined programme. In barely two or three years, the national revolution encountered immense success (...) These successes were based on the creation of the revolutionary support base of Kuang Tong, and the victory of the Northern Expedition” [10] [38]. All this is pure falsehood. As we have seen, the period from 1924 to 1927 was characterised not by the “national revolution” but by the revolutionary wave amongst the working class in all the great Chinese cities, rising to the point of insurrection. The co-operation between the CPC and the Kuomintang, in other words the opportunist alignment of the proletarian party with the bourgeoisie, was built not on the basis of “enormous successes”, but of tragic defeats for the proletariat. And finally the “Northern Expedition”, far from being a revolutionary “victory”, was nothing but a bourgeois manoeuvre designed to control the cities and massacre the working class. And the high point of this expedition was precisely the massacre of workers by the Kuomintang.
As for the events of 1926, in the midst of an upsurge of the workers’ movement Mao could hardly avoid a reference to the “general strikes in Hong Kong and Shanghai, at the origin of the events of 30th May” [11] [39]. But by 1939, he had reduced these to a mere demonstration by the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, and failed so much as to mention the historic Shanghai insurrection of 1927 in which almost one million workers took part [12] [40].
The systematic burial of the whole experience, and of the historic and worldwide importance of the revolutionary movement in China, is one of the essential aspects of Maoism’s “original” contribution to bourgeois ideology in obscuring proletarian class consciousness.
This is one of the historic principles of the proletariat’s historic struggle, and therefore of marxism, which contains within itself the question of the destruction of capitalist states and the overcoming of national boundaries imposed by bourgeois society. “It is indisputable that internationalism constitutes one of the cornerstones of communism. It has been well-established since 1848 that the “workers have no country” (...) If capitalism found in the nation the most appropriate framework for its own development, communism can only be established on a worldwide scale. The proletarian revolution will destroy all nations” (from the Introduction to our pamphlet Nation or Class?).
In Mao’s hands, this principle was turned into its exact opposite. For him, patriotism and internationalism were identical: “Can a communist internationalist also be a patriot? He not only can be, he must be (...) In wars of national liberation, patriotism is the application of the internationalist principle (...) We are both internationalists and patriots, and our slogan is: ‘struggle against the aggressor to defend the fatherland’” [13] [41]. Let us just recall in passing that the “national war” in question is none other than World War II! This is how the enrolment of workers into imperialist war becomes an application of proletarian internationalism! It is by using just such monstrous mystifications that the bourgeoisie gets the workers to massacre each other.
Mao Zedong cannot even claim the distinction of being the first to formulate this “ingenious” idea, whereby an internationalist can be a patriot at the same time. He merely repeated the speech of Dimitrov, one of Stalin’s hired ideologues: “Proletarian internationalism must, so to speak, “acclimatise itself” to each country (...) The national ‘forms’ of the proletarian struggle in no way contradict proletarian internationalism (...) The socialist revolution will be the nation’s salvation” [14] [42]. He himself was merely adopting the declarations of social-patriots of the Kautsky variety, who sent the proletariat to the slaughter in 1914: “All have the right and the duty to defend the fatherland; real internationalism consists in recognising this right for the socialists of every country” [15] [43]. We are more than willing to recognise Maoism’s continuity, not with marxism, but with those “theories” which have always tried to deform marxism in the service of capital.
The class struggle
We have already shown how Mao Zedong, throughout his works, buried the whole experience of the proletariat. And yet he never ceases to refer to “the proletariat’s leading role in the revolution”. Yet the most important part of “Mao Zedong thought” on the class struggle is that which subordinates the interests of the exploited classes to those of their exploiters: “It is now an established principle that in the war of resistance against Japan, everything must be abandoned in the interests of victory. Consequently, the interests of the class struggle must be subordinated to the interests of the war of resistance, and not enter into conflict with them (...) We must apply an appropriate policy of readjustment in the relations between the classes, a policy which does not leave the working masses without political and material guarantees, but which takes account of the interests of the possessing classes” [16] [44].
Mao Zedong’s terminology here is that of a classic bourgeois nationalist, who demands that workers make the supreme sacrifice in exchange for promises of “political and material guarantees”, but in the framework of the national interest, in other words in the framework of the interests of the ruling class. He is indistinguishable from the others, except for the particular cynicism which allows him to describe this as a “deepening of marxism”.
Maoism’s supposed “development of marxism” appears in the question of the state, through the theory of the “new democracy”, presented as the “revolutionary path” for under-developed countries. If we are to believe Mao Zedong, “the revolution of the new democracy (...) does not lead to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, but to the dictatorship of the united front of various revolutionary classes under the leadership of the proletariat (...) It also differs from the socialist revolution, in that it can only defeat the domination of the imperialists, collaborationists, and reactionaries in China, since it eliminates none of those sectors of capitalism that contribute to the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle”.
Mao has thus discovered a new kind of state, which is supposedly the instrument of no particular class, but rather an inter-classist front or alliance. This may be a new formulation of the old theory of class collaboration, but it has nothing to do with marxism. The theory of the “new democracy” is nothing but a new version of bourgeois democracy, which claims to be the government of the people, in other words of all classes. The only difference is that Mao calls it a “front of various classes”, and as he himself recognised: “Essentially, the revolution of the new democracy coincides with the revolution that was called for by Sun Yat Sen with his Three Principles of the People (...) Sun Yat Sen said: “In modern states, the so-called democratic system is in general monopolised by the bourgeoisie and has become merely an instrument for oppressing the common people. By contrast, the democratic principle defended by the Kuomintang defends a democratic system in the hands of this common people, and will not allow that it should be confiscated by the few”” [17] [45].
Concretely, the theory of the “new democracy” was the means for controlling the largely peasant population in the zones under CPC control. It was later to become the ideological fig-leaf for the state capitalism set up when the CPC took power.
For years, Mao Zedong’s “philosophical works” were taught in university circles as “marxist philosophy”. Not only does Mao’s philosophy have nothing to do with the marxist method - despite its pseudo-marxist language - it is in total opposition to it. Mao’s philosophy, inspired by vulgarisations of Stalin, is nothing but a justification of its author’s political contortions. Let us consider, for example, the embarrassing rhetoric that he uses to deal with the question of contradictions: “In the process of development of a complex thing many contradictions are found, and one of these is necessarily the principle whose existence and development determines or influences the existence and development of the others (...) A semi-colonial country like China provides a complex framework to the relations between the principal contradiction and the secondary contradictions. When imperialism unleashes a war against such a country, the different classes which make up the latter (except a small number of traitors) can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. The contradiction between imperialism and the country in question thus becomes the principle contradiction, temporarily relegating the contradictions between the different classes within the country to a secondary and subordinate level (...) Such is the situation in the present war between China and Japan”.
In other words, the Maoist “theory” of “displaced contradictions” simply comes down to saying that the proletariat can and must abandon its struggle against the bourgeoisie in the name of the national interest, and that the antagonistic classes can and must unite in the framework of imperialist slaughter, that the exploited classes can and must bow to the interests of the exploiters. We can understand why the bourgeoisie all over the world spread Maoist philosophy in the universities, presenting it as marxism!
To sum up, we would say that Maoism has nothing to do with the working class’ struggle, nor its consciousness, nor its revolutionary organisations. It has nothing to do with marxism: it is neither a tendency within nor a development of the proletariat’s revolutionary theory. On the contrary, Maoism is nothing but a gross falsification of marxism; its only function is to bury every revolutionary principle, to confuse proletarian class consciousness and replace it with the most stupid and narrow-minded nationalist ideology. As a “theory”, Maoism is just another of those wretched forms adopted by the bourgeois in its decadent period of counter-revolution and imperialist war.
Ldo.
[1] [46] See International Review nos.81 and 84.
[2] [47] See the Report on an enquiry into the Hunan peasant movement, Mao Zedong, March 1927.
[3] [48] For more on Chen Duxiu, see the box below.
[4] [49] Quoted by Lazlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, Hurst & Co, 1992.
[5] [50] Speech by Mao at the 2nd Congress of the “Chinese Soviets”, published in Japan. Quoted by Lazlo Ladany, op. cit.
[6] [51] Lost Chance in China. The World War II despatches of John S. Service, Vintage Books, 1974.
[7] [52] Report on an enquiry into the Hunan peasant movement, Mao Zedong, March 1927.
[8] [53] The urgent tasks after the establishment of the co-operation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Mao Zedong, September 1937.
[9] [54] Present tactical problems in the anti-Japanese United Front, Mao Zedong, May 1940.
[10] [55] See the first article in this series, in International Review no.81.
[11] [56] Analysis of classes in Chinese society, March 1926.
[12] [57] The Chinese revolution and the CPC, Mao Zedong, December 1939.
[13] [58] The role of the CPC in the national war, Mao Zedong, October 1938.
[14] [59] Fascism, democracy, and the Popular Front, report presented by Georgi Dimitrov to the 7th Congress of the Comintern, August 1935.
[15] [60] Quoted by Lenin in The downfall of the Second International, September 1915.
[16] [61] The role of the CPC in the national war, op. cit.
[17] [62] The Chinese revolution and the CPC, op. cit.
The summit of European Union heads of state in May was intended as a solemn finale to the introduction of the common currency, the Euro. The meeting, held in Brussels, was supposed to celebrate their victory over "nationalist egotism". The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, declared beforehand that the new currency was above all the incarnation of peace in Europe for the next century, and in particular an end to the historic and bloody rivalry between Germany and France.
But facts are stubborn, and it is often when least expected that they blow to pieces the fraudulent ideas that the ruling classes invent to deceive both themselves, but especially those that they exploit. Instead of an expression of mutual confidence and peaceful collaboration between European states, the Brussels conference quickly turned into a fisticuffs over an apparently secondary question: when should the Frenchman Trichet replace the Dutch Duisenberg as President of the new European Central Bank (ECB) - an arrangement which itself violates the solemnly adopted treaty on the Euro.
When the dust settled, and the French President Chirac had finished boasting how he had imposed Duisenberg's replacement by Trichet after four years, and the German Finance Minister Weigel was no longer contradicting him with the assertion that Bonn's Dutch favourite could perfectly well stay for eight years "if he wanted", an embarrassed silence fell over the European capitals. How to explain this sudden relapse into a supposedly anachronistic spirit of national "prestige"? Why had Chirac endangered the common currency's introductory ceremony for no other reason than to see one of his compatriots at the head of the ECB, especially when the man in question has the reputation of being a clone of Bundesbank President Tietmeyer? Why did Kohl hesitate for so long to make the slightest concession on such an issue? Why was he so strongly criticised in Germany for the compromise that he eventually accepted? And why did the other nations resign themselves to such a dispute, despite their unanimous support for Duisenberg? After much head-scratching, the bourgeois press came up with an explanation, or rather with several explanations. In France, the Brussels argument was put down to German arrogance; in Germany, to inflated French national pride; in Britain, to the madness of the continentals who are unable to stick to their good old traditional currency.
Are not these excuses and "explanations" a proof in themselves that a real conflict of national interest was played out in Brussels? Far from limiting economic competition between the participating national capitals, the introduction of a single currency means an intensification of these rivalries. More especially, the conflict between the "good friends" Kohl and Chirac expresses the French bourgeoisie's disquiet at the growing economic and political strength, and aggressiveness, of its German crony. Despite all Kohl's diplomatic caution, Germany's economic and imperialist rise cannot but alarm its French "partner". Foreseeing his own coming retirement, Kohl has indeed left the following message to his successors: "The expression "German leadership" should be avoided, since it could lead to accusations that we are trying to win hegemony in Europe"[1].
Increasing aggressiveness of German capitalism
In fact, May 1998 saw two important developments which concretise Germany's intention to impose economic measures that will ensure the dominant position of German capitalism at the expense of its weaker rivals.
The first is the organisation of the European currency. The Euro was originally a French project, forced on Kohl by Mitterrand in exchange for French consent to German unification. At the time, the French bourgeoisie rightly feared that the Frankfurt Bundesbank would use the leading role of the Mark and a policy of high interest rates to force the whole of Europe into financing German re-unification. But once Germany threw its whole weight into the project (without which the Euro would never have existed), what finally emerged was a European currency corresponding to German, not French, notions and interests.
After the Brussels summit, the German bourgeoisie's view was expressed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "From the independence of the Central Bank and its establishment in Frankfurt, to the stability pact to support the Central Bank and the rejection of an "economic government" as a political counterweight to the ECB, in the final analysis France has been unable to impose a single one of its demands. Even the name of the single currency laid down in the Maastricht Treaty, the Ecu - which is a reminder of a historic French currency - has been abandoned on the road to Brussels in favour of the more neutral "Euro" (_) As far as its political prestige and ideas are concerned, France has come away empty-handed. Chirac played rough in Brussels in order to wipe out this impression, at least partially" (5th May, 1998).
The second important expression of Germany's aggressive economic expansion lies in the international buy-out operations being conducted by the main German motor manufacturers. The merger of Daimler-Benz and Chrysler will create the world's third largest car builder. Unable to survive as the third US manufacturer behind General Motors and Ford, and having already been saved once from bankruptcy by the American state, Chrysler had no choice but to accept the German offer, despite the fact that this gives access to its shares in NASA projects and the US armaments industry to Daimler, which is already Germany's biggest armaments and aeronautics manufacturer. The ink on this agreement was barely dry when Daimler announced its intention to buy Nippon Trucks. Although Daimler is the world's largest truck manufacturer, it still only holds 8 % of the important Asian market. Here again, the German bourgeoisie is in a position of strength. Although Japan knows full well that the Stuttgart giant intends to use this merger to increase its market share to 25 % - at Japan's expense' - it can hardly prevent the agreement, since the once proud Nippon Trucks is facing bankruptcy.
To complete the tableau, there is the dispute over the purchase of the British Rolls-Royce from Vickers, currently being fought out between two German companies, which in the light of history places the shareholders before an unpleasant choice. A sale to BMW would almost be a sacrilege to the memory of the Battle of Britain, where the Royal Air Force equipped with Rolls-Royce engines fought off a Luftwaffe largely supplied by the same BMW. "The idea of BMW owning Rolls-Royce breaks my heart" declared one venerable gentleman to the German press. Unfortunately, the only other choice is Volkswagen, a company created by the Nazis and which would oblige Her Majesty the Queen to get around in a "People's Car".
This is only the beginning of a process which will not be limited to the car industry. The French government and the European Commission in Brussels have just concluded an agreement on a plan to save the Credit Lyonnais, one of the main French banks. One of the plan's principal objectives is to prevent the most profitable parts of the Credit Lyonnais from falling into German hands[2].
During the Cold War, Germany, a major capitalist nation, was divided, militarily occupied, and deprived of complete sovereignty. It was politically unable to develop an international presence for its banks and businesses to match its industrial strength. When the world order born at Yalta collapsed in 1989, the German bourgeoisie no longer had any reason to tolerate this state of affairs, at least as far as business was concerned. Recent events have confirmed that the thoroughly democratic successors to Alfred Krupp and Adolf Hitler are just as capable when it comes to pushing their rivals out of the way. Scarcely surprising that their capitalist "friends" and "partners" should be so irritated.
The Euro: a tool against "look after number one"
Kohl understood earlier than his German colleagues that the disintegration of the imperialist blocs, but also the anxiety aroused by the re-unification of Germany, were likely to provoke a new wave of protectionism and an economic "look after number one" - something that until then had been restrained by the discipline of the American bloc. It was clear that Germany, as Europe's greatest industrial power and champion exporter, risked being the main victim of any such development.
The majority of the German bourgeoisie - so proud of the Deutschmark and so scared of inflation[3] - was brought round to Kohl's position by the European monetary crisis of 1993 (which had begun a year before when Britain and Italy left the European Monetary System). The crisis was provoked by substantial international currency speculation - itself an expression of capitalism's chronic and general crisis of overproduction. It almost led to an explosion of the EMS set up by Helmut Schmidt and Giscard d'Estaing to prevent the uncontrolled and unforeseen currency fluctuations which threatened to paralyse intra-European trade. As the crisis advanced, the inadequacy of the system was revealed. Moreover, in j 993 the French bourgeoisie - which often demonstrates more determination than good sense - suggested replacing the German Mark with the French Franc as Europe's reference currency. This proposal was certainly unrealistic, and was unanimously rejected by France's "partners", notably Holland (Duisenberg's country'). All this convinced the German ruling class that there was a danger of an uncontrolled free for all. This is why they rallied round their Chancellor. The common currency was thus intended both to put an end to monetary fluctuations between the various European "trading partners", and to counter a potential tendency towards protectionism and the collapse of world trade. After all, Europe is, with the United States, the main centre of world commerce. Unlike America, however, Europe is divided into a multitude of national capitals. As such, it is a potential weak link in the chain of world trade. Today, even the most convinced advocates of a "United Europe", like the German CDU and SPD, are convinced that there is no alternative to a "Europe of nations"[4]. However, they can set up the Euro in order to limit the risks at the level of world trade. This is why the Euro is supported by most fractions of the bourgeoisie, not just in Europe but also in the USA.
But if there is such widespread support for the Euro, how does this express a sharpening of capitalist competition? What is the particular interest of the German bourgeoisie? Why is the German version of the Euro an expression of aggressive self-defence against its rivals? In other words, why does it annoy Chirac so?
Euro: the strong impose their rules on the weak
The conflict in Europe over the Euro
It is true that the common European currency serves the interests of all its participants. But this is only a part of the reality. For the weaker countries, the protection offered by the Euro is much like the generous protection that the Mafia offers its victims. Confronted with Germany's superior exporting power, most of its European rivals have, during the last thirty years, had regular recourse to currency devaluations (eg Italy, Sweden, Britain), or at least to a policy of economic stimulation and a weak currency (France). In Paris, the conception of fiscal policy "at the service of economic expansion" has been no less a state doctrine than the Bundesbank's "monetarism". At the beginning of the 1930s, such policies, and abrupt devaluations in particular, were amongst the European nations' favourite weapons at Germany's expense. Under the new Germanic law of the Euro, this will no longer be possible. At the heart of this system is a principle that France finds it hard to swallow: the principle of independence for the ECB, which in fact means its dependence on the policy and support of Germany.
The weaker countries - Italy is a classic example - have slight means to maintain a minimum of stability outside the Euro, without the access to the capital, currency markets, and competitive interest rates that the system offers. Britain and Sweden are relatively more competitive that Italy, and less dependent on the German economy than France and Holland, and will be able to survive longer outside the Euro. But within its protective walls, the others will have lost some of their weapons against Germany.
Germany could compromise on the issue of Trichet and the presidency of the ECB. But it has accepted no compromise on the organisation of the Euro, any more than it has on the international expansion of its banks and industries. It could not be otherwise. Germany is the motor of the European economy. But after thirty years of open crisis, even Germany is a "sick man" of the world economy. It is enormously dependent on the world market[5]. The number of unemployed is approaching that of the 1930s. And it has a further, extremely expensive, problem to resolve: the economic and social costs of reunification. It is decadent capitalism's irreversible crisis of overproduction which has shaken the German economy to its core, forcing it, like the other capitalist giants, to fight mercilessly for its own survival.
Kr, 25th May 1998
[1] Declaration by Kohl at a meeting of the Bundestag parliamentary commission on the finances and business of the European Union, 21/4/98.
[2] It is worth noting the important role played by the highly respectable Trichet in the Credit Lyonnais affair: that of hiding the bank's insolvency from the public for several years.
[3] The German bourgeoisie has not forgotten 1929, but nor has it forgotten 1923 when the Reichsmark was not worth the paper it was printed on.
[4] The world's division into competing national capitals can only be overcome by the world proletarian revolution.
[5] According to the OECD, Germany's exports were $511 billion in 1997, second only to the USA with $688 billion, and well ahead of Japan with $421 billion.
In parallel with our series 'Communism is not a nice idea, it is on the agenda of history', we are publishing a number of classic documents of the revolutionary movement of the 20th century relating to the means and goals of the proletarian revolution. We begin with the platform of the Communist International adopted by its founding Congress in March 1919 as the basis for adherence of all genuine revolutionary groups and currents to the new world party.
1919 was the zenith of the great revolutionary wave which came in the wake of the 1914-18 imperialist war. The October insurrection in Russia, the seizure of power by the workers' soviets under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, had ignited a flame which threatened to engulf the capitalist world. Between 1918 and 1920, Germany, at the very heart of world capitalism, experienced a series of revolutionary uprisings; mass strikes broke out in key industrial cities from Italy to Scotland and from the USA to Argentina; at the very time the CI was holding its Congress, news came through of the proclamation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
But at the same time, events just prior to the Congress had demonstrated the grave consequences that would ensue if this growing mass movement was not guided by a programmatically clear and internationally centralised communist party. The defeat of the Berlin uprising in January 1919, which had led to the assassination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, was to no small extent the result of the inability of the fledgling KPD to lead the workers away from the traps of the bourgeoisie so that they could preserve their forces for a more propitious moment. The formation of the CI thus corresponded to the most urgent needs of the class struggle. It was the fulfilment of the work of the revolutionary left ever since the collapse of the Second International in 1914.
But far from being a leadership imposed from without, the CI was itself an organic product of the proletarian movement, and the clarity of its programmatic positions in 1919 reflects its close connection to the most profound forces at work in the revolutionary wave. By the same token, the later opportunist degeneration of the CI was intimately linked to the decline of this wave and the isolation of the Russian bastion.
The platform was drafted by Bukharin and the KPD delegate Eberlein, both of whom also had the responsibility of summarising its main points before the Congress. It is worth quoting from Bukharin's opening remarks because they show how the platform incorporated some of the most important theoretical advances made by the communist movement as it emerged from the wreckage of social democracy:
"First comes the theoretical introduction. It gives a characterisation of the whole present epoch from a particular point of view, namely, one that takes the bankruptcy of the capitalist system as its starting point. Previously, when introductions of this sort were composed, they simply gave a general description of the capitalist system. In the most recent period, in my opinion, this has become insufficient. Here we must not only give a general characteristic of the capitalist and imperialist system, but also show the process of disintegration and collapse of this system. That is the first aspect of the question. The second is that we must examine the capitalist system not just in its abstract form, but concretely in its character as world capitalism, and we should examine it as something that is a single entity, as an economic whole. And if we look at this world capitalist economic system from the standpoint of its collapse, then we have to ask ourselves: how was this collapse possible? And that is why we must analyse, first of all, the contradictions of the capitalist system" (proceedings of the First Congress of the CI, Report on the Platform).
Bukharin also goes on to point out that in this epoch of disintegration, "the previous form of capital - dispersed, unorganised capital - has almost disappeared. This process had already begun before the war and strengthened while it was underway. The war played a great organising role. Under its pressure, finance capitalism was transformed into an even higher form, the form of state capitalism".
From the beginning, then, the CI was founded on the understanding that by the very fact of developing into a world economy, capitalism had also reached its historic limits, had entered its epoch of decline. This is a striking rebuff to all the modernisers who think that "globalisation" is something new and, furthermore, has conferred a new lease of life on capitalism I But it is equally a sharp reminder to those revolutionaries (particularly in the Bordigist tradition) who profess descent from the programmatic positions of the CI and yet reject the notion of capitalist decadence as a cornerstone of revolutionary politics today. As for the notion of state capitalism, which Bukharin played a key role in elaborating, we shall have occasion to return to its significance in the context of our series on communism. Suffice it to say here that the International considered it important enough to include as a fundamental feature of the new epoch.
Following the general introduction, the platform focuses on the central issues of the proletarian revolution: first and foremost, the conquest of political power by the working class; secondly, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the economic transformation of society. On the first point, the platform affirms the essential lessons of the October revolution: the necessity for the destruction of the old bourgeois state power and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat, organised through the council or soviet system. Here the platform was supplemented by the Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, drafted by Lenin and adopted by the same Congress.
The break from social democracy with its fetishism of democracy in general and bourgeois parliaments in particular was axed around this point; and the demand for the transfer of power to the workers' councils was the simple but irreplaceable rallying cry of the whole international movement.
The section on the economic measures is necessarily general; only in Russia had this become a concrete question (and, furthermore, one that could not be solved in Russia alone). It puts forward the bare essentials of the transition towards a communist society: the expropriation of the great private and state enterprises; the first steps towards the socialisation of distribution in place of the market; the gradual integration of small producers into social production. The series on communism will examine some of the difficulties and misconceptions that hampered the revolutionary movement of the day when it came to these problems. But the measures put forward in the CI platform were nevertheless an adequate point of departure, and their weaknesses could have been overcome given the successful development of the world revolution.
"If we were writing only for Russians, we would take up the role of the trade unions in the process of revolutionary reconstruction. However, judging by the experience of the German communists, this is impossible, for the comrades there tell us that the position occupied by their trade unions is the complete opposite of the one taken by ours. In our country, the trade unions play a vital role in the organisation of useful work and are a pillar of Soviet power. In Germany, however, it is just the opposite. This was brought about, evidently, by the fact that the German trade unions were in the hands of the Yellow Socialists - Legien and Company. Their activity was directed against the interests of the German proletariat. That continues even today, and the proletariat is already dissolving these old trade unions. In place of them, new organisations have arisen in Germany - the factory and plant committees, which are trying to take production into their own hands. The trade unions there no longer play any kind of positive role. We cannot work out any kind of concrete line on this, and therefore we say only that, in general terms, to manage the enterprises, institutions must be created that the proletariat can rely on, that are closely bound to production and embedded in the production process ...."
We can take issue with some of Bukharin's formulations here (particularly on the role of the unions in Russia) but the passage is still a striking indication of the receptive attitude of the International at that moment. Faced with the new conditions imposed by the decadence of capitalism, the CI expresses a concern to give expression to the new methods of proletarian struggle appropriate to these conditions; and this is clear proof that its platform was a product of the high tide of the worldwide revolutionary movement, and remains an essential reference for revolutionaries today.
The contradictions of the world capitalist system, formerly hidden deep within it, have erupted with colossal force in a gigantic explosion: the great imperialist World War.
Capitalism sought to overcome its own anarchy by organising production. Mighty capitalist associations formed, such as syndicates, cartels, and trusts, replacing the numerous, competing entrepreneurs. Bank capital merged with industrial capital. The finance capitalist oligarchy came to dominate all of economic life; it used its organisation, based on this power, to achieve exclusive supremacy. Monopoly took the place of free competition. Capitalists in association replaced the individual capitalist; organisation replaced insane anarchy.
Capitalism also tried to overcome its contradictory social structure. Bourgeois society is a class society. In the largest "civilised" nations, capital wanted to conceal its social contradictions. It bribed its wage slaves at the expense of the plundered colonial peoples, thereby forging common interests between exploiter and exploited with respect to the oppressed colonies - the yellow, black, and red colonial peoples - and shackling the European and American working class to the imperialist "fatherland".
But continuous bribery, the very technique that made the working class patriotic and enslaved it psychologically, was transformed by the war into its opposite. Physical annihilation and utter enslavement of the proletariat; enormous hardship, suffering, and degradation; worldwide famine - these were the final pay-off for the "civil peace". This "peace" was shattered. The imperialist war was turned into a civil war.
A new epoch is born: The epoch of capitalism's decay, its internal disintegration; the epoch of the proletarian, communist revolution.
The imperialist system is collapsing. Turmoil in the colonies and in the newly independent small nations; proletarian revolts and victorious proletarian revolutions in some countries; disintegration of the imperialist armies; utter incapacity of the ruling classes to guide the destinies of nations any further - that is the true picture of conditions around the world today.
Against this, world capital is arming itself for the final battle.
Using the "League of Nations" and pacifist phrase-mongering to conceal its intentions, it is making a last attempt to paste the crumbling pieces of the capitalist system back together and rally its forces against the ever-growing proletarian revolution.
The proletariat must answer this outrageous new conspiracy of the capitalist class by conquering political power, directing that .power against the class enemy, and wielding it as a lever of economic transformation. The final victory of the world proletariat will mean the beginning of the real history of liberated humanity.
The conquest of political power by the proletariat means destroying the political power of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie's mightiest instrument of power is the bourgeois state apparatus with its capitalist army led by officers of the bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy, its police and security forces, its judges and jailers, preachers, government bureaucrats, and so forth. The conquest of political power does not mean merely a change of personnel in the ministries. Instead, it means destroying the enemy's state apparatus; seizing real power; disarming the bourgeoisie, the counter-revolutionary officers, and the White Guards. It means arming the proletariat, the revolutionary soldiers, and the workers' Red Guard; removing all bourgeois judges and organising proletarian justice; abolishing the rule of reactionary government officials; and creating new organs of proletarian administration. The key to victory for the proletariat lies in organising its power and disorganising that of the enemy; it entails smashing the bourgeois state apparatus while constructing a proletarian one. Only after the proletariat has achieved victory and broken the resistance of the bourgeoisie can it make its former enemies useful to the new order, placing them under its control and gradually drawing them into the work of communist construction.
The proletarian state is an apparatus of repression like every other, but it is wielded against the enemies of the working class. Its purpose is to break and eliminate the resistance of the exploiters, who use every means in a desperate struggle to drown the revolution in blood. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which openly gives the working class the favoured position in society, is at the same time a provisional institution. As the bourgeoisie's resistance is broken, and it is expropriated and gradually transformed into a part of the workforce, the proletarian dictatorship wanes, the state withers away, and with it, social classes themselves.
So-called democracy, that is, bourgeois democracy, is nothing but a veiled dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The highly touted general "will of the people" is no more real than national unity. In reality, classes confront each other with antagonistic, irreconcilable wills. Bur since the bourgeoisie is a small minority, it needs this fiction, this illusion of a national "will of the people", these high-sounding words, to consolidate its rule over the working class and impose its own class will on the proletariat. By contrast the proletariat, the overwhelming majority of the population, openly wields the class power of its mass organisations, its councils, in order to abolish the privileges of the bourgeoisie and to safeguard the transition to a classless, communist society.
Bourgeois democracy puts the primary emphasis on purely formal declarations of rights and freedoms, which are beyond the reach of working people, the proletarians and semi-proletarians, who lack the material resources to exercise them. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie uses its material resources, through its press and organisations, to deceive and betray the people. In contrast, the council system, the new type of state power, assigns the highest priority to enabling the proletariat to exercise its rights and freedom.
The power of the councils gives the best palaces, buildings, printing plants, paper stocks, and so forth to the people for their newspapers, meetings, and organisations. Only thus does real proletarian democracy even become possible.
Bourgeois democracy, with its parliamentary system, only pretends to give the masses a voice in running the government. In reality the masses and their organisations are completely excluded from real power or participation in state administration. Under the council system the mass organisations govern, and through them the masses themselves, since the councils involve a constantly increasing number of workers in administering the state. Only in this way is the entire working population gradually integrated into actually governing. Therefore the council system rests on the mass organisations of the proletariat: the councils themselves, the revolutionary trade unions, the co-operatives, and so on.
Bourgeois democracy and the parliamentary system widen the .gulf between the masses and the state by separating legislative and executive power and by means of parliamentary elections without recall. Under the council system on the other hand, right of recall, the unification of legislative and executive powers, and the character of the councils as working bodies all serve to connect the masses with the administrative organs of government. This bond is further strengthened by the organisation of elections in the council system on the basis of production units, not artificial geographic districts.
Thus, the council system puts into practice true proletarian democracy, democracy by and for the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie. This system favours the industrial proletariat as the best organised, most politically mature, and leading class, under whose hegemony the semi-proletarians and small farmers in the countryside will make gradual progress. The industrial proletariat must utilise its temporary advantages to tear the poorer petty-bourgeois masses in the countryside away from the influence of the large peasants and the bourgeoisie and to organise and educate them as fellow workers in the construction of communism.
The breakdown of capitalist order and work discipline make 'it impossible to return to production on the old basis under the existing relationship of class forces. Even when they are successful, workers' struggles for higher wages fail to bring the desired improvements in the standard of living, as soaring prices on all basic necessities wipe out every gain. The workers' living conditions can he raised only when the proletariat itself, and not the bourgeoisie, controls production. The powerful struggles for higher wages by workers in every country, through their elemental driving force and tendency to become generalised, clearly express the desperate situation workers face. These battles make it impossible for capitalist production to continue. The resistance of the bourgeoisie prolongs the old society's death agony and threatens to destroy economic life completely. In order to break this resistance and to expand the productive forces of the economy as rapidly as possible, the proletarian dictatorship must expropriate the big bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy and transform the means of production and distribution into collective property of the proletarian state.
Communism is now being born amid the rubble of capitalism; history leaves humanity no other way out. The utopian slogan of reconstructing the capitalist economy, advanced by the opportunists as a way to put off socialisation, only prolongs the process of disintegration and creates the danger of complete collapse. Communist revolution, on the other hand, is the best and the only means by which society can preserve its most important productive force, the proletariat, and thereby save itself.
The proletarian dictatorship most definitely will not divide up the means of production and distribution; on the contrary, its purpose is to subordinate production to a centralised plan.
The first steps toward socialising the whole economy include: socialisation of the system of big banks, which now direct production; take-over by the proletarian state power of all of the agencies for economic control by the capitalist state; seizure of all municipal enterprises; socialisation of branches of production dominated by cartels and trusts, as well as those where seizure is practical because capital has been concentrated and centralised; nationalisation of agricultural estates and their transformation into socially operated agricultural enterprises.
As far as the small enterprises are concerned, the proletariat must gradually combine them, depending on their size.
It must be made very clear here that small property owners will not be expropriated under any circumstances, nor will proprietors who do not exploit wage labour be subject to any coercive measures. This layer will gradually be drawn into socialist organisation by example and experience, which will show it the advantages of the new system. This system will free the small farmers and the urban petty bourgeoisie from the economic yoke of usury capital and the landed aristocracy, and from the burden of taxation (in particular by cancelling all government debts).
The proletarian dictatorship will be able to accomplish its economic task only to the degree that the proletariat can establish centralised agencies to administer production and introduce workers' management. To that end it will have to use the mass organisations that are most closely linked to the production process.
In the sphere of distribution, the proletarian dictatorship must replace the market with the equitable distribution of products. To accomplish this the following measures are in order: socialisation of wholesale firms; takeover by the proletariat of all distribution agencies of the bourgeois state and the municipalities; supervision of the large consumer cooperatives, which will continue to play a major economic role during the transitional period; and gradual centralisation of all these institutions and their transformation into a single system distributing goods in a rational manner.
In the sphere of distribution as in that of production, all qualified technicians and specialists should be utilised, provided their political resistance has been broken and they are capable of serving the new system of production rather than capital.
The proletariat will not oppress them; for the first time it will give them the opportunity to develop their creative abilities to the utmost. Capitalism created a division between manual and intellectual labour; the proletarian dictatorship, by contrast, will foster their co-operation and so unite science and labour.
Along with the expropriation of the factories, mines, estates, and so on, the proletariat must also do away with exploitation of the population by capitalist landlords. It must place the large buildings in the hands of the local workers' councils and resettle workers in the bourgeoisie's houses, and so forth.
During this time of great upheaval, the council power will have to steadily centralise the entire administrative apparatus, while also involving ever broader layers of the working population in direct participation in government.
The revolutionary epoch requires the proletariat to use methods of struggle that bring all of its strength to bear. That means mass action and its logical consequence, direct confrontations with the bourgeois slate machinery in open battle. All other methods, such as revolutionary utilisation of bourgeois parliament, must be subordinated to this goal.
In order for this struggle to be successful, it will not be enough to split with the outright lackeys of capital and the hangmen of the communist revolution, the role played by the right-wing Social Democrats. It is also necessary to break with the centre (the Kautskyites), who abandon the proletariat in its hour of greatest need and flirt with its sworn enemies.
On the other hand, a bloc is needed with the forces in the revolutionary workers' movement who, although not previously part of the Socialist party, now for the most part support the proletarian dictatorship in the form of council power. Certain forces in the syndicalist movement are an example of this.
The revolutionary movement's growth in all countries; the danger of its being strangled by the league of capitalist states; the attempts of social-traitor parties to unify their forces by founding the Yellow "International" in Bern, the better to serve Wilson's League of nations; and moreover, the absolute necessity of co-ordinating proletarian actions: all these considerations make it essential to establish a truly revolutionary and proletarian Communist International.
The International, which puts the interests of the international revolution ahead of so-called national interests, will make mutual aid among the proletariat of different countries a reality. Without economic and other forms of mutual assistance, the proletariat cannot organise the new society. By the same token, in contrast to the Yellow social-patriotic International, international proletarian communism will support exploited colonial peoples in their struggles against imperialism in order to hasten the ultimate downfall of the world imperialist system.
At the beginning of the World War, the capitalist criminals claimed that they were only defending the common fatherland. But the bloody deeds of German imperialism in Russia, the Ukraine, and Finland soon showed its actual predatory nature. Now the Entente countries are being exposed, even before the backward layers of the population, as international bandits and murderers of the proletariat. In concert with the German bourgeoisie and social patriots, and mouthing hypocritical rhetoric about peace, they are strangling the proletarian revolution in Europe with their war machines and with brutalised, barbaric colonial troops. The White Terror of the bourgeois cannibals defies description. The working class's victims are without number. It has lost its best Liebknecht and Luxemburg.
The proletariat must defend itself against this terror no matter what the cost. The Communist International summons the whole world proletariat to this final battle. Weapon against weapon! Power against power'!
Down with capital's imperialist conspiracy!
Long live the international republic of proletarian councils!
1) Throughout its history, the workers’ movement has had to deal with the penetration into its ranks of alien ideologies, coming either from the ruling class or from the petty bourgeoisie. This penetration has taken a number of forms within working class organisations. Among the most widespread and best-known we can point to:
2)
Sectarianism is the typical expression of a petty bourgeois conception of
organisation. It reflects the petty-bourgeois mindset of wanting to be king of
your own little castle, and it manifests itself in the tendency to place the
particular interests and concepts of one organisation above those of the
movement as a whole. In the sectarian vision, the organisation is “all alone in
the world” and it displays a regal disdain towards all the other organisations
that belong to the proletarian camp, seen as “rivals” or even “enemies”. As it
feels threatened by the latter, the sectarian organisation in general refuses
to engage in debate and polemic with them. It prefers to take refuge in its
“splendid isolation”, acting as though the others did not exist, or else
obstinately putting forward what distinguishes itself from the others without
taking into account what it has in common with them.
3)
Individualism can also derive from petty bourgeois influences, or from directly
bourgeois ones. From the ruling class it takes up the official ideology which
sees individuals as the subject of history, which glorifies the “self-made man”
and justifies the “struggle of each against all”. However, it is above all
through the vehicle of the petty bourgeoisie that it penetrates into the organisations
of the proletariat, particularly through newly proletarianised elements coming
from strata like the peasantry and the artisans (this was notably the case last
century) or from the intellectual and student milieu (this has been especially
true since the historic resurgence of the working class at the end of the 60s).
Individualism expresses itself mainly through the tendency :
4)
Opportunism, which has historically
constituted the most serious danger for the organisations of the proletariat,
is another expression of the penetration of petty bourgeois ideology. One of
its motor-forces is impatience, which expresses the viewpoint of a social
stratum doomed to impotence, having no future on the scale of history. Its
other motor is the tendency to try to conciliate between the interests and
positions of the two major classes in society, the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie. From this starting point, opportunism distinguishes itself by the
fact that it tends to sacrifice the general and historic interests of the
proletariat to the illusion of immediate and circumstantial “successes”. But
since for the working class there is no opposition between its struggle inside
capitalism and its historical combat for the abolition of the system, the
politics of opportunism in the end lead to sacrificing the immediate interests
of the proletariat as well, in particular by
pushing the class to compromise with the interests and positions of the
bourgeoisie. In the final analysis, at crucial historical moments, such as imperialist war and
proletarian revolution, opportunist political currents are led to join the
enemy camp, as was the case with the majority of the Socialist parties during
World War I, and with the Communist parties on the eve of World War II.
5)
Adventurism (or putschism[1] [68])
presents itself as the opposite of opportunism. Under cover of “intransigence”
and “radicalism” it declares itself to
be ready at all times to launch the attack on the bourgeoisie, to enter into
the “decisive” combat when the
conditions for such a combat don’t yet exist for the proletariat. And in so
doing it does not hesitate to qualify as opportunist and conciliationist, even
as “traitorous”, the authentically proletarian and marxist current which is
concerned to prevent the working class from being drawn into a struggle which
would be lost in advance. In reality, deriving from the same source as
opportunism - petty bourgeois impatience - it has frequently converged with the
latter. History is rich in examples in which opportunist currents have
supported putschist currents or have been converted to putschist radicalism.
Thus, at the beginning of the century, the right wing of German Social
Democracy, against the opposition of its left wing represented notably by Rosa
Luxemburg, gave its support to the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were
adepts of terrorism. Similarly, in January 1919, when even Rosa Luxemburg had
pronounced against an insurrection by the Berlin workers, following the
provocation by the Social Democratic government, the Independents, who had only
just left this government themselves, rushed into an insurrection which ended
in a massacre of thousands of workers, including the main communist leaders.
6)
The combat against the penetration of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology
into the organisations of the class, as well as against its different
manifestations, is a permanent responsibility for revolutionaries. In fact, it
can even be said that it is the main combat which the authentically proletarian
and revolutionary currents have had to wage within the organisations of the
class, to the extent that it is much more difficult than the direct fight
against the declared and official forces of the bourgeoisie. The fight against
sects and sectarianism was one of the first waged by Marx and Engels,
particularly within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA).
Similarly, the fight against individualism, notably in the form of anarchism,
mobilised not only the latter but also the marxists of the Second International
(particularly Luxemburg and Lenin). The combat against opportunism has
certainly been the most constant and systematic carried out by the
revolutionary current since its origins:
The
fight against putschism has not been as constant a necessity as the struggle
against opportunism. However, it has been waged since the first steps of the
workers’ movement (against the immediatist Willich-Schapper tendency in the
Communist League, against the Bakuninist adventures over the Lyon “Commune” in
1870 and the civil war in Spain in 1873). Similarly, it was particularly
important during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23: in particular, it was
largely the Bolsheviks’ ability to carry out this struggle in July 1917 that
allowed the October revolution to take place.
7)
The preceding examples show that the impact of these different manifestations
of the penetration of alien ideologies depends closely on:
For
example, one of the most important expressions of the penetration of petty
bourgeois ideology, and the one most explicitly fought against, opportunism,
even if it is a permanent feature in the history of the workers’ movement,
found its terrain par excellence in the parties of the Second International,
during a period:
Similarly,
the penetration of opportunism into the parties of the Third International was
strongly determined by the ebb in the revolutionary wave. This encouraged the
idea that it was possible to gain an audience in the working masses by making
concessions to their illusions on questions like parliamentarism, trade
unionism or the nature of the “Socialist” parties.
The importance of the historic
moment to the different type of penetration of alien ideologies into the class
is revealed even more clearly when it comes to sectarianism. This was
particularly significant at the very beginning of the workers’ movement, when
the proletariat was only just emerging from the artisans and journeymen’s
societies with their rituals and trade secrets. Again, it went through a major
revival in the depth of the counter-revolution with the Bordigist current,
which saw withdrawing into its shell as an (obviously false) way of protecting
itself from the threat of opportunism.
8)
The phenomenon of political parasitism, which to a large extent is also the
result of the penetration of alien ideologies into the working class, has not
been accorded, within the history of the workers’ movement, the same amount of
attention as other phenomena such as opportunism. This has been the case
because parasitism has only significantly affected proletarian organisations in
very specific moments in history. Opportunism, for example, constitutes a
constant menace for proletarian organisations and it expresses itself above all
when the latter are going through their greatest phases of development. By
contrast, parasitism does not basically manifest itself at the time of the most
important movements of the class. On the contrary, it is in a period of
immaturity of the movement when the organisations of the class still have a
weak impact and not very strong traditions that parasitism finds its most
fertile soil. This is linked to the very nature of parasitism, which, to be
effective, has to relate to elements looking for class positions but who find
it hard to distinguish real revolutionary organisations from currents whose
only reason for existing is to live at the expense of the former, to sabotage
their activities, indeed to destroy them. At the same time, the phenomenon of
parasitism, again by its nature, does not appear at the very beginning of the
development of the organisations of the class but when they have already been
constituted and have proved that they really defend proletarian interests.
These are indeed the elements
which we find in the first historic manifestation of political parasitism, the
Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which sought to sabotage the combat of the IWA
and to destroy it.
9) It
was Marx and Engels who first identified the threat of parasitism to
proletarian organisations:
“It
is high time to put an end, once and for all, to the internal conflicts
provoked daily in our Association by the presence of this parasitic body.
These quarrels only serve to waste
energies which should be used to fight against the bourgeois regime. By
paralysing the activity of the International against the enemies of the working
class, the Alliance admirably serves the bourgeoisies and the governments" (Engels,
“The General Council to all the members of the International” - a warning
against Bakunin’s Alliance).
Thus
the notion of political parasitism is not at all an “ICC invention”. It was the
IWA which was the first to be confronted with this threat against the
proletarian movement, which it identified and fought. It was the IWA, beginning
with Marx and Engels, who already characterised the parasites as politicised
elements who, while claiming to adhere to the programme and organisations of
the proletariat, concentrated their efforts on the combat not against the
ruling class but against the organisations of the revolutionary class. The
essence of their activity was to denigrate and manoeuvre against the communist
camp, even if they claimed to belong to it and to serve it:[2] [69]
“For
the first time in the history of the class struggle, we are confronted with a
secret conspiracy at the heart of the working class whose aim is to destroy not
the existing regime of exploitation, but the very Association which represents
the bitterest enemy of this regime” (Engels, Report to the Hague Congress
on the Alliance).
10)
To the extent that the workers’ movement, in the shape of the IWA, possesses a
rich experience of struggle against parasitism, it is of the utmost importance,
if we are to face up to the present-day parasitic offensives and arm ourselves
against them, to recall the principal lessons of this past struggle. These
lessons concern a whole series of aspects:
In
fact, as we shall see, on all these aspects there is a striking similarity
between the situation facing the proletarian milieu today and the one
confronted by the IWA.
11)
Although it affected a working class which was still historically
inexperienced, parasitism only appears historically as an enemy of the workers’
movement when the latter has reached a certain level of maturity, having gone
beyond the infantile sectarian stage.
“The first phase of the struggle of the proletariat was characterised
by the movement of the sects. This was justified in a period in which the
proletariat had not developed sufficiently to act as a class” (Marx/Engels).
It was the appearance of marxism, the maturation of proletarian class
consciousness and the capacity of the class and its vanguard to organise the
struggle which set the workers’ movement on a healthy foundation:
“From this moment on, when the movement of the working class had
become a reality, the fantastic utopias were called upon to
disappear....because the place of these utopias had been taken by a clear
understanding of the historical conditions of this movement and because the
forces of a combat organisation of the working class were more and more being
gathered together” (Marx, first draft of The Civil War in France).
In fact, parasitism appeared
historically in response to the foundation of the First International, which
Engels described as “the means to progressively dissolve and absorb all the
different little sects” (Engels, letter to Kelly/Vischnevetsky).
In other words, the International
was the instrument that obliged the different components of the workers’
movement to embark upon a collective and public process of clarification, and
to submit to a unified, impersonal, proletarian organisational discipline. It
was in resistance to this international “dissolution and absorption” of all
these non-proletarian programmatic and organisational particularities and
autonomies that parasitism first declared war on the revolutionary movement:
“The sects, which at the beginning had been a lever to the movement,
became an obstacle to as soon as they were no longer on the order of the day;
they then became reactionary. The proof of this is the sects in France and
Britain, and recently the Lassalleans in Germany, where after years of
supporting the organisation of the proletariat, they have become mere
instruments of the police” (Marx/Engels, The so-called split in the
International).
12)
It is this dynamic framework of analysis developed by the First International
that explains why the present period, that of the 80s and above all of the 90s,
has witnessed a development of parasitism unprecedented since the time of the Alliance and the Lassallean current. For
today we are confronted with all sorts of informal regroupments, often acting
in the shadows, claiming to belong to the camp of the communist left, but
actually devoting their energies to fighting the existing marxist organisations
rather than the bourgeois regime. As in the time of Marx and Engels, the
function of this reactionary parasitic wave is to sabotage the development of
open debate and proletarian clarification, and to prevent the establishment of
rules of behaviour that link all members of the proletarian camp. The
existence:
are
among the most important elements presently provoking the hatred and offensive
of political parasitism.
As we
saw with the experience of the IWA, it is only in periods when the workers’
movement leaves behind a stage of basic immaturity and reaches a qualitatively
superior level, a specifically communist level, that parasitism becomes its
main opponent. In the current period, this immaturity is not the product of the
youth of the workers’ movement as a whole, as in the days of the IWA, but is
above all the result of the 50 years of counter-revolution which followed the
defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Today, it is this break in organic
continuity with the traditions of past generations of revolutionaries which
above all else explains why there is such a weight of petty bourgeois
anti-organisational reflexes and behaviour among so many of the elements who
lay claim to marxism and the communist left.
13)
There are a whole series of similarities between the conditions and
characteristics of the emergence of parasitism in the days of the IWA, and of
parasitism today. However, we should also note an important difference between
the two periods: last century, parasitism largely took the form of a structured
and centralised organisation within the class’ organisation, whereas
today its form is essentially that of little groups, or even of “non-organised”
elements (though the two often work together). This difference does not call
into question the fundamental identity of the parasitic phenomenon in the two
periods, which can be explained essentially by the following facts:
In this sense, it is important to say clearly that the present dispersal
of the proletarian political milieu, and any sectarian behaviour which prevents
or hinders an effort towards the regroupment of fraternal debate between its
different components, plays into the hands of parasitism.
14)
Marxism, following the experience of the IWA, has pointed out the differences
between parasitism and the other manifestations of the penetration of alien
ideologies into the organisations of the class. For example, opportunism, even
if it can initially manifest itself in an organisational form (as in the case
of the Mensheviks in 1903) fundamentally attacks the programme of the
proletarian organisation. Parasitism, on the other hand, if it is to carry out
its role, does not a priori attack the programme. It carries out its activity
essentially on the organisational terrain, even if, in order to “recruit”, it
is often led to put into question certain aspects of the programme. Thus at the
Basle Congress of 1869, we saw Bakunin launch his battle cry of “the abolition
of the right of inheritance”, because he knew that he could gather numerous
delegates around this empty, demagogic demand, given that many illusions
existed on this question in the International. But his real aim in doing so was
to overturn the General Council influenced by Marx, and which fought against
this demand, in order to constitute a General Council devoted to himself.[4] [71]
Because parasitism directly attacks the organisational structure of proletarian
formations, it represents, when historical conditions permit its appearance, a
much more immediate danger than opportunism. These two expressions of the
penetration of alien ideologies are a mortal danger for proletarian
organisations. Opportunism leads to their death as instruments of the working
class through their passage into the bourgeois camp, but to the extent that
opportunism above all attacks the programme, it only reaches this end through a
whole process in which the revolutionary current, the left, is able to develop
within the organisation a struggle for the defence of the programme.[5] [72]
By contrast, to the extent that it is the organisation itself, as a structure,
which is threatened by parasitism, this leaves the proletarian current much
less time to organise its defence. The example of the IWA is significant in
this respect: the whole of the struggle against the Alliance lasted no more
than 4 years, between 1868 when Bakunin entered the International and 1872 when
he was expelled at the Hague Congress. This simply underlines one thing: the
necessity for the proletarian current to attack parasitism head on, not to wait
until its already done its worst before launching the fight against it.
15)
As we have seen, it is important to distinguish parasitism from other
expressions of the class’ penetration by alien ideologies. However, one of
parasitism’s characteristics is that it uses these other expressions. This
springs from parasitism’s origins, which are also the result of the penetration
of alien influences, but also from the fact that its approach - whose aim, in
the final analysis, is the destruction of proletarian organisations - is not
encumbered with principles or scruples. As we have seen, within the IWA and the
workers’ movement of the day, the Alliance was distinguished by its ability to
make use of the remnants of sectarianism, to use an opportunist approach (on
the question of the right of inheritance, for example), and to launch into
completely adventurist undertakings (the Lyon “Commune”, and the civil war of
1873 in Spain). Similarly, it was strongly founded on the individualism of a
proletariat which had barely emerged from the artisan and peasant classes
(especially in Spain and the Swiss Jura). The same
characteristics are also to be found in parasitism today. We have already
mentioned the role of individualism in the formation of parasitism, but it is
worth pointing out that all the splits from the ICC which have since formed
parasitic groups (GCI, CBG, EFICC), have been based on a sectarian approach,
splitting prematurely and refusing to take the debate to a clear conclusion.
Similarly, opportunism was one of the marks of the GCI, which accused the ICC
(when still a “tendency” within the organisation) of not imposing sufficiently
rigorous conditions on new candidates, only to turn to the most unprincipled
recruitment, even modifying its programme to accommodate the fashionable
leftist mystifications of the day (such as “Third Worldism”). The same
opportunism was demonstrated by the CBG and the EFICC at the beginning of the
1990s, when they entered an incredible round of bargaining, in an attempt to
begin a process of regroupment. Finally, as far as adventurism-putschism is
concerned, it is remarkable that, even if we leave aside the GCI’s softness for
terrorism, all these groups have systematically plunged head first into the
traps that the bourgeoisie lays for the class, calling on the workers to
develop their struggle when the ground had been mined in advance by the ruling
class and the unions, particularly, for example, during the autumn of 1995 in
France.
16)
The experience of the IWA has revealed the difference that can exist between
parasitism and the swamp (even if the latter term was not used at the time).
Marxism defines the swamp as a political zone divided between the positions of
the working class, and those of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. Such
areas can emerge as a first step in a process of coming to consciousness by
sectors of the class, or of breaking from bourgeois positions. They can also
contain the remnants of currents which at a certain point did express a real
effort by the class to come to consciousness, but which have proved unable to
evolve with the new conditions and experience of the proletarian struggle. The
groups of the swamp can rarely maintain a stable existence. Torn between the
positions of the proletariat, and those of other classes, they either fully
adopt the positions of the proletariat, or go over to those of the bourgeoisie,
or end up split between the two. Such a process of decantation is generally
given greater impetus by the great events that confront the working class (in
the 20th century, these have been essentially
imperialist war and proletarian revolution), and the general direction of this
decantation is largely dependent on the evolution of the balance of forces
between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Faced with these currents, the attitude
adopted by the left of the workers’ movement has never been to consider these
groups completely lost for the workers’ movement, but to give an impetus to the
clarification within them, to allow the clearest elements to join the combat
while firmly denouncing those who go over to the enemy class.
17)
Within the IWA, there existed alongside the vanguard marxist current, currents
which we could define as belonging to the swamp. Such was the case, for
example, with certain Proudhonist currents which in the first part of the 19th century had formed a real
vanguard of the French proletariat. By the time of the struggle against the
parasitic Alliance, these groups were no longer a vanguard.
Nonetheless, despite their confusions they were capable of participating in the
struggle to save the International, notably during the Hague Congress. The
attitude of the marxist current towards them was quite different from its
attitude towards the Alliance. There was never any question of
excluding them. On the contrary, it was important to involve them in the
struggle against the Alliance, not only because of their weight
within the International, but also because the struggle itself was an
experience which could help these currents to greater clarity. In practice,
this combat confirmed the existence of a fundamental difference between the
swamp and parasitism: where as the former is traversed by a proletarian life
which allows its best elements to join the revolutionary current, the latter’s
fundamental vocation is to destroy the class organisation, and it is completely
unable to evolve in this direction, even if some individuals who have been
deceived by parasitism may be able to do so.
Today, it is equally important to distinguish between the currents of
the swamp[6] [73]
and the parasitic currents. The groups of the proletarian milieu must try to
help the former evolve towards marxist positions, and provoke a political
clarification within them. Towards the latter, they must exercise the greatest
severity, and denounce the sordid role that they play to the great profit of
the bourgeoisie. This is all the more important, in that the confusions of the
currents in the swamp are particularly vulnerable to the attacks of parasitism
(particularly given their reticence towards organisation, as in the case of
those that come from councilism).
18)
Every penetration of alien ideology into proletarian organisations plays the
game of the enemy class. This is particularly evident when it comes to
parasitism whose aim is the destruction of these organisations (whether this is
openly avowed or not). Here again, the IWA was particularly clear in affirming
that even if he was not an agent of the capitalist state, Bakunin served the
interests of the state far better than any agent could have done. This does not
at all signify that parasitism in itself represents a sector of the political
apparatus of the ruling class like the bourgeois currents of the extreme left
like Trotskyism today. In fact, in the eyes of Marx and Engels, even the best
known parasites of their day, Bakunin and Lassalle, were not seen as political
representatives of the bourgeois class. This analysis derived from their
understanding that parasitism as such does not constitute a fraction of the bourgeoisie,
having neither a programme or orientation for the national capital, nor a
particular place in the state organs for controlling the struggle of the
working class. This said, bearing in mind what a service parasitism renders to
the bourgeoisie, the latter accords it a particular solicitude. This expresses
itself in three main forms:
Here it should be noted that while the majority of parasitic currents
advertise a proletarian programme, the latter is not indispensable for an
organisation in carrying out the functions of political parasitism, which is
not distinguished by the positions it defends but by its destructive attitude
towards the real organisations of the working class.
19)
In the present period, when proletarian organisations don’t have the notoriety
that the IWA had in its day, official bourgeois propaganda does not on the
whole concern itself with providing support to the parasitic groups and
elements (which in any case would have the disadvantage of discrediting them in
front of the elements who are searching for communist positions). It should
however be noted that in the bourgeois campaigns around “negationism”
specifically aimed at the communist left, an important place is reserved for
groups like the ex-Mouvement Communiste, La Banquise, etc, who are presented as
representatives of the communist left, when in fact they have a strong
parasitic colouring.
On the other hand, it was indeed
a state agent, Chénier,[7] [74]
who played a key role in the formation within the ICC of a “secret tendency”
which, having provoked the loss of half the section in Britain, gave rise to one
of the most typical parasitic grouplets, the CBG. Neither should we exclude the
possibility that certain elements who were at the origin of the 1978 split from
the ICC which gave rise to the GCI were also agents of the state or leftist
organisations (as some of those who seceded at the time now think).
Finally, the efforts of bourgeois
currents to infiltrate the proletarian milieu and carry out a parasitic
function there can be seen clearly with the activities of the Spanish leftist
group Hilo Rojo (which for years had been trying to get into the good books of
the proletarian milieu before launching an all-out attack on it), or those of
the OCI (an Italian leftist group certain of whose elements have come from
Bordigism and which today presents itself as the “true heir” of this current).
20)
The penetration of state agents into the parasitic circles is obviously
facilitated by the very nature of parasitism, whose fundamental calling is to
combat the real proletarian organisations. Indeed, the fact that parasitism
recruits among those elements who reject the discipline of a class
organisation, who have nothing but contempt for its statutory functioning, who
rejoice in informalism and personal loyalties rather than loyalty to the
organisation, leaves the door of the parasitic milieu wide open to infiltration
of this type. These doors are equally wide open to those involuntary
auxiliaries of the capitalist state, the adventurers, those declassed elements
who seek to place the workers’ movement in the service of their own ambitions,
of their quest for a notoriety and power denied to them by bourgeois society.
In the IWA, the example of Bakunin is obviously the best known in this regard.
Marx and his comrades never claimed that Bakunin was a direct agent of the
state. But this didn’t stop them from identifying and denouncing not only the
services he involuntarily rendered to the ruling class, but also the approach
and class origins of adventurers within proletarian organisations and the role
they play as leaders of parasitism. Thus, with regard to the actions of
Bakunin’s secret Alliance within the IWA, they wrote that the “declassed
elements” had been able “to infiltrate it and establish secret
organisations at its very heart”. The same approach was taken up by Bebel
in the case of Schweitzer, the leader of the Lassallean parasitic current: “he
joined the movement as soon as he saw that there was no future for him within
the bourgeoisie, that for him, whose mode of life had declassed him very early
on, the only hope was to play a role in the workers’ movement in keeping with
his ambition and his capacities” (Bebel: Autobiography).
21)
This being said, even if parasitic currents are often led by declassed
adventurers (when not by direct state agents), they do not only recruit in this
category. We can also find there elements who at the outset are animated by a
revolutionary will and who don’t set out to destroy the organisation but who:
end
up developing a deep hostility towards the proletarian organisation, even if
this hostility is masked by “militant” pretensions.
In the IWA, a certain number of
members of the General Council, such as Eccarius, Jung and Hales, fall into this
category.
Moreover, parasitism is capable
of recruiting sincere and militant proletarian elements who, affected by petty
bourgeois weaknesses or through lack of experience, allow themselves to be
deceived or manipulated by openly anti-proletarian elements. In the IWA, this
was typically the case with most of the workers who were part of the Alliance in Spain.
22)
As far as the ICC is concerned, most of the splits which led to the formation
of parasitic groups were very clearly made up of elements animated by the petty
bourgeois approach described above. The impetus given by intellectuals seeking “recognition”, frustrated by not
receiving it from the organisation, impatience because they did not manage to
convince other militants of the “correctness” of their positions or at the slow
pace of the development of the class struggle, sensitivity to criticisms of
their positions or their behaviour, the rejection of centralisation which they
felt to be “Stalinism”, were the motive force behind the formation of the
“tendencies” which led to the formation of more or less ephemeral parasitic
groups, and to the desertions which fuelled informal parasitism. In succession,
the 1979 “tendency” which gave birth to the “Groupe Communiste Internationaliste”,
the Chénier tendency, one of whose avatars was the defunct “Communist Bulletin
Group”, the McIntosh-JA-ML “tendency” (largely made up of members of the
central organ of the ICC) which gave rise to the EFICC, (now Internationalist
Perspective) are typical illustrations of this phenomenon. In these episodes it
could also be seen that elements who undoubtedly had proletarian concerns
allowed themselves to be led astray by personal loyalty towards the leading
members of these “tendencies” which were not really tendencies but clans as the
ICC has already defined them. The fact that all these parasitic splits from our
organisation first appeared in the form of internal clans is obviously no
accident. In reality, there is a great
similarity between the organisational behaviour that lies at the basis of the
formation of clans and those which fuel parasitism: individualism, statutory
frameworks seen as a constraint, frustration with militant activity, loyalty
towards personalities to the detriment of loyalty towards the organisation, the
influence of “gurus” (elements seeking to have a personal hold over other
militants).
In fact, what the formation of
clans already represents - the destruction of the organisational tissue - finds
its ultimate expression in parasitism: the will to destroy proletarian
organisations themselves.[8] [75]
23)
The heterogeneity which is one of the marks of parasitism, since it counts in
its ranks both relatively sincere elements and those animated by a hatred of
the proletarian organisation, even political adventurers or direct state
agents, makes it the terrain par excellence for the secret policies of
those elements who are most hostile to proletarian concerns, enabling them to
drag the more sincere elements behind them. The presence of these “sincere”
elements, especially those who have dedicated real efforts towards the
construction of the organisation, is actually one of the preconditions for the
success of parasitism since its lends credit and authority to its false
“proletarian” passport (just as trade unionism needs its “sincere and devoted”
militants in order to carry out its role). At the same time, parasitism, and
its leading elements, can only establish control over a large part of their
troops by hiding their real aims. Thus, the Alliance in the IWA was made up of several
circles around “citizen B”, and there were secret statutes reserved for the
“initiated”. “The Alliance divides its members into two
castes, the initiated and the non-initiated, aristocrats and plebeians, the
latter being condemned to be directed by the former via an organisation whose
very existence is unknown to them” (Engels, Report on the Alliance). Today, parasitism acts in the
same way and it is rare for the parasitic groups, and particularly the
adventurers or frustrated intellectuals who animate them, to openly parade
their programmme. In this sense, “Mouvement Communiste”,[9] [76]
which clearly says that the left communist milieu has to be destroyed, is both
a caricature of parasitism and a mouthpiece for its real underlying aims.
24)
The methods used by the First International and the Eisenachers against
parasitism have served as a model for those used by the ICC today. In the
public documents of the congresses, in the press, in open meetings and even in
parliament, the manoeuvres of parasitism were denounced. Again and again, it
was shown that it was the ruling classes themselves who stood behind these
attacks and that their goal was the destruction of marxism. The work of the Hague Congress as well as Bebel’s famous
speeches against the secret politics of Bismarck and Schweitzer revealed the
capacity of the workers’ movement to give a global explanation for these
manoeuvres while denouncing them in an extremely concrete manner. Among the
most important reasons given by the First International for publishing the
revelations about Bakunin, we can point above all to the following:
But
at the centre of this policy lay the necessity to unmask political adventurers
like Bakunin and Schweitzer.
It cannot be emphasized often enough that such an attitude characterised
Marx’s whole political life, as we can see in his denunciation of the acolytes
of Lord Palmerston or Herr Vogt. He understood very well that sweeping such
affairs under the carpet could only benefit the ruling class.
25)
It is this great tradition that the ICC is continuing with its articles on its
own internal struggles, its polemics against parasitism, the public
announcement of the unanimous exclusion of one of its members by the 11th international congress, the
publication of articles on freemasonry, etc. In particular, the ICC’s defence
of the tradition of the court of honour in the case of elements who have lost
the confidence of revolutionary organisations, in order to defend the milieu as
a whole: all this partakes of exactly the same spirit as that of the Hague
Congress and the commissions of inquiry of the workers’ parties in Russia
towards people suspected of being agents provocateurs.
The storm of protest and accusations broadcast by the bourgeois press
following the publication of the principal results of the inquiry into the Alliance shows that it is
this rigorous method of public denunciation that scares the bourgeoisie more
than anything else. Similarly, the way that the opportunist leadership of the
Second International, in the years prior to 1914, systematically ignored the
famous chapter “Marx against Bakunin” in the history of the workers’ movement
shows the same fear on the part of all defenders of petty bourgeois
organisational conceptions.
26)
Towards the petty bourgeois infantry of parasitism, the policy of the workers’
movement has been to make it disappear from the political scene. Here the
denunciation of the absurdity of the positions and political activities of the
parasites plays an important role. Thus Engels, in his celebrated article “The
Bakuninists at work” (during the civil war in Spain) backed up and completed
the revelations on the organisational behaviour of the Alliance.
Today, the ICC has adopted the same policy by fighting against the
adepts of the different organised and “unorganised” centres of the parasitic
network.
With regard to the more or less proletarian elements, more or less taken
in by parasitism, the policy of marxism has always been quite different. It has
always been to drive a wedge between these elements and the parasitic leadership
which is directed and encouraged by the bourgeoisie, showing that the first are
the victims of the second. The aim of this policy is always to isolate the
parasitic leadership by drawing the victims away from its sphere of influence.
Towards these “victims”, marxism has always denounced their attitude and their
activities while at the same time struggling to revive their confidence in the
organisation and the milieu. The work of Engels and Lafargue towards the
Spanish section of the First International is a perfect concretisation of this.
The ICC has also followed this
tradition by organising confrontations with parasitism in order to win back the
elements who have been deceived. Bebel and Liebknecht’s denunication of
Schweitzer as an agent of Bismarck at a mass meeting
of the Lassallean party at Wuppertal is a well known
example of this attitude.
27)
The fact that the tradition of struggle against parasitism has been lost since
the great combats within the IWA, owing to:
This
constitutes a major weakness for the proletarian political milieu faced with
the parasitic offensive. This danger is all the more serious as a result of the
ideological pressure of the decomposition of capitalism, a pressure which, as
the ICC has shown, facilitates the penetration of the most extreme forms of
petty bourgeois ideology and creates an ideal terrain for the growth of
parasitism.[10] [77]
It is thus a very important responsibility of the proletarian milieu to engage
itself in a determined combat against this scourge. To a certain extent, the
capacity of revolutionary currents to identify and combat parasitism will be an
indication of their capacity to combat the other dangers which weigh on the
organisations of the proletariat, particularly the most permanent danger,
opportunism.
In fact, to the extent that
opportunism and parasitism both come from the same source (the penetration of
petty bourgeois ideology) and represent an attack against the principles of
proletarian organisation (programmatic principles for the first, organisational
principles for the second), it is quite natural for them to tolerate each other
and to converge. Thus it was not at all a paradox that in the IWA we saw the
“anti-statist” Bakuninists hand in hand with the “statist” Lassalleans (who
represented a variety of opportunism). One of the consequences of this is that
it is basically up to the left currents of proletarian organisations to wage
the combat against parasitism. In the IWA, it was directly Marx and Engels and
their tendency who assumed the fight against the Alliance. It was no
accident that the main documents produced during this combat bore their
signature (the circular of 5 March 1872, The so-called split in the
International was written by Marx and Engels; the 1873 report on “The
Alliance for Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen’s
Association” by Marx, Engels, Lafargue and Utin).
What was valid in the time of the
IWA remains valid today. The struggle against parasitism constitutes one of the
essential responsibilities of the communist left and is part of the tradition
of its bitter struggles against opportunism. Today it is one of the basic
components in the preparation of the party of tomorrow, and in fact is one of
the determining factors both of the moment when the party can arise and its
capacity to play its role in the decisive battles of the proletariat.
[1] [78]
It is obviously necessary to
distinguish the two meanings that can be given to the term “adventurism”. On
the one hand, there is the adventurism of certain declassed elements, political
adventurers, who have failed to play a role within the ruling class. Realising
that the proletariat is called to occupy a vital place in society’s life and in
history, they try to win a recognition from the working class, or from its
organisations, which will allow them to play that personal role which the
bourgeoisie has refused them. The aim of these elements in turning towards the
class struggle is not to put themselves in its service, but on the contrary to
put the struggle in the service of their ambition. They seek notoriety by
“going to the proletariat”, as others do by travelling round the world. On the
other hand, the term adventurism also describes a political attitude which
consists of launching into ill-considered action when the minimal condition for
success - a sufficient maturity within the class - does not exist. Such an
attitude may come from political adventurers looking for thrills, but it can
just as well be adopted by utterly sincere workers and militants, devoted and
disinterested, but lacking in political judgement, or eaten up with impatience.
[2] [79]
Marx and Engels where not
alone in identifying and describing political parasitism. For example, at the
end of the 19th century, a great marxist theoretician like
Antonio Labriola adopted the same analysis of parasitism: “In this first
type of our present parties [he is writing here about the Communist League],
in what we might call the first cell of our complex, elastic, and highly
developed organism, there existed not only a consciousness of the mission to be
accomplished by, but also the only appropriate forms and methods of association
of, the first beginners of the proletarian revolution. This was no longer a
sect: that form was already outmoded. The immediate and fantastic domination of
the individual had been done away with. The organisation was dominated by a
discipline, whose source lay in experience and necessity, and in the doctrine
which must be precisely the conscious reflection of this necessity. The same
was true of the International, which only appeared authoritarian to those who
tried and failed to impose their own authority on it. The same must and will be
true in all the workers parties: and wherever this characteristic is not or
cannot yet gain influence, a still elementary and confused proletarian
agitation will engender nothing but illusions and a pretext for intrigues. And
where this is not the case, then it will be a sect where the fanatic rubs
shoulders with the madmen and the spy; it will be a repeat of the International
Brotherhood, which latched on to the International like a parasite and
discredited it (...) or else it will be a group of declassed and petty
bourgeois malcontents who spend their time speculating about socialism, as they
would about any other term politically in fashion” (Essai sur la
conception matérialiste de l’histoire).
[3] [80]
This phenomenon was of course
reinforced by the weight of councilism which, as the ICC has pointed out, is
the price that the workers’ movement has paid, and will pay, for the grip of
Stalinism during the period of counter-revolution.
[4] [81]
This of course is why, at this
congress, Bakunin’s friends supported the decision to strengthen substantially
the powers of the Central Council. Later, they were to demand that these did
not go any further than the role of a “letter box”.
[5] [82] The history of the workers’ movement
has seen many of these long struggles undertaken by the Left. Amongst the most
important, we can cite:
[6] [83]
In our own epoch, the swamp is
represented notably by the variations on the councilist current (like those
which emerged with the class struggle at the end of the 1960s, and which will
probably reappear in future periods of class struggle), by remnants of the past
like the De Leonists in the Anglo-Saxon countries, or by elements breaking from
leftism.
[7] [84]
There is no proof that Chénier
was an agent of the state security services. By contrast, his rapid rise,
immediately after his exclusion from the ICC, within the state administration,
and above all within the apparatus of the Socialist Party (in government at the
time), demonstrates that he must have been already been working for this
apparatus of the bourgeoisie while he was still presenting himself as a
“revolutionary”.
[8] [85] In response to the ICC’s analyses
and concerns over parasitism, we are often told that the phenomenon only
concerns our own organisation, whether as a target or as a “supplier”, through
splits, of the parasitic milieu. It is true that today, the ICC is parasitism’s
main target, which is explained easily enough by the fact that it is the
largest and most widespread organisation of the proletarian movement. It
consequently provokes the greatest hatred from the enemies of this movement,
which never miss an occasion to stir up hostility towards it on the part of
other proletarian organisations. Another reason for this “privilege” of the ICC
is the fact precisely that our organisation has suffered the most splits
leading to the creation of parasitic groups. We can suggest several
explanations for this phenomenon.
Firstly, of
all the organisations of the proletarian political milieu which have survived
the 30 years since 1968, the ICC is the only new one, since all the others
already existed at the time. Consequently, our organisation suffered from a
greater weight of the circle spirit, which is the breeding ground for clans and
parasitism. Moreover, the other organisations had already undergone a “natural
selection” before the class’ historic resurgence, which had eliminated all the
adventurers, semi-adventurers, and intellectuals in search of an audience, who
lacked the patience to undertake an obscure labour in little organisations with
a negligible impact on the working class. At the moment of the proletarian
resurgence, this kind of element judged it easier to “rise” in a new
organisation in the process of formation, than in an older organisation where
the “places were already taken”.
Secondly,
there is generally a fundamental difference between the (equally numerous)
splits that have affected the Bordigist milieu (which was the most developed
internationally until the end of the 1970s), and those which have affected the
ICC. In the Bordigist organisations, which claim officially to be monolithic,
splits are usually the result of the impossibility of developing political disagreements
within the organisation, and do not therefore necessarily have a parasitic
dynamic. By contrast, the splits within the ICC were not the result of
monolithism or sectarianism, since our organisation has always allowed, indeed
encouraged, debate and confrontation within it: the collective desertions were
the result of impatience, individualist frustrations, a clan approach, and
therefore bore within themselves a parasitic spirit and dynamic.
This
being said, we should point out that the ICC is far from being parasitism’s
only target. For example, the denigration by Hilo Rojo and “Mouvement
Communiste” are aimed at the entire communist left. Similarly, the special
target of the OCI is the Bordigist Current. Finally, even when the parasitic
groups focus their attacks on the ICC and spare, or even flatter, the other
groups of the proletarian political milieu (as was the case with the CBG, and
as Échanges et Mouvement does continuously), this is generally designed to
increase the divisions between the groups - something that the ICC has always
been the first to fight.
[9] [86]
A group consisting of
ex-members of the ICC who had belonged to the GCI, and of old transfers from
leftism, not to be confused with the “Mouvement Communiste” of the 1970s, which
was one of the apostles of modernism.
[10] [87] “At the outset, ideological
decomposition obviously affects the capitalist class first and foremost, and
then the petty-bourgeois strata which have no real autonomy. We can even say
that the latter identify particularly well with decomposition, in that their
own situation, their lack of any future, matches the major cause of ideological
decomposition: the absence of any perspective in the immediate for society as a
whole. Only the proletariat bears within itself a perspective for humanity, and
in this sense it also has the greatest capacity for resistance to this
decomposition. However, it is not completely spared, notably because it rubs
shoulders with the petty-bourgeoisie which is decomposition’s principle
vehicle. The different elements which constitute the strength of the
proletariat directly confront the various facets of this ideological
decomposition:
Clearly,
the behaviour typical of parasitism - pettiness, the false solidarity of the
clan, hatred for organisation, mistrust, slander - is nourished by today’s
social decomposition. According to the proverb, the most beautiful flowers grow
from manure. Science teaches that many parasitic organisms like it just as
well. And in its own domain, political parasitism follows the laws of biology,
making its honey from society’s putrefaction.
The period 1918-20, the "heroic" phase of the international revolutionary wave inaugurated by the October insurrection in Russia, was also the period in which the communist parties of the day formulated their programme for the overthrow of capitalism and the transition towards communism.
In IR 93 we examined the programme of the newly formed KPD - the Communist Party of Germany. We saw that it consisted essentially of a series of practical measures designed to guide the proletarian struggle in Germany from the stage of spontaneous revolt to the conscious conquest of political power. In IR 94 we published the Platform of the Communist International - drawn up at its founding congress as a basis for the international regroupment of communist forces and as an outline of the revolutionary tasks facing the workers in all countries.
At almost exactly the same moment, the Communist Party of Russia - the Bolshevik party - published its new programme. The programme was closely linked to the CI platform and indeed had the same author - Nikolai Bukharin. Even so, to a certain extent, this separation between the CI platform and the programmes of its national parties - and between the latter programmes themselves - reflected the persistence of federalist conceptions inherited from the period of social democracy; and, as Bordiga was later to point out, the inability of the "world party" to subject its national sections to the priorities of the international revolution was to have very serious consequences in the face of the retreat of the revolutionary wave and the isolation and degeneration of the revolution in Russia. We will have occasion to return to this particular problem. And yet it is instructive to make a specific study of the RCP programme and to compare it with the ones previously mentioned. The KPD programme was the product of a party faced with the task of leading the masses towards the seizure of power; the CI platform was seen more as a general point of reference for those aiming to regroup with the International than as a detailed programme of action. Indeed, it is one of history's little ironies that the CI did not adopt a formal and unified programme until its 6th Congress in 1928. Here again Bukharin was the author, but this time the programme was also the International's suicide note, since it adopted the infamous theory of socialism in one country and thus ceased to exist as an organ of the internationalist proletariat.
The RCP programme, for its part, was drawn up after the toppling of the bourgeois regime in Russia and was thus first and foremost a precise and detailed statement of the aims and methods of the new soviet power. In short, it was a programme for the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus stands as an invaluable indication of the level of programmatic clarity attained by the contemporary communist movement. Not only that: although we shall not hesitate to point to those parts of the programme which practical experience was to put into question or definitively refute, we shall also be showing that in most of its essentials this document remains a profoundly relevant reference point for the proletarian revolution of the future.
The RCP programme was adopted at the 8th Party Congress in March 1919. The need for a fundamental revision of the old 1908 programme had been apparent at least since 1917 when the Bolsheviks had abandoned the perspective of the "democratic dictatorship" in favour of the proletarian conquest of power and the world socialist revolution. At the time of the 8th Congress there were numerous disagreements within the party about the way forward for the soviet power (we shall return to this in a subsequent article) and so in some senses the programme expressed a certain compromise between different currents in the party; but since, like the CI platform, the document was very much a product of the bright hopes and radical practices of the early phase of the revolution, it was able to satisfy the majority of the party, including many of those who had begun to feel that the revolutionary process in Russia was not advancing with sufficient rapidity or even that certain basic principles were being put into question.
The programme was shortly to be accompanied by a considerable work of explanation and popularisation - The ABC of Communism, penned by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky. This book was constructed around the points of the programme but is more than a mere commentary on it; rather it became a classic in its own right, a synthesis of marxist theory and its development from the Communist Manifesto to the Russian Revolution, written in a lively and accessible style that made it a manual of political education both for the party membership and for the broad mass of workers who supported and sustained the revolution. If this article focuses on the RCP programme rather than The ABC of Communism, it is because a detailed examination of the latter is outside the scope of a single article; it is by no means intended to lessen the importance of the book, which still repays reading today.
The same point can be made even more emphatically with regard to the numerous decrees issued by the soviet power in the initial phases of the revolution, and to the 1918 constitution which defined the structure and functioning of the new power. These documents also need to be examined as part of the "programme of the proletarian dictatorship", not least because, as Trotsky wrote in his autobiography, "during that first period the decrees were really more propaganda than actual administrative measures. Lenin was in a hurry to tell the people what the new power was, what it was after, and how it intended to accomplish its aims" (My Life, Penguin edition, p 356). These decrees covered not only burning political and economic issues - such as the structure of the state and the army, the struggle against the counter-revolution, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and workers' control of industry, the conclusion of a separate peace with Germany etc - but also numerous social issues such as marriage and divorce, education, religion, and so on. Again in Trotsky's words, these decrees "will be preserved forever in history as the proclamations of a new world. Not only sociologists and historians, but future legislators as well, will draw repeatedly from this source" (ibid, p 358). But precisely because of their immense scope, their analysis lies beyond the ambitions of this essay, which will focus on the 1919 Bolshevik programme for the very reason that it provides us with the most synthetic and concise statement of the general goals of the new power and the party whose aims it had adopted.
The epoch of proletarian revolution
The programme begins, like the platform of the CI, by situating itself in the new "era of the world-wide proletarian communist revolution", characterised on the one hand by the development of imperialism, the ferocious struggle for world dominion by the great capitalist powers, and thus by the outbreak of imperialist world war - the concrete expression of the collapse of capitalism; and, on the other hand, by the international revolt of the working class against the horrors of capitalism in decay, a revolt which had taken tangible form in the October insurrection in Russia and the development of the revolution in all the central capitalist countries, particularly Germany and Austria-Hungary. The programme itself does not elaborate on the economic contradictions of capitalism which had led to this collapse; these are examined in The ABC of Communism, although even the latter does not really formulate a definite and coherent theory of the origins of capitalist decadence. By the same token - and in surprising contrast to the CI platform - the programme does not utilise the concept of state capitalism to describe the internal organisation of the bourgeois regime in the new era; again however, this concept is elaborated in The ABC of Communism and in other theoretical contributions by Bukharin which we will come to in another article. Finally, like the CI platform, the RCP programme is absolutely firm in its insistence that it is impossible for the working class to make the revolution "without making it a matter of principle to break off relations with and wage a pitiless struggle against that bourgeois perversion of socialism which is dominant in the leading official social democratic and socialist parties ".
Having affirmed its membership of the new Communist International, the programme then moves on to the practical tasks of the proletarian dictatorship "as applied in Russia, a land whose most notable peculiarity is the numerical predominance of the petty bourgeois stratum of the population". The subheadings that follow in this article correspond to the order and titles of the sections of the RCP programme.
General politics
The first task of any proletarian revolution - the revolution of a class which has no economic base in the old society - must be to consolidate its political power; and in line with the Platform of the Communist International and the accompanying Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship, the RCP programme's "practical" sections begin by affirming the superiority of the soviet system to bourgeois democracy. Against the misleading all-inclusiveness of the latter, the former, based primarily on workplace rather than territorial base units, openly proclaims its class character; in contrast to bourgeois parliaments, the soviets, with their principle of permanent mobilisation through base assemblies and of the immediate revocability of all delegates, also provide the means for the immense majority of the exploited and the oppressed population to exert a real control over the organs of state power, to participate directly in social and economic transformation, and this regardless of race, religion or gender. At the same time, since the immense majority of the Russian population was made up of the peasantry - and since marxism recognises only one revolutionary class in capitalist society - the programme also registers the leading role of the "industrial urban proletariat" and points out that "our Soviet Constitution reflects this, by assigning certain preferential rights to the industrial proletariat, as opposed to the comparatively disunited petty bourgeois masses in the villages" (specifically, as Victor Serge explains in his book Year One of the Russian Revolution, "The All-Russian Congress of Soviets consists of representatives of local soviets, the towns being represented by one deputy for every 25, 000 inhabitants and the country areas by one deputy for every 125, 000. This article formalises the dominance of the proletariat over the peasantry" (Chicago 1972 edition, p271).
The programme, it must be remembered is a party programme, and a true communist party can never be satisfied by any status quo until it has reached the ultimate goal of communism, at which point there will be no need for the party to exist as a separate political organ. That is why this section of the programme repeatedly insists on the need for the party to fight for the increasing participation of the masses in the life of the soviets, to raise their political and cultural level, to combat the national chauvinism and prejudices against women that still exist in the proletariat and other oppressed classes. It is noteworthy that there is within the programme no theorisation of the dictatorship of the party - this was to come later, even if the question of whether or not the party wields power had always been ambiguous for the Bolsheviks and indeed for the entire revolutionary movement at the time. Rather the opposite: there is a real awareness expressed in the programme that the difficult conditions facing the Russian bastion at the time - cultural backwardness, civil war - had already created a real danger of bureaucratisation in the soviet power, and it therefore outlines a series of measures to combat this danger:
"1. Every member of a soviet must undertake some definite work in the administrative service.
2. There must be a continuous rotation among those who engage in such duties, so that each member shall in turn gain experience in every branch of administration.
By degrees, the whole working population must be induced to take turns in the administrative service".
In fact, these measures were largely insufficient given that the programme underestimates the real difficulties posed by the imperialist encirclement and the civil war: the siege conditions, the famine, the grim reality of territorial warfare fought with the most extreme ferocity, the dispersal of the most advanced layers of the proletariat to the front, the plots of the counter-revolution and the corresponding Red Terror: all this sapped the lifeblood from the soviets and other organs of proletarian democracy, more and more subsuming them into a vastly atrophied bureaucratic apparatus. By the time the programme had been written, the involvement of even the most advanced workers in the tasks of state administration was having the effect of removing them from the life of the class and of turning them into bureaucrats. Instead of the tendency for the withering away of the state advocated in Lenin's State and Revolution, it was the soviets that began to wither away, isolating the party at the head of a state machine that had become increasingly divorced from the self-activity of the masses. In such circumstances, the party, far from acting as the most radical critic of the status quo, tended to merge with the state and so become an organ of social conservation (for more on the conditions facing the proletarian bastion at this time, see 'Isolation spells the death of the revolution' in IR 75)
This rapid and tragic negation of the radical vision that Lenin had stood for in 19 J 7 - a state of affairs which had already advanced to a considerable degree by the time the RCP programme was adopted - is frequently utilised by the enemies of revolution to prove that this vision was at best utopian, at worst a mere deception aimed at winning the support of the masses and propelling the Bolsheviks to power. For communists, however, it is proof only that if socialism in one country is impossible, this is no less true of that proletarian democracy which is the political precondition for the creation of socialism. And if there is an important weakness in this and other parts of the programme, it is in the passages that imply that merely applying the principles of the Commune, of proletarian democracy, in the case of Russia could lead to the disappearance of the state, without clearly and unambiguously stating that this could only be the result of a successful international revolution.
The problem of nationality
While on many questions, not least the problem of proletarian democracy, the RCP programme was faced above all with the practical difficulty of applying its measures in the conditions of the civil war, the section on the problem of nationality is flawed from the outset. Correct in its starting point - the "primary importance of ... the policy of uniting the proletarians and semi-proletarians of various nationalities in a joint revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie ", and in its recognition of the need to overcome feelings of suspicion engendered by long years of national oppression, the programme adopts the slogan that had been defended by Lenin since the days of the Second International: the "right of nations to self-determination" as the best way to allay these suspicions, and applicable even (and especially) under soviet power. On this point the author of the programme, Bukharin, took a significant step backwards from the position he, along with Piatakov and others, had put forward during the imperialist war: that the slogan of national self-determination was "first of all utopian (it cannot be realised within the limits of capitalism) and harmful as a slogan which disseminates illusions" (letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee, November 1915). And as Rosa Luxemburg showed in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks' policy of allowing "subject nations" to secede from the soviet power simply handed over the proletarians of these newly "self-determining" bourgeois nations to their own predatory ruling classes, and above all to the schemes and manoeuvres of the great imperialist powers. The same disastrous results were obtained in "colonial" countries like Turkey, Iran or China where the soviet power thought it could ally itself with the "revolutionary" bourgeoisie. In the 18th century Marx and Engels had certainly supported certain struggles for national independence, but only because in that period capitalism still had a progressive role to play vis-a-vis the old feudal or despotic remnants of a previous era. At no stage in history could "national self-determination" mean anything but self- determination for the bourgeoisie. In the epoch of the proletarian revolution, where the entire bourgeoisie stands as a reactionary obstacle to human progress, the adoption of this policy was indeed to prove extremely harmful to the needs of the proletarian revolution (see our pamphlet Nation or Class and the article on the national question in IR 67). The one and only way to struggle against the national enmities that existed within the working class was to work for the development of the international class struggle.
Military affairs
This is inevitably an important section of the programme given that it was written when the internal civil war was still raging. The programme affirms certain basics: the necessity for the destruction of the old bourgeois army and for the new Red Army to be an instrument for the defence of the proletarian dictatorship. Certain measures are put forward to ensure that the new army does indeed serve the needs of the proletariat: that it should be "exclusively composed of the proletariat and the kindred semi-proletarian strata of the peasantry"; that training and instruction in the army be "effected upon a basis of class solidarity and socialist enlightenment", to which end "there must be political commissars, appointed from among trusty and self-denying communists, to cooperate with the military staff", while a new category of officers composed of class conscious workers and peasants must be trained and prepared for leading roles in the army; in order to prevent the separation between the army and the proletariat, there must be "the closest possible association between the military units and the factories, workshops, trade unions and poor peasants' organisations", while the period of barrack life should be "reduced to the utmost". The use of military experts inherited from the old regime was accepted on condition that that such elements be strictly supervised by the organs of the working class. Prescriptions of this type express a more or less intuitive awareness that the Red Army was particularly vulnerable to escaping the political control of the working class; but given that this was the first Red Army and the first soviet state in history, this awareness was inevitably limited both at the theoretical and the practical level.
The last paragraph of the section already poses certain problems, where it says that "the demand for the election of officers, which had great importance as a matter of principle in relation to the bourgeois army whose commanders were especially trained as an apparatusfor the class subjugation of the common soldiers (and, through the instrumentality of the common soldiers, the subjugation of the toiling masses), ceases to have any significance as a mailer of principle in relation to the class army of workers and peasants. A possible combination of election with appointment from above may he expedient for the revolutionary class army on practical grounds".
While it is true that elections and collective decision-making have their limitations in a military context - particularly in the heat of the battle - the paragraph seems to underestimate the degree to which the new army was itself reflecting the bureaucratisation of the state by reviving many of the old norms of subordination. In fact, a "Military Opposition", linked to the Democratic Centralism group, had already arisen in the party, and at the 8th Congress it was particularly voiciferous in criticising the tendency to deviate from the "principles of the Commune" in the organisation of the army. These principles are important not merely on "practical" grounds but above all because they create the best conditions for the political life of the proletariat to infuse the army. But during the civil war period, the opposite was tending to happen: the imposition of "normal" military methods was helping to create a climate in favour of the militarisation of the entire soviet power. The leader of the Red Army, Trotsky, became more and more associated with such an approach in the period 1920-21.
The basic problem we are dealing with here is the problem of the transitional state. The Red Army - like the special security force, the Cheka, which is not even mentioned in the programme - is a statist organ par excellence, and, while it can be used to safeguard the gains of the revolution, cannot be considered as a proletarian and communist organ. Even exclusively composed of proletarians (which could hardly be the case in Russia), it inevitably appears as an organ one step removed from the collective life of the class. It was thus particularly damaging that the Red Army, like other state institutions, was more and more escaping the overall political control of the workers' councils; while at the same time, the dissolution of the Red Guards, based in the factories, deprived the class of a means of direct self-defence against the danger of internal degeneration. But these were lessons that could only be learned through the often merciless school of revolutionary experience.
Proletarian Justice
This section of the programme complements the one on general politics. The destruction of the old bourgeois state also involves the replacement of the old bourgeois courts with a new apparatus of justice in which judges are elected from among the workers, and jurors drawn up from amongst the mas of the labouring population; the new court system was [Q be simplified and made more accessible to the population than the old labyrinth of higher and lower courts. Penal methods were [Q be freed of any attitude of revenge and become constructive and educational. The long term aim being that "the penal system shall ultimately be transformed into a system of measures of an educative character" in a society without classes or a state. The ABC of Communism, however, pointed out that the urgent demands of the civil war had required the new popular courts to be supplemented by revolutionary tribunals to deal not only with "ordinary" social crime but with the activities of the counter-revolution. The summary justice handed out by these tribunals was a product of bunting necessity, although abuses were committed, and certainly carried the danger that the introduction of more humane methods would be postponed indefinitely. Thus the death penalty, abolished by one of the first decrees of the new soviet power in 1917, was rapidly restored in the fight against the White Terror.
Education
Like the proposed penal reforms, the soviet power's efforts to overhaul the education system were very much subject to the demands of the civil war, Furthermore, given the extreme backwardness of social conditions in Russia, where illiteracy was widespread, many of the proposed changes themselves aimed no further than enabling the Russian population to reach a level of education already attained in some of the more advanced bourgeois democracies. Hence the call for free, compulsory co-educational schooling for all children up to the age of 17; for the provision of crèches and kindergartens to free women from domestic drudgery; for the removal of religious influence from the schools; the provision of extra-scholastic facilities such as adult education, libraries, cinemas etc etc.
Nevertheless, the longer term aim was "the transformation of the school so that from being an organ for maintaining the class dominion of the bourgeoisie, it shall become an organ for the complete abolition of the division of society into classes, an organ for the communist regeneration of society ".
To this end, the "unified labour school" was a key concept, elaborated more completely in The ABC of Communism. Its function was seen as that of beginning to overcome the division between elementary, middle and upper schools, between the sexes, between common schools and elite schools. Here again, it was recognised that such a school was the ideal of every advanced educationist, but as a unified labour school it was seen as a crucial factor in the communist abolition of the old division of labour. The hope was that from a very early stage in a child's life, there would no longer be any rigid separation between mental education and productive work, so that "in communist society, there will be no closed corporations, no stereotyped guilds, no petrified specialist groups. The most brilliant man of science must also be skilled in manual labour ... .A child's first activities take the form of play; play should gradually pass into work by an imperceptible transition, so that the child learns from the very outset to look upon labour, not as a disagreeable necessity or an a punishment, but as a natural and spontaneous expression of faculty. Labour should be a need, like the desire for food and drink; this need must be instilled and developed in the communist school".
These basic principles would surely remain valid in a future revolution. Contrary to certain strains of anarchist thought, school cannot be abolished overnight, but its aspect as an instrument for imposing bourgeois discipline and ideology would certainly have to be attacked straight away, not only in the content of what is taught (The ABC is very insistent on the need to instil the school with a proletarian outlook in all areas of education), but also in the way (hat teaching takes place (the principle of direct democracy, as far as possible, would have to replace the old hierarchies within the school). Similarly, the gulf between manual and mental labour, work and play would also have to be addressed from the start. In the Russian revolution, numerous experiments took place in these directions; although disrupted by the civil war, some of them continued well into the 1920s. Indeed, one of the signs that the counter-revolution had finally triumphed was that the schools once again became instruments for the imposition of bourgeois ideology and hierarchy, even if concealed in the garb of Stalinist "marxism".
Religion
The inclusion of a specific section on religion in the party programme was, at one level, an expression of the backwardness of Russian material and cultural conditions, compelling the new power to "complete" certain tasks unrealised by the old regime, in particular, the separation of church and state and the ending of state provision for religious institutions. However, this section also explains that the party cannot remain satisfied with the measures "which bourgeois democracy includes in its programmes but has nowhere carried out owing to the manifold associations that actually obtain between capital and religious propaganda". There were longer term aims guided by the recognition that "nothing but the fulfilment of purposiveness and full awareness in all the social and economic activities of the masses can lead to the complete disappearance of religious prejudices". In other words, religious alienation cannot be eliminated without the elimination of social alienation, and this is possible only in a fully communist society. This did not mean that the communists took a passive attitude to the existing religious illusions of the masses; they had to be actively fought on the basis of a scientific conception of the world. But this was above all a work of propaganda; it was completely foreign to the Bolsheviks to advocate the forcible suppression of religion - another hallmark of the Stalinist regime which could dare in its counter-revolutionary arrogance to have realised socialism and thus to have extirpated the social roots of religion. On the contrary, while carrying out a militant atheist propaganda, it was necessary for the communists and the new revolutionary power to "avoid anything that can wound the feelings of believers, for such a method can only lead to the strengthening of religious fanaticism". This is also far removed from the approach of anarchism, which favours the method of direct provocation and insult.
These basic prescriptions have not lost their relevance today. The hope, sometimes expressed in Marx's earlier writings, that religion was already dead for the proletariat, has not been fulfilled. Not only the persistence of social and economic backwardness in many parts of the world, but also the decadence and decomposition of bourgeois society, its tendency to regress to extremely reactionary forms of thought and belief, have ensured that religion and its various offshoots remain a powerful force of social control. Consequently communists are still faced with the necessity to fight against the "religious prejudices of the masses".
Economic Affairs
The proletarian revolution necessarily begins as a political revolution because, having no means of production or social property of its own, the working class needs the lever of political power in order to begin the social and economic transformation that will lead to a communist society. The Bolsheviks were fundamentally clear on the fact that this transformation could only be carried to its conclusion on a global scale; although as we have noted, the RCP programme, this section included, does contain a number of ambiguous formulations which talk about the establishment of complete communism as a kind of progressive development within the "soviet power", without making it clear whether this refers to the existing soviet power in Russia or to a world-wide republic of councils. In the main, however, the economic measures advocated in the programme are relatively modest and realistic. A revolutionary power could certainly not avoid posing the "economic" question from the start, since it is precisely the economic chaos provoked by the collapse of capitalism which compels the proletariat to intervene in order to ensure that it provide society with the minimum needed for survival. This was the case in Russia where the demand for "bread" was one of the main factors of revolutionary mobilisation. However, any idea that the working class, having assumed power, could set about calmly and peacefully reorganising economic life was immediately dismissed by the speed and brutality of the imperialist encirclement and the White counter-revolution which, coming in the wake of the World War, had "bequeathed an utterly chaotic situation" to the victorious proletariat. In these conditions, the primary aims of the soviet power in the economic sphere were defined as being:
* the completion of the expropriation of the ruling class, the seizure of the principal means of production by the soviet power;
* the centralisation of all economic activities in all the areas under soviet rule (including those in "other" countries), under a common plan; the aim of such planning was to secure "a universal increase in the productive forces of the country" - not for the sake of the "country" but in order to ensure "a rapid increase in the quantity of goods urgently needed by the population";
* the gradual integration of small-scale urban production (handicrafts etc) into the socialised sector via the development of cooperatives and other more collective forms;
* the maximum use of all available labour power by "the general mobilisation by the soviet power of all members of the population who are physically and mentally fit for work";
* the encouragement of a new labour discipline based on a collective sense of responsibility and solidarity;
* the maximation of the benefits of scientific research and technology, including the use of specialists inherited from the old regime.
These general guidelines remain fundamentally valid both as the first steps of a proletarian power seeking to produce the necessities for survival in a given area, and for the real begirmings of communist construction by the world-wide republic of councils. The main problem here was again the harsh conflict between overall aims and immediate conditions. The project of raising the consuming power of the masses was straight away thwarted by the demands of the civil war which turned Russia into a veritable caricature of a war economy. So great was the chaos brought about by the civil war that "the development of the productive powers of the country" remained a complete non-starter. Instead the vastly diminished productive powers of Russia, the result of the imperialist war, were still further diminished by the ravages of the civil war and by the necessity to feed and clothe the Red Army in its combat against the counter-revolution. The fact that this war economy was highly centralised, and, in conditions of financial chaos, virtually did away with monetary forms, led to its being dubbed "war communism"; but this altered nothing of the fact that military necessities more and more prevailed over the real aims and methods of the proletarian revolution. In order to maintain its collective political rule, the working class needs to have secured at least the basic material necessities of life and in particular to have the time and energy to engage in political life. But we have already seen that instead, during the civil war, the working class was reduced to absolute penury, its best elements dispersed to the front or swallowed up in the growing "soviet" bureaucracy, subject to a real process of "declassment" as others fled to the countryside or scrabbled to survive by petty trade and theft; those who remained in factories which still produced were forced to work longer hours than ever before, sometimes under the watchful eye of Red Army detachments. The Russian proletariat made these sacrifices willingly, but since they were not compensated by the extension of the revolution, they were to have profoundly damaging longer term effects, above all in undermining the proletariat's capacity to defend and maintain its dictatorship over society.
The RCP programme, as we have also seen, did recognise the danger of growing bureaucratisation during this period, and advocated a series of measures to combat it. But whereas the "political" section of the programme is still wedded to the defence of the soviets as the best means of maintaining proletarian democracy, the section on economic affairs emphasises the role of the trade unions, both in the management of the economy and in the defence of the workers from the excesses of bureaucracy: "The participation of the trade unions in the conduct of economic life, and the involvement by them of the broad masses of the people in this work, would appear at the same time to be our chief aid in the campaign against the bureaucratisation of the soviet power. This will also facilitate the establishment of an effective control over the results of production".
That the proletariat, as the politically dominant class, also needs to exercise to the maximum a direct control over the process of production, is axiomatic and - on the understanding that political tasks cannot be subordinated to economic tasks, above all in the period of the civil war - this remains true throughout all phases of the transition period. Workers who cannot "rule" in the factories are unlikely to be able to take political control over an entire society. But what is mistaken here is the idea that the trade unions could be the instrument for this task. On the contrary, by their very nature, the trade unions were much more susceptible to the virus of bureaucratisation; and it was no accident that the trade union apparatus became the organs of an increasingly bureaucratic state within the factories. by abolishing or absorbing the factory committees which had been a product of the revolutionary élan of 1917, and which were therefore a far more direct expression of the life of the class and a far better base for resisting bureaucracy and regenerating the soviet system as a whole. But the factory committees are not even mentioned in the programme. It is certainly true that these committees often suffered from localist and syndicalist misconceptions, in which each factory was seen as the private property of the workers who worked within them: during the desperate days of the civil war, such ideas reached their nadir in the practice of workers bartering "their own" products for food and fuel. But the answer to such errors was not to absorb the factory committees into the trade unions and the state; it was to ensure that they functioned as organs of proletarian centralisation by linking them much more closely to the workers' soviets - an obvious possibility given that the same factory assembly which elected delegates to the town's soviet also elected its factory committee. To these observations we should add: the difficulties that the Bolsheviks had in understanding that the trade unions were obsolete as organs of the class (a fact confirmed by the very emergence of the soviet form) was also to have very grave consequences in the International, especially after 1920, where the influence of the Russian communists was decisive in preventing the CI from adopted a clear and unambiguous position on the trade unions.
Agriculture
The basic approach to the peasant question in the programme had already been outlined by Engels in relation to Germany. Whereas large scale capitalist farms could be socialised fairly rapidly by the proletarian power, it would not be possible to compel the small farmers to join this sector. They would have to be won over gradually, primarily thanks to the capacity of the proletariat to prove in practice the superiority of socialist methods.
In a country like Russia, where pre-capitalist relations still held sway in much of the countryside, and where the expropriation of the great landed estates during the revolution had resulted in the peasants dividing up the land into innumerable smallholdings, this was all the more true. The policy of the party could thus only be to, on the one hand, encourage the class struggle between the semi-proletarian poor peasants and the rich peasants and rural capitalists, helping to create special organs for the poor peasants and rural proletarians who would be the main support for the extension and deepening of the revolution in the countryside; and, on the other hand, to establish a modus vivendi with the smallholding middle peasants, helping them materially with seed, manure, technology etc, so as to increase their yield, and at the same time fostering cooperatives and communes as transitional steps towards a real collectivisation. "The party aims at detaching them [the middle peasants] from the rich peasants, at bringing them over to the side of the working class by paying special attention to their needs. It attempts to overcome their backwardness in cultural matters by measures of an ideological character, carefully avoiding any coercive steps. On all occasions upon which their vital interests are touched, it endeavours to come to a practical agreement with them, making to them such concessions as will promote socialist construction". Given the terrible economic scarcity in Russia immediately after the insurrection, the proletariat was not in a position to offer these strata much in the way of material improvement, and indeed, under war communism, many abuses against the peasants were committed during the requisitioning of grain to feed the army and the starving cities. But this was till a far cry from the forced Stalinist collectivisation of the 1930s, which was based on the monstrous assumption that the violent expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie (and this for the requirements of a capitalist war economy) signified the achievement of socialism.
Distribution
"In the sphere of distribution, the task of the soviet power at the present time is unerringly to continue the replacement of trade by a purposive distribution of goods, by a system of distribution organised by the slate upon a national scale. The aim is to achieve the organisation of the whole population into an integral network of consumers' communes, which shall be able with the utmost speed, purposiveness, economy and a minimal expenditure of labour, to distribute all the necessary goods, while strictly centralising the whole distributive apparatus". The existing cooperative associations, defined as "petty bourgeois ", were to be as far as possible transformed into" consumer communes led by the proletarians and the semi-proletarians" . This passage conveys all the grandeur but also all the limitations of the Russian revolution. The communisation of distribution is an integral part of the revolutionary programme and this section shows how seriously it was taken by the Bolsheviks. But the real progress they had made towards it was greatly exaggerated during - and indeed because of the war communism period. War communism was in reality no more than the collectivisation of misery and was largely imposed by a state machine that was already slipping out of the workers' hands. The fragility of its basis was proved as soon as the internal civil war had ended, when there was a rapid and general return to private enterprise and trade (which had in any case flourished as a black market under war communism). It is certainly true that, just as the proletariat will have to collectivise large sectors of the productive apparatus after the insurrection in one region of the world, it will also have to do the same for many aspects of distribution. But while these measures may have some continuity with the constructive policies of a victorious world revolution, neither should the they be identified with the latter. The real communisation of distribution depends on the capacity of the new social order to "deliver the goods" more effectively than capitalism (even if the goods themselves differ substantially). Material scarcity and poverty are the soil of commodity relations; material abundance the only solid basis for the development of collectivised distribution and for society to "inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).
Money and Banks
As with distribution, so with money, its "normal" vehicle under capitalism: given the impossibility of immediately installing integral communism, above all in the confines of a single country, the proletariat can only take a series of measures which tend in the direction of a moneyless society. However, the illusions of war communism - in which the collapse of the economy was confused with its communist reconstruction - lend an over-optimistic tone to this and other related sections. Equally over-optimistic is the notion that merely nationalising the banks and fusing them into a single state bank would constitute the first steps towards "the disappearance of banks and to their conversion into the central book-keeping establishment of communist society". It is doubtful that organs so central to the operation of capital can be taken over in this way, even if the physical seizure of the banks will certainly be necessary as one of the first revolutionary blows aimed at paralysing the hand of capital.
Finance
"During the epoch in which the socialisation of the means of production confiscated from the capitalists has begun, the state power ceases to be a parasitic apparatus nourished upon the productive process. There now begins its transformation into an organisation directly fulfilling the function of administering the economic life of the country. To this extent the state budget will be a budget of the whole of the national economy". Again, the intentions are laudable but bitter experience was to show that in the conditions of an isolated or stagnating revolution, even the new commune-state more and more becomes a parasitic apparatus feeding on the revolution and the working class; and even in the best conditions it can no longer be assumed that merely centralising finances in the hands of the state "naturally" leads an economy that once functioned on the basis of profit to become one functioning on the basis of need.
The housing question
This section of the programme is more rooted in immediate necessities and possibilities. A victorious proletarian power cannot avoid taking rapid steps to relieve homelessness and overcrowding, as did the soviet power after 1917, when it "completely expropriated all the houses belonging to capitalist landlords and handed them over to the urban soviets. It effected mass settlements of workers from the suburbs in the bourgeois dwellings. It handed over the best of these dwellings to the workers' organisations, arranging for the upkeep of the houses at the cost of the state; it undertook to provide the workers' families with furniture, etc". But here again, the programme's more constructive aims - the clearing of slums and the provision of decent housing for all - remained largely unrealised in a war-ravaged country. And while the Stalinist regime embarked upon massive housing schemes later on, the dreadful results of these schemes (the infamous workers' barracks of the ex-Eastern bloc) were certainly no solution to the "housing problem ".
Evidently, the longer term solution to the housing question lies in a total transformation of the urban and rural environment - in the abolition of the antithesis between town and country, the reduction of urban gigantism and the rational distribution of the world's population over the face of the earth. Clearly such grandiose transformations cannot be carried through until after the definitive defeat of the bourgeoisie.
Labour protection and social welfare work
The immediate measures put forward here, given the extreme conditions of exploitation prevailing in Russia, are merely the application of minimum demands long fought for in the workers' movement: the 8-hour day, disability and unemployment benefit, paid holiday and maternity leave, etc. And as the programme itself admits, even many of these gains had to suspended or modified due to the demands of the civil war. However, the document pledges the party to fight not only for these "immediate demands" but also for more radical ones - in particular, the reduction of the working day to six hours so that more time could be devoted to training, not only in work-related areas but also and above all in state administration. This was crucial because, as we have already noted, a working class weighed down by daily labour will not have the time or energy for political activity and the running of the state.
Public Hygiene
Here again it was a matter of struggling for "reforms" which were long overdue because of the terrible conditions of existence experienced by the Russian proletariat (diseases related to slum housing, unsupervised hygiene and safety standards at work), etc. Thus, "the Russian Communist Party regards the following as its immediate tasks:
1. the vigorous pursuance of extensive sanitary measures in the interests of the workers, such as:
(a) improvement of the sanitary condition of all places of public resort; the protection of earth, water and air;
(b) the organisation of communal kitchens and of the food supply generally upon a scientific and hygienic foundation;
(c) measures to prevent the spread of disease of a contagious character;
(d) sanitary legislation (. . .)
4. a campaign against social diseases (tuberculosis, venereal disease, alcoholism).
5. The free provision of medical advice and treatment for the whole population" .
Many of these apparent basics, however, have yet to be achieved in many regions of the globe. If anything, the scope of the problem has widened immeasurably. To begin with, the bourgeoisie, faced with the development of the crisis, is everywhere cutting back the medical provisions that had begun to be regarded as "normal" in the advanced capitalist countries. Secondly, the aggravation of capitalism's decadence has vastly amplified certain problems, above all through its "progressive" destruction of the natural environment. Whereas the RCP programme only briefly mentions the need for the "protection of earth, water and air", any programme of the future would have to recognise what an enormous task this represents after decades of systematic poisoning of "earth, water and air".
CDW
We have noted that the essential radicalism of the RCP programme was a product of the unity of aim and purpose in the Bolshevik party in 1919, and a reflection of the high revolutionary hopes of that moment. In the next article in this series we shall examine a further effort by the Bolshevik party to understand the nature and tasks of the transition period, this time posed in a more general and theoretical manner. Once again the author of the text in question - The Economics of the Transformation Period - was Nikolai Bukharin.
The full extent of the financial crisis which began just over a year ago in South-East Asia is beginning to emerge. It took a new plunge during the summer with the collapse of the Russian economy, and the unprecedented convulsions of the "emerging countries" of Latin America. But today, it is the developed countries of Europe and North America that are in the firing line, with a continuing slide on their stock exchanges and the constant downward adjustment oftheir forecast growth. We have come a long way from the bourgeoisie's euphoria of a few months back, expressed in the dizzying rise in western markets during the first half of 1998.
Today, the same "specialists" who had congratulated themselves on the "good health" of the Anglo-Saxon countries, and who forecast a recovery for all the European countries, are the first to talk of recession, or even "depression". And they right to be pessimistic. The clouds gathering over the most powerful economies are pregnant, not with some passing squall, but with a veritable temptest, an expression of the dead-end into which the capitalist economy has plunged.
The summer of 1998 devastating for the capitalist system's credibility: a deepening crisis in Asia, prey to a lasting recession which has evev hit the two major economies of China and Japan; a menacing situation looming over Latin America; the spectacular crash of the Rusian economy; close to record falls on world's stock market. In three weeks, the rouble lost 70% of it's value (since June 1991, Russia's GDP has fallen by between 50% and 80%). On 31st August - the famous "blue Monday", according to athe expression of a journalist who dared not call it "black" - Wall Street fell by 6.4%, while the Nsdaq (the exchange specialising in technology shares) fell by 8.5%. The nxt day, the European exchanges were hit in their turn. Frankfurt begn the morning with a 2% fall, Paris with 3.5%. During the day, Madrid lost 4.23%, Amsterdam 3.56% and Zurich 2.15%. In Asia, during 31st August Hong Kong fell by mre than 7%, while Tokyo fell sharply to reach its lowest position for 12 years. Since then, the stock markets have continued to fall, so that by 21st September (and the situation will probably be worse by the time this issue of the International Review goes to press) most of the indices had returned to the same level as the beginning of the year. New York was up to 0.32% and Frankfurt 5.09%, but London, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Stockholm were all down.
This accumulation of events is not due to chance. Nor it is the sign of some "passing crisis of confidence" in "emerging economies", or of a "salutary automatic correction of an over-valued market". It is on the contrary another episode in the decline of capitalism as a whole, a descent into hell caricatured by the disintegration of the Russian economy.
The crisis in Russia
The world ruling class and its "experts" had a serious fright a year ago, with the financial crisis in South-east Asia. For months afterwards, they consoled themselves with the thought that this crisis had not dragged the other "emerging economies" down with it. The media went on about the "specific" natue of the difficulties affecting Thailand, Indonesian, Korea, etc. Alarm-bells rang again when chaos gripped the Russian economy at the beginning of the summer1. The "international community", which had already paid heavily for South-east Asia, found itself forced to cough up an aid of $22.6 billion over 18 months - combined, as usual, with draconian conditions: a drastic reduction in state spending, an increase in taxes (especially taxes on wags, to compensate for the Russian state's inability to collect taxes from business), price rises and a rise in pension subscriptions. And all this, when the living conditions of Russian workers are already wretched, and most state and many private sector workers have notbeen paid for months. A dramatic expression of their poverty is the fall in life expectancy since June 1991; down from 69 to 58 years for men; the birth rate has also fallen substantially.
A month later, it was clear that these funds were merely good money thrown after bad. After a dreadful week, which saw the Moscow stock market plummet, and hundreds of banks teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, on 17th August the Yeltsin government was forced to abandon its last shred of credibility: the rouble and its parity wtih the dollar. Of the first tranche of IMF aid - $4.8 billion in July - $3.8 billion were swallowed up in a vain defence of the rouble. As for the remaning billion dollars, they were not used to restore the government's finances, still less to pay worker's back wages, for the simple reason that they had also melted away, to service the national debt (which already devours more than 35% of the country's income), in other words in interest payments fallen due during this period.not to mention the money that sticks to the fingers of this or that faction of a gangsterised bourgeoisie. The failure of this policy means not only a string of bank failures (more than 1,500 banks were affected), a plunge into recession, and an explosion of the state's dollar debt, but a return to galloping inflation which is already forecast to reach 200% or even 300% this year.
This disaster immediately provoked a political crisis in the upper echelons on the Russian state, which had still not been resolved at the end of September. The discomfiture of the ruling circles, which makes Russia look more and more like a vulgar banana republic, alarmed the Western bourgeoisies. But while the ruling class frets over the fate of Yeltsin and his henchmen, it is the Russian people and the working class who are paying the heavy price of thi situation and its consequences. The rouble's fall has already increased by 50% the price of imported food-stuffs, which amount for more than half of Russia's consumption. Production is barely 40% of its level prior to the fall of the Berlin wall.
Today, reality fully confirms what we said nine years agoin our "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern bloc", written in September 1989: "Faced with the total collapse of their economies, the only way out for these countries, not to any real competitiveness, but at least to keeping their heads above water, is to introduce mechanisms which make it possible to impose a real responsibility on their leaders. These mechanisms presuppose a "liberalisation" of the economy, the creation of a real internal market, a greater "autonomy" for enterprises and the development of a strong "private" sector (...) However, while this kind of programme has become more and more vital, its application runs up against virtually insurmountable obstacles" (International Review no. 60)
A few months later, we added: "(...) some fractions of the bourgeoisie answer that a new Marshall Plan is needed, to rebuild these countries' economic potential (...) today, a massive infection of capital in the East European countries aimed at developing their economic, and specially industrial potential, cannot be on the agenda. Even supposing that such an industrial potential were to be re-established, the goods it produced would only burden stiil further an already super-saturated world market. The countries emerging form Stanlinism today are in the same position as the unde- developed countries: for the latter, the policy of massive credit injections during the 1970s and 80s has simply lead to the catastrophic situation which is well known today (a debt of $1.400 billion, and economies in a still worse state than before). The fate of the East European countries (whose economies in many ways resembles those of the under-developed world) cannot be any different (...) The only thing we can expect is their provision of emergency credit or aid, to allow these coutries to avoid an open financial bankrsuptcy and famines, which would worsen the convulsions that shake them" ("After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos", International Review no. 61)
Two years later, we wrote: "In order to loosen the financial strangulation of the ex-USSR, the G7 agreed to a year's delay in the repayment of interest on the Soviet debt, which now stands at $80 billion. But this will be like putting plaster on a wooden leg because in any case all the credits just disappear down a huge hole. Two years ago, there were all sorts of illusion floating around about the "new markets" that were being opened up by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Today, when one of the expressions of the world economic crisis is a sharp crisis of liquidity, the banks are more and more reluctant to place their capital in this part of the world" (Editorial, International Review no.68)
Against all the interested illusions of the bourgeoisie and its flatterers, the reality of events has thus confirmed what Marxist theory has allowed revolutionaries to foresee. Today, complete disintegration and dreadful poverty are growing at the very gates of "fortress Europe".
The media's attempt to persuade us once the wave of panic at the stock markets has passed, the consequences will be minimal for the real economy internationally, have had little success. This is hardly surprising, since the capitalist's desire to reassure themselves, and above all to hide the gravity of the crisis from the working class, are confronted with the harsh reality of events. Firstly, Russia's creditors have been placed in a difficult situation. The Western banks lent almost $75 billion to Russia. They hold Treasury bonds whose value has fallen by 80%; repayments have been halted for those denominated in dollars. The Western bourgeoisie is also worried lest the other countries Eatern Europe slide into the same nightmare, and they have good reason: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic account between them for 18 times more investment than Russia. At the end of August, the Warsaw stock market fell by 9.5%, while Budapest lost 5.5% - a sign that a capital is already beginning to deset these new financial markets. Moreover, and even more immediately, Russia is drhe agging down with it the other countries of the CIS, whose economies are closely linked to its own. Even if Russia is only a "minor debtor" in the world economy, relative to other regions, its situation is particularly serious given its geopolitical position as a nuclear minefield in the heart of Europe, threatened with a plunge into chaos by its political and financial crisis.
The fact that the Russian debt is small relative to those of South East Asia, or other parts of the world, is poor consolation. Other dangers are looming, notably the threat of a financial crisis in Latin America, which in recent years has been the main recipient of direct foreign investment in "developing countries" (45% of the total in 1997, as opposed to 20% in 1980 and 38% in 1997). The threat of devaluation in Venezuela, the abrupt fall in raw materials prices since the Asian crisis, which has hit the Latin American countries even harder than Russia, a colossal national and foreign debt (Brazil, with the world's seventh highest GDP, has a national debt far greater than Russia's), all go to make Latin America a time bomb which threatens to add to the disaster in Russia and Asia. A time bomb set to go off at the very gates of the world's greatest power the USA.
However, the main threat does not come from the less developed countries, but from the hyper-developed second economic power on the planet: Japan.
The crisis in Japan
Even before disaster hit the Russian economy, in June 1998 n earthquake centered in Tokyo threatened to destabilise the whole world economic system.since 1992, despite seven "recovery plans" which have injected the equivalent of 2-3% ofGDP into the economy every year, and a 50% devaluation of yen in three years which should have upheld the competitiveness of Japanese products on the world market, the Japanese economy have continued to decline. The Japanese state has continuously delayed taking measures to "cure"its banking sector, for fear of confronting the social and economic consequences, in an already fragile situation. Unrecoverable debts now amount to some 15% of the GDP... enough to plunge the Japanese, and so the world economy into a recession without precedent since the great crisis in 1929. Given Japan's inability to get out of the recession, and the government's hesitation to take the necessary counter-measures, the yen has been thetarget of massive speculation, threatening all the currencies of the Far East with a series of devaluations which would trigger a nightmare scenario of deflation. On 17th june 1998, alarm bells rang on the financial markets: the US Federal Reserve gave massive support to a yeh which had begun to slide. However, this only puts the disaster off for later: with the help of the international community, japan was able to put off the day of reckoning, but only at the price of a dizzying rise in debt. The national debt alone is now equivalent to one year's production (100% of GNP)
It is interesting to note at this point, that the same "liberal" economists who once denounced the intervention of the state in the economy, and who have the greatest influence today in the world's great financial institutions and in Western governments, are now crying out for a new and massive injection of public money into the banking sector in order to save it from bankruptcy. Here is the proof that despite all their ideological chatter about "less state intervention", the bourgeoisie's "experts" know very well that the state is the last rampant against economic disaster. When they talk about the "less state", they essentially mean "less welfare state", in other words less social protection (sick pay, unemployment benefit, minimum wage) for the working class, and all their speeches simply mean more and worse attacks on the workers.
Finally, on 18th September, government and opposition signed a compromise to save the Japanese banking system. Instead of launching a recovery, however, these new measures were greeted with a new slide in the markets - an indication of world financiers' deep distrust in the planet's second economic power, presented for decades as the "model" to follow. Deutsche Bank's chief in Tokyo, Kenneth Courtis - a serious witness if ever there was one, did not mince his words:
"We must reverse the downward trend, which is more serious than at the beginning of the 1970s (plummeting investments and consumption.) We have now entered a phase where new bad debts are being created. Thre is much talk about the banks' bad debts, but none about those of households. With the fall in the value of housing and the rise in unemployment, we are likely to see a growing inability to repay loans guaranteed by mortgages on property held by individuals. These mortgages have reached the fabulous sum of $7,500 billion, while the properties have lost 60% of their value. There is a latent social and political problem (...) there should be no mistake: a large scale purge of the economy is underway... the companies that survive will be incredibly strong. The greatest threat to the world economy since the 1930s is likely to take shape in Japan..." (Le Monde, 23rd September).
Clearly, for the Japanese economy - and for the Japanese working class- the worst is still to come. Workers have already been hard ht by ten years of stadnation, and now recession, and will now have to suffer repeated austerity plans, massive redundancies, and increase exploitation in a context where financial crisis is combined with tha closure of some of the country's most important factories. However, since the working class has not yet digested the ideological defeat it suffered with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, this is not the capitalist's most pressing concern. Much more alarming is the destruction of their illusions and the growing realisation of the catastrophic perspectives for their economy.
Towards a new world recession
We have become used, during previous alerts to hearing comforting declarations from the "specialists", along the lines that "trade in South East Asia is not very important", "Russia's weight in the world economy is small", "the European economy is sustained by the perspective of the Euro", "the fundamentals of the US economy are good". Today, the tone has changed! The mini-crash at the end of August throughout the world's markets has been a reminder that, when a tree's weakest branches break first in the storm, it is because the trunk can no longer draw enough energy from its roots to nourish them. The heart of the problem lies in the central countries, and the stock market professionals have no doubt about it. When every reassuring declaration is immediately given the lie by events, it is no longer possible to hide the truth. More fundamentally, the bourgeoisie now has to prepare public opinion for the painful economic and social consequences of an increasingly inevitable recession: "a world recession has not been banished. The American authorities have judged it necessary to make it known that they are following events closely (...) the probability of a worldwide economic slowdown is not a negligeable one. A large part of Asia is in recession. In the USA, the fall in share is in encouraging households to save more, at the expense of consumption, provoking an economic slowdown" (Le Soir, 2nd September)
The crisis in eastern Asia has already led to massive devaluation of capital, throughthe closure of hundreds of production sites, the devaluation of shares, the bankruptcy of thousands of businesses, and the fall into profound poverty of tens of millions of people: "the most dramatic collapse of a country in the last 50 years" is how the World Bank describes the situation in Indonesia. Moreover, the decline in tha Asian stock markets was triggered by the official announcements of both Korea's and Malaysia's entry into recession in the second quarter of 1998. Together with Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Thailand, almost the whole of the much vaunted South East Asia region is going down, since even Singaporeis expected to enter recession by the end of the year. Only China and Taiwan are keeping their heads above the water - but for how long? Indeed, the issue in Asia is no longer recession but depression: "Depression is when the fall in production and trade accumulates to such a point that the social foundations of economic activity are undermined. At this point, it becomes impossible to foresee the tendency being reversed, and difficult, if not pointless to adopt the classic measures for recovery. Many of the Asian countries are in this situation today, to the point that the entire region is under threat" (Le Monde Diplomatique, September 1998). If we combine the economic difficulties in the central countries with the recession with the world's second economy - Japan - and througout South East Asia, adding on the deflationary effects of the crash in Russia on the countries of Easter Europe and Latin America (in particular the fall in raw material prices, notably oil), then we end up with an inevitable contraction of the world market which will be the basis for a new international recession. Indeed, the IMF has already included substantial deflationary effects in its own forecasts: the crisis will cut 2% off world growth rates compared to 1997 (4.7%), while the main blow will come in 1999. The third millennium, which was supposed to open on the definitive victory of capitalism and the new world order, seems likely to begin with zero gowth!
Continuity and limitations of palliative measures
For more than 30 years, the plunge into ever-increasing debt, and the diversion of the crisis' most devastating effects onto the periphery, has made it possible for the international bourgeoisie to put of the day of reckoning. This policy, which is still in extensive use today, is showing more and more signs of exhaustion. The new financial order which has progressively replaced the post-war Bretton Woods agreement "today appears extremely costly. The rich countries (USA, European Union, Japan) have benefited from it, while the small ones have been easily submerged by even a modest capital inflow" (John Llwellyn, global chief economist at Lehman Brothers, London). It is proving more and more difficult to contain the most devastating effects of the crisis on the margins of the international economic system. The economic decline and upheavals are so great that their repercussions will be inevitably be felt in the most powerful countries. After the bankruptcy of the Third World, the Eastern bloc, and South East Asia, the world's second largest economy - Japan - is swaying. This is no longer a matter of the periphery: one of the three poles at the very heart of the system is infected. Another unmistakable sign of the exhaustion of palliative measures is the growing inability of international institutions like theIMF and the World Bank - set up to avoid the repetition of events like 1929 - to extinguish the fires that burst out ever more frequently in the four corners of the world. This is expressed concretely in financial circles by uncertainty as to the IMF's status as "lender of last resort". The markets mumur that the IMF no longer has the resources to play the part of fireman: "Apart from anything else, the latest repercussions of the Russian crisis have shown that the IMF was no longer inclined - no according to some - to systemically play the fireman. The decision last week of the IMF and the G7 group of industrialised countries not to provide extra financial support for Russia can be considered fundamental for future policies of investment in the emerging countries (...) Translation: nothing says that the IMF will intervene financially to extinguish a potential crisis in Latin America or elsewhere. This is not going to reassure investors" (Agence France Presse, Le Soir, 25th August). Increasingly, like the drifting African economy, the bourgeoisie h s no choice but to abandon whole sectors of its world economy, in order to isolate the most gangrened parts and preserve a minimum of stability on a smaller foundation. This is one of the main reasons for the acceleration in the creation of regional economic groupings (European Community, NAFTA, etc). Just as, since 1995m the bourgeoisie in the developed countries has worked to renew the credibility of its trades unions to try to control the workers; struggles to come, so the Euro represents an effort t o resist the financial and monetary tremors to come, while working to stabilise whatever stiil works in the world economy. It is in this sense that the European bourgeoisie describes the Euro as a shield. A cynical calculation has begun to be worked out: international capitalism establishes a balance sheet comparing the cost of the measures needed to rescue a country or region, and the consequences of a bankruptcy if nothing were done. In the future, there is thus no guarantee that the IMF will function as "lender of last resort". This uncertainty is starving a so-called "emerging" countries of the capital on which they had built their "prosperity", thus rendering hypothetical any economic recovery.
The bankruptcy of capitalism
Not so long ago, the term "emerging countries' made the world's capitalists tremble with excitement, as they desperately searched the world market for new terrain for the accumulation of capital. They were the icing on the cake for the hired hacks who presented them as the proof of capitalism's youth, discovering a "second wind" in these regions. Today, the term immediately evokes stock exchange panic and the fear that some "far-off" region should infet the central countries with a new crisis.
But the crisis does not come from this part of the world in particular. It is not a crisis of "youthful countries" but a crisis senility, of a system that entered its decadence more tha 80 years ago, and which has been confronting its insoluble contradictions ever since: the impossibility of finding ever more solvent markets for goods produced in order to ensure the continued accumulation of capital. Two world wars, and destructive open crisis like the present one, that has lasted for thirty years, have been the price. To keep going, the system has constantly cheated with its own laws. And the main "cheat" has been the plunge into ever more fantastic levels of debt.
The absurdity of the rusian situation, whre both banks and the state only survived at the cost of an exponential increase in debt, which forced them to go further into debt just to pay the interest on debts already contracted, is not a "Russian" madness. The entire world economy has survived for decades at the cost of the same absurd flight into debt, because this is the only answer it has to its contracdictions, the only answer it has to its contradictions, the only means of artificially creating new markets for capital and commodities. The whole world sytem is built on an enormous and increasingly fragile house of cards. The massive loans and investments in the "emerging" countries, themselves financed by other loans, have been no more than a means to push the system's explosive contradictions from the centre to the periphery. The repeated stock market crashes - 1987, 1989, 1997, 1998 - express the increasing extnt of capitalism's collapse. The question this raises is not why we are in such a brutal recession, but why it has not come much earlier. The only answer is: because the bourgeoisie worldwide has done everything to put off the day of reckoning by cheating with its own laws. And today, Marxism once again makes no distinction between the experts of "liberalism" and the advocates of "stricter financial and economic control". None of them can rescue an economic system whose contradictions are exploding despite all its cheating. Only Marxism has shown the bankruptcyof capitalism to be inevitable, making this understanding a weapon in the struggle of the exploited.
And when the bill has to be paid, when the fragile financial system cracks, t hen the fundamental contradictions are once again in control: we see the plunge into recession, the explosion of unemployment, strings of bankruptcies, of companies and whole industrial sectors. In a few months, in Thailand and Indonesia for example, the crisis plunged tens of millions deep in poverty. The bourgeoisie itself hs been forced to recognise this reality - which shows just how serious the situation is. Nor is this restricted to the so-called "emerging" countries. The recession is coming to all the central countries of capitalism. The highest levels of debt are owed, not by countries like Russia or Brazil, but by the very heart of capitalism: Japan and the USA. Following two quarters of negative growth, Japan is now officially in recession, and its GDP is expected to fall by 1.5% for 1998. Britain, presented not so long ago, alongside the US, as a model of economic "dynamism" has been forced by the threat of inflation to plan a "cooling" of the economy, and a "rapid rise in unemployment" (according to Liberation of 13th August). Redundancies are already proliferating in manufacturing (100,000 lay-offs out of 1.8 months).
Asia presents us with the perspective for the world capitalist economy. Despite all the "rescue" plans designed to return these countries to health and restore their vigour, we have seen the recession make itself at home, forming huge pockets of poverty and famine.
Capitalism has no solution to its crisis, which in return has no solution within this system. This is why the only solution to the barbarism and poverty that it imposes on humanity, is its overthrow by the working class. Thanks to its concentration and its historic experience, the proletariat at the very heart of capitalism, and in Europe notably, bears a decisive responsibility towards its class brothers in the rest of the world.
MPF
1 We should point out that the IMF's annual general meeting in October 1997 considered that the next major country "at risk" could well be Turkey. So much for the lucidity of the bourgeoisie's most qualified "experts"!
On numerous occasions in our press, we have denounced the massacres and crimes of the "great democracies" and shown that the "allies" shared responsibility for the holocaust with the Nazis (International Reviews 66 and 89). Contrary to the lying propaganda of the bourgeoisie, which repeats endlessly that the Second World War was a struggle between the democratic and humanist "forces of good" and the "absolute evil" of Nazi totalitarianism, this conflict was really a bloody conflict between rival imperialist interests, both as barbaric and as murderous as each other.
Once the war was finished and Germany defeated, the natural tendencies of decadent capitalism took their course and the new rivalries between former allies came to the surface. A regime of famine and terror was imposed on the European populations, especially in Germany. Here again, contrary to the propaganda of the Western bourgeoisies, this policy was by no means exclusive to Stalinism.
The episode of the Berlin airlift in 1948 marked a brutal acceleration of imperialist antagonisms between the blocs formed around Stalinist Russia and the USA. It was a turning point in the latter's policy towards Germany. Far from being an expression of their humanism, the Berlin airlift was an expression of their counter-offensive against Russia's imperialist ambitions. At the same time, it allowed them to hide their policy of terror, of organised famine, of mass deportation and imprisonment in labour camps which they had imposed on the German population right after the war.
It is not surprising that the democratic victor, of World War II - the French, British and American bourgeoisies - have taken the opportunity this year to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin airlift that began on June 26 1948. According to their propaganda, this event proved, on the one hand, the humanitarianism of the Western democratic powers and their mercy towards a defeated nation; and on the other provided a beacon of resistance against the threats of Russian totalitarianism. For more than a year over 2.3 million tons of relief goods were flown on 277,728 flights by American and British planes to a West Berlin that had been blockaded by Russian imperialism. The passion for peace, freedom and human dignity revealed by this historical episode continues to live on today in the hearts of the western imperialists, according to their own media and politicians.
Nothing could be further from the truth, either of the history of the last 50 years in general or of the real meaning of the Berlin airlift in itself. In reality the airlift essentially marked a change of American imperialist policy. Germany was no longer to be de-industrialised and turned into farmland as put forward at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 but was now to be reconstructed as the bulwark of the newly created Western imperialist bloc against the Eastern bloc. This change on the part of Western imperialism was not motivated by compassion. Instead the reason for the reorientation was the threat of Russian hegemony spreading to Western Europe as a result of the latter's economic and political dislocation after the mass slaughter and destruction of World War II. Thus the Berlin airlift, while feeding pan of a starving population, was a well-devised propaganda stunt to hide the misery of the past few years, and to sell the new orientation to the West German and Western European populations who were, henceforth, to be held hostage to the emerging Cold War. Thanks to these "humanitarian" supply flights, three US bomber groups were sent to Europe, placing Soviet targets well within the range of their B-29s ...
Nevertheles the celebration of the airlift today, despite a special visit by US President Clinton to Berlin, has been relatively quiet. One probable explanation for the low intensity of this particular anniversary campaign is that a sustained celebration would raise uncomfortable questions about the real policy of the Allies towards the German proletariat during and immediately after World War II. It might reveal too much of the hypocrisy of the democracies, and their own crimes against humanity. It would also help vindicate the communist left which has consistently denounced all the barbaric manifestations of decadent capitalism, whether in the form of democracy, fascism, or Stalinism.
The ICC has often shown1, along with other political tendencies of the communist left, how the crimes of Allied imperialism during the Second World War were no less heinous than those of the fascist imperialisms. They were the product of capitalism at a particular stage of its historic decline. The fire bombings or nuclear erasure of major German and Japanese cities at the end of the war showed the spurious philanthropy of the Allies. The bombing of all the densely populated centres in Germany did not have the object of destroying military or even economic targets. The dislocation of the German economy at the end of the war was not achieved by these 'area bombings' but by the destruction of the transport system2. Instead the bombardment was designed specifically to decimate and terrorise the working class and prevent a revolutionary movement developing out of the chaos of defeat as it had after 1918.
But 1945, year zero, did not bring an end to the nightmare.
"The 1945 Potsdam Conference and the inter-Allied agreement of March 1946 formulated concrete decisions to ... reduce German industrial capacity to a low level and instead give agriculture a greater priority, In order to eliminate the German economy's capacity to wage war, it was decided to implement a total ban on the German output of strategic products such as aluminium, synthetic rubber and synthetic benzene. Furthermore Germany would be obliged to reduce its steel capacity to 50% of its 1929 level, and the superfluous equipment would be dismantled and transported to the victorious countries of both East and West"3.
It is not difficult to imagine the 'concrete decisions' that had been made in respect of the welfare of the population:
"At the surrender in May 1945, schools and universities were closed, as well as radio stations, newspapers, the national Red Cross and mail service. Germany was also stripped of much coal, her eastern territories, [accounting for 25 % of Germany's arable land] industrial patents, lumber, gold reserves, and most of her labour force. Allied teams also looted and destroyed Germany's factories, offices, laboratories and workshops ... Starting on May 8th, the date of the surrender in the West, German and Italian prisoners in Canada, Italy, the USA and the UK, who had been fed according to the Geneva convention, were suddenly put on greatly reduced rations ... ( .... )
"Foreign relief agencies were prevented from sending food from abroad; Red Cross food trains were sent back to Switzerland; all foreign governments were denied permission to send food to German civilians; fertiliser production was sharply reduced; and food was confiscated during the first year, especially in the French zone. The fishing fleet was kept in port while people starved".
Germany was effectively turned into a vast death camp by the Russian, British, French and American occupying powers. The Western democracies captured 73 % of all German prisoners in their zones of occupation. Many more of the German population died after the war than had during battle, air raids, and concentration camps during the war. Between 9 and 13 million people perished as a result of the policy of Allied imperialism between 1945-50. There were three main foci of this monstrous genocide.
* Firstly amongst a total of 13.3 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern parts of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc., as allowed by the Potsdam agreement. This ethnic cleansing was so inhumane that only 7.3 million arrived at their destination within the post-war borders of Germany; the rest 'disappeared' in the most gruesome circumstances.
* Secondly amongst the German prisoners of war who died as a result of the starvation and diseased conditions of the allied camps - between 1.5 and 2 million.
* Finally amongst the population in general who were put on rations of around 1000 calories per day, guaranteeing slow starvation and sickness - 5.7 million died as a result.
The full extent of this unimaginable barbarism still remains the best kept secret of the democratic imperialisms. Even the German bourgeoisie is to this day covering up the facts so that they can only be gleaned by independent research comparing inconsistencies in the official records. For example the estimate of the number of civilians who perished in this period is reckoned, among other ways, by the enormous shortfall in population recorded by the census of Germany in 1950. The role of the democratic imperialisms in this extermination campaign has become clearer after the fall of the Soviet Empire and the opening of the Soviet archives. Many of the losses that had previously been blamed on the USSR by the West have turned out to be the latter's responsibility: many more prisoners of war for example died in the camps run by the Western powers than did those in the Russian zone. Their deaths were simply not recorded or were hidden under other headings. The scale of the slaughter is not surprising considering the conditions: prisoners were left without food or shelter; the numbers were swelled by the sick turned out of the hospitals; at night they could be randomly machine-gunned for sport. Feeding the prisoners by the civilian population was decreed a capital offence4.
The extent of the starvation of the civilian population, 7.5 million of whom were homeless after the war, can be deduced also from the rations that were allocated to them by the Western occupiers. In the French zone where conditions were worst the official ration in 1947 was 450 calories per day, half the ration of the infamous Belsen concentration camp.
The Western bourgeoisie still presents this period as one of 'readjustment' for the German population after the inevitable horrors of World War II. The deprivations were a 'natural' consequence of post-war dislocation. In any case, the bourgeoisie argues, the German population deserved such treatment as retribution for starting the war and to pay for the war crimes of the Nazi regime. This repulsive 'argument' is particularly hypocritical for a number of reasons. Firstly because the complete destruction of German imperialism was already a war aim of the allies before they had decided to use the 'great alibi' of Auschwitz to justify it. Secondly, those immediately responsible for National Socialism and its imperialist ambitions - the German bourgeoisie - emerged relatively unscathed from the war and its aftermath. While many figureheads were executed at the Nuremburg Trials, the majority of the functionaries and bosses of the Nazi era were 'recycled' and took up posts in the new democratic state set up by the allies.5 The German proletariat that suffered the most from the post-war policy of the allies had no responsibility for the Nazi regime: they were the first of its victims. The allied bourgeoisies, which had supported Hitler's repression of the proletariat after 1933, targeted an entire generation of the German working class during and after the war not out of revenge for the Hitler era, but to exorcise the spectre of a German revolution that haunted them from the aftermath of World War I.
It was only when this murderous objective had been achieved and when US imperialism realised that the exhaustion of Europe after the war might lead to the domination of Russian imperialism over the whole continent that the policy of Potsdam had to be changed. The reconstruction of Western Europe demanded the resurrection of the German economy. Then the wealth of the United States, swollen in part by reparations already looted from Germany, could be funnelled into the Mar hall Plan to help rebuild the European bastion of what was to become the Western bloc. The Berlin airlift of 1948 was the symbol of this change of strategy.
The crimes of imperialism in their fascist and Stalinist form are well known. When those of the democratic imperialisms are clearer to the world's working class, then the scope of the proletariat's historic mission will be more sharply revealed. No wonder the bourgeoisie wants to try and fraudulently assimilate the ork of the communist left on this question [Q the lies of the extreme right and to ‘negationism'. The bourgeoisie wants to hide the fact that genocide, instead of an aberrant exception perpetrated by evil madmen, has been the general rule of the history of decadent capitalism.
Como
1 International Review 83 "Hiroshima: The Lies of the bourgeoisie". IR 88 "Anti-fascism justifies Barbarism ", lR 89 "Allies and Nazis both responsible for the holocaust".
2 According to The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939-45, The Official Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit, that has only just been published!
3 Hennan Van der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval, Pelican 1987.
4 James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, The fate of German civilians under Allied occupation 1945-50, Warner Books.
5 See Tom Bower, Blind eye to Murder
In the industrialised countries, the summer period is one where, in general, the bourgeoisie concedes holidays to its exploited in order that they may recover their energy for work and become more productive for the rest of the year. The workers in turn have learnt to their cost, that the dominant class profits from their dispersion, their separation from the place of work and their lack of vigilance to accelerate the attacks against their living conditions. Thus, while the workers rest, the bourgeoisie and its governments do not remain inactive. However, for several years, the holiday period has also become one of the most fertile for the aggravation of imperialist tensions. For example, Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, leading to the Gulf crisis and war. In the summer of 1991 ex-Yugoslavia began to break up and brought war to the heart of Europe for the first time for nearly half a century. More recently, the summer of 1995 saw the NATO bombardment and US-supported Croat offensive against the Serbs. We could go on giving more examples.
By contrast, the summer of 1997 was particularly calm from the standpoint of imperialist confrontations. The international situation was no calmer as a result: during this summer, and independently of any calculation by the capitalists and their governments, there began the financial crisis in the South East Asian countries, which presaged the convulsions in which the world economy is floundering today.
The summer of 1998 returned to the "traditional" sharpening of imperialist conflict, with the war in the Congo and the bombing of two US embassies in Africa, followed by the American bombardment of Sudan and Afghanistan. At the same time, the state of the world economy has worsened considerably.
In particular, the chaos in Russia has been followed by a sharp decline in "emerging countries" such as those in Latin America, and by a historic fall in the value of stock markets in the developed world.
This recent unfurling of convulsions throughout the capitalist world is no accident. It expresses a new step by bourgeois society into insurmountable contradictions. There is no direct, mechanical link between today's economic upheavals and the increase in military confrontations. But they all spring from the same source: the world economy's plunge into a crisis which expresses the capitalism's historical dead-end ever since it entered its decadent phase with the outbreak of World War I.
This is why the 20th Century which is drawing to a close is recognised as the century of the greatest tragedies in human history. And only the world working class, by carrying out the communist revolution, can prevent the 21st Century from being worse still. This is the main lesson that workers must draw from world capitalism's plunge into crisis and increasing barbarism.
The victorious conquest of power by the working class in Russia in October 1917 lit a flame that illuminated the whole world. The working class of neighbouring countries immediately followed the example given by the Russian workers. In November 1917 the working class in Finland joined the fight. In the Czech provinces, in Poland, in Austria, in Rumania and Bulgaria in 1918, waves of strikes shook the regimes in power. And when, in turn, in November 1918, the German workers took the stage, the revolutionary wave had reached a key country, a country which would be decisive for the ultimate outcome of the struggles, and where the defeat or victory of the revolution would be determined.
The German bourgeoisie responded by putting an end to the war in November 1918, and by using Social Democracy and the unions - working hand in glove with the army - to sabotage the movement and to empty it of its content. Finally, through provoking a premature uprising and above all by making full use of the forces of 'democracy', the bourgeoisie prevented the working class from taking power and thus extending the Russian revolution.
The international bourgeoisie unites to stop the revolutionary wave
The series of uprisings which took place in 1919, in Europe as in other continents, the foundation of the Hungarian soviet republic in March, the formation of workers' councils in Slovakia in June, the wave of strikes in France in the spring as well as the powerful struggles in the USA and Argentina, all these events took place at a time when the extension of the revolution to Germany had suffered a major set-back. Since the key player in the extension of the revolution, the working class in Germany, had not succeeded in overthrowing the capitalist class with a sudden and rapid assault, the wave of struggles began to lose its élan in 1919. Although the workers continued to battle heroically against the offensive of the bourgeoisie in a series of confrontations, in Germany itself with the Kapp putsch in March 1920 and in Italy in the autumn of the same year, these struggles did not manage to push the movement forward.
By the same token, these struggles did not break the offensive that the capitalist class had launched against the isolated proletarian bastion in Russia. In the spring of 1918, the Russian bourgeoisie, which had been overthrown very quickly and almost without any violence, began to wage a civil war, supported by 14 armies of the 'democratic' states. In this civil war, which was to last almost three years and was accompanied by an economic blockade aimed at starving the workers, the White armies of the capitalist states bled the Russian working class dry. After the years of blockade and encirclement, the Russian working class, through the military offensive of the Red Army, had won the civil war, but it was completely exhausted, with over a million dead, and, above all, it was politically enfeebled.
At the end of 1920, when the working class had already been through its first major defeat in Germany, when the working class in Italy had been caught in the trap of the factory occupations, when the Red Army had failed in its march on Warsaw, the communists began to understand that the hopes for a rapid and continuous extension of the revolution were not going to materialise. At the same time the capitalist class realised that the principal, mortal danger represented by the insurrection in Germany had retreated, for the moment at least.
The generalisation of the revolution had been countered above all because the capitalist class had quickly drawn the lessons of the workers' successful conquest of power in Russia.
The historical explanation of the explosive development of the revolution, and its rapid defeat, lies in the fact that it arose in response to an imperialist war, and not to a generalised economic crisis as Marx had envisaged. Unlike the situation which prevailed in 1939, the proletariat had not been defeated in a decisive manner before the First World War; it was thus capable, despite three years of carnage, of coming up with a revolutionary answer to the open barbarism of world imperialism. Putting an end to the war and thus preventing the massacre of even more millions could only be done rapidly and decisively, by directly attacking the regimes in power. This is why the revolution, once it had broken out, developed and spread so quickly. And in the revolutionary camp, everyone hoped for a rapid victory of the revolution, at least in Europe.
However, while the bourgeoisie is incapable of ending the economic crisis of its system, it can stop an imperialist war when it is faced with the threat of revolution. This is what it did once the revolutionary wave reached the heart of the world proletariat in Germany, in November 1918. In this way the exploiters were able to reverse the dynamic towards the international extension of the revolution.
The balance sheet of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave shows conclusively that world war, even before the era of atomic weapons, does not provide a favourable soil for the victory of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg argued in The Junius Pamphlet, modern world war, by killing millions of proletarians, including the most experienced and conscious battalions of the class, poses a threat to the very foundations of the victory of socialism. Furthermore, it creates conditions of struggle which are different depending on whether the workers are in the victorious or the losing countries. It was no accident that the revolutionary wave was strongest in the camp of the defeated, in Russia, Germany, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also in Italy (which only formally belonged to the victorious side), and that it was much less strong in countries like Britain, France and the US. These latter were not only able to temporarily stabilise their economies thanks to the spoils of war, but also to contaminate many workers with the euphoria of 'victory'. The bourgeoisie even succeeded to some extent in stoking up the fires of chauvinism. Thus, despite the world wide solidarity with the October revolution and the growing influence of internationalist revolutionaries during the course of the war, the nationalist poison secreted by the ruling class continued to do its destructive work in the proletariat once the revolution had begun. The revolutionary movement in Germany gives us some edifying examples of this: the influence of extremist and so-called 'left communist' nationalism - that of the 'national Bolsheviks' who, during the war, in Hamburg distributed anti-semitic leaflets against the Spartacist leadership because of its internationalist positions; the patriotic feelings sharpened after the signing of the Versailles Treaty; the anti-French chauvinism stirred up by the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, etc. As we will see in a subsequent article, the Communist International, in its phase of opportunist degeneration, more and more tried to ride this nationalist wave instead of opposing it.
But the intelligence and deviousness of the German bourgeoisie was not only revealed when it put an end to the war as soon as the workers began to launch their assault on the state. Unlike the working class in Russia, which was faced with a weak and inexperienced bourgeoisie, the German workers came up against a unified bloc of the forces of capital, with Social Democracy and the unions at its head.
By drawing maximum profit from the illusions the workers still had in democracy, by using and aggravating the divisions resulting from the war, notably between 'victors' and 'vanquished', by setting up a whole series of political manoeuvres and provocations, the capitalist class succeeded in luring the working class into traps and defeating it.
The extension of the revolution had been halted. Having survived the first wave of workers' reactions, the bourgeoisie could then go onto the offensive. It was to do everything in its power to turn the balance of forces in its favour.
We will now examine how the revolutionary organisations reacted in the face of this blockage in the class struggle and what were {he consequences for the working class in Russia.
The Communist International between its 2nd and 3rd Congresses
When the working class began to move in Germany in November 1918, the Bolsheviks, from December, began calling for an international conference. At this time most revolutionaries thought that the conquest of power by the working class in Germany would succeed at least as quickly as in Russia. In the letter of invitation to his conference, it was proposed that it be held in Germany (legally) or in Holland (illegally) on 1 February 1919. Initially, no-one foresaw holding it in Russia. But the crushing of the Berlin workers in January, the assassination of the revolutionary leaders Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and the repression organised by the Freikorps under the direction of the SPD made it impossible to hold this meeting in the German capital. It was only at this point that Moscow was chosen. When the Communist International was founded in March 1919, Trotsky wrote in Izvestia on 29 April 1919: "If today the centre of the Third International lies in Moscow - and of this we are profoundly convinced - then on the morrow this centre will shift west- ward: to Berlin, to Paris, to London".
For all the revolutionary organisations the policy of the CI was determined by the interests of the world revolution. The initial debates at the congress were centred on the situation in Germany, on the role of Social Democracy in crushing the working class in January and the necessity to combat this party as a capitalist force.
In the article just mentioned Trotsky wrote: "The revolutionary 'primogeniture' of the Russian proletariat is only temporary ... The dictatorship of the Russian working class will be able to finally entrench itself and to develop into a genuine, all-sided socialist construction only from the hour when the European working class frees us from the economic yoke and especially the military yoke of the European bourgeoisie". And again: "if the European people do not rise up and overthrow imperialism, it is we who will be overthrown ... there is no doubt about this. Either the Russian revolution opens the floodgates to the struggles in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will annihilate and strangle our struggle" (Trotsky to the 2nd Congress of Soviets).
After several parties had joined the CI in a short space of time, it was noted at its Second Congress in July 1920 "In certain circumstances, there can be a danger of the CI being diluted in a milieu of semi-convinced groups that have not yet freed themselves from the ideology of the 2nd International. For this reason, the 2nd World Congress of the CI considers that it is necessary to establish very precise conditions for the admission of new parties".
Although the International was founded in the heat of the situation, it established certain clear delimitations on questions as central as the extension of the revolution, the conquest of political power, the clearest possible demarcation from Social Democracy and the denunciation of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand other questions, like the unions and the parliamentary question, were left open.
The majority of the CI adopted the orientation of participating in parliamentary elections but without this being an explicit obligation. This was the result of the fact that a strong minority (notably the group around Bordiga , then known as the 'abstentionist fraction') was totally opposed to this. On the other hand, the CI decided that it was obligatory for all revolutionaries to work in the trade unions. The delegates of the KAPD, who in a totally irresponsible manner had left the Congress before it had begun, were unable to defend their point of view on these questions, unlike the Italian comrades. The debate, which had already begun prior to the Congress with the publication of Lenin's Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, would evolve around the question of the methods of struggle in the new epoch of the decadence of capitalism. It was through this political battle that the communist left made its appearance.
With regard to the perspectives for the class struggle, the 2nd Congress was still optimistic. During the summer of 1920 everyone was expecting an intensification of the revolutionary struggle. But after the defeat of autumn 1920, this tendency went into reverse.
The reflux in the class struggle, springboard for opportunism
In the "Theses on the International Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern", at its Third Congress in July 1921, the CI analysed the situation as follows:
"During the year that elapsed between the Second and Third Congresses of the Communist International a series of working class uprisings and battles have resulted in partial defeats (the Red Army offensive against Warsaw in August 1920; the movement of the Italian proletariat in September 1920; the uprising of the German workers in March 1921).
The first period of the revolutionary movement after the war is characterised by the elemental nature of its onslaught, by the considerable formlessness of its methods and aims and by the extreme panic of the ruling classes; and it may be regarded by and large as terminated. The class self-confidence of the bourgeoisie and the outward stability of its slate organs have undoubtedly become strengthened (...) The leaders of the bourgeoisie ... have everywhere assumed the offensive against the working masses, on both the economic and the political fronts (...) In view of this situation the Communist International presents 10 itself and to the entire working class the following questions: To what extent do these new political interrelations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat correspond to the more profound interrelationship of forces between these two contending camps? Is it true that the bourgeoisie is about to restore the social equilibrium which had been upset by the war? Are there grounds for assuming that the epoch of political paroxysms and class battles is being superseded by a new and prolonged epoch of restoration and capitalist growth? Doesn't this necessitate a revision of programme or tactics on the part of the Communist International?"
And in the "Theses on Tactics" it was suggested that "The world revolution ... will necessitate a longer period of struggles ... The world revolution is not a linear process".
The CI would adapt to the new situation in different ways.
The slogan 'to the masses': a step towards opportunist confusion
In a previous article, we have already looked at the pseudo-theory of the offensive. Part of the CI and a part of the revolutionary camp in Germany were pushing for an 'offensive', to 'strike a blow' in support of Russia. They theorised their adventurism in a 'theory of the offensive', according to which the party can launch an assault on capital, without taking into account the balance of forces or the militancy of the class, as soon as the party is sufficiently brave and determined.
However, history shows that the proletarian revolution cannot be provoked in an artificial manner and that the party cannot compensate for a lack of militancy and initiative among the masses. Even if the CI finally rejected the adventurist actions of the KPD at its Third Congress in July 1921, it then went on to advocate opportunist methods of increasing its influence among the undecided masses: ""to the masses", this is the first slogan that the Third Congress sends to the communists of all countries". In other words, if the masses were marking time, the communists had to go to the masses.
In order to increase its influence among the masses, the CI in autumn 1920, had already pushed for the establishment of mass parties in a number of countries. In Germany, the left wing of the centrist USPD had joined the KPD to form the YKPD in December 1920 (which raised its membership to 400,000). In the same period, the Czech Communist Party with its 350,000 members and the French Communist Party with its 120,000 were admitted to the International.
"From the day of its foundation the Communist International has clearly and unambiguously made its goal the formation not of small communist sects ... but participation in the struggle of the working masses, the direction of this struggle in a communist spirit and the creation in the course of this struggle of experienced, large, revolutionary mass communist parties. From the beginning of its existence, the CI has rejected sectarian tendencies by calling on its associated parties - whatever their size - to participate in the trade unions in order to overturn from within their reactionary bureaucracy and to make the trade unions mass revolutionary organs, organs of struggle ... At its Second Congress the Communist International publicly rejected sectarian tendencies in its resolutions on the trade union question and on arliamentarism ... Thanks to the tactics of the Communist International (revolutionary work in the trade unions, the open letter, etc) communism in Germany ... has become a great revolutionary mass party. In Czechoslovakia, the communists have managed to win over the majority of the politically organised workers ... Sectarian communist groups (like the KAPD) on the other hand, have not had the slightest success" ("Theses on tactics", Third Congress of the CI).
In reality, this debate on the means of the struggle and the possibility of a mass party in the new epoch of decadent capitalism had already begun at the founding congress of the KPD in December 1918-January 1919. At this time, the debate revolved around the union question and around whether it was still possible to use bourgeois parliaments.
Even though, at this congress, Rosa Luxemburg still pronounced herself in favour of participating in parliamentary elections and for working in the unions, it was with the clear vision that new conditions of struggle had arisen, conditions in which revolutionaries had to fight for the revolution with the greatest perseverance and without the naive hope in a 'rapid solution'. Warning against impatience and precipitation, she said with great emphasis: "If I describe the process in this way, it is because this process seems to be a longer one than we at first imagined". Even in the last article she wrote, just before she was murdered, she affirmed: "from all this we can conclude that we cannot expect a final and lasting victory at this moment" ('Order reigns in Berlin').
The analysis of the situation and the evaluation of the balance of forces between the classes has always been one of the primordial tasks for communists. If they do not correctly assume these responsibilities, if they continue to see things moving forward when they are about to move backwards, there is the danger of falling into impatient reactions into adventurism, and into trying to substitute artificial measures for the real movement of the class.
It was the leadership of the KPD, at its conference of October 1919, after the first reflux of the struggles in Germany, which proposed to orient the party towards working in the unions and parliamentary elections in order to increase its influence in the working masses. In doing so it was turning its back on the majority vote taken at the founding congress. Two years later, at the Third Congress of the CI, this debate resurfaced.
The Italian left around Bordiga had already attacked the orientation of the Second Congres on participation in parliamentary elections (see its "Theses on Parliamentarism"), warning against an approach which would be a fertile soil for opportunism. And though the KAPD failed to make itself heard at the Second Congress, its delegation intervened at the Third Congress in more difficult circumstances and fought against this opportunist dynamic. Whereas the KAPD stressed that "the proletariat needs a highly formed party-nucleus", the CI sought salvation in the creation of mass parties. The position of the KAPD was rejected.
As for the opportunist orientation of 'going to the masses', it was to facilitate the adoption of the tactic of the 'United Front', which was adopted a few months after the Third Congress.
What is notable here is that the CI embarked on this journey at a time when the revolution in Europe was not extending and the wave of struggles was in retreat. Just as the Russian revolution of 1917 was only the opening of an international wave of revolutionary struggles, the decline of the revolution and the political regression of the International were simply the result and expression of the evolution of the international balance of class forces. The historically unfavourable circumstances of a revolution emerging out of a world war, combined with the intelligence of the bourgeoisie which had put an end to the war and played the democratic card, had prevented the extension of the revolution and created the conditions for opportunism to grow within the International.
The debate on the evolution of Russia
In order to understand the reactions of revolutionaries to the isolation of the working class in Russia and the change in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, we have to examine the evolution of the situation in Russia itself.
In October 1917, when the working class, under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, took political power, there was no illusion that socialism could be built in Russia alone. The whole class had its eyes fixed on the outside, awaiting help from there. And when the workers took the first economic measures like the confiscation of the factories and steps towards taking control of production, it was precisely the Bolsheviks who warned them against any false hopes in such measures. The Bolsheviks were particularly clear on the fact that political measures were the vital priority, ie measures oriented towards the generalisation of the revolution. They were clear that the conquest of political power in one country did not do away with capitalism. As long as the working class had not overthrown the ruling class on a world scale, or at least in the most decisive regions, political measures remained primordial and decisive. In the economic sphere, the proletariat could only administer, to the best of its interests, the scarcity that characterises capitalist society.
But the situation was more serious than this. In the spring of 1918 when the capitalist states imposed an economic blockade and entered the civil war on the side of the Russian bourgeoisie, the workers and peasants of Russia faced a truly disastrous economic situation. How were they to resolve the grave problems of food shortages while at the same time dealing with the sabotage orchestrated by the capitalist class? How were they to organise and coordinate the military effort needed to respond to the attacks of the White Armies? Only the state was able to assume such tasks. It was indeed a new state that had arisen after the insurrection and which, at many levels, was still composed of the old layers of functionaries. And to deal with the breadth of the tasks imposed by the civil war and the fight against sabotage from within, the militias of the initial period were no longer sufficient; it was necessary to create a Red Army and special organs of repression.
Thus, while the working class had genuinely held the reins of power in the short period since the October revolution, a period where the main decisions were taken by the soviets, a process rapidly developed in which the soviets were more and more to lose their power and their means of coercion to the benefit of the post-insurrectionary state. Instead of the soviets controlling the state apparatus, exerting their dictatorship over the state and using it as an instrument in the interests of the working class, it was this new "organ" which the Bolsheviks erroneously called a "workers' state" - which began to undermine the power of the soviets and impose its own directives on them. This evolution had its origins in the fact that the capitalist mode of production continued to prevail. Moreover, not only did the post-insurrectionary state not tend to wither away - it tended to swell more and more. This tendency was to become more acute the more the revolutionary wave ceased to extend and began to go into retreat, leaving the working class in Russia increasingly isolated. Less and less was the proletariat able to put pressure on the capitalist class on an international level; less and less was it able to counteract its plans and in particular to prevent its military operations against Russia. In this way the bourgeoisie was to dispose of a greater margin of manoeuvre in order to strangle the revolution in Russia. And it was within this overall dynamic that the post-insurrectionary state in Russia was to develop. Thus, it was the capacity of the bourgeoisie to prevent the extension of the revolution which was at the basis of this state becoming more and more hegemonic and "autonomous".
In order to deal with the growing scarcity imposed by the capitalists, with the bad harvests, with sabotage by the peasants, with the destruction caused by the civil war, with the famines and epidemics which resulted from all this, the state directed by the Bolsheviks was forced to take more and more coercive measures of all kinds, such as the requisitioning of the grain harvest and the rationing of nearly all goods. It was equally forced to try to strike up commercial links with the capitalist countries; this was posed not as a moral question but as a question of survival. Scarcity and trade could only be administered by the state. But who controlled the state?
Who should control the state? The party or the councils?
At the time, the concept that the class party should take power in the name of the proletariat and thus hold the commanding posts in the new state was widely shared among revolutionaries. Thus after October 1917 the leading members of the Bolshevik party occupied the highest positions in the new state and began to identify themselves with the state.
This conception could have been put into question and rejected if, after a number of victorious insurrections elsewhere, and especially in Germany, the working class had triumphed over the bourgeoisie on an international level. After such a victory, the proletariat and its revolutionaries would have been better placed to see the differences, and even the conflict of interests, between the state and the revolution. It would have thus been easier for them to have made a more effective critique of the errors of the Bolsheviks. But the isolation of the Russian revolution meant that the party more and more stood for the interests of the state instead of the interests of the international proletariat. Progressively, every initiative was taken out of the hands of the workers and the state became more and more autonomous, spreading its tentacles everywhere. As for the Bolshevik party, it was at once the main promoter and the main hostage of this development.
At the end of the civil war, the famine got even worse during the winter of 1920-21, to the point where the population of Moscow, part of which tried to flee the famine fell by 50 % , and that of Petrograd by two thirds. Peasant revolts and workers' protests were on the increase. A wave of strikes broke out in the Petrograd region and the Kronstadt sailors were the spearhead of this resistance against the deterioration of living conditions and against the state. They put forward economic and political demands rejecting the dictatorship of the party and calling for the renewal of the soviets.
The state, with the Bolshevik party at its head, decided to confront the workers violently, considering them to be counter-revolutionary forces manipulated from the outside. For the first time, the Bolshevik party participated in a homogeneous manner in the violent crushing of a part of the working class. And this took place at the very moment it was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune and two years after Lenin at the founding Congress of the CI, had inscribed the slogan 'all power to the soviets' on the flag of the International. Although it was the Bolshevik party which concretely assumed the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising, the whole revolutionary movement of the time was mistaken about its nature. The Russian Workers' Opposition, like the parties that belonged to the International, denounced the rising clearly.
In response to this situation of growing discontent, and in order to encourage the peasants to produce more and bring their crops to market, it was decided in March 1921 to introduce the New Economic Policy (NEP), which, in reality, did not represent a "return" to capitalism since capitalism had never been abolished, but was merely an adaptation to the phenomenon of scarcity and to the laws of the market. At the same time, a trade agreement was signed between Russia and Britain.
With regard to this question of the state and the identification of the party with the state, there were divergences within the Bolshevik party. As we wrote in the International Review nos 8 and 9, the left communists in Russia had already rung the alarm and warned against the danger of a state capitalist regime. In 1918, the journal Kommunist had protested against the measures of discipline imposed on the workers. Even though, with the civil war, most of these criticisms were put on the back-burner, and the party closed ranks to face up to the aggression by the capitalist states, an opposition continued to develop against the growing weight of bureaucracy within the party. The Democratic Centralism group around Ossinski, founded in 1919 criticised the workers' loss of initiative and called for the reestablishment of democracy within the party, notably at the 9th Congress in the autumn of 1920, where it denounced the party's growing bureaucratisation.
Lenin himself, despite holding the highest state responsibilities, was the one who in many ways saw most clearly the danger that the new state could represent for the revolution. He was often the most determined in his arguments calling for the workers to defend themselves against this state.
Thus, in the debate on the union question, Lenin insisted on the fact that the unions had to serve in the defence of workers' interests, even against the "workers'" state which in fact suffered from severe bureaucratic deformations. This was clear proof that Lenin admitted that there could be a conflict of interest between the state and the working class. Trotsky, on the other hand, called for the total integration of the unions into the "workers" state. He wanted to complete the militarisation of labour, even after the end of the civil war. The Workers' Opposition group which appeared for the first time in March 1921, at the 10th Congress of the party, wanted production to be controlled by the industrial unions, themselves under the control of the soviet state.
Within the party, decisions were more and more transferred from party conferences to the Central Committee and the recently formed Politburo. The militarisation of society which the civil war had provoked had spread throughout the state to the very ranks of the party. Instead of pushing for the initiative of party members in the local committees, the party submitted the whole of its political activity to the strict control of the leadership, through the system of political "departments". This led to the decision, at the 10th Congress, to ban fractions in the party.
In the second part of this article, we will analyse the resistance of the communist left against this opportunist tendency and the way the International more and more became the instrument of the Russian state.
DV
Over the summer there was no pause in the convulsions of the capitalist world. On the contrary, as has often been the case in recent years, the summer period was marked by a brutal aggravation of imperialist conflicts and military barbarism. The bombings of the US embassies in Africa, the US reprisals in Sudan and Afghanistan, the rebellion in the Congo against the new Kabila regime, involving a number of neighbouring states, etc. All these new events can be added to the multitude of armed conflicts that have been devastating the world and highlight the fact that under the reign of capitalism human society is sinking into bloody chaos.
On a number of occasions we have shown in our press that the collapse of the eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s did not result in a "new world order" as announced by the US President of the day, George Bush, but in the greatest chaos in human history. Since the end of the second imperialist butchery, the world had lived under the yoke of two military blocs whose constant confrontations over a period of more than four decades led to more deaths than during the world war itself. However, the division of the world between the two imperialist blocs, while fuelling many local conflicts, obliged the two superpowers to exert a certain discipline in order to keep these conflicts within "acceptable" limits and prevent them degenerating into a general state of chaos.
The collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the resulting disappearance of the opposing bloc, did not bring an end to imperialist antagonisms between capitalist states, on the contrary. The threat of a new world war may have retreated for the time being, since the blocs that might have waged it no longer exist, but, sharpened by the capitalist economy sinking into an insurmountable crisis, rivalries between states have intensified and become increasingly uncontrollable. In 1990, by deliberately provoking the Gulf crisis and the war in which it gave evidence of its enormous military superiority, the USA tried to affirm its authority over the whole planet, and particularly over its former allies in the Cold War. However, the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia saw these allies confronting each other and putting American hegemony into question. Some supported Croatia (Germany), others Serbia (France and Britain), whereas the USA, after first supporting Serbia, ended up supporting Bosnia. This was the beginning of a tendency towards "every man for himself" in which international alliances have become more and more temporary and in which America has found it harder to exert its leadership.
We had the most striking illustration of this situation last winter when the USA had to renounce its military threats against Iraq and accept a solution negotiated by the General Secretary of the UN and supported by a country like France which since the beginning of the 90s has been openly challenging US hegemony (see International Review 93, "A reverse for the US which will raise military tensions"). What has happened over the summer provides further illustration of this tendency towards each for themselves and even of a spectacular acceleration of it.
The war in the Congo
The chaos that now marks the relations between states becomes blindingly obvious when you survey the various conflicts that have shaken the planet recently. For example, in the war that is now going on in the Congo, we can see countries which less than two years ago were giving their support to the offensive waged by Laurent-Desire Kabila against the Mobutu regime, ie Rwanda and Uganda, now fully supporting the rebellion against this same Kabila. More strangely, these countries, which had seen the US as their main ally against the interests of the French bourgeoisie, now find themselves on the same side as the latter, which is giving discrete support to the rebellion against Kabila, considered as an enemy since he overthrew the pro-French Mobutu regime. Still more surprising is the decisive support Angola gave the Kabila regime when it was on the verge of collapse. Kabila, who at the beginning did have Angolan support (notably through the training and equipment of the Katanga gendarmerie) has been allowing the troops of UNIT A, which is at war with the present regime in Luanda, to take refuge and train in Congolese territory. Apparently, Angola has been paying him back for this disloyalty. To further complicate matters, Angola, which just one year ago helped bring about the victory of the Denis Sassou Ngesso clique, supported by France against Pascal Lissouba for control of Congo- Brazzaville, now finds itself in the camp opposing France. Finally, with regard to the USA's efforts to strengthen its grip on Africa, particularly against French interests, we can say that, despite the successes represented by the installation of a "friendly" regime in Rwanda, and above all by the elimination of Mobutu who was supported to the bitter end by France, the Americans are now just treading water. The regime which the world's first power set up in Kinshasa in May 1997 has now succeeded in arraying against itself not only a considerable proportion of the population which had welcomed it with flowers after thirty years of "mobutism", but also a good number of neighbouring countries, and particularly its Ugandan and Rwandan patrons. In the present crisis, American diplomacy has been particularly silent (it has restricted itself to "demanding instantly" that Rwanda should not get involved and should suspend all military aid to the country), while its French adversary, notwithstanding its necessary discretion, has been clearly supporting the rebellion.
In reality, what is so striking about this, in the midst of the chaos engulfing central Africa, is the fact that the various African states are more and more escaping the control of the great powers. During the cold war, Africa was one of the stakes in the rivalry between the two imperialist blocs who dominated the planet. The old colonial powers, and especially France, were given a mandate by the Western bloc to police the continent on the latter's behalf. One by one, the different states which, shortly after independence, had tried to ally with the Russian bloc (for example, Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique) changed camp and became faithful allies of the American bloc, even before the collapse of its Soviet rival. However, as long as the Eastern bloc, even though weakened, maintained its presence, there existed a fundamental solidarity between the Western powers in their efforts to prevent Russia from regaining its footholds in Africa. It was precisely this solidarity which fell apart as soon as the Russian bloc disintegrated. For the USA, the fact that France still maintained a grip over a good part of the African continent, a grip out of proportion with its economic and above all its military weight on the world arena, became an anomaly, all the more so because France lost no opportunity to challenge American leadership. In this sense, the fundamental element underlying the different conflicts which have ravaged Africa over the last few years has been the growing rivalry between these two former allies, France and the USA, with the latter trying by all possible means to chase the former out of its traditional spheres of influence. The most spectacular concretisation of this American offensive was the overthrow of the Mobutu regime in May 1997, a regime which for decades had been one of the key pieces in France's imperialist strategies in Africa (and in the strategy of the US during the cold war). When he came to power, Kabila took no time in declaring his hostility towards France and his "friendship" towards the USA, which had just put him in power. At this time, behind the rivalries between the different cliques, particularly ethnic ones, which were confronting each other on the ground, the mark of the conflict between France and America was clearly visible, as it had been not long before with the change of regimes in Rwanda and Burundi to the benefit of the pro-American Tutsi factions.
Today it would be difficult to discern the same lines of conflict in the new tragedy which is sweeping the Congo. In fact it appears as if the different states involved in the conflict are essentially playing their own game, independent of the fundamental confrontation between France and the USA which has determined African history in the recent period. Thus Uganda, which was one of the main artisans of Kabila' s victory, is now dreaming of heading up a "Tutsiland" which would regroup Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and the western provinces of Congo. Rwanda, for its part, by participating in the offensive against Kabila, aims at carrying out an "ethnic cleansing" of the Congolese sanctuaries of the Hutu militias, which have been continuing their raids against the Kigali regime. Rwanda also wants to get its hands on the Kivu province (furthermore, one of the leaders of the rebellion, Pascal Tshipata, said on 5th August that it had come about as a result of Kabila breaking his promise to cede Kivu to the Banyamulenge who had supported him against Mobutu).
Neither did Angola's support for Kabila come without strings. In fact this support is more like the rope that supports the hanged man. By ensuring that the survival of the Kabila regime depends on its military aid, Angola is in a position to dictate its terms: banning UNIT A rebels from Congolese territory and the right to pass through Congolese territory to the Cabinda enclave which is geographically cut off from its Angolan owners.
The general tendency towards "every man for himself" which had been expressed more and more by the former allies of the American bloc, and which came out in a striking manner in ex-Yugoslavia, has taken a supplementary step with the Congo conflict; now, countries of the third or fourth rank, like Angola or Uganda are affirming their imperialist ambitions independent of the interests of their "protectors". And it is this same tendency that we could see at work in the bombings of the American embassies on 7th August and the "reprisals" by the US two weeks later.
The bombing of the American embassies and the US reprisals
The detailed preparation, coordination and murderous violence of the August 7th bombings makes it likely that these actions were not carried out by an isolated terrorist group but were supported or even organised by a state. Moreover, immediately after these attacks, the American authorities declared that the war against terrorism would from now on be the leading objective of their policy (an objective forcefully underlined by President Clinton at the UN on 21st September). In reality, and the US government is very clear about this, the target of such declarations is the states which practice or support terrorism. This policy is not new: for a number of years now the US has been pointing the finger at "terrorist states" such as Libya, Syria and Iran. Obviously, there are "terrorist states" which don't rouse the anger of the US: those which support movements which serve its interests (as is the case with Saudi Arabia which has financed the Algerian fundamentalists at war with a regime allied to France). However, if the world's leading power has accorded such importance to this question, this is not just a matter of propaganda for circumstantial interests. The fact that terrorism has today become a means used more and more commonly in imperialist conflicts is an illustration of the chaos developing in the relations between states1, a chaos which is allowing countries of no great importance to argue the toss with the great powers, especially the greatest of them all - a development which can only further undermine its authority.
The two US ripostes to the attacks on its embassies, the cruise missile strikes on a factory in Khartoum and Osama Ben Laden's base in Afghanistan, illustrate in a striking manner the real state of international relations today. In both cases, the world's leading power, in order to reassert its global leadership, has once again resorted to what constitutes its essential strength: its enormous military superiority over everyone else. The American army is the only one that could bring death on such a scale and with such diabolical precision tens of thousands of kilometres away from its own territory, and without taking the slightest risk. This was a warning to any country that might be tempted to lend support to terrorist groups, but also to the Western powers which maintain good relations with such countries. Thus, the destruction of the factory in Sudan, even if the pretext given for it (that it was making chemical weapons) has not stood up well to investigation, did allow the US to hit an Islamic regime which maintains good relations with France.
However, as on other occasions, this recourse to military force proved to be of little use as a means of rallying other countries around the US. To begin with, nearly all the Arab or Muslim countries condemned the strikes. Secondly, the big Western countries, even when they made a show of supporting the action, made known their reservations about the methods used by the US. This is new testimony to the considerable difficulties that the world's most powerful country is having in affirming its leadership: in the absence of another superpower (as was the case when the USSR and its bloc existed), the use of military force does not succeed in consolidating alliances around the US, or in overcoming the chaos it aims to combat. Very often such policies only sharpen the antagonism towards the US and further aggravate the tendency towards every man for himself.
The constant development of this tendency and the difficulties of American leadership appeared clearly with the bombing of Ben Laden's bases in Afghanistan. The question whether he really did order the bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi has not been clarified. However, the fact that the US decided to deploy its cruise missiles against his training bases in Afghanistan shows that the US does consider him to be an enemy. And yet during the time of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, this same Ben Laden was one of the USA's best allies, and they financed and armed him generously. Even more surprising is the fact that Ben Laden enjoys the protection of the Taliban, for whom US support (with the complicity of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) was a decisive factor in their conquest of Afghan territory. Today, the Taliban and the USA are on opposing sides. But in fact there are several reaSOI1~ that enable us to understand why the US struck this blow against them.
First, the unconditional support hitherto accorded the Taliban by Washington has been an obstacle to the "normalisation" of its relations with the Iranian regime. This process was advanced in a spectacular manner with the friendly exchanges between the US and Iranian football teams in the last World Cup. However, in their diplomacy towards Iran, the US has lagged behind countries like France, which at that very same moment was sending its minister of foreign affairs to Tehran. For America it was important not to miss the opportunities afforded by the warming of its relations with Iran and not to allow other countries to pull the carpet from under its feet.
But the blow against the Taliban was also a warning against the latter's temptations to take their distance from Washington now that their almost complete victory on the home front has made them less dependent on American aid. In other words, the world's leading power wants to avoid what happened with Ben Laden happening on a bigger scale with the Taliban - its former friends becoming enemies. But in this case as in many others, there is no guarantee that the US coup will pay off. Every man for himself and the chaos it leads to cannot be counter-acted by the world cop resorting to force. These phenomena are an integral part of the current historical phase of capitalist decomposition and they are insurmountable.
Furthermore, the basic inability of the US to resolve this situation is having its repercussions in the internal life of its bourgeoisie. Behind the crisis facing the US administration over "Monicagate", there are probably internal political causes. Also, this scandal, which has been covered so systematically by the media being used to divert the workers' attention from a worsening economic situation and the growing attacks of the bosses, a need demonstrated by the rise of working class militancy (strikes at General Motors, American Airline, etc). There again, the surreal aspect of the trials of Clinton is further witness to the fact mat bourgeois society is rotting on its feet, However, such an offensive against an American president, which could lead to his downfall, reveals above all the malaise of the bourgeoisie of the world's most powerful country which is incapable of imposing i leadership on me planet.
This said, the problems of Clinton and even of me whole American bourgeoisie are only a minor aspect of me drama now being out on a world scale. For a growing number of human beings, and today this is particularly me case in me Congo, the chaos that keeps on growing all over the world is synonymous with massacres, famines, epidemic and barbarism. A barbarism which took a new step forward in the summer and which will continue LO get worse as long as capitalism has not been overthrown.
Fabienne
1 In the article 'Faced with the slide into barbarism the necessity and possibility of the revolution' in International Review 48, first quarter of 1987, we already showed that terrorist attacks like the ones in Paris in 1986 were one of the manifestations of capitalism's entrance into a new phase in its decadence, the phase of decomposition. Since then, all the convulsions which have shaken the planet, particularly the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc at the end of the 80s have abundantly illustrated capitalism's continuing descent into decomposition.
Those who are today posing questions about the revolutionary perspectives of the working class come across a proletarian political milieu which is considerably dispersed1. The movement towards this milieu by newly arising militant forces is held back by several factors. First there is the general pressure of the ideological campaigns against communism. Then there is the whole confusion sown by the 'leftist' currents of the bourgeois political apparatus as well as the array of parasitic groups and publications which claim to be communist but which merely make the content and organisational form of communist politics look ridiculous2. Finally there is the fact that the different organised components of the communist left mutually ignore each other most of the time and run away from the public confrontation of their political positions, whether we are talking about their programmatic principles or their organisational origins. This attitude is a barrier to the clarification of communist political positions, to the understanding of what the different tendencies of this milieu have in common, and of the divergences which explain their separate organisational existence. This is why we think that anything which goes towards breaking with this attitude has to be welcomed, providing that it is based on a political concern to publicly and seriously clarify the positions and analyses of other organisations.
This clarification is all the more important as regards the groups that present themselves as the heirs of the 'Italian Left'. This current is composed of a number of organisations and publications which all refer back to the same common trunk - the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s (which mounted the most consistent opposition to the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International) and also to the constitution of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) in Italy in 1943. This 1943 PCInt was to give rise to two tendencies in 1952: on the one hand the Partito Cornunista Internazionalista (PCInt)3, on the other hand the Partito Comunista Internazionale (PCI)4 animated by Bordiga. Over the years the latter has dislocated and given birth to at least three main groups who all call themselves the PCI, as well as a multitude of more or less confidential small groups, without mentioning the individuals who nearly all present themselves as the "only" continuators of Bordiga. The label of "Bordigism" is often used (frequently as a term of abuse) to describe the continuators of the Italian Left, because of the personality and the notoriety of Bordiga.
For its part the ICC, while it does not refer back to the PCInt of 1943, does refer to the Italian Left of the 1920s, to the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy which later became the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left in the 1930s, as well as to the French Fraction of the Communist Left which in the 1940s opposed the dissolution of the Italian Fraction into the newly-formed PClnt, since it considered the constitution of the party to be premature and confused 5.
What are the common positions and the divergences? Why such an organisational dispersion? Why so many groups and "parties" coming from the same historical tendency? Such are the questions which any serious group has to deal with, if it is to respond to the need for political clarity which exists in the working class as a whole, as well as among the more politicised minorities which appear within the class.
It is in this sense that we have welcomed the recent internal polemics within the Bordigist milieu, which has shown an attempt, serious if a little timid, to go into the question of the political roots of the explosive crisis of the PCI-Programma Comunista in 1982 (see International Review 93). It was in the same spirit that we briefly took position, in the article 'Marxism and mysticism' in IR 94, on the debate between the two Bordigist formations which publish respectively Le Proletaire and II Partito Comunista. In this article we showed that while Le Proletaire was correct in criticising Il Partito's slide towards mysticism. these ideas did not come out of the blue but have their roots in Bordiga himself; and we concluded this article by affirming that Le Proletaire's criticisms of Il Partito "must go deeper, to the real historical roots of its errors and in doing so, engage with the rich heritage of the entire communist left". And it is again in this spirit that we are welcoming the appearance of a pamphlet published by Battaglia Comunista on Bordigism: 'Among the shades of Bordigism and its epigones', a critical balance sheet of the Bordigism of the post-war period, which explicitly presents itself as a "clarification" as it says in the pamphlet's subtitle.
A good critique of the conceptions of Bordigism
We share the essentials of BC's analysis and critique of Bordigism's conceptions about the historical development of capitalism: "In sum, the risk is precisely one of taking up an abstract stance in the face of a 'historical development of situations' of which - and here we are in agreement with Bordiga - 'the party is both a factor and a product', precisely because historical situations are never like a simple photocopy of each other, and their differences must always be estimated in a materialist fashion".
We can also underline the validity of the critique that BC makes of the implications these conceptions have for the capacity of the organisation to live up to the demands of the situation: "It is a materialist truth that the party is also a historic product, but there is the risk of reducing this principle to a completely contemplative affirmation, to a passive and abstract view of social reality. There is the risk of once again falling into mechanical materialism, which has nothing dialectical about it, and which neglects the links, the phases the movement has to pass through over various situations. There is the risk of not understanding the relations which reciprocally influence each other in historical development, and thus of reducing the preparation and activity of the party to an idealist 'historic' presence, or to a 'formal' appearance".
A strong point of BC's critique of Bordigism resides in the fact that BC tries to go to the roots of the divergences, by going back to the various positions which already made their appearance within the PCInt of 1943, up to 1952 when the split took place between the Bordigists on the one hand and the Battaglists on the other. With regard to this we should note that BC has made a particular effort to document and analyse this period by publishing two Quaderni di Battaglia Comunista, no 6 'The process of the formation and birth of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista' and no. 3, 'The Internationalist Split of 1952, Documents'.
The richness of BC's critique also resides in the fact that it deals with aspects of the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation as well as with the programmatic positions it has to defend.
In the next part of this article, we will limit ourselves to certain questions relating to the first point, around which BC develops a very effective critique of organic centralism and the myth of unanimism as theorised by Bordiga and defended by his political heirs.
Organic centralism and unanimism in decisions
In substance, organic centralism, as opposed to democratic centralism, corresponds to the idea that the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat must not submit to the logic of the formal approval of decisions by the majority of the party; this 'democratic' logic is a logic borrowed from the bourgeoisie for whom the position that wins out is the one that receives the most votes, independent of whether it corresponds to the needs and perspectives of the working class:
"The adoption and general or partial use of the criterion of consul1ation and deliberation on the basis of numbers and majorities, when it is foreseen in the statutes or in the technical praxis, has a technical or expedient character, but not the character of a principle. The bases of the party organisation cannot therefore resort to rules which are those of other classes or other forms of historical domination, like the hierarchical obedience of simple soldiers to the various officers and leaders inherited from military or pre-bourgeois theocratic organisations, or to the abstract sovereignty of electors delegated to representative assemblies or executive committees which are typical of the juridical hypocrisy of the capitalist world, the critique and destruction of such organisations is the essential task of the proletarian and communist revolution" (Bordigist text published in 1949 and reproduced in BC's pamphlet 'The Internationalist Split').
We can understand Bordiga's fundamental concern when, with his return to active politics after the war, he was trying to stand up to the invasive ideology of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, to the grip they could so easily have over a generation of militants newly integrated into the PCInt, most of them inexperienced, not well formed theoretically and often even influenced by counter-revolutionary ideologies7. The concern can be understood, but we cannot agree with the solution that Bordiga came to. BC rightly responds:
"To condemn democratic centralism as the application of bourgeois democracy to the revolutionary political organisation is above all a method of discussion comparable to that used on many occasions by Stalinism ". BC then recalls how "Bordiga, after 1945, on a number of occasions ridiculed the 'solemn resolutions of sovereign congresses' (and the foundation of Programme Communiste in 1952 had its origins in precisely such a disdain for the first two congresses of the Partito Comunista Iniemasionalista)".
Naturally, in order to realise organic centralism, it was necessary to validate "unanimism", ie the idea that the party cadres are ready to passively accept the (organic) directives of the centre, setting aside their divergences, or hiding them, or at most circulating them discretely in the corridors at the official meetings of the party. Unanimism is the other side of the coin to organic centralism. All this can be explained by the idea - which was taken up by a large part of the PClnt in the 1940s (the part which was later to form Programme) - according to which Bordiga was the only one intellectually capable of resolving the problems posed to the revolutionary movement after the war. Let us cite this significant testimony by Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi):
"The Italian party is for the most part made up of new elements, without theoretical formation - political virgins. The old militants themselves have for 20 years been isolated, cut of ffrom any developing political thought. In the present situation the militants are incapable of dealing with problems of thought and ideology. Discussion can only disturb them and will do more harm than good. For the moment they need to walk on solid ground, even if it is made up of old positions which are now out of date but which have at least been formulated and are comprehensible to them. For the moment it is enough to group together those who have a will to act. The solution to the great problems raised by the experience between the wars demands the calm of reflection. Only a 'great mind' can approach them fruitfully and give them the answers they require. General discussion will only lead to confusion. Ideological work cannot be done by the mass of militants, but only by individuals. As long as these brilliant individuals have not arisen, we cannot hope to advance ideologically. Marx and Lenin were such individuals, such geniuses, in the past. We must await the arrival of a new Marx. We in Italy are convinced that Bordiga is such a genius. He is now working on a whole series of responses to the problems tormenting the militants of the working class. When this work appears, the militants will only have to assimilate it, and the party to align its politics and its action with these new developments" (taken from the article 'The concept of the brilliant leader', lntemationalisme 25, August 1947, reproduced in IR 33, second quarter of 1983).
This testimony is the expression of a whole conception of the party which is alien to revolutionary marxism, in that unlike the stupidities against democratic centralism cited above, we have here a truly bourgeois conception of the revolutionary vanguard. Consciousness, theory, analysis, are presented asthe exclusive task of a minority - and even at some level, of a single intellectual - while the party has to do no more than wait for the directives from the leader (imagine how long the working class as a whole would have to wait if it had a party like that for its guide!). This is the real meaning of organic centralism and the need for unanimity8. But how can this be squared with the fact that Bordiga was the comrade who, in order to defend the positions of the minority, created and animated the abstentionist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, and who demonstrated his militant courage in defending the views of his party within the Communist International, and as a result of all this was an inspiration to the comrades in exile who, during the years of fascism in Italy, constituted the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy with the aim of drawing up a balance sheet of the defeat in order to form the cadres of the future party? No problem: all that can be dismissed by saying that the Fraction is no longer of any use; now, the brilliant leader will resolve everything.
When such a party has been fanned and is active, it has no further use within itself for fractions which are divided ideologically and still less organisationally" (extract from 'Notes on the bases of the organisation of the class party', a Bordigist text published by the PClnt in 1949 and reproduced in BC's pamphlet 'The Internationalist Split').
The limits of Battaglia's critique
As we said before, we consider that BC's criticisms are very valuable and we agree on a good number of the points dealt with. There is however a weak point in the critique which has often been a subject for polemics between our two organisations, and which is important to clarify. This weak point concerns the analysis of the formation of the PClnt in 1943, which for us obeyed an opportunist logic - an analysis which BC obviously doesn't share - which is a considerable weakness in its critique of Bordigism. We cannot go back over each aspect of the problem here; in any case we have examined this question in the two recent articles we have already mentioned, 'On the origins of the ICC and the IBRP', but it is important to recall the main points:
1. Contrary to what BC says, ie that in any case we were always opposed to the formation of the party in 1943, let us remember that "When in 1942-43 the great workers' strikes began, that were to lead to the fall of Mussolini and his replacement by the pro-Allied Badoglio ... the Fraction considered, in line with the position it had always held, that 'the course towards the transformation of the Fraction into the Party is open in Italy'. The Conference of August 1943 decided to renew contact with Italy, and asked its militants to prepare to return as soon as possible" (IR 90).
2. Once the modalities for building this party in Italy were known - modalities which consisted of regrouping comrades from the old Livorno party of 1921, each with their own history and its consequences, without the slightest verification of a common platform, thus throwing away all the work carried out by the Fraction in exile10, the Gauche Communiste de France11 began to develop some very strong criticisms, which we share in all their essentials.
3. Among other things, this critique concerned the integration into the party, and in a position of highest responsibility, of someone like Vercesi who had been expelled from the Fraction for participating, at the end of the war, in an anti-fascist committee in Brussels. Vercesi had not made the slightest criticism of his activity.
4. The criticism also concerned the integration into the party of elements from the minority of the Fraction in exile who had split to go and carry out propaganda work among the republican militias during the war in Spain in 1936. Here again, the criticism was not about the integration of these elements as such but about the fact that it had been done without any prior discussion on their past errors.
5. Finally, there was a criticism of the PClnt's ambiguous attitude towards the anti-fascist partisans.
A fair number of the criticisms that BC make of the Bordigist wing of the PClnt in the years 1943-52 concern errors that were really the expression of this unprincipled unification which had been at the basis of the formation of the Party; comrades of both wings of the Party were aware of this and the GCF had denounced it without any concessions12. The subsequent explosion of the Party into two branches in a phase of great difficulty resulting from the reflux of the struggles which had broken out during the war, was the logical consequence of the opportunist way the Party had been constructed.
It is precisely because this is the weak point of its text that BC is led into some strange contortions: sometimes it minimises the differences between the two tendencies within the PCInt at the time; at other times it makes out that they only appeared at the time of the split and, at still other times it attributes them to the Fraction in exile itself.
When BC minimises the problem, it gives the impression that before the PCInt there was nothing, that there wasn't the whole work of the Fraction beforehand and later of the GCF which carried out a major work of reflection and came to a number of important conclusions:
"When we reconsider all these events, the short but intense historic period in which the Pclnt was formed has to he kept in mind: it was among other things inevitable that after nearly two decades of dispersion and isolation of the surviving cadres of the Italian left, that there would he some internal differences, based mainly on misunderstandings and on different balance-sheets drawn from various personal and local experiences" (Quademi di Battaglia Comunista no. 3, 'The Internationalist Split').
When BC makes it look as if the divergences only appeared at the time of the split, it is simply committing a historical falsehood which tends to hide the responsibility of its political ancestors for trying to swell the party's ranks with as many militants as possible in a purely opportunist manner:
"What happened in 1951-52 took place precisely in the period in which certain of the most negative characteristics of this tendency - which would have continued to cause other damage, notably thanks to the work of the epigones - manifested themselves for the first time" (ibid, our emphasis). Finally, when BC attributes to the Fraction the divergences which later expressed themselves within the Party, it only shows that it has not understood the difference between the of a fraction and those of a party. The task of a fraction is to make a balance sheet of a historic defeat and to prepare the cadres of the future party. It is inevitable that in malting this balance sheet different points of view will be expressed and this is why Bilan defended the idea that, in this internal debate, it was necessary to make the widest possible criticisms without any ostracism. The task of the party, on the other hand, is to assume, on the basis of a platform and a programme which is clear and agreed upon by all, the political leadership of workers' struggles in a decisive moment of class confrontations, so that an osmosis develops between party and class and the party is recognised as such by the class "But in the Fraction before the Party and within the Party afterwards there cohabited two states of mind which the definitive victory of the counter-revolution ... was led to separate" (ibid).
It is precisely this incomprehension of the respective functions of fraction and party which has led BC (like Programma itself through its various splits) to carry on calling its organisation a party, even though the workers' upsurge at the end of the war was completely exhausted and it was necessary to go back to the patient but no less absorbing work of completing the balance sheet of the defeat and forming the future cadres. In this regard, despite the falsity of certain arguments put forward by Vercesi and other elements of the Bordigist wing, BC is also wrong to dismiss as liquidationist the idea that since the historic period had changed, it was necessary to go back to the work of a fraction:
"They were the first steps which would later lead certain elements to envisage the demobilisation of the Party, the suppression of the revolutionary organisation and the renunciation of any contact with the masses, by replacing the militant function and responsibility of the party by the life of a fraction, of a circle which would be a school of marxism" (ibid).
On the contrary, it was precisely the formation of the Party and the pretence of developing the work of a party when the objective conditions for this did not exist which pushed and still pushes Battaglia to take a few steps towards opportunism, as we showed recently in an article that appeared in our territorial press about BC's intervention towards the GLP, a political formation that has come out of the autonomist milieu:
"Honestly, our fear is that BC, instead of playing its role of political leadership towards these groups by pushing them to clarify and to reach a political coherence, is tending out of opportunism to adapt itself to their activism, closing its eyes to their political deviations, and thus running the serious risk of being pulled into the leftist dynamic which the GLP contain"13.
This is a serious matter because, leaving aside the danger of sliding towards leftism, BC is limiting its intervention to that of a local group with an intervention towards students and autonomists. In reality BC has a vitally important role to play both in the current dynamic of the proletarian camp, and in the development of the IBRP itself.
5th September 1998, Ezechiele
To obtain the pamphlet in Italian Fra les ombre del bordighismo e dei sui epigone: Battaglia Comunista, Casella Postale 1753, 20101, Milano, Italy.
1 As we have already developed on a number of occasions in our press. what we understand by the proletarian political milieu is made up of those who derive from or who are moving towards the positions of the communist left. Because it is made up of groups and organisations who have been able to maintain the principles of proletarian internationalism in and since the Second World War, and who have always denounced the counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism and the left of capital. the communist left. With those who take up its principles and attach themselves to this tradition, is the only authentically proletarian political milieu.
2 See IR 94, 'Theses on parasitism'
3 This is the group which publishes Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista and which in the 1980s formed the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) with the Communist Workers' Organisation of Britain.
4 The theoretical organ of the PCI after the split was Programma Comunista in Italy and Programme Communiste in France, the countries where it had its strongest representation.
5 See the polemic 'On the origin of the ICC and the IBRP: The Italian Fraction and the Communist Left of France', IR 90; 'The formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista', lR 91.
The different Bordigist groups have the bizarre habit of all calling, themselves the International Communist Party. To differentiate them we refer to them by the best known periodical each one publishes internationally, even when these groups exist in several countries. We therefore talk about Le Proletaire (which publishes II Comunista in Italy); II Partito (which publishes under the same name) and Programma Comunista, which is now distinct from Programme Communiste in France).
6 The pamphlet currently exists in Italian; it will be available in French at the end of 1998 and in English the following year.
7 Consider the following passage taken from a letter to the Executive Committee in March 1951 (this was right in the middle of the split) and signed by Bottaioli, Stefanini, Lecci and Damen: "In the Party press we often find theoretical formulations, political indications and practical justifications which show the determination of the EC to develop Party cadres who are not organisationally very reliable and are politically unprepared, rather like guinea pigs for experiments of political dilettantism which has nothing in common with the politics of a revolutionary vanguard" (our emphasis).
8 The alternative to organic centralism is naturally not anarchism, the obsessive search for individual liberty, the lack of discipline, but to assume one's militant responsibility in the debates of the revolutionary organisation and in the class, all the while applying the orientations and decisions of the organisation once they have been adopted.
9 See also the older polemics on this theme: 'The party disfigured: the Bordigist conception' in IR 23 'Against the concept of the brilliant leader', IR 33; 'Discipline. Our principal strength' in IR 34.
10 On the very low level of political formation of the party cadres, we have already cited at the beginning of this article testimonies both from the Battaglia and Programma wings of the Party.
11 The Gauche Communiste de France was formed around the positions of the Italian Fraction in 1942, initially taking the name French Nucleus of the Communist Left, then the French Fraction.
12 This is how the Bordigist group Le Proletaire put it in an article devoted to the 1952 split:
"Another point of disagreement was the way of seeing the process of the formation. of the Party as a process of 'aggregating' dispersed nuclei whose lacunae would be compensated mutually (this was in particular the case with the famous attempt at the 'four way regroupment' - quadrofolio - through the fusion of different groups, including Trotskyists, which went through various re-editions, all of them unfruitful, before being incarnated in the formula of the 'Bureau' ... " (Taken from 'The meaning of the
1952 split in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista', Programme Communiste 93, March 1993).
13 See the article 'The Proletarian Struggle Groups': an incomplete attempt to reach a revolutionary coherence', Rivoluzione Internazionale, soon to be published in Revolution Internationale.
Links
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[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/leon-trotsky
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[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/parasitism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/internationalist-perspective
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/russia
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1848-civil-wars-europe
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/communist-manifesto
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
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[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
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[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/revolution-internationale
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[64] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/maoism
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/europe
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
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[94] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left