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.

China: a link in the chain of world imperialism, part iii

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] [5]. 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.

Counter-revolution and imperialist war: the midwives of Maoism

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.

Mao Zedong’s participation in the liquidation of the proletarian party

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] [6].

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] [7] - 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.

The conversion of the CPC into a bourgeois party and the creation of the Mao gang

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] [8].

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] [9]. 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”.

On the Long March with the Stalinists

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.

Control of Yanan, alliance with the Kuomintang

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.

Wang Ming’s defeat and the flirt with the USA

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] [10]. 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: an ideological weapon of capital

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] [11]. 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] [12]. “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] [13].

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.

A complete falsification of marxism

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] [14]. 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] [15]. 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] [16].

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.

Internationalism

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] [17]. 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] [18]. 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] [19]. 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] [20].

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”.

The state

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] [21].

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.

Dialectical materialism

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.

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.

ICC Introduction

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.

Platform of the Communist International

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.

1. The conquest of political power

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.

2. Democracy and dictatorship

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.

3. Expropriation of the capitalists and the socialisation of production

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.

4. The road to victory

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:

• sectarianism
• individualism
• opportunism
• adventurism
• putschism

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 :

• to see the organisation not as a collective whole but as a sum of individuals in which relations between persons take precedence over political and statutory relations;
• to advance one’s own “desires” and “interests” as opposed to the needs of the organisation;
• consequently, to resist the discipline necessary within the organisation;
• to look for “personal realisation” through militant activity;
• to adopt an attitude of constantly contesting the central organs, which are accused of trying to crush individuality; the complementary attitude is that of looking for “promotion” through gaining a place in these organs;
• more generally, to adhere to an élitist view of the organisation in which you aspire to be one of the “first class militants” while developing a contemptuous attitude to those seen as “second class militants”.

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] [46]) 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:

• against Lassallean “state socialism” in the 1860s and 1870s;
• against all the Bernstein-type revisionists and reformists at the turn of the century;
• against Menshevism;
• against Kautsky’s centrism on immediately before, during, and after World War I;
• against the degeneration of the Communist International and the Communist parties throughout the 20s and at the beginning of the 30s;
• against the degeneration of the Trotskyist current during the 1930s.

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:

• the historic period;
• the moment in the development of the working class;
• the responsibilities of the class in this or that circumstance.

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:

• in which illusions in conciliation with the bourgeoisie flourished because of the prosperity of capitalism and the real advances in the living conditions of the working class;
• in which the existence of mass parties gave credence to the idea that mere pressure from these parties could gradually lead capitalism to transform itself into socialism.

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] [47]

“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:

• the moment of parasitism’s appearance;
• its specificities with regard to other dangers facing proletarian organisations;
• its recruiting ground;
• its methods;
• the most effective means of fighting it.

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:

• of an international marxist current like the ICC, which rejects sectarianism and monolithism;
• of public polemics between revolutionary organisations;
• of the current debate about marxist organisational principles and the defence of the revolutionary milieu;
• of new revolutionary elements searching for the real marxist organisational and programmatic traditions,

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:

• the Alliance developed in part on the basis of the vestiges of the sects of the preceding period: it adopted their structure, tightly centralised around a “prophet”, and their taste for clandestine organisation; by contrast, one of the bases for today’s parasitism is the remnants of the student rebellion which weighed on the historic recovery of proletarian struggle at the end of the 1960s, and especially in 1968, along with all its baggage of individualism and calling into question organisation and centralisation, which supposedly “stifled individuals”;[3] [48]
• while the IWA existed, there was only one organisation that regrouped the whole proletarian movement, and the currents whose aim was to destroy it, while still claiming to be fighting the same struggle against the bourgeoisie, had to act within it; by contrast, at a moment in history where the elements who represent the revolutionary struggle of the working class are dispersed in the different organisations of the proletarian milieu, each parasitic group can put itself forward as representing another “component” of the milieu, along with the other groups.

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] [49] 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] [50] 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] [51] 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:

• a political support to the activities of parasitism; thus, the European bourgeois press took up the cause of the Alliance and Bakunin in their conflict with the General Council;
• infiltration and manoeuvres of state agents within parasitic currents; thus, the Lyon section of the Alliance was clearly led by two Bonapartist agents, Richard and Blanc;
• the direct creation by sectors of the bourgeoisie of political currents whose vocation is to parasite on the proletarian organisation: thus the Mazzinists joined the International at its foundation while the “League for Peace and Freedom” (led by the Bonapartist agent Vogt) was, as Marx put it, “formed in opposition to the International” and tried, in 1868, to “ally” itself with it.

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] [52] 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:

• impregnated by petty bourgeois ideology, impatient, individualist, elitist, preferring affinity relations to political relations;
• “disappointed” by the working class which doesn’t move ahead quickly enough for them;
• finding it hard to put up with organisational discipline, frustrated at not finding in militant activity the “satisfaction” they hoped for or the “posts” they aspired to,

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] [53]

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] [54] 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:

• openly unmasking them is the only way to rid the workers’ movement of such methods. Only if all the members of the organisation became conscious of these questions would it be possible to prevent such things happening in the future;
• it was necessary to publicly denounce Bakunin’s Alliance in order to dissuade those who were using the same methods. Marx and Engels knew quite well that other parasites were still carrying out secret activities inside and outside the organisation, such as the adepts of Pyat;
• only a public debate could break Bakunin’s control over many of his victims and encourage them to speak out. To this end, Bakunin’s methods of manipulation were revealed above all by the publication of the Revolutionary Catechism;
• a public denunciation was indispensable to prevent the International being associated with such practices. Thus, the decision to expel Bakunin from the International was taken after the arrival of the news about the Nechayev affair, with the danger that it would be used against the International;
• the lessons of this struggle had a historical importance, not only for the International but for the future of the workers’ movement. It was in this spirit that years later Bebel devoted 80 pages of his autobiography to the struggle against Lassalle and Schweitzer.

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:

• the fact that parasitism did not represent a major danger for proletarian organisations after the IWA;
• the length and depth of the counter-revolution.

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] [55] 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.