Cabu, Charb, Tignous, Wolinski, among the twenty killed in the attacks in Paris on 7 and 9 January, these four were a kind of symbol. They were the priority targets. And why? Because they stood for intelligence against stupidity, reason against fanaticism, revolt against submission, courage against cowardice1, sympathy against hatred, and for that specifically human quality: humour and laughter against conformism and dull self-righteousness. We may reject and oppose some of their political positions, some of which were totally bourgeois2. But what was being hit was what was best about them. This barbaric rampage against people who were just cartoonists or shoppers at a kosher supermarket, gunned down just because they were Jews, has provoked a great deal of emotion, not only in France but all over the world, and this is quite understandable. The way this emotion is now being put to use by all the licensed representatives of bourgeois democracy must not hide the fact that the indignation, anger and profound sadness which gripped millions of men and women, and led them to come out spontaneously onto the streets on 7 January, was a basic and healthy reaction against this despicable act of barbarism.

A pure product of the decomposition of capitalism

Terrorism is not new3. What is new is the form that it has taken and which has developed since the mid 80s to become an unprecedented global phenomenon. The series of indiscriminate attacks that hit Paris in 1985-86, which, clearly, was not carried out by small isolated groups but bore the signature of a state, inaugurated a new era in the use of terrorism that has reached hitherto unknown levels and claimed a growing number of victims.

The terrorist attacks by Islamist fanatics are not new either. The history of this new century has regularly witnessed this, and on a much greater scale than the Paris attacks of early January 2015.

The kamikaze aeroplanes that crashed into the Twin Towers in New York September 11, 2001, opened a new era. For us it is clear that the US Secret Service let it happen and even facilitated these attacks, which allowed the American imperialist power to justify and unleash the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, just as the Japanese attack against the naval base of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, foreseen and wanted by Roosevelt, had served as a pretext for the entry of the US into World War II4.  But it is also clear that those who had taken control of the aircraft were completely delusional fanatics who thought they could gain entry to paradise by killing on a vast scale and sacrificing their own lives.

Less than three years after New York, March 11, 2004, Madrid was the scene of a terrible massacre: "Islamist" bombs caused 200 deaths and over 1,500 injuries in the Atocha station; human bodies were so mangled that they could only be identified by their DNA. The following year, on 7 July 2005, it was London that was struck by four explosions, also on public transport, killing 56 people and leaving 700 wounded. Russia also has experienced several Islamist attacks in the 2000s, including that of 29 March 2010 that killed 39 and injured 102. And of course, the peripheral countries have not been spared, especially Iraq since the US invasion in 2003 and as we saw again just recently in Pakistan, in Peshawar, where last December 141 people, including 132 children, were killed in a school5.

This attack, in which children were a deliberate target, shows, in all its horror, the increasing barbarism of these followers of "Jihad". But the attack in Paris on 7 January, although much less deadly and horrific than the one in Pakistan, expresses a new dimension of this slide into barbarism.

In all previous cases, however revolting the massacre of civilians, including children, there was some "rationality": it was to retaliate or attempt to pressure the state and their armed forces. The Madrid massacre of 2004 was meant to "punish" Spain for its involvement in Iraq alongside the United States. The same goes for the London bombings in 2005. The attack in Peshawar was aimed at putting pressure on the Pakistani military by slaughtering their children. But in the case of the attacks in Paris on January 7, there was not the slightest "military objective", even an illusory one. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and their colleagues were murdered to "avenge the Prophet" since the newspaper had published caricatures of Mohammed. And this happened not in a country ravaged by war or ruled by religious obscurantism, but in France, "democratic, secular and republican" France.

Hatred and nihilism are always a key driver in the activities of terrorists, especially those who deliberately sacrifice their lives to kill as massively as possible. But this hatred that turns humans into cold killing machines, with no regard for the innocent they kill, has as its main target this other "killing machine" - the state. None of that on 7 January in Paris: here obscurantist hatred and the fanatical thirst for revenge could be seen in their purest form. Its target is the other, the one who does not think like me, and especially the one who thinks, because I've decided not to think, that is to say, to exercise this faculty proper to the human species.

It is for this reason that the killings of 7 January caused such an impact. In a way, we are faced with the unthinkable: how can human minds, educated in a "civilized" country, get drawn into such a barbaric and absurd project similar to that of the most fanatical Nazis with their burning of books and extermination of the Jews?

And that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that the extreme act of the Kouachi brothers, of Amedy Coulibaly and their accomplices, is only the tip of an iceberg of a whole movement that thrives mainly in poor neighbourhoods, a movement that was expressed when a number of young people put forward the idea that "Charlie Hebdo had it coming for insulting the prophet", and that the killing of the cartoonists was something "normal".

This is also a manifestation of the advance of barbarism, the breakdown in our "civilized" societies. This descent of a part of the youth, and not only those who have been through the process of immigration, into hatred and religious obscurantism - this is one symptom among many of the putrefaction of capitalist society, but a particularly significant pointer to the gravity of the present crisis.

Today, all over the world (in Europe as well, and especially in France), many young people with no future, living chaotic daily lives, humiliated by successive failures, by cultural and social poverty, become easy prey to unscrupulous recruiters (often related to states or political expressions such as ISIS) that drain these misfits into their networks through conversions as sudden as they are unexpected, turning them into potential hit men or cannon fodder for the "jihad". Lacking their own perspective on the current crisis of capitalism, which is an economic crisis but also a social, moral and cultural one; faced with a society that is rotting on its feet and oozing destruction from every pore, for many of these young people life seems pointless and worthless. Their despair can often take on the religious colouring of a blind and fanatical submission, inspiring all sorts of irrational and extreme behaviour, fuelled by a suicidal nihilism. The horror of capitalist society in decay, which ​​elsewhere creates huge numbers of child soldiers (for example in Uganda, Congo and Chad, especially since the early 1990s) is now giving birth, in the heart of Europe, to young psychopaths, professional cold blooded killers, completely desensitised and capable of the worst without expecting any reward for it. In short, this rotting capitalist society, left to its own morbid and barbaric dynamics, can only lead the whole of mankind towards bloody chaos, towards murderous insanity and death. As can be seen from the growth of terrorism, it is producing more and more totally desperate individuals, who have been ground down to the point of being capable of the worst atrocities. In short, it moulds these terrorists in its own image. If such "monsters" exist it is because capitalist society has become "monstrous." And if not all the young people affected by this obscurantist and nihilistic trend enrol directly in "jihad", the fact that many of them regard those who have taken this step as "heroes" or as agents of "justice” constitutes proof of the increasing weight of despair and barbarism invading society.

The odious "democratic" recuperation

But the barbarism of the capitalist world is not expressed only in these terrorist acts and the sympathy they meet in a part of the youth. It is also expressed in the vile way that the bourgeoisie is recuperating these dramas.

At the time of writing this article, the capitalist world, headed by the principal “democratic” leaders, is about to carry out one of its most sordid operations. In Paris, on Sunday, January 11, a huge street demonstration has been planned, around President Holland and all the political leaders of the country, together with world leaders such as Angela Merkel, David Cameron, the heads of government of Spain, Italy and many other European countries, but also the King of Jordan, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel6. 

While hundreds of thousands of people spontaneously took to the streets on the evening of January 7, the politicians, starting with François Hollande, and the French media began their campaign: "It’s the freedom of the press and democracy which are under threat "," We must mobilise and unite to defend the values ​​of our republic. " Increasingly, in the gatherings that followed those of 7 January, we heard the French national anthem, the "Marseillaise," whose chorus says "water our furrows with the blood of the impure!" …"National Unity", "defence of democracy", these are the messages that the ruling class wants to get into our heads, that is to say the slogans which justified the dragooning and massacre of millions of workers in the two world wars of the twentieth century. Hollande also said it in his first speech: by sending the army into Africa, especially Mali, France has already begun the fight against terrorism (just as Bush explained that the US military intervention in 2003 Iraq had the same purpose). The imperialist interests of the French bourgeoisie obviously have nothing to do with these interventions!

Poor Cabu, Charb, Tignous, Wolinski! Fanatical Islamists killed them the first time. They had to be killed a second time by these representatives and "fans" of bourgeois "democracy", all these heads of state and government of a decaying world system that is responsible for the barbarism invading human society: capitalism. And these political leaders do not hesitate to use terror, assassinations, and reprisals against civilians when it comes to defending the interests of this system and its ruling class, the bourgeoisie.

The end of the barbarity expressed by the killings in Paris in January 2015 will certainly not come from the actions of those who are the main supporters and guarantors of the economic system that generates this barbarity. It can only result from the overthrow of this system by the world proletariat, that is to say, by the class whose association produces most of the wealth of society, and its replacement by a truly universal human community no longer based on profit, competition and the exploitation of man by man but based on the abolition of these vestiges of human prehistory. A society which will be "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" 7 , communist society.

Révolution Internationale (11/01/2014)

The cartoon is by Wolinski, from 1968: the workers call for revolution, the union official replies: “you’re crazy – the government and the bosses will never allow it!”

The article that follows was originally published in 2006 in French, following the box-office success of the French film "Joyeux Noël". If we are publishing it now, it is because the 1914 Christmas Truce has become something of a media celebrity 100 years after the event with its own website, and even an advert for Sainsbury’s supermarkets taking the Truce as a theme. Needless to say, the ruling class presents it as a victory for "humanity" but one which had no future: "inevitably" the war went on, the idea that the simple soldiers could take matters into their own hands and bring the war to an end by overthrowing the entire capitalist system that engendered it. We are invited to remember the Christmas Truce, the better to make us forget the revolutionary potential of fraternisation.

"The 1914-18 war as you have never seen it before at the cinema". So begins the enthusiastic review in the magazine Historia of Christian Carion’s film Joyeux Noël,1 which came to cinema screens on 9th November 2005 and has been selected to represent France at the 2006 Oscars.

What is so great about this film that it should deserve such an enthusiastic reception?

The film’s producer has chosen to focus on a "special moment" in the vast butchery of the Great War: 24th December 1914, the first Christmas Eve since the outbreak of war the previous August. That evening, as Carion says in the novel inspired by his film, "the unimaginable happened". Despite the orders for mutual slaughter, despite the hatred for the "Hun" or the "Französe" taught them ten years before on the benches of their primary schools with just this war in view, the soldiers on each side of the front put down their guns, sang Christmas carols, then spontaneously left their trenches to shake hands and share wine, schnapps, bread and cigarettes. According to the military archives, in some places football matches were even organised for the following day. These fraternisations are the film’s subject-matter.

Obviously, the ruling class does not make just any film a candidate for an Oscar, especially when it deals with such a sensitive subject as the Christmas Truce. If it does so, then this is clearly a sign that Carion’s film suits it perfectly.

The scenes where we witness the soldiers’ fraternisation cannot help but leave us overcome with emotion. Nonetheless, the meaning – or rather the absence of meaning – that is given to the event itself comes as a slap in the face to the viewer, and is nothing less than a falsification of history.

In the end, the 1914 Christmas Truce is reduced to a mere, though beautiful, parenthesis in the war, quickly closed for "business as usual" must go on. The dialogue between the French, British and German officers is instructive in this respect:

"‘The war’s outcome won’t be decided this evening... Nobody could reproach us for putting aside our guns on Christmas Eve!’.

‘Don’t worry! It’s just for one night’ went on Horstmayer [the German officer], trying to ‘reassure’ his French opposite number".

In the novel’s epilogue, we can read the following conclusion: "Needless to say, the war reasserted itself (…) When Christmas 1915 came around, the General Staffs on each side had learned their lesson and left nothing to chance: they ordered the shelling of areas which they considered too peaceful. There were to be no more fraternisations as in 1914". End of story. To repeat the words of the French officer Audebert "the parenthesis was closed".

Even in 1914 the press, especially in Britain, was aware of the Christmas Truce and did nothing to hide it. On the contrary, the filled their columns with similar sentiments to those we find today in Merry Christmas. Thus we could read on the Manchester Guardian of 7th January 1915: "‘But they went back to their trenches’, a shrewd and inhuman observer from another planet might say, ‘and brutally continued to kill and be killed. Obviously there is nothing to be expected from such noble sentiments’. To which we would rightly reply that much remains to be done: Belgium must still be delivered from the terrible yoke that weighs her down and Germany must be taught that culture cannot be imposed by the sword".2

"The is still much to be done, so no more of this nonsense and let us return to our trenches" is precisely what Carion makes his soldiers say, for example when one of his main characters, the German soldier Nikolaus, refuses to desert as his girlfriend encourages him to do because after all "I am a soldier here! I have duties, obligations just like the others!".

It is in this cheap moralising that the film slides over into pure fiction, a fantasy of the ruling class which rewrites history to suit itself and so confiscates it from the working class.

The fraternisations of Christmas 1914 were no "miracles without a future", no "intermission before the next act of the terrible drama" in the words of the historian Malcolm Brown, joint author with Marc Ferro of Meetings in No Man's Land, which appeared in bookshops shortly before the film came out.

On the contrary, both before December 1914 and throughout the war, fraternisations took place repeatedly on all the fronts: on the Western front between German, British and French troops, on the Eastern front between Russians and Germans or Austro-Hungarians, or on the Italian front between Austrians and Italians. Everywhere saw the same scenes: sharing food, drink, or cigarettes passed between the trenches, the same attempts to exchange a few words (some deeply regretted their inability to speak the language of those opposite them). Soldiers would often agree to avoid killing each other (the historians speak of agreements to "live and let live"). Attempts at fraternisation were sometimes pushed to the point that officers were sometimes forced to ask the enemy’s artillery to force their troops back to their trenches.

The idea that the fraternisations had "no future" implies another untruth: the idea that they were "rare and limited". "Without a future" also means "without any hope of putting an end to the carnage". With the support of a whole army of historians, the film sets out to empty the events of any political content. As Marc Ferro says "They were a cry of despair against useless offensives, from soldiers at the end of their tether... But they were not a step towards a questioning of the war" and above all "they had no revolutionary content".

If there were a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, Marc Ferro would be a serious contender. It is surely obvious that when soldiers who have been ordered to massacre each other, put down their guns and shake hands instead, this calls the war into question de facto.

"The fraternisations had no political meaning". On the contrary, they expressed the international nature of the working class, the fact that workers have no interest in massacring each other for the interests of their exploiters and the nation. The fraternisations, and then the mutinies that came after December 1914 expressed a growing revolt within the working class, at the front and in the rear, against the suffering imposed by the war, which reached a crescendo in the Russian Revolution of 1917. There is no lack of examples of the implications of the Christmas Truce. The French corporal Louis Barthas writes in his war diaries3 that in the sector of Neuville-Saint-Vast the trenches flooded and French and German soldiers left them to fraternise. Later, after giving a short speech, a German soldier broke his rifle in a gesture of anger and "both sides applauded, and sang the Internationale". Another French soldier reports in January 1917 that "The boches [French slang for the Germans] made signs with their rifles that they would not fire on us and if they were forced to they would raise their rifle-butts in the air" (a well-known signal for mutiny). According to Barthas again, this time in the Vosges in 1917: "one [German] soldier took his rifle, waved its butt in the air, and finally aimed it not at us, but towards the German rear. It was very explicit and we concluded that he meant to say that they should shoot not at us but at those who led them".

The workers’ movement understands very well the value and the meaning of the fraternisations. In an article in Pravda (28th April 1917), Lenin expressed it very well: "The capitalists either sneer at the fraternisation of the soldiers at the front or savagely attack it (…) The class-conscious workers, followed by the mass of semi-proletarians and poor peasants guided by the true instinct of oppressed classes, regard fraternisation with pro found sympathy. Clearly, fraternisation is a path to peace. Clearly, this path does not run through the capitalist governments, through an alliance with them, but runs against them. Clearly, this path tends to develop, strengthen, and consolidate fraternal confidence between the workers of different countries. Clearly, this path is beginning to wreck the hateful discipline of the barrack prisons, the discipline of blind obedience of the soldier to “his” officers and generals, to his capitalists (for most of the officers and generals either belong to the capitalist class or protect its interests). Clearly, fraternisation is the revolutionary initiative of the masses, it is the awakening of the conscience, the mind, the courage of the oppressed classes; in other words, it is a rung in the ladder leading up to the socialist proletarian revolution.

Long live fraternisation! Long live the rising world-wide socialist revolution of the proletariat!"4

This is the reality that the film Merry Christmas obscures. It highlights the fraternisations of 1914 only to hide their content and their future significance in the outbreak of proletarian revolution in Russia 1917. For all its humanist and pacifist sentiments, this kind of film renders the fraternisations meaningless, to confiscate the working class’ memory, and so its revolutionary perspective.

Azel, 2nd January 2006

On 8th November 2014, a conference was held in Marseille on the subject of "The radical left of the 1920s, internationalism and proletarian autonomy".

Before we give an account of the meeting itself, we aim to provide our readers with some background information on the conference speaker, Philippe Bourrinet, presented in the publicity as "the author of various articles and books on the revolutionary workers’ movement and a member of the Smolny press collective".1 Otherwise, it would be impossible to understand either Philippe Bourrinet’s presentation or the discussion that followed.

One might paraphrase Marx’s famous polemic against Proudhon2 as follows:

"Philippe Bourrinet has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood. Among those who are interested in or claim to belong to the Communist Left, he passes for a serious and honest historian. Among historians, he passes for a defender of the Communist Left’s ideas and a connoisseur of its main organisation, the ICC, since everybody knows that he was a militant of the ICC for more than fifteen years. As militants of the ICC, and therefore attached to a serious and honest understanding of history (though we do not claim to be historians), we desire to protest against this double error".

As a foreword to our protest against the ignorance of which Philippe Bourrinet is a victim, let us revisit a few episodes of his political career, since this will allow us to refute many of the false ideas about him which are in circulation these days.

Philippe Bourrinet as a militant of the ICC

After a short stay in the ranks of the Trotskyist organisation Lutte Ouvrière, at the beginning of the 1970s Philippe Bourrinet entered the Révolution internationale group, shortly thereafter to become the section in France of the ICC. Since he had a ready pen and extensive knowledge, he was soon given the responsibility of writing articles for the organisation, under the name of Chardin. He also entered the ICC’s central organ shortly after its creation in 1975, one of the reasons for this nomination being his linguistic ability, notably in German.

Philippe Bourrinet had begun his studies in history, and it was agreed between him and the ICC that he should devote his Master’s dissertation to a study of the Italian Communist Left, so that this could be published by our organisation as a pamphlet. He received the fullest support for this work, which of course benefited his own university career, from our organisation: not only material support but also political support, since our comrade Marc Chirik,3 who had been a member of the Italian Left, provided him with an extensive documentation and first-hand information, as well as precious advice. As planned, his dissertation was published shortly afterwards by our organisation, in book format. Considered as a work of the ICC, and putting forward the ICC’s analyses, it was unsigned, like all our pamphlets.

After the book was published, we encouraged Philippe Bourrinet to undertake a similar study of the Dutch-German Communist Left for his doctoral thesis. The first chapters were published in issues 45, 50, and 52 of the ICC’s International Review. Once again, Philippe Bourrinet benefited from the ICC’s complete political and material support.4 He submitted his thesis in March 1988, and we then began the long work on the book’s layout, delivering it to the printers in November 1990; Philippe Bourrinet had left the ICC a few months beforehand. He gave no political reasons for his resignation, saying only that he no longer wanted to be a militant.

Philippe Bourrinet, member of the "Société des Gens des Lettres"

Two years later, we received in our PO Box, without the slightest accompanying letter, a copy of two surprising documents [15]. The first, dated 21/08/1992, was the "Receipt for the submission by Philippe Bourrinet of a manuscript entitled The Dutch Communist Left 1907-1950". This receipt was issued by the copyright department of the Société des Gens des Lettres.5 The second document, dated 27th July 1992, was even more surprising. It was a typewritten text titled "Concerning the anonymous publications distributed by the International Communist Current group (ICC) in France and elsewhere".

In this document, we read that "The book titled THE DUTCH LEFT, signed ‘International Communist Current’, printed in November 1990 by the ‘Litografia Libero Nicola, Napoli’ and distributed in France and Belgium, was entirely written by Philippe BOURRINET, doctor at the University of Paris 1 – Sorbonne (22nd March 1988)". This was perfectly true. But there followed a series of allegations, accusing the ICC of "piracy", which we desired to clarify with Philippe Bourrinet. Accordingly, a delegation from the ICC met him in a café on the Place de Clichy in Paris, close to where he lived at the time. This delegation pointed out to Philippe Bourrinet the truth of the matter, none of which he attempted to contradict. The delegation asked him why, all of a sudden, he was making such a fuss about his name not appearing on the book on the Dutch Left, since he had never before made this demand. He replied that it would be useful for him to appear as the book’s author in view of an upcoming job application, and that he wanted his name to figure on future editions. Although in his statement, Philippe Bourrinet had made a series of outrageous attacks against the ICC, we decided not to hold it against him: we did not, for example, put anything in the way of his professional ambitions. We decided to accede to his demand, but since the French edition had already been printed we told him that it was too late for this version of the book, on which he agreed. We therefore undertook to publish in any future edition, the following brief statement: "This book, which first appeared in French in 1990, is published under the responsibility of the ICC. It was written by Philippe Bourrinet in the context of his work for his university doctorate, but it was prepared and discussed by the ICC when the author was one of its militants. For this reason it was conceived and published as the collective work of the ICC, without an author's signature and with his total agreement.

Philippe Bourrinet has not been in the ICC since April 1990, and he has since published editions of this book under his own name, with the addition of certain 'corrections' linked to the evolution of his political positions.

For its part, the ICC fully intends to continue its policy of publishing this book. It should be clear that our organization cannot be held responsible for any additional or divergent political positions that Philippe Bourrinet might integrate into the editions produced under his own responsibility."6

Philippe Bourrinet accepted this proposal.

For the ICC, the matter was closed and we no longer paid much attention to the career of Doctor Bourrinet.7 Our inattention was all the greater in that his later literary efforts were of incomparably lesser quality and interest than the two books on the Italian and Dutch-German Lefts. We did of course notice, on the Internet, that Doctor Bourrinet had republished the two documents, with a few modifications of the ICC’s original which brought the text closer to the positions of councilism. It turned out that in the Postface to the new edition of the Dutch-German Left, Doctor Bourrinet wrote: "The present edition contains defects inevitable in a work carried out within the university framework. There also appears the author's membership of the aforementioned group [the ICC], in the form of traces of ideology at a remove from a rigorous marxist analysis of the revolutionary movement and theory (…) I have tried as far as possible to remove or diminish the passages which contained too much ‘anti-councilist’ polemic, specific to the group whose influence I was under at the time".

In this passage, we learn several things. First, that Doctor Bourrinet had to leave the ICC to acquire at long last "a rigorous marxist analysis of the revolutionary movement and theory". He forgets to mention that it was the Révolution Internationale group (the future ICC section in France) which taught him the basics of marxism, when he had just left Lutte Ouvrière, a group which – whatever its claims to the contrary – has nothing to do with either marxism or the revolutionary movement. He also accredits the idea – so popular with university "marxism" – that one can remain a "marxist" while avoiding any form of political organisation fighting for the defence of proletarian principles. This idea is very close to degenerate councilism’s rejection of the need for such an organisation – which explains why so many "marxist professors" have such an affinity with councilism. We could answer Doctor Bourrinet’s viewpoint with these words of the ICC militant... Philippe Bourrinet: "Unlike the Otto Rühle variety of ‘councilism’ in the 1920s, or the Dutch variety in the 1930s, today’s councilist current has broken with the ‘council communist’ tradition of the Communist Left. It corresponds much more to the revolt of fractions of the petty bourgeoisie or of proletarian elements suspicious of any political organisation. The councilist danger of tomorrow will not appear with the defeat of the revolution, as was the case during the 1920s in Germany, it will appear at the beginning of the revolutionary wave and will be the negative moment of the proletariat’s coming to consciousness" (from the Proceedings of a study day on the danger of councilism, held by the ICC’s section in France in April 1985, p19).

"Workerism co-exists only too well, one can even say perfectly, with intellectualism. In this sense, we have seen a kind of petty-bourgeois anarchism, in the sense of the rejection of any form of authority or organisation, etc, etc; similar to the vision of the workerist intellectual already condemned by Lenin in What is to be done?" (ibid., p32).

And finally, we learn that at the time, the militant Philippe Bourrinet made these mistakes because he was "under the influence". Doctor Bourrinet, just for once you are far too modest!8 The militant Philippe Bourrinet was not "under the influence" of the ICC’s positions, on the contrary he was their determined and talented defender in the organisation’s struggle against the tendencies towards councilist positions in its midst. This is precisely why the ICC entrusted him with the article that took up the cudgels publicly against these tendencies (See International Review no.40, "The function of revolutionary organizations: The danger of councilism").

Having revised the two texts on the Italian Left and the Dutch-German Left, Doctor Bourrinet had new editions printed, which he put on sale on the Internet. These texts obviously had slightly more content and slightly fewer errors than those published by the ICC. Amongst other things, they expressed the good Doctor’s new theoretical line. And these changes were of considerable value: whereas the ICC sold its book on the Dutch-German Left for 12 euros, the good Doctor’s price was 75€ [16]. Similarly for the Italian Left, the price was not 8€ but 50€ [17] (40€ for the English edition [18]).9 Of course, the good Doctor’s editions had colour covers! In a famous letter of 18th March 1872 to the French publisher of Capital, Marx wrote "I welcome your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a periodical. In this format it will be more accessible to the working class, and for me this consideration overrides all others". Clearly, this is not the kind of consideration that carries much weight with Doctor Bourrinet, whose methods are more like those of the private medical Doctors whose fees are ten times higher than those of the general practitioner, with the added benefit of allowing them to avoid any contact with the sweaty masses.

Is stinginess the explanation for the exorbitant prices of Doctor Bourrinet’s works? Not impossible, since the militant Philippe Bourrinet was known for his stinginess in the ICC, and got teased for it by Marc Chirik, at the time the treasurer of the ICC’s section in France. That said, it is unlikely that the good Doctor’s avarice, however obsessive it might be, has rendered him completely stupid. Even an idiot can see that the Doctor’s works are unlikely to find any buyers, even if the ICC were to put an end to its own distribution as the Doctor never stops demanding that we do.10 More likely, the Doctor’s elevated prices are no higher than his elevated esteem for his works and his own good self. To sell his literary production "on the cheap" (and it must be more valuable, in his estimation, than Capital), would be to minimise their value, according to the classic and contemptible bourgeois logic which we have already seen in his appeal to the "Société des Gens des Lettres". If our explanation is incorrect, Doctor Bourrinet need only supply his own, which we will gladly publish, as well as any reply he cares to give to this article.

Doctor Bourrinet, liar and slanderer

But all these examples of Doctor Bourrinet’s petty-mindedness and bad faith pale into insignificance beside the slander he directed at our organisation in 1992. We did not react publicly at the time; we intend to do so now, because since March 2012 they have been smeared across the Internet. On the site www.left-dis.nl/f/ [19] there is now a title "Une mise au point publique (Paris, décembre 91) sur le parasitisme 'instinctif' de la secte 'CCI'. Mars 2012" ("Public statement (Paris, December 1991) on the ‘instinctive’ parasitism of the ‘ICC’ sect"). The title links to a PDF11 containing all the above-mentioned documents received by the ICC in 1992, to which we will now return.

In the "Statement" of 27th July 1992, we read:

"On the occasion of the publication of the author’s doctoral thesis, and of his previous Master’s dissertation on the Italian Communist Left (1926-1945), without the author's agreement, and with arbitrary additions and cuts made by this group, which thinks it owns the document under the pretext that the undersigned author was once a member of the ICC, the following clarification is necessary for the reader:

This work was published anonymously by the ICC in 1991, in French, without the author's agreement and without warning him in advance, and without his corrections. The author was confronted with a fait accompli, a veritable act of ‘piracy’.

[There then follows the passage quoted above in which we learn that Philippe Bourrinet is a doctor of the University of Paris 1, and another giving the circumstances in which he submitted his thesis.]

This book is a continuation of that on THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST LEFT 1912-1945, a Master’s dissertation by the same author (Paris 1 – Sorbonne, 1980, supervised by Jacques Droz).

This dissertation was published in 1981 and 1984, anonymously – in French and Italian – by the ICC group, with the tacit, and only the tacit, agreement of the author".

Let us begin with "the tacit, and only the tacit, agreement" that the militant Philippe Bourrinet gave for the publication of the work on the Italian Communist Left, without mentioning the author's name. What is this can of worms Doctor Bourrinet, you pitiful hypocrite? Did you or did you not agree that the text you wrote should be published as an ICC pamphlet? When you discussed at length with other militants of the organisation, about the layout and the cover for this pamphlet (where indeed, the author's name does not figure), did you do so "tacitly"?

As for the work on the Dutch-German Left, which was supposedly published without the agreement of the shiny new "Doctor" Bourrinet, we’re surprised your nose didn’t get in the way when you were writing: it must have stuck out further than Pinocchio’s! Really Doctor Bourrinet, you are the most arrant liar to pretend that you were confronted with a "fait accompli". And here is the proof that you are a liar, in an article published in our International Review no.58 (3rd Quarter 1989) and titled "Contribution to a history of the revolutionary movement: Introduction to the Dutch-German Left", where we read: "The history of the international communist left since the beginning of the century, such as we've begun to relate in our pamphlets on the ‘Communist Left of Italy' isn't simply for historians. It's only from a militant standpoint, the standpoint of those who are committed to the workers' struggle for emancipation, that the history of the workers' movement can be approached. And for the working class, this history isn't just a question of knowing things, but first and foremost a weapon in its present and future struggles, because of the lessons from the past that it contains. It's from this militant point of view that we are publishing as a contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement a pamphlet on the German-Dutch communist left which will appear in French later this year. The introduction to this pamphlet, published below, goes into the question of how to approach the history of this current".

Who then is the slimeball of an ICC militant, justifying in advance the "piracy" of Doctor Bourrinet’s thesis, the willing accomplice in a manoeuvre intended to confront the good Doctor with a "fait accompli"? The article is signed Ch, alias Chardin, alias... the militant, Philippe Bourrinet.

So here we have the militant Philippe Bourrinet ("under the influence" in all likelihood), who takes responsibility publicly and in writing for the ignominious crime that the ICC is about to commit on poor Doctor Bourrinet. But, at the moment that this article is written, he has already received his doctorate from the University of Paris 1 – Sorbonne. In other words, one of those most responsible for the infamous acts against Doctor Bourrinet, is none other than Doctor Bourrinet himself. Is Doctor Bourrinet a masochist? At all events, he is certainly an out and out liar, of that there is no shadow of a doubt. A contemptible liar and slanderer.

The threats of Doctor Bourrinet the shopkeeper

One might imagine that Doctor Bourrinet could not stoop any lower than he did in March 2012, with this publication of his 20-year old documents: if so, one would be mistaken. At the same time, several militants of the ICC received a registered letter dated 23rd March 2012 [20], from the Legal department of the Société des Gens des Lettres. Here follow the main passages:

"We intervene in the name of Mr Philippe Bourrinet, member of the Société des Gens des Lettres, on the matter of his dissertation and his theses (…)

We are most surprised to discover that these two works are the object of systematic forgery, thus damaging both the property rights and the moral right of Mr Bourrinet.

We therefore ask that you immediately cease all use of these texts, either on the different Internet sites where they may be found, or in printed publications.

If he does not obtain satisfaction, the author reserves the right to take any action he deems appropriate".

In other words, Doctor Bourrinet "reserves the right" to set the law on certain ICC militants, should the ICC continue to distribute the books on the Dutch-German and the Italian Left. And the best of it is, that one of the militants targeted by this threatening letter was also one of those who was most involved in giving Doctor Bourrinet material support for his thesis, by using the photocopying services at his job (at the risk of getting into serious trouble with his employer, up to and including the sack), to copy hundreds upon hundreds of pages (drafts of Philippe Bourrinet’s work so that it could be proofed by other militants, collections of publications of the Communist Left that had been lent to him, copies of his dissertation and thesis for the University...).

Today, Doctor Bourrinet – with his characteristic cowardice, since he hides behind the Société des Gens des Lettres, who he has got on-board by lying to them – has the ludicrous pretension to lay claim to the heritage of the Communist Left, and to texts of the workers’ movement which belong to nobody if not to the working class, and of which proletarian organisations are the custodians, and the political and moral guarantors. This philistine thinks he can behave like any vulgar capitalist protecting his patents, putting it about that the product of the universal history of the exploited class is a commodity that can be reduced to the "intellectual property" of his own pathetic individuality. This is the merest swindle, a takeover bid worthy of Hollywood. The working class does not produce militants as individuals, but revolutionary organisations which are the product of struggle and a historic continuity. This is already contained in the 1864 Statutes of the IWA: "In its struggle against the collective power of the possessing classes the proletariat can act as a class only by constituting itself as distinct political party, opposed to all the old parties formed by the possessing classes." (Article 7a). Workers’ organisations defend principles which are the fruit of historical experience. In this sense, the work of their militants is part of a movement which is not and cannot be their "personal property". The ICC’s statutes state with the utmost clarity something which was once a morally self-evident fact within the proletariat: "every militant who leaves the ICC, even as part of a split, returns to the organisation all the material means (money, technical material, stocks of publications, internal bulletins etc.) which had been put at the militants disposal" (our emphasis).

Here then is Doctor Bourrinet’s true face! Grab his swag, and then turn to bourgeois justice out of personal vengeance and to flatter his injured vanity. This violation of his initial moral commitment, when he was a militant, is not merely pitiful, it is completely foreign to the workers’ movement. This pettifogging, petty-bourgeois legalism, fuelled by personal revenge, is something unheard of in the Communist Left that this fraud claims to defend. What terms should one use to speak of Doctor Bourrinet? So many spring to mind that we are left at a loss which to choose, so let us just say that he is "unspeakable".

Doctor Bourrinet slanderer of our comrade Marc Chirik

This is not the end of the unspeakable Doctor’s exploits. Not only is he ready to use the vilest methods to damage his one-time organisation, the ICC, he also sets out to attack the memory of a militant who played a determining role in its formation: Marc Chirik, deceased in December 1990.

To this end, he uses a biographical sketch published on his web site [21], and which includes, amongst others, those published at the end of his new version of the book on the Italian Left.

In the biographical sketch published at the end of the book, he permits himself a petty attack on Marc Chirik: "For Jean Malaquais, the friend of a lifetime, he embodied a certain kind of political ‘prophet’". On Doctor Bourrinet’s web site, the sentence is longer and the attack more open: "For Jean Malaquais, the friend of a lifetime, he embodied a certain kind of political ‘prophet’, constantly trying to prove to others and to himself that he had ‘never made a mistake’".12 We recognise here the style of the two-faced Doctor Bourrinet. He starts with the "friend of a lifetime" the better to put over a negative image, without saying that while Malaquais was a great writer and a fine polemicist who shared the positions of the Communist Left, he did not have the personality of a communist militant, nor an understanding of what it means to be one. In the days when Malaquais lived in Paris and came frequently to our public meetings, he asked at one point to join the ICC; Marc Chirik had little difficulty persuading the other comrades that we could not accept his candidature, given his often haughty attitude both to our militants and to our activities.

This sketch of Marc Chirik is petty-minded sniping, but worse is to come. In an addition, Doctor Bourrinet repeats the vilest slanders put about against our organisation, in particular by the pack of hooligans and grasses that called itself the "Internal Fraction of the ICC":

"In 1991-93, very shortly after his death, Marc Chirik’s group was shaken by a furious ‘war of succession’ between the ‘leaders’ to put themselves at the head of the ‘masses’ of the ICC, in reality the most grotesque conflicts worthy of an asylum".

Doctor Bourrinet then passes the microphone to the "adversaries" of our comrade and our organisation, to heap a cartload of muck on both:

"For his political adversaries, Marc Chirik remained a figure of the past, attached to the worst aspects of the Leninist and Trotskyist current, a remote disciple of Albert Treint, stooping to ‘Zinovievist’ manoeuvres and not hesitating – during yet another split, in 1981, to carry out ‘Chekist raids’ against ‘dissidents’, to ‘defend the organisation’ and to ‘recover its equipment’.

Exercising a monolithic control over ‘his’ organisation, Marc Chirik thus helped to plunge it, from an early stage, into a sort of paranoid psychosis. A sombre reality which, in the eyes of many ex-militants, tore apart the ‘Chirikist’ organisation, whose most visible defects were: political dishonesty raised to the level of a categorical imperative, ‘police tactics of harassment’, a carefully cultivated atmosphere of ultra-sectarian paranoia using the ‘theory of the plot’ ad nauseam, and recommending, to resolve political divergences, the prophylactic eradication of the ‘parasitism’ of ‘enemy organisations’.

To conclude:

1. a triumphant (and accepted) return of ‘repressed’ Stalinism in ‘praxis’;

2. a superficial attachment to the ‘acquisitions of Freudianism’ where the ‘struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie’ lives alongside ‘the eternal struggle of Eros and Thanatos’, and between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the latter being the ‘proletarian morality’ of which the ICC is the custodian through its ‘central organs’;

3. a quasi-religious devotion to Darwinism, as a method for ‘selecting’ the most ‘adapted’ political species, under cover of the development of the ‘social instinct’ of which the ICC is the ultimate incarnation;

4. under the ‘virtuous’ mantle of ‘proletarian morality’, the triumph behind the scenes of political amoralism, the ‘eternal return’ of ‘Nechaev’s catechism’ where anything goes to destroy a political enemy".

As anyone can see, the accusations repeated by Doctor Bourrinet are not only aimed at Marc Chirik and the ICC when he was alive, but largely post-date his death. For example, the ICC never discussed Darwinism or published articles on the subject in Marc Chirik’s lifetime. Only since 2009, 20 years after his death, did the ICC deal with the question in our internal discussions or publish articles on the subject. In fact, Doctor Bourrinet’s intention is to kill two birds with one stone: to demolish both Marc Chirik and the ICC, whose principal founder he was.

In fact, this veritable inventory of accusations offers us a condensed version of the "Bourrinet method". He bows to the formal respect of historiographical standards by following his sketch with a bibliography where, indeed, we can find the sources for all these insanities. But so vast is this bibliography that the slanderous publications are drowned there. Moreover, it is difficult even for a "specialist" to access many of the texts referred to, such that most readers are unlikely to check "who said what". And this is precisely what counts. If one were to include, in a biography of Trotsky, a passage on what his political adversaries said about him, and if amongst the accusations were one claiming that he had been "an agent of Hitler", then the mere fact that the accusation came from Vyshinsky, the prosecutor at the Moscow trials, would be enough to discredit it. We have no intention of burdening the reader with a systematic refutation of all the slanders directed at Marc Chirik and the ICC in the articles so obligingly referenced by the good Doctor. Suffice it to say that for the most part they come from ex-members of the ICC who, for whatever reason, are eaten up by a tenacious hatred for our organisation. Some are still under the influence of anarchist ideas which have lead them to adopt the slogan "Lenin=Stalin". Others have felt that the organisation did not appreciate their true worth, or couldn’t face up to criticism and found that the defence of their hurt pride was more important than the defence of communist positions. Others have distinguished themselves by thuggish behaviour, while still being ready to call the police when the ICC visited them to recover equipment stolen from our organisation. Still others – or the same – continue to defend the dubious element Chénier, excluded in 1981, and who was shortly after to be found making a career for himself in the Socialist Party then in power.

If Doctor Bourrinet repeats certain accusations whose absurd, and even insane, character is obvious to anyone, it is probably not because he thinks that they will be believed as such, but because they make it possible to put about the idea that "there’s no smoke without fire", and that "even if it’s exaggerated, there must be some truth behind it". The Bourrinet method again: if you throw enough mud, something will always stick.

One final word on this. Doctor Bourrinet has written biographical notes of many militants of the Communist Left, but only Marc Chirik has had the privilege, of having not only his militant life, but also the accusations made against him, exposed in detail. All this without, needless to say, so much as a word about, or a reference to the texts (articles, interventions on forums, etc.) which refute these accusations, and all this in the name of "serious", "honest" historical research!13

Let us return then to the idea that Doctor Bourrinet is "a serious and honest historian". As Marx put it, we must "protest" against any such idea. In his 1989 article for our press, announcing the forthcoming publication of the ICC’s Dutch-German Communist Left, the good Doctor referred to several serious and honest historians of the workers’ movement: Franz Mehring, Leon Trotsky, both revolutionary militants, but also George Haupt, who was "far from being a revolutionary" to use Doctor Bourrinet’s words: "On this point it's worth again citing the historian Georges Haupt, who died in 1980, and was known for the seriousness of his works on the IInd and IIIrd Internationals:

‘With the aid of unprecedented falsifications, treating the most elementary historical realities with contempt, Stalinism has methodically rubbed out, mutilated, remodelled the field of the past in order to replace it with its own representations, its own myths, its own self-glorification(...)’".

The least one can say is that the same "probity" hardly characterises Doctor Bourrinet. As we have seen, he hesitates not a moment to proffer the most colossal lies when it suits him – whenever historical reality does not fit his own "self-glorification". When he was a militant of the ICC, Doctor Bourrinet produced work that was interesting, important, and honest. Since then, it is possible that some of his studies may have been honest, if not necessarily interesting or important. But what is sure, is that his honesty flies out the window whenever the subject concerns his obsessive pet hates: the militant Marc Chirik and the International Communist Current. After all, there are Stalinist historians who have produced excellent studies of the Paris Commune, but it would be too much to expect that they would be capable of doing the same for the history of the "Communist" Parties.

As far as the other illusions about Doctor Bourrinet are concerned – that he is "a defender of the Communist Left’s ideas and a connoisseur of its main organisation, the ICC" – here again, what we have said above shows that these are far from the truth. As a connoisseur of the ICC, we have seen better: either he takes the insane accusations of the ICC and Marc Chirik’s "political adversaries" at face value, in which case his "knowledge" is worthy of Hello! magazine or Minute,14 or he does not, which is worse. As for the defence of the ideas of the Communist Left, there is nothing to expect from someone whose overriding obsession is the defence of... his intellectual property, and who, to do so, has no hesitation in bringing in the bourgeois state. When one claims to defend certain ideas, the least that can be expected is that one does not act in flagrant contradiction to those ideas. There is nothing to be expected of someone who is devoured by hatred to the point where he can cover in shit the memory of Marc Chirik, one of the very rare militants of the Communist Left who, rather than remaining welded to his initial positions, was capable of integrating the essential insights of both the Italian and the Dutch-German Communist Left, and defending them to his dying day.

For Doctor Bourrinet, the ideas of the Communist Left are mere stock in trade, inherited from the days when he was a militant, and which he is trying as best he can to capitalise in the service of his need for social recognition (since he can’t make any money out of it).

Doctor Bourrinet, the petty-bourgeois democrat

To demonstrate this assertion conclusively, it is worth reading the biographical sketch devoted to Lafif Lakhdar (deceased July 2013), published on the site Controverses which presents itself as a "Forum for the Internationalist Communist Left" – a sketch signed Ph B (the good Doctor, in person no less).15 In the introduction, Lafif Lakhdar is presented as "an Arab intellectual, writer, philosopher and rationalist, a militant in Algeria, the Middle East and France. Known as ‘the Arab Spinoza’". In the sketch itself, we learn that "From 2009 onwards he took part, with the philosopher Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010), in UNESCO’s Aladdin project, an ‘intellectual and cultural programme’ launched with the patronage of UNESCO, Jacques Chirac, and Simone Weil". We also learn that "In October 2004, he co-authored, together with numerous liberal Arab writers, a Manifesto published on the web (www.elaph.com [22], www.metransparent.com [23]) calling on the UN to set up an international tribunal to judge terrorists, and organisations or institutions inciting terrorism". Frankly, we have great difficulty seeing what this biography is doing on a "Forum for the Internationalist Communist Left", and why someone who claims to belong to the Communist Left should write it. As far as one can judge from this, Lafif Lakhdar was probably a man full of good intentions and not without a certain courage in standing up to the threats of Islamist fanatics, but whose action was entirely within the framework of bourgeois "democracy", and in defence of the illusions thanks to which the bourgeoisie maintains its domination. For anyone who had anything to do with the Communist Left, it would be out of the question to call on the UN (that "den of thieves" to use Lenin’s expression about the League of Nations) "to set up an international tribunal to judge terrorists". Should we react to terrorist attacks by demanding that the bourgeois state strengthen its police and judicial arsenal?16 Indeed, amongst Lafif Lakhdar’s achievements, there is one that Doctor Bourrinet does not mention (did he forget, or did he hide it?): an open letter dated 16th November 2008 to the new President of the United States, Barrack Obama, suggesting that he "change the world in 100 days by concluding a reconciliation between Jews and Arabs".17 In the letter, we find the following passages:

"Solving this conflict, with its explosive mixture of religion and politics, would be an agreeable surprise from you to the peoples of the region and the world. It would have undoubtedly a positive psychological impact on all the other crises, including the world financial crisis.

How can this be achieved? (…)

Send an American peace delegation headed by President Clinton and the outgoing Israeli President Ehud Olmert,18 and made up of Prince Talal Ben-Abdul Al-Aziz, the symbolic representative of the Arab peace initiative, and of Walid Khalid and Shibli Talham as representatives of the Palestinian people.

And what is the solution?

First of all, the application of Mr Clinton’s parameters which give the Jews what they have been lacking since the destruction of the Temple in 586BCE, and to the Palestinians what they have never had in their history: an independent state. Then, the application of Ehud Olmert’s ‘advice’ to his successor, which would accord the Palestinians the major part of their demands...".

And the letter concludes:

"President Barack Obama, it is said that you have little experience; by solving, in your administration’s first hundred days, a century-old conflict which has provoked five bloody wars and two intifadas, you would demonstrate to the world that you are a competent and responsible leader, and make a gift to the 80% of the world population who prayed for your success and so celebrated your victory". Could the Communist Left do no better than that?

Doctor Bourrinet’s biographical sketch of Lafif Lakhdar is published on the site Controverses under the heading "Internationalists". But what exactly is an internationalist? Someone who not only denounces chauvinism and military barbarism, but who defends to the utmost the only perspective that can put an end to them: the overthrow of the capitalist system by the world proletarian revolution. And this necessarily involves the denunciation of all pacifist and democratic illusions, and all the bourgeoisie’s political forces that spread them, however "democratic", "enlightened" or well-intentioned they may be. Whoever has not understood this stands not on proletarian ground, but on that of the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie. Our eminent Doctor (just like the equally eminent publishers of Controverses) clearly does not know the difference between a democratic humanist bourgeois and an internationalist, in other words a revolutionary. And this is because Doctor Bourrinet’s viewpoint is not that of the working class but of the petty bourgeoisie. This is clear enough in our account of the Doctor’s behaviour since he left the ICC, but his sketch of Lafif Lakhdar confirms it in as striking a manner as you could wish.

In fact, Doctor Bourrinet’s frantic search for official social recognition, his use of bourgeois institutions, and the state, to defend his "copyright" and his "intellectual property", his pettiness, his bad faith, his lies, his cowardice, and to cap it all, his hatred for the organisation and the militants thanks to whom he was able to write his two books, all the Doctor’s contemptible behaviour since 1992, are not merely expressions of his personality. They are also, and much more, the expression of his belonging to the social category which most concentrates all these moral defects: the petty bourgeoisie.

As we shall now see, the conference where Doctor Bourrinet figured as speaker amply confirms everything we have said about his person.

A significant conference

Doctor Bourrinet began with a long and soporific introduction. But the lethargy that crept over the audience (including the chair) was not merely because the Doctor has all the charisma of an oyster. More fundamentally, it was the fruit of a speech without soul or fighting spirit, at the end of which the chair could conclude that "the past is past" and that "questions today are posed differently".

There followed logically a whole series of "new" questions from the audience, such as "the situation in the prisons" (very new!) and of "precarious labour", etc. In short, the sole effect of Doctor Bourrinet’s discourse was to present the tradition of the Communist Left as something without interest for the present or the future, something from a vanished past to be read about in books fit only to gather dust on the shelf, at the disposal of university researchers.

In other words, Doctor Bourrinet’s presentation confirmed what all his behaviour up to then had already revealed: that henceforth, for our good Doctor, the history of the Communist Left has become a mere academic discipline and has nothing to do with the words of the militant Philippe Bourrinet, when as Chardin he wrote that it was: "(...) first and foremost a weapon in its present and future struggles, because of the lessons from the past that it contains" (International Review no.58, ibid).

But there’s more to come! Doctor Bourrinet made the most of the soporific effect of his presentation to slip in, as is his wont, a few historical falsifications – in perfect conformity with his tendency to "rearrange" history to suit himself.

He thus described the different Communist Lefts (of Italy, Holland, and Germany) as if they were completely isolated from each other, as if they had no interaction with each other. Nothing could be farther from the truth! It is true that in 1926, the Italian Left refused a proposal from Karl Korsch (then member of a group in Germany around the review Kommunistische Politik) for a common declaration by all the Left currents of the day (cf letter from Bordiga to Korsch of 28th October 192619). But the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party, which published Prometeo in Italian from 1929, and then Bilan in French from 1933, not only had the firm intention to confront its positions with those of the other left currents, above all with those of Trotsky’s Left Opposition and of the Dutch-German Left, it also adopted several positions of the latter current. For example, the analysis of national liberation struggles worked out by Rosa Luxemburg within the German and Polish Social-Democracy, then taken up by the German Left, was integrated into Bilan’s positions at the end of the 1930s.

Better still, this "expert" of the Communist Left even managed to ignore completely the very existence of the French Communist Left (Gauche Communiste de France, GCF). Just as, in Stalin’s day, people disappeared from photographs at each rewriting of official history, so our good Doctor somehow "forgot" all about this group, created at the end of World War II, in 1944. And with good reason: the distinguishing feature of the GCF (which published Internationalisme) was precisely its profound synthesis of the Lefts of different countries, in continuity with the work of Bilan. By drawing its inspiration from Bilan’s theoretical advances, and still more from its vision of a living, non-dogmatic marxism, open to every expression of the proletariat internationally, the GCF prevented this little group from falling into oblivion, and made it on the contrary a bridge between the best proletarian traditions of the past, and the future of the proletarian struggle. In other words, when Doctor Bourrinet wipes the GCF from the whiteboard of history he also, in a sense, wipes out Bilan, he breaks the historic continuity between revolutionary groups, and he breaks the transmission of this precious experience of our illustrious predecessors. In a word, he disarms the proletariat before its class enemy.

All this is perfectly deliberate on Doctor Bourrinet’s part. He knows perfectly well the GCF’s existence and its place in history. This is not the fruit of an unfortunate forgetfulness, or of ignorance; it is a deliberate effort to hide a truth which he would prefer to ignore: that the GCF made a contribution of prime importance to the thought of the Communist Left.

Why so? The answer is simple. Purely out of hatred for the ICC, the only organisation which explicitly claims a descent from the GCF, and out of hatred for the militant who played a key role in the formation of the ICC and was the main thinker behind the GCF: Marc Chirik.

Doctor Bourrinet’s hatred, which we have already seen at work in his various writings, was laid out for all to see at this public conference.

When the ICC’s delegation tried to call out the good Doctor for his falsifications and his "intellectual property", he became perfectly hysterical (as everyone could see): "you are terrorists and cheats", he cried, "you have forced many militants to resign from the ICC by stifling them" – in other words, he repeated all the slanders of "Marc Chirik’s political adversaries" which he has reported so "objectively" in the biographical sketch published on his web site.

Up to now, our Doctor has spread his venom from the shelter of official bodies, "doctored" biographical sketches, and "statements" on the Internet. This time, for once, he has dared do so in public, before four militants of the ICC. Such a change in attitude calls for an explanation.

As we have seen, Doctor Bourrinet is the prototypical petty bourgeois: cowardly, dishonest, and little inclined to spit his bile in the light of day, except... when the wind of rumour swells the cries of hatred against the ICC. Then he gets drunk on "courage" and is ready to take his part in the vilest of slander and the lowest of threats against our organisation. Through the centuries, calls to pogrom have always been thus: each participant makes his own wretched contribution according to his own motives, all different but all equally shabby and full of hate. Almost every time, this kind of barbaric dynamic is started by some kind of provocateur – whether a professional or an amateur is really immaterial. It is precisely into this that our unspeakable Doctor has plunged, hook line and sinker. After reading the anti-ICC prose of the IGCL,20 that seedy bunch of police-like back-room plotters with its provocateur Juan, the good Doctor has perked up no end and is ready to answer the call to villainy and hatred.

On 28th April 2014, the IGCL21 published an article as bad as anything by a professional provocateur. This slanderous text was titled "A new (and final?) crisis in the ICC!",22 and announced with ironic delight the ICC’s disappearance... which turned out to be "thoroughly exaggerated".23 But however unfounded, the mere idea that the ICC is weakened, almost at death’s door, has galvanised all those who are obsessed with the hope of seeing us dead and buried. And it is in this "courageous" crowd that we find the Doctor Bourrinet, all hot and flustered at the idea that he too can now howl with the wolves against the ICC. But even the encouragement of the provocateurs of the IGCL was not enough to give him pluck; he needed the comforting company of an acolyte alongside him, small in brain but big in brawn, and above all with the mentality of the hoodlum ready for any underhand villainy against the ICC: none other than Pédoncule,24 always ready to reassure and motivate our Doctor should his courage fail him during the conference. This individual has an edifying, and violent, pedigree: physical aggression against one of our women comrades, aggression against another comrade threatened with the switch-blade he always carries on him, and threats to "slit the throat" of yet another.25

The association of the Doctor and the hooligan (which could have been made into a French movie with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Depardieu in the title roles) may seem paradoxical, but should come as no surprise. The alliance between the intellectual petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat is not new, and in general it comes when they confront a common enemy: the revolutionary proletariat. In 1871, the majority of French writers (with the noteworthy exceptions of Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Vallès, and Victor Hugo) lined up with the scum of Paris to cheer on the Versaillais who slaughtered the Commune: the former with the pen, the latter more concretely through grassing and assassination.26 In 1919, the "honorable" leaders of German Social-Democracy used the lumpenproletariat grouped in the Frei Korps (the predecessors of the Nazis) to assassinate thousands of workers, at the same time as they murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolution’s leading lights. Today, the petty bourgeois Bourrinet, Doctor of the University of Paris 1 – Sorbonne, teams up with Pédoncule the Ripper: what could be more normal? Both share the same obsessive hatred of the ICC; both want to see the disappearance of the ICC, in other words of the main organisation defending internationally the positions of the Communist Left.

As far as we are concerned, we intend to continue distributing the two books on the Italian Left and on the Dutch-German Left, whether Doctor Bourrinet likes it or not. And we urge our readers to read these books, written by Philippe Bourrinet when he was a militant of the ICC. They have lost none of their value just because, since then, the militant has become a Doctor and betrayed the cause to which he had been committed in his youth. Nor we will we give up denouncing the Doctor’s infamy, his lies, his slanders, and his contemptible efforts to call the institutions of the bourgeois state to his aid to threaten our militants and satisfy his hatred. He need not, however, worry that we will send a commando to "slit his throat" – we will leave that kind of thing to his bodyguard, Pédoncule the Ripper.

The history of the workers’ movement is littered with militants who once defended revolutionary proletarian positions, only to change camp and capitulate to bourgeois ideology to put themselves at the service of the ruling class. We all know what happened to Mussolini, who was a leader of the Italian Socialist Party’s left wing prior to World War I. Plekhanov, who introduced marxism to Russia and was one of the foremost figures in the struggle against Bernstein’s revisionism at the end of the 19th century, turned into a dyed-in-the-wool social chauvinist in 1914. Kautsky, the 2nd International’s "pope of marxism" and Rosa Luxemburg’s comrade-in-arms up to 1906, in 1914 put his pen to serve, de facto, the imperialist war, and condemned the 1917 revolution in Russia, all the while proclaiming formally his attachment to marxism, right up to his death in 1938.

Today, Doctor Bourrinet continues to proclaim his formal attachment to the Communist Left and its positions. But this is a swindle. The Communist Left is not just a matter of political positions. It also means loyalty to principles, refusal to compromise, a will to struggle for the revolution, an immense courage – all qualities of which Doctor Bourrinet is utterly bereft. Read today The Italian Communist Left, and The Dutch-German Communist Left, not as Doctor Bourrinet’s "intellectual property", but in the spirit of Philippe Bourrinet a quarter-century ago: "It's only from a militant standpoint, the standpoint of those who are committed to the workers' struggle for emancipation, that the history of the workers' movement can be approached".

International Communist Current, 15/01/2015

On the 26th of September 2014, in the state of Guerrero in Mexico situated about 400 km south of Mexico City, a number of students from the teacher training college of Ayotzinapa went to Iguala, a town some 250 km away in order to prepare with others a demonstration taking place the following week on October 2; a demonstration in memory of the massacre of students on the “Three-Cultures” square in the capital (Tlatelolco) in 1968. This commemoration was taking place in parallel with a massive and spontaneous demonstration of students at the polytechnic school who were protesting against reforms of the education system which, among other things, particularly hit them by re-classifying their future professional qualifications, and thus their future wages, by reducing their grades from engineer to technician.

On their return, in order to pay for transport, the youth from Ayotzinapa “borrowed” a bus. They were then chased and fired on by the municipal police of Iguala. The fusillade killed 6 of the youths. Others were able to flee but 43 more were captured and immediately delivered to the mafia gang “Guerreros Unidos”[1] on the telephone orders of the mayor of Iguala, a member of the PRD[2] and under the cover of the state governor, also a member of the PRD. The narco-traffickers were thus made responsible for making the students “disappear”.

Around the area of the shootings some days later, recent burnt remains were discovered in a ditch containing about 20 bodies, some of whom had been burnt alive and others hideously mutilated – the skin torn off their faces and eyes gouged out – indicating that the victims had suffered acts of the most abominable torture and barbarity imaginable. Under cover of the long procedure to identify the bodies the bourgeoisie talked hypocritically about “looking for the missing” whereas the fate of these unfortunate youths – aged between 17 and 21 – was beyond doubt.

Since then there’s been a loud and sickening daily barrage: on the one side the government of Pena Nieto and his clique in power (the PRI), with his ally the PAN, alongside the public prosecutor who prompted the enquiry saying that “light must be shone” on events and “the guilty punished”, all posing as the real and sole defenders of justice (the supposed boss of the “Guerreros Unidos” was arrested a fortnight later with triumphant zeal!), while the mayor and local chief of police fled and a vast popular and media campaign was launched in order to demand the resignation of the governor. On the other side the parties of the left[3] including the PRD itself, the unions, the leftist organisations and a range of humanitarian organisations (from Human Rights to a whole range of NGO’s) are launching a vast campaign in the style of “clean hands” in Italy, demanding the dismissal of such and such a politician with close links to the cartels, or such and such corrupt policeman. Profiting from the indignation and emotion aroused by this odious massacre, a vast movement to polish up the image of the state is being launched, along with illusions in the clean, impartial state, the defender of justice above classes and guarantor of the “rights of the people” with the aim of drawing behind it the parents of the victims, all the students, a maximum of proletarians and the population in general. At the same time the leading bourgeoisies all over the world, with the whole media at their disposal, wax indignant and point their finger at their Mexican counterparts and the collusion that’s been established between the politicians and drug traffickers in order to better mask the degree of their own corruption and their own crimes.

Since this article was written the former mayor of the southern Mexican city of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, has been charged with the murder of six people who died in the initial police attack. It seemed he ordered his police to attack the students because he thought that they were going to disrupt the attempt of his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, to campaign to replace him as mayor in 2015. The couple’s close links to the “Geurreros Unidos” drug gang, as well as the gang’s previous joint murderous actions with the police have emerged (The Guardian, 14.11.14). Abarca is in jail where he faces charges and Pineda is under investigation with both of them still giving their services, if not voluntarily, to the campaign for the “clean”, democratic state.

In reality, this tragic episode is no aberrant manifestation or any sort of “slip up” of the local or national bourgeoisie but rather an illustration of another step taken in the decomposition of capitalism at the global level, a process dragging society into barbarity and a growing chaos. This is the same spiral that we see in the present exacerbation of imperialist conflicts between states who use torturers and militia armies, terrorist bands of religious fanatics, nationalists, separatists, rebels, etc. This is expressed in a generalised gangsterism of the state apparatus, of the bourgeoisie and all its representatives. Thieves, armed mafia gangs and narco-traffickers have become a regular force of the state as instruments of the violence of its domination and above all as organs for the bloody repression of social movements, just like the police and the army – a repression particularly exercised against the working class and its struggles. It’s quite significant that drugs and arms trafficking, which has taken a preponderant place in international commerce and the national economies, has led to these armed gangs of narco-traffickers becoming indispensable auxiliaries of all the fractions of the bourgeoisie in order to assure their power against their rivals or to exercise a pitiless repression against any threat to the existing order.

But this evolution also implies the absolute rejection of all moral values. Even in the sphere of thievery and gangsterism, there existed, even in clannish and reified forms, a sort of “code of honour”, certain moral taboos. Today these elements have disappeared .They have sunk under the process of social decomposition, of the putrefaction of capitalism dominated by the immediate interest of “every man for himself”, the “war of each against all”, in the unleashing of unlimited violence and terror. This social militarisation, this “banalisation of evil”, according to the expression of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, more and more tends to escape the control of the bourgeoisie itself and takes on an increasingly irrational character. Under the oppression and conditioning permanently exercised by the system it tends to express itself by the brutal explosion of instincts, of individual and collective “mad” slaughter, in a blind barbarity pushed to the extreme, of which Mexico and its thousands of “disappeared”, its hundreds of hidden graves filled with bodies is only one illustration.

We are publishing a leaflet distributed in Mexico by ‘internationalist communist proletarians’. We share their indignation and welcome their healthy and authentically proletarian reaction to the massacre.

The state is the murderer! Justice cannot come from the state!

The way in which the state has murdered dozens of people in Igualada is well known: the police of the “Progressive Movement” encircled and opened fire on the students from the training school of Ayotzinapa. The rest of the deed, which consisted of killing more than 40 students, burning and hiding their bodies, has been undertaken by an armed group linked to the state: the narco group supported by the police of the Iguala Commune. The indignation and rage over this atrocity is indescribable and immense but so too is the hypocrisy coming from all sides, from NGO’s to  the official and unofficial bodies of the state.

“War between state and narco-traffickers” or the state still more closely linked to the traffic in drugs?

The close collaboration between the police of the “Progressive Movement” and the armed groups of drug traffickers doesn’t mean that “organised crime” has penetrated the state. Rather it shows that the bourgeoisie, engulfed by the decomposition of capitalism and gripped by its internal rivalries, is compelled to resort to increasingly violent and criminal practices. Drug trafficking is not a separate sector of the bourgeoisie and the interests of narco-traffic have never ceased to be involved  in the state apparatus, this superior form of class organisation against the working class.

The press, another arm of the bourgeoisie, is trying to reinforce the idea that the police of Iguala were the armed force of the “Guerros Unidos” and that from now, thanks to the army and the police, order is being returned to the streets. Proletarians, remember! The state is a machine for class repression, a machine to subjugate and exploit another class.

The grief of the families is being used in the conflicts between parties and in their internal struggles

The left of capital is pursuing a determined strategy through the media with the aim of whitewashing the image of the PRD and PT of Morena of the “Movimiento Ciudadano” with a view to the next elections. While the families of the disappeared are expressing their suffering, these parties, real cogs in the assassination arsenal of the bourgeoisie, point fingers at such and such a bureaucrat, such and such a policeman while saying nothing about the state being part of and at the origin of the barbarity in which the exploited live day after day. All these political parties form part of the state, not only the PRI and the PAN but those that want to join up with them, trying to profit from social discontent while fighting it with blood, bullets and prison when the occasion is presented.

On what ground do the famous “Human Rights” exist?

Les porte-parole de l'État et leurs officines à visage "démocratique", à la solde du gouvernement ou "indépendants", nous rebattent les oreilles sur les "exécutions illégales" pour inculper tel ou tel fonctionnaire corrompu mais, surtout, pour disculper la bourgeoisie comme classe sociale ayant en charge les tribunaux, l'armée, la police et autres bandes criminelles. Pour ces défenseurs de la loi et de l'ordre bourgeois, il suffirait que les exécutions soient prononcées "dans le cadre de la loi". Ils dissimulent ainsi que la violence et la terreur sont en eux-mêmes la manière brutale dans laquelle l'État garantit le bon fonctionnement des affaires de la bourgeoisie.

The mouthpieces of the state and its “democratic” offices, whether in the pay of the government or “independent”, are assaulting our ears with their noise about the “illegal executions”, accusing this or that corrupt state functionary; but the aim of all this is to give a bill of clean health to the bourgeoisie as a social class which is behind the army, the police and other criminal bands. For these defenders of bourgeois law and order it would be enough if such executions are pronounced “within the framework of the law”. They thus conceal the fact that the violence and terror are in themselves the brutal manner by which the state guarantees the good functioning of the business of the bourgeoisie.

The only aim of the “Human Rights” comedy is the strengthening of bourgeois domination

What’s essential for the capitalist class is to maintain the “prestige” of the state. The comedy of the “commissions of enquiry” and investigations into “Human Rights” is following the same pattern as throughout the history of the criminal enterprises of the ruling class: enquiry – proceedings – appeal – sentences – strengthening of the state. Remember the massacre of the villagers of Dos Erres in Guatemala in December 1982[4], where the army killed 500 men, women and children? Here the conclusion of the bourgeois circus was a macabre sentence: a massive swindle. A “monument” was erected by the assassins to “preserve the memory”, some scraps of paper with the seal of the state were given in order to buy off, keep quiet and render complicit the parents of the deceased. A law was enacted called “National Reconciliation” with the participation of the whole range of organisms defending “Human Rights”. In short,  law ensuring the submission of the parents of the victims to class collaboration and accepting the terms imposed by the assassins. It was a joke allowing the blood to be washed off the hands of the state and the class which it serves: the bourgeoisie.

The only justice: struggle for the destruction of capitalism! Break with all class collaboration!

Being bogged down in the misery and existence of bourgeois society is the cause of a greater decomposition of capitalism which also threatens to destroy those it exploits. Caught up in this situation, the proletariat has met enormous difficulties in developing its struggles, taking them into its own hands, spreading them and breaking with the whole political apparatus of capital. The latter is not limited to the “Rights” industry but integrates all the parties, official or “independent” unions, leftist groups who keep all expressions of struggle in the framework of the bourgeoisie, and who seek to tie the proletariat to nationalism, an ideological instrument based on collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

It’s the left of capital that the working class has to unmask. Its methods lead to a dead-end, keep the struggles of the workers in isolation and thus make them all the more vulnerable to repression.

The difficulty of recognising that student proletarians are part of the working class and need to develop their own forms of struggle which don’t isolate them and separate them from the rest of the class is another obstacle to be overcome.

Social democratic pacifism and minority violence have the same origin: petty-bourgeois thought. The only way to face up to the bourgeoisie is the massive, conscious and organised struggle of the proletariat

Proletarian solidarity is not a blind following of demonstrations and slogans, but criticism without concession of everything which prevents the development of proletarian struggle – as one class on a world level – against the bourgeoisie, capital and the state. It is indispensable to recover these methods of struggle, which are foreign to minority violence and authoritarian and militarist organisation. It’s not a matter of whether demonstrations are “peaceful” or not. It is a question of their content: how they contribute, or not, to the development of an autonomous perspective of the proletariat and its generalisation. By autonomy we don’t mean the regional autonomy typical of the petty-bourgeoisie, but the autonomy of the proletariat faced with other classes. It is a question of retrieving from the history and world experience of the working class the forms of struggle and the methods which really develop solidarity with the rest of the working class, its capacity for serious reflection, its ability to struggle on a class terrain. It is consequently necessary to break with the ideology of martyrdom and blind discipline advocated by the FECSM[5]. Along with these, standing against a real struggle, are the social democratic parties and NGO’s, the tactics of isolation imposed both by the “official” unions and their “rank and file” counter-parts, and the elitist violence of groups pretending to give “an example” with their individual and minority actions to what is supposed to be a “passive and obedient mass of workers”. At the origin of all these practices is the thought of the petty-bourgeoisie and the general framework of the left of capital.

If the working class doesn’t organise itself, if from the outset all the causes of barbarity are not criticised, then all the indignation, all the rage, all the grief, all its force will be diverted towards the strengthening of the state and towards the strengthening of the bourgeoisie.

Justice won’t come from our executioners  -  the state and the multiple fractions of the bourgeoisie that comprise it.

We can’t demand justice from the state, it is necessary to destroy it!

We don’t ask for “Human Rights”, we call for self-organisation in order to satisfy our needs, and for the struggle against capitalism and its whole apparatus, on the left as well as the right!

For the exploited, the best solidarity begins by recognising ourselves as one and the same class: the proletariat.

With the few resources that we have we are making an effort to develop and make known a proletarian perspective. Read, discuss and reproduce this text!

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Izquierda Comunista no es estalinismo ni trotskismo sino Revolucion  Mundial[6]

The ICC’s section in France recently held its 21st Congress which took place over two sessions. The first, devoted to debates about the organisational problems of the oldest section of the ICC, took place during our Extraordinary International Conference last May[1]. The second session of the Congress was devoted to two questions:

1. The analysis of the balance of forces in the social situation in France, on the basis of a critical examination of our difficulties in analysing the movement against pension reforms in the autumn of 2010. The debates on this question led to the Congress adopting a ‘Resolution on the social situation in France’ which we publish in this issue of WR.
    
2. The defence of the organisation faced with pogromist and police-type attacks (fuelled by certain social networks, blogs and websites) which targets us as the main internationally organised current of the communist left.

The ‘culture of theory’: an indispensible weapon in the intellectual and moral revival of the organisation

As shown by the article the ICC published on its third Extraordinary International Conference, ‘The news of our death is greatly exaggerated’, the ICC’s section in France was the epicentre of the ‘moral and intellectual’ crisis the organisation has been going through. This crisis (which hadn’t been identified at the time) came to the surface in the discussion on the activities resolution of the 20th Congress of RI, which insisted on the necessity for a marxist culture of theory and pointed to the weaknesses of the section in France and the ICC on the level of our internal debates. The diagnosis of a ‘danger of sclerosis’ and ‘fossilisation’, even of organisational ‘degeneration’ put forward in this activities resolution prompted the raising of a shield-wall on the part of a circle of militants linked by ties of affinity, along with personal attacks against one comrade who had supported and defended this orientation (which had actually been developed by the activities resolution of the preceding ICC Congress). Emotional and irrational approaches emerged, animated by a strong tendency towards the personalisation of political questions (with the absurd idea that this activities resolution was targeting certain young militants who had difficulties reading theoretical texts). Faced with this aberrant situation, with this open crisis, the central organ of the section in France, once it had identified the nature of this crisis, carried out a political fight aimed at the recovery of the section. Among the weaknesses of the section in France, the organisation identified the lack of any in-depth debate on the problem of the circle spirit, which had been analysed at length in the orientation text ‘The question of the functioning of the organisation in the ICC’, written in response to the internal crisis of 1993[2]. Given the predominance of good old common sense, of the ‘religion of everyday life’ and of the distrust which are the hallmarks of the circle and clan spirit, certain militants wrongly identified this text as a weapon against this or that individual, when in fact it was dealing with a political question which has a long history in the workers’ movement (in particular in the First International and in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903).

This lack of a culture of theory necessarily went hand in hand with emotional approaches and the conception of the organisation as a group of friends or a big family, linked by ties of affection and not by common political principles. The resurgence of the pogromist mentality of the clan which was to form the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’, whose apotheosis has been the police-type group ‘International Group of the Communist Left’, had its roots in the absence of any theoretical discussion of an orientation text submitted for discussion after the crisis of 2001, ‘The pogromist mentality and the fight against capitalist barbarism’. The idea that was prevalent in the wake of this crisis was of a ‘return to normal’, to the routine functioning of the organisation, with the illusion that the ‘evil’ had been eliminated with the exclusion of the members of the IFICC for behaving like informers. There was also the idea it was not necessary to expend any energy in discussing the question of pogromism, even though it is a phenomenon of decadent capitalism which, especially in its phase of decomposition, tends to invade all spheres of social life (not only in imperialist wars, as we have seen in Ukraine for example, but also among young people in the ‘banlieux’, in schools and even at the workplace).

The 21st Congress of the section in France thus had to take on the character of an extraordinary congress. The section had to draw up a balance sheet of the work of its central organ and of the struggle it had waged over the past two years, aimed at exposing the ‘familialist’ conceptions of organisation which still existed in the section in France and which are the most fertile soil for the development of a pogromist mentality (via the spirit the family vendetta or taking revenge on behalf of your gang of mates).

All the militants of the section took an active part in the debates to support and salute the work of the central organ which had made it possible to prevent this moral and intellectual crisis from leading to an explosion of the section or to the formation of a new parasitic group (motivated by the defence of wounded pride, which Lenin  described as ‘aristocratic anarchism’). The attachment to the ICC as a political body, the will to reflect on and understand the underlying reasons for the serious errors made by certain comrades, loyalty to the organisation and a determination not to capitulate to the ‘invisible hand’ of capital (to use the expression of Adam Smith) made it possible for the militants of the section in France to engage fully in the orientations of the 20th Congress of RI, in particular the fundamental importance of the work of theoretical elaboration, of assimilating marxism. In order to be able to surmount this moral and intellectual crisis, the only away forward is to develop a marxist culture of theory against the ideology of the ruling class, against the alienation and reification which mean that in capitalist society relations between human beings become relations between things. 

One of the weaknesses of the Congress was that it didn’t manage to develop a deep discussion of the two conceptions of organisation which have been co-existing for many years in the oldest section of the ICC, and which have repeatedly been the source of cleavages and fractures: on the one hand, this familialist conception in which the political positions that militants adopt are motivated by personal sympathies or loyalties, and on the other hand the conception that what holds the organisation together is the militants’ commitment to shared organisational principles.

If these two years of open crisis in the section in France didn’t end up giving rise to a new parasitic split, it is also thanks to the capacity of the central organ in France to push forward and animate the life of the section and to carry out the orientations of the 20th Congress, notably by organising days of study and discussion to combat the danger of sclerosis, the loss of the ICC’s acquisitions, and to develop a marxist theoretical culture within the organisation and among all the militants. This was a way of fighting against intellectual laziness, dilettantism, the loss of taste for reading and theory, along with the persistence of hierarchical and elitist ideas which see the work of theoretical reflection as the work of ‘specialists’. The section in France thus organised several days of study over the last two years on different themes connected to the organisational problems which have re-appeared in an even more dangerous manner than in the past:

• The conception of the individual in Marx, the question of associated labour against the Stalinist notion of the anonymous collective;
• The congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1903: the circle spirit as an expression of petty bourgeois ideology in the former editorial board of Iskra and the divergences between Lenin and Martov over paragraph 1 of the statutes of the RSDLP;
• Volume 1 of Capital and in particular the question of the fetishism of commodities, of the value form, the marxist conception of reification and alienation in the analysis of the commodity, and the connection between these questions and our recurrent organisational difficulties;
• The history of the statutes of the organisations of the workers’ movement since the Communist League;
• The final RI day of study during this period was held after the 21st Congress, with the attendance of the international delegation that had been at the Congress. It examined an aspect of the ‘Theses on Morality’ which have been submitted for international debate by the ICC’s central organ: the ‘exogamic revolution’ in the history of human civilisation and the ‘endogamic’ principle of pogromism (as evidenced, for example, by the anti-Semitic laws of the Nazi regime).

The crisis which has shaken the section in France and sent shockwaves throughout the ICC was in this sense a salutary crisis, since it has made it possible to face up to a fundamental question of marxism and the workers’ movement which up till now has not been posed at the theoretical level by the ICC: the moral and intellectual dimension of the proletarian struggle.

The ‘news of our death’ triumphantly announced by the pogromist, jihadist appeal of the IGCL has thus indeed been greatly exaggerated.

Reappropriating the marxist method for analysing the class struggle

The session of the Congress devoted to the analysis of the balance of forces between the classes had the aim of understanding the underlying causes of the social calm that has reigned since the movement against the pension reforms of autumn 2010, and the errors in the analysis by the section in France. These errors are reflected in certain articles in our press which we were able to critically review. In reality, the organisational crisis was already potentially contained in losing the marxist compass, in losing our theoretical acquisitions in analysing the dynamic of the class struggle. Impatience, immediatism, losing sight of the function of the organisation were expressed by activist tendencies which saw a focus on intervention in the immediate struggles to the detriment of an in-depth discussion about the social movements. The Congress drew out the fact that the movement of autumn 2010 against the pension reforms was in reality the result of a manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie which was able to revitalise its trade unions in order to inflict a serious defeat on the working class and push through with its attacks.

The social calm over the last four years has shown that the proletariat in France has not yet digested this defeat. To understand this manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie and the breadth of the defeat in 2010, the Congress pointed out that our impatience had led us to forget the ABC of Marxism: as long as a revolutionary period has not opened up, until there is a situation of ‘dual power’, it’s always the ruling class which is on the offensive, and the exploited class can only develop its defensive struggles, its resistance against the attacks aimed at it. To understand how the bourgeoisie has been able to carry out its economic, political and ideological attacks against the working class in France, the RI Congress had to take a step back from immediate events and re-examine the dynamic of the class struggle since the ‘turning point’ of 2003, placing it back in the historical and international framework determined by the collapse of the eastern bloc and the ideological campaigns about the ‘failure of communism’, the ‘end of the class struggle’ and the ‘disappearance of the proletariat’ as the only force capable of changing the world.

This ‘turning point’ of 2003, marked by the search for solidarity between the generations and in the struggle, showed that the working class in France and internationally was in the process of returning to the path of struggle after the deep reflux it had been through in the wake of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the so-called ‘communist’ regimes. Thus, in 2006, the struggle of the students against the CPE, which took the bourgeoisie by surprise, threatened to extend to other generations and the employed workers, forcing the ruling class to withdraw its project because of the real risk of the development of a wider solidarity, the danger of contamination of the mass of wage workers. This is why in 2007 the bourgeoisie went onto the counter-offensive. It could not tolerate this defeat and had to try to wipe out all traces of it: the attack on the special pension provisions was thus orchestrated with the aim of directly attacking this dynamic towards active solidarity within the working class.

The debates at the Congress also showed that the section in France had been a victim of the media campaigns about the ‘financial crisis’ of 2008, which was aimed at sowing panic throughout society, especially within the working class in order to make it accept sacrifices, trying to get it to believe that because this really was a financial crisis (i.e. one that could be fixed through a few reforms) and not a new convulsion of a historically condemned world system based on the production of commodities and the exploitation of workers’ labour power.

This wind of panic also affected the ICC, particularly its section in France, so the Congress had to restore the balance, notably by re-appropriating our analysis of the ‘Machiavellianism’ of the bourgeoisie, its capacity to use its tame media as a means of ideological intoxication to obscure the consciousness of the exploited masses. Since consciousness is the main weapon of the proletariat in the overthrow of capitalism and the building of a new society, it is inevitable that the ruling class will always try to disarm its moral enemy through ideological media campaigns.

The Congress noted that the disorientation of the section in France, its activist tendencies in the immediate struggles to the detriment of our long-term work contained the danger of dragging the organisation into dangerous adventures, in particular the traps of workerism and radical leftism. As we have often argued, immediatism is the royal road to opportunism and revisionism, towards the abandonment of proletarian principles.

The Congress underlined that losing sight of the acquisitions and method of marxism in analysing the class struggle is linked to an underestimation:

• Of the necessity for revolutionary organisations to study the functioning of capitalism and the political life of the ruling class;
• Of the difficulties of the proletariat to rediscover its revolutionary class identity in the historical context opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes;
• Of the capacity of the bourgeoisie to keep control of the situation both on the economic and political levels, despite the social decomposition of its system.

The resolution on the situation in France, adopted by the congress, could not integrate and develop all the questions examined in the Congress debates, which will have to carry on in the organisation (in particular, the discussion about the strengthening of state capitalist measures, which is not limited to France).

The fight for the defence of the revolutionary organisation

The report presented to the Congress on the defence of the organisation had the object of synthesising the experience of the ICC and its section in France in the face of attempts to destroy the organisation. Such attempts were identified by our comrade MC, a founding member of the ICC, particularly in the crisis of 1981, which obliged us to carry out an operation to get back material stolen by the ‘Chenier tendency’ (typewriters, etc). In the face of petty bourgeois hesitations and resistance in RI at the time (notably in the Paris section), MC won the support of the central organ of the section in France to recuperate its material and publicly denounce the gangster methods of this ‘tendency’ (with a communiqué on the expulsion of Chenier in order to warn and protect other groups of the proletarian political milieu against the activities of this suspicious element). 

The revolutionary organisation is an alien body in bourgeois society, since as Marx put it the proletariat “is a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates”. What he meant by this is that the proletarians can never really find their place in bourgeois society. The proletariat and the bourgeoisie are two antagonistic classes. This is why, as an organisation of the proletariat, we could never have taken our complaints about these thefts to the police (who would have laughed in our faces!). The material stolen was not the private property of an individual but belonged to a political group and had been bought with money from militants’ contributions. It was thus a duty, based on proletarian moral principles, to recuperate our material in order to reject the habits of gangsterism inside a communist organisation.

The debates at the Congress highlighted the fact that, in order to continue defending this body alien to capitalist society, the revolutionary organisation has to struggle against localism and make its international unity a living reality in the face of the attacks aimed either at destroying it or creating a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around it, aimed at preventing new elements searching for a class perspective from approaching it.

We know that the campaigns of slander against the ICC are not going to stop, even if they may be put under wraps for a while. These have been the classic methods of the ruling class against the revolutionary movement since Marx showed that the proletariat is the gravedigger of capitalism. From the slanders of Herr Vogt (an agent of Napoleon III) against Marx to the calls for a pogrom against the Spartacists, which culminated in the cowardly and bestial murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, history has shown that repression against revolutionary organisations has always been prepared by slander. The hatred directed against the ICC (in a small philistine milieu animated by a ‘fellowship of former ICC members’) is the hatred of the bourgeoisie for the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, the hatred of Thiers, Macmahon and Galliflet for the Paris Commune, of Noske, Ebert and Scheidemann for the threat of the Russian revolution spreading to Germany.

Faced with the real development of a pogromist mentality against the organisation, the 21st Congress put forward a clear orientation for the defence of the organisation in the framework of the moral and intellectual dimension of the proletarian struggle.

“…as Engels said, the working class alone has today preserved an understanding of and interest in theory. The workers’ craving for knowledge is one of the most noteworthy cultural manifestations of our day. Morally, too, the working-class struggle denotes the cultural renovation of society” (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Stagnation and Progress of Marxism’ 1903). 

Révolution Internationale

In Greece the triumph in the January elections for the left-wing Syriza party produced a pleasing symmetry in the response of the right and left of the political spectrum. In the UK, from the right, the Times declared “Far-left firebrand races to victory”, joined by the Daily Mail’s “Shock waves across Europe as the far left sweeps to power in Greece”.

In contrast to the scaremongering of the right, leftist groups welcomed Syriza’s coming to office. In Germany Die Linke were delirious (26/1/15) “Greece has experienced a truly historic election day. We rejoice with you …It is a great achievement SYRIZA has accomplished. As a pluralistic and modern leftist party you’ve managed to become the voice of millions. People give you confidence because you are consistent and honest, and because you give them back their pride.” In France, the NPA (the New Anticapitalist Party) (10/2/15) agreed “The victory of Syriza is an extremely positive event. It will help to loosen the grip of austerity that caused a fall in living standards of the Greek population…. At the European level, it is a defeat for the governments of the right and left who keep repeating that there is no alternative to austerity and the destruction of social gains.” In the UK, the Socialist Workers Party (27/1/15) followed suit: “Voters in Greece delivered a resounding rejection of austerity … Radical left party Syriza stormed to victory while the mainstream parties were left humiliated.”

It’s true this Right/Left pattern of demonisation/celebration was not perfect as some right-wingers also queued up to salute Syriza (and not just for their coalition with the far right ANEL). Marine Le Pen of the French Front National was “delighted by the enormous, democratic slap in the face that the Greek people have delivered to the European Union”. Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party saw the election result as “a desperate cry for help from the Greek people, millions of whom have been impoverished by the euro experiment.”

The reason for citing this range of views is because this is a classic range of the different expressions of bourgeois ideology. The Right warns that a change in Greek economic policy will disrupt other economies in Europe, and maybe even have an impact on the functioning of capitalism beyond. The Left portrays Syriza’s ascendance as evidence that an ‘alternative’ capitalism is possible, and is glad that there is a newly emerged social force in which people have confidence.

One dissident voice on the left is that of the French group Lutte Ouvrière. In an article entitled “Showdown after the victory of Syriza” (18/2/15), while expressing some familiar sentiments (“workers expressed their anger by voting for Syriza” etc) it is also very critical. “Tsipras and Syriza have never questioned the capitalist order. They do not claim to fight, much less seek to overthrow it. They are completely on the terrain of the bourgeoisie.” Also, in a country where “anti-German sentiments are widespread … Syriza fights on the terrain of nationalism and emerges as  champion of Greek national independence.” However, in the final analysis, LO do not reject the defence of Syriza: “There is an objective need to be in a position to fight in solidarity with the government of Tsipras when it sticks to the measures favourable to workers that it has promised and against it if it turns its back on its promises.” LO holds out the possibility that a capitalist government in Greece under Syriza could somehow act in the interests of a class other than the bourgeoisie.

Various ways of managing the capitalist crisis

The position that Syriza has taken is as part of the political apparatus of the Greek capitalist state. It is subject to the same pressures as bourgeoisies elsewhere, and it is no surprise that Syriza, very soon after coming to power, started to make many of the concessions that it had previously set itself against. As a coalition it started as the offspring from splits from PASOK and the KKE (both of which have had periods in power, the former over many years, and the latter once in coalition with the conservative New Democracy). As a party vying for power it was situated on a capitalist terrain, differing from others only in the manner in which it expressed its nationalism, in the particular emphasis of its state capitalist economic policies.

For the leftists to depict Syriza as some sort of alternative is utterly fraudulent. Just before the election, a group of 18 distinguished economists (including two Nobel Prize winners and a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee) wrote to the Financial Times endorsing aspects of Syriza’s economic policies: “We believe it is important to distinguish austerity from reforms; to condemn austerity does not entail being anti-­reform. Macro­economic stabilisation can be achieved through growth and increased efficiency in tax collection rather than through public expenditure cuts, which have reduced the revenue base and led to an increase in the debt ratio.” The letter appeared under the headline “Europe will benefit from Greece being given a fresh start”, clearly seeing the advent of Syriza as potentially beneficial for European capitalism. As a commentator in the New Statesman (29/1/15) put it “Syriza’s programme … is mainstream macroeconomics. The party is merely planning to do what the textbooks suggest.”

And so, following the textbooks, Syriza negotiated with Greece’s European creditors, in the first instance to extend the bailout and its conditions until 30 June. While there were demonstrations on the streets of Athens against this, in the German parliament Die Linke were voting along with the government parties. Usually they have voted against the bailouts because of the austerity measures that have been imposed as a condition of funding. This time they claimed that it was ‘out of solidarity’ with Syriza. Die Linke’s leader told the German parliament that “Now you’ll see that a leftwing government can achieve anything.” Anything, that is, that fits in with capitalist socialist relations and the pressures of the economic crisis.

In a recent debate in London between a leading member of the SWP and Stathis Kouvelakis from Syriza’s central committee, the latter is quoted (Socialist Worker 3/3/15) as saying “‘32 general strikes and hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets haven’t succeeded in defeating a single measure.’ Syriza ‘provided the political imagination that was missing’ and translated these movements into a ‘challenge to power’. And while Syriza’s demands are moderate, Stathis reminded the audience that the Russian Revolution of 1917 began with calls for ‘Peace, Bread and Land’” It is true that the general strikes in Greece have been staged by the various union co-ordinations in Greece, and as such proved an outlet for workers’ anger against the austerity measures imposed by the ND/PASOK government. They ensured that opposition to austerity was contained and diverted. The ‘political imagination’ that Syriza has provided involves taking its place in the apparatus of the capitalist state. It is not a ‘challenge to power’ but a participation in the domination of capital and the exploitation of the working class.

References to 1917 are potentially risky for any leftists to make. The reality of revolution and the participation of revolutionaries within that process tend to expose the postures of such as Syriza. The Russian Revolution not only threw up demands such as those of ‘Peace, Bread and Land’, it was also characterised by Lenin’s theoretical work on marxism and the state, the April Theses, and State and Revolution. A cornerstone of marxism is that the state exists because of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. In this it is appropriate for Syriza to take its place in the capitalist state and for other leftists to conjure up illusions in what state capitalism can do. Car 5/3/15

The bloody and barbaric attacks in Paris last month gave rise to a massive indignation and disgust. All this was shown in the gigantic gatherings in all the major towns of France and in numerous cities of the world. Millions of people and hundreds of thousands of workers all wanted to express their total rejection of these barbaric terrorist acts. Solidarity spontaneously took hold in the streets and in the squares. But this healthy and necessary reaction was immediately confronted with calls for patriotism, “national unity” and the “sacred union” from almost all wings of the French bourgeoisie – a bourgeoisie shamefully profiting from the emotion which gripped a shocked population. To listen to the politicians and the media France was about “to go to war”. Only the state could protect us; it alone could provide “security for the French”, the defence of “democracy” and “freedom of speech”. And this same ideological poison widely infected the population of Denmark after the recent attacks in Copenhagen. The fear and worry cleverly distilled by all the media was such that inside the head of every terrified proletarian was the idea that the state was the head of the family proposing to the “good people” its benevolent and protective shadow.

Beyond these mystifications some real questions are posed to the proletariat. Who really profits from these odious crimes perpetrated against the journalists of Charlie Hebdo and the customers in the kosher supermarket? What does the soft talk of the government amount to? What is hidden behind the intense media propaganda on the famous “post-January 7”, likened to the “post-9/11”? The truth behind the bourgeois speeches must come out. The proletariat cannot naively accept everything that the state says, or it will pay dearly for it in the future.

The latest attacks in Paris are an ideal pretext for strengthening the militarisation of society

The French bourgeoisie, from the time of the attacks, has displayed its unity. The permanent wars between its different cliques and competing factions have disappeared as if by magic. In the name of the defence of “the country under attack”, of the “French people in danger”, the “French nation” must “face up to the terrorist menace as one”. Dressed up in a humanist facade, hiding behind hypocrisy and lies, the imperialist wolf finds a democratic alibi in order to justify its more marked military engagement in the world, aimed at ensuring that France “takes up its proper rank”. Without hesitation, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle left for French outposts in this new crusade. We are no longer meant to be disturbed by the active military role that French imperialism is playing in a number of wars which are soaking the planet in blood and which it tries hard to cover up under the flag of “humanitarianism”. Erased is the role played by the French bourgeoisie and its army in the genocide in Rwanda during the time of another Socialist president – Mitterand.  Forgotten are the declarations of the latter according to which the genocide, which led to over a million deaths in this country, was nothing really serious! The extreme barbarity of the attacks in Paris seems to give the French state the right to make war and restrict so-called “freedoms”. After the attacks, the bourgeoisie has thus dressed itself up, without any complexes, in the costume of the guardian of order and security. Faced with irrational, crazy murders, the ordinary barbarity of the democratic state must be presented as “normal”. Its zealous servants, the media, can now show on the TV screens a massive deployment of the forces of order on a war footing. Thousands of police, gendarmes and military can henceforth take over and carve up all the public spaces. And they pretend that this is for our well-being! Without at all holding back, one part of the French right asks for the setting up of a French Patriot Act on the model of what the US bourgeoisie put into effect after 9/11. This is something that the left and the government rapidly and hypocritically “reject” so as to actively prepare measures which are exactly like it. In fact, regarding the ideological and repressive response, there’s a great similarity between the Patriot Act and the policy adopted by the bourgeoisie in France this last month. Moreover, this security policy that the Socialist Hollande has prepared acts as a spearhead within the European Union which has already been seduced and conquered.

We should remind ourselves how the Patriot Act appeared! On September 11, 2001, two planes smashed into the twin towers in New York. Two others crashed in Washington and Pennsylvania. The outcome was terrifying: more than three thousand people killed. Doubts persist about the breadth of complicity of the US state in the attacks but one thing is certain: just like France, immediately after these attacks, the US political apparatus and its media were requisitioned to mobilise the population behind the establishment of a state of war on American soil. The imperialist aims of the United States were not at all absent from this cynical calculation and the orchestration of a war psychosis. For the US bourgeoisie, it had to profit from this dramatic event in order to wipe out the “Vietnam war syndrome”, and prepare its entry into Afghanistan and Iraq. Any terrorist attack of any scale on national soil is always used by the bourgeoisie for its nationalist and imperialist aims. Not only are the anti-terrorist measures of states powerless to stop the growth of terrorism but they are part of the further escalation of terror. They further feed the climate of suspicion towards others by generating divisions within populations. France is no exception to this rule. If terrorism is an arm of war of the bourgeoisie, of no matter which country and whatever religion, it is nevertheless equally a precious ideological weapon of the latter against the working class. Thus the crusade against “the Axis of Evil”, launched at the time by the Bush administration, allowed the implementation of this famous Patriot Act without even the need to pass it though the legislature. Then it becomes normal to have surveillance over e-mails, letters, telephone calls of each one of us and the power to shamelessly enter any dwelling including those where the occupants are absent. A group of people going to work can be stopped without any explanation. As to the police, they are provided with an almost total immunity. The more and more frequent assassinations perpetrated by the police against black people do not in general give rise to any sort of judicial pursuit. In fact what up to now have been punctual and exceptional measures have now become permanent. The exception has become the norm, as in Britain for example where this same pretext has allowed the justification of innumerable surveillance cameras practically everywhere. In democracy exceptional laws have become normal.

Of course in France the proletariat has had quite another experience to that of the United States. The Paris Commune of 1871 and May 1968 are not totally wiped out of the memory of the working class. The French bourgeoisie knows this perfectly well and it’s for this reason that despite everything it remains prudent. It advances in a more disguised way than its American homologue. But two weeks after the attacks in Paris that didn’t stop the office of Prime Minister Valls disclosing a whole series of measures which were supported by all the European bourgeoisies, and which even the American leadership wouldn’t have disowned. This same minister declared that faced with “the strong challenge facing France means that there will have to be exceptional measures”…. which we know will be permanent. The financial burden has gone up to 700 million euros, to be paid for by clear cuts in a public expenditure already in restricted mode. On the other hand the army will not now suffer the cuts previously imposed. And the forces of the gendarmerie and the police will be massively strengthened with men and material. Well-armed cops and soldiers will thus extend their patrols and not only in “sensitive” areas. The proletariat cannot be naive.  A state which shows its force in this way is engaging in a direct form of intimidation. It is a warning given to the workers. Here it’s a question of the power of surveillance  and repression “in all its republican legality”, not only against everything that bothers it and which it considers is outside the norm, but above all to arm itself against the proletariat and its struggle which it is necessary to criminalise. The laws of the Patriot Act are in fact an obsession of the entire democratic bourgeoisie. For proof, in France, even children of seven or eight at primary school can’t escape a very close surveillance. And beware those teachers who do not become informers in this dirty work. In the name of secularism, the government wants infants to receive a “civic” education, thus reinforcing their worship of the state and their total conditioning and subservience to it. This is training in bourgeois rules and values. If conscription is no longer conceivable for the bourgeoisie then it’s a good bet that a strengthened civic service will be soon adopted with total unanimity.

Some well known repressive laws against the proletariat

The dominant class, beyond its own internal divisions, has always understood the nature of its gravedigger. The history of this class abounds with examples of the means with which it has systematically provided itself in order to face up to its only real enemy – the proletariat. In a revolutionary period, the capitalist state will dispense with any legality in order to massacre a proletariat in struggle. The Cossacks during the revolution of 1917 or the Freikorps in social-democratic Germany in 1919 are sinister examples of this. But when the working class doesn’t directly threaten the power of the bourgeoisie, the latter hides its real exploitative nature behind a heap of ideological lies, behind a sophisticated democratic screen. It’s now nearly 150 years ago, at the time when the socialist parties were real revolutionary organisations, that the Chancellor of the German Empire, Herr Bismarck, who had had the help of the bloody republican attack-dog Monsieur Thiers, the executioner of the Paris Commune, promulgated his “Anti-Socialist Laws”. These were laws which banned socialist and social-democratic organisations and all their activities within the German Empire. This repressive law was accompanied by the reinforcement of the military and police presence within all the big German towns. But this policy of the “Iron Fist” was not the prerogative of the German Empire. In 1893-1894, in the very democratic French Third Republic, laws came onto the books under the name of the “villainy laws”. They were aimed, under the cover of the struggle against “evildoers”, at anarchist groups, but overtly threatened all workers’ organisations at the same time. Merely to be under suspicion for having sympathy with anarchism or the workers’ struggle became a crime. As today these laws equally encouraged informers. In 1894, on his way back from Carmaux where he’d supported the miners’ strike which had been violently repressed by the army and military, Jaures, in the Chamber of Deputies, spoke out against the villainy laws: “Thus you are obliged to recruit into crime, those who oversee crime, into misery those that oversee misery and into anarchy, those who oversee anarchy”. The real villains were to be found in Paris amongst those who promulgated these laws. At Carmaux, a certain Tornade, who was active in the strikes of 1892, offered funds from Paris to the striking miners to buy dynamite, thus directly opening the way to repression which was immediately justified in the name of “the struggle against terrorism”. Jaures had good reason to denounce the action against the workers’ struggle and the workers’ voices, which was really the aim here.

From this point of view, “free expression” or “freedom of the press”, much vaunted today after the attacks, have always been illusions knowingly maintained by the dominant class. Not only because the media and the official speeches are the emanation of capitalist property, but because straightaway they show their allegiance to the bourgeois state without it being necessary for anyone to ”guide” them or to systematically dictate the content of their propaganda. Nepotism and clientism are well known among a good number of journalists and the collusion of the media with leading politicians are thus only purely anecdotal consequences and not the cause of their docility.  Any real, critical opposition, anything that calls the capitalist state into question, has no place in the media and it will not be accepted or disseminated by it. “Freedom of expression” is in reality summed up in speeches that are subordinate to the state, to the laws and values of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie is the most Machiavellian class in history

The working class in France, as internationally, is going through a profoundly difficult period. But the proletariat is far from giving up its arms. In a situation where the economic crisis can only continue to get worse and living conditions are deteriorating more and more, the bourgeoisie knows perfectly well that there will come a time when it will have to confront widespread workers’ struggles. The more it prepares for it the better! The dominant class has known for a long time the danger that the revolutionary proletariat and its avant-garde organisations represent for it and its system. Its consciousness of this danger, its unity faced with it, in short its Machiavellianism has no limit. Machiavelli, who lived in the epoch of the Renaissance, has, in this area, been a clear precursor of the bourgeoisie. He declared that “Lies and deception are the means of governing that any Prince must know how to handle with a maximum of efficiency”. In a word the means used are defined by the aim to be achieved. There is no moral principle to be respected here and the current bourgeoisie has carried this method of government to heights never achieved before in history. Lies, terror, coercion, blackmail, scapegoats, pogroms, plots and assassinations are the usual methods of capitalist governance. The assassination of the revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 by soldiers on the orders of the social-democratic government of Ebert in Germany is one of the most symbolic expressions of it. As the assassination of Jaures in July 1914 was prepared by a whole hateful and patriotic campaign, this time by the French democratic republic, talking only of the sacred union and wallowing in the mire of the first world butchery. The Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie is not a perversion of democracy; it is the product of its nature as the most intelligent ruling class in history. Pearl Harbour is a terrifying example of the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie. In 1941, the United States wanted to enter the war against Japan and Germany. In order to justify it, being well aware of the imminent attack by the Japanese air force on the military base of Pearl Harbour, the American state didn’t for a moment hesitate to sacrifice its Pacific Fleet and thousands of unarmed and helpless soldiers. In this domain, examples are legion. The strengthening of control of police surveillance, the increase in the weight of the repressive arsenal announced by the government of President Hollande are only some expressions of the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie. The displays about protecting the French population, the “citizens”, are only a smokescreen, a simple alibi. Faced with the defence of its capitalist interests the bourgeoisie has always shown a complete contempt for human life. The militarisation of society is the direct strengthening of the totalitarian power of state capitalism and democracy is only an ideological mask for the dictatorship of capital.  A terribly hypocritical mask, making it possible to ensure the monopoly of violence by the state and the maintenance of exploitation with its constant companions: bullying and daily humiliations at work, mass unemployment and a growing pauperisation. In brief, an unprecedented violence against which revolt is forbidden and which is necessary to for the “good citizen” to accept without flinching. Ignoring what’s behind the good will of the state and the humanitarianism of this exploiting class would leave the proletariat politically disarmed. The measures of Valls and Hollande today, like those deployed in the past, are a serious and active preparation for repression. Only the revolutionary proletariat, by affirming its communist perspective, can paralyse the strong arm of the bourgeoisie and its state.  Cyril, 10.2.15

In Britain, the electoral season is upon us once again. And the ruling class is a bit worried that a growing number of people aren’t that interested. That’s why, along with the usual arguments about the personalities of this or that political leader, followed (usually in order of importance) by arguments about the policies of the different parties, we are hearing a great deal about voter apathy and even the threat to democracy that it poses. The scandal caused by Russell Brand in his interview with Jeremy Paxman in October 2013 summed it up quite well: after Brand’s shocking admission that he has never voted and never will, because he is sick of the lies and dishonesty of the entire ‘political class’, Paxman came back with the classic response: if you don’t vote, you have no right to say anything about the political system. And he was backed up in particular by various celebrities and commentators on the left, who sometimes threw in further arguments about the vote being something that workers and oppressed women fought for to make sure they would have a voice in society. So either you vote and take part in electoral politics, or you are shamefully advocating political indifference and apathy, and even betraying the memory of the fighters of the past.

The workers’ movement and bourgeois democracy

Electoralism, the parliamentary system, is a central plank of bourgeois politics. We know of course that the capitalist class has frequently dispensed with it in times of crisis - fascism being an obvious example - or where it is congenitally weak, as in the stalinist regimes or various military dictatorships in the peripheral countries. But brute repression is not the most effective form of class rule, and in the most developed countries democracy is favoured because it upholds the illusion among the exploited that they really do have a say in how they are ruled. The democratic state is the more subtle mask of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the best framework for preventing class conflict from getting out of control.

But didn’t the working class fight for the vote in the nineteenth century, and didn’t support for this struggle distinguish the marxists from the anarchists in the workers’ movement? And what about the heroic struggle of the suffragettes? Surely we should honour their struggle by exercising the right they secured for us?

It’s true that Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and others argued that the working class, as well as forming trade unions to defend its interests at the economic level, should organise political parties whose programme would include the right to vote and the fight, inside bourgeois parliaments, for laws that would back up the improvements won through the economic struggle. And when the anarchists attacked them for being reformists and demanded an all-out and immediate fight for revolution, they replied by arguing that capitalist society was still in the ascendant and that the working class was therefore faced with the necessity to develop its class identity and its historical programme inside the confines of bourgeois society.

It’s also true that this perspective contained serious pitfalls. If the workers’ movement got too attached to the struggle for immediate gains, it would lose sight of the long-term goals of revolution and communism, and thus ran the risk that its painfully created organisations would become a functioning part of bourgeois society. And this indeed is what happened – the trade unions and the mass social democratic parties were gradually integrated into capitalism, and a whole new current of thought emerged from within them, justifying this process by revising the fundamentals of marxism, which had always been based on the prediction that capitalism would sooner or later enter into a historical crisis which would make revolution a necessity.

The culminating point of this revisionist or opportunist trend was reached in 1914, when the epoch of crisis dawned and the workers’ organisations were faced with the choice: hold onto to what you have achieved inside capitalism by selling yourself to the bourgeoisie and supporting the war, or hold onto your principles by defending the international interests of the working class and opposing the war. In 1917-21, the choice was posed just as starkly: support the ruling class against the threat of revolution, or join the revolutionary struggle.     

Revolution, by definition, demands a radical break with the past, and in the first great wave of revolutions provoked by the imperialist war of 1914-18, those who remained loyal to the working class were faced with the necessity to break with the old organisations – trade unions and political parties – that had become part of the capitalist war effort. They were obliged to reject the tactics of the previous period, focused on the fight for reforms, and to participate in the new forms of organisation created by the need for revolution.

Soviets versus parliament

The question of the vote and of parliament was a key element in this debate about the tactics appropriate to the epoch of revolution. After three years of futile slaughter, the working class had responded with truly revolutionary methods: mutinies and mass strikes. These movements gave rise to forms of organisation that would allow the working class to unite its forces and pose the question of political power: the soviets or workers’ councils, based on elected and revocable delegates from general assemblies of workers or soldiers. These organs were directly opposed to bourgeois parliaments, founded on the atomised citizen who votes for a party that can now assume the reins of state and oppress and defraud the population for the next four or five years. And everywhere the councils emerged – especially in Germany – the ruling class did everything it could to get them to hand over power to parliament, above all via the influence of the social democratic parties which still had the majority in the councils.

It was no accident that the right to vote was granted to the majority of the working class precisely when it had gone beyond the parliamentary form and affirmed in practice the possibility of a new form of political power, directly controlled from below and aimed at the complete transformation of society. In Britain, it was also symbolic that the vote was given to women (though still not all of them) in 1918, after the majority of the suffragette movement had pledged its loyalty to capitalism by supporting the war. Having initially opposed granting the vote to the exploited and the oppressed majority for fear that it would result in the overthrow of class rule, the bourgeoisie now rushed to grant universal suffrage as the best way of preserving its threatened system. This deception was denounced at the time by Sylvia Pankhurst, still often presented to us as a famous suffragette, but who in fact broke politically with the suffragette movement, including her mother Emmeline, for supporting the war; identifying herself with the workers’ revolution, Sylvia and her paper The Workers’ Dreadnought entered the battle for soviets against parliament and bourgeois elections.

Need for a proletarian perspective

Of course, this all happened a long time ago. The working class may have come close to revolution then, but today the working class hardly recognises itself as a class at all. For decades now it has been told that the attempt to build ‘communism’ in the USSR and the eastern countries was a total failure, that marxism has been refuted, that the working class doesn’t really exist anymore. Certainly the main parties contesting the next election no longer refer to class – including the ‘Labour’ party; and the ones that pretend to be a radical alternative to the established parties, such as UKIP on the right and the Greens on the left, call on us to vote on the basis of Britishness or as concerned citizens.

But capitalism is even more decrepit than in was in 1914 and the longer it continues, the more it threatens the very survival of humanity. In a world facing economic crisis, war and barbarism from all sides, the national solutions and reforms promised in bourgeois elections are more fraudulent than ever. And despite all the changes in its structure on a global scale since the first revolutionary wave, the working class is still the class that creates the wealth in this system, still the exploited class, and still the only force that can change society from top to bottom. What the working class lacks, above all, is a perspective, a sense not only of what it is today but of what it can become. And this perspective can only be a political one, because it is centred round the question of who will hold power - a minority of exploiters, or the majority made up of the exploited and the oppressed – and what they will do with power – defend their privileges even at the expense of the destruction of society and the natural environment, or create a new society based on solidarity and the satisfaction of human need. 

All forms of bourgeois politics are a barrier to the self-organised, self-conscious movement we need if we are to challenge this social order. We are against participating in capitalist elections not because we favour apathy and withdrawal from political engagement, but because we are for proletarian politics and the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state.   Amos 5/3/15

1.             The analysis of the class struggle in France, of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat, can only be understood in the context of the current world situation, even if, of course, the proletariat in each country faces economic, political and ideological specificities. In his sense, it is necessary to analyse the broad lines of this world situation, in particular to understand the difficulties encountered by the proletariat in France in responding to the increasingly violent attacks coming from the ruling class.

2.             From September 1989, the ICC had been predicting that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would strike a very heavy blow against the consciousness of the world proletariat:

“The disappearance of Stalinism is the disap­pearance of the symbol and spearhead of the most terrible counter-revolution in history.

But this does not mean that the development of the consciousness of the world proletariat will be facilitated by it. On the contrary. Even in its death throes, Stalinism is rendering a last service to the domination of capital; in decom­posing, its cadaver continues to pollute the at­mosphere that the proletariat breathes. For the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, the final collapse of Stalinist ideology, the `democratic’, ‘liberal’ and nationalist movements which are sweeping the eastern countries, provide a golden opportunity to unleash and intensify their campaigns of mystification.

The identification which is systematically es­tablished between Stalinism and communism, the lie repeated a thousand times, and today being wielded more than ever, according to which the proletarian revolution can only end in disaster, will for a whole period gain an added impact within the ranks of the working class. We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the con­sciousness of the proletariat…While the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which capitalism can’t help but mount on the proletariat will oblige the workers to enter the struggle, in an initial period, this won’t result in a greater capacity in the class to develop its consciousness. In particular, re­formist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions” (‘Theses on the economic and political crisis in USSR and the eastern countries’, International Review 60[1]). 

The quarter of a century which has gone by since then has amply confirmed this prediction and, in particular has confirmed that there is a very heavy weight of democratic illusions and a strengthening of the grip of the unions, which had been more and more put into question during the workers’ struggles of the 80s. Thus, the strikes launched by the unions in the transport sectors in France, Belgium and Germany in 1995 had clearly resulted, as we said at the time, in a revival of the influence of these organs for controlling the working class. Furthermore, the retreat in class consciousness was also accompanied by a very marked retreat in its militancy and self-confidence, of the sense of class identity, a phenomenon aggravated by the disappearance of many large industrial sectors which had traditionally been among the most combative in many western European countries (for example, steel, engineering and cars). Finally, the difficulties met by the working class, both in the development of its consciousness and in its self-confidence, were also aggravated by the growing weight of the decomposition of capitalist society which has instilled in an increasingly damaging way the sentiment of despair, the feeling that there is no future, the flight into ‘everyman for himself’ and atomisation.

3.            In 1989 we also established that “the rhythm of the col­lapse of western capitalism… will constitute a de­cisive factor in establishing the moment when the proletariat will be able to resume its march towards revolutionary consciousness.

By sweeping away the illusions about the revival’ of the world economy, by exposing the lie which presents liberal’ capitalism as a solu­tion to the historic bankruptcy of the whole capitalist mode of production - and not only of its Stalinist incarnation - the intensification of the capitalist crisis will eventually push the proletariat to turn again towards the perspec­tive of a new society, to more and more inscribe this perspective onto its struggles” (ibid).

In effect, since 1989, the French bourgeoisie, like its European cohorts, has launched growing attacks on the working class, pushing the latter to resist and to throw off the dead weight that has been bearing down on it since the end of the 80s. One of the moments of this tendency for the proletariat to raise its head was constituted by the social movements which took place in 2003, in particular the struggles around the defence of pensions in France and Austria. These movements were marked by a revival of solidarity, especially in the car industry in Germany and in public transport in New York. These workers’ struggles were obviously only a small step, still very insufficient, in a dynamic towards overcoming the profound retreat suffered by the working class after 1989. The slow rhythm of this process of overcoming the reflux in the class struggle (there had been more than 13 years between the implosion of the eastern bloc and the strikes of spring 2003) can be explained to a large extent by the still slow rhythm of the development of the insurmountable crisis of the capitalist economy, in turn a result of the capacity of the bourgeoisie to hold back the historic collapse of its economic system. Furthermore, these social movements revealed the extreme skilfulness of the political and union apparatus of the bourgeois class, its capacity to push through attacks and to demoralise the working class, to drum into its head that “it’s not the street that governs” (as prime minister Raffarin put it in 2003) through a whole arsenal of sophisticated manoeuvres, based on a systematic division of labour and tight cooperation between the government which delivers the blows and the unions who sabotage the response of the working class.

Thus the strikes of spring 2003 in the public sector in France came up against a strategy of the ruling class which had been tried and tested in 1995: alongside a general attack on the whole working class, the bourgeoisie carried out a more specific assault on a particular sector which was thus destined to constitute a sort of ‘vanguard’ of the movement;

• In 1995, the Juppé plan attacking social security for all wage earners was accompanied by a specific attack on the pension arrangements for the railway workers;
• In 2003, the attack on pensions for the whole public sector was accompanied by a specific attack aimed at the workers of national education.

In the first case, after several weeks of complete blockage of transport and a succession of massive demonstrations, the government withdrew the measures aimed at the special retirement regime of the railway and RATP workers. With the return to work in these sectors, following a concession by the government which the unions presented as a ‘victory’, a fatal blow had been dealt to the dynamic of the movement, which enabled the Juppé government to push through the general attack on social security.

In the second case, the workers of national education, who had gone on strike massively and represented the ‘reference’ for the public sector, were led to carry on for weeks with a movement that had been exhausted in other sectors, and this with the encouragement of the most ‘radical’ unions. This produced a deep feeling of bitterness and discouragement, with a message for all workers: not only ‘it’s not the street that governs’ but also ‘there’s no point in struggling’.

4.             This feeling or powerlessness was however, overcome three years later, in the spring of 2006, in the massive mobilisation of the young generations of the working class against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) introduced by the Villepin government. A mobilisation which, this time, was not planned in advance by the government and the unions. The latter had done the minimum possible to oppose a measure aimed at accentuating the precarious nature of employment for young proletarians (and which even the bosses thought was superfluous). It was the educated youth in the universities and high schools who embarked on the struggle, i.e. the huge mass of future unemployed and precarious workers. As we said at the time, this movement against the CPE was exemplary. It was able, thanks in particular to the daily general assemblies open to the whole working class, to massive street demonstrations which were not controlled by the unions, to deal with the different traps laid by the bourgeoisie. The movement threatened to draw in the employed workers, in particular those in industry. This is why, on the advice of Laurence Parisot (the boss of the bosses), the government ended up withdrawing the CPE. This retreat by the Villepin government was a striking refutation of Raffarin’s 2003 declaration because this time it was the street that had the last word. As well as the massive and sovereign general assemblies, this movement against the CPE highlighted another essential element of the proletarian struggle: solidarity between different sectors and generations of the exploited class. It was therefore imperative for the French bourgeoisie to wipe out all the lessons of this movement if it was to prepare the new attacks made necessary by the aggravation of the economic crisis.

5.            This process of wiping out the ‘bad example’ of the anti-CPE movement was composed of two decisive steps that accompanied the attack on pensions:

• The strikes of autumn 2007 against the suppression of the special pension provisions;
• The movement of autumn 2010 against postponing retirement age.

In the first case, the unions played to the hilt the card of division within the Intersyndicale, a card which had already been played (particularly in 1995 when the CFDT supported the Juppé Plan on social security). This time, we saw an out and out destruction of the movement: initially, the government, while maintaining the whole of the attack, gave in to the demands of the highly corporatist union of the train drivers, which had voted for a return to work. Then, it was the CFDT which called for a return to work, followed by the CGT (which resulted in Bernard Thibault, a former railway worker, being called a traitor by the CGT rank and file). As for FO and SUD, their role was to call for ‘continuing the fight’ in order to tire out the most militant workers. This defeat was a real blow for millions of workers because the movement had won the sympathy of many sectors of the working class (especially because the railway workers had called not only for maintaining the 37 and a half years as a requirement for their own pensions, but for all sectors). But the bourgeoisie had to pay a price for this victory and for getting the attack pushed through: a powerful distrust with the unions who were widely seen as being responsible for the defeat because of their divisions and quarrels in the meetings of the Intersyndicale.

The second step, the most decisive one, in wiping out the lessons of the CPE, was the decision of the Sarkozy government to attack one of the most significant ‘gains’ won during the years of the Union of the Left under Mitterand: retirement at 60. For the French bourgeoisie it was a question of ‘unlocking’ this symbolic figure and making up for the delay in following the example of other European bourgeoisies in their attacks against the class (mainly because of the fear of returning to a social situation comparable to May 1968). What’s more, the French bourgeoisie had to cut the deficits of the state, which, like everywhere else, had been severely aggravated by the measures required to prevent the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and to face up to the very strong recession which had got going since that year. For the French bourgeoisie there were thus both economic and political issues at stake. The tactic employed by the ruling class to push through the economic attack was different from that used on previous occasions. It was above all important that the workers should not come out of the conflict with even more distrust towards the unions. This is why the latter, including the managers’ union, the GCG, played up the theme of ‘trade union unity’, raising the slogan ‘all together, all together!’. At the same time, calling successive days of action throughout the autumn of 2010, they polarised attention on an essential theme: the participation of several million workers in the street demos. In the end, the bourgeoisie did not retreat: it was able to carry out the whole economic attack (exchanging a few small improvements for workers who had very taxing jobs) as well as the political and ideological attack, getting across two essential messages:

• ‘it’s not the street that governs’
• Struggle gets you nowhere, even when millions of workers are demonstrating and even when the unions are united.

This time, the unions succeeded in exhausting the militancy of the working class without losing any credibility. What’s more since even ‘struggling all together’ produced nothing, the very need for solidarity was put into question.

This was a heavy defeat at all levels for the working class in France at the end of 2010. The exhaustion of militancy and the demoralisation of the working class that followed this defeat partly explain the social calm of the last four years, and the very weak involvement of the young generation in France in the movement of the Indignados which took place a few months later in the whole of Spain and which also spread onto the international level.

Obviously, in this offensive against the working class in France, the bourgeoisie of this country was able to benefit from the full support of its European cohorts, particularly the German bourgeoisie, above all because they are all aware of the historic experience of the proletariat in France (June days of 1848, Paris Commune of 1871, and May 68).

6.             As we have often pointed out, the Indignados movement was the main proletarian reaction to the convulsions of the world capitalist economy after 2008. This reaction did not take the ‘classic’ form of workers’ strikes or even of street demonstrations, with the exception of the European countries most violently hit by the economic crisis, like Greece or Portugal. This brutal aggravation of the capitalist crisis has led to a dizzying rise in unemployment, which has continued to act as a factor paralysing the strike weapon: what’s the point of stopping work when the enterprise has shut down? Furthermore, the ideological campaigns which accompanied the ‘sub-primes’ crisis were another factor in confusing the exploited and increasing their feeling of powerlessness. In fact, the wave of panic about the financial crisis in 2008-9, widely stirred up by the media and fuelled by the discourse of the economic experts, had the consequence, even when it was not its direct aim, of making the working class feel dumbstruck. The essential message was this: ‘you have to tighten your belts, accept sacrifices, because that’s the only way out of the crisis’. This went along with the key message that the real responsibility for the crisis lay with ‘international finance’ and not the capitalist system itself. Président Hollande, shortly before his election, put it like this: “my main adversary..is the world of finance” (speech at Bourget, 22/1/12). The Indignados movement, for all its democratic illusions and its confusions about the financial system being responsible for all evils, still contained within it a radical rejection of bankrupt capitalism and clearly raised the necessity to replace it with a new society (this is why the movement was prey to the ‘alternative world’ reformists like ATTAC with their mystifying slogan ‘another world is possible’). It expressed the fact that class consciousness and class identity are not exactly the same. The Indignados, with their call for another society, were not aware that this demand belongs to the only class capable of constructing this other society – the proletariat. The majority of them didn’t even feel that they belong to the working class. However, this movement was an important step on the road towards the world proletariat become conscious of itself, a step which has left traces in the minds of millions of young proletarians. And it was precisely this step which the proletariat in France was not able to take, given the defeat inflicted on it by the bourgeoisie and its unions through the days of actions and demonstrations in the autumn of 2010.

7.            At present, the attacks descending on the working class in France, which are now being directed by a left government, are encountering practically no resistance, despite the existence of a very strong social discontent. This is also the case in nearly all countries. For the moment, the bourgeoisie is managing to conserve a certain control both over its economic apparatus and over the social situation, thanks to the unions recovering their grip and imprisoning the workers in fake, insignificant and highly corporatist struggles (which are often even extremely unpopular since they set one group of workers of against another, as in the case of last June’s SNCF strike for the defence of the railway workers’ status). There will have to be a serious degradation of general living and working conditions for the working class to be able to overcome its paralysis. With the aggravation of the economic crisis, new attacks are inevitable and so are new reactions from the proletariat. The working class has to confront some major obstacles, which are posed on the scale of the historic stakes facing today’s society. It has to face a bourgeoisie which is very experienced in confronting the working class; it has to overcome the democratic illusions which are still very strong in the class despite the fact that the official institutions of bourgeois democracy have been profoundly discredited as can be seen, among other things, from the increasing rates of abstention at elections, the miniscule popularity of Président Hollande and the success of the Front National at the last European elections.

The success of the FN is one of the expressions of decomposition, of capitalist society rotting on its feet, which is an added difficulty the proletariat as to confront on the road to its emancipation. The future is not written in advance: despite the enormous difficulties facing the working class, in France as everywhere else, it has not suffered a decisive defeat like the one it went through after the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Even if it is paralysed at the moment, it has not been dragooned behind bourgeois flags as it was in the 1930s when it marched under the banners of nationalism or antifascism. Furthermore, and more fundamentally, both the fight against the CPE and the Indignados movement have revealed that there is a process of reflection going on among the young generations of the working class, a maturation of consciousness about the failure of capitalism, which cannot offer them any perspective expect unemployment, the destruction of the environment, war and barbarism in all its forms. This reflection contains the search for another perspective for society, opening the way to the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness, even if the road ahead is still a long one.

Revolution Internationale

According to the media, the triumph of the Syriza coalition1 has made the big capitalist powers very nervous. This “nervousness” is apparently linked to the manoeuvres around the negotiations over Greece’s debt. But Syriza is on the same side as these powers, because it shares with them the defence of the nation, the banner behind which every national capital defends its interests against the proletariat and against its imperialist rivals.

At its last meeting, just before winning the election, Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, summarised very well what his party represents: “Beginning Monday, we will be finished with the national humiliation and with orders coming from abroad”. This programme is antagonistic to that of the proletariat, whose objective is the formation of the world human community and whose driving force is internationalism.

The triumph of Syriza is not that of the “people”, but of Greek capital whose needs it serves. Its policies will only bring new attacks against the whole working class.

The catastrophic situation of the Greek economy is an expression of the world crisis of capitalism

The data about the Greek economy are terrifying. We will mention just two figures: national income has fallen by 25% in 7 years, and exports, despite huge wage reductions, are now 12% lower than in 2007. The ruinous state of the Olympic installations built at vast and wasteful expense for the 2004 Olympics are an eloquent symbol of all this.

However, the crisis Greece is suffering is not a local crisis resulting from the poor management of successive governments, but the expression of the historic impasse facing the capitalist mode of production, which has been in open crisis since 1967 – almost half a century. A crisis in which the ‘sub-primes’ of 2007 marked a new step, followed by the big financial panic of 2008 and the recession of 2009, which has been called “the Great Recession”.

The measures taken by the big capitalist countries have succeeded in limiting the most dangerous effects of these events, but have not overcome the underlying problem: the generalised overproduction which has plagued capitalism for nearly a century. The “solution” that they came up with – a massive dose of debt taken in hand by states directly – has only aggravated the situation despite patching over the puncture for the moment.

One of the consequences is that “It was now entire states which were confronted with the increasingly crushing weight of debt, ‘sovereign debt’, which affects their capacity to intervene in order to revive their respective national economies through budget deficits”2. This situation has become unbearable for “those countries of the Eurozone whose economies are the most fragile or the most dependent on the illusory palliatives put in motion during the previous period – the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain)”3

In Greece, the public debt has reached 180% of GNP; the public deficit was 12.7% in 2013. This burden is trapping the economy in a vicious circle: just to pay back the interest in the debt, it has to contract new debts and, in exchange, to impose draconian austerity measures which themselves hamstring the economy, demanding even stronger doses of debt and worse austerity measures.

The vicious circle facing in which the Greek economy is trapped is symbolic of the wider vicious circle in which the whole of world capital is turning. But “this does not mean however that we are going back to a situation similar to that of 1929 and the 1930s. 70 years ago, the world bourgeoisie was taken completely aback faced with the collapse of its economy, and the policies it applied, with each country turning in on itself, only succeeded in exacerbating the consequences of the crisis. The evolution of the economic situation over the last four decades has proved that, even if it’s clearly incapable of preventing capitalism from sinking deeper and deeper into the crisis, the ruling class has the ability to slow down this descent and to avoid a situation of generalised panic like on ‘Black Thursday’ on October 24th 1929. There is another reason why we are not going to relive a situation similar to that of the 1930s. At this time, the shock wave of the crisis began from the world’s leading power, the USA, and then spread to the second world power, Germany”4. 

Today, unlike those times, the bourgeoisie – thanks to the systematic strengthening of state capitalism – has managed to “organise” the world economy in such a way that the effects of the crisis fall most heavily on the weakest countries and spares the strongest as much as possible. Germany and the US, which in 1929 were at the epicentre of the crisis, are today the countries which are coping the best and have succeeded in improving their position vis-a-vis their rivals.

Managing the crisis means dividing the working class

The policies described above are allowing capitalism as a whole to resist further plunges into the crisis by concentrating on the defence of its nerve centres. They are also a means of dividing the proletariat, since “one of the major components of the evolution of the crisis escapes from a strict economic determinism and moves onto the social level, to the rapport de forces between the two major classes in society, bourgeoisie and proletariat”5. The economy is not just a blind machine functioning by itself, and the needs of the class struggle do have an influence on it. By displacing the worst effects of the crisis onto the weakest countries, the bourgeoisie gives itself the means to divide the proletariat.

This political management of the crisis means that this dramatic situation is seen by the Greek workers not so much as the expression of the impasse of world capitalism, but as the consequence of the “well being” of its class brothers and sisters in Germany. And, by the same token, the apparent prosperity in Germany makes it difficult for the workers of this country to grasp the gravity of the situation, making them vulnerable to the “explanation” that the threat to their “privileged” position comes from the “laziness and irresponsibility” of their Greek brothers and sisters and, in general, the waves of immigration lapping at their doors.

This political management of the crisis reinforces a deformed vision among the proletarians of each country: seeing the problems as something specific to “their” country, and thus having national solutions, when really the problem is world-wide and can only be solved at the world level. In Greece, unemployment has reached the intolerable level of 27% and public employees, who generally have had jobs for life, have been reduced from 900,000 to 656,000; a third of the population lives below the poverty threshold; around 40,000 people have abandoned the cities and have headed to the countryside in a desperate search to live by subsistence farming in the most precarious conditions. The minimum wage in Greece has gone down by 200 euros over the last 5 years; pensions by 5% a year….all this is the extreme expression of a situation which is developing to varying degrees in all countries, but appears to be a phenomenon strictly limited to Greece and caused by Greek problems. This helps the bourgeoisie to create a thick smokescreen which makes it hard to understand the prevailing general tendencies in world capitalism.

The extreme nationalism of Syriza

Syriza is a product of the evolution of the political apparatus of the Greek state and, in turn, of general tendencies appearing in the central countries of capitalism. As marxism has explained many times, the state is the executive organ of capital and a means of exclusion: it is always, however democratic its forms, the expression of the dictatorship of the ruling class over the whole of society and more particularly over the proletariat. In the decadence of capitalism, the state becomes totalitarian and this is expressed in a tendency towards a single party. But in the most democratic countries which have a sophisticated electoral game at their disposal, this tendency is expressed by what can be called “bi-partyism” - a two party system, with one inclined towards the right, the other leaning to the left, alternating their role in the exercising of power. This schema has functioned perfectly since the Second World War in Europe, America, etc.

However, with the unrelenting acceleration of the crisis and the weight of decomposition, this schema has suffered from a lot of wear and tear. On the one hand, the rival-partner parties have been more and more forced to manage the crisis, which has irredeemably discredited them; each time they occupy the seat of government, they have taken austerity measures which give the lie to the promises they made when they were in opposition; in the opposition, they say things they’ll never actually do and when they are in government, they do things they never said they would.

Furthermore, the decomposition of the capitalist system has caused a growing dislocation in the ranks of the major parties and an increasingly obvious irresponsibility, the most spectacular expression of this being record-breaking corruption, which is always outdoing itself in cynicism, dishonesty and indecency.

The two main traditional parties in Greece – New Democracy on the right and PASOK on the left – illustrate this to the point of caricature. For a start – and this is a mark of the archaic nature of Greek capital – they are led by two dynasties which have been at the head of these two parties for over 70 years, the Karamanlis family on the right and the Papandreou clan on the left. The funds coming in from Europe have resulted in a “perpendicular corruption”: with stupefying cheek, the two parties have been dividing up the goodies among themselves.

So where does Syriza come from? This is a coalition that became a party in 20126, and which picked up factions coming from Stalinism and social democracy, ingredients to which it added, to give itself a spicier flavour, Trotskyist, Maoist and ecologist groups. The founding nucleus of an important split from the Stalinist KKE party, following the collapse of the USSR in 1989, changed the formula of “really living socialism” to a more democratic version, more adapted to a liberal form of state capitalism. Tsipras himself made a career in this clique of rats who were abandoning the sinking ship of Stalinism.

This is why Syriza resembles, like two drops of water, other attempts to renew the bi-party political schema which have emerged in other countries like Italy for example, where the old model (based on Christian Democracy which, with the support of the social democrats, acted almost like a single party for 40 years) was replaced by another, on the right, the irrepressible Berlesconi and, on the other hand, the chaotic coalition whose spinal column is the former Communist Party converted into a “democratic” party. It is highly significant that Syriza has associated to its government Anel, a party of the far right.

Syriza’s partner, Anel, has a policy towards immigrants very similar to that of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. This xenophobic policy, which presents the immigrants as invaders stealing jobs and social benefits from Greeks, has two aims.

On the one hand, to drag the workers and the “popular” strata into this degrading policy of seeking a scapegoat personified in the blacks, the Arabs, the Slavs, etc – in sum, all those not born Hellenes. But on top of this, it obeys a political and economic calculation: to get the highest price for playing the role of gendarme which the European Union has assigned to those countries (Greece, Italy and Spain) who constitute the gate of entry of all those desperate masses of people fleeing from the most extreme poverty and from interminable wars. In the gangster struggle between the different thieves of the EU, the new Greek government knows quite well that having a hard policy towards immigrants is a trump-card in any negotiations.

The defence of the nation is the common patrimony of all parties of capital whatever political colours they adopt. One of the most sinister arguments that Syriza and Anel share with Golden Dawn is the idea of “Greece for the Greeks”, the fanatical pretension of closing yourself up in a supposed “national community” in which you can have a decent life. This is a reactionary utopia, but it is above all a frontal attack on the consciousness and solidarity of the workers, whose greatest force is precisely that it constitutes a community in which all nationalities, races and religions can be fused.

Nationalism and the defence of the interests of Greek capital is the real programme of Syriza. The programme of structural reforms is a show for the gallery, whose outlines have become more and more fluid and whose content has attenuated the closer Syriza approached government. We find in it the old worn-out recipes typical of the left of capital. Renationalising the banks, this or that privatisation put into question, a plan for guaranteed employment, some emergency measures to deal with extreme poverty, and a few other bits of patchwork.

These measures have been used thousands of times in capitalism and they have never succeeded in improving the workers’ living conditions. Capitalism, even its most right wing factions, is happy to “socialise the banks” whenever they are in danger. De Gaulle, Hitler, Franco and other champions of the right set up public banks. Former US president Bush, during the crisis of 2007-8, passed measures for the state to take hold of the banks – to the point where the Venezuelan president Chavez called him a comrade and deliriously compared him to Lenin.

Regarding the promise for a “plan to guarantee employment”, which got smaller in scope the nearer Syriza got to power (from creating 300,000 new jobs the promise went down to 15,000), we can see how serious this is when we consider the new government’s attitude towards the civil servants: the evaluation programme established by the previous government, which included a drop in wages, downgrading to lower positions or even going on to a “manpower reserve”, which is nothing less than a cover for lay-offs and unemployment, has not been abrogated: it will simply be “applied in a fairer manner” according to the new minister, who also announced that wages in the public sector will be frozen.

As for the payment of the gigantic Greek debt, Syriza is approaching this like a real poker player. To win over the electors, the party began with ultra-radical proposals. But even during the election campaign, it began moderating its discourse. As soon as its victory looked plausible, new figures appeared. Now, installed in government, it has watered down its wine to the point of making it completely colourless. For example, it has gone from refusing to pay the debt to a staggering of the debt after a partial payment and, finally, it proposed to exchange debt for perpetual bonds and other instruments of financial engineering. This now looks a lot like the Brady plan which, during the 1980s, was set up by the American government to deal with Argentine’s debt, a plan that is well known for involving grave attacks against the living conditions of the working class.

The difficulties of the proletariat

The proletariat today has to a large extent lost its sense of class identity and its self-confidence. This situation of profound weakness can’t simply be overcome through a wave of struggles. It has given rise, within the political apparatus of capital, to a series of “left wing” populisms coming along to complete the work of the “right wing” populisms. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, the Front de Gauche in France, etc, are taking advantage of the difficulties of our class to put forward their slogans about “the people” and “citizenship” in order to defend the nation defined as the community of all those who live on the same territory.

With this kind of propaganda, these forces are not only, like real con-men, taking take advantage of the difficulties of the proletariat, but they are rubbing salt into the wound by creating barriers which make the recovery of class identity and self-confidence even more difficult for the workers. This is why we propose to denounce the lies of this new anti-proletarian apparatus and counter them with real class positions.

G, 15.2.15

The re-emergence of Russian imperialism and the NATO response

The region around Crimea is crucial for Russian strategic interests, for the protection of its pipelines, an essential part of its economy, but more so for the Russian navy where the Black Sea is its only guaranteed warm-water port, the others being iced up for six months of the year. Crimea, which gives access to the Black Sea, has already been integrated into the Russian Federation. With this move the idea of Novorossiya that the Russian bourgeoisie has been talking about since Putin took the presidency in 1999, after his brutal and successful military operation in Chechnya, has become more of a reality. Novorossiya is an expression of Russian imperialism from its Tsarist days when it took the region north of the Black Sea from the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Today its stamp is has also been marked in the breakaway Donbass region, in the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and the ‘Lugansk People’s Republic’. Donetsk airport is a smouldering ruin, littered with corpses. The railway hub of Debaltseve was fought over during the February ‘cease-fire’ brokered by France and Germany. The destruction continues with moves towards a land corridor to the Black Sea via the town of Mariupol. The Russian ruling class, with Putin at its head, has no qualms about using force in this region of vital Russian interest against the resistance of Kiev’s special forces. Russian imperialism’s retreat after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 is well and truly over

The German and French led Minsk cease-fire of 12 February has already broken down, like the failure of the cease-fire last September. To a certain extent, the separatist rebels in the East are a wild card, independent of Russia but, overall, and for the reasons above, it is Russia that is pulling the strings and providing the overwhelming fighting force and material. Latest reports suggest that much of the deadly artillery shelling comes from within Russian territory.

At the same time we have been seeing the manoeuvring of the western countries, particularly the US, to give backing the Kiev regime. The western leaders and their media gave their support to the Maidan ‘revolution’ which was nothing more than a military coup replacing the Russian-backed gangsters in Kiev with those supported by the west. Russia cannot allow this regime to be incorporated into NATO with its forces right up to its borders. The war could thus become a long-term affair, giving Russia a sort of buffer zone and providing it with the ability to turn it on and off, thus gradually destabilising the western-backed Kiev regime. It’s a dangerous game. The US threat to provide Kiev with lethal weaponry is more than bluff and, at any rate, these events tend to take on their own irrational dynamic. In respect of supporting Kiev with arms there have been contradictory statements from various western ministries which probably represent both a genuine uncertainty and a campaign of disinformation. What is clear is that NATO has begun arming Eastern European countries with more modern weapons and military systems along with the creation of a NATO rapid reaction force.

There’s a contradiction here: on the one hand this is a period marked by the overall weakening of US imperialism, but at the same time NATO forces rely very heavily on US military assets. There’s a contradiction too within the alliance of the western countries, because while there’s no such thing as a ‘European’ foreign policy and certain centrifugal tendencies hold sway, including a weakening of the ‘transatlantic bond’, even down to arguments over the meaning of NATO’s Article 5 on mutual defence, these events have nevertheless promoted a more unified response. Thus NATO is doubling its rapid reaction force to 30,000 with units stationed in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. According to NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Staltenburg, this is “The biggest reinforcement of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War” (The Guardian, 5/12/15). Germany is taking the lead in NATO’s Response Force (NRF) in 2015, through the rotation system. And according to last November’s Die Welt, a paper well-connected with NATO intelligence circles, Germany is playing a particular role in organising elite response forces.

United States military instructors are due to arrive in Kiev in March in order to train local forces how “to defend themselves against Russian artillery and rockets” (The Times, 12/2/15, citing the senior military US commander in Europe). This is a far cry from ‘US disengagement’ that some parts of the press talk about. In relation to the question of disinformation raised above, it seems that the armies of the west are now using the Russian expediency of Maskirovoka, i.e., putting out general information through the media in order to mislead the enemy.

A different situation to the wars in the Balkans in the 1990’s

Russia’s strategy in Ukraine is based on exploiting the divisions and uncertainty within Europe and NATO. This was made clear by its foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in a speech a couple of weeks ago: “The events in the past year (in Ukraine) have confirmed the reality of our warnings regarding deep, systematic problems in the organisation of European security”(reported in The Guardian, 13/2/15).

The present war is entirely different from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s which were more expressive of the imperialist tensions between western bloc countries and the US in the ‘New World Order’. These tensions, which translated on the ground into mass rape, massacres (Sarajevo, Srebrenica...) and the total fragmentation of ex-Yugoslavia and its provinces, were not a confrontation between Russia and the west but rather saw the imperialist interests of Germany, Britain, France and the US in a proxy war of each against all. A concrete example of this occurred at Pristina airport, June 1999 in the aftermath of the Kosovo War where Russian troops occupied the airport ahead of a NATO deployment. US overall NATO commander Wesley Clarke ordered the airport to be taken by British troops under his command. British military commander, Mike Jackson, refused Clarke’s orders saying: “I’m not going to start World War III”[1].

The current war is less like the Balkans of the 90s and more like the war in Georgia in 2008, where the latter, supported by the US, agitated to join NATO. Russia gained ground here and with the US engaged elsewhere the latter was forced to swallow the ‘European’ (i.e., dictated by Moscow) plan for a cease-fire[2]. Now it’s Russia v the others in continuity with its imperialist interests dating back to Tsarist days. Russia is pursuing this strategy with reduced means and ambitions compared to the Cold War, but it’s still pushing for a new front line in Europe. All this is very dangerous for the working class across this continent and beyond.

An irrational situation

None of this is rational, even from a capitalist point of view. Russia and European countries are suffering enormously over US-imposed sanctions. Sanctions on Russia were introduced in March 2014 and compounded by Russian countersanctions banning food imports. Gas and oil price falls of 40% have also hit the Russian economy. While the Rouble has plummeted, many businesses ceased trading in Russia due to its volatility, and the working class and population as a whole is hit by soaring food prices. Meanwhile Putin calmly anticipates the next rise in oil prices! In reality, things will only get worse with new sanctions threatened following the breakdown of the latest cease-fire.

In Putin Russia has equipped itself with a sadistic leader prone to military adventures regardless. Regardless of the cost to the economy in the short term. Regardless of Russia’s capacity to make long term gains on the imperialist front, while its short term gains, as in the Donbass, can only be held by military force or occupation and corruption, and come at the cost of undermining its strength in the long term.

The victory of nationalism on both sides

In Kiev large numbers of the population, egged on by the west and its media foghorns, voted for nationalist and fascist goons who then terrorised what genuine demonstrators there were in Maidan. Kiev’s new president, Poroshenko, already at his inauguration last June, promised war and austerity and he is now talking about introducing martial law and ‘reforms’ in order to pursue the war and further attacks on the population. The IMF, which has already given billions of dollars to Kiev, is talking about another $17.5 billion with $40 billion more over the next 4 years. This will be in exchange for ‘reforms’ such as cutting the social wage even further and substantially increasing basic prices. This will happen whether the war intensifies or not. And, particularly affected and caught up in all this, the working class is unable to provide any realistic opposition.

This is not to say that there has been no resistance to the war. In the East of the country, outside of the armed gangs of separatists and nationalists there seems very little support for the war. There was some action from miners in the Donbass at the beginning which seemed independent, but it was quickly recuperated by the ‘rebels’ who used as a show-piece for their ‘support’. In fact the rebel factions have complained about the lack of support from the population.

In the West of the country there has been more open resistance, particularly in the light of Poroshenko’s heavy hint about martial law and the proclaimed draft of 100,000 more soldiers from 16 to 60 years old – a mobilisation that is reminiscent of the Nazis in the last days of World War II, where the Volkssturm was enacted calling up the youth and old of similar ages. Documents hacked from the office of Kiev’s chief military prosecutor, Anotoli Matous, show a far greater number of war casualties than the official figure of 5,400 (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8/2/15, quotes German military intelligence as estimating 50,000 killed). The leaks also show over ten thousand desertions, the latter including senior military personnel and desertions from special military units and this to the point that the regime has set up special military units to track down deserters from the special military units – amongst others.

In Kiev-controlled territory there have been demonstrations and meetings in the provinces of Odessa and Zaphorizia where women particularly have been addressing crowds denouncing the war and the regime and getting a deal of support. But this resistance, though welcome, is by no means sufficient to spark a wider anti-war movement or anti-austerity fight. While generally not supporting the war, the working class of East and West Ukraine have not enough force, not enough political maturity to really oppose it on a class basis.

Is this the eve of World War III?

A frequently asked question, the answer to which is no... but. From the point of view of the attack on class consciousness and the rise of nationalism, feeding into the decomposition of the capitalist system in general, the all-pervading destructiveness could do almost as much damage to the prospects of communism as a world war. But for the latter, for a truly global conflict, there is a need for more or less coherent military blocs. Such do not exist. Even if they are against the renewed push of Russian imperialism there is little unity amongst NATO countries where centrifugal tendencies still dominate. All countries are wary of a German-dominated force as are many of an American domination and this gives an opening to Russia. As for the latter, it has taken steps to get China onside for its ‘Asiatic bloc’ and is making advances to other countries unwilling to bow to US pressure: Egypt, Hungary and Greece for example, but there is no prospect of a military bloc on the horizon.

On the other front, the social front, for a world war to be prepared the working class of the central countries needs to be mobilised and ready to give ‘blood, sweat and tears’ for the national, i.e., imperialist interest just as the proletariat was marched off to war and slaughter in 1914. Despite the present reflux in the struggles in the west, this is still not the case.

Perspectives

We should remember that in World War I, while anti-war movements broke out almost immediately, it took more years of destruction and carnage until 1917 bought a qualitative change in the working class that forced the ruling class to end the war. The conditions in Ukraine are very different today in that the war doesn’t entail mass mobilisations and the role of the big powers is more indirect and hidden. There is the danger of a ‘hidden’ war here, one that just rumbles on, becoming entrenched like other war zones in this period. In this key strategic area between Europe and Asia, with the direct participation of Russia and NATO forces, even if the latter are not totally united – along with other conflicts going on in the world – the catastrophic descent into decomposition is graphically illustrated.

This will tend to further demoralise the working class in the main industrial heartlands, just as the repression of the ‘Arab Spring’, with the knowing complicity of the bourgeoisie of the major powers, has been a factor of demoralisation and an opening for the nationalist left (e.g. Greece and Spain). But despite these considerable difficulties in the class, the task of revolutionaries, communists, around the world is to speak with one voice against imperialist war, something that they have singularly and pathetically been unable to do. For all their talk of ‘internationalism’ their responsibility in deeds towards it has been shamefully ducked, making it nothing more than one empty word amongst all others.

We have to bear in mind that it was only a very small number of revolutionaries, true internationalists, that stood up for the proletarian cause prior to and during World War I, just as more workers were being mobilised to massacre each other. We need to debate, come together and denounce the war highlighting the responsibility of the workers in the west. We need to maintain our analyses in the spirit of Zimmerwald and Kienthal and stand as a beacon against capitalist decomposition and imperialist war. 

Boxer 18/2/15

“In Syria, every day brings new massacres. The country has joined the other theatres of imperialist war in the Middle East. After Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, now it’s Syria’s turn. Unfortunately this situation immediately poses a very disquieting question: what’s going to happen in the period ahead? The Middle East seems to be on the verge of a conflagration whose limits are difficult to foresee. Behind the war in Syria, it’s Iran which is the focus of imperialist fears and appetites, but all the main imperialist brigands are ready to defend their interests in the region. This is a part of the world that is on a war footing - a war that could have irrational and destructive consequences for the whole capitalist system”. Thus began the article “The threat of an imperialist cataclysm in the Middle East” in International Review number 149, written nearly three years ago to the day.  The situation, the militarisation and decomposition of the Middle East, has since worsened and the threat of a generalised conflagration has become even greater.

The war in Syria continues and Isis strengthens and expands

We are now five years into an imperialist war in Syria involving the major powers of America, France, Britain, and Russia along with local powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, etc. Rather than showing any end, this conflict is intensifying. War and instability are spreading wider and deeper and that particular expression of capitalist irrationality and decomposition, the Islamic State and its Caliphate is, if anything, becoming stronger. Just a couple of hundred of its fighters have been holding off thousands of Iraqi troops and Shi’ite militias attempting to re-take the Iraqi town of Tikrit – which according to the Pentagon on April 14 is still being “contested” (The Guardian, 15.4.15) -  just as Isis becomes even more ensconced in Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria and spreads to other areas. At the end of March the jihadi forces of al-Nusra took Syria’s second provincial capital of Idlib, just days after al-Nusra in the south, with help from Israeli military interventions, which is de facto working with the jihadists, took the ancient Roman-Arab capital of Bosra al-Sham in the Daraa district. In some cases al-Nusra and Isis have cooperated to a degree but such cooperation is fragile given the general suspicion and ‘each against all’ conflict. Similar expressions have been taking place in the huge Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk on the outskirts of Damascus, with al-Nusra paving the way for a murderous Isis advance into an enclave already subjected to two years of siege and starvation in which itself represents a microcosm of the general decay. In Yarmuk strong counter-tendencies to any jihadi cooperation have been shown. These alliances within the various Sunni factions are themselves contingent and fraught with many Sunni factions often hating their own rivals more than they do the Shia. In Yarmuk a three or four-way fight is breaking out. Isis have withdrawn somewhat under military pressure from al-Nusra, pro-Assad Palestinian forces are involved as well as the anti-regime jihadi Sunni group of Aknaf Beit al-Maqdes (the Mujahedin Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem – also active in the Sinai Peninsula) which is hated by both Isis and al-Nusra, and skirmishes have already broken out. The poisonous atmosphere of capitalist disintegration permeates the ground with the various religious factions and schisms generating hatred, distrust and the pogrom mentality.

Isis has also spread its wings to North Africa in the US/UK/French destabilised lands of Libya and the still unstable Sinai Peninsula, despite the intervention in both by Egypt’s military regime. All this means that there are further consequences for possible terrorist attacks in Europe and beyond – a question we will return to. In the meantime the spread of this tide of decomposition, aided in different parts by Libyan instability and weaponry, massive unemployment throughout the region and irrational religious ideology coming within a general breakdown of capitalist society, has reached down into the al-Qaeda linked groups of East and West Africa with both Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Shabab in Kenya spreading warfare and terror both internally and beyond their borders. Countries affected here are Somalia; South Sudan (where Chinese troops are present); Cameroon – whose Israeli-trained rapid intervention forces are fighting back; and Chad, whose Fort Carson, Colorado-based Special Anti-terrorist Forces are working with British trainers and French special forces. The forces of French imperialism have been increased here both before and after the Paris attacks, attacks reputedly instigated by Al-Qaeda on the Arab Peninsula (AQAP).

Already the consequence of the rise of jihadism is an unprecedented spiral of violence and destruction across the Middle East and Africa. In order to re-take the Syrian border town of Kobani from Isis for example, where fighting continues to this day in its surrounding villages, the west and its Kurdish fighters had to bomb the town flat and the same thing looks to be happening with Tikrit in Iraq: scorched earth and terror from Isis matched by scorched earth and terror from the west and its allies, and this is more and more becoming the story in this whole chain of war. The devastation across the region is almost beyond measure and while the hypocritical democrats of Britain, the US and France, as well as the UN den of thieves, denounce the destruction of ancient cultural sites by Isis, their own war planes or those of their “allies” are hardly less destructive. All this devastation in the Middle East and Africa, the breakdown or setting up of fortress-type borders, the misery of staggering numbers of refugees and displaced families which goes along with it, is too much to go into here and, as grim as it is, we will also have to return to this question in the future. Despite the bombing missions against it, and because of the way it fights, Isis is a formidable force and remains an expanding threat. The knowledgeable Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent, 20.3.15: “The Islamic State is not going to implode because of mounting popular discontent within its borders. Its enemies may deride its pretensions to be a real state, but in terms of its ability to conscript troops, raise taxes and impose its brutal variant of Islam, it is stronger than many of its regional neighbours”.

The Tikrit example shows how difficult it will be to dislodge, let alone defeat, Isis. Here just a few hundred jihadists have held off a coordinated assault by thousands of Iraqi special forces and Shia militias for weeks, and despite Baghdad saying it has taken Tikrit (The Guardian, 1.4.15), Isis still controls parts of the city as well as the much wider provinces of Anbar and Nineveh. The assault appears to have caused some three-way problems between the Iraqi government, the US and the Iranian-backed Shia militias with the upshot being an increase in US air strikes and de facto assistance to Iranian forces[1]. And it is this relationship between America and Iran that is causing great consternation and alarm among the former’s allies – already estranged after the collapse of the two bloc system of the Cold War and the emergence of tendencies of each going their own way – not least within Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Is there a rapprochement between the US and Iran?

There already have been some elements of a rapprochement in effect in the war against Isis in both Iraq and Syria. The rise of Isis has driven the US war machine into an even greater dilemma. If the Assad regime had been beaten the road to Damascus would have been open to Isis. This was explicitly recognised by the Director of the CIA John Brennan recently when he said that he didn’t want a collapse of the Assad government (Middle East Eye, 14.3.15), words that were echoed a few days later by Secretary of State John Kerry, pertinently during the nuclear talks with Iranian officials. US tensions with Israel, the Netanyahu clique particularly, simmering for some time over still- ruined Gaza and increased settlement building, have boiled over publicly, reaching similar proportions as 1992 when President Bush fell out with President Yitzhak Shamir over settlement building. But this present situation seems much more serious with the Israelis feeling undermined and vulnerable as a result of what some Israeli politicians are calling the US “Pivot to Persia”. Assad or Isis, Israel or Iran, plague or cholera, these are the insoluble dilemmas facing US foreign policy, whose impasse is at root the impasse of the entire global network of imperialist alliances and rivalries.

If the Israelis are worried about a US/Iran rapprochement, which existed in fact up the late 70’s when the Shah of Iran was the US and British policeman of the region, then so too are the Saudis and this concern has been a major impetus in their present adventure in Yemen (see below).  Iran’s 1979 Islamic “revolution”, which deposed the Shah, was a threat to Saudi Arabia with its “appeals to the oppressed” – a weapon of Iranian imperialism in order to gain an advantage over its local rivals. From that time Iran fell out of favour with the west and, independent of and alongside that, the Saudi regime promoted a hard-line Wahabi Islam in order to foster and encourage extreme anti-Shia sentiments and actions[2]. The House of Saud, concerned about a possible Iranian nuclear capacity, has made its own nuclear aspirations quite clear, and it seems that from talks that have already taken place Pakistan would be prepared to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear capability (The Guardian, 11.5.10: “Pakistan’s bomb and Saudi Arabia”). The Middle East plus a nuclear arms race! This is very much a possibility now.

Another factor in any US and Iranian “axis” – and we are still some way from that even if there is an agreement over Iran’s nuclear capacity – is that Russia, Iran’s main ally as well as Assad’s supporter, would suffer a serious setback. It would be further pushed back from what global presence it has, surrounded and squeezed into its heartlands, making Europe an even more dangerous place with a greater threat of Russian imperialism trying to break out in the longer term.

Yemen: a Saudi/Iranian confrontation and more

Even by the standards of the Middle East, its irrationality, the wanton destruction, the constant, intensifying imperialist machinations and wars, then the Saudi-led attack on Yemen in late March reaches new levels of surreal absurdity:  the Saudis are leading a Sunni Muslim coalition of ten nations including non-Arab, nuclear-armed Pakistan in an attack on Yemen. Local gangsters like the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are involved but also the Egyptian dictator al-Sisi and the genocidal clique of Sudan’s al-Bashir. All these despots are backed by the USA and Britain, which has offered the coalition “logistical and intelligence” support. The strength of this coalition is unclear given that Oman has refused to join it, Qatar is wavering and Pakistan has apparently left.

The situation in Yemen is much more complex than a coalition of Sunnis attacking an Iranian-backed Shia ally – there are strong elements of this but there is more. This country, given its terrain, is another Afghanistan as British, Egyptian and other imperialist forces have found out to their cost in the past. Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. There are an estimated ten million children on the edge of malnutrition and poverty and corruption is rampant. The bones of this country, which has no serious history of ethnic strife, have been picked by imperialism and war in recent years and that is set to continue. Last September President Obama called US drone action in Yemen an anti-terrorist “success” story, a “model” even[3]. Yemen, and its long-suffering people, is about to suffer a new layer of tension and destruction that will, in all probability, only strengthen the positions of Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula and Isis. While these two groups have co-existed or worked together elsewhere this alliance is purely contingent and in Yemen at the moment the Houthi’s, AQAP, Isis and the Saudi-backed Aden rump are all at each others’ throats. Each for themselves reaches new proportions here where even the jihadi “terrorists”, though sometimes backed by various states, are fighting among themselves – and there are and have been similar expressions of this happening now in Syria.

The Houthi rebels now gaining strength in Yemen come from the Zaidi sect – an obscure branch of Shia Islam from the northern al-Houthi clan where its people have lived for a thousand years. It started life in the early 1990’s as a reportedly peaceful revivalist movement called “Believing Youth”. It was radicalised, like so many others, by the western-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Iranians call it the “Ansarullah” revolution and they have certainly provided it with some assistance, but very little on the scale of things for the region and the Houthis are no simple pawns of Tehran. There are long-standing links between the Shias and Iran here and the Saudis with the Sunnis but it’s only of late that these divisions and their manipulation by states have coincided with such a rotting of the social bonds and the general breakdown engendered by capitalist decomposition.

The Houthi group had previously battled the government forces of US and Saudi-backed President Saleh as well as those of AQAP. President Saleh stood down in 2012 and he, his son and a hundred thousand of his soldiers now support the Houthi advance, an advance that has also been further facilitated by despair and distrust of the authorities. Newly-installed Yemeni President Hadi, backed by the Saudis and the west, has fled the Houthi advance to Aden, where some forces favourable to him remain, and he is now reported to be in Riyadh. Hadi’s particular Sunni affiliation is outlawed in Saudi Arabia, which is just another convoluted element to this story. Embassies were closed and US troops also fled the Houthi HouthiHHHHadvance, with the latter scooping up a reportedly half-a-billion dollars worth of abandoned US military hardware. A further factor of every man for himself here is that ex-President Saleh’s alliance with the Houthis is shaky at best and some of his troops have defected to Saudi leadership, fleeing the air bombardment on their quarters. This points to the possibility of his army turning against the  Houthis and towards Saudi and his previous western backers.

Some journalists[4] who write about the Middle East have noted the complexity, as well as the dangers of the unfolding war in Yemen. They call it “multidimensional” which is a fair description of the breakdown. There are the Houthis, now well-armed courtesy not of Iran but of the USA; AQAP – whose branch has been deadly effective here against western and local targets for 15 years; Isis, which announced the opening of its Yemeni branch late last year and was behind the bombing of a mosque on March 21, killing over a hundred Houthi Shias; the declining rump of Saudi-backed Sunni forces and a western sea-board partly dominated by pirates and warlords. And into this inferno Saudi Arabia, well-armed by the west that supports it, wants to bomb and send in an invasion force! Saudi Arabia is apparently mobilising 150,000 soldiers and artillery in order to attack Yemen. The military, economic and geo-strategic dimensions of the conflict in Yemen have also not gone unnoticed by the same journalists, with the Red Sea and Suez at one end and the Gulf of Aden at the other, joined by the Yemeni Bab-el-Mandeb strait; another reason why this is such an important theatre for imperialist plays. Saudi jets have now started bombing Yemen, inevitably hitting refugee camps and civilian areas. The Saudis are also worried about their own population and the stability of their own country as the crisis deepens overall, and up to half of the Saudi army are reported to be from Yemeni tribes.

The Saudi proposed invasion of Yemen is reminiscent of, but different from, their invasion of Bahrain in 2011 during the “Arab Spring”. The repression of the anti-government protests by the Saudi-backed government had the support of the west down to its British armoured vehicles. The Saudis, like Israel, will be alarmed by the strengthening of Iran in Iraq and the necessary cooperation with the US. The Saudis have called their Yemeni war plans “Operation Decisive Storm”, echoing the USA’s 1991 “Desert Storm” in Iraq which involved, amongst others, the massacre of Iraqi conscripts and civilians on the famous “Turkey Shoot” on the road to Basra. Civilians are already being bombed in Yemen now as they have been, by one faction or another, for some time. Iran will not be happy with the move by Saudi Arabia and will be aware of the wikileaked Saudi plea to the Americans “to cut off the head of the snake” (Reuters, 29.11.10). Whether or not there is an American/Iranian rapprochement, tensions and war in this region can only exacerbate. This is the future that capitalism holds out for this region and ultimately for the whole world.

Boxer 15.4.15

Having read on the website of the Internationalist Communist Tendency the communiqué of 12 April 2015 entitled A proposito di alcune infami calunnie (‘Response to a vile slander [59]’), the ICC expresses its total solidarity with the ICT and with those of its militants who have been particularly targeted in these attacks by former members of the ICT’s section in Italy, the Partito Comunista Internazionalista.

All those who see themselves as part of the communist left, or who are interested in this current, know the disagreements between the ICC and the ICT, on questions of general analysis (like the course of history), on how we interpret historical experience (like the work of the Italian Fraction between 1928 and 1945 or the foundation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in 1943-45) or – and for us this is the most important – on the relations that should exist today between the groups that consider themselves part of the communist left. We have never hidden these disagreements or renounced our vigorous criticisms of those political positions of the ICT (and of the IBRP in the past) which we judge to be negative for the struggle of the communist left. But in our eyes this cannot affect the expression of our total solidarity with the ICT or the firmness with which we condemn the slanders being aimed today at the organisation and certain of its militants. This is an attitude which belongs to the tradition of the workers’ movement.

The ICC does not know the identity of the elements who are today attacking the PCInt-ICT, nor the exact terms of their allegations. However, the ICC has complete confidence in the communiqué published by the ICT and considers that the information it contains is valid. This confidence is based on the following facts:

• We cannot imagine that an organisation which has laid claim to the positions of the communist left and which has defended these positions for 70 years could invent the facts reported in the communiqué;

• The experience of the workers’ movement (as well as the experience of the ICC itself) attests that former militants can fall into the basest ignominy when they develop resentments against their former organisation, when they abandon the fight for the communist perspective in order to engage in a fight for their petty personal concerns. Disappointment, frustration, wounded pride, rancour then become the motive force for their behaviour, and no longer the revolt against this shameful society of exploitation. As the PCInt communiqué puts it, the “hateful attacks” against their former organisation “has become their main focus of their politics, if not their lives”, rather than the combat against capitalism, whose allies they thus become, whether they want to or not;

• One of the most insidious, but unfortunately, “classic” features of the destructive approach of these elements towards their former organisation is to make the most sordid accusations against its most prominent militants, in particular the accusation that they are “state agents”.

This kind of accusation has to be fought and denounced in the firmest possible manner, especially because it introduces suspicion within the organisation but also within the whole proletarian milieu. This is why the ICC declares its readiness to offer whatever help it can to the ICT, and which the ICT judges would be most useful to it, in order to unmask the slanders aimed at certain of its militants and to re-establish their honour.

The ICC calls on all elements and groups who fight sincerely for the communist revolution, and particularly those who see themselves as part of the communist left (especially those who refer to the current animated by Bordiga after 1952) to offer unfailing solidarity to the ICT against these sordid attacks. It is the honour of the communist left to have fought against these kinds of methods, in which Stalinism was the great specialist, in the darkest moments of the counter-revolution. Participating in the combat of the communist left does not only mean defending its political positions. It also means denouncing political behaviour such as rumours, lies, slander and blackmail, all of which are diametrically opposed to the proletariat’s struggle for its emancipation.

The ICC, 17.4.15.

70 years after ‘Victory in Europe’ day, we are republishing an article that first appeared in Révolution Internationale no. 15, in 1975.

This anniversary is always celebrated by the bourgeoisie and its media with an intense barrage of propaganda, aimed at preserving nationalist feelings and travestying what the Second World War really was: not a struggle between democratic humanity and fascist barbarism but a struggle between capitalist nations who, in the defence of their sordid interests, were quite ready to shed the blood of millions of proletarians, to whip up hatred and commit the worst kind of atrocities.

This is what is pointed out by this short text written by our comrade Marc Chirik, a militant of the communist left who, during the war, firmly defended the principle of proletarian internationalism, producing leaflets calling for the fraternisation of the workers of all countries.

In a whole number of countries, the bourgeoisie has made a big noise about the 30th anniversary of the victory over Germany. The left variety of this noise has been particularly virulent: in Eastern Europe, there were huge ceremonies marking the 8 May. In France, where the government has decided to remove this date from the official calendar, the guardian of the historic past of La Patrie, the so-called Communist Party, has thrown all its strength into a great national battle to annul this “scandalous”, “monstrous”, “ignoble and infamous” decision (cf L’Humanité 12 May 1975). Having stirred up chauvinism between the two world wars around the figure of Joan of Arc, the same party disputes with the rest of the bourgeoisie the right to speak for the nationalist cult and denounces the “anti-national policy of Giscard d’Estaing”. It is calling on all the “national and democratic forces” to fight this decision by Giscard “as a national duty for all patriots”. It reminds us that “the Communists fought in the Resistance alongside the Gaullists. They took the same risks. They shared a certain idea about France, its role, its future…” And it concludes that “the policy of M Giscard d’Estaing is leading to the betrayal of the common struggle that Communists and Gaullists waged against fascism for the independence and grandeur of France!”

Far more than the Gaullists, to whom it is extending its hand, the Communist Party is scaling the heights of the most repulsive nationalist hysteria.

For the bourgeois faction that displays the most virulent chauvinism, especially when it’s combined with antifascism, this is a time to remember. “Let’s remember”, it says to the proletarians, “how heroic you were in the defence of our interests”.

And indeed: let’s remember!

First, let’s remember the cause of this war, the crisis which began in 1929 and which plunged the whole world into unbearable poverty alongside stocks of goods which couldn’t be sold! Let’s remember the tens of millions of starving unemployed workers, going from town to town looking in vain for work!

Let’s remember the fascist barbarism with which the bourgeoisie responded to this crisis, as well as the antifascist hysteria, which both together led the workers of Spain, and then of the main countries of the world, to the slaughter.

Let’s remember the Stalinist and Hitlerite concentration camps, where tens of millions of human beings were exterminated!

Let’s remember the pact of September 1939 between the two brigands, Hitler and Stalin, between Nazi Germany and “socialist” Russia - the first clause of this pact being the dividing up of Poland, which directly resulted in the war.

Let’s remember the massacres between 1939 and 1945: 55 million dead, the greatest holocaust in the history of humanity!

Let’s remember the way this war ended: with the explosion of two atomic bombs which, in a fraction of a second, razed two Japanese cities to the ground, killing without distinction several hundred thousand individuals – either immediately or after atrocious suffering!

Let’s remember the “Liberation”, the purges and the sordid settling of scores, the slogans of the Communist Party: “á chacun son Boche!” – everyone should kill a German -  “long live eternal France”, all the cries about freedom from fascism from the Trotskyists and the anarchists, the latter entering Paris with the Leclerc division, brandishing the image of Durruti!

Let’s remember the “Reconstruction”, the brutal super-exploitation for a crust of bread, with Stalinist ministers telling the workers “pull up your sleeves”, while the militants of the same party played the role of cops in the factories!

Workers, let’s remember the role the Stalinists played in the past as butchers, cops, torturers, exploiters, and be on guard against what they have in store for us tomorrow if we spring their traps, along with those of their fellow-travellers in antifascism and the Resistance, whether Trotskyists or anarchists!

Workers, let’s remember the past and look clearly at what awaits us if we leave our class terrain for the terrain of antifascism, of nationalism, of democratic illusions; if we are not capable of uniting on an international scale to confront and destroy the bourgeois state!

CM (May 1975). 

On 12 and 19 April, two overloaded boats carrying migrants fleeing from the most extreme misery sank in the Mediterranean, taking with them up to 1200 lives. These tragedies have been repeating themselves for decades: in the 1990s, the well-guarded fortress of Gibraltar was already a tomb for many migrants. Since 2000, 22,000 people have disappeared while trying to get to Europe by sea. And since the Lampedusa drama in 2013, in which 500 perished, the migrations and their fatal consequences have been growing at an unprecedented rate. With nearly 22,000 crossings and 3500 deaths, the year 2014 broke all records. Since January 2015, the sea has already claimed 1800 migrants’ lives.

An expression of decomposing capitalism

In the last few years, we have been seeing a kind of industrialisation in human trafficking. The testimonies paint an edifying picture of refugee camps, of people crossing war zones, of beatings, rapes, slavery…The brutality and cynicism of the smugglers seem to have no limits. And the migrants go through all this in order to be welcomed to humiliating conditions in Europe, where they are defined as a “burden”, to use the expression of the head of operations at Triton, which is supposedly there to save the migrants at sea.

If people are prepared to go through such ordeals, it’s because what they are escaping from is even worse. At the root of the increasing waves of migrations are the unbearable conditions of life in more and more areas of the planet. These conditions are not new, but they have been getting worse and worse. Hunger and disease, and above all a society that is rotting on its feet is what all these masses of people are running away from: the accelerating decomposition of Africa and the Middle East, with their intractable conflicts, permanent insecurity, the reign of armed gangs, rackets, mass unemployment….

The great powers, driven by the logic of an increasingly irrational and murderous capitalism to defend their imperialist interests by using the most sordid methods, have a major responsibility for the frightful situation facing so many parts of the world. The chaos in Libya is a caricatured example: western bombs have replaced a tyrant with the reign of lawless militias. As well as illustrating the only perspective that capitalism can offer humanity, the dislocation of the country has provided the soil for the flourishing of the unscrupulous gangs of smugglers who are often connected to various imperialist agencies: mafia cliques, jihadists and even the self-proclaimed governments which are engaged in a bloody struggle against each other.

In the period of decadence, the great powers have become anti-immigrant fortresses

Like the migrants crossing the Mediterranean, being uprooted is inscribed in the history of the working class. From the very beginnings of capitalism, part of the rural population formed in the mediaeval period was torn off the land to provide the first source of man-power for the process of manufacture. Often the victims of brutal expropriations, these pariahs of the feudal system, too numerous for nascent capitalism to absorb, were already treated like criminals: “Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed” (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, chapter 28) . With the development of capitalism, the growing need for labour power gave rise to numerous waves of migration. In the 19th century, when capitalism was prospering, millions of migrants took the path of exile to fill the factories. With the historical decline of the system, which was marked by the First World War, the displacement of populations didn’t stop and even increased. Imperialist wars, economic crises, climatic disasters – there are plenty of reasons for trying to escape from hell.

And with the permanent crisis of the system, immigrants are constantly faced with capital’s problem of absorbing extra labour power. Administrative, legal and police obstacles have gradually increased, aimed at preventing migrants from reaching the territories of the most developed states: limited stay, deportation, harassment, police tracking, air and navy patrols at the frontiers, detention camps, etc. Before the First World War, when the USA was looking to expand its work-force, it was the symbol of the land of asylum. Today the American border with Mexico is guarded by a gigantic wall. Europe has not escaped this dynamic. In the 1980s, the very democratic European states have begun to deploy an armada of warships in the Mediterranean and didn’t hesitate about collaborating with the “Guide of the Revolution”, Muammar Gaddafi, and his esteemed equivalents, His Majesty the King of Morocco and Algeria’s president for life, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, with the aim of pushing migrants back towards the desert. While the bourgeoisie was triumphantly dismantling the Iron Curtain, other “walls of shame” have been going up on numerous frontiers. The hypocrisy about freedom of circulation in the European space covered by the Schengen agreement can be seen very clearly in all this. As for those who do survive the crossing, it’s another round of police harassment and humiliation, awful detention centres, etc. Behind their crocodile tears, the cynicism of the democratic states is as boundless as that of the smugglers.

What’s behind the media frenzy about the plight of the migrants?

Overcrowded boats capsizing, hundreds drowning – this has been going on for years now. The growing number of deaths in the Mediterranean doesn’t date from April. So why the media frenzy right now?

It responds to a logic of ideological intoxication which is mobilising all factions of the bourgeoisie. Parallel to the transformation of states into fortresses, a nauseating anti-immigrant ideology is being spread, seeking to blame “foreigners” for the effects of the crisis and to present them as hordes of criminals undermining public order. These often hysterical campaigns try to divide the proletariat by making it identify with the cause of the Nation, i.e. those of the ruling class. They are based on the pernicious idea that the division of humanity into nations is normal, natural and eternal. Furthermore, the hypocritical attempt to talk about “good” and “bad” immigrants is entirely part of this logic: those who are judged “good” are those who can be useful to the national economy, the “bad” ones being those judged to be a burden on it.

As can be seen from the expressions of solidarity by workers in Italy towards the migrants who finally reached the coast of Sicily, many proletarians are in fact indignant about the fate the bourgeoisie reserves for the immigrants. But who better to channel this legitimate reaction towards a dead-end than the patent experts in this kind of work – the left of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus. These so-called “friends of the people” take advantage of real indignation to trap the workers in the talons of the capitalist state. The Non-Government Organisations, acting once again as scouts for imperialism, haven’t got words strong enough to demand a military response from the state, all in the name of human rights. After the “humanitarian war” in Africa, we now have the “charitable control of the frontiers”! What loathsome hypocrisy! In France, the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière illustrate this approach very well in its article ‘Capitalist Europe condemns migrants to death’[1]: “By reducing the number and scope of the patrols, the leaders of the EU have made the choice to allow those who attempt the crossing to die. This is the policy of non-assistance to people in danger. The 18 warships and two helicopters which were sent to the place the drama took plac, but after the drowning, increases the ignominy”. In a word, this bourgeois party, which claims to be marxist, also calls for more warships to “save” the migrants. Thus, the bourgeoisie is instrumentalising the hecatomb to strengthen its means of repression against the migrants, increasing and developing the means available to the Frontex agency which is in charge of coordinating military deployment at the frontiers of Europe and the anti-immigrant operations inside its borders: patrols, raids, arrests. It seems that the bourgeoisie has organised everything to “help” the migrants. Air strikes in Libya are also envisaged! Behind all this, the bourgeoisie is trying to stoke up the threatening atmosphere which enables it to carry out its repressive policies against the working class.

Truth Martine, 5.5.15

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism”. (Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917)[1]

January 15 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated, along with her comrade of combat Karl Liebknecht, by the Freikorps. These soldiers were under the orders of the minister Noske, a member of the SPD (German Social Democratic Party) who declared “If a bloodhound is necessary, then I will be it”! It was the Socialist party in power who orchestrated the bloody repression of the workers’ insurrection in Berlin and assassinated one the greatest figures of the international workers’ movement.

This odious murder was prepared for a long time through a series of slanders against Rosa Luxemburg. “Red Rosa”, “Rosa the incendiary”, “Bloody Rosa”, “Rosa the agent of Tsarism”... no lying attack against her was spared, culminating in the calls for a pogrom at the end of 1918/ beginning 1919, notably at the time of the “bloody week” in Berlin.

But just a few months after her murder, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists in the workers’ movement began to make her into an inoffensive icon so as to canonise her, empty her of revolutionary content, degrade her and take the edge off this trenchant revolutionary. Above all for them Rosa Luxemburg mustn’t remain the militant and exemplary revolutionary that she was; she had to be killed a second time, misrepresented into a sort of pacifist and feminist democrat. This is the real aim, in recent decades, of the work of “remembrance “which aims to “rehabilitate” (that’s to say recuperate) this great fighter for the revolution.

A constant campaign to distort the combat of Luxemburg and Lenin

In the 1930’s in France for example, a whole current developed around Lucien Laurat, which increasingly ceded to the sirens of democracy and ended up arguing that from the very beginning of the “Bolshevik revolution”, the “worm” of Lenin was in the “fruit” of the revolutionary project. This argument logically became the apology for the Republican Army in the war in Spain of 1936-39 and for the dragooning of the working class into the second world butchery under the cover of the fight against fascism. It supported the POUM in Spain and the Trotskyists in the “heroism” of their national resistance. This nauseous democratic propaganda went into paroxysms after the Second World War through people such as Rene Lefeuvre, founder of the Editions Spartacus. The latter, in a collection of texts by Rosa Luxemburg[2], has a purely ideological preface and its 1946 title Marxism against dictatorship (a heading never used by Rosa Luxemburg!) presented this fighter for the revolution as radically hostile to Bolshevism, which is nothing other than a gross lie. In the introduction to the collection, Lefeuvre writes that: “all the great marxist theoreticians of renown: Karl Kautsky, Emile Vandervelde, Rodolphe Hilferding, Karl Renner, Georges Plekhanov – and ourselves in passing – denounced as much as Rosa Luxemburg the totalitarian doctrine of Lenin as absolutely contrary to the principle of marxism”.

Stalin mummified Lenin and perverted his thoughts into a terrifying dogma. “Bloody” Rosa Luxemburg became a sort of saint for democracy. The Stalinist counter-revolution rapidly generated two new putrid and complementary ideologies: attractive “Luxemburgism”  on one side and repellent “Marxism-Leninism” on the other. Really just two faces of the same coin or rather two jaws of the same trap with the same result: reject the “bloodthirsty” Bolsheviks and admire the figure offered by a “pacifist” Rosa, like you admire a lion in a cage.

In Western Germany 1974 (the FRG), they even printed stamps bearing the image of Rosa Luxemburg!

A new campaign against the proletariat and its revolutionary organisations

After the collapse of the eastern bloc and the disappearance of the USSR, this vast ideological campaign was dug up again and amplified so as to feed the so-called “death of communism” zealously decreed by the bourgeoisie with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Official ideology here pursued the greatest lie in history, fraudulently assimilating communism with Stalinism. It is a particularly effective ideological weapon in the hands of the dominant class. Because if since the 1990’s the proletariat has had so many difficulties to see itself as a social force, to develop its consciousness and its organisation, it is really because it is cut off from its past, it’s lost its identity, it doesn’t know where it’s come from or where it’s going. If communism is Stalinism, this horror which has finally failed, then why fight for it? Why study the history of the workers’ movement when it will only lead to the Stalinist catastrophe? It is this logic and this poison that the bourgeoisie wants to put in our heads! And the presentation of Rosa as a pacifist and enemy of Lenin, the “dictator over the proletariat”, the “spiritual father of Stalin”, is one of the blackest chapters in this ignoble propaganda. Whether they are conscious of it or not, those who participate in this sham fight against the working class.

Today on blogs and forums, in bookshops and kiosks, throughout Europe and in the world, a new nauseous campaign has resurfaced in order to again distort the image of the militant Rosa Luxemburg. Thus, from television programmes, Rosa Luxemburg again appears under the sole traits of a “woman” and a “pacifist”. The very-well known and acclaimed paper, Le Monde, published an article in September 2013, written by a certain Jean-Marc Daniel, a professor of ESCP Europe, with the very evocative title: “Rosa Luxemburg, marxist-pacifist”. This association of the words “marxist” and “pacifist” is gob-smacking: for the ruling class the “real marxist” is one who abdicates from the class war, renounces the insurrection and the overthrow of capitalism.

Numerous books have now been published, including children’s literature, where Rosa Luxemburg is again presented as a relentless adversary of the Bolsheviks and of the “dictator” Lenin. Conferences and debate are also organised here and there, as was the case in Paris recently under the aegis of the “Luxemburgist” democratic historians of the group Critique Sociale. Even within the arts, the MAIF prize 2014 was awarded to the sculptor Nicolas Milhe for his project “Rosa Luxemburg”! This is a real ovation for Rosa ... on condition that she is opposed to her comrades in the fight, to the Bolsheviks, to the Russian revolution, in short opposed to revolution. The recuperation of Rosa Luxemburg in order to turn her into an “inoffensive icon” is a vast enterprise of ideological intoxication. It aims to inject the idea that the proletariat must fight to construct... not a global communist society but a “more democratic” society. After the odious propaganda of the Black Book of Communism, it is henceforth this idea of Luxemburg as the enemy of the Bolsheviks which is very seriously and officially taught in school programmes[3].

The stakes for the bourgeoisie today are to convince the most critical and recalcitrant elements that there is no other future than the defence of the democratic bourgeoisie. But behind this distortion there is also the campaign of the recuperation of Rosa Luxemburg by all sorts of democrats, with another unsaid objective, which is to discredit and demonise the real positions of revolutionary organisations.

Olga, November 7 2014

Over the last 40 years, the ICC in Britain has maintained a regular analysis of the situation in Britain – economic crisis, political manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, the UK’s imperialist role, and in particular the class struggle and the history of the workers’ movement. We are republishing here one of our first efforts to develop an overall understanding of the class struggle in the country where capitalism initially had its most impetuous development (from World Revolution No7, July 1976). The text addresses one of the main problems which still confront the class movement today – how to pass from immediate struggles of economic defence to a more global and political struggle based on a perspective of revolutionary social change. The ‘Theses’ provide some solid arguments about why this problem has been particularly marked in the working class in Britain, while at the same time examining the connection between this difficulty and the relatively weak tradition of revolutionary marxism in the UK. Subsequently, we have published a number of further studies which go deeper into this issue[1], but the basic approach in the Theses remains valid. Indeed, point 9 of the Theses could still be confidently written about the political milieu in Britain today: “....Sectarian rivalries between the different revolutionary groups; attachment to outmoded social democratic and syndicalist conceptions; above all the inability to understand the need for centralised organisation and political coherence were to obstruct the efforts of the British revolutionaries....” 

The text was written during one of the short periods of retreat in the class struggle which marked the period between 1968 and 1989. It predicts that the austerity measures then being introduced by the Labour government would provoke a strong reaction from the class – a perspective verified by the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979, and confirmed by subsequent movements of the class against the continuation of these attacks on its living standards orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.  However, as with other analyses of the class struggle by the ICC during this period, there is a tendency to underestimate the depth of the problem which is precisely the main focus of the Theses – the problem of politicisation – and thus to end with the hope that the passage to a higher level of class struggle would be far closer than it has turned out to be in reality. This is why we intend to produce some sequels to this text, aimed at elaborating a balance sheet of the class struggle in Britain in the four decades since the Theses were written – a period which has been marked by even greater challenges to the working class (the conscious counter-attack on the class mounted by the ‘right in power/left in opposition’ manoeuvres of the 80s, the defeat of the miners’ strike, the dismantling of traditional centres of working class militancy,  the ideological offensive around the collapse of the eastern bloc after 1989, and the onset of the phase of capitalist decomposition).

WR 23.6.2015

1. The evolution of the proletarian class struggle in Britain has been fundamentally determined by the fact that Britain was the motherland of industrial capitalism, the first capitalist nation. From the first trade clubs and combinations of the late eighteenth century, the British proletariat pioneered the struggle to resist the ferocious exploitation of early capitalism. The British proletariat evolved the form of organization most suited to this defensive struggle: the trade union, and thus set a heroic example to the workers of the whole world. But just as the global generalisation of capitalist relations of production was, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, to leave Britain lagging behind younger, more vigorous capitalisms, so the political development of the working class movement in Britain was to be severely retarded by the very factors which had been a source of strength for the movement in an earlier period.
    
2. The depth and tenacity of the trade union tradition in the British proletariat, the long period of struggle on an economic and reformist terrain, should not obscure the often violent political struggle which the proletariat of this country did embark upon in its early days. The secret armed associations organized by the Luddites; the ‘physical force’ wing of the Chartist movement: these and other tendencies testify to the existence of a genuinely insurrectionary tradition in the British working class and amply refute the notion of the eternally 'docile’ and ‘peaceful' British worker. Nevertheless, the political revolutionary element in the British workers’ movement has always been, at best, a secondary one.
    
3. The main reason for this was the strength and stability of British capitalism in its ascendant epoch. The British bourgeoisie, having made its political revolution at a very early stage of its historic development, was able to boast the stability and self-confidence that comes from long years of peaceful domination. This was in profound contrast, for example, to the French bourgeoisie, which was still engaging in violent struggle against feudal and reactionary elements until the second half of the nineteenth century, giving the French proletariat an experience of insurrection and confrontation with the state long before the epoch of its own social revolution had dawned. Over this period of stability and prosperity, in which Britain was ‘the workshop of the world’, the British bourgeoisie was able to evolve a political apparatus eminently suitable to the peaceful containment of the class struggle: the regime of parliamentary democracy. Above all, the strength of British capital enabled it to make substantial concessions to the working class on the social, economic and political fronts: systematic rises in real earnings, reductions in the working day, education, electoral and trade union rights, etc. The huge successes obtained by the British workers’ movement, through trade union struggles and through supporting progressive factions of the bourgeoisie in Parliament, were able to create in the workers’ movement a strong conviction in the immutable efficacy of these methods. In the leadership of the movement, the bourgeois ideas of empiricism, gradualism and compromise were to penetrate so deeply that Marx and Engels sometimes despaired of creating a communist minority within the British labour movement.
    
4. The development of communist ideas, of proletarian political theory and organization, thus did not find its most important expression in Britain, but in other national sectors of the workers’ movement. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, marxism as the theory of the proletarian revolution was developed by the revolutionary social democrats of Germany, Russia, and elsewhere. In Britain, the social democratic movement in its marxist form had but shallow roots. And despite the importance of organizations like Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and William Morris's Socialist League, their main reaction to the dominant empiricism and reformism in the British labour movement was a sectarian purism, an abstract disdain for the day-to-day struggles of the class. These attitudes tended to isolate them from the class movement and thus to enforce its economism.
    
5. In contrast to other nations, where the social democratic parties had been largely instrumental in setting up the trade unions, Britain did not acquire a mass social democratic party until the trade unions were faced with the necessity of creating an independent political party to defend their interests in Parliament. Because of the deeply conservative tendencies of the trade union leadership at that time, the emergence of the Labour Party in 1908 as the political wing of the trade unions could only accentuate the reformist character of this party. But more important, the Labour Party was established at a time when the revisionist, gradualist, and class-collaborationist tendencies of international social democracy had all but completed its effective integration into bourgeois society. In contrast to the Social Democratic Party of Germany and parties elsewhere, the Labour Party at its inception had no pretensions to be a revolutionary, or even a socialist party. The Labour Party was created too late to serve as an organ of reformist struggle of the class, but early enough to be used as a powerful weapon of bourgeois mystification in the era of capitalist decline that was clearly dawning by the beginning of this century.
    
6. In reaction to the growing bourgeoisification of the craft-based trade unions, but in essential continuity with the anti-political current which had grown up in the British workers’ movement, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a considerable development of Syndicalist tendencies within the British working class. Syndicalist and industrial unionist ideas played an important part in the struggles which gave birth to unskilled workers’ unions in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and in the process of amalgamation and centralization which led to the creation of big industrial unions in the 1900s: miners, railwaymen, transport workers. The militancy of the syndicalist current was amply demonstrated during the huge strike waves which swept the country between 1910 and 1914; and the influence of syndicalist ideas on the revolutionary minorities of the class could be seen in the programme of the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party, the emergence of a British section of the IWW and the penetration of industrial unionist ideas into other socialist organizations. The shop stewards and workers’ committee movement, which emerged during World War I as an elemental class response to the integration of the official trade union apparatus into the imperialist war machine of the state, was in essential continuity with this syndicalist tradition.
    
7. The imperialist war of l914-18, which put a temporary halt on the preceding strike waves, gave shattering proof of the integration of the unions and the Labour Party into the capitalist state, in common with the unions and social democratic parties of the world. By calling for an ‘industrial truce’ for the duration of the war - a truce which was a prelude to the militarization of labour and the outlawing of strikes - and by calling on the workers to sacrifice themselves in the interest of the ‘nation’, the unions and the Labour Party proved their value to the bourgeoisie at this critical juncture, but were irrevocably lost to the proletariat.
    
8. But if the war marked the definitive passage of the unions and social democracy into the camp of the bourgeoisie, it also demonstrated the inadequacy of syndicalism as a response to the new conditions of class struggle posed by the advent of capitalist decadence. As in Russia, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, the proletariat in Britain began to engage in a bitter class resistance as the barbarity of the war stripped it of most of the gains it had made in decades of reformist struggles. The munitions, engineering and miners’ strikes during the war, and above all the massive general strikes in the Clyde and Belfast in 1919, were a formidable part of the revolutionary wave which swept the world after l917. Together with the stirrings of revolt in the army and navy, these struggles showed that a revolutionary situation was maturing in Britain as well as in continental Europe. The bourgeoisie’s recognition of this was demonstrated as much by the sending of troops and tanks to the Clyde in 1919 as by the government‘s ignominious climb-down in the face of the movement against British intervention in Soviet Russia in 1920. But if the bourgeoisie was able to recognize an objectively revolutionary situation, the leadership thrown up by the class struggle - the shop stewards and militants of the different socialist groups - proved unable to recognise it. Syndicalist ideas of seizing or gradually taking over industry as a way of abolishing capitalism; localist prejudices; the failure to link up the workers’ strikes to the revolts in the armed forces; above all the inability to see the necessity for the working class to centralise its struggle into a political assault on the capitalist state, into a fight for the soviet dictatorship: all these shortcomings were to make it impossible for the mass strikes in Britain to take on a clearly insurrectionary character and thus link up with the proletarian revolution in Europe and Russia. These failings in the leadership of the class in turn reflected the inability of the British class as a whole to break out of the limitations of a trade unionist and reformist tradition, and to face up to the revolutionary tasks imposed by the new epoch.
    
9. The hesitancy of the general class movement in Britain was also reflected in the difficulties encountered by revolutionaries in this country in regrouping themselves into a centralized organization with a clear communist programme. As in Germany where the Communist Party was not constituted until the revolution had already got underway, so the Communist Party of Great Britain was not set up until 1920-1, when the main wave of struggle had already passed its peak. Sectarian rivalries between the different revolutionary groups; attachment to outmoded social democratic and syndicalist conceptions; above all the inability understand the need for centralised organisation and political coherence were to obstruct the efforts of the British revolutionaries to form a really effective Communist Party. And when the CPGB was finally established, largely thanks to the intervention of the Communist International, it was to be profoundly marred by the signs of degeneration that were already clearly apparent in the International. With the full support of the Comintern leadership, the CPGB adopted a programme shot through with opportunist tactics: participation in Parliament and trade unions, application for affiliation to the Labour Party, etc. The left wing communists were isolated and finally pushed aside, while the CPGB leadership became one of the most loyal travellers along the CI's path to class betrayal. When the Stalinist counter-revolution finally delivered the coup de grace to the International, the CPGB could only lamely follow the rest of its parties into the camp of the bourgeoisie.
    
10. In the struggle for a coherent revolutionary regroupment in the years 1914-24, there were some notable exceptions to the general confusion that prevailed in the British workers’ movement: in particular the left wing of the British Socialist Party under John Maclean, who took a clear revolutionary defeatist position against the imperialist war; and the group around Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers‘ Dreadnought, which led the fight against the opportunist tactics of the CI and the CPGB. In the years 1917-24, the Dreadnought provided a vital focus for the elaboration of communist positions. Pankhurst’s was the first tendency in Britain to establish real links with the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern; and it was the first to provide a forum for the struggle of the left communists against the degeneration of the CI; in particular the Russian left communists, the KAPD (the Communist Workers‘ Party of Germany) and the KAI (Communist Workers’ International), with which the Pankhurst group attempted to regroup through a British Communist Workers‘ Party (CWP, subsequently the Communist Workers’ Movement). But if the Dreadnought was a real expression of proletarian resistance to the growing opportunism of the Third International, it has also had severe weaknesses on the theoretical plane, expressing themselves in a tendency towards syndicalism and immediatism. These weaknesses made it impossible for the Pankhurst group to sustain itself after the revolutionary wave had subsided, to carry on the new tasks imposed by the onset of the counter-revolution. In other words, to carry out the theoretical reflection and preparation which are the work of the communist fraction in a period of reflux. The disappearance of the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1924 was also the disappearance of any real left communist tradition in Britain until today, a factor which has weighed heavily on the newly emerging communist movement.
     
11. The weakness of the revolutionary movement in Britain, in conjunction with the momentary advantages won by British capital through its ‘victory’ in the imperialist war, allowed the British bourgeoisie to avoid a catastrophic confrontation with the class in the immediate post-war period. Through a series of temporary concessions, and through the counter-revolutionary manoeuvres of its left-wing agents, British capital weathered the revolutionary storm. But in fact the war had effectively deprived British imperialism of its former world supremacy. Lagging far behind its more dynamic US rival, British capital was struck with considerable savagery by the 1921 world economic crisis. In this situation the British bourgeoisie had no alternative but to launch a massive counter-offensive against the proletariat, in order to regain a competitive position on the world market. This attack - in the form of wage-cuts, lock-outs, and redundancies - was bound to lead to a new confrontation with a proletariat that had not yet suffered the huge physical defeats undergone by the Russian and European workers. This confrontation was narrowly avoided in 1921, due to the ‘betrayal’ of the Triple Alliance on ‘Black Friday’, and again in 1925 when the bourgeoisie retreated from a major clash in order to prepare its repressive forces (the so-called ‘Red Friday’). In the context of a declining world revolutionary wave, these delays could only function to the advantage of the bourgeoisie. The final confrontation came when the revolutionary wave had almost entirely exhausted itself in Europe: 1926.
     
12. The General Strike of 1926 was thus the last flicker of the revolutionary wave in Europe, but the British proletariat went into battle with all the forces of the counter-revolution ranged against it: not only the Conservative Government of Baldwin and Churchill, which had meticulously prepared itself to deal with the strike - but also the so-called ‘workers’ organizations’, the trade unions and the Labour Party, which did everything they could to keep the strike within the bounds of a respectable ‘industrial dispute’. The Stalinised Communist Party meanwhile provided a ‘left’ cover for this counter-revolutionary concert. Despite the militant spirit of the workers, despite local attempts at self-organization and at raising the level of struggle, the class found itself caught up in the sheer impossibility of a simple ‘general strike’ in the epoch of decadence. Failing to go onto the stage of insurrection, the strike could only fall back in defeat. Because of the isolation imposed on the struggle by the decline of the international revolution, the workers found it impossible to shatter the stranglehold of the forces of the counter-revolution in their own midst, and were finally abandoned to their fate by the shameless retreat of the unions. The demoralization and disarray caused by this defeat were to weigh heavily on the consciousness of the class for decades.
     
13. Its spirit finally broken by the collapse of the 1926 strike, the working class in Britain found itself almost completely incapable of resisting the effects of the 1929 world crisis, which began to hit Britain with appalling intensity in 1931. The utter prostration of the class movement was symbolised by charades like the Jarrow Hunger March, in which the workers were reduced to begging capitalism for the meanest crumbs. Along with the rest of the world proletariat, the workers in Britain found themselves being beaten further and further into the ground by the depression years, until they were ready for mobilization into the imperialist war of 1939-45, capital’s ‘solution’ to the crisis. In the work of mobilizing the class with the call to ‘defend democracy’ and ‘fight fascism’, the unions and the Labour Party once again proved their importance as organs of the bourgeoisie; and this time they were ably assisted by the Communist Party, the newly-reconstituted shop stewards movement, and the Trotskyists, all of whom demanded the defence of the ‘socialist fatherland’ in Russia.
     
14. Having learned its lessons from the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, the world bourgeoisie did all it could to make sure that the end of the 1939-45 war did not give rise to another proletarian outburst. It thus combined a savage repression of the isolated workers’ revolts that did occur (Italy, Germany, East Europe, Vietnam), with a series of conciliatory methods aimed at convincing the proletariat that its struggle against fascism had not been in vain. It became necessary to integrate the class into the running of society: in France, the Communist Party was brought into the government to encourage the workers in the ‘reconstruction’ of capitalism, while in Britain a Labour Government came to power, pledged to the building of a ‘Welfare State’ for the benefit of the working people.
     
15. Despite the austerity of the post-war years, the reconstruction gave world capitalism a breathing space of unprecedented length. In Britain the temporary expansion of markets gave rise to all the illusions of prosperity, of a ‘consumer society’. The 1950s and early 1960s was thus the period in which the workers were told that they ‘had never had it so good’, a period of social calm and stability presided over by a complacent Conservative administration. During this period, which was actually one of ever-increasing rates of exploitation in exchange for a few consumer ‘perks‘, there was an important development of unofficial strikes, especially in the car industry, where the militant spirit of the workers set an example for the whole class. But the impact of these strikes could at that time be absorbed by economic concessions which removed the threat of their breaking out of local and sectional confines.
     
16. The re-emergence of the world capitalist crisis in the late 1960s led in Britain, as it did all over the globe, to a resurgence of class struggle on a scale not seen for nearly fifty years. The high point of this resurgence was the year 1972, the year of the national miners’ strike, the building workers’ strike and the London dockers’ struggle which exploded into an unofficial general strike that filled the bourgeoisie with near panic. In these and other strikes, the class began to engage in forms of struggle which extended the autonomy and scope of the strikes towards open confrontation with the repressive forces of the state: occupations, flying pickets, unofficial strike committees. In particular the antagonism between the class and the trade unions was more and more revealed through these struggles.
     
17. Since 1972, however, there has been a definite decline in class combativity with the notable exception of some large-scale outbursts - like the miners’ strike and the Scottish strike wave of 1971 - and certain localized strikes in which workers have achieved some autonomy from the union apparatus (Imperial Typewriters 1974), or come directly up against the state (Glasgow firemen 1973, Glasgow dustmen 1975). 1975 saw the lowest number of strikes since the onset of the crisis, and this despite the huge growth in unemployment, continually rising prices and increased exploitation which is the lot of the class in Britain as everywhere else today.
     
18. Even at its highest points, the new wave of class struggle in Britain has not yet reached the same level as it has in countries such as Spain, Argentina and Poland. This is in great part due to the strength of the democratic and trade union apparatus in which the British bourgeoisie, one of the most sophisticated and experienced ruling classes in the world, is still able to imprison the proletariat. The continued importance of the electoral circus, and more particularly of the Labour Party, as a means of sabotaging the class struggle, was demonstrated by the 1974 election which put an end to the dangers posed by the miners’ strike and the three-day week. And although the majority of strikes are unofficial and are opposed by the trade union bureaucracy, they do not often elude the control of the shop stewards who remain the indispensable ‘shock absorbers’ of the unions and thus of the state within the factory. Although this is basically a reflection of the persistence of sectional and localist illusions in the class, the active role of the shop stewards in derailing and containing the workers’ struggles must be recognized and denounced by revolutionaries; in the same way, the activities of the various leftist groups – Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc - must be attacked as so many ways of mystifying the class and diverting its struggle towards reactionary and fraudulent goals (nationalisations, self-management, the ‘right to work’, etc).
     
19. If the struggle of the British proletariat has in a general way been held back by democratic and trade unionist mystifications, the sector of the class in Ireland has been more particularly kept in line through the mystifications of nationalism and religious chauvinism, both of the ‘Loyalist-Protestant’ and ‘Republican-Catholic’ varieties. In a historical epoch in which so-called national liberation struggles everywhere can only have a reactionary character, the struggle between different factions of the bourgeoisie in Ireland seeking a 'national’ solution to the ‘Irish problem’ can offer nothing to the working class. On the contrary, the continuing inability of the British and Irish bourgeoisie to establish a political framework capable of mediating these conflicts expresses the historical weakness of capitalism in this region and its inability to face up to the hammer blows of the world economic crisis. The result of this is a barbarous social decomposition in which the working class in Northern Ireland is caught in a murderous crossfire between the different nationalist gangs (UDA, IRA, etc) and the ‘official’ forces of state repression. To support any of these forces is simply to participate in the mobilisation and slaughter of the proletariat; the only way for the working class in Ireland to extricate itself from this impasse is to find its own class terrain, rejecting the national and religious divisions imposed by capital and integrating itself into the mainstream of the international class struggle. This necessarily implies a merciless struggle against all the nationalist forces and all forms of bourgeois state power.
     
20. British capital is one of the weakest of all the advanced capitals. The brutal intensification of the crisis in this country is something that no government can possibly avoid, no matter how many measures of state intervention or financial juggling it resorts to. Today the British bourgeoisie, gaining in confidence because of the low level of class struggle, has felt able to begin the frontal attack on the working class which the crisis demands, although the full brunt of this attack is yet to come. With the full co-operation of the unions, the Labour government has launched a programme of wage freezes, lay-offs, and cuts in social welfare spending. For the moment the reaction of the British working class has been cautious in the extreme; it is as though it is waiting to see whether by ‘pulling in its belt’ for the time being, it will be able to benefit from the ‘upturn’ in the economy which, as the bourgeoisie never tires of saying, is ‘just round the corner’.
     
21. But since the crisis will not disappear with the prayers of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat will sooner or later be forced to realise the uselessness of going along with the austerity measures of the bourgeois state; similarly it will more and more discover the ineffectiveness of sectional struggles as a way of defending its living standards. Although the transition to a higher level of struggle may not be on the immediate agenda in Britain, when it does occur it will probably be very brusque and unexpectedly violent, shattering the myth of the ‘moderate’ British working class. This is precisely because of the fact that, while the democratic and trade union apparatus has been used to such good effect by the British bourgeoisie, the very utilization of these weapons over such a long period of time is now more and more revealing their rottenness and decay. The workers’ awareness of this decay has built up over the decades in a gradual, almost subterranean way, expressing itself in a widespread cynicism and disillusion with the 'workers’ organizations’. But once this merely passive cynicism is transformed through a series of bitter struggles into a conscious and active political understanding of the nature of the so-called ‘workers organisations’, it will become clear that the lessons of the last sixty years have not been lost to the class in Britain.
     
22. When this transition to a higher level of struggle does occur, it is bound to confront the trade union apparatus with considerable fury because of the identification of the unions with the whole regime of austerity which is currently being foisted on to the class. The overt confrontation with the unions will be the signal for the appearance in Britain of those radical forms of struggle which have already sprung up in other countries: mass assemblies, wildcat strike committees completely outside the control of the stewards, generalized struggles affecting whole towns and regions, direct conflict with the repressive forces of the state.
     
23. In these deepening struggles, the proletariat in Britain will forge the consciousness of the necessity to join together with the workers of the whole world in the violent assault on the capitalist state. In the battle to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale, the proletariat in Britain will at last realize its immense potential strength, and will constitute one of the most important bastions of the world revolution.

WR July 1976

Seventy years ago in Hiorshima,on August 6 1945, more than a hundred thousand of its inhabitants were atrociously pulverised, being used as a target in a grand demonstration of the new US nuclear force.  According to official figures, close to 70,000 perished in the initial explosion and thousands of others suffered the same fate in the days that followed[1]. Three days later on August 9, a second bomb exploded above Nagasaki killing a similarly terrifying number of victims. The barbarity and suffering inflicted on so many people is hardly conceivable.

Thus, as we wrote in 2005, on the 50th anniversary of this event: “In order to justify such a crime, and to answer the legitimate shock provoked by the bomb’s awful effects, Truman - the US president who ordered the nuclear holocaust - and his accomplice Winston Churchill put about a cynical lie: that the use of the atomic bomb had saved about a million lives, which would have been lost had American troops been forced to invade Japan. In short, and despite appearances, the bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and which are still killing fifty years later, were pacifist bombs! But this peculiarly revolting tale is given the lie by numerous historical studies published by the bourgeoisie itself”.

When one looks at the military situation of Japan at the time when Germany capitulated, we can see that the former was already virtually beaten. Its aviation, an essential arm of the Second World War, was almost finished, reduced to a small number of machines generally piloted by a handful of adolescents who were as fanatical as they were inexperienced. The navy, merchant as well as military, was practically destroyed. Anti-aircraft defences covered only a small area of the sky, which explains why the B29’s were able to carry out thousands of attacks throughout spring 1945 with practically no losses. And Churchill himself admitted as much in volume 12 of his memoirs!

A study by the American secret services of 1945, published by the New York Times in 1989, revealed that: “Conscious of defeat, the Emperor of Japan decided on June 20 1945 to cease all hostilities and open up talks on July 11 with a view to the cessation of hostilities”[2]. And since in capitalist society cynicism and contempt have neither limits nor frontiers, we can only recall that the survivors of these explosions, the “hibakusha”, have only been recognised as victims by the state from the year 2000[3].

Concerning the real objective of these bombardments, here’s what we wrote in 2005:

“Contrary to all the lies that have been peddled since 1945, about the supposed victory of a democracy synonymous with peace, World War II was barely over than the new front line of imperialist confrontation was being drawn. Just as the Treaty of Versailles contained inevitably within it the seeds of another war, so Yalta already contained the split between the main victor of 1945, the USA, and its Russian challenger. Thanks to World War II, Russia had risen from being a minor economic power to world ranking imperialism, which could not but threaten the American superpower. In spring 1945, the USSR was already using its military strength to carve out a bloc in Eastern Europe. Yalta did nothing but caution the existing balance of forces between the main imperialist sharks. What one balance of forces could set up, another could undo. In the summer of 1945, the real problem facing the American state was thus not, as the schoolbooks tell us, how to make Japan capitulate as soon as possible, but how to confront and contain the imperialist drive of its ‘great Russian ally’”.

In reality it was on the basis of aggravated imperialist tensions that the nuclear arms race began before 1945. A great capitalist power worthy of the name could only maintain its ranking on the imperialist scene and be taken seriously by its rivals by showing them that it possessed, or better still showed that it could make use of nuclear arms. This is particularly true for countries that were “bloc leaders” which by then were made up of the United   States and the USSR. Ranged behind one or the other, the other great powers could only fall into line. From 1949, the Russians started tests for their own bomb. In 1952, it was the turn of the British. In 1960, the very French “Gerboise bleue” showed in its turn its nuclear power at Reggane, in the Algerian Sahara. During this whole time one could say without exaggeration that there were hundreds of nuclear tests with consequences on the environment (and sometimes on surrounding populations) that the states have kept quiet about. Beyond this crazy race between the USA and the USSR to deploy a still-greater quantity of these types of arms, unrelenting research was undertaken in order to maximise their power of destruction. If the bombs of 1945 were a moment of intense cruelty in the history of capitalist barbarism, they are far from the culminating point of the destructive potential of existing arms.

Capitalist barbarism has no limits! As if the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t just a foretaste of what decadent capitalism is capable of producing, the Americans went to another level in 1952 with the explosion of “Ivy Mike”, the famous H-Bomb with a power of 10.4 megatons, six times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb! And who can forget the “Tsar Bomba” that the Russians exploded over the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya (Arctic Russia) in 1961. With a power of more than 50 megatons it literally vitrified the soil over a radius of 25 km and destroyed wooden buildings hundreds of kilometres away. The army was satisfied with the idea that the heat of the radiation produced caused third degree burns over a radius of more than 100km.  From a formal point of view the big nuclear powers of the United States, Russia, the UK and France, signed a non-proliferation pact (NPT) in 1968. This agreement, which was supposed to halt the proliferation of nuclear arms, had only a very limited impact. It is just as hypocritical as the Kyoto Accords against global warming! Since the NPT came into effect in 1970 several countries have to be added to the list: India, China, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Further there’s a list of countries whose possession of nuclear weapons is a matter of discussion between bourgeois factions: Iran of course, but also Brazil which is suspected of developing a nuclear programme[4], Saudi Arabia and Syria whose nuclear reactor in Damascus was much talked about. In short, it is clear that “non-proliferation” is only a pious wish essentially aimed at masking the sordid reality of the trafficking of nuclear materials. In a system based on competition and relations of force, the idea of a return to reason can only be a pure mystification. Since the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the blocs in 1990, military instability has progressively gained ground in all zones of the planet. The international situation shows us this on a daily basis. It’s a real process of decomposition which generates still more barbarity and irrationality. It is within this framework that we should put the announcement by Putin on June 16, according to which: “Russia is going to strengthen its nuclear arsenal with the deployment of more than forty new inter-continental missiles from here to the end of the year (...). This announcement was made on the basis of the aggravation of tensions between Russia and the United States, whose plans to deploy heavy weapons in Europe revealed by the New York Times have provoked anger in Moscow”[5]. On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the nuclear holocaust, such a declaration is a significant marker of the putrefaction into which capitalist society is sinking[6].

The working class, the sole class bearing a perspective for the future of humanity, is thus also the only class capable of putting an end to the barbaric wars of the imperialist powers. The proletariat cannot let itself be panicked by the horror of which the capitalist class is capable and it cannot remain paralysed faced with the attacks from the latter. It’s true that the atrocity of August 1945 and of war in general generates fear. And for good reason! In the troubled game of capitalist competition, the bourgeoisie always wants to wipe out its rivals. The only real brake on this barbarity is the level of consciousness of the revolutionary class and its capacity for outrage at the horror of a decomposing society.

Finally, let’s remember that summer 2015 is also the 110th anniversary (June 27 1905) of the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, though the media is much more discreet about this. Here the Russian sailors, scandalised by the contempt shown to them by their officers and worn out by the war with Japan, turned their guns against them and stood up in one of the heroic moments of the history of the workers’ movement[7]. It’s not tears of despair, but rather outrage and the will to fight which bear the promise of the construction of a communist society.

Tim, July 2 2015

What is the significance, for the working class, of the first Tory majority government in 18 years? It is certainly going to mean even more draconian cuts in benefits, as we show elsewhere in this issue. On a wider scale the results of the election have reinforced the state’s offensive against the proletariat at the ideological level. This is as important as its actions at the economic level. The new political line up of the British state’s democratic facade has the aim of deepening the sense of disorientation within the working class in order to weaken its ability to develop its struggle, and above all its capacity to offer an alternative perspective to the hell of decaying capitalism. Thus the proletariat can expect a whole array of ideological attacks to be launched against it.

Democratic campaigns

The central theme of the current democratic campaigns is the idea that each ‘citizen’ can contribute to the political process. This was exemplified by the election itself. There was the constant message that the outcome of the election was in the balance, could go either way, thus it was important to vote. The polls showed Labour and Tories nearly neck and neck; there was the idea that UKIP may make a break through; in Scotland the question was would Labour mobilize enough votes to stop the SNP decimating the number of Labour MPs? These questions were endlessly debated on the news. The whole message was this: voting could make a difference.

All the “surprise” at the results and the opinion polls getting it so wrong was guff. The secret polls carried out by the parties and the state showed the Tories would win. Also looking at the political situation made it clear the Tories would win. The Liberal Democrats signed their own death certificate when they joined the Coalition and agreed to rises in university tuition fees and other blatant attacks. The SNP’s crushing of Labour in Scotland was hardly a surprise, given that the SNP set itself up as the radical opposition to the austerity measures that Labour quietly accepted. As for UKIP, this populist bogeyman served its role in stoking up the anti-immigrant atmosphere during the election: the others parties used them as a justification for making their own contribution to this poison, but then cast Farage and Co. aside and left them in disarray. The BNP had suffered the same fate previously.

The election campaign has also served to continue the nationalist campaigns around questions such as should Scottish MPs vote on matters related to England, or should there be an English assembly like in Scotland and Wales? During the election itself the threat of the SNP forming an alliance with Labour was used to scare voters. The election, like the Scottish referendum before it, has reinforced nationalist illusions in parts of the working class. In Scotland, which has a long history of proletarian militancy, the working class is confronted with an openly nationalist party representing itself as the radical alternative, as the only real opposition to the Tories.

This democratic circus is not going to stop now the election is behind us. There is now the prospect of months of ceaseless campaigning around the referendum about European Union membership. Workers will be called on see their interests as the same as those of the ruling class and to throw their weight into this ‘decisive’ historical vote. This will add further confusion and divisions as we are told we have to choose a side in this referendum, which will also stir up a new hornets’ nest of nationalism and xenophobia.

The idea of democracy as a British value is also a central theme in the whole anti-terrorism campaign. The politicians were falling over themselves to take full advantage of the barbaric massacre of tourists in Tunisia to use the argument that in order to defend democracy it would be necessary to impose even more draconian anti-terror laws and measures.

Imperialist interests

The referendum on European membership is not simply a democratic circus. It is also an important part of the British bourgeoisie’s attempt to counter the efforts of its historical European imperialist rivals, France and above all Germany, to draw the EU under greater centralised control. The Eurozone crisis has seen German capitalism strengthening its dominant economic and political role in the EU. British imperialism on the other hand wants to use the referendum to reinforce its distinctive role in Europe – hence its drive to re-negotiate the rules of membership, aimed at undermining German and French efforts to strengthen them. It’s a mark of the confidence of the British ruling class, that it has called a referendum on the EU so quickly after the election. It would not do such a thing if it felt it would not get the right result. This demonstrates to those inclined to support British efforts to counter-balance Germany, such as Holland, that the British ruling class is not playing fast and loose with EU membership. The majority and strongest fraction of the British bourgeoisie is pro-EU, and it has reason to hope that the referendum will deliver a powerful defeat to the Eurosceptic fraction which crosses both Labour and Conservative Parties.

The new government is also seeking to take advantage of the growing chaos in Syria and the wider actions of Islamic State to regain the confidence of the population about military action abroad. Recent parliamentary debates about whether Britain should join in the bombing of Islamic State in Syria, rather than just in Iraq, have cleverly used the idea that the government has learnt the lessons of the debacle over Iraq. One of the central tasks of the Coalition government was to overcome popular distrust in the state’s military actions following the Iraq war and the blatant lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The last government defeat two years ago over the bombing of Assad in Syria is being presented as a lesson learned, as proof that the new government’s proposals for action will take much more account of the democratic will of parliament. Again we see the bourgeoisie cynically using the bloodbath in Syria and the rise of Islamic State to further its own imperialist aims, above all its efforts to mobilise the population behind its military actions.

Terror and the climate of fear

As with the previous government and the Labour government before that, the new team is making every effort to whip up a climate of fear in the population. The murders in Tunisia and the cases of British citizens running off to join IS in Syria are the most recent excuses for strengthening the state’s repression of the population. The government instruction that teachers must test children for signs of ‘radicalisation’ and inform the police and social services if they have any suspicions is another step in the integration of teachers, social workers and health workers into the work of the secret police. All such workers have to attend education classes about extremism and the defence of “British values”, and are expected to cooperate with the police and security services. This is an integration of the “social” face of the state into the repressive apparatus that would impress the old Stalinist and fascist regimes.

These anti-terrorist measures fit in with the state’s need to keep control of elements who might link up with hostile imperialist forces, but they will be unleashed on the working class and its revolutionary minorities in the future. Already the new guidelines for identifying ‘extremists’ includes anyone opposed to the bourgeoisie’s democratic apparatus and in favour of its forcible overthrow.

The loyal opposition

The right has emerged from the election with renewed strength, whilst Labour is in a “historic crisis”, or so we are told. Labour is engulfed in a leadership campaign between Blairites and one hard left candidate in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn who is not seen as a serious contender. The other candidates talk mainly about the need to reconnect with the “core vote”, to deal more realistically with the question of immigration, to be open about the necessity to make more cuts, to be the party of the Centre etc.  At a time when the working class is suffering huge attacks it seems strange that the left face of the capitalist state is seeking to distance itself even further from the class, but this is a well thought-out strategy to reinforce the proletariat’s loss of confidence in its ability to struggle against these attacks and to be able offer an alternative. The whole New Labour project was based on reinforcing the disorientation in the working class following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, with its rejection of Labour’s old-fashioned “socialist policies”, and its emphasis on the democratic citizen and ‘the people’.

Since the election there have been some small expressions of discontent, such as the unexpectedly large “anti-austerity” demonstrations called by the leftist Peoples’ Assembly umbrella group in June, but these were well controlled events. Such discontent will mount but it will be trapped in the idea that the Tories are to blame for cuts in living standards, not the capitalist system. This new anti-Toryism, which was so powerful in the 1980s and early 1990s, leads nowhere but to looking to Labour and the trade unions to defend the working class, offering the working class a false choice between the left and right faces of British state capitalism. 

Phil, 4.7.15

Tory Chancellor George Osborne is set in the July Budget to announce details of the new phase of the Spending Review which will undoubtedly continue the vicious attacks on benefits which have continued to hit the very poorest sectors of the working class under Labour and Coalition governments.

David Cameron has hinted at a plan to raid Working Tax Credit Benefits. He justified these cuts by wanting to abolish the ‘merry-go-round’ of benefits paid to people in work. Cameron has had the gall to make low pay part of his case for cuts. He argued, “We need to move from a low wage, high tax, high welfare society to a higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare society.”

We cannot say precisely where the cuts will fall but the Tory election manifesto gave some important indications of the areas they are aiming at:

• Cut working-age social security spending by £12bn.
• Cap overall welfare spending over the course of the next parliament.
• Freeze the value of working age benefits for two years from April 2016.
• Deliver the universal credit reform of most existing welfare benefits.
• Lower the household benefits cap from £26,000 to £23,000.
• Reduce benefits for drug-addicted or obese claimants who refuse medical treatment to enable them to return to work, and force sick and disabled claimants to undergo psychological treatment

In a leaked exposé leaked before the election, Danny Alexander, the former Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, said that in June 2012, members of an inner group of senior cabinet members were sent a paper by the Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith that involved:

• Limiting support to 2 children in child benefit and child tax credit, so cutting up to £3500 from a family with three children.
• Removing the higher rate child benefit from the first child, an average cut of over £360 for every family with children.
• Means-testing child benefit – cutting £1750 for a two child middle income family
• Removing child benefit from 16 to 19 year olds – a cut of over £1000 for parents of a single child.
• Removing housing benefits for 18 to 21 year olds.

The director general of the right-leaning Institute for Economic Affairs think-tank supports the need for making savings in the welfare budget, but has said that the composition of the proposed cuts “looks set to be extremely unfair on the working age population […] simply salami-slicing the value of tax credits will hit certain households hard”[1].

Another area where the axe is due to fall is incapacity benefits. ‘Reforming’ incapacity benefit, crystallised in the notorious fit-for-work tests carried out by Atos, was a major PR disaster for the Coalition. Today, Atos has been replaced with a new agency – Maximus - but this body still has the function of throwing as many claimants off benefits as possible. The Tories promise to push on with this, and with parallel reductions in the numbers of people receiving disability benefits, “so that help goes to those who really need it”.

Labour isn’t against austerity

This list of attacks planned by the new government could be greatly extended, but they already demonstrate that the Tories will ruthlessly accelerate the attacks on working class living standards carried out under the Coalition.

But just in case anyone should think that these attacks are the invention of the Tories, let’s recall that the Coalition merely kept up the attacks of the previous Labour governments of Blair and Brown:

“The consequences of Labour’s welfare reforms were devastating. 52,399 benefit sanctions were inflicted on Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants in March 2010.  This was twice the number from just two years earlier and more than the 51,142 sanctions handed out by the Tories in September 2014…  

“In March 2010 the number of people on sickness benefits who had their benefits stopped for failure to carry out work related activity hit a high of 3,673. This is just slightly below the 3,828 sanctions handed out to this group in September 2014.

“To hear the current rhetoric from the TUC, you would think that mass benefit sanctions were a Tory invention.  TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady recently released a statement saying ‘Under this government the sanctions system has become a cruel maze in which it is all too easy for claimants to lose cash for minor breaches of rules and random decisions’. This was in response to a report showing the desperate toll that sanctions were taking on lone parents and most importantly their children. As far back as 2008 the government’s own experts, the Social Security Advisory Committee, recommended that lone parents should not face sanctions.  The Labour government rejected this advice”. (Johnnie Void, 8/3/15, posted on the The Void)

Cutting working class living standards, subjecting proletarians to increased surveillance and repression, is not an ‘ideological’ choice of this or that bourgeois party. It is a remorseless necessity for the state in its defence of the profitability of the national economy in the face of an irresolvable economic crisis and the fierce competition of other nation states. Capitalist profit and human need are irreconcilably opposed.  

Melmoth 28/6/15

When the Greek government decided at short notice to call a referendum it was clear that the differences between the Syriza-led coalition and the IMF/ECB/EC Troika were minimal. When it came to the referendum campaign the differences between No and Yes sides, despite much melodramatic language, were, therefore, also limited.

Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis accused the Troika of trying to “humiliate” Greece.  “Why have they forced us to close the banks? To frighten people. And when it’s about spreading terror, that is known as terrorism.” (El Mundo 4/7/15) Syriza claim that the purpose of the referendum was to improve the negotiating position of the Greek state. Meanwhile, the proponents of the Yes vote warned of the disastrous consequences of an exit from the Eurozone and the possibilities of leaving the EU.

Both sides mobilised the population as so many atomised individuals blindly following the campaigns of the bourgeoisie. A Greek professor quoted in the New York Times (3/7/15) said “There is no discussion of the real issues … They are exaggerating the feelings of fear and agony and creating an atmosphere that makes it impossible for anyone to think clearly.” Thinking clearly is something that the bourgeoisie discourages at every opportunity. What it needs are millions trooping into polling stations to express their passivity in the face of the bourgeoisie’s economic attacks.

Negotiating austerity

When the coalition led by Syriza assumed office after January’s election it claimed that it would end austerity. Many naively believed that this was possible. The negotiations with the Troika were undertaken in an atmosphere of charge and counter-charge. However, as the June 30 deadline approached, when Greece would default if there was no agreement producing new funds, it seemed as though agreement was imminent. But the Greek government walked out of talks a few days before the deadline. Even after the deadline Syriza continued to make concessions on the measures proposed by the Troika.

In the end the sticking points were matters of detail. The Greek government accepted most of the proposed changes to VAT, with the exception of the special treatment of the Greek islands. It accepted most of the attacks on pensions, but not all. On defence cuts there were initially no concessions made by Syriza at all. After all national defence is one of the central concerns of every capitalist state, whether led by a party of the left, right or centre. In the end what was offered by the Greek state was close to what was demanded by the Troika.

As far as the austerity experienced in Greece over the last five years is concerned the prospect is only for the situation to worsen. The US and the IMF might speak more of restructuring debt relief, the EC/ECB more of the particular measures that must be introduced, and Syriza more about the suffering of the Greek people. No one can offer any improvements in the actual conditions of life of those living in Greece. Both Yes and No campaigns, apart from describing the impossible horrors of supporting the other side, insisted that following them would restore Greek pride. Both sides posed things in terms of the Greek nation, the Greek people and the Greek economy. Nationalists tell us that Greek workers should be proud of the fact that the Greeks work among the longest hours in Europe, despite the fact that this shows them to be among the least productive. The quality of Greek agriculture is often extolled, and yet 70% of food consumed in Greece is imported. In the final analysis Greek capitalism has proven uncompetitive and has lost out to larger and stronger economies. The problems of the Greek economy are not due to the particular Hellenic problems of corruption and the non-payment of taxes (widespread though they are), but are an expression of the international crisis of decadent capitalism.

In reality in Greece there is no prospect for a reduction in unemployment, many taxes rise, wages and pensions will be further reduced, the age of retirement will go up to 67, and further public services will decline because of a lack of viability. In practice, for all their talk of opposition to austerity, Syriza have shown themselves in continuity with the governments of New Democracy and Pasok that preceded it.

Fomenting divisions within the working class

If the population in Greece has suffered the rigours of sustained austerity, it is not unique. The economic crisis of capitalism, as it worsens, always means the capitalist class will make the working class, and other non-exploiting strata of the population, pay … in reduced wages, lost jobs, higher prices, cut services, and ultimately in imperialist war. The anti-austerity rhetoric of parties such as Syriza is exposed as just so many words as soon as they are part of government.

But the working class does not only suffer from privation and pauperisation, it also faces capitalism’s ideology and its apparatus of democracy. In Greece, in the past there have been many general strikes ‘against austerity’, but these have been very much initiated, controlled and divided by the rival union federations. Far from developing any sense of class identity or the possibility of autonomous action, the unions have pulled the workers into relying on factions in parliament and supported the parties of the left. In the past this meant the social democrats Pasok and the Greek Stalinists (KKE), more recently it’s meant Syriza.

The fierce polarisation of Greek bourgeois politics continues to draw in the working class. Coups and counter-coups in the 1920s and 30s, the dictatorship of Metaxas, the Civil War in the 1940s, the regime of the colonels (1967-74), the emergence of Pasok and New Democracy – all these past expressions of divisions within the ruling class have found workers rallied behind factions of the bourgeoisie rather than against it.

Although the question posed in the referendum was of Byzantine complexity, the answer was reduced to a choice between ΝΑΙ or ΟΧΙ (Yes or No). ΟΧΙ is not a neutral term in modern Greek culture. Every 28 October in Greece is ΟΧΙ Day, a national holiday celebrating the refusal of Metaxas of an ultimatum from the Axis powers and the entrance of Greece into the Second World War. In Greece today the political parties of the bourgeoisie compete to display their nationalist credentials. None of them can offer anything but further austerity and war.

It will be a great step forward for the working class when it realises that its interests are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeoisie. In the past there have been political minorities in Greece that have defended the perspectives of working class revolution. During the 1940s the group around Agis Stinas defended an internationalist position against the Second World War. More recently there were internationalist voices during the social movements of 2009-2011 The way forward for the working class in Greece, even if it is not an immediate prospect, is to link its struggles with those of the world working class and to develop a truly internationalist and revolutionary perspective. 

Car 4/7/15

The British economy is growing. The latest GDP growth was 2.9% with a predicted growth of 2.4% for 2015 (The Economist, 4.7.15). At the same time average pay has increased faster than inflation in the year to March, in other words the fall in real wages has been halted. However, this does not tell the whole story and the economy in both the UK and the world, despite having emerged from the deep recession of 2008, remains fragile.

Stagnating productivity

“Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything”[1]. Britain has become a low productivity economy, with output per worker per hour lagging behind Italy and Canada, and way behind France, Germany and the USA. A US worker can do in 3 weeks what will take a worker in the UK a month. It was improving at approximately 1.75% a year, or slightly faster than the rest of the group of 7 countries, until the start of the recession in 2007, since when productivity has stagnated in Britain although not in the other advanced countries, widening the gap. The loss of the improvement in productivity has been across the spectrum of economic activity particularly in manufacturing, but not excluding services. These sectors have seen either a very significant fall in productivity improvement, or a loss of productivity, since then. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has noted a 0.3% increase in hourly productivity in the first quarter of this year, or 1.3% in the year to the end of March.

Whether or not this improvement is sustained, 8 years of stagnation has left productivity approximately 16% lower than it would have been if it had continued improving at the previous rate. This does not mean workers would be an average of £5,000 better off if productivity had continued to grow as before – it was the recession that caused the stagnation in productivity because capital could no longer produce and sell so many products or services profitably. In fact some employers kept workers on through the recession, often at reduced pay, in the expectation of future growth so that unemployment did not rise so fast or so high as in previous recessions, which contributed to the initial fall in productivity at the start of the recession. This was accompanied by the cut in investment during the recession, leaving workers using fewer and more out of date machines.

Low productivity in Britain is also a long term problem that dates back to the start of the open crisis of capitalism at the end of the post World War 2 boom nearly 50 years ago. “Prof Haskel [of Imperial College] admits it is impossible to pin point one factor to explain why the economy has all of sudden become less efficient. Instead, he makes several conjectures. One is the slowdown in the amount of research and development undertaken by companies and the state since the 1970s compared with the immediate postwar period. As R&D’s affect on productivity has a long lag, what happened forty years ago may help to explain the productivity problem Britain faces today.”[2]

Productivity is a problem for British national capital[3]. It is something of an interminable mantra imposed in the public sector, in the NHS and in our schools, and predicted to be an important concern in the budget. It makes it harder to complete internationally. And it is driving down wages. There are dangers for the ruling class in imposing conditions of low pay, poor working conditions on a working class with strong traditions of struggle for too long – even while politicians of left and right have had some success with blaming these conditions, and unemployment, poor housing, etc. on immigration.

Fragility in the global economy

British national capital relies on its international trade for its survival and therefore on the health of the world economy. “In 2015, the IMF says, for the first time since 2007 every advanced economy will expand” (The Economist, 13.6.15) but hazards remain such as Greek debt and China’s shaky markets and slowing growth, as well as the Brazilian and Russian economies likely to shrink this year. “The danger is that, having used up their arsenal, governments and central banks will not have the ammunition to fight the next recession”. It’s not that The Economist is predicting a recession on the horizon, but that they tend to come along regularly in capitalism and there are all sorts of fragilities in the world economy. Including Europe’s debt and dependence on exports. The EU is Britain’s most important partner accounting for approximately 50% of its trade in goods (imports and exports) and a substantial proportion of its trade in services. While any particular business may have a greater or lesser interest in the EU, the UK cannot grow indefinitely while the Euro area lags behind, with only 1% growth according to the latest figures and 1.5% predicted for this year.

What The Economist is most concerned about is the ability of the various economies to respond to a new crisis by increasing borrowing, manipulating the Government budget balance and interest rates. After the debt accumulated since 2007 and the exceptionally low interest rates – for instance in Britain Bank Base Rate never fell below 2% until 2007, and is now at 0.5% – you can see their concern. But when base rate is close to zero “Central banks’ capacity to conduct QE [quantitative easing] is theoretically limitless … markets will tolerate much more QE than economists had thought” (The Economist, 13.6.15). Lenders remain confident that the British government can repay loans despite a £1.5 trillion debt equal to 80% of GDP.

More cuts

While average pay has gone up a little higher than inflation after several years of falling real wages, some of the poorest have done very badly such as care escorts averaging £7,400 with a loss of 3.3% or retail check out staff on around £9,160 down 3.4%[4]. The income gap has only widened as the working class is made to pay for the crisis.

The government response is to continue to impose more attacks on the working class (see page 2) with cuts and restrictions in budgets for social services, schools and health and particularly on benefits. These measures, like the restrictions on immigration, are also being used to paint sections of the population as scapegoats for the problems in the economy. This is particularly the case for the attacks on working age benefits for those in work, out of work or unable to work.

What is the meaning of the fragility of the recovery?

Any attempt to follow the evolution of the economy naturally uses the statistics produced by the bourgeoisie for its own purposes: to help manage state policy to defend the national capital, to provide information for capitalists trying to make profitable decisions whether the economy is doing well or badly. On the other hand we are trying to follow the evolution of a decadent system, one in which the exploitative relations of production are in conflict with the forces of production, and most importantly the working class. It is not just a question of the fall in production with each recession – capitalism has always experienced that even when it was vigorously expanding across the globe – but also the fragile and anaemic recoveries or the various bubbles that follow in which the productive forces continue to be hindered. And all the while it is doing so in ways that damage both the environment and the health of the population and the working class in particular through pollution. 

Alex  4.7.15

As the Greek government – almost immediately after the victory of the ‘No vote’ which it had campaigned for -  agreed to the intensification of austerity measures, there was genuine sympathy from workers internationally for their Greek comrades.  The extent of the attacks on jobs, incomes, pensions and a whole range of essential services has struck a chord because this is not something restricted to the workers in Greece. But at the same time every part of the bourgeoisie’s political spectrum felt confident to use the situation for its own benefit, and against the consciousness of the working class, above all by distorting the real meaning of class solidarity.

The various right wing factions try to show how harmful the EU is for the defence of national interests and demonise the German government, while others continue to blame the ‘lazy Greeks’ for living beyond their means. The left, after supporting Syriza and the No vote in the referendum, still claims that capitalism can function without austerity and that their campaigns will have a different outcome to Syriza’s. At the same time they tell us that solidarity with the Greek workers means solidarity with the Syriza government against the EU.

In fact the ‘Greek crisis’ is part of a crisis facing the whole working class and is indicative of the future for all of us. Instead of following the nationalists of right and left, workers need to grasp that their interests come up against all factions of the bourgeoisie, and their struggles can only develop if they take on an internationalist, and therefore revolutionary perspective.

The soap opera which has gone on since the latest cycle of negotiations began in February has partly obscured a situation of economic catastrophe and increasingly terrible living conditions for the proletariat in Greece. The brutal pauperisation, mass unemployment and the mind-boggling fall of wages and pensions, the delays and threats of non-payments, the terrible decline of hospitals, the collapse of care and services, the drastic rationing of medicines, the proliferation of suicides and depression, the nervous tension, the dramatic spread of homelessness and even hunger and rationing following the closure of banks, all this feeds a terrible backdrop, that of the descent of capitalism into its ultimate phase, the phase  of decomposition.

On the basis of the chronic economic crisis, where for the first time a western state finds itself in default of payment, we see the use of this event indecently transformed into a great theatrical spectacle with multiple twists and turns. We are once again held in suspense over this famous ‘Greek debt’ where the rivalries of the great powers are further strained and where each country tries to defend its own sordid national interests. All TV channels drag out the suspense about the possibility of ‘Grexit’ up to the fateful moment, that of the symbolic hour when the great clock is going to strike midnight: Tuesday June 30. And afterwards? Is the Greek fairy godmother going to turn into a pumpkin? No! The IMF has ‘learned’ that the Greek state could not repay 1.5 billion euros demanded of it.  More acrobatics and it’s then necessary to spice up the drama even more with the referendum initiated by Tsipras and his government: are the Greeks going to vote Yes or No?

Finally, on Sunday July 5, after a series of polls carefully staged before the count, it’s No that has it.

A bourgeoisie that is prepared faced with events

Contrary to the exaggerations of a ‘storm of panic’ conjured up by some elements of the media in order to try to frighten the population, the better to enslave them and carry forward the attacks, the reality is rather that of a degradation of the Greek economy that’s already been bled dry for years, aggravated by the anti-working class measures of the Syriza government itself.

The result of the referendum changed nothing about that. It is for this reason that the game of the negotiations engaged in on the basis of the crisis between on the one side, the IMF, the political forces of the EU, the ECB, and on the other, the Greek government (defending its national interests) was reminiscent of the arm-wrestling which accompanies such politico-media circuses that go beyond the sphere of the economy. Faced with the gravity of the situation, the bourgeoisie has already been led to adapt and organise itself by anticipating the economic difficulties of Greece and the euro zone, as it had to do faced with the shocks and consequences of the preceding financial and banking crisis, the so-called ‘sub-primes’ of 2008. It had to react in a concerted manner so as to avoid the worse consequences of the fall of the markets.

By taking measures at the level of capitalist states and the central banks (European Central Bank or the US Fed), they supported the markets and avoided a too brutal drying up of liquidity. In fact, they are well on top of the situation of Greece. It is evident that the banks (notably the ECB) and the capitalist states have very largely anticipated events in order to organise themselves and take measures faced with the difficulties of Greece. Tsipras didn’t so much see a break with the past in the No vote as “the strengthening of our negotiating position”.

The historic decline of capitalism has, for a century now, generated a universal tendency to state capitalism, pushing this latter to the central stage at the heart of the economy. This tendency, initiated both by the necessities to face up to the growing contradictions of the system and to the need to mobilise for total war, was strongly accentuatedafter the stock market crash of 1930 and has never let up since. A whole experience has been accumulated by the setting up of Keynesian measures and perfected during the great economic convulsions of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, 1990s and ‘globalisation’, still more complex mechanisms are put to work and all sorts of palliatives and trickeries with the law of value have allowed the most powerful capitalist states to slow down the most disastrous effects of the economic crisis and, above all, to push back the most devastating effects onto weaker rival capitalist states.

In some ways Greece is already on the periphery of the EU. It is situated on the southern margins of Europe and shows all the weaknesses paradoxically and hypocritically exploited by their predatory rival states that are looking out for themselves. Well before the case of Greece, the IMF had already faced up to other catastrophic situations, as was the case in Argentina at the beginning of 2000. Let’s add however that preoccupying as the case of Greece it is, in reality it has only 1.8% of the GDP of the euro zone, which limits the ‘risks of contagion’. Moreover the private banks are largely relieved of the burden of this ‘Greek debt’ to the profit of the ECB and of the principal public actors that are the capitalist states. All this shows that the essential stakes in this whole set up have quite another political dimension.

A political set up against the proletariat

The main reason for all the media masquerade exploiting the gravity of the situation is essentially to mystify the proletariat, to cloud its consciousness, notably to try and mask the bourgeois and nationalist nature of Syriza and the Tsipras government. It is also to give credence to the idea of a possible credible ‘alternative’ of the ‘radical left’ which is gradually emerging in Europe (the examples of Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, the NPA and the Left Front in France, etc.). This is offered as an alternative to the traditional Socialist Parties, judged as ‘traitors’ who have supposedly abandoned the ‘the values of the left’. Also the essential aim is naturally to facilitate the swallowing of the pill of austerity and the attacks on all the workers, and not only in Greece! To bring to power a fraction as ‘radical’ as the extreme left of the bourgeois political apparatus can only bring discredit to the leftist ideologies necessary for the political  control of the proletariat. Much more so now that these ideologies have already been weakened since the collapse of the Berlin Wall by virtue of their support, over several decades,  for the Stalinist regimes (certainly in a “critical” but none the less zealous manner for all that).

The whole set up, expressing in passing some real divergences and rivalries between the protagonists involved in the negotiations, constitutes in essence a means to preserve the radical left image of Syriza. Even if that appears paradoxical, the attitude of all involved has only consolidated the ‘intransigent’ image of the Greek government and established its will to ‘refuse the diktats of Brussels’ – an image which is also strengthened by the victory of the No. The very firm position of Angela Merkel contrasted to the will to maintain more open negotiations on the part of those European authorities with a more ‘understanding’ attitude, such as President Hollande, more ‘open to the left’ regarding Greece while remaining firm, ultimately allows the Greek government to be presented as ‘faithful to the people, categorically refusing ‘austerity’.  In short, Syriza and Tsipras are confirmed as ‘heroes’ and ‘victims’ of the ex-Troika which is presented as ‘wicked capitalists’[1].

Thus, despite the brutal and growing attacks directly led by the Greek state, they are made to appear as if imposed from the ‘outside’. The Greek government which represses and pressures the proletarians as ever, this real hangman at the head of the bourgeoisie state, here finds the status of a real ‘fighter’ standing toe to toe with the capitalists to supposedly limit the ‘suffering of the Greek people’. Syriza, strengthened by this helping hand and its ‘popular support’, can thus benefits from a ‘working class’ image. And this mystification is much more efficient in that it’s been largely disseminated and supported by leftists of all types in Europe who applaud the victory of the “No” in order to back up their arguments about a so-called possible alternative to austerity: “Since January 25 2015 and the electoral victory of Syriza in Greece, the EU/ECB/IMF Troika has used unprecedented brutality in order to make the government of Tsipras capitulate, so that the popular choice to finish with austerity is ridiculed”[2].

Another major consequence of all these ideological manipulations is the accentuation of divisions within the working class. Firstly by presenting Greek proletarians as pariahs and victims, whose fate is ‘foreign’ to the other ‘well off’ workers in Europe, the media try to cut off the Greek workers from the rest of the working class. In this analysis, only the Greek workers have a ‘valid reason’ to struggle, although they are strongly recommended to accept the ‘necessary sacrifices’ in order ‘to come out of the crisis’. This perversion is all the more potent when it’s accompanied by the completely noxious addition of solidarity by the leftists who reduce the question to a simple electoral support in favour of No: “Massive mobilisations of solidarity are needed in order that confidence is increased so that a No is secured in Greece” (ibid). Such is the ‘solidarity’ of the leftists, nothing more nor less than support for the Greek government, a government which defends its sordid, capitalist, national interests! Finally, through this democratic ideology the referendum is framed and motivated; the divisions within the Greek proletariat are strengthened through the Yes/No division, even if the No carries a majority.

In the final account, as we said in one of our preceding articles:

“For the leftists to depict Syriza as some sort of alternative is utterly fraudulent. Just before the election, a group of 18 distinguished economists (including two Nobel Prize winners and a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee) wrote to the Financial Times endorsing aspects of Syriza’s economic policies … As a commentator in the New Statesman (29/1/15) put it: ‘Syriza’s programme … is mainstream macroeconomics. The party is merely planning to do what the textbooks suggest.’ And so, following the textbooks, Syriza negotiated with Greece’s European creditors, in the first instance to extend the bailout and its conditions”

Syriza and the leftists who defend it, the famous Troika and its consorts, the media setting the scene, all of them are continuing their mystifications after the referendum. They all belong to the same world and that world is that of decadent capitalism. They are the political commissars, defenders of the state, and defenders of bourgeois order at the service of the most brutal exploitation.

WH.  6/7/15

The ICC has contributed to the first Korean edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet, written 100 years ago in response to the carnage of the First World War. We are publishing the introduction written for the new edition here. In its 100 year ‘commemorations’ of the war, the ruling class and its propaganda machine offers us so many forms of apology for the massacre; revolutionaries on the other hand can take pride in celebrating the moral and intellectual courage of those internationalists who stood against the war and for the proletarian revolution.

The Junius Pamphlet was written as a first major theoretical-political analysis of the First World War which had inaugurated a world historic change. A machine of destruction was set in motion, massacring human beings on a scale never seen before. For example in the north of France and in Flanders (Belgium) within a few weeks hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed through the use of new weapons such as mustard gas. Some 20 million dead were counted by the end of the war. And immediately after the war an epidemic which later became known as “the Spanish flu” provoked the death of another 20 million exhausted and often undernourished people.

On 4 August 1914, the parliamentary group of the German Social Democratic Party voted in support of war credits. For the first time, the leadership of a proletarian party, and in this case one of the oldest and most influential parties of the Second International, betrayed the most crucial principle of internationalism: workers have no fatherland. A group of the few remaining internationalists in Germany came together in the apartment of Rosa Luxemburg and began to organise the defence of internationalism against the traitors. A year later a first international meeting of internationalists was organised in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald[1]. In response to the unleashing of the war and the betrayal of the leadership of Social Democracy revolutionaries started to put forward an analysis of the roots of the war and its consequences. Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Crisis of Social Democracy and the Theses on the Tasks of International Social Democracy which she drafted were part of these international efforts to understand the new situation for humanity and to draw out the perspectives for the work of revolutionaries. She wrote her text only a few months after the beginning of the war in April 1915, producing it in prison under the nom de guerre “Junius”. Due to the conditions of war the text could not be published immediately; only in January 1916 could it be published outside of Germany. In view of this new world historic situation her slogan was first of all: understand in depth what happened, why the war could begin and above all learn from our own mistakes. It was necessary to make a ruthless and fearless self-critique.

Searching for the roots

In several chapters of her pamphlet she analysed the historic development of capitalism. She showed how and why capitalism in its world-wide expansion had to constantly conquer new markets and how those countries which “arrived (too) late” had no other choice but to snatch away conquests from “those who had arrived first” by means of violence, i.e. war. These chapters on the ascent of imperialism illustrate the role of war in the capitalist system. She unmasked the imperialist ambitions of all states and recognised that this development was not triggered off by a single country alone. “(…) Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole” (Chapter 7).

The analysis she had put forward in the 1890s, arguing that Poland could no longer become an independent state and revolutionaries could no longer support the demand for national self-determination, was confirmed by the events of the world war. Rosa Luxemburg was amongst the first in the revolutionary camp to reject any support of national wars of defence. “Every socialist policy that depends upon this determining historic milieu, that is willing to fix its policies in the world whirlpool from the point of view of a single nation, is built upon a foundation of sand.” (Chapter 7)

The few months of war helped Rosa Luxemburg to grasp the new characteristics of this war, which would lead to the economic ruin of most of the participating countries.

After having analysed the new historical conditions, this qualitatively new phase rooted in the laws and contradictions of capitalism itself, she underlined the subjective conditions for the unleashing of war. Her conclusion: without the betrayal of the leadership of Social Democracy, the oldest and strongest workers’ party, and without the proclamation of social peace (i.e. the prohibition of strikes) in the factories, a pact which the trade unions signed with the capitalists, in short without the mobilisation of the working class for war through Social Democracy and the trade unions, the war could never have been begun.

Consequences for the working class and humanity

While Social Democracy in Germany called for support for the fatherland, Luxemburg insisted on the crucial role of the working class for the ending of the war. And she warned against the pacifist hope that capitalism might eliminate its own drive to war and destruction. She recognised the danger that if capitalism continued to exist the very survival of humanity would be at risk. Humanity was faced with the alternative between socialism and barbarism.

Consequences for revolutionaries

Faced with the betrayal by the SPD leadership, the determined internationalists in Germany around Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring and others did not want to let the SPD leadership bring the whole party under its control, because the party leadership did not have the majority of the party behind it. The group round Luxemburg stood for the regroupment of all internationalist forces in the party and the preparation of a new International on a new basis. Luxemburg drafted the “Theses on the tasks of International Social Democracy” which were published as an annexe to the Junius Pamphlet and adopted with a few changes by the newly founded Spartacusbund as the guidelines of the group.

The significance of the Junius pamphlet

As well as offering a historical-theoretical framework for understanding the qualitatively new step taken by capitalism, Luxemburg’s pamphlet offered a political framework for the activities of revolutionaries. Its main ideas (the historical development of imperialism, the perspectives of capitalist society in its decadent phase, socialism or barbarism, the question of internationalism in the workers’ movement and the task of revolutionaries) and its method (go to the roots and clarify the principles of each question, a ruthless self-critique, the long-term view for the task of revolutionaries) are all points of reference valid not only for the period of the First World War but to this day.

The theoretical-historical foundations of the Junius Pamphlet can be found in another text, which Rosa Luxemburg wrote before World War One (The Accumulation of Capital). In this text she outlined the driving forces of capitalism, its basic contradictions and why the accumulation of capital from a certain phase on inevitably leads to war and destruction.

In the same way as the publication of The Accumulation of Capital had already provoked considerable controversy in the workers’ movement, the publication of the Junius Pamphlet also gave rise to passionate debate amongst internationalists. In particular, Luxemburg's conclusion that with the development of capitalism imperialism had become the cancer of all countries, whether big or small, and that thus the call for ‘national self-determination’ was no longer on the agenda, caused a big controversy. In the midst of the war a thorough-going debate started amongst internationalists, in which Lenin was one of the strongest critics of Luxemburg.

However, it is important to underline that this debate took place within the framework of a common internationalist standpoint, a shared perspective of proletarian revolution. The discussion about the deeper roots of the development of imperialism, of the betrayal of internationalism and the perspectives of the struggle, never prevented them from pulling in the same direction - fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist system, under the most adverse conditions of repression and exile.

The revolutionary spirit of Rosa Luxemburg during the war

In the face of this historic disaster for humanity, this betrayal by the former workers’ party, Rosa Luxemburg gave an example of the revolutionary spirit, of an unwavering, determination and a capacity to carry out theoretical-political analysis with a long-term view.

The unfolding of this unheard of level of barbarism and the betrayal of the party was a true shock for revolutionaries and led to a feeling of depression amongst some of them. Many revolutionaries in Germany were thrown into jail or driven into exile. Rosa Luxemburg herself was detained in jail for most of the war. Altogether she spent 3 years 4 months in jail during the 4 years 4 months of war. After having been thrown into prison in order to break her determination and to silence her, the reaction of Luxemburg was to fight back with the weapon of theory. She wrote the Anticritique, a reply to criticisms of her book The Accumulation of Capital. During her activities as a teacher at the German Social Democratic party school she had given courses on political economy. Now, in prison she wrote her Introduction to Political Economy using the initial material she had used as a party teacher. And she also dealt with questions of literature and culture. She wrote a foreword to the book of the Russian author Korolenko History of my Contemporary and translated his book into German. And it was from prison that she also wrote her first analysis of the Russian revolution, On the Russian Revolution, developing some first important points for a critique of the errors made by the revolution in Russia.

Of course Luxemburg suffered from being locked-up in jail, but this could never break her will or undermine her morale. It is highly inspiring to read her notes and correspondence during her time in prison. The large variety of issues that she dealt with in prison and the series of letters on art and literature give testimony to an untameable, creative spirit. “Often I do nothing else but read and write from 6 in the morning until 9 in the evening”[2].

Faced with the moral bankruptcy of capitalism and the perspective of socialism or barbarism she not only flung herself into the most determined struggle, but she also maintained her courageous spirit even after the terrible loss of people who were very close to her. She preserved her strength through her theoretical efforts, her capacity to follow other passions (such as for drawing and for botany) and through a large network of support from outside. She received food from outside of the prison (because of the bad health of her stomach, which required a special diet). Her writings were repeatedly smuggled out of prison (sometimes with the connivance of the prison guards). While in prison she corresponded with a lot of comrades, gave them advice and supported them as best as she could from behind prison walls. No prison cell could be thick enough to silence her and to prevent her from offering her support to individual people, to her comrades and to the working class as a whole. Thus her voice could be ‘heard’ outside of the prison – politically and as a human being. The day she was released from prison some 1000 workers (many of them women) waited at the prison gate for her and accompanied her home.

Her time in prison was in continuity with her whole life.

Brief summary of Rosa Luxemburg’s life 

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamość [90] (Poland) in March 1871 as the fifth and last child of a Jewish family. 1871 was the year of the Paris Commune and the time of the struggle within the First International against the conspiracies of Bakunin. As a 17 year old young woman the repression in Poland forced her to emigrate to Switzerland, where she studied several subjects (amongst others botany, mathematics, economics, history, and law). In 1897 she presented her doctorial thesis on “The industrial development of Poland”. Already during the 1890s, together with other comrades from Poland, she put into question the old doctrines of the Second International. She had the intellectual capacity to detect a new development in capitalism and she had the courage to conclude, against the resistance of the Second International, that Polish self-determination was no longer on the agenda. This position was at odds with the dominant position of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, and in particular with Lenin

In 1898 she moved to Germany, where she joined the ranks of the SPD. Within the SPD a current had emerged, whose main representative was Bernstein, which defended the idea that capitalism had become more or less crisis free, that the transition to socialism would be possible by peaceful means. In fact Bernstein was ready to abandon the goal of the movement. Rosa Luxemburg wrote her reply, “Reform or revolution” (1899). Already during that period she was in the vanguard of the struggle against opportunism

In 1903 in her text “Stagnation and Progress of Marxism” she deplored a stagnation in the Marxist movement since the death of Marx and Engels and insisted on the need of renewed theoretical efforts, stressing that Marxism itself needed to be further elaborated.

This is why she wrote “Marxism is a revolutionary view of the world, which must constantly strive for new insights, which despises nothing so much as the fossilization of forms which are considered to be valid once and for all, and which through the intellectual weapon of self-critique and in the thunderstorms of history can best preserve its living force.” (1916)

Following the war between Japan and Russia in 1904 the first big wave of mass strikes erupted in Russia. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first to discover the new dynamic of the class struggle in the 20th century, where the workers’ initiative becomes the distinguishing feature, and where the class struggle cannot be ‘planned’ by the apparatus of the trade unions or a party. Although she did not yet understand the role of the workers’ councils, in her book The Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions, she insisted on this mass activity. This new dynamic of the class struggle was fiercely combated by the trade unions and growing layers within Social Democracy. In close cooperation with the trade union apparatus the Social Democratic leadership issued a ban on debates about the mass strike within the party. In 1906 Rosa Luxemburg had to go to jail for 2 months, convicted of “incitement to class hatred”, after her book on the mass strike was published. The former leading figure of Social Democracy, Karl Kautsky, who was known as the orthodox “Pope” of Marxism, increasingly took a position against Rosa’s radical course. During these years there was an intensification of smear campaigns and calumnies against Rosa Luxemburg as a “Jew”, “foreigner”, and “spinster”, creating trouble in the “peaceful”, “harmony-loving” Social Democracy.

At the 1907 Stuttgart congress of the Second International which was organised in response to the growing danger of war, Luxemburg, Lenin and Martov fought for a common orientation of “hastening the abolition of capitalist class rule” if the war broke out. In 1912 in her book The Accumulation of Capital she had the courage to point to the limits and contradictions in Marx’s works. Her book offers a basis for understanding the role of extra-capitalist markets and the specific function of militarism. Written barely two years before the unleashing of World War One the book offers an indispensable insight into the basic contradictions of capitalism.

As mentioned above, immediately after the betrayal of the SPD leadership in August 1914 Luxemburg became a leading figure in the struggle against war. The Junius Pamphlet was thus in direct continuity with her struggle since the early 1890s for understanding the new conditions, for offering an explanation of the political, social and economic conditions for the run up to World War One and the challenge facing the proletariat..

In 1917, still in prison, she offered a first analysis of the importance of the revolution which had just started in Russia. It was clear to her that in Russia the question of revolution could only be posed; it could not be solved in Russia itself. When Luxemburg was released from prison in November 1918 the ruling class feared her more than ever. Social Democracy above all made her the target of their campaigns against the working class. In December 1918, at the Berlin Workers’ Council she and Karl Liebknecht, the most famous of the leaders of the working class in Germany, were not allowed to participate, under the pretext that they were not workers. At the founding Congress of the German Communist Party, the KPD, at the end of December 1918, in a speech on the programme, she highlighted the historic dimension of the proletarian revolution and insisted that the revolution cannot resort to terror, but must mobilise to the full the energy and consciousness of the working class as a whole. She was one of the very few who spoke up against any immediatist illusion of a quick and easy victory against a very cunning enemy. Finally, the smear campaign and calumnies against her reached a peak in the first days of January 1919. After the crushing of the so-called Spartacus-rising in the second week of January 1919, when thousands of workers were massacred, Rosa Luxemburg was also assassinated. The ruling class finally managed to wipe out one of the most courageous and clear-sighted revolutionaries of the time.

The Junius Pamphlet remains one of her greatest works, an indispensable tool for understanding the growing barbarism of capitalism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and for developing the perspective for its revolutionary overthrow by the exploited class.

D

By starting a new heading of ‘Readers’ Contributions’ on our website, and occasionally in our paper, we hope to encourage our readers and sympathisers to write texts and articles which can go into greater depth than is possible in our discussion forum, and so stimulate a longer term reflection. These articles, while being broadly based on proletarian politics, need not fully represent the positions of the ICC, or may deal with issues on which the ICC does not have a collective view. The following article is a good example of what we mean: as an attempt to explore the historical origins of Islam and to situate the actions of the current ‘Islamic State’ against this background, it raises questions which are of general concern to marxists but which can also give rise to a fruitful confrontation of ideas. 

Recently there have been fresh reports of the cultural destruction wrought by the IS thugs in Iraq as these ‘brave monotheists’ cast down long dead idols of past civilisations. In the process destroying links to the time when Iraq was the cradle of civilisation while making a handy profit on the black market with what they didn’t destroy. This cultural destruction and the attendant attitude of contempt for the past is not only reactionary but also completely in sync with wider trends within bourgeois society and culture both Western, ‘modern’ and  ‘secular’ and in the backward view of religious fundamentalism. After all no civilisation in history has been more culturally destructive than capitalism which has destroyed almost every other culture and social form in existence.

These ‘Islamic’ gangsters want to depict themselves as modern day heirs of Moses and Mohammed, casting down pagan idols, ignoring the fact that no one worships these idols anymore and haven’t done for over a thousand years. In actuality ISIS do nothing and can do nothing to oppose the real problem of idolatry in the modern world, because they serve the very same idols as the rest of the world bourgeoisie.

What is idolatry?  

Many Marxist writers including Marx himself have pointed out the connection between our concepts of alienation, fetishisation and reification with the older concept of idolatry. Erich Fromm, in his book Marx’s Concept of Man, makes the point particularly explicit when he says:

“The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols”  (Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 1961, page 39)

This is true of things which are not directly created by man as well, for example a natural object such as a tree; even an idea or experience such as success or love can become idols. This happens when they are fetishised and separated off from their true being which is always in connection with other beings and with being as a whole. This is the essence of reification, the giving of independent power and existence to something which is in reality a part of a whole or one aspect of a dialectical relation. ‘Reification’ is therefore fundamentally the same as ‘deification’ because it involves cutting off and turning a partial aspect of reality into a ‘god’.

By this reckoning modern capitalism is perhaps the most idolatrous society to date, as it is pre-eminently the society of the ‘thing’. Not only in the sense of its worship of commodities and its elevation of Profit as the jealous God of the whole human race, but also in the way that this effects its entire worldview and its whole mode of consciousness. This is not altered by the fact that this idolatry is a repressed, unconscious idolatry; in the spirit of typical bourgeois cynicism the idea that people worship things like greed, success, their own ego or any other expression of reified modern power is denied by all or at least turned into a minor criticism of ‘popular’ culture; the extent to which this ‘worship’ is hard-wired into the system itself is vehemently denied.

Monotheism in History

All three monotheistic religions began as a rebellion of the oppressed. There are numerous theories about what the true origins of Judaism were; the official founding myth of Judaism is the rebellion against slavery led by Moses. However historians disagree on how much historicity can be lent to this tale. Norman Gottwald[1] put forward a theory in the 1970s that was at first derided among mainstream historians but has gained more traction even in these circles since then: that Judaism in fact started as a ‘peasant revolt’ which aimed to ‘re-tribalise’ society (i.e. to go back towards primitive communistic ideals and practices), to avoid the necessity of the state and to create a more egalitarian and free society than the Cannanite society he claims they lived in prior to this. Whatever the case might be, it is almost certain that a rebellion of some oppressed strata was fundamentally involved. Christianity starts as a rebellion not just of ‘the Jews’ against Rome but was fundamentally a movement of the most oppressed and exploited of the time (Kautsky in Foundations of Christianity refers to the proletariat of the day, although its nature was very different from the proletariat under capitalism). This can be seen in the explicit communism of the early Christians (as well as other Jewish groups of the time such as the Essenes) which is more pronounced in Christianity than all other religions, although it is present in nearly all religions to some extent.

Islam was not a movement of the most dispossessed alone, of an equivalent to Kautsky’s proletariat. However it was certainly a movement of the oppressed; in particular it was a movement of the oppressed tribal groups, those who had not emerged to take control of the power and wealth of the newly emerging economic and social reality of 6th and 7th century Arabia. It was a movement which drew in support from all the oppressed strata of this social reality: the poor, women, orphans and widows, unprotected foreigners and slaves, and which attacked the power and the sources of wealth of the leading tribes such as the Quraish (the tribe Muhammad, although an orphan, belonged to).

Islam painted itself from the start as a return to a previous way of being. Firstly this meant that Arabs should remember their own moral codes that had been lost in the rush towards individual success and economic ruthlessness. A ‘pagan’ morality of self-interest and prideful contempt for the ‘weak’ became widespread as the emerging relations of private property eroded the tribal principles based on caring for all members of the community. War and blood feuds had also gotten out of control. This is where the newness of the Islamic morality really comes into play. The shifting influence of moral responsibility from the tribe collectively as in the traditional Arab worldview of the time to an ‘individualistic’ morality which saw the individual as alone being responsible for his/her actions in Islam reflects many contradictory historical tendencies. Firstly, it can be said to represent the growing alienation of the individual from the community; however it is a community by this point which has already degenerated and no longer fits the new historical circumstances. This expresses itself in the way that this ‘individualistic’ morality was able to help combat the prevalence of blood feuds in which one life from a tribe was seen as being interchangeable for another.

Islam was also a movement of a growing merchant class and it would be wrong to obscure or diminish this fact. Marx and Engels, in the little writing they did dedicate to the history of Islam, make the accurate observation that Islam was the ideological basis which expressed and gave body to the movement towards Arab unification and an early kind of ‘nationalism’. This unification was made possible and could only be made possible at this time through the growing importance of trade and the merchant class in general.

The fact that Islam was less radical than Christianity in its rejection of money and possessions is not only connected to the fact that Christianity was a more ‘proletarian’ movement and was therefore expressing the views of people who could see firsthand, to an extent the majority of Arabs of this time could not, the inherent problems and injustices that money and trade create. It reflects also a difference in ‘temperament’ between the two movements; Christianity was a movement of a class which, as rebellious they might have been, had no realistic way in which to establish their ‘kingdom of God’ on earth and could only imagine it coming through an apocalyptic struggle with the aid of divine intervention; the early Muslims on the other hand had a realistic programme of social reform and saw the ‘end times’ and the perfect age of righteousness as still firmly in the future, not as an immediate goal. This was why the revolution of Islam in taking power and giving rise to a new society (even if it immediately disappointed the most radical of the followers of Muhammad such as Abu Dharr, for following wealth and status and becoming like all the other kingdoms) was successful while Christianity could only be co-opted and sanitised by its enemies in the form of the Roman empire.

This is not to say that the civilisation that was established and came to dominate much of the world throughout the medieval period, as progressive as it was in many respects, would not have been a huge disappointment to Muhammad. The degree of this disappointment can be glimpsed at in particular by considering the example of one of his most radical followers, Abu Dharr, who did live to see the beginnings of this process. Abu Dharr, who was likened to Jesus in his humility and way of life by Muhammad, was a proto-communist who was exiled by the second Caliph Uthman for preaching against the slide back towards the ‘old ways’ of ostentatious and luxurious living of the powerful at the expense of the poor. Abu Dharr declaimed against this stating that: “This capital, wealth, gold and silver which you have hoarded must be equally divided among all Muslims. Everyone must share in the others' benefits in the economic and ethical system of Islam, in all blessings of life." (https://www.iranchamber.com/personalities/ashariati/works/once_again_abu_dhar1.php#sthash.9xmYwI2A.dpuf [94])...

What does all this have to do with idolatry?

The question to be posed then is what was it about monotheism that allowed it to be so closely connected to revolutionary movements. Firstly monotheism in its original sense implied a rejection of the worldly powers. The connection between ‘having power over’ and being the ‘god of’ someone was much clearer to those living in the ancient world than it is today in our so called ‘secular’ world; and in declaring that there was no ‘god but God’ as in the Islamic Shahada (declaration of faith) the early Muslims, like the early Jews and Christians, were directly challenging and rejecting the existing power structures of their times. It is obvious as well that monotheism in the case of Islam was a rebellion against the economic and social power connected with the worship of these idols. Control of the holy site of the Kaaba and the markets connected to it for example was central to the social-economic power structure of the day. This connection between ‘theological’ ideas and concrete economic and social questions was also much clearer in the ancient world than it appears today when the idolatry inherent to capitalism is hidden behind a veil of repression and ‘common sense’ and monotheism has long since been accommodated to worldly power.

Therefore not only did monotheism originally entail a rejection of the power structures, but also an attempt at a critique of the increasingly alienated economic structures and practices of the time. If we look at this question historically we see that the idea of a ‘Supreme Being’ is extremely common throughout the world and in all stages and forms of human society; and indeed Allah was just such a ‘Supreme Being’ recognised by the pre-Islamic Arab peoples as well as the Muslims. Why then does monotheism as such, i.e. a conscious and vehement denial and denunciation of all other gods, only emerge at a certain point in history? It is precisely because it is only when the economic break up and fragmentation of the tribal community had reached such a level that a symbol of a higher unity, one that goes beyond the tribal conception in that it aims to incorporate all of humanity, while also harking back to it in terms of its emphasis on solidarity and equality, can emerge.

What IS idolises

So where do IS stand in all this and how do they relate to idolatry? How do they relate to the ‘gods’ of our times? They like to portray themselves as being the only true heirs to the original followers of Muhammad and paint their current struggle almost as a re-run of the original struggles of Muhammad.  While we must denounce these claims it is also necessary to analyse them from a historical perspective in order to really understand the differences and similarities between the two movements. This is the only way to avoid the bourgeois right wing/left wing or moderate/extremist dead ends. The problem with IS and their ilk is not, as the ‘moderates’ (both Muslim and non-Muslim) claim, that they are ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’. It is precisely the opposite- it is that they are not radical at all. They do not understand let alone offer an alternative to capitalism and in fact simply represent capitalism in its most raw, undisguised gangster form.

One key similarity between IS and the original movement of Muhammad lies in the historical context. Both are expressions of the disintegration of ‘great civilisations’ and a vacuum left by the collapse or non-existence of state power; as well as the desperate search for new ways of thinking and being  which these historical situations at all times produce in those living through them. However this is where the similarity ends and the key differences in the two movements is most clearly illustrated.

Whereas the early Muslims aimed to unite all of humanity into one community and in practice their movement led to an enlarging of the community and allowed massive strides forward in various fields of life, not least morality, medicine and science, IS can only offer bloodshed, oppression and a shrinking and dividing of the community to a greater and greater extent. Early Islam saw itself as not starting a new religion but as the renewal and fulfilment of all the prophets sent to all the nations of the earth through time. IS on the other hand do not even recognise fellow Muslims as belonging to their community; extreme sectarianism and xenophobia have replaced the ideas of universal brotherhood and equality which gave early Islam its impetus. IS’ ‘takfiri’ policies of denouncing all other Muslim groups and communities as well as all non-Muslims as non-believers, and hence legitimate targets of their brutal violence, are the polar opposite of the original Islamic conception and practice. IS therefore can clearly be seen to worship the idols of ‘their’ religion and ‘identity’ serving the most deadly and corrosive idol of our times in the form of nationalism (albeit disguised with a veil of hypocritical talk of the Umma, the world community of Islam)....

Norman O Brown made an accurate enough observation when he said that Marxism and Islam agree on one proposition: “there will be one world or there will be none” (The Challenge of Islam, Norman O. Brown, 2009,p 12 – a collection of lectures first given at Santa Cruz university in 1980). In the past this uniting of humanity was envisioned in many traditions including Islam as a result of the actions of a conquering hero/ prophet/messiah establishing a kingdom of peace and justice. This vision is flawed and can only be seen as a symbolic view of a change which for most of history was impossible to achieve in reality but now can only be achieved by the united self-determined force of the workers of the world. The Caliphate even in its most exalted sense cannot be a programme of progress in the present epoch for this precise reason. IS’ vision is the most extreme example of the purely negative aspect of this vision and this is reflected in the fact that despite the fact that the Quran clearly states that there can be ‘no compunction in religion’, their only hope of achieving their insane ideal is to force the whole world at gun point (including even the vast majority of Sunni Muslims whom they supposedly represent) to bow before them...

Society descending into gangsterism

It is no coincidence that IS derives a lot of its support from ex-gang members and was actually created by an ‘ex’ gangster in Al Zakarwi. Their entire world view and practice is gangsterism; from the protection money, black market trading and intimidation which are the keys of their ‘economic model’ to their celebration of brute force, extreme violence and misogyny which make up their ‘teachings’. 

This shows not only that the first and foremost god they serve, just as every other capitalist ‘nation’, gang, or individual company, is the world-eating god of profit; it also illustrates the most important difference between the present historical moment and that of early Islam. Unlike with the collapse of Roman and Persian civilisation, the collapse of capitalism will not result in any new progressive civilisations such as the Islamic (even if the eventual civilisation established under the banner of Islam would have been a massive disappointment to Muhammad himself and was an immediate disappointment to his most radical followers) or feudalism in Europe. The barbarity capitalism will produce will not be related to any organic growth coming out of  any other social strata for the simple reason that capitalism has destroyed all other societies and social relations bar its own.

In contrast to this, both European feudalism and the Islamic civilization created after the life-time of Muhammad could develop tribal social models and the surrounding ‘civilized’ but collapsing societies into a new synthesis of the two, creating a new civilization and a higher form of culture.

This should remind us that there is one truth which IS and their ideology has at least an intimation of, however perverted that insight is, and that is the sheer extremity of the situation facing the world in the current epoch. The idea that these are the Last Days has much truth to it. Humanity stands at a cross-road between world revolution and the creation of a world-wide communist community or the gradual (or not) destruction of huge swathes (if we are lucky) of life on earth. Those proletarians who have been fooled by IS are not all simply ‘mad’ or stupid as they are portrayed in the bourgeois press. They are having their real insights and healthy instinctive opposition to and will to fight against this situation corrupted and led into a dead end by one sect among thousands of bourgeois ideologues. The simplistic claim by ‘the moderates’ of all stripes that ‘Islam is a religion of Peace’ hides the truth that IS corrupts; that the movement of Muhammad and the prophets before him were movements of struggle; a sometimes violent struggle against oppression and alienation and against the false gods which support them. We do not aim to re-fight their battles nor make a fetish of the past as all religion does to some extent; but we are the inheritors of the dreams of the past, charged with the task of making them flesh; and to do that we need to understand them. 

Jaycee 3/7/15

After four years of the war in Syria and around a year since the establishment of the “Caliphate” of the Islamic State, a new turn by Turkey, fully backed by the forces of NAT0, sees it enter the war, dumping its previous jihadi allies and turning its fire on its Kurdish “partners in peace”. Up to now Turkey has, at the very least, been extremely tolerant of the jihadi forces, allowing them to travel through its border to fight its enemy, the  Assad regime in Syria. Isis leaders have been seen openly swaggering around Turkish cities and resorts. Its wounded fighters have received hospital treatment and sent back to the battlefields (as Israel does for al-Nusra[1]) and Turkish cops that have arrested high status Isis members have themselves been thrown into prison. Also, going back years, there were credible reports that, with the assistance of Turkish intelligence (MIT), planeloads of jihadis and heavy weaponry from Libya organised by the CIA were landing in Turkey and crossing its border into Syria to fight Assad’s troops and its Hezbollah proxies. Though all this rarely came out into the open there is no doubt that it caused considerable tensions within NATO, of which Turkey is a member, and greatly strained Turkish/US relations even though US agencies were also involved in supporting the jihadis. A number of questions are raised by Turkey’s new front: why this turn now by Turkey? What does this mean for the Turkish/Kurdish “peace process” and its two-year old “cease-fire”? Are there any elements within the forces of Kurdish nationalism that represent the interests of the working class in any way? Will this move lead to any sort of halt or alleviation in the descent of the whole region into instability and war?

Turkey and the AKP ruling party defends its own and greater imperialist interests

On July 20 a suicide bomb attack in Suruc, close to the Turkish/Syrian border killed 32 young activists and injured many others working for or in liaison with the leftist group, the Federation of Socialist Youth. The suicide bomber, a jihadi-supporting Kurd, was rapidly identified by the MIT and it is quite possible that Turkish intelligence itself was involved in the bombing. It has a track record in such (Reyhanli, 2013) and while “who profits from the crime” doesn’t always work out, it does most times. And there is no doubt that, whoever was behind it, the ruling AKP clique of President Recip Erdogan has used the bombing in order to bolster its internal position and the defence of Turkish imperialist interests as it sees them. Erdogan’s AKP, like any nationalist gang, is trying to protect its own interests within the state; but it seems to very much have the backing of the Turkish military and the secret services, both vital for its continual position of power. Clearly Isis is not a stable ally but talks between the Turkish state and the US administration about a serious confrontation with an expanding Isis began soon after the Turkish election in June when the AKP was shocked to see its overall majority lost and the rise of the Kurdish-friendly People’s Democratic Party (HDP) which received 13% of the vote and appeared to be on a political roll. Further tensions have been growing in Erdogan’s party, along with the Turkish military, while it has watched the Kurdish army of the YPG[2] (the “People’s Protection Units”, the fighting wing of the PYD[3] and PKK in the Byzantine organisation of Kurdish nationalist forces) acting as the closest ally of the US in its attacks on Isis.  It is probably a combination of these two elements: the domestic electoral problems of the AKP and the rise of the YPG and the strengthening of its positions along the Turkish/Syrian border, that has concentrated Turkish minds and directed it into some sort of understanding with the US over the availability of its air-bases to US fighter-bombers and armed drones, particularly the air-base at Incirlik, in order to pursue its bombing missions against Isis in Syria.

In the days after the Suruc bombing, Turkish fighter-bombers and artillery hit one or two Isis positions and scores of PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) positions inside Turkey, northern Iraq, as well as YPG positions on the Syrian border (BBC World News, 3.8.15). The ferocity of Turkish attacks against the Kurds, and their disproportionality in relation to attacks on Isis, show the real intentions of the AKP. Overall, the whole situation is a complete can of worms and expressive of the decay of international relations and the weakness of US imperialism: a NATO member openly supporting the Isis Caliphate; elements of a branded Kurdish terrorist organisation being the American’s closest ally in fighting Isis; for the umpteenth time US-trained and equipped forces (see note 4) taken over by the ever-growing jihadi forces; Turkey allowing Isis free-range both sides of the border with Syria here, while Turkey and the US “advisors” train anti-Isis forces elsewhere in the country.  And within this the divergences and tensions between the various (and many) Kurdish factions – the PKK, the YPG and the northern Iraqi government of Masoud Barzani’s Iraqi Kurdistan among others. There is an utter absurdity to the whole situation which is the hallmark of much of imperialism today.  

The end of the Turkish/Kurdish “peace process”

Like any capitalist “cease-fire” or “peace process”, the one between the Turkish state and the Kurdish PKK are just moments of pause in the intensification of imperialist war and further violence. This was confirmed in the fact that just after the Suruc attack the Turkish authorities arrested just a handful of Isis fighters and launched just a few air assaults against Isis positions, while its attacks on Kurdish interests and the general repression that this entailed against the population was widespread. Just a few days after the Suruc attack, Turkish military helicopters launched a scorched earth policy against Kurdish/PKK areas in southern Turkey, burning crops, livestock and houses, while setting up military checkpoints and arresting anyone considered suspicious (The Times, 5.8.15). For its part the forces of Kurdish nationalism immediately launched attacks against the Turkish military. These included sabotage actions which killed at least one Turkish railway worker in the eastern province of Kars (AP, 31.7.15). And, like any “resistance” force, these sorts of attacks are intrinsically divisive and invite general retribution onto the Kurdish population. Under the cover of an attack on Isis, the real target for the Turkish authorities is an attack on Kurdish interests which, amongst other things, it calculates could raise the force of Turkish nationalism and increase the chances of a probable AKP majority in the case of a new election, thus giving an open mandate to the ruling clique. At any rate, the last thing that the Turkish state wants in the longer term is the proclamation of a new Kurdish state, which would turn out to be another ethnic “Caliphate”; another nationalist abomination, another peculiar statist structure expressive of the ambient decomposition around the region. Ethnic clans and religious clans have their own specificity certainly, but they are also much the same thing: capitalist bodies which crush the interests of the working class.  And this generally applies well beyond the Middle East and throughout the whole capitalist world. Look at the latest nation state of capitalism, the Republic of South Sudan which gained its independence in 2011. The local gang, its leadership, was backed and set up with considerable support, intelligence, military assistance and funding from the major countries of the west and has, almost immediately, collapsed into a heap of warfare, internecine strife, corruption and gangsterism.

There are major implications in these latest events for NATO. Turkey has the second-largest army in NATO at 700,000 strong and its turn against “terrorism”, Isis and the PKK, has been welcomed by the US-dominated force knowing the assistance that Turkey can give, not only in making its bases available but in freeing the Isis-controlled area between the Turkish border and Aleppo in Syria[4] as well as weakening Kurdish influence along the border. Turkey is acting here from a certain position of strength in dealing with the US with the latter running out of options. NATO, despite some differences and misgivings inside it, welcomed Turkey’s moves with open arms in an Extraordinary Meeting in Brussels on July 28. Despite some lukewarm words about laying off the Kurds, words subsequently completely ignored by Ankara, the NATO Secretary General summed up the sentiments of the meeting of 28 ambassadors:”We all stand united in condemning terrorism, in solidarity with Turkey” (Jens Stoltenberg, Independent, 29.7.15). The immediate quid pro quo for Turkey could well be more Patriot missiles, intelligence and logistic assistance from the US. A further concession from the US that looks on the cards, after being resisted by the latter for some time, and one that would boost the AKP, would be the establishment of a “safe-zone”, a “buffer-zone” across the Turkish/Syrian border which is presently largely controlled by the YPG. The actual proposed territory would split YPG-held territory in half and would be entirely occupied by the Turkish military. This would be a “no-fly zone” in everything but name. It would represent an invasion of Syria and a further escalation of the war as well as a possible stepping stone to further Turkish “activity” in Syria. From this potential annexation of Syrian territory (in actual fact a country called “Syria” no longer exists) it would be possible to launch further attacks, though this is not immediately on the cards.

Are Kurdish forces representative of a capitalist state or do they contain some proletarian content?

Just as workers’ cooperatives and self-management of the factory, with the best will in the world, cannot escape the laws of capitalist production, just as national liberation “struggles” immediately fall into the maws of imperialism, so any nationalist, proto-nationalist or ethnic movement can only take on functions of a capitalist state. And this very much applies to the “libertarian” turn of the PKK and its ideas of a federalisation of “mini-states” representative not of any coherence but, on the contrary, of the global capitalist process of breakdown and fractionalisation. As such it can only be detrimental to any independent expression of the working class.

On the libcom website on a thread about Turkey[5], a supporter of the ethnic Kurds, one Kurremkarmerruk, asks where is there any demand or anything that the Kurdish liberation movement has made that calls for a state. We’ve already looked at the question of any new states in a wider context but in the late 80s the PKK moved from a “proletarian orientation” (by this Kurdish nationalism meant Stalinist-type organisation) from a model “of the national state with its own government” to a form of “communal social life with the freedom of women”. Leaving aside the sexual predation of women rife in the PKK, the new-found “freedom of women” is largely expressed in their equality as cannon-fodder in Kurdish involvement in imperialist war. The new Kurdish “anti-authoritarianism” and “communalisation in which the individual is paramount” within a federation is nothing but another form of capitalist relation with an anarchist tinge – perfectly compatible with an ethnic or national liberation movement[6]. There is nothing at all here that questions class society or imperialist war; on the contrary, both are strengthened by Kurdish nationalist desires for a place in the “international community”. Since World War I Kurdish nationalism and ethnicity has made its people pawns and cannon-fodder in wider imperialist Great Games. This ethnic framework certainly has nothing to do with marxism, nor any element of the workers’ movement. The PKK is based on terror, not least against its own population. It is based on ethnic exclusion and has often played a role on the imperialist chessboard. Like so many “national liberation” movements it was completely undermined both materially and ideologically by the collapse of Stalinism in the late 80s and nothing of this has changed given that the “socialist” YPG element was until very recently the closest ally of US imperialism in the region. In the past ethnic Kurdish interests have been used by Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Germany, Britain and Greece. It has also embraced and extended the capitalist values of democracy and pacifism. Any nationalist or ethnic movement, even or especially “federalised”, is essentially and fundamentally a statist organisation working within capitalism and its imperialist forces. The defence of Kurdish ethnicity, like any other, is based on exclusion. Whatever the leftist mystifications and language, the “common homeland”, an entirely capitalist structure, remains the aim of Kurdish ethnicity.

It now seems that the Erdogan/AKP clique, with the military behind it, has had enough of the “peaceful and democratic” rise of the Kurds within the “international community” (i.e., the imperialist chessboard) and decided to go onto the offensive against it while strengthening the position of his party within the state. And Kurdish forces in their turn will present this as an attack on its so-called “socialist principles” and take further part in its “war of self-defence” thus acting as a further division of the working class.

What is the perspective?

For the working class of the major capitals both inside and outside the region, the generalisation of this war and its expressions are a great cause for concern, not least from the involvement of their “own” states and the spread of militarism generally. Overall for the local populations of the Middle East and around it is grim with the certainty of more war, violence, chaos and instability. Isis is extending its Caliphate, and like forces are coming to meet it, while, at another level, the weakening of US imperialism persists and it is this which has allowed Turkey to take this new, aggressive step. It was a weakness in the first place for the US to rely on Kurdish forces, a development which to some extent precipitated this present stage of the crisis. And, in the immediate, Turkish attacks on the Kurds can only weaken the fight against Isis. There are further dangers here. After a year of coalition bombing up to this July, 5000 airstrikes, 17000 bombs dropped and, at least, hundreds of civilians killed to add to the carnage and Isis relatively unscathed and further entrenched, Obama has now authorised blanket air coverage for its ground forces in Syria (World Socialist Website, 4.8.15). The problem for the Americans is that the ground forces that they can rely on in Syria are currently non-existent. The further complication in this respect is that the Assad regime has a very sophisticated, Russian-made, air-defence missile system.

Into this mix of irrationality, ethnic and religious rivalry overseen by imperialism and the development of each for themselves, the weakening of US influence and reach has helped force the latter to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran that has much wider consequences and implications. This deal will impact on Turkey, the other regional powers, Russia and much wider afield. We will return to the elements of the US/Iranian deal and its implications at a later date.

Boxer, 8.8.15

The International Communist Current is organising a day-long public meeting in London on October 10 2015. There will be two sessions:

• 11am to 1 pm: We will be showing a new film produced by a close sympathiser, Mark Hayes, whose film ‘How the working class put an end to the First World War’ was shown at last year’s meeting. The new film will show that the so-called ‘Good War’ of 1939-45 was in reality another imperialist massacre in direct continuity with the one in 1914-18.  The film will be followed by a short presentation and a period of discussion which we hope will draw out its main themes – in particular, what the two world wars tell us about the historical epoch in which we live.  For us, the barbarity of the Second World War provides clear confirmation that capitalism has, for the past century, been a socially regressive mode of production, a system in decline. However we are aware that many who identify themselves as revolutionaries reject this analysis and we encourage them to come to the meeting and put forward their point of view.
   
• 2pm to 5pm: 2015 is not only the ‘anniversary’ of the end of the Second World War but also the centenary of two key events in the development of an internationalist struggle against the 1914-18 war: the Zimmerwald Conference, which brought together the different political tendencies of the workers’ movement opposed to the war, and the publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet, which in our view represents the clearest analysis of the origins and significance of the world conflict. Our presentation will look not only at the internationalist opposition to World War One, but also at those rare groups who remained loyal to proletarian principles in the period leading up and during the Second World War, in contrast to those former working class currents – in particular a large part of the Trotskyists and the anarchists – who failed this crucial test.  The discussion will also seek to examine the tasks facing revolutionary internationalists today.

Venue: The Lucas Arms, 245A Gray's Inn Rd, London, WC1X 8QY

The event is free but we welcome contributions to the cost of the room and food.

By starting a new heading of ‘Readers’ Contributions’ on our website, and occasionally in our paper, we hope to encourage our readers and sympathisers to write texts and articles which can go into greater depth than is possible in our discussion forum, and so stimulate a longer term reflection. These articles, while being broadly based on proletarian politics, need not fully represent the positions of the ICC, or may deal with issues on which the ICC does not have a collective view. The question of art is clearly such an issue, and we welcome Boxer’s effort to deepen our understanding of the marxist approach to humanity’s creative productions.

The main purpose of this article is to bring the work of Max Raphael into the field of contemporary marxist attention and discussion where it belongs. The bourgeoisie calls many of its intellectuals “marxist”, which not only serves to give them a sheen of credibility but usually helps to debase genuine marxist contributions. Many learned individuals have important things to say around the various ideological spheres that have grown up around society and this is to be expected. But unlike the bourgeois “marxists” who pronounce on the ideologies of the ruling class, the views of Max Raphael are very clear on the necessity of the revolutionary overthrow of a corrupt and destructive capitalism by independent working class action, and this fact alone leads us to express an interest in trying to understand his works. Raphael wrote dozens of books and many more papers on art, mostly in French and German with a few in English. He said that if one wanted to understand his views on art then all of them should be read. We can’t do that or even approach it, but we can draw out some elements in order to give us a deeper perspective on art within a framework of the workers’ movement.

Art is a difficult question for marxists and this is reflected in the lack of positions from the political sphere in general, often in the face of much more pressing necessities. It is difficult and complex but it is an important part of society and elements of it have been covered by marxism, including Trotsky, by the ICC drawing out some salient points in its “Communism” series and in the excellent text by MH on this website, “Notes towards a history of art in ascendant and decadent capitalism”[1] which also refers to these previous contributions. In fact a short quote from Trotsky’s “Art and Politics in our epoch”[2], mentioned in MH’s text, indicates how Raphael approaches the question of art. The framework of the quote from Trotsky, quite correctly, is the drive towards destruction by decaying capitalism of everything that’s been built up within it, including art; an art, according to Trotsky, which will be destroyed “as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture based on slavery”. Now while the content of the quote is apt in the framework of decay, it’s obviously not the actual case that Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of Greek society. On the contrary, it persisted with strength, became incorporated into artistic developments and was revived again and again and still fascinates us today. Trotsky himself points to the complexity of the issue in his 1923 Communist Policy Towards Art: “...art must make its own way by its own means”. This begins to point to the nub of the problem: what is the relationship of this ideological sphere which is art to the economic substructure of society[3]? This is the question that Max Raphael addresses over all his works; it is his mission to try to address it in all its glory. In his text MH clearly shows the relationship between an ascendant capitalism that used art to decorate and promote the consolidation of its dictatorship, and its decay which turned what art there was mostly into trash.

Marx, in a profound quote below, puts the whole question of the relation of the ideology (art) to the economic and political substructure (the productive basis) to the test and Raphael takes up the problem posed from here applying the marxist method to it with some rigour.

Who was Max Raphael?

Max Raphael was born in Germany in 1889 and studied philosophy and art at university. He also studied some of the writings of the workers’ movement including Marx and Engels. He was conscripted into the German army for the First World War and there are reports that he deserted in 1917. He led an austere and difficult life, suffered racial and political persecution and held no official academic position in the art world from whose cultural hierarchies he was completely isolated. In the 1920’s he was kicked out of Berlin’s Volkshochule after the directorate heard that his unofficial lectures on art included dialectical materialism. Despite, or rather because of, the unparalleled contribution that he was making to a critique of art and society he, as one later art commentator described, “scourged” the art institutions of both the democratic west and The Palace of Soviets. All sides treated him with suspicion and it was just a small group of friends and unofficial pupils that kept his work alive. He fled persecution in Germany in the 30’s for France where he met Picasso, Matisse and Rodin in Paris, but he never owned a work of art. He made visits to Sicily and Greece, where he studied Doric architecture and visited many art galleries, which he described as “mausoleums”. He was interned twice in France in camps for Jews and dissidents and after the second time fled to America where, living on his wife’s wages as a cleaner in New York City, he committed suicide in 1952. Some of his statements could be taken as support for anti-fascism but he was pursued by the Nazis in Paris and his critique of Picasso’s Guernica, an artist whom he called “the greatest of our time”, by no means follow the anti-fascist narrative. His study of Guernica, when it was on loan to New York, took days and he literally studied it from every angle. He was daring and thorough in his analyses and his starting point was both the general historical conditions, what was the weight of their application to the art produced and, from another direction within the ideology, what is the intrinsic nature of the artist, the effect of society on him, his materials and the work of art itself?[4]. Going from the single artist, the weight of society on the individual and the original “idea” for a work, how do you also factor in the developing altered state of consciousness that grips the artist?  On the ferment within the artist, Raphael, in his The Demands of Art, quotes Paul Cezanne, an artist who pretty much had his feet on the ground, on his state of mind when painting: “I am in such a state of cerebral agitation, in an agitation so great, that at one point I was afraid it would engulf my reason” (Letter to Emile Barnard while painting the landscape of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Cezanne, incidentally, despised capitalism and talked of the future emergence of “a truly revolutionary art”. How do you square all this? How do you take all these factors, subjective and objective, into account? The answers to these questions lie in the complexity of their dialectical relations.  Art won’t change the world and Raphael is clear that this task belongs to other forces. But the struggle to understand art is for him part of “the struggle for a social order in which everyone will have the fullest opportunity to develop their creative capacities”[5]. At the end of the section on Picasso, in his book Proudhon, Marx, Picasso[6], Raphael talks about the inability of the modern artist to be able to express any revolutionary content in an “... epoch torn apart by contradictions” -and how could they when stuck within a bourgeois framework? Raphael is referring to Picasso in this next quote from the same work but his words here have a much wider resonance: “Thus, what has not yet been born is in a sense already outmoded, for the motive force of history is already on the other side of the barricade. The mere fact that there is a proletariat conscious of its class and struggling for it – however little this fact has entered the artist’s consciousness and sphere of experience – already today deeply influences the subconscious of the intellectual worker. The need for a new, integral work of art adapted to a new social order, makes itself felt in all his creations. But all the convulsions and all the individual sufferings of a bourgeois genius will be inadequate to meet this need”.

The “eternal charm” of Greek art

With Trotsky’s quotes above, which Raphael is unaware of as far as I can see, there’s a certain ambiguity towards art: that Greek art is “buried” but that art must also “find its own way”, the latter implying some sort of independent existence.  This, I think, is representative of the fitful approach that, by necessity, marxism has taken towards the development of art. Engels recognised the problem of the question of the relations of the superstructure, art in this case, to the economic core. To make the issue more complex – and ultimately more rewarding – then the superstructures, the ideologies of society do not have the same relationship to the base but, further, have complex relationships between themselves. Raphael quotes Engels in this respect: “... In the first instance we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from economic facts. But at the same time we have on account of the content neglected the formal side the manner in which these notions, etc., come about”[7]. Engels regularly returns to this question in the 1890’s in his correspondence with Paul Ernst, Joseph Bloch, W. Borgius and Conrad Schmidt – all quoted by Raphael in the section on Marx in Proudhon, Marx, Picasso. For Engels the relationship of art to the political economy is one that cannot be charted easily and mechanically. There is a relationship but it doesn’t take a parallel course: it diverges, moves in zigzags, can be far apart or closer but, generally, over the course of time the relationship exerts itself. The nature of this relationship, the relationship between subject and form, matter and spirit, the levels that they reach in the totality of their relations, their interdependence or not, is the question that Max Raphael deals with in some detail.

 He quotes Marx in respect of the above: “In order to examine the connection between spiritual production and material production it is above all necessary to grasp the latter itself not as a general category but in its definite historical form. Thus for example different kinds of spiritual production correspond to the capitalist mode of production and to the mode of production of the Middle Ages. If material production itself is not conceived in its specifically historical form, it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production corresponding to it and the reciprocal relationship of one on the other. Otherwise one cannot get beyond inanities”[8].

From what I’ve read of Raphael he was greatly motivated by the statement from Marx in his introduction in Grundrisse where the problem is posed more clearly (in a sense): “But the difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as the norm and as an unattainable model.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in a child’s naivety, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the underdeveloped stage of society on which it grew...”[9].  There’s a great deal in this quote but in relation to art this follows on from Marx’s statement a couple of paragraphs earlier in his introduction explaining that, in certain periods, the flowering of art is out of all kilter with the material foundation of society and its general development. “...certain periods of the highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and skeletal structure of its organisation”. He further talks about the different elements in the domain of art itself and how they influence one another, and predates Raphael in saying that within this domain whatever hasn’t yet been born is already outmoded.

The negation of cause and effect by reciprocal action

There was very little motivation (and time) to move Marx and Engels in the direction of art but what they did say about the question takes us forward in leaps and bounds and particularly on the way we approach it. Idealist philosophy a la Proudhon is of no use here, relying as it does on its fundamental a priorism. In relation to the problem posed by Marx and the “eternal nature” of Greek art, founders of historical and dialectical materialism were not impelled to delve further into the question of art. Raphael writes in The Marxist Theory of Art: “Moreover, those who wanted to treat these problems empirically had no exact science available to help them. Aesthetics was unusable, consisting as it does of a mixture of metaphysical deductions and empirical findings which are determined by the deductive method rather than by objective laws; on the other hand, the history of art, to the extent that one may be said to have existed, was concerned with a host of external manifestations rather than with the phenomenon of art itself”. Raphael himself finds aesthetic values useful for art in general with its “normative values” and the “aesthetic values” of play (and sexuality) in relation to art.

the study of the mind, right up to today, remains crude and the line between subjective emotion and scientific method difficult to draw. You could say that art developed in a certain aloof, autonomous manner “away” from society – in fact in one of his letters Engels uses the term “the relative autonomy of art”. More than that, art also has certain relationships with other ideologies as well as relationships within the different domains of art itself. Again Raphael quotes Engels: “Political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause and solely active, whereas everything else is only passive effect. On the contrary, interaction takes place on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always exerts itself”[10].

The “eternal charm” of Greek art in Marx’s 1857 introduction to Grundrisse, is a long way from, a lot more complex than Trotsky’s idea of Greek art being interred under ruins. And it is from this passage of Marx that Max Raphael sees the most important tool for building up a marxist theory of art. This passage from Marx is no simple statement but the posing of a fundamental problem and from it Raphael attempts to show that dialectical materialism can provide the way for going forward in the face of all the apparent contradictions. For him a detailed analysis of the statement by Marx “... will show that dialectical materialism, providing it is applied correctly, supplies us with the means for successfully overcoming all such initial obstacles as arise from social and individual factors, and for going forward to a theory and sociology of art. This method also enables us to eliminate the almost inevitable drawbacks of the initial situation, namely the fact that art and the pseudo-scientific method for dealing with it serve as a metaphysical refuge for the reactionary bourgeoisie and, at the same time, afflict all superficial, and hence dogmatic, Marxists with a kind of anxiety neurosis”[11]. If an “eternal charm” exists, despite changed historical, social and economic conditions, then there must be an eternal source to it. So the task for marxism is to produce something of an accurate analysis of the spiritual process that connects historical conditions with “eternal charms”; that is, according to Raphael, “the values created by mankind transcending the limits of a given epoch”. The problem remains unsolved. Marx excluded religion from communism because it sets limits on the creative ability of mankind and diverts action away from class struggle by preaching class collaboration. But he certainly saw art as part of a new society, because while it could also have an opiate effect it could also be a powerful weapon. Art is a synthesis of nature (with history) and the human mind and in its expression it acquires a certain autonomy from both.

Following Marx and Engels, there’s no vulgar “art comes from the economy” from Raphael.  For him there are three important questions posed by the quote from Marx above:

• Myth as an intermediary in the move from the economic substructure to the ideology of art;
• The lack of proportionality between economic and ideological development;
• The “eternal charm” of an artistic expression whose economic foundations disappeared ages ago.

Mythology is a force created by mankind in order to try to subdue, control and affect the forces of nature. This is especially true of Greek mythology where the myths were accepted by the same people with the same cultural background, from the same economic order expressing a single collective character of the beginnings of the unconscious process from which art arises. Marx also said that mythology was an intermediate historically determined link which disappears when mankind gains mastery over nature; and in the section on Marx in his book Raphael goes into great detail about mythology. Greek mythology was a generally understood product of a single people’s imagination and its symbolic power is a bridge to a generally shared understanding. The symbol, for Raphael in The Demands of Art, “...for all its visible finitude, points to the infinite: it is a sensory synthesis of the finite and the infinite and hence has a character of necessity. Allegory (such as used by Picasso in Guernica for example, B) is merely a metaphor for the gulf between the two and hence always arbitrary. It leads to dogma rather than a dialogue between the self and the world”. Because of its specifics here this could be expressed with Greek art and not with Egyptian art for example, because the latter’s mythology was produced and mediated by a priestly caste. Later on, according to Raphael, Christianity and Christian art tried to join the forces of natural, popular development and priestly organisation. There’s no doubt about the assimilation and use of barbarian (i.e., non-civilised) art by Christianity and expressions of Christian art.

 All we’ve done here is taken a superficial view of Max Raphael’s analysis but they are nevertheless very important steps for beginning to develop a marxist view of art. I hope to return to these questions above, particularly the deeper elements of his book Proudhon, Marx, Picasso. But for now Marx saw Greek art as an expression of the “Historical childhood of humanity... its beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return” expressing an “eternal charm”. How much more then does this apply to a much earlier “childhood” expression of art that Marx and Engels knew nothing about: Upper Palaeolithic cave art. We will look at this particular expression and Raphael’s analysis of it in the next part [103] of this series.

Boxer, 4.2.15

A few facts are enough to show the horror of the situation facing the migrants:

• On 27 August, in Austria near the Hungarian border, 71 bodies (including 8 women and 4 children) were discovered in an advanced state of decomposition, locked into a lorry abandoned by the roadway;
• A few days later, the body of a little boy of three, drowned at the same time as his mother and brother, was washed up on a beach at Bodrum in Turkey.

These were both cases of migrants from Syria fleeing the nightmare of four years of war. This phenomenon of refugees has now been globalised on an unprecedented, going well beyond the exoduses of the worst years of the 20th century.

Propaganda and solidarity

One thing about this is striking. The media are not trying to hide the unbearable horror of the situation. On the contrary, they are headlining it and are coming up with more and more shocking images, like that of the little boy on the beach. Why?

In fact, the bourgeoisie is exploiting, for the purpose of its propaganda, both the barbarism for which it is itself responsible, and the feelings of indignation it provokes, and the spontaneous expressions of solidarity between local working people and migrants which in the last few months has begun to develop in several parts of Europe. The propaganda is aimed at strangling at birth any possibility of independent thought and to instil nationalist ideology in a more insidious way. In the eyes of the ruling class, left to themselves, proletarians in Europe are acting in a curious and even irresponsible way: they are helping and supporting the migrants. Despite the permanent ideological bombardment, we find that very often when these proletarians are in direct contact with the refugees, they bring them what they need to survive -  food, drink, blankets -  and sometimes even take them in to their homes. We have seen such examples of solidarity in Lampedusa in Italy, Calais in France  and a number of cities in Germany and Austria. When, after being hassled by the Hungarian state, train loads of refugees have arrived at the stations, the exhausted migrants have been welcomed by thousands of people offering them support and material aid. Austrian rail workers have worked extra hours to transport the refugees towards Germany. In Paris, thousands demonstrated on 5 September to protest against the treatment of the refugees. They raised slogans like “we are all children of migrants”.

Faced with such massive and international expressions of solidarity from the civil population, when the main concern of the state has been to intimidate the refugees and keep them under control, the ruling class has had to react. Almost everywhere the bourgeoisie has had to modify the anti-immigrant discourse of the last few years and adapt to the situation. In Germany, the turn-around of the bourgeoisie has helped it to strengthen the image of the country as a very advanced democracy, to exorcise the ghosts of the past in response to those of its rivals who never miss an occasion to refer to Germany’s dark history. What’s more, it’s the trauma of the Second World War which explains the sensitivity of the German proletariat to the question of refugees. The German authorities have had to suspend the Dublin agreement which calls for the deportation of asylum seekers. In the eyes of the world’s migrants, Angela Merkel has become the champion of Germany’s openness and a model of humanity. In Britain, David Cameron has had to modify his hard line stance, along with the worst right wing tabloids which up till now have been describing migrants as a threatening and sub-human horde. For the bourgeoisie, one of the key issues has been the need to hide the fact that there are two totally antagonistic logics at work here: capitalist exclusion and ‘every man for himself’ versus proletarian solidarity; a dying system sinking into barbarism versus the affirmation of a class which bears within itself the future flourishing of humanity. The bourgeoisie cannot avoid reacting to the real feelings of indignation and solidarity which are appearing in the central countries.

The spectacular explosion in the number of refugees

The situation is not totally new. In 2012, the High Commission for Refugees (HCR) was already counting 45.2 million “displaced” people and was ringing the alarm bells about this growing human disaster. In 2013, 51.2 million were fleeing various kinds of horror. The threshold of 50 million had thus been crossed for the first time since the Second World War. The HCR explained this as the result of “the multiplication of new crises” and “the persistence of old crises which never seem to die down”. The year 2015 is about to mark a new record: 60 million refugees for Europe alone. Since January, appeals for asylum have increased by 78%. In Germany, according to the minister of the interior, these appeals have quadrupled, reaching the record figure of 800,000. Macedonia has declared a state of emergency and closed its borders. Officially, more than 2800 of these exiles, men, women and children, have drowned in the Mediterranean in the last few months. In Asia, the phenomenon is also massive. For example, a growing number of people have been fleeing repression and persecution in Myanmar and desperately seeking refuge in other southeast Asian countries. In Latin America, criminality and poverty have reached such levels that hundreds of thousands of people are trying to get to the USA. A goods train which goes from the south of Mexico to the north, nicknamed ‘The Beast’, has been regularly carrying thousands of migrants. They run the risk not only of falling from the carriage roofs or being thrown off in the tunnels, but also of being assaulted by the authorities; they are above all at the mercy of the drug gangs or other bandits who ransom them, rape them, kidnap women for prostitution, and as often as not kill them. And for those who have the fortune to get through all this, all along the US frontier they face a wall of barbed wire policed by armed guards who don’t hesitate to shoot at them.

In fact, the hypocritical and civilised speeches of the democratic states go very well with the nastiest and most xenophobic rants. The first encourages feelings of powerlessness, the second of fear. Both obstruct any real reflection, any real development of solidarity.

A phenomenon accentuated by the reality of decomposition

Entire zones of the planet are being devastated and made uninhabitable. This is particularly the case for the regions linking Ukraine to Africa via the Middle East. In certain of these war zones, half the population is in flight and are being held in gigantic camps, at the mercy of the most unscrupulous traffickers, organised on an industrial scale. The real cause of this hell is the decay of the world system of exploitation. The breadth of the refugee phenomenon is a clear expression of the downward spiral of capitalism, which brings in its wake pogroms and violence of all kinds, growing pauperisation linked to the economic crisis, and ecological catastrophes. Of course wars, crises and pollution are not new. All wars have led to people fleeing to save their lives. However, the intensity of these phenomena is growing all the time. Up until the First World War, the number of refugees remained relatively limited. The war then brought the beginning of massive displacements, ‘population transfers’ etc. This spiral took on a whole new dimension with the Second World War, when the number of refugees reached unheard-of levels. Then, during the Cold War, the numerous proxy wars between east and west generated a significant number of refugees, as did the famines in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 70s and 80s. But since the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 a veritable Pandora’s box has opened up. The antagonism between the two imperialist blocs imposed a certain order and discipline: most countries obeyed the diktats of their respective bloc leader, the US or Russia. The wars of this period were inhuman and murderous, but in a sense they were ‘ordered’ and ‘classical’. Since the collapse of the USSR, growing instability has given rise to a multiplication of local conflicts, to all sorts of shifting alliances. Conflicts have gone on and on, resulting in the disintegration of states and the rise of warlords and gangsters, in the dislocation of the entire social fabric.

In addition, the contradictions between the imperialist powers (marked by the development of ‘every man for himself’, in which each nation plays its own imperialist card with increasingly short-term objectives), have led the latter to make military interventions in an increasingly regular, almost permanent manner. Each of the big powers support this or that mafia clique or warlord, this or that increasingly irrational band of fanatics, in the defence of their imperialist interests. What dominates in capitalist society today is the disintegration of entire regions, where the most crying expressions of social decomposition can be seen: whole regions controlled by drug gangs, the rise of Islamic State with its barbaric atrocities, etc.

The bunkerisation of the great powers

The states which bear the main responsibility for all this social, ecological and military chaos have at the same time become real fortresses. In a context of unemployment and chronic crisis, security measures are being stepped up to a drastic degree. States have become ‘bunkerised’. Only the most qualified migrants are allowed in to be exploited, to lower the cost of labour power and create divisions within the proletariat. The majority of refugees and migrants, the ‘undesirable’ ones, those reduced to misery and starvation, are cynically enjoined to stay where they are and die without inconveniencing anyone. The northern states have literally chased them into a corner, as in the case of France with its ‘Jungle’ near the Channel Tunnel at Calais. Gangrened by a crisis of overproduction, capitalist society can no longer them any perspective. Instead of opening up, the doors are being closed: states are barricading their frontiers, electrifying fences, constructing more and more walls. During the Cold War, the time of the Berlin Wall, there were about 15 walls defending frontiers. Today more than 60 have been built or are being constructed. From the ‘apartheid wall’ raised by Israel in the face of the Palestinians, to the 4000 miles of barbed wire separating India from Bangladesh, states are falling into a real paranoia about security. In Europe, the Mediterranean front is littered with walls and barriers. Last July, the Hungarian government began construction of a four meter high razor wire fence. As for the Schengen space in Europe, and the work of the Frontext agency or Triton, their industrial-military effectiveness is formidable: a permanent fleet of surveillance and war ships there to prevent refugees from crossing the Mediterranean. A similar military machine has been set up along the Australian coastline. All these obstacles seriously raise the mortality rate among refugees, who are forced to take more and more risks to get past them.

The cynicism of the bourgeoisie

On the one hand, the bourgeois state is barricading itself in. It feeds to the maximum the warnings of doom coming from the most xenophobic populist parties, sharpening hatred, fear and division. Themselves facing deteriorating living conditions, the weakest sections of the proletariat are hit full on by this nationalist propaganda. In a number of countries there have been anti-migrant marches, physical attacks, arson attack on refugee centres. The refugees are the target of campaigns against ‘foreigners who threaten our way of life’. The state legitimises all this by setting up internment camps (over 400 in Europe), deporting those it can, patrolling the frontiers.

On the other hand, this same bourgeoisie fakes its indignation through the voice of politicians who talk about the ‘moral challenge’ posed by the refugees and offers them token support and assistance. In short, the capitalist state, the arch-criminal, poses as their saviour.

But as long as capitalism lasts, there can be no real solution for the migrants and the refugees. If we don’t fight against this system, if we don’t go to the roots of the problem, our indignation and solidarity will not go beyond the stage of basic aid, and the deepest and most noble human feelings will be recuperated by the bourgeoisie, turned into heavily publicised acts of charity which will be used to fuel a more hidden form of nationalism. Therefore, we must try to understand what’s really happening. The proletariat has to develop its own critical and revolutionary point of view on these questions.

In future articles, we will return in more depth to this historic issue.

WH, 6.9.15

“Nothing is so striking today, nothing has such decisive importance for the whole shape of today’s social and political life, as the yawning contradiction between an economic foundation that grows tighter and firmer every day, binding all nations and countries into a great whole, and the political superstructure of states, which seeks to split nations artificially, by way of border posts, tariff barriers and militarism, into so many foreign and hostile divisions” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy, in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1, Verso, London 2013, p 121)

Borders as a demarcation of the ownership of land are as old as the existence of property itself. There simply is no existence of property without the demarcation and defence of it. With the advent of major empires such as the Rome or China, gigantic fortified borders were set up: Hadrian’s Wall, Limes, the Great Wall of China. So the existence of such borders to defend an empire against the invasion of rivals is nothing new.

However, as long as the planet was not yet “divided” amongst the major capitalist rivals, the demarcation of borders still remained mostly at low levels or could even be settled at the negotiation table through treaties. For example in 1884 at the Berlin Conference, borders in Africa could still be drawn on a map; in the early 19th century a territory as big as Alaska was sold by the Russian Czar to the USA. At the turn of the 19th century the Mexican-US border almost had no guards. And at the time of World War One, borders in Europe still were not heavily guarded.

Only once the world had been divided amongst the major capitalist rivals at the turn of the 20th century did the defence of territories become a battle on a different scale. But even though WW1 contained large battles for territories – such as the trench war in Belgium and France, with their terrible cost in human lives and material - the borders remained remarkably ‘open’ after the war. The reparations imposed on the defeated countries by the Versailles Treaty were either a relatively minor loss of territory (the German Saarland, ‘lost’ to France, or the former German colonies, which changed owners) or were made up of big financial payments. However, there was not yet any partition of entire countries, and there were not yet any fortifications of borders as would occur after World War Two.

With the intensification of imperialist rivalries, the defence of borders and territories has changed qualitatively. A fierce fight over every inch of territory set in. After WW 2 a number of countries were divided (Germany, Korea, China, Vietnam, India-Pakistan), all of which set up the most militarised borders, equipped with mines, fences, walls, armed guards and dogs.  The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 meant the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the need to entrench itself behind the most sophisticated walls. This has now led to one of the most heavily guarded border walls in the world. “Symbolically, the wall in Palestine is this century’s Berlin Wall, albeit four times as long as that hated Cold War icon and more than twice as high – 8 m.. Under construction since 2002, it is expected to eventually extend for 709 kilometres through the West Bank. A series of concrete slabs, barbed-wire ‘buffer zones’, trenches, electrified fences, watchtowers, thermal-imaging video cameras, sniper towers, military checkpoints and roads for patrol vehicles have dismembered the cities of the West Bank and segregated them from occupied East Jerusalem (…) The wall has cost over $2.6 billion so far, while the cost of yearly maintenance is $260 million”[1].

In sum: since WW1 all countries are imperialist and have to obey the law of defending their interests also through the most obnoxious border defence systems.

And the recent series of wars across the planet has meant that frontiers have been fortified to prevent the infiltration of enemy forces- often terrorist gangs with various states behind them.

A whole system has been set up to screen any person in need of a visa, and Orwellian surveillance institutions like the Homeland Security Authority in the US have been developed to track down possible enemies and prevent them from entering the country.

At the same time while migration in the 19th century was not so much hampered by a complex legislation and a sophisticated police system, the 20th century meant that the borders have now also taken on a second function in addition to the ‘traditional’ military one: to prevent the entrance of labour power that is not needed. Contrast this with the USA’s demand for labour at the end of the 19th century – the real reason for the appeal to “send us your poor, your huddled masses”. Today the USA has joined the race to seal off its southern borders against waves of Latin American proletarians in flight from poverty and criminality in Central and South America.

In the 1960s another new phenomenon appeared. Many of the countries dominated by the Russian bloc had a shortage of labour, in particular East Germany. Thus the East German State erected the Berlin Wall which had to prevent its work force from leaving its territory. The economic underdog closed its borders to keep its citizens inside.

So now more and more we have a simultaneity or double function of borders: in addition to the classical military function of defence of territory, the most sophisticated walls are constructed to prevent refugees from entering and preventing or filtering unwanted “economic migrants”.

So although the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, the disappearance of the confrontation between the old blocs did not mean a new borderless world. On the contrary!

“Between 1947-1991 eleven walls were built, which survived the end of Cold War (South-Africa-Mozambique, Zimbabwe, North-South Korea, India-Pakistan, Israel, Morocco-West-Sahara, Zimbabwe-Zambia). Between 1991-2001 seven walls were erected: Around the exclaves Ceuta, Melilla, USA-Mexico, Malaysia-Thailand, Kuweit-Iraq, Uzbekistan-Afghanistan/Kirgizistan). 22 walls were erected since 2001: Saudi-Arabia-United-Arab Emirates, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Burma-Bangladesh, Botswana-Zimbabwe, Brunei-Malaysia, China-North-Korea, Egypt-Gaza-strip- United Arab Emirates-Oman, India-Bangladesh, Burma-Pakistan, Iran-Pakistan, Israel-Jordan/West-Bank, Jordan-Iraq, Kazakstan-Uzbekistan, Pakistan-Afghanistan, Thailand-Malaysia- Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan, Israel-Egypt.

(www.dandurand.uqam.ca/evenements/evenements-passes/440-fences-and-walls-... [111] also Chaire Raoul-Dandurand _ Fences and Walls in International Relations.html, Berlin Wall is Gone but Separation Walls are a Growth Industry _ Burning Billboard.org.htm)

Between the almost 200 countries of the world there are some 250,000 kilometers of borders. An entrenched society![2]

This shows the totally irrational character of the capitalist system. While capitalism can only ‘prosper’ if there is free mobility of goods and labour, the movement of human labour is submitted to the most ruthless checks and obstacles. This means not only an unknown level of violence along the borders, but also totally lunatic financial costs. The massive border protection system between Mexico and the US costs a fortune: “But that has come at a cost. Most estimate inspection, patrol, and infrastructure set taxpayers back somewhere between $12 billion and $18 billion per year. That's up about 50% from the early 2000s, according to the Journal, which says spending has included ‘everything from 650 miles of fencing to military aircraft, marine vessels, drones, surveillance equipment, infrared camera towers and detention centres’. More generally, border security costs totalled $90 billion between 2002 and 2011, a Freedom of Information Act request conducted by the Associated Press shows. The news outlet reports that annual expenses vary from drug-sniffing dogs -- $4,500 each -- to National Guard troops -- about $91,000 per soldier”. (Source https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/08/06/the-migrant-crisis-could-cost-billions-but-border.aspx [112])

If you imagine the total number of guards all along the borders in the world, their cost would be the most absurd figure – and it shows graphically what this society wastes its resources on! [3]

We should add that, along with the most sophisticated border controls, within each country more and more “gated communities” are set up, fences and often armed protection systems for the privileged. Entire neighbourhoods have become “no-go-areas” for non-residents. 

But the industrial countries are not only becoming real “bunkers”. They are also the biggest “deporters” of labour-power. While the total number of slaves who were taken by force mainly from the African continent amounts to some 10-20 million during period 1445-1850, the deportation policy by the industrialised countries and even other states will probably reach a similar number in a much shorter span of time. A few examples: more than 5 million ‘illegal’ immigrants have been deported from the US - under G.W. Bush around 2 million, under Clinton almost 900,000, and under Obama more than 2 million. In Europe the measures are tougher and tougher, and there about 400 detention centres for ‘illegals’ awaiting deportation. Mexico itself deports 250,000 foreigners a year to Central America. Saudi Arabia is to deport more than one million people who live and work illegally in the kingdom.

Faced with the recent wave of refugees from the war torn areas of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Northern Africa... the  system of border protection has reached a new scale. The authorities deploy ever more troops and material to detain and deport  refugees. More than a quarter of a century after the “opening” of the Iron Curtain in Hungary, Hungary has sealed its border with Serbia with barbed wire to prevent “Les misérables” from reaching “safer havens”, and it is planning to set up another Iron Curtain along the Romanian border. Similar measures are being taken in other European countries. The previously “open” Schengen borders are now controlled by border police; “hotspots” (refugee ‘selection’ centres are to be set up in Greece and Italy, with the possibility of sending back refugees to the inferno where they came from. Or outposts for holding back refugees are extended to Africa itself, where arrangements are made to set up border controls at the refugee transit routes in Africa.  

The pictures of refugee treks and thousands of detained or repulsed refugees on the Balkans and elsewhere, left without food and shelter, remind us of the way the Jewish population was treated under the Nazi regime or the fate of the refugees at the end of World War Two.  They show the continuity of barbarism in this system. A century of war refugees, of camps, of deportations, of Iron Curtains, of illegal migration and deportation of those who have the cheek to come only to fill their bellies.  

We now have the highest and longest walls ever to prevent war refugees and desperate ‘economic’ migrants from entering – but they still cannot stem the tide of victims of the combined effects of capitalism’s inexorable decomposition.

By creating a global economy, capitalism has created the conditions for a world wide human association. But its total inability to realise it is illustrated today by the universal fortification of its frontiers. Calls for ‘no borders’ by well-meaning activist groups are thus entirely utopian. Borders can only be abolished through international proletarian revolution, which will dismantle the anti-human prison of the nation state. 

Dv.  09.09.15

On August 12th, at 22.50 (China local time), there was a warning of a small fire in one of the industrial warehouses in the district of Bihai, in the port city of Tianjin, China. Some firemen rushed to the scene. Some 40 minutes later, there was a tremendous explosion equivalent to 3 tons of TNT, and some seconds after that another brutal explosion, equivalent to 21 tons of TNT, which could be seen even via satellites surrounding the earth.

Why was this explosion so terrible? These warehouses are not just the usual ones; they were warehouses of dangerous products with more than 3 tons of products potentially harmful to any human being. All of them were situated in an industrial zone where only workers are living.

It seems that the calcium carbide that was stored could have reacted with the water that was used by the firemen to extinguish the fire, transforming itself into an explosive acetylene. An explosion of acetylene would have been enough to detonate a chain reaction of other products that were stored there, causing an even far bigger one. At the moment there are 114 deaths and initially 720 people have been treated in hospitals. We should add that the warehouse had also stored 700 tons of sodium cyanide, a highly toxic substance for human beings; and there is fear that it might have intoxicated the whole zone.

The destructive logic of capital

Behind all these facts and figures one thing is hidden: the inhuman logic of capital, a new infliction on the working class, paid for in blood, a new offensive against everything that is human on this planet. In 1915, in his pamphlet ‘The enemy is in our own country’, the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht said: “The enemies of the people are hoping that the masses will forget… We fight this with the following means: Verify everything, don’t forget anything! Don’t forgive anything!”.

This slogan is still valid today. Why was there a warehouse stuffed with such material, if not for the need to reduce costs, to maintain the accumulation of capital? Why have workers been living so close to these monstrous piles of explosives, if not because the Moloch of capital needs to maximise the use of space filled by the exploited and humiliated population?

We need to remember that those accidents are not isolated cases, but a chronic problem of capitalism in general and Chinese capitalism in particular. In its Sunday edition of 23rd of August, the Spanish newspaper El País titled its report: ‘Industrial insecurity: an endemic problem in China’. There we are told that between January and May 2015, industrial accidents caused 16.000 deaths and there were 26 explosions like the one in Tianjin, with a total of 65 deaths. China is not an exception according to the ILO (International Organisation of Labour), because in 2014 2,300,000 people died as a result of industrial across in the world.

In its phase of decomposition capitalism loses its capacities for a ‘healthy’ coordination and functioning, what little was there in the first place. For this reason they sent firemen to extinguish a fire in a warehouse that was full of substances that reacted violently when they came into contact with water. So they lost their warehouse, their industrial infrastructure and the port activities came to a standstill in a port which is a transit point for 40% of all imported vehicles. The mining giant BHP Billiton suspended all its port activities. Renault lost 1,500 cars and Hyundai 4,000. Toyota and John Deere halted their production. 17.000 buildings are damaged…. Capitalism's crazy drive for accumulation is turning against itself, like a gigantic fist. Capitalism is demonstrating that its survival generates monstrous contradictions, which are increasingly difficult to control and which lead to ever more dangerous waves of destruction.

But if the bourgeoisie suffered losses with this self-inflicted catastrophe, the proletariat has lost more. What does all the industrial production of Toyota, John Deere and BHP mean, compared to the life of one single worker? To all those workers who lost their home or even worse, to the workers which this infamous government wants to relocate to this zone, even though is poisoned with cyanide? Nothing!

Against this cruel reality, against these continuing humiliations imposed by the bourgeoisie and the Chinese government, there have already been some small protests.

But these protests seem to be sunk in the swamp of democratism and legality: “they did not know about the content of the warehouse when they should have known it…it was too close to habitations according to the existing law…”

 A real proletarian voice is still needed in China, a voice that says clearly: no to the assassination of our class brothers, no to the servile and inhumane factory-cities and no to the shameless logic of capital. There has to rise, finally, a voice that speaks for what is human in man. In the meanwhile we all want to be that voice:

Verify everything, don’t forget anything! Don’t forgive anything! Tianjin is murder!

Comunero 24.8.15

This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC in Spain.

We are publishing an appreciation of the recent telephone technicians' struggle at Movistar. This arose out of a widespread discussion amongst comrades close to the ICC. This debate was started with the contribution of one comrade; this provided the bones for this article, and others added contributions and they were incorporated into the final draft.

The role of the immediate struggles of the proletariat

The immediate struggles to defend the living conditions of the workers are one of the factors in the process of the coming to consciousness, of developing solidarity, unity and determination within the proletariat. Revolutionaries follow very closely these struggles and participate in them as far as they are able. They put lots of work into supporting them and are never dismissive of economic gains they achieve, because these are necessary for the daily survival of workers; because they result from the courage and the spirit of initiative of proletarians in asserting themselves against capital; and because they are a declaration of war against the logic of the market and the national capital.

This logic tells us we should sacrifice ourselves on the altar of the imperatives of capitalist accumulation and, therefore, that we should work harder, with less pay, agree to lay-offs, worsening conditions, the loss of social benefits and so on, so that capitalist profits can prosper and especially so that the nation – whether it be Spanish, Greek, German or Catalan - is respected in the international arena and is "recognised" for its "seal of quality".

Against such logic, in struggling to defend their living conditions, the workers highlight implicitly that human life is not for production - this is the logic of capital - but that production of use values is part of human life – that is the logic of the new communist society that the proletariat carries within itself. [1]
But to restrict ourselves to such an implicit response is not sufficient, since most of these struggles will not get results. Their main contribution comes from the lessons - often negative - linked to the historical struggle for a new society. Also, we have to consider these struggles critically to be able to develop and deepen the theoretical, organisational and moral acquisitions of the proletariat.

The role of strikes

The strike is the traditional starting point for the coming to consciousness of the workers about the reality of their situation, because it throws light on all the elements of the class struggle and the diametrically opposed interests that underpin it: the struggle against the economic attacks of capital, the perception, or at least the immediate intuition, that all employees must defend themselves and, sooner or later, begin to fight against the social relations imposed by capitalist production.

But what is the essential meaning of a strike? Formerly, during the ascendant phase of capitalism, with the whole world to conquer, there could be real and more or less lasting economic improvements for the proletariat. But even at that time, the revolutionaries insisted on the need to understand what strikes really meant, that workers learn from them, examine all the questions they raise, gain from the experience they provide in fighting together and in the strengthening of political consciousness.

Today, for a mode of production in decomposition, there is little margin for a real and lasting improvement in the situation of the workers, if any. If revolutionaries defend the self-organised strike, it is because it brings into play the best conditions for building solidarity and confidence between workers and because no other action pushes this forward as much as the widest debate, as organised mass assemblies in which every aspect of this society is subject to scrutiny through criticism and discussion.
So it is not a matter of defending the strike because it is "harmful" to this or that capitalist, because it impedes production and prevent the capitalists from filling their own pockets. For us, what is important is the debate, the assemblies, being politically independent of the state and capital, the fact that the strike pushes the workers forward, into taking control of their struggle, breaking with their individual atomisation and reconnecting with the historical methods of struggle outside of the influence of the bourgeois politics of the State.

The strike is a part of the whole of the means available to the proletarian class struggle. It combines economic struggle, political struggle and ideological struggle, all three forming a unity that nourishes proletarian consciousness.

An attempt at self-organisation

The Movistar technicians' strike, of indefinite duration, had two sides almost from the beginning: the most negative was, from what we know about it, that the strike was called by the unions, the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) and the UGT, which have been able to reinforce a strong tendency to corporatism that was very present in this strike.

However, its most encouraging and promising side was the notable effort by the workers to hold assemblies outside and separate from these major unions and to organise themselves to try to move forward. That's why we can say that the struggle had, for some time, a real prospect of self-organised proletarian struggle and a certain potential.

These assemblies express, firstly, a tendency towards unification within the working class; secondly, a battle to take control of the struggle and to wrench it free from the hands of the capitalist state organisations which, in controlling it, can only bring defeat. Thirdly, it heralds a new mode of social organisation – communism - based on the associated decisions of humanity freed from all forms of exploitation. We have been able to see that such general assemblies constituted one of the most prominent vital and dynamic elements at the time of the Indignados movement and also in the struggle at Gamonal.[2]

Every struggle should be seen in its historical and international context, because otherwise, we would be looking at them with opera glasses distorted by empiricism and immediatism, which would prevent us from seeing the broader picture. Thus, we should take into account that the struggle at Movistar comes at a historic time of great weakness of the proletariat with a loss of its class identity, characterised by a significant lack of confidence in itself as an independent social force.

This struggle is part of a series of struggles which, despite what they bring, are well below what the gravity of the situation imposed by capitalism demands. In recent years, there have only been, on the one hand, some relatively important strike movements in some companies in the Asturias (2012), in Bangladesh, China, South Africa, Vietnam, and more recently in Turkey. On the other hand, there have been occupations in the centres of some towns and cities or mass assemblies, notably with the anti-CPE movement in France (2006) and with the Indignados movement in Spain (2011), also in the course of more recent examples, but these have had weaker international echoes, in Brazil and Turkey (2013) and Peru (2015).[3]

The political and trade union forces of the bourgeoisie, in their desire to divide and counter the proletarians in struggle, oppose these two types of movement, whereas, even with their differences, they are driven by a profound unity. It is this unity, especially the effort of self-organisation, that is expressed in the struggle at Movistar.

Attempts at solidarity

We have seen attempts at solidarity. There is a strong sense of solidarity among the workers... but it does not extend to being a class expression, that is, solidarity "going outside" to workers in other sectors, and is not expressed as a practical recognition of being part of the same struggle, but as sympathy and support (which is still sincerely welcomed); so there is a significant lack of consciousness of belonging to the same world-wide class struggling for the same interests. Leftists, who in their verbiage gladly borrow the language of the workers, promote this distorted view highlighting "immediate action" by making an appeal to good old "common sense" that claims it should deal only with what is "urgent" in the narrowest and most trifling sense of the term.

The struggle itself has nonetheless revealed a remarkable effort of unification, even more commendable in the case of Movistar, a company where the nature of the work of the technicians is atomised, with no concentration in work centres, with a fragmented workforce and where many of them do not appear, on legal grounds, as workers, "working on behalf of someone", but are falsely considered to be "self-employed".[4]

The danger of the entrapment of the struggles

But the struggle has shown that the main trap was corporatism, resistance expressed in an isolated and desperate manner: this is what happened to Coca-Cola workers but also those at Panrico. There is a reaction against the major unions on close examination, but this reaction does not necessarily challenge the union logic. There has been and there is still a strong tendency in the struggles, not towards explicitly seeking unification, extension and debate inside the assemblies, but retreating and taking a stand inside the company or the industry until a judicial verdict or a hypothetical favourable agreement has been reached.

These reactions, that lead everyone to be a prisoner in his hole, his sector, his company or his corporation, have several causes. The first is clear, we just raised it: the loss of class identity that fuels a sense of emptiness, not knowing who to contact to seek solidarity, a desire to desperately cling to the imagined protective refuge of the small space and alleged "intimacy" of the company, corporation and "work mates" ...

It bears the stamp of a historical situation that we characterise as that of the decomposition of capitalism, which marks all components of society with a dangerous tendency to dislocation,  to "every man for himself ", to dispersion. As we have said in our Theses on Decomposition: “"every man for himself ", marginalisation, the atomisation of individuals, the destruction of family relationships, the exclusion of older people, the destruction of emotions and their replacement with pornography, commercialised sport and media coverage, mass gatherings of young people in the collective hysteria of song and dance, a sinister substitute for solidarity, with the social ties completely absent. All these manifestations of social putrefaction today, on a scale unknown in history, invade every pore of human society, expressing only one thing: not just the dislocation of bourgeois society, but the annihilation of every principle of collective life within a society that is deprived of any project, from any perspective, even in the short term, even the most illusory".[5]

This is fertile ground for the penetration of trade union and leftist organisations, always ready to bring workers' struggles to the "safe area" of bourgeois legality "for their own good" or "for the struggle" as a pure abstraction. In an atmosphere of isolation, of lack of reflection and debate, of lack of contact between strikers and the workers of other sectors, union and reformist logic finds its breeding ground that opens the way for organisations who seek only to control the workers and to attract their votes.
These organisations say they defend the workers, but we could see, with Syriza for example, what they do when they take on government responsibilities. But we must also understand their nature when they are not in government, when they do not stop pressing for solutions from the legal institutions of the exploiters, from the State, and above all try to prevent workers from learning, from reflecting, from debating in the heat of the struggle, and instead try to get us to entrust the solution to conflicts to the very forces that represent the mode of production that every day and everywhere lies behind these same conflicts. A significant example is that of the Trotskyist tendency 'El Militante' that wildly applauded the fact that the workers of Coca-Cola had ended the struggle by appealing to the Supreme Court to demand suspension of the closure of the plant in Fuenlabrada, chanting slogans such as ''Make the courts see justice.''

In the case of Movistar, the suspension of the strike for "other forms of struggle" was a clear statement that the struggle was over. For several weeks now, we have seen that the loss of a desire to unify and to extend the struggle has created disarray, with the entry onto the scene of 'new players' such as Cayo Lara, leader of Izquierda Unida, or Pablo Iglesias, of Podemos, although we did see a small group of workers expressing dissent through ironic interjections of the word “Presidente” during one of his speeches to a demonstration of strikers.

Perspectives

It is clear that the current struggles are still far away from achieving some key elements: what appears almost intuitively (solidarity and self-organisation) demands further elaboration to deepen what is essential: class identity, class consciousness (historical and international), the extension of the struggle, which help us to move towards the re-appropriation of revolutionary theory by the masses themselves.
The intervention against every effort to give credibility to the bourgeois state is a first requirement, against its democracy and its representative bodies that act to overcome the conflicts between the workers and their exploiters, and against trade unionist notions, which are openly reformist and belong to a bygone period, and which the leftist organisations instil into workers continually. This work is particularly pernicious in countries where the bourgeoisie has been able to equip itself with a well-oiled democratic system, with a long and deep political experience facing situations like this kind of struggle. The intervention of revolutionaries in these strikes and participation as an active factor in the coming to consciousness means a struggle against reformist conceptions and their representatives, democratic or not, which always will have an influence and a presence in the struggles of the proletariat, and which are themselves an active factor in the opposite sense – towards disintegration, dislocation and demoralisation, physical or ideological.

It is important to develop criticisms and balance sheets and to publicise them inside the struggles in expressing our solidarity, not as outside groups, but as part of the same class struggle. It is important to be present in these movements because they express the living reality of the class struggle in its immediate level; they bring us elements for deepening our theoretical work; they help us to put the immediate struggles in the context of the revolutionary struggle and to highlight the historical perspective of our class.

Refugees and other migrants wanting to come to Britain congregate in the ‘Jungle’, a shanty town near Calais. For over a decade several thousand people have been living there, or prior to that in the official Sangatte camp that was destroyed in 2002 at the request of the UK. They are there in the hope of being able to get into the UK through the Channel Tunnel. This is where Britain, like so many other countries, has built a barbed wire fence to protect its borders and keep out refugees, except that it only needs to defend the entrance to the Eurotunnel and not a land border. The refugees around Calais returned to the news over the summer when striking French ferry workers blocked the entrance to the Eurotunnel, causing queues of cars and lorries that people desperate to get to the Britain tried to climb onto. Others risked their lives trying to walk through the tunnel. Some nights up to 2,000 people were trying to get through the police lines and fencing. Although the strike and blockade has long finished the media continue to report delays on Eurotunnel and Eurostar due to migrants breaking into their terminal. The UK media in general give greater prominence to the delays than to the deaths of migrants – 13 since late June – taking such a dangerous route, and there is very much less coverage of the utter misery suffered by thousands in the camp.

The British state keeps out the “swarms”

PM David Cameron responded to the situation created by the ferry strike by talking of “swarms” of people trying to “break into Britain”, the answer being to “show that Britain is not a soft touch on asylum”. Landlords will have to check tenants’ documents proving their right to stay, and evict those living illegally - a policy already piloted in the Black Country. The withdrawal of all financial support from failed asylum seekers will be extended from adults to families with children, except for an appeal to the Home Office with evidence they are unable to leave the country. Now families with children will be forced into the kind of destitution already suffered by single adults denied asylum. Plus the government is tendering an estimated £500 million contract to return failed asylum seekers, which could include some from Calais. 12,460 were forcibly removed last year.

On 20 August home secretary Teresa May visited Calais to organise the increased security with French minister of the interior, Bernard Cazeneuve: Britain is investing in fencing, CCTV, floodlighting, and infrared detection; France is putting in extra police search teams with dogs; Eurotunnel is increasing its guards; and a new integrated control room will coordinate all this security.

According to one view common in the media, it is those who really don’t get democracy yet, having grown up under Eastern European Stalinist regimes, who do not understand their responsibilities to the refugees: “The very worst of Europe has been seen in Viktor Orban, the pocket-Putin who serves as Hungary’s prime minister. Ignorant of history, Mr Orban sees the refugees as a threat to European civilisation. His answer is to build a 175km razor wire fence. Sadly, he is not alone in such bigotry. The Slovakian government says it will accept only non-Muslim refugees. There is something truly dispiriting about former communist states recently welcomed into the EU slamming the door against refugees from other forms of tyranny.”[1] Britain’s own razor-wire response, coming from the country that boasts the “Mother of Parliaments”, and from the mouths of politicians who would never fall into any such “politically incorrect” bigotry about non-Christians or non-Europeans, makes it harder to maintain this argument, except by saying Cameron is letting down the British tradition of generosity.

Cameron has a change of rhetoric

On 3 September, when the photograph of a dead toddler appeared on the front pages, one of 12 Syrians drowned trying to reach Kos, Cameron was still saying that Britain cannot take more people fleeing from war: “we think the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that part of the world. I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees” (Guardian 3.9.15).

Shortly afterwards he announced that Britain would take a paltry 20,000 vulnerable Syrian refugees directly from the Middle Eastern countries over the next 5 years, and make use of the UK opt out of the EU system of quotas for those arriving in Greece and Italy. Last year Britain had only 31,260 asylum applications, only half the number received by France or Italy, a sixth as many as Germany, and less than Hungary!

The patriotic opposition

In fact the first Westminster politician to suggest that the UK could take some more Syrian refugees was Yvette Cooper, at the time one of the Labour leadership candidates. Pointing to the scale of the humanitarian crisis she said “we seem paralysed to respond. We cannot carry on like this. It is immoral, it is cowardly and it is not the British way. It is a test of British values, too — of whether we will again be able to reach out to the rest of the world and help as we have done in previous generations, or whether we will turn inwards and turn our backs instead.”[2] Her proposal for help was similar to the prime minister’s – 10,000 distributed throughout the country.

The winner of the leadership contest, Jeremy Corbyn, sounds even more positive: “There’s a very large number of people going over to Calais to take aid and support to them … Our health service, our education service, much of our industrial development in Britain, has been greatly enhanced by the work done by people who have made their homes here, paid their taxes here, worked very hard here…”[3]

In fact, Britain has been welcoming or resistant to immigration according to the needs not of the migrants or refugees, but of the national capital. After World War 2 immigration was greatly encouraged to make up for a shortage of labour. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, on the other hand, when a huge mass of Asians were expelled from East Africa, it was Labour home secretary Callaghan who rushed through the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1968 so that people with British passports no longer had the right to settle in the UK unless they could show a personal connection with the country. Nor should we forget how the last Labour government campaigned about “bogus” asylum seekers. Right now Britain’s population is expected to rise by more than 10% in the next 20 years, and less than 15% of firms have difficulty filling vacancies, so it has less need of immigration. Germany, by contrast, which has been much more welcoming to refugees, has a falling population and more than 45% of firms report having difficulty filling their vacancies (The Economist 19.9.15).

Capitalism is the problem

When we look at the number of refugees fleeing war, or even the economic migrants who are seeking somewhere to earn a living, we are presented with a barrage of propaganda and opinions that can be roughly divided between those that say we have to defend what we have, and those who say since we are better off we should be generous with our resources when others are in such a desperate situation. The former is represented by the present conservative government as well as UKIP and similar right wing populist organisations in Europe eg Pegida in Germany, although as the Labour government showed in 1968 they can carry out the same policies. The latter more welcoming attitude is today, more or less weakly, expressed by the Labour Party. However the 1951 Conservative government carried on the same policy of encouraging immigration as the previous Atlee government, because it was required. Both these views take it for granted that we are fortunate to live in stable, free, democratic European countries, surrounded by these dangerous unstable regions that threaten us, and then put forward a policy to cope within the system as it is.

As we show in the series of articles on the problem of refugees starting in this issue (page 4 and 5) capitalism is continually causing both economic migration and waves of refugees from imperialist war. It is the same capitalist system that has created both the better conditions in Europe and the wars elsewhere, just as it was responsible for WW2 and the waves of refugees that followed, and profoundly affected Europe. There is no way out within capitalism so we cannot afford to get drawn into either side in this campaign. It is perfectly true that some of the more xenophobic comments are completely revolting, such as Sun journalist Katie Hopkins likening refugees to cockroaches. Much more dangerous is the hypocrisy of the politicians who pretend compassion for refugees when it suits them while equally prepared to put up fences or change the law to keep them out when they are not needed. No less dangerous is the attempt to turn individual acts of kindness and solidarity shown to refugees, whether in Calais or arriving at German railway stations, into a symbol of patriotism: “we British” are kind hearted, “we Germans” understand the problems faced by refugees. General feelings of solidarity with migrants and refugees can only have a future if they become part of a growing class solidarity among all those that capitalism exploits and oppresses.

Alex  3/9/15

On the 10th October, 2015, the ICC is organising a day-long public meeting [123]in London. In order to facilitate discussion, we are publishing the article that will form the basis of the afternoon presentation. We hope this will give a flavour of the topic of the meeting and also give participants the opportunity to prepare comments and counter-arguments in advance.

1915, 1945: the development of internationalist opposition to imperialist war

1915, 1945: two rather contrasting anniversaries. On 1915, the ruling class and its mouthpieces don’t have anything like as much to say as they did on 1914. The unutterable slaughter of the Somme might come in for a mention: regrettable for the right, but part of the necessary sacrifice for king, country, or resistance to German aggression; for the left, proof of the futility of this particular imperialist war.

1945 is also an anniversary of horrors: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the opening of the Nazi death camps. But on this particular imperialist war, both left and right are in agreement. After the scandal of not singing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial, Jeremy Corbyn hastened to say, in a statement issued by Labour HQ, that his parents, “like that whole generation….showed tremendous courage and determination to defeat fascism”. This was a Good War, not only toppling Hitler, but also bringing us post-war “socialism” in the shape of a Labour Government and the NHS.

For revolutionaries, these dates have a rather different significance. 1915 was the beginning of proletarian resistance to the imperialist massacre, opening the road to the revolutions of 1917 and 1918 and ultimately forcing the bourgeoisie to bring the war to an end. This resistance was expressed both through mass actions such as demonstrations against the war in Berlin and strikes on the Clyde, and through the revival of the political organisations of the working class, which had been hit hard by the shameful betrayal of mainstream social democracy at the outbreak of the war[1].

1945, by contrast, was a year that indeed brought horror and not hope, because it was a low point in the defeat of the international working class after its revolutionary attempts at the end of the first war. The “victory over fascism” in 1945 also meant the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution in the east and the democratic counter-revolution in the west.  

In this discussion, we want to recall what has made it possible for revolutionaries today to defend a proletarian position on both theses wars and on all the innumerable wars that have ravaged the world since 1945. In other words, we want to focus on the combat waged by internationalist political organisations in the two world wars, which was certainly connected to the mass struggles of the class, but which also has its own dynamic and importance.

In 1915 there were two highly significant moments in the revival of marxist political organisation: the Zimmerwald conference, and the publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet.

The Zimmerwald conference

Zimmerwald is a small town in Switzerland, and it was host to a small conference: 38 delegates from 12 countries - all the internationalists transported there in a couple of coaches, as Trotsky joked.  And even among these few, only a small minority defended a really revolutionary position against the war. The “classic” centrist tendency, incarnated in the likes of Kautsky and the future leaders of the USPD, was on the right at Zimmerwald[2]. Kautsky had argued that the International, which had indeed collapsed in 1914, was not an instrument that could be used in war, but only in peacetime, so for him and his ilk the priority was to call for peace, appealing to the good sense of the world’s rulers rather than the class struggle. The centre here was represented rather by Trotsky and by Luxemburg’s comrades in the Spartacus group, who were for the methods of class struggle to end the war, but who also called for peace without annexations as the goal of the struggle. Only the Bolsheviks around Lenin and some of the other German groups stood for revolutionary methods and revolutionary goals: transformation of the imperialist war into civil war, the destruction of capitalism as the source of all wars.

Analysing imperialism

The result of the fierce debates at Zimmerwald was a manifesto to the proletarians of the world which was in many ways a compromise between the left and the centre, since it did not take up the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary slogans. Nevertheless its ringing denunciation of the war and its call for class action against it still enabled it to articulate and politicise the anti-war sentiments that were growing among the mass of the working class. And within two years the theoretical standpoint of the left was to be put into practice by the workers of Russia, whose revolt against the war led them to seize political power through the soviets.

But if Luxemburg lagged behind Lenin on the question of the goals of anti-war action, she had leapt ahead of him when it came to providing a more general theoretical understanding of the origins of the war, and its consequences for certain key elements of the revolutionary programme. In a series of works published around 1915 or the year after, all the revolutionaries were agreed – unlike the former “pope of marxism”, Kautsky – that imperialism was not a policy, whether good or bad, freely decided on by capitalism, but a historical necessity, a whole new epoch in the life of the bourgeois economy, which had unified the planet under the reign of capital, but in doing so had brought not peace and harmony but war and catastrophe. Lenin’s Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy were both important landmarks in the elaboration of this outlook. But just before the war Luxemburg had already published The Accumulation of Capital, which went deeper than either of them in locating capitalism’s imperialist drive in the historical conditions of accumulation, and it was on this theoretical foundation that Luxemburg, writing from prison, was able to put forward the most thorough-going analysis of the motives behind the different imperialist antagonists in the push towards war. And at the same time she was able to draw the most radical conclusions from an understanding that imperialism “is not the creation of any one or any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will." (The Junius Pamphlet). In sum: all nations are imperialist: every small nation acts under the aegis of a larger power but has its own imperialist appetites. Hence the epoch in which revolutionaries could support struggles for national independence was over once and for all. Even then this profound breakthrough was not entirely without limitations: Lenin, who continued to hold on to the old slogan of the “rights of nations to self-determination” criticised the Junius Pamphlet for its curious concessions to the idea of national defence, which he understood was impossible in the context of this war. But for the whole of the coming century, which was to witness an endless proliferation of proxy imperialist conflicts fought under the slogans of national liberation, it was above all Luxemburg’s approach that has made it possible for revolutionary minorities to maintain an internationalist stance against these wars.

The struggle for internationalism needs political organisation

The example of Zimmerwald demonstrates that, for revolutionaries, the struggle against war takes place at three distinct but interconnected levels:

• Organisational: the betrayal of the majority of the old parties demanded that the minority of internationalists had to work as an organised fraction, to work either for the expulsion of the traitors or, when this proved impossible, as it did in the majority of cases, to fight to win over the maximum number of healthy elements and to prepare the ground for a new party, a new International. This demanded a relentless battle against centrism and opportunism, against the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. Thus the Zimmerwald left in particular was the driving force behind the formation of the Third International in 1919. In a situation of war or impending revolution, the heroism of individual militants like Luxemburg, Liebknecht, John Mclean or Sylvia Pankhurst was certainly vital, but could never be enough on its own. It could only have a real meaning in the context of collective organisation around a clear political programme;

• Theoretical: the necessity to understand the characteristics of the new epoch demands a patient work of theoretical elaboration, an ability to step back and reassess the whole situation in the light of the past and of the perspectives for the future. Hence Lenin, at the outbreak of war, “retreating” to the Zurich library to read Hegel in order to grasp the dialectic of social change, which can make what was valid in one period entirely reactionary in another. This reinforced Lenin’s ability to reply to the traitors and opportunists who used Marx’s words from a different period to justify, for example, their advocacy of a war to defeat Russian Czarism. The work of Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek and others enabled the re-emerging political movement of the class to understand that a new epoch had dawned, one in which the class struggle would take on new forms and new methods to achieve directly revolutionary objectives;

• Propaganda and agitation: armed with a lucid theoretical framework, the intervention of revolutionaries in the new situation could avoid unthinking activism and make thought-out, concrete proposals to fortify the resistance against war and the struggle for revolution. Hence Lenin’s study of the marxist theory of the state in State and Revolution underpinned the Bolshevik slogan “all power to the soviets”.  The regroupment of revolutionaries into political organisations enabled them to develop their propaganda and agitation through the medium of a regular press and mass-produced leaflets, and to speak in the workers’ assemblies and councils not as individuals representing only themselves but on behalf of a definite political tendency within the class movement.  

The dark road to 1945

In 1915 the working class was beginning to throw off the heavy weight of its ideological defeat in 1914, which had been prepared by decades of growing opportunism in the movement. By 1917 the period was directly revolutionary. This rapid shift in the historic course was, however, also reversed very rapidly: by 1923, the post-war revolutionary wave was over and the Russian revolution was sinking into isolation and internal degeneration. By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 30s the counter-revolution was triumphant all along the line: Stalinism in Russia, fascism in Germany and Italy were its most evident forms, but as the world lurched towards another war, the ideology of democracy and anti-fascism was to prove indispensable to the bourgeoisie in mobilising the working class for a second world war within 20 years.

Class struggle did not cease during this dark period, and there was still a proletarian political opposition to the advancing counter-revolution. But it was extremely weak, facing police repression and endless defections and betrayals. It was weak above all at the theoretical/political level, with the majority of forces within Trotskyism and anarchism more and more succumbing to the siren calls of anti-fascism and thus incapable of standing against the march towards war. Rather than seriously examining the balance of forces between the classes and the programmatic changes demanded by the new epoch, Trotskyism in particular threw itself into an unprincipled quest for growth at any cost, culminating in the formation of an abortive Fourth International in 1938.

This process of degeneration left the clearest elements of the political movement – the heirs of the left communists who had first begun to recognise the decline of the Russian revolution and the opportunist course of the Third International – extremely isolated. The capacity of the groups of the German/Dutch left to maintain political activity was further undermined by the drift towards “councilism”, the denial of the necessity for political organisation – in effect a concession to anarchist ideology. This mean that the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left was almost alone in advocating a course of activity appropriate to a highly unfavourable historical juncture, where the priority was to draw the lessons of past defeats and prepare the programmatic basis of the party of the future.

The most decisive test for the political milieu of the day came with the war in Spain in 1936. The initial military coup led by Franco in July was halted by a real working class uprising, but this was almost immediately led onto the terrain of anti-fascism and the defence of the bourgeois republic; with the intervention of the fascist powers and Stalin’s USSR, the conflict was also transformed into a rehearsal for the next imperialist world war. The Trotskyists and anarchists, with a few exceptions, threw themselves into the anti-fascist camp, leaving a minority of left communists denouncing the war for what it truly was: not a civil war, but an imperialist war, not a revolution, but a new step in the world-wide counter-revolution. The Italian Fraction distinguished itself by its ability to situate the war in its real historical and global context, and to remain loyal to the needs of the class struggle against both capitalist camps. And even then the pressures of the period did not spare the Fraction, which suffered a serious split soon after the war began, with a minority enrolling in the militias of the POUM in Spain.

The outbreak of the world war in 1939 increased these pressures, not only because of the brutal repression that revolutionaries faced under conditions of military occupation, but also because the enormous force of imperialist ideology strengthened confusions within their own ranks: the Italian Fraction, for example, was thrown into disarray when the war began because some its leading figures had developed the revisionist “theory of the war economy” which in the late 30s suddenly began to argue that world war was not on the agenda, and, when the war in fact began, insisted that it proved the social disappearance of the proletariat and thus the impossibility of any organised political activity. This theory was vigorously opposed within the Fraction and in particular by comrades in France who managed to regroup and carry out organised, clandestine work in both the “Vichy” zone and the area directly occupied by the German army. This work involved both internal debates about the theoretical problems posed by the war, and political propaganda calling for class struggle against both warring blocs, with no concessions to the patriotic ideology of the Resistance.

The definitive betrayal of internationalism by the Trotskyist organisations and many of the anarchists had already been prepared by the events in Spain, although there were some important minorities in both who rejected the ideology of the anti-fascist war: for the Trotskyists, the Stinas group in Greece, Munis in Spain and Mexico, the RKD in Austria and so on. In Britain, while the Trotskyists almost unanimously declared for participation in the war to defend democracy and the “workers’ state” in Russia, small groups of revolutionaries from the councilist and anarchist traditions stuck to their internationalist principles.

Before and during the war, many revolutionaries had clung to the hope that the end of the war would bring about another revolutionary situation, as in 1917. And indeed there were some important class movements towards the end of the war, most notably in the factories of northern Italy in 1943, which led the ruling class to drop the Mussolini regime like a hot potato. This created a wave of short-sighted optimism among revolutionaries, especially comrades of the Italian left, many of whom returned from exile to join the Partito Comunista Internazionalista which was formed in considerable haste from different oppositional groupings.

In a situation of considerable confusion it was again the French Fraction of the Communist Left (constituted in 1942) which was best able to carry on the political tradition of the Italian Fraction, now dissolved into the PCInt. Having initially thought that the strikes in Italy announced a change in the historic course, they soon understood that the bourgeoisie had learned the lessons of 1917 and was well-prepared to prevent any re-run of the revolution at the end of the Second World War. The terror bombing of German cities, Churchill’s policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice” in 1943 – halting the advance of the allied armies from the south of Italy to allow the Nazis to crush the class movement in the north – expressed the ruthless determination of the bourgeoisie to wipe out the least sign of resistance to its rule in the potentially dangerous closing phase of the war. 

The French Fraction was able to understand that the formation of a party – in one single country, and in conditions where the defeat of the working class was being further exacerbated both by repression and the ideological poison of “Liberation” and the “victory of democracy” – was an opportunist error that could only result in a programmatic regression in relation to the gains made by the Fraction in the previous period. This was demonstrated by the concessions made by the new party – especially after the fusion with the groups in the south led by Bordiga in 1945 – on such vital issues as the nature of Russia, the trade union and national questions, and even electoralism.

Against the activist attitudes of the new party, the French group (which took the name Gauche Communiste de France following the split with a tendency that aligned itself with the Italian party) understood that the need for theoretical elaboration was still paramount, and in the post war period produced a considerable body of work analysing such issues as the function of war in the epoch of capitalist decadence, the development of state capitalism as a worldwide phenomenon, the role of the party, and the problem of the state in the period of transition to communism. 

Obviously the scale of the activity of revolutionaries during and immediately after the Second World War, and the perspectives for the growth of its influence within the class, was considerably reduced in comparison with the groups that met at Zimmerwald in 1915 and were to meet again at the formation of the Third International in 1919. But the essential dimensions of this activity – organisation, theory, intervention – were as relevant in 1945 as they had been 30 years earlier.

Internationalism today

One of the clearest signs that capitalism has outlived its usefulness for humanity is the near permanence of war over the last century. Even before the end of the Second World War, the battle lines for the Third were already forming: the primary motive for the atom bomb being dropped on an already defeated Japan was to issue a warning against the imperialist ambitions of the USSR in the east. The ‘Cold War’ was mainly made up of a series of proxy wars between the new superpowers, but as we said earlier they were often fought under the banner of national independence. A number of the groups of the communist left today were born in the period of the Vietnam war, and they found themselves having to fight against the dominant trend, among those who considered themselves to be revolutionaries, which advocated support for North Vietnam as the “little guy” against the US bully, when in fact Vietnam was backed by the “big guys” of Russian and Chinese imperialism, and this “national liberation” struggle was in reality yet another inter-imperialist confrontation. In the period after the break-up of the two imperialist blocs, marked by a more chaotic series of conflicts, the need for a principled and coherent position on war is as vital as ever: the recent rush of elements within the anarchist milieu to line up with Kurdish nationalism (and the USA) against ISIS in Rojava is proof of that. But a principled and coherent position can only be maintained and developed on the basis of the acquisitions we have inherited from the revolutionaries of the past, those who faced the ultimate test of loyalty to the proletarian cause.

Amos

An ex-member of the ICC, Devrim, who left some three years ago, has subsequently made a number of criticisms of our organisation.

Devrim’s ‘My experience in the ICC’ first appeared on the anarchist web forum Libcom in 20121. It was, by definition, a personal account , based on impressions and anecdotes of life in the ICC rather than a general critique of the ICC’s political principles as a whole. Since there can be no argument about personal taste we tended to let the criticisms lie, particularly as Devrim declared he did not want to engage in a debate about this account. He had in any case left the organisation without politically justifying his departure.

We now believe that these personal criticisms need a reply because the issues they raise have taken on a general interest today, when the fundamental conditions of revolutionary militancy are being put in question, including amongst those who consider themselves part of the ‘Communist Left.’

We have come to realise that his personal account of the ICC is supposed to be a self-standing political analysis itself: a personal interpretation is seen as sufficient to judge the ICC to be an organisation that has outlived itself.

The life and death of revolutionary organisations

Devrim’s critique has thus led him to repeat on several occasions the belief that the ICC will die. In an email to a member of the ICC in 2013 he wrote, in reply to the criticism that he should be taking up the political principles of the ICC:

‘I think that the point that you have to address the political positions of an organisation belongs to the thinking of a bygone age. The ICC will die, and it will, not because people engage with and refute its political positions, but precisely for the opposite reason; because people can’t be bothered to do even this. Of course this points to a more general problem of depoliticisation within society, but to an outside observer, it would seem that the ICC is actively trying to complete the circle of its isolation.’

The ICC will die, the argument goes, not because its political positions or principles are wrong or have become outmoded and need to be replaced by those that correspond to the evolution of the needs and objectives of the working class struggle. It will pass away instead from a general disinterest in political positions themselves. The failure of the ICC to adapt to this disinterest and the current boredom with politics in the population and even amongst would-be revolutionaries, and to insist by contrast on defending and elaborating its political principles, will lead to its complete isolation and demise. This is the essential thinking of Devrim.

In his account ‘My Experience…..’ Devrim, true to his vision, does not ‘address the political positions’ of the ICC, but gives a series of mostly negative impressions and opinions about life in the organisation, on its process of integration of new members, on its mode of centralisation and on its debates. We will come on to some of these questions in a later part of the article. But first we want to look at how important political positions and principles are in the marxist concept of revolutionary organisation.

In the past marxist revolutionary parties and organisations have often died, even at a relatively young age. The most obvious example is the sudden collapse of the 2nd International in 1914, after its main constituent parties betrayed their internationalist political principles, joined their imperialist bourgeoisies, and helped send millions of workers to the mutual slaughter of the trenches. The 3rd International also perished after the adoption of the slogan of ‘Socialism in one country’, as it became an instrument of the Russian state and prepared the working class for the imperialist carnage of the 2nd World War. 2

In these two major instances of the marxist revolutionary movement, organisations disappeared because of a progressive abandonment of political principle, in particular the most important one for the working class - international unity and action in the face of imperialist war or in face of their preparation. These marxist organisations therefore died (at least as far as working class interests were concerned) not as a result of a failure to adapt to the general mood of society, but because they did adapt to it and gave into the pressure of the imperialist bourgeoisie and abandoned proletarian political positions. So we think the reality runs diametrically counter to Devrim’s logic. In fact, if we use revolutionary history as a guide, the ICC would be more likely to disappear if it abandoned or lessened the importance of its political positions as a way of accommodating itself to the prevailing disinterest in politics and failed to stand firm and theoretically develop these and other fundamental principles out of a fear of isolation. So we draw the opposite conclusion to Devrim.

If the marxist revolutionary movement has known periods of betrayal and organisational death like those just mentioned, it can also offer magnificent examples from these periods where marxist minorities suffered the most brutal isolation in order to uphold political positions and create a life-line to new revolutionary organisations. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who went to prison (hard labour in the case of Liebknecht) and were later murdered because of their internationalist fight against the First World War, helped to inspire the October Revolution and the formation of the Communist International . Or the hardly known militants of the Communist Left, who risked (and often fell victim to) the terror of the Gestapo or the Partisans, in order to defend internationalist principles in the Second World War, keeping alive a tradition that we uphold today.

Today’s revolutionary organisations would hardly merit the appellation ‘Communist Left’ if they weren’t able to withstand the relatively soft conditions of isolation that they can experience today in the face of the general distaste for politics. Surely they can bear the ridicule and ostracism that can be directed to revolutionary militants today, when one measures the terrible conditions their antecedents have faced in the past?

The ability to preserve and develop revolutionary political thought in the face of often extreme isolation is an important measure of whether a revolutionary organisation deserves to exist.

The ICC therefore would deserve to die as an authentic current of the Communist Left … if it followed the criticism of Devrim and underestimated the importance of political positions as ‘the thinking of a bygone age’. The ICC thrives on the ability to hold onto and develop the political positions that are relevant to the working class in the current and coming period. We will come on to the present conditions of working class struggle below. First some general observations about the importance of political positions.3

The proletarian revolution is political

Marx, following Aristotle, the Ancient Greek philosopher, defined man as a political animal:

“Man is a political animal in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualised only within society”.

(Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1857)

By extension the term ‘political’ has a general meaning (and therefore goes beyond the description of the corrupt machinations of the parties of the bourgeois state): man’s attempt to determine the direction of society as a whole and thus his own future.

In the long history of class-divided society the exploited masses have been completely excluded from its political direction. However in capitalism, the last form of class society, the working class has been able to force itself onto the political stage and form political parties. This capacity to express its interests in a political form is ultimately a result of the fact that unlike previous exploited classes the working class is a revolutionary class that bears within itself an entirely new mode of production to replace capitalism.

The working class struggle in capitalism, when fought to a successful conclusion, leads to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This supreme political act, the coming to political power of the working class, is the condition for the ultimate establishment of a classless society - communism. The development of the self-consciousness of the proletariat is the recognition of its historical/political interests as a class, expressed by, though not exclusively, the formation of political parties. The working class, having an innate need to take society into socialism has to unify around these political definitions of what it is, and what it must do, as a class. Political positions are the constituent elements of the platform of the revolutionary political organisation - what distinguishes the perspective of the working class from the objectives of the bourgeoisie, and other classes in society. The precise nature of this political party, when it can be formed, the role it plays in the proletarian seizure of power, etc., has evolved dramatically in the course of the last two centuries. But the marxist conception of the revolutionary organisation as a fundamentally political entity remains.

This is all the more crucial considering that the working class, unlike previous revolutionary classes, cannot build up an economic power base in existing society, so the theoretical elaboration and adoption of proletarian political positions becomes all the more vital.4 The formulation of political positions must for this same reason precede the actual seizure of political power.

The working class therefore is not simply an economic or sociological category within bourgeois society, an exploited class like the slaves or the serfs, but above all a historical class with a revolutionary purpose and therefore a political class in the deepest sense of the word.

The disdain for the central importance of politics in the working class struggle, and in the organisations which claim to defend its interests, cannot however avoid or escape political pressures, since the struggle between the classes over the direction of society is invariably a political fight that is imposed on the combatants whether they like it or not. Apoliticism, despite its illusions, inevitably becomes political… but not necessarily in a good way. Rather, because of its lack of clear and developed proletarian political positions and principles, the apolitical approach comes under the sway of the dominant political forces of the ruling class.

This is nowhere better exemplified than in the history of anarchism and its attempted revolutionary apoliticism. In the great political tests of history anarchists have in the main been unable to resist the pressures of the politics of the ruling class and capitulated to them, most famously by Peter Kropotkin in the First World War:

Kropotkin, Tcherkesoff and Jean Grave were the most eager defenders of France: "Don't let these heinous conquerors wipe out the Latin civilisation and the French people again... Don't let them impose on Europe a century of militarism" (Letter of Kropotkin to J.Grave, 2 September1914). It was in the name of the defence of democracy against Prussian militarism that they supported the Sacred Union: "German aggression was a threat - executed - not only against our hopes for emancipation but against all human evolution. That's why we, anarchists, we, anti-militarists, we enemies of war, we passionate partisans for peace and fraternity between peoples, we line up on the side of the resistance and we have not thought of separating our fate from that of the rest of the population" (Manifesto of Sixteen (the number of signatories) 28 February 1916).”5

The main representatives of anarchism lined up behind the politics of the ruling class, as did the opportunist leadership of the main Social Democratic parties. The latter abandoned the internationalist political positions of the working class; the former, largely dismissive of these positions, found that their own nice-sounding but empty phrases about democracy and emancipation, human evolution, against war, for peace and fraternity, could be recuperated by the imperialist politics of the bourgeoisie.6

The scorn for political positions amongst revolutionaries can also be harmful in other, less decisive periods, like today’s, tending to reflect, rather than counter, the present disorientation of working class.

Marxist political positions and the current period

Devrim says that there is a problem of depoliticisation in society. True, as far as it goes. But what are the particular characteristics of de-politicisation today which affect the working class and its tiny revolutionary minorities?

Since the resurgence of class struggle on a historical scale in 1968, ending the long counter revolutionary epoch, the working class has found it very difficult to develop its struggle onto its own political terrain. It has remained largely on the defensive, and under the sway of social democracy, Stalinism and trade unionism. The ruling class, for its part has been able to phase in its growing economic crisis, and manoeuvre politically and intelligently against the threat from below. The resulting stalemate between the two main class adversaries in capitalist society has opened up a period of the social decomposition of capitalism, which has led to a profound disorientation within the working class.7

The definite opening of the period of decomposition was marked by the collapse of the USSR, and this has been deliberately used by the ruling class to reinforce this disorientation. The enormous ideological campaigns by the international bourgeoisie since 1989 about the “death of communism”, of “marxism”, and “the end of the working class” as a political force in society are not accidental. Marxist minorities like the ICC, even if they were not tainted in any way by Stalinism, nevertheless have suffered the full force of this attempt by the ruling class to de-politicise the working class, and thus use the social decomposition of its system to inflict a profound blow on its class adversary.

Devrim in his personal testimony ‘My experience…’ expresses agreement with the ICC’s analysis of the social decomposition of capitalism which we have briefly outlined above:

"Personally I think that a lot of what it has to say is a good description of the new period that began with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it has to be understood also as a way to justify the mistakes present in the stuff about the years of truth" (a reference to the analysis the ICC had made to describe the stakes of the 1980s).

Devrim doesn’t elaborate on what parts of the Theses on Decomposition he agrees with or what parts that he doesn’t disagree with, or the nature of the mistakes we are supposed to have made in the analysis of the 80s, nor does he explain what is faulty in the analysis of the Theses on Decomposition which apparently proves they are a way of justifying this earlier analysis.8

Nevertheless we can infer that Devrim doesn’t follow the most important conclusions of the Theses that this new period would create new difficulties for the proletariat and therefore its revolutionary organisations:

“13) In fact, we must be especially clear on the danger of decomposition for the proletariat’s ability to raise itself to the level of its historic task. Just as the unleashing of the imperialist war at the heart of the ‘civilised’ world was ‘a bloodletting which [may have] mortally weakened the European workers’ movement’, which ‘threatened to bury the perspectives for socialism under the ruins piled up by imperialist barbarism’ by ‘cutting down on the battlefield (...) the best forces (...) of international socialism, the vanguard troops of the whole world proletariat’ (Rosa Luxemburg, The crisis in Social-Democracy), so the decomposition of society, which can only get worse, may in the years to come cut down the best forces of the proletariat and definitively compromise the perspective of communism. This is because, as capitalism rots, the resulting poison infects all the elements of society, including the proletariat" (Theses on Decomposition).

Devrim hasn’t drawn from this analysis the conclusion that the revolutionary organisation, as an emanation of the working class, must resist this process of de-politicisation and explore in the deepest theoretical way all the implications of the new period for the proletariat as a political class to prepare for its future reawakening, which is still possible in spite of the negative weight of decomposition.

He rather draws the opposite conclusion: if society and the working class have in this period been de-politicised, revolutionaries should adapt to this trend to reduce or obliterate the significance of the historic interests of the proletariat, and thus reduce their preoccupation with its related political positions and theory and adjust their language to suit. But wouldn’t this be a return to the worn-out fashions and muddled theory of anarchistic apoliticism?

We should remember that this trend to de-politicisation in the working class today is not permanent nor complete, nor has the putrefaction of capitalism reached its ultimate conclusion. The contradictions of world capitalism will continue to oblige the working class to think again in political terms no matter how difficult and lengthy such a process of reawakening may prove.

Which is why there continue to be a small minority of individuals who are attracted to marxist politics. So we don’t think Devrim speaks for all people or all ‘outside observers’ of the ICC who he suggests are all repelled or bored by political positions.

It would be tragic if the revolutionary organisation failed today to meet the challenge of this trend, albeit still minuscule, towards working class political positions, and failed to give the latter a historic context, a global consistency and coherence, and their deepest theoretical basis.

In this sense Devrim’s prediction of the demise of the ICC because of its preoccupation with proletarian political principles, expresses instead, in his own way, the present trend of decomposing capitalism, toward the destruction of class consciousness and consequently of the revolutionary minorities who are trying to preserve and enrich it.

Politics and the internal life of the marxist revolutionary organisation

Devrim’s personal account ‘My Experience in the ICC’ doesn’t address the political principles of the organisation, its platform, and touches only very briefly on certain key ICC analytical texts like the Theses on Parasitism and the Theses on Decomposition.

This belittling of the framework of the existence of the ICC is a logical consequence of his idea, expressed in the email to an ICC member which we quoted at the beginning of this article, that the addressing of political positions of the platform expresses the thinking of a bygone age. Instead Devrim’s memoir focuses on his experience of the internal life of the ICC. Here again he doesn’t address the political principles behind the internal functioning of the ICC, but bases his critiques on impressions and personal anecdotes and hearsay evidence (such as ‘a member of the central organs told me….’ or ‘I’ve heard of cases where integration took years’ etc)9.

Nevertheless a number of basic themes emerge from his critical account which would be of general interest to discuss. We will look at three of them and then reply:

1) The ICC’s conditions of membership are too tight, and the process of integrating new members is too long and exhaustive.

“The process of joining the ICC is a drawn out and tedious one. ….. Basically to join the ICC you have to agree with the platform and statutes. I have heard of incidences within the ICC when this process has taken years. With us it was quicker, but still a very long extended process….

…..it seems that the ICC actively tries to avoid recruiting10 new people by making it as difficult to join as possible. The feeling that I got was that the centre felt that we had been integrated too quickly, and that part of the problem was that we hadn't agreed with them on certain issues before joining, particularly the 'Theses on Parasitism', but also many others. This presents a dichotomy for the ICC because although officially membership relies upon adherence to the platform and statutes, the desired level of political agreement is actually much higher. When we were originally discussing the platform, there were numerous 'supplementary' texts that it was also suggested that we discuss. My feeling is that in the future the ICC will insist on even more of these texts, which will have the dual effect of not only making it more difficult to recruit people but also mean that there are less fresh ideas within the ICC itself.

2) The ICC is ‘too highly centralised’

“The ICC sees itself as a single internationally centralised organisation, and not as a collection of different national sections. This said the amount of intervention of the central organs into the everyday running of the various sections seemed to me to be not just excessive, but absolutely overbearing.

On the subject of the relationship between the members and the organisation, I feel that the one that exists within the ICC serves to diminish the initiative of the individual members, and also of the sections by encouraging an organisational culture, which, in my opinion, is too highly centralised.

Despite what I would consider an extremely high level of political agreement as a criteria for membership, it still seems to me that in the ICC the orders come from the top, and are transmitted downwards. This process, I feel, acts to discourage initiative coming from the membership of the organisation as a whole and despite the ICC's protests to the contrary tends to mirror the hierarchical relations prevalent in society as a whole”.

3) There is too much internal discussion in the ICC, demanding too much political commitment….

“There is so much 'debate' within the ICC that it tends to make any real discussion impossible.

This leads to a problem where just to keep up with the internal business of the ICC requires an amount of time which I would imagine that most people in political organisations put into their entire political activity.

…..

Everything must be discussed endlessly internally before it can be presented to the outside

…..

I think that it presents the impression that the ICC is composed of a bunch of robots who all parrot the same line. However, true or untrue this may be, it is certainly an impression held by many outside the ICC, which the ICC does very little to dispel. The second is that the ICC generates an immense volume of texts, many of which, as has already been discussed, don't even get read by all of their own members. Surely there must be some people out there who might be interested in some of them”.

…..while the theory of the ICC is ‘too coherent’.

“The theory of the ICC is an impressive body of work, more so because of its deep coherence. It all fits together perfectly with every block having its place in the entire structure. Certainly for those looking for theoretical coherence it can seem very attractive, especially for new groups, as we were at the time, the adopting of a theoretical whole in one go can seem deeply attractive rather than going through the painstaking theoretical work that is the alternative. The problem is though that it is a house of cards where each part is dependent on the others to stop the entire edifice from collapsing.

Taken as a whole, if you strip out the disparaging personal impressions and derogatory metaphors and quite a few fibs in his personal account, Devrim is criticising the ICC for being too much of a revolutionary political organisation: the required political agreement for being a member is too high, it is too centralised on an international scale, it has too much internal theoretical debate, it demarcates itself too much from other political tendencies; it demands too much political passion from its members; and finally it is too theoretically coherent.

Altogether this is too complimentary to a political organisation! The history of the ICC shows it has had many difficulties. Nevertheless, despite all the mistakes and insufficiencies of the ICC, for a revolutionary organisation to be able to hold onto, for 40 years, a lineage from the marxist left (in the Communist League, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Internationals and the Communist Left itself); to provide an extensive analysis of the historic period (the decadence of capitalism) as well as capture the main features of its last phase of decomposition; to provide a platform which outlines the communist perspective in these conditions; to maintain independence from the bourgeoisie including from its extreme left wing; to furnish regular analyses of the evolving international situation in its dimensions of the economic crisis, the imperialist conflicts and the class struggle; to intervene with one voice across continents (despite its small numerical size); to generate the level of internal discussion needed to present its debates in a clear way to the outside; to survive and prosper from internal political crises…. all this at least shows that the preoccupation with political principles tends to sustain a revolutionary organisation rather than lead to its demise.

But this political tenacity is not our exclusive achievement. In the end the capacity the ICC has shown is a reflection of the latent potential in the working class as a revolutionary political class, its capacity to become highly conscious of its historic goals and to unify around these interests in the face of all the obstacles that have been and will be put in its way.

Nevertheless it’s these very political capacities which Devrim thinks are antiquated and will lead to the demise of the ICC, a fate which he implies should be accelerated. Principled politics supposedly destroy individual and local initiatives, discourage the development of fresh ideas from such initiatives, and isolates the organisation from outside sources of inspiration and thus prevents growth. In short the ICC restricts personal liberty, the individual freedom necessary for a vibrant and growing organisation as Devrim puts it. The integration process of new members, the role of the central organs, the framework of internal debate, and its theoretically coherent goals and its attitude to other parts of the political milieu, are, in a word, authoritarian.

Individual political freedom, bourgeois and proletarian

In order to answer this false idea that marxist revolutionary political organisation restricts the freedom of the individual, we need to try and clarify a few questions in order to give a certain coherence to the problem.

The desire for freedom, for the ability to shape one’s own destiny and be true to oneself is one of the oldest human needs, an intrinsic one for a species which has the capacity for self-consciousness and which must live communally. The interplay between the innermost desires of the individual and the needs of others has always been a fundamental aspect of human existence.

For a large part of pre-capitalist human history, dominated by classes and the exploitation of man by man, the individual’s spiritual need for personal freedom and control of his destiny was largely turned against him by the spectre of ‘God’ and by the latter’s self-appointed representatives on earth, who, not coincidentally, happened to belong to the class of slaveowners. The producing mass of the population was shackled on earth by the ruling class and in the imaginary heavens by a celestial tyrant.

The secularisation and therefore politicisation of personal freedom and destiny, in the bourgeois revolutions - particularly in the French Revolution 1789-1793 - was a fundamental step in the progress toward the real-world solution of human freedom. Not least because it opened the way for the working class to force itself into the political arena and define itself politically. However, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, the bourgeoisie presented its own newly won freedom as a universal achievement that benefited everyone. This deception resulted partly from its own illusions and partly from the bourgeoisie’s need to enroll the whole population behind its banner. The concept of freedom remained within a mystified abstract form, hiding the fact that in capitalist society the producers, while legally free and equal to their masters, would now be enchained by a new form of exploitation, a new dictatorship. The victorious bourgeoisie had brought with it the generalisation of commodity production which had accentuated the division of labour, tearing the individual away from the community. The various forms of the social texture confronted the individual as external necessity, and turned his fellow man into a competitor. From this atomisation and isolation came, paradoxically, the mystique of individual freedom in capitalist society. In reality only capital was free:

“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois abolition of individuality and freedom. And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at”.

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

The living, historically concrete development of individual freedom therefore depends on the solidarity of the proletarian struggle for the abolition of classes and exploitation. Real freedom is only possible in a society of free labour, that is a communist mode of production, where the abolition of the division of labour permits the all-round development of the individual.

The promotion of proletarian political freedoms on which this revolutionary transformation of society depends, and which the communist political organisations must defend, necessarily involves the struggle against the ferocious demands for bourgeois political freedom that capitalist society continually generates.

1) ’Too tight conditions of membership’

To paraphrase the Communist Manifesto: The stringent conditions of marxist militancy are reproached by the bourgeoisie for restricting the freedom of the individual and his initiatives. And rightly so. The prohibition of bourgeois individual freedoms and bourgeois initiatives is undoubtedly aimed at.

The political principle of opposition to parliamentary participation, which the ICC holds in common with the rest of the tradition of the Communist Left, in large measure prevents the sort of careerism and hierarchical decision-making which infected the parties of the Second International and which is typical of bourgeois political life. The principled independence from the bourgeois state apparatus precludes the sort of personal ambition and adventurism fuelled by the expectation of easy money which animates the participants of bourgeois politics.

The struggle for proletarian political freedom against bourgeois freedoms doesn’t end here. There are those who are disgusted by the rotten world of bourgeois politics, left and right, and who want to fight it inside a marxist revolutionary organisation. But they haven’t given up, at root, the abstract and empty slogan of ‘individual freedom’ which serves as the ultimate ideological cover and justification for the capitalist world.

Unchecked, these residues of bourgeois thought lead, inside the organisation, to an attitude of surreptitious combat against

the alleged rigidity of proletarian political principles, the supposed hierarchy of centralisation, the ‘dogmatism’ of proletarian debate, which are felt to be so many restrictions on personal rights, even if superficially these very principles -centralisation and the culture of debate - are agreed with. This attitude has no precise alternative, no distinct positive outlines, but is mainly characterised by being against, of rejecting what is. It demands the right to not abide by collective, centralised decisions, the right to take local initiatives counter to those of the rest of the organisation without explanation, the right not to be coherent and above all not to be held responsible for any inconsistency.11

This anarchistic attitude retains the bourgeois belief in ‘individual freedom’. It rejects the authority of capitalist politics and exploitation but also ends up rejecting the authority of the Marxist alternative to it as well.

The marxist revolutionary organisation therefore must struggle against and protect itself from this more diffuse and empty defence of bourgeois political freedom as well as its open obvious expressions that are found in parliamentary and leftist parties. .

It’s not accidental that in the history of the marxist movement the question of who is, and who is not, a member of the organisation has assumed vital importance. At the Hague Congress of the 1st International the first days were spent verifying the eligibility of the delegates, particularly because there was a secret cabal within the organisation: Bakunin’s Brotherhood.

At the fateful 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 one of the principle divisions between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over the definition of a member in the proposed statutes of the party.

The tight conditions of membership are a vital means of excluding both the classic expressions of bourgeois political freedom like adventurism and careerism, and the more diffuse concessions to them that take the form of opportunism on matters of general political principle and the formation of personal cliques that resist the consistent application of principles on questions of organisation.

A lack of rigour in the process of integration of militants is a good means of establishing a hierarchy within the organisation between ‘those who know and those who don’t know’ the positions and analyses of the latter. Obviously it is never possible to completely eliminate the inequalities and differences of capacities between militants, but the ‘recruitment’ on insufficient bases are the best means to reinforce rather than attenuating them.

2) Centralisation and the non-hierarchical conception of delegation.

All organisms need a given amount of unity in order to maintain their existence. This is true in the political sphere as it is in the natural world. Centralisation is the essential means of ensuring any complex unity. This expresses a fundamental, universal premise: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Unity is not the simple result of the collection or aggregation of the different constituent elements of the whole. Unity requires another quality: the capacity to centralise and coordinate these otherwise disparate elements. An orchestra requires a conductor to bring all the musicians together, who in return recognise and respect his indispensable role in creating a unified work of art that is qualitatively more than the sound of each instrument taken separately.

A revolutionary political organisation is likewise more than a collection of individuals who happen to agree - it also requires, in order to sustain itself, a will to unity and therefore a will to centralisation by every militant.

The high degree of centralisation needed for proletarian political organisations reflects the fact that the proletariat has no separate economic or political interests within itself, unlike other classes. It also expresses an important need of an exploited class: to combat the process of division and atomisation which wage labour and generalised commodity production imposes on the proletariat and to compensate for the absence of any economic power to solidify its combat.

Centralisation is necessarily restrictive on certain individual initiatives - those that resist the process of centralisation and instead pursue their own independent direction that leads to a loss of cohesion and ultimately the dissolution of the whole. But by contrast, it is entirely dependent on the individual initiatives and diversity of the whole political organism. The protracted nature of centralisation is precisely a result of the need to collectively resolve these differences, synthesise the disagreements - the only way to bring the whole together and enrich it into a higher unity.

The marxist concept of centralisation is therefore not monolithic. It allows for, in fact demands, the expression of minority positions - with the objective of winning over the majority so the whole organisation can take the right path. The de-centralised or federalist conception that the minority should not be open to criticism, and not subject to the unity of the organisation while the debate continues, is in fact authoritarian since it means the arbitrary imposition of a part over the whole.12

Centralisation always appears to be hierarchical to the adepts of ‘personal freedom’ because it involves the principle of delegation. The Congresses for example which formulate the general goals of the organisation cannot possibly sit permanently and deal with the huge amount of daily functions of the organisation and in particular its intervention within the working class. It has to delegate responsibility to central organs to translate its orientations into the daily life of the organisation. The mandating of central organs and their return of mandate to the next congress to be verified is a hallmark of revolutionary marxist political organisation.

The principle of delegation and of the maintenance of unity during the debates over differences is not too much centralisation, it is centralisation: the lifeblood of the revolutionary organisation. The hostility to these principles means in the end the assertion of the will of the individual or a minority over the interests of the whole. It is this, not centralisation, that is authoritarian.

3) Debate, diversity and the search for coherence.

An interesting aspect of Devrim’s personal account is that he criticises the ICC for having too much internal debate, therefore too much diversity and individual initiative on the one hand, while on the other he criticises the organisation for being too theoretically coherent, where nothing is out of place so that no room for individual initiative remains.

Devrim is not concerned with reconciling this apparent contradiction in his account: that an organisation can be both intensely self critical and intensely cohesive at the same time. 13 In fact there is no contradiction between these two opposites - we think they are complementary and interdependent.

The tradition of the marxist left, which the ICC belongs to, has always been characterised by a critical spirit that is not just directed to the bourgeoisie and capitalist society but also to itself, to its own parties, and their concessions to the bourgeoisie, to theoretical errors, and theoretical insufficiency in front of the changes of events and historical periods. The political principles that the ICC defends are the fruit of long efforts to question principles, or conceptions of these principles, that have been found wanting in the light of the constant unfolding of social reality and the creation of new situations, which require new answers and analyses. The ICC’s vision of the role of the party or the state in the period of transition for example is the product of a long and tortuous theoretical development within the Communist Left, requiring decades of debate and confrontation after the defeat of the October Revolution.

And in the history of the ICC itself internal debate has led to the rejection of once axiomatic analyses of the marxist tradition such as Lenin’s theory of the weak link - the concept that the revolutionary socialist transformation would emanate from the peripheral countries of capitalism. The ICC countered that it was in Western Europe with the most experienced sectors of the working class and with the most intelligent bourgeoisies, where the central impetus for proletarian revolution lay. 14

A constant critical stance towards the acquisitions of the marxist tradition in the light of the new problems thrown up in the evolution of events is therefore a necessary aspect of marxist theory.

It implies that every militant takes this critical approach to heart, recognizes the need to think for him or herself and refuse to accept things at face value.

At the same time marxist criticism can only be severe enough if it involves the search for new coherence. Only the quest for new syntheses that either enrich or even overturn the old can go to the roots.

The marxist objective is always to create or recreate a theoretically and politically unified vision that traces the ‘general line of march’ of the working class struggle as the latter evolves over time and through changing conditions. The need for the unified theoretical conception of the interests of the proletariat is a vital counterpart to organisational unity. Theoretical unity or coherence, like centralised organization, is not the same as conformity or uniformity. Every coherence contains potential contradictions. And these latent oppositions point toward new debates and, necessarily, new conclusions.

Diversity is not therefore a goal in itself, the celebration of difference for its own sake, as the anarchists believe, but the means to the greater self-consciousness of the proletariat as a unified revolutionary class.

Likewise the goal of the debates within the organisation is not to reinforce the authority of any ‘leaders’ but to allow the greatest clarity, the most homogeneity within the organisation, that is, to fight against the conditions which engender the need for ‘leaders’.

The power of the ideas of the revolutionary organisation in the working class, which must be measured in the long term, is not through the dilution of its principles and analyses or the abandonment of coherence, as Devrim thinks, but through the greater concentration and depth of its theory.

All this places particular theoretical demands on the revolutionary militant. One of the most important is that they have to see beyond their own personal impressions and feelings.

But Devrim’s whole account of his negative experience in the ICC stays at the first stage of personal impressions which are never raised to the level of a debate over the political and organisational principles which are the essence of marxist revolutionary organisation.

Consequences

There is no detailed alternative conception of revolutionary organisation in Devrim’s critique. But by implication his criticism of the ICC means the alternative should be less stringent in its integration of new members, less centralized, leaving the different parts of the organisation more autonomy. It should spend less time on internal theoretical debate, less time demarcating itself from other political tendencies. There should be less importance given to the collective development of coherent political positions and more weight to personal impressions and feelings. In brief, the revolutionary organisation should be less a political expression of the working class and more a reflection of the personal inclinations of its individual members.

Since Devrim gives no historical models or reference points for what such an organisation should look like, or how it would avoid previous failures based on the same lack of parameters, his alternative seems extremely hazy, its contours indeterminate.

In the end Devrim’s critique expresses a completely different vision of revolutionary militancy to the marxist one. Whereas the latter sees the free development of the militant as a process of interaction with his comrades, that is, as a question of organisational solidarity, Devrim sees the revolutionary as someone who must retain his personal autonomy at all costs even if it means the desertion of the organisation and thus his comrades.

In a period when the working class needs to regain its identity as a political class, the suggestion that an existing revolutionary political organisation, one that can provide a valid communist political perspective, is obsolete, and should be replaced by a vaguely conceived alternative which is indifferent to political positions - well, this is derisory. Not only derisory but harmful.

Today there are groups and individuals who deliberately set out to destroy revolutionary organisations and the ICC in particular. While Devrim does not agree with our definition of these elements as ‘parasitic’, he nevertheless once rejected their behaviour and objectives as anti-working class - one of the reasons that originally drew him to the ICC. But his present attitude, expressed in his personal critique, which now implies the ICC is not worth defending in the face of such attacks, can, irrespective of his own intentions, only whet the destructive appetites of the parasites.

The preoccupation with ‘personal liberty against authority’ finds itself caught in a no-man’s-land between two alternatives: the political determination of marxism on the one hand and the hostile political power of the bourgeoisie, and those who have put themselves at the latter’s service, on the other. In reality there is no neutral middle ground between these two political poles.

It’s clear which of these two camps genuine revolutionaries must choose.

Como

Introduction: Economic migration and refugees from war throughout the history of capitalism

From its ascendence

For thousands of years people have been forced to flee from war, persecution, famine and forces of nature such as floods, droughts, volcanoes etc.  But these movements were not a permanent phenomenon and they mostly involved only a small part of the population. After the beginning of agriculture, with the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals, humanity lived for thousands of years on the same spot. Under feudalism the peasantry were attached to the land and serfs stayed, from the moment they were born until their death, on the same land, which belonged to their feudal lord. But, with the onset of capitalism around the fourteenth to fifteenth century this changed drastically.

Capitalism spread by conquest, by intense and massive violence across the globe. First in Europe, where enclosures drove self-sufficient peasants from communal land into the cities to work in factories.  Marx described primitive accumulation as the process of “divorcing the producer from the means of production. … great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process” (Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation). This separation of the peasant from the soil, from their means of production, meant uprooting millions of people. Because capitalism needs “the abolition of all laws preventing labourers from transferring from one sphere of production another to and from one local production centre to another” (Marx, Capital Volume 3, Chapter 10.)

At the same time as capitalism in Europe was compelling the peasants to sell their labour power, it began to spread its colonial rule by invasion and conquest around the globe. And for centuries slave-hunters kidnapped millions of people, mostly from Africa to supply cheap labour for the plantations and mines mainly in America. When slavery ended many slaves working on plantations were replaced with indentured labour (1).  All along its expansion capitalism uprooted and displaced people, either from the countryside forcing them to sell their labour power to a capitalist, or by robbing labour power and turning them into slaves to be sold on another continent. In the same way as capitalism needs the biggest, if not unlimited mobility for its commodities and free access to markets, it also imposes the biggest mobility and access to the work-force. Capitalism “must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe – up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. This labour power, however, is in most cases rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organisation of production. It must first be ‘set free’ in order to be enrolled in the active army of capital. The emancipation of labour power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism.” (The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter 26; Rosa Luxemburg). Mobility has a particular significance within capitalism. “Capitalism necessarily creates mobility of the population, something not required by previous systems of social economy and impossible under them on anything like a large scale” (Lenin The Development of Capitalism in Russia “The ‘Mission’ of Capitalism”).

The proletarian is thus forced to move incessantly, always in search for an opportunity, for a place to sell his labour power. Being a wage earner means being forced to move large and small distances, or even to move to another country or continent, wherever a worker can sell his labour power. Whether in violent forms or through ‘mere’ economic coercion capitalism from its beginning has drawn its work-force from the entire planet, it has been global, international from the start. In other words: the working class – by the nature of the conditions of capitalism, is a class of migrants – and this is why workers have no fatherland. However the distances a worker has to migrate depends on the economic situation and on other factors such as famine, repression or wars. 

During the nineteenth century, the ascendant phase of capitalism, this meant migration occurred mostly towards the areas with expanding industries. Migration and urbanisation went together. In many cities in the 1840-80s in Europe the population doubled within a period of 30-40 years.  Within a few decades or, often, within an even shorter period, small towns centred on coal mines, iron mines or new factories, swelled into huge cities.

To the twentieth century 

At the same time, since capitalism always runs into economic crises, a ‘surplus’ of labour power regularly crops up with masses of unemployed workers looking for jobs. In the ascendant phase of capitalism economic crises were mainly cyclical. When the economy entered into a crisis, many workers could emigrate, and, when a new boom phase began, additional workers were needed. Millions of workers could emigrate without any major restrictions - mainly because capitalism was still expanding - in particular to the USA. Between 1820 and 1914 some 25.5 million people from Europe emigrated to the USA; altogether some 50 million left the European continent. In every year between 1820 and 1915, more than half the increase in the British population simply emigrated (2). But these waves of mainly economic migration slowed down considerably with the First World War, when the global historical conditions changed and in particular when  the economic crisis was no longer just cyclical but became long-lasting, if not permanent. From massive and almost unhampered, migration became filtered, selected and more and more difficult, if not illegal. From World War I a period of stricter border controls began to be imposed on economic migrants.

The decadent system produces an endless number of war refugees

And yet we need to distinguish economic migration from wars: every refugee is a migrant, but not every migrant is a refugee. A migrant is someone who leaves his residence in search of a place where he can sell his labour power. A refugee is someone whose life is at stake in an immediate way and moves elsewhere to find a safe place.

Wars and pogroms are not new phenomena. Any war means violence, forcing people to run away from the confrontations to save their life. Thus war refugees are as old as wars themselves, and war refugees appeared a long time before capitalism forced workers into economic migration. However, the number of wars also took on a different size and quality with the First World War. Up until then the number of war refugees was relatively small. And also the number of victims of pogroms as the ones against the Jews in Russia (or elsewhere) began to change with World War I. In earlier centuries the refugee problem was mainly a temporary and limited phenomenon. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, with the onset of the decadence of capitalism, with each world war and, after 1989, with the period of ‘local’, ‘regional’ but often endless wars, the question of refugees has taken on a new dimension. Both the number of war refugees and economic migrants depend on the respective historical conditions – whether there is an economic crisis and how much war has become dominant.

We plan to publish a number of articles on the question of refugees and migration, which look at the questions from different angles. We have already published an article on migration [127]  and plan to take up this question in more detail soon. We begin this series with the development of the spiral of violence in the twentieth century and the consequences for the scope of flight from wars, taking up in more detail the different phases from the First World War to the Second World War, and its aftermath, before taking up the period from the Cold War up to the present day. In another article we will also look more closely at the policy of the ruling class and what consequences flow from this for the struggle of the working class.

Heinrich 3/10/15

1914: a new era of violence against populations

“One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point…The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat – these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers’ movement seem a pleasant idyll”. Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, 1916

The brutal and violent impetus inherent in decadent capitalism, evoked here by Rosa Luxemburg, has been strikingly confirmed by the tragic fate of the civilian populations in the 20th century who have been subjected to imprisonment in camps, to displacement, deportation and liquidation en masse. The combined effect of wars, economic crisis and oppression in declining capitalism gave rise to an irrational dynamic of blind violence, of pogroms, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and unbridled militarism. The 20th century was one of the most barbaric in history.

The year 1914 and its chauvinist hysteria opened a whole spiral of violence. In the past of course wars led to massacres and oppression, but this was usually on a local scale; they didn’t result in massive exoduses, the displacement of whole populations and the near- paranoid obsession to control them on the part of the state. Modern warfare has become total war. It mobilises, over a period of years, the entire population and the economic machines of the warring countries, reduces to ashes decades of human labour, sacrifices the lives of tens of millions of human beings, hurls hundreds of millions into famine. Its effects are no longer limited to mere conquests, with their train of rape and pillage, but gigantic destructions across the whole globe. On top of the uprooting, the rural exodus brought about by the introduction of capitalist social relations, total war adds the militarisation of the whole of civil society in the service of the battle fronts.  This was a real qualitative step. Populations of entire countries, and above all the youth, are forcibly displaced to become soldiers, compelled to engage in a mutual bloodbath with those from rival countries. The civilians at the rear are bled dry by the war effort and the first camps are made up of the prisoners from enemy nations. Although during the First World War there were no extermination camps, we can still talk about mass imprisonments and deportations. Any foreigner immediately became a suspect. In Britain for example foreigners were stuck in the Newbury race course or on the Isle of Man. In Germany, the camps at Erfurt, Munster or Darmstadt were used to imprison masses of civilians. In France, 70 internment camps were in service between 1914 and 1920 on the west coast (in the vicinity of Brest for example) and in the southern departments. At first they were existing buildings or perimeters surrounded by barbed wire and closely guarded. Transfer from one camp to another was done with cattle wagons and any revolt was met with violence. Useless to point out that any communist militant was subject to imprisonment as were women who had “compromised with the enemy”. A camp like the one in Pontmain was made up of Turks, Austro-Hungarians and especially Germans. This was indeed a prefiguration of the concentration camp universe that was set up in the 1930s and reached its summit during the Second World War. At the same time as xenophobic prejudices were being whipped up, the indigenous inhabitants of distant countries were dragged towards Europe by the recruiters, enrolled as sacrificial lambs in the war. From 1917-18, under orders from Clemenceau in France, 190,000 North Africans were sent to the front. 170,000 West Africans, the famous “Senegalese sharpshooters” were for the most part mobilised by force. Chinese people were also mobilised by France and Britain. Britain also sent Africans and Indians to the slaughter (1.5 million from the Indian sub-continent alone). The belligerent powers – and this also included the Russians with their “savage divisions” from the Caucasus – used all these “natives” as specialised cannon-fodder for the most dangerous military operations. As well as the soldiers displaced, more than 12 million Europeans were compelled to flee from the war, to become refugees.

The Armenian genocide and the persecution of minorities

This was the case for the Armenian populations, one of the most striking tragedies of the war, and seen as the first real genocide of the 20th century. Even during the 19th century, Armenian aspirations for independence, like that of the Greeks, resulted in persecution by the Ottomans. A political movement known as the “Young Turks”, which adopted an extremely nationalist Pan-Turkish ideology, prepared the massacre. Having become scapegoats during the war, especially after the defeat by the Russians, the Armenians were subjected to a well-planned massacre between April 1915 and the autumn of 1916. Having initially arrested a number of intellectuals, the rest of the Armenian population was systematically deported and decimated en masse by the Turkish state. Women and children were transported in boats and many drowned around the coasts or were sold like slaves. The Baghdad railway was used to carry out massive deportations to the desert or to camps, some of which were already being used to exterminate people, A large number of Armenians died of thirst in the Mesopotamian desert. Those who managed to escape the slaughter became impoverished refugees, including thousands of orphans. They were to make up a real diaspora (many for example went to the US where a sizeable community still exists). All this of course was very quickly forgotten by the ‘great democracies’ not long after this tragic event. And yet over a million Armenians had been killed!

The collapse of the last great empires during this terrible war gave rise to a multitude of nationalist tensions which had equally disastrous consequences for other minorities. The formation of nation states after the First World War was the result of the fragmentation of the old moribund empires. This was particularly the case with the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires that had been composed of a mosaic of populations that were preyed upon by the hungry vultures that were the European imperialist powers. By struggling for their own survival, these ruined empires had tried to fortify their frontiers, conclude desperate military alliances and carry out population exchanges which gave rise to sharpened divisions and forms of “ethnic cleansing”. The Greek-Turkish conflict, which is often presented as the consequence of the spontaneous reaction of crowds of Turks, was highly orchestrated by the new state run by its modern leader Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. The new state he founded was to wage a long and murderous war against the Greeks. During this conflict, the Greeks also engaged in pillaging, with armed civilian bands burning Turkish villages and committing all kinds of atrocities against their inhabitants. Between 1920 and 1923 the Turkish forces also carried out a whole number of cruel massacres against Greeks and Armenians. From the beginning there were wholesale transfers of populations, of Greeks who had been living in Turkey and vice-versa (1,300,000 Greeks left Turkey and 385,000 Turks left Greece). In 1923, the Lausanne Treaty put the seal on these violent measures with a number of administrative procedures. Thousands of Greeks and Turks were expelled through this official exchange and good number of them died during the course of this exodus. More generally, in such conditions, with the displacement and concentration of hungry populations across the continent, it was not surprising that pathogenic infections proliferated. Central and eastern Europe was soon hit by typhus. But more spectacularly, the world was swept by the “Spanish flu” which claimed 40 to 50 million victims in populations weakened by the years of war. Before that the worst epidemic had been cholera in the 19th century. You would have to go back to the Middle Ages and the Black Death to find an epidemic on such a scale (30% of the European population was wiped out by the plague).

This whole barbaric reality was only possible because the working class had been dragooned by nationalism and soiled by patriotism. But faced with these atrocious conditions, the proletariat did raise its head, demonstrated that it alone was capable of blocking the war machine and putting an end to the carnage. It was after the mutinies of 1917 and the revolutionary wave which began in Russia and with workers’ uprisings in Germany (the sailors’ mutiny at Kiel and the revolts in big cities like Berlin) that the main belligerents were forced to sign the armistice. Faced with the threat of world revolution, the war had to be brought to a rapid end.

The counter-revolution: manhunts and pogroms

The ruling class had one obsession faced with the problem of desertions, demobilisation, and above all the risk of social conflict: it was vital to crush the focal points of the communist revolution. The Entente Powers, driven by powerful class hatred, encircled Bolshevik Russia. The terrible civil war was launched by the “White” armies, backed up by the armies of the capitalist states of Europe and the USA. All this resulted in countless victims. An economic blockade provoked a major famine in Russia. But to crush the proletariat, a new wave of violence had to be unleashed. The proletariat had become the common enemy of all the capitalist powers. Faced with the proletarian danger, they had to cooperate. But in contrast to the victorious countries, the bourgeoisie and especially the petty bourgeoisie in the defeated countries like Germany was to develop a deep feeling of having been “stabbed in the back”, of having been humiliated by the “enemy within”. The drastic conditions of the Versailles Treaty precipitated the hunt for scapegoats, leading to the development of anti-Semitism and a real man-hunt against communists, who were also made responsible for everything that had gone wrong. The culminating point was the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 and the series of savage massacres that followed: “The butchers set to work. Whole buildings collapsed under artillery fire, burying entire families in the ruins. Other proletarians fell in front of their homes, in schools, in stables, shot dead, beaten to death with clubs, pierced by bayonets, most often denounced by anonymous informers. They were put up against the wall singly, in twos, in groups of three or more, or finished off with a bullet in the back of the neck, in the middle of the night, on the banks of the Spree. For weeks, the river was throwing up corpses.” (3)

A succession of defeats for the working class was punctuated by the murder of great figures of the movement, the most celebrated being Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In the 1920s, ferocious repression against any form of opposition was made all the easier because the Stalinist counter-revolution was carrying out expulsions and murders, creating labour camps and prison camps, the Gulags, hunting down revolutionaries and systematically locking up workers suspected of “sedition”.

In the framework of decadent capitalism and of the counter-revolution, hatred of communism and its assimilation with the rootless Jew led to a qualitative change in anti-Semitic pogroms. In the 19th century, there had already been a series of pogroms against the Jews, especially in Russia after the annexation of Poland. Outbursts of violence against the Jews had already been recurrent in Odessa in the early part of the 19th century. But between 1881 and 1884 pogroms led to real massacres. Local populations were incited and encouraged to pillage, rape and murder. In 1903 a terrible series of pogroms struck the city of Kishinev. In a totally irrational and obscurantist manner, the Jews were accused of practising ritual murders. Between 1879 and 1914 nearly 2 million Jews became refugees. At the beginning of the 1920s, there was a new upsurge of pogroms. During the civil war in Russia, thousands of Jews were massacred by the White Armies, especially those led by Denikin. Following these pogroms, our comrade MC, for example, had to take refuge in Palestine with part of his family (see International Review 65 and 66). During this period, pogroms in Russia resulted in 60,000 deaths.

The defeat of the proletariat in Germany generated growing tensions against the Jews, as in other parts of Europe, producing a fresh wave of refugees. The programme of the Nazi party, dated 24 February 1920 had already stated that “To be a citizen, you must have German blood, religious denomination is not important. Thus no Jew can be a citizen”.

The central role of the state: towards the totalitarian control of populations

With the preparation and entry into the war, a new epoch had opened up: that of capitalism in decline and its universal tendency towards state capitalism. From now on, each state, led by its executive and its armed wing, would exert a bureaucratic control over the whole of social life. As a result of the war and in the name of the military needs or security of the state, there was a tightening of border controls and increasing control over and exactions against exiled populations and refugees.  Unlike the period before the First World War, migrations were now subject to restrictions. It was at this moment that the main tools of administration were put in place. The displacement of populations during the war led states to establish a real police control over identities, to systematically place all foreigners under suspicion and to search hem. In France for example, “the creation of identity cards in 1917 was a real reversal of previous police and administrative habits. Our mentalities have today taken on board this individual stamp whose police origins are no longer seen as such. It is not however neutral that the introduction of identity cards first concerned foreigners, with the aim of surveillance in a full-on state of war” (PJ Deschodt and F Huguenin, La République xenophobe, ed JC Lattès). From the start, armies recognised that the displacement of civilians – whether spontaneous or provoked – was a real threat, an “encumbrance” for troop activity and military logistics. States thus tried to give evacuation orders, instrumentalising civilians and refugees to use them as weapons of war, as was the case during the Greek-Turkish conflict concluded by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923.  The “solution” that was resorted to more and more was the multiplication of internment camps, as we saw above. When refugees had to flee from combat zones (as was the case with the Belgians in 1914 when the country was invaded by Germany), even though they sometimes benefited from the help of voluntary associations, a large number of civilians were directly placed under the control of the authorities and ended up in camps. Prisoners were divided up according to nationality and “dangerousness”. These were decisions of states out to defend their sordid capitalist interests, with the most “democratic” ones to the fore, and ready to take entire civil populations hostage.

In the aftermath of the war, following the physical and ideological defeat of the proletariat, the spirit of revenge took a new step and an even more murderous and barbaric conflict was being prepared.  Facing a pile of ruins, the states of Europe were in a difficult situation with so much labour power having been destroyed. Accords were signed to allow economic emigration. In the 1920s, France for example recruited Italian, Polish and Czech immigrants, the prelude to new xenophobic campaigns brought about the economic crisis and the terrible depression which followed, opening the course towards a new world war. 

WH 28/6/15

The outbreak of a second world holocaust would take barbarism to unheard of levels for civilian populations and refugees. We will look at this tragic development in the second part of this article [128].

(1) Frölich, Lindau, Schreiner, Walcher, Révolution et contre-révolution en Allemagne, 1918-1920, Ed Science marxiste

(2) Indentured labour means an emigrating worker signs a contract in his county of migration, according to which for a period of 5 or 8 or 10 years he has to work in that country. The wages are fixed, he cannot ask for an increase and he cannot cancel the contract. Between 1830 and 1930 this involved around 5 million Indians and 5-6 million people from other Asian countries – so as many as 12 million people were indentured labourers.

This article is contributed by a close sympathiser who has participated in a number of recent online debates about the question of capitalist decadence.

Introduction

The ICC has commented more than once on the persistent tendency in the proletarian milieu – especially that part influenced by anarchism – to reject the Marxist theory of capitalist decadence.[1]

Since the main conclusion we draw from this theory is that capitalism today is a socially regressive system, and that its overthrow is therefore both possible and necessary for humanity, you might be forgiven for thinking there would be some common ground on this; especially today, with the daily images of millions of people desperately trying to flee the barbaric wars of capitalism in the Middle East; wars which increasingly reveal the lack of any rational economic motive even from the point of view of imperialism...

Instead, if a recent online discussion on libcom’s forum is anything to go by,[2] at least some in this milieu display outright hostility to the whole Marxist theory of decadence, arguing that it is at best unnecessary to explain capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production, and at worst a purely ideological construct or pseudo-religious belief.

This goes to prove that ‘decadence-denial’ is a real phenomenon in the proletarian milieu today.

Online discussions certainly have their weaknesses and this one generated as much heat as light at times, so rather than go back over ‘who said what’ instead we want to focus on what seem to us to be the key questions to address: to re-state, as clearly and simply as we can, the Marxist position on these questions; to briefly look at the arguments of the ‘deniers’, and pose some key questions for them to answer, so at the very least we can identify common ground where it exists and try to avoid false arguments in the future.

1. What method do we use to understand changes in capitalism?

From the beginning of the discussion, the onus was firmly placed on the supporters of “decadence theory” to prove that capitalism has been decadent since 1914.

But before we can answer that we have to decide what theory we’re going to use to determine it; after all, as Einstein said: it is the theory which decides what we can observe.

Our starting point is the Marxist method of understanding history, and like all scientific methods it must be firmly based on the verified discoveries of those who have gone before.

Capitalism is a historically transitory system

Contrary to popular belief, the main discoveries of the Marxist movement are not the existence of classes or of the struggle between them, or even of the labour theory of value; all of these concepts had already been advanced by bourgeois historians and economists at a time when the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class struggling against decaying feudalism.

The first key development in the work of Marx and Engels is that the existence of classes and of the struggle between them is merely a historical phase in the development of the productive forces; capitalism is only the last in a whole succession of modes of production which creates the conditions for its own abolition and – after a successful proletarian revolution – for the abolition of all classes and the creation of a communist society.[3]

This is in a nutshell is the materialist conception of history and the core of historical materialism, which is simply the method we use as Marxists to understand the laws involved in this coming into being and passing away of successive modes of production and to analyse the change from one to another.

The fatal contradictions of capitalism

The second key development in the work of Marx and Engels is the discovery of the specific way these laws express themselves within capitalism. Based on their theoretical framework, Marx and Engels were able to identify, even in the crises of youthful capitalism when it was still expanding rapidly across the planet, the seeds of the fatal contradictions that would eventually create the conditions for its abolition:

“The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means by which crises are prevented.” (Communist Manifesto)

As a dynamic mode of production driven solely by the extraction of profit, capitalism has a built-in tendency to produce too many commodities relative not to social need but the purchasing power of society. It must therefore seek ever-larger outlets for its products, extending its market across the whole world. But as it extends its mode of production throughout the world it progressively reduces the outlets it needs to grow. The trajectory of capitalism is therefore inexorably towards “more extensive and more destructive crises” which it is increasingly unable to prevent[4]. 

At several times during the 19th century Marx and Engels overestimated the speed of capitalism’s trajectory and even thought capitalism was entering into its final crisis. But they were able to revise their perspective and clarify their framework for understanding how and why capitalism would prove to be historically transitory. As long as it had not definitively reached the limits of its progressive expansion a world revolution of the proletariat was not yet possible. Only when the further development of the productive forces came into conflict with bourgeois relations of production (ie. with wage labour, capital and the nation state), would the conditions for capitalism’s abolition exist. When this point was finally reached a whole era of social revolution would be opened, characterised by acute contradictions, crises and convulsions.[5]

Decadence at the heart of historical materialism

It still took several more decades of capitalist development, and in particular the rise of imperialism, to clarify exactly how capitalism’s era of crises, convulsions and class struggles would finally be ushered in. But we can see from the theoretical framework developed by the Marxist movement in the 19th century that “decadence theory” is simply the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production. It is therefore indispensable for understanding the historical period we are living in, and how to act as revolutionaries.

For the deniers on the other hand, the theory of decadence is at best unnecessary to explain capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production, and at worst ‘teleological’, a  purely ideological construct imposed by Marxists, or even a mystical, pseudo-religious belief…

The main argument of the deniers seems to be that capitalism is essentially a cyclical system and that the manifestations of decadence today can therefore be understood as the symptoms of its ‘normal’ functioning. In other words, rather than having any built-in tendency towards increasingly devastating and irresolvable crises, capitalism is in a sort of stasis where each crisis simply irons out temporary problems and results in a new phase of growth. 

But it became very clear in the discussion that this disagreement is not about “decadence theory”, or even the history of capitalism: it’s about the whole materialist conception of history as a succession of modes of production which go through a phase of ascent and decline.

2. How do we explain capitalist growth since 1914?

A total halt to the productive forces?

The online discussion was prompted by a question about growth in the so-called ‘developing countries’ in Asia. How can we say that capitalism is ‘decadent’ when there are so many signs that capitalism has continued to grow since 1914?

There are certainly phenomena to be explained – for example the spectacular growth of China since the 1980s – but in general we can say that because capitalism is a global system, it enters into its epoch of decay as a global system and not on a country by country basis; no national economy or region can escape from capitalism’s trajectory.

There is a strong tendency among our critics to see any sign of growth since 1914 as a refutation of decadence and to offer a whole list of new developments to show that capitalism has in fact continued to grow vigorously in its epoch of decay: telecommunications, consumer goods, aviation, computers, data/web services...

But decadence has never meant a total halt to the growth of the productive forces, even in previous modes of production, and capitalism is the first mode of production to be based solely on the extraction of  profit; if the growing accumulation of capital cannot be ensured then the whole system would simply grind to a halt.

Is capitalism a socially regressive system?

Flowing from the Marxist theory of capitalism as a historically transitory system, the real question we need to answer is: are the productive forces definitively and irreversibly in conflict with bourgeois relations of production? In other words, does capitalist growth since 1914 demonstrate that it is now a socially regressive system?

At the quantitative level, it is possible to show the braking effect of bourgeois relations of production since 1914 by comparing the growth of industrial production in the period of capitalist decadence with what it would have been without this braking effect. Taking the rate of growth in the last phase of capitalist ascendancy and applying it to the whole of the period of decadence, industrial production in decadence reaches only 60% of what it could have been, although even this is likely to be an overestimation.[6]

But this still doesn’t show the crucial qualitative changes to growth in decadence. Since the conditions for capitalism’s abolition already exist, this growth is increasingly characterised, in Marx’s poetic phrase, as “development as decay”.

Having reached the geographic limits of its expansion, with remaining extra-capitalist markets insufficient for its further progressive growth, capitalism’s hereditary disease of overproduction becomes chronic and irreversible. As Marx forecast in the 1848 Manifesto, it is forced to destroy parts of its own body and adopt a series of increasingly drastic palliatives to prolong its life and ensure growing accumulation.

We can see this process at work since 1914:

• the periodic destruction of the productive forces on an increasing scale through global wars (20 million dead in WW1, 60+ million in WW2);
• the massive increase in the role of the state to shore up the economy against collapse and to control a proletariat which has become a permanent threat;
• the growing burden of unproductive costs (state bureaucracy, arms production, welfare, marketing, etc.);
• the huge growth of debts that realistically can never be repaid.
• systematic attempts to ‘cheat’ the law of value, for example protectionist policies and the massive use of credit to create artificial markets.

So if capitalism in decadence at certain times or in certain areas has still been able to display impressive growth rates, this still disguises the increasingly ‘drugged’ nature of this growth, which is at a mounting cost for the future of humanity and the planet itself, and the gigantic waste of the productive forces entailed in these palliative measures.

In other words, it is the growth of a socially regressive system.

The context for understanding the growth in East Asia

All the palliatives adopted since the entry of capitalism into decadence are now themselves exacerbating its mortal sickness. Capitalism has no choice but to launch a frontal assault on the wages and living conditions of the working class to try to make it pay for its crisis. But even this provides no ‘solution’; on the contrary, it can only reduce demand and intensify its chronic crisis of overproduction.

This is the context in which we must analyse the spectacular development of the East Asian economies since the 1980s, especially China which has managed to achieve the most dramatic growth rates in the entire history of capitalism – even during a period of worsening crisis internationally.

A full examination of China’s development is clearly beyond the scope of this article,[7] but based on our theoretical framework for understanding the nature of growth in decadence we are led to conclude that the growth of the East Asian economies is not the indication of a new period of capitalist expansion as in the 19th century, but rather a temporary upturn within a global decline; and in fact we have recently seen China’s growth rates fall to their lowest level for 25 years, leading bourgeois pundits to warn of the shock waves hitting an already weak global economy.[8]

But we should be cautious about making any forecasts. The return of capitalism’s open crisis in the late 1960s dramatically re-affirmed the Communist Left’s analysis of the decadence of capitalism and the inability of the system to overcome its fatal contradictions. But the evolution of the crisis over the last five decades is testament to capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to adapt and survive – even if this can only mean storing up more problems for itself in the longer term. Just as Marx and Engels at times mistakenly believed capitalism was entering into its final crisis, revolutionaries have on occasions underestimated this capacity of capitalism or to foresee the possibility of an under-developed country like China industrialising quite so spectacularly.[9]

We have now passed the milestone of 100 years of capitalist decadence. Despite massive waves of struggles especially in the late 60s and early 1970s, the proletariat has not yet been able to destroy decadent capitalism. But this failure of the working class to meet its ‘appointment with history’, especially in the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, does not in any way invalidate the Marxist theory of capitalist decadence.

Some questions for the ‘deniers’ 

There seems to be common ground that capitalism today is a socially regressive system – although we probably disagree on whether it was ever progressive in the first place – and that a proletarian revolution is both possible and necessary.

There also appears to be broad agreement that capitalism is a historically transitory system. But it is entirely unclear what theory the deniers use to determine this, given that they appear to reject the whole materialist conception of history as a succession of modes of production which go through a phase of ascent and decline.

• Why is capitalism a historically transitory system?
• And if it is historically transitory, what are the seeds of its destruction, the fatal contradictions that will – at least at some point in its development – lead to its historic crisis?
• And if it has no fatal contradictions – no built-in tendency towards overproduction, for example – why can it not prolong its life indefinitely?
• Are there any limits – geographic or other – to its ability to continue to create new markets for its commodities?
• Are there any final limits to capitalism’s ability to adapt and survive – for example the degradation of the planet to the point where it threatens the survival of humanity?

If there are no limits, then it’s hard to see why capitalism is not, as the bourgeoisie itself proclaims, essentially an eternal system.

So in conclusion we think the onus is on the deniers of decadence to demonstrate how they prove that capitalism is not, as the bourgeoisie argues, the final finished product of the class struggle that contains no fatal contradictions.

For ourselves, having tested all the links of our theoretical framework, we’re confident that the Marxist theory of capitalist decadence remains absolutely valid. 

MH  26.9.15

In the struggle to form a Communist Party in Britain during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 it was the Left, led by the small group around Sylvia Pankhurst and the Workers’ Dreadnought, that was clearest about the danger posed by the Labour Party to a workers’ revolution.

After some initial hesitations in 1914 the Labour Party had joined the ranks of the ‘social patriots’ and became a supporter of British imperialism in the slaughter. This excerpt from an article written by Pankhurst in 1920 still refers to Labour as ‘reformist’ rather than a capitalist party but it is very clear in denouncing its counter-revolutionary role for the capitalist state.

In opposition to the programme of the social patriotic Labour Party the Dreadnought group defended the need for the overthrow of capitalism and the dictatorship of the working class exercised through the soviets as a step towards the abolition of the wages system and communism.

“The social patriotic parties of reform, like the British Labour Party, are everywhere aiding the capitalists to maintain the capitalist system; to prevent it from breaking down under the shock which the Great War has caused it, and the growing influence of the Russian Revolution. The bourgeois social patriotic parties, whether they call themselves Labour or Socialist, are everywhere working against the Communist revolution, and they are more dangerous to it than the aggressive capitalists because the reforms they seek to introduce may keep the capitalist regime going for some time to come. When the social patriotic reformists come into power, they fight to stave off the workers’ revolution with as strong a determination as that displayed by the capitalists, and more effectively, because they understand the methods and tactics and something of the idealism of the working class.

The British Labour Party, like the social patriotic organisations of other countries, will, in the natural development of society, inevitably come to power. It is for the Communists to build up the forces that will overthrow the social patriots, and in this country we must not delay or falter in that work.

We must not dissipate our energy in adding to the strength of the Labour Party; its rise to power is inevitable. We must concentrate on making a Communist movement that will vanquish it.

The Labour Party will soon be forming a Government; the revolutionary opposition must make ready to attack it.”

Excerpt from ‘Towards a Communist Party’, Workers’ Dreadnought, 21 February 1920.

Why are millions fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and other countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa? Because the population there is desperate to escape a permanent state of war, an infernal spiral of two, three, even five way conflicts between equally murderous antagonists, whether official government armies or terrorist gangs. Syria is the most ‘advanced’ expression of this descent into chaos. The Assad government, which has shown itself ready to bomb Syria to ruins rather than relinquish power, now only controls about 17% of the country. Whole areas of the north and east of the country are under the control of the fanatical jihadis of Islamic State. Other areas are in the hands of what the western media sometimes calls “moderate” oppositionists, but which are themselves increasingly dominated by jihadi forces like al-Nusra, which is an affiliate of al-Qaida: the “secular and democratic” rebels of the Free Syrian Army, which has been noisily supported by the US and Britain, seem to have become increasingly marginal. Between the anti-Assad forces themselves there is a never-ending game of alliances, betrayals and armed battles.  

But Syria, like the other wars in the region, is also a confrontation between international powers, a fact brought home by the direct intervention of Russian war planes. From the start, Russia has backed the Assad regime with arms and “advisers”. Today its fighters are bombing “terrorist” targets because the Assad regime has its back to the wall and there is a threat that IS will overrun Russia’s base at Tartus, its only naval outlet to the Mediterranean. But for Russia, all the opposition forces, including those backed by the US, are terrorists, and its recent strikes have hit more of the non-IS rebels than IS itself. The US, which might have welcomed Russian aid in its bombing campaigns against IS in Syria and Iraq, can see very clearly that Russia’s number one aim is not to beat back IS but to prop up Assad. So the two powers are acting in the same country with opposing ends, even if they are not yet confronting each other head on.

Russia’s actions in Syria clearly mark an escalation, but they are an escalation in chaos. They go against any possibility of the big powers coming to some kind of settlement to the 4-year war in Syria, and thus any hope of stemming the tide of refugees fleeing the country. Like the US invasion of Iraq, the great powers are not bringing stability to the region, but a mounting instability, and their lack of options opens the door further to the ambitions of the regional powers. In Yemen, for example, where the Saudi- backed government has been fighting the rebels supported by Iran, which in turn has sent forces to Syria to support Assad. On the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi frontier, where Turkey has used the pretext of opposing IS to step up its attacks on the Kurdish PKK; Turkey also supports the Ahar al-Sham group in Syria, while Qatar and Saudi have their own Islamist protégés, some of which have also received CIA support.   

For decades after World War Two, the world lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the two imperialist blocs controlled by the US and the USSR. But this “Cold War” also brought with it a certain discipline, a certain order, as the majority of lesser countries or nationalist forces had to obey the diktats of one bloc or the other. The break-up of the Russian bloc at the beginning of the 90s led to the rapid unravelling of the US bloc, and subsequent attempts by the US to impose order on the resulting centrifugal tendencies only accelerated them further. Its failures in Afghanistan and Iraq are clear evidence of that, above all today as the Taliban, ousted from power by the 2001 US invasion, grow in strength in Afghanistan, and whole swathes of Iraq fall to IS or are under the influence of Iran, which is no friend to the US despite recent attempts to find a rapprochement. After these very negative experiences the US is reluctant to intervene with “troops on the ground” but the rise of IS has obliged it to resort to air power and to step up proxy support for forces like the PKK – previously considered a terrorist group -  which has proved most effective in fighting IS.   But this in turn has goaded Turkey to raise the stakes in its war on the Kurds. Attacking IS in Syria also runs the risk of indirectly boosting the Assad regime and thus Russian ambitions in the region. The contradictions mount up with no solution in sight. 

In sum, there are no forces of order on the planet. The irrationality of capitalist war is becoming increasingly apparent: the wars ravaging the planet bring short term profits to a minority of capitalists and gangsters, but overall they are a total drain on capital, and carry with them no prospect of any post-war reorganisation and reconstruction, as was the case after World War Two. And yet, none of the capitalist powers, from the mighty US to the smallest local war-lord, can afford to stay out of this headlong plunge into militarism and war. The underlying drive of capitalist and imperialist competition is too strong. The financial cost of intervening militarily may be formidable, but the worst thing of all is to lose ground to your rivals. And there will always be rivals.

For the population of these regions, the cost is counted in flesh and blood – in the civilians bombed, raped, beheaded by government armies or opposition militias, in the ruin of their homes along with the historic and cultural products of centuries, in the choice between starvation in refugee camps on the edges of the war zones or the perilous journey to the “safety” of Europe. For humanity as a whole, the prospect is the spread of military chaos across the world, dragging us towards a fateful point of no return.

But that point has not yet been reached. If Europe still looks like a haven of prosperity to the refugees of the world, this is not because of the kindness of the European bourgeoisie. It’s because the working class in these countries is still a force to be reckoned with, and the ruling class is not able to grind it down to utter poverty or mobilise it for war as it was in the 1930s when it faced a defeated working class. Syria gives us a picture of the barbarity of the ruling class when the working class is weak and unable to resist the brutality of the state. The problem for the working class in the more central countries is that it doesn’t know its own strength, doesn’t understand its capacity to fight back, doesn’t have an independent perspective that can offer a future to all the world’s exploited and oppressed. But this perspective – of class struggle across all frontiers with the goal of creating a new society – remains the only real hope for humanity.

Amos, 4.10.15

We are publishing here a letter written by the ICC in response to an article published on the website of the Communist League of Tampa, a group which has appeared recently in the USA ("Why we need a world party"). In the interests of public debate among revolutionaries, the comrades asked us to publish our letter on our website and informed us that they are working on a reply which will in turn be published on their site.

To the Communist League of Tampa

From the International Communist Current

22.8.15

Dear comrades,

We have been following your site with interest. We are encouraged by the appearance of a group which in some way identifies itself with the positions of left communism and which states plainly the need for revolutionaries to organise politically.

We think it would be fruitful to begin a political dialogue with your group and – given the importance of the organisation question for revolutionaries - that a useful starting point for this dialogue would be the text ‘Why we need a world party’ . We understand that this does not represent a ‘programmatic’ statement of the group and that it may well be the subject of disagreements among you: all the more reason, we think, to offer our own thoughts on this text and contribute to the discussion.

As already mentioned, a text which calls for a world party seems to go against the stream in a milieu dominated by anarcho-syndicalism, councilism, communisation theory, and all the varieties of individualism which flourish in a world increasingly ruled by the bourgeois principle of ‘every man for himself’. The open affirmation of the need not only for revolutionaries to come together and organise in a distinct political organisations, but also to prepare the ground for a worldwide revolutionary party in the future – this appears as a bold stance given the enormous weight of suspicion about the marxist conception of revolutionary organisation. From the mainstream media to the anarchists, we are ceaselessly informed that revolutionary political organisations can only be outmoded sects and that they are irrevocably tainted by the poisonous experience of Stalinism. We should not be surprised by this: just as the working class is a “class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”, so the revolutionary organisation which is a product of this class is essentially an alien body in capitalist society, and its militants cannot be deterred by the inevitable hostility they encounter from the representatives of the ruling ideology in all its forms. So we see a key area of agreement in the very title and theme of this text, as well as in the criticisms it makes of the anarcho-syndicalist and councilist arguments against political organisations and the political party. We have some disagreements with its formulations about the possibility of forming “revolutionary unions”, but that is an issue we can return to elsewhere, perhaps in a discussion about the Tampa group’s ‘Points of Unity’

Equally important – because the working class is an international class and its revolution can only win on an international scale - is the fact that the text sees the party as a world party, and that it must be prepared today through a process of common discussion and activities among revolutionary groups in different parts of the globe. Thus while, as you say, it is perfectly true that “forming a world party is not an immediate task at hand”, neither is it a purely abstract goal that will come about of itself sometime in the future: what revolutionaries do and say today plays an active role in the process that will lead to the formation of the party (or, negatively, in the failure to form it, which is certainly a possibility and a danger). That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily in agreement about the kind of organisation we need to develop now – we will return to this later.

Before that, we want to take up some questions about the text’s view of the party which seem inconsistent to us. First of all, the text uses the term “mass party” as opposed to the idea of a “vanguard party” based around a “tight ideological/theoretical line imposed on members”. In our view, the idea of a mass party which developed in the workers’ movement in the late 19th century was tied up with the notion of the party as a kind of government in waiting which would take over the running of society - probably through the medium of parliamentary elections, but similar ideas persisted in the revolutionary movement which broke from official social democracy during the First World War. The most obvious example is the Bolshevik party in the Russian revolution, which saw its role as forming a government after winning a majority in the soviets.

Would you not agree that the mass party idea that developed in the 19th century was also connected to the rise of opportunism in the workers’ movement? That the attempt to build a mass base as rapidly as possible led to the dilution of principles and to compromises with the ruling class, both in the parties of the Second International and in the Communist Parties after 1920-21? And we would argue that it was not accidental that the principal opponents of opportunism in both Internationals were currents who had begun to elaborate a critique of the idea of the mass party: first the Bolsheviks , following the famous debate about ‘who is a member’ at the 1903 RSDLP congress, and then the Italian and German left communists in the Third International, who took up the best in Bolshevism by arguing that, in the new epoch of proletarian revolution, the party had to be made up of committed revolutionaries on the basis of a voluntary – not “imposed” – adherence to a high level of programmatic unity. In the period up to and even during the revolution, such an organisation would necessarily be formed around a minority (a “vanguard” if you like) of the proletariat.

It also seems to us that the text’s commitment to the idea of a mass party results in a regression to social democratic ideas about the relationship between the party and the councils, or at least to a very ambiguous position about the taking of power by the party. The text makes several references to the party taking power, to the idea that “council rule is still essentially party rule”. Although the danger of substitutionism is recognised, the text appears to see the main remedy to this in the fact that the party “shares power with the entire revolutionary movement as well as other revolutionary tendencies it may be in alliance with”.

For us, this vision does not escape the parliamentary vision of council rule which hamstrung the movement in 1917. We certainly agree with the text that the aim of the party is to fight for its programme1 within the councils, which will be a battle-ground between political standpoints that, in the final analysis, represent different class interests, or encapsulate the confusions which will still weigh heavily on the proletariat during the revolution. But the party’s role is not to take power or to confuse its own functioning with the actual organs of power, the councils. Would you not agree that a central lesson of the Russian revolution was that the identification of the Bolshevik party with the state, and its tendency to substitute its decisions for those of the councils, led to the degeneration not only of the Soviet power but of the party itself? We think that clarity on this question is now a key point in the platform of the revolutionary organisation, and thus eventually of the party itself. We refer you to a polemic we had with the Communist Workers’ Organisation [141] on this question in the 1970s and would be interested in your response.

Turning to the text’s conception of the kind of organisation that needs to be built today to prepare the ground for the party: since we don’t see the party as a mass party, but as a minority organised around a clear programme, we think that the organisations which can serve as a bridge to the future party also need to have a high level of political and theoretical coherence, based around an agreed platform that is more than just a series of minimum points. This does not mean that such organisations, any more than the future party, can be monolithic; on the contrary, a living marxist organisation is one that engages in permanent debate both internally and with other tendencies in the proletarian movement. But we do think that such organisations are more than just discussion circles and need to be imbued with what Lenin called the ‘party spirit’ even if they are not the party. Furthermore, they need to be built from the start on an international scale because the future party is not (as was conceived in the past, even in the Third International to some extent) a federation of national sections but a single worldwide organisation. The experience of organising in this manner will be essential to the functioning of the future party.

This view of the present organisations as a bridge to the future party is strongly influenced by the concept of the Fraction as developed by the Italian left in the 1930s. The notion of the Fraction is, first of all, founded on the conviction that revolutionary organisations don’t come from nowhere but are part of a tradition in the workers’ movement, a tradition without which they would not exist and which needs to be assimilated in depth; at the same time, this must always be a critical assimilation based on new lessons drawn from the experience of the proletarian struggle and the practice of the revolutionary organisations of the past. The aim of this work is to prepare the programmatic and organisational principles which will be the basis for the new party. We think that a weakness of the text on the party is precisely that, except for a few lines at the end, it does not situate itself sufficiently in relation to the experience of the past and, most crucially, to attempts by previous generations and organisations of revolutionaries to address the same question as those posed in the text: how do revolutionaries today organise in order to prepare the terrain for the party of the future?

We have recently republished what we think is an important text on the party produced in 1948 [142] by a group that was heir to the tradition of the Italian left: the Gauche Communiste de France. Again, we would be very interested in your views on this text, and of course to the comments and criticisms contained in this letter. We sincerely hope that this letter can be the basis for a fruitful discussion between us – one that will clarify issues not only between our organisations, but also for the proletarian political movement in general.

Communist greetings

Alf

For the ICC

1 Regarding the question of the programme of the party, the comments by various posters at the end of the article indicate that some confusion has been caused by the idea in the text that measures like the destruction of the bourgeois state and the creation of a new proletarian power are part of a “minimum programme”. Surely the latter term evokes memories of the old social democratic parties with their programme of demands to be implemented within capitalist society? However we don’t think the issue of terminology is the most crucial one here: the real question is the content of the measures (which seem to us to be correct) and the fact that they would indeed be part of a programme that the party defends inside the assemblies and councils.

Despite it being anticipated in all the preceding polls, there were still many expressions of ‘surprise’ at the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party. Previous leaders Kinnock, Blair and Brown had all warned that the election of Corbyn would mean that Labour would lose the 2020 general election and could be out of power for a generation. After Corbyn’s speech to the Labour Party Conference he was accused of only speaking to the ‘activists’ and it was widely claimed that, under his leadership, Labour would only be a party of protest.

The elevation of Corbyn was not an accident, but it can only be understood in terms of the overall political needs of British capitalism.

The myth of anti-austerity

In the General Election in May the distinction between the varieties of austerity on offer from the major parties was even less clear than usual. Against the policies undertaken by the Conservative/LibDem Coalition, Labour offered little more than ‘Austerity Lite’. After the election Labour in parliament proceeded to support new cuts in welfare introduced by the new Tory government. It was against this background that Corbyn stood as an opponent of austerity who puts forward fairness and equality, along with growth and state intervention, as an alternative to the brutality of a government that favours the few, not the many.

Comparisons were justifiably made with the Greek populist government of Syriza. Syriza also advertises itself as being against austerity, although it should be recalled that, after winning a clear majority against the bailout conditions proposed by the ‘troika’, Syriza then accepted an even more stringent programme of austerity than had been agreed by previous governments of right and left. However, the idea that Corbyn’s emergence expresses a similar rejection of austerity as that trumpeted by Syriza, and by Podemos in Spain, remains popular. It is tied up with the notion that austerity is a political choice, and not something imposed on all capitalist governments by the reality of the capitalist economic crisis.

While state capitalism is at the heart of the governing regime of every country in the modern world, Corbyn and the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell have made explicit their commitment to the strengthening of the role of the capitalist state in all aspects of economic and social life in the UK. Plans for state investment, for ‘peoples’ quantitative easing’, for the nationalisation of banks, the re-nationalisation of the railways, and  similar policies, show that the domination of capital in Britain is safe in their hands. It’s true that the shadow energy minister has said that Labour “don’t want to nationalise energy. We want to do something far more radical. We want to democratise it.” But this apparently means that “There should be nothing to stop every community in this country owning its own clean energy power station” - which still seems to be a populist green variation on the same basic theme.

To prove that they are not ‘deficit deniers’, the new Corbyn leadership has signed up to Chancellor George Osborne’s fiscal charter and insists that Britain must ‘live within its means’. Corbyn and McDonnell have also appointed an economic advisory panel including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, fashionable author Thomas Piketty, and former Bank of England monetary policy committee member Danny Blanchflower, to provide ideas for the reforming of the role of the capitalist state. This can only mean minor modifications in an economic system that is based on the exploitation of the labour power of the working class.

At the level of British imperialism Corbyn has been much criticised for saying that, if he were to be Prime Minister, he would not use nuclear weapons. This should be put into context. In his speech to the Labour Conference he did say that “Britain does need strong, modern military and security forces” and that “British values … are the fundamental reason why I love this country and its people.” There can be no challenging his patriotism. His support for “the authority of international law and international institutions” demonstrates a support for the imperialist set-up that is the basis for international relations. As for nuclear weapons, his favourable words towards the policies of US President Obama reveal no antagonism towards the Commander in Chief in charge of the greatest nuclear force on the planet.

However, opposition to nuclear weapons is, at root, as important a part of Corbyn’s appeal as the ‘opposition to austerity’. All the attacks on the new Labour leader from mainstream media, saying how ‘dangerous’ his policies are, only go to boost his radical image. This is reinforced by the claims of the left. At the Labour Conference Matt Wrack, the leader of the Fire Brigades Union, said that  Corbyn and McDonnell “represent a serious challenge to the establishment, in reality to the British ruling class” and that “MI5, Special Branch and the CIA are all watching this conference, and watching what is going on in the shadow cabinet, with the aim of undermining it.” Socialist Worker (15/9/15) agreed that “Corbyn faces opposition from the vast majority of his fellow MPs as well as from the ruling class and the majority of the media. They will do anything to bring him down.” Left and right agree that Corbyn is a threat to the status quo. And many people have been attracted to the Labour party, or persuaded to return to it, because of illusions that somehow Corbyn is a refreshing change or represents a return to socialist basics, rather than being a typical conformist product of the Labour Party machine.

In reality a Corbyn-led Labour Party will perform a useful function as part of capitalism’s political apparatus. In the face of deepening cuts in services and other attacks on living standards, the ruling class is aware that there is the possibility of discontent from those who are most affected. This does not need to be on the scale of widespread unrest for it to be a concern for the bourgeoisie. Labour will be able to present itself as a radical alternative for those who are the victims of a continuing programme of austerity and impoverishment. At this stage the existence of a ‘party of protest’ (which doesn’t challenge the fundamentals of the capitalist system, only points to its impact on ‘the many’) will serve British capitalism well.

Labour’s long history as a pillar of capitalism

Over the last hundred years the Labour Party has shown itself to be an essential part of capitalism’s superstructure, both in government and opposition.

In 1914, alongside social democratic parties across Europe, Labour, along with the unions, came to the aid of British imperialism, acting as a recruiter for the bloodbath of the First World War and standing against workers’ actions that would undermine the war effort. In the face of mutinies and the unrest that followed the war Labour acted as a pole of responsibility; and in 1918 it adopted a constitution with the explicit commitment to nationalisation and other state capitalist measures that had already characterised the management of social life during wartime. Against the aspirations of those who had been inspired by the revolution in Russia it offered stability, state control and opposition to social upheaval.

Throughout the inter-war period Labour offered ‘socialist planning’ against the anarchy of capitalist competition. In the 1930s, alongside Conservative mavericks like Winston Churchill, it stood against the policy of appeasement and for preparation for a war against German imperialism. During the Second World War Labour was a key constituent of the war-time Coalition which meant it slipped naturally into government in 1945.

The government of Clement Attlee from 1945-51 is often presented as a golden age for the Labour Party. In practice it presided over a period of great austerity, where troops and states of emergency were used against striking workers, when the role of the state was reinforced in many areas of economic and social life, when British imperialism continued to deploy its military forces and tried to develop nuclear weapons, and when Britain was a loyal lieutenant in the American-dominated imperialist bloc.

The subsequent Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan were able to replace Conservative administrations at key points in history. The 1974 Labour government was brought in against a wave of struggles, promoting illusions that it would be different to its predecessors. In fact, in the 1970s, Labour and the unions held down wages with the imposition of their Social Contract. Under Callaghan began the monetarist policies, the programme of cuts in public spending, that were later taken up by Margaret Thatcher. The strikes and demonstrations of the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978-79 were against a Labour, not a Conservative government.

In the 1980s Labour in opposition made ‘radical’ critiques of Thatcherism, providing a so-called ‘alternative’ at a time when workers were embarking on waves of massive struggles. Subsequently, the governments of Blair and Brown played their part in the management of the capitalist economy; at the level of international relations the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were further evidence of Labour’s commitment to the militarist core of imperialist conflict.

This is the history of the Labour Party’s defence of British values over the last century, as a party of government and as a party in opposition. In the period to come, when attacks on the working class could lead to a questioning of the very basis of society, and not just the policies of particular governments, Corbyn’s Labour Party will prove a valuable weapon for the bourgeoisie in Britain.

Car 3/10/15

Our comrade Bernadette died on Wednesday 7 October, after a long and painful illness: lung cancer. Bernadette was born on 25 November 1949 in the south west of France. Her father was a skilled worker in an engineering factory and her mother didn’t have a paid job because she had to look after her 8 children. In other words, this was a family of modest means, an authentically working class family. Bernadette thus had a direct experience of the reality of the workers’ condition from a very early age. Also from a very early age she was animated by an ardent intellectual passion, a desire to understand the world and society. She was drawn to literature and loved reading in general. After graduating from the lycée, she entered the University of Toulouse and obtained a master’s degree in linguistics and literature. She then got a job as an office worker in the ministry of national education.

She was still a student when by chance she met a militant of the ICC, in the mid 70s. This comrade, seeing what concerned Bernadette, told her to read the Communist Manifesto. For her this was a kind of revelation: for the first time she found a clear and coherent response to the questions she was asking. “That’s it, that’s exactly it” is how, 40 years later, she described the way she felt when reading this text. Reading the texts of the ICC, which she then wanted to acquaint herself with, made a similar impression on her.

She decided very quickly that the ICC - unlike other groups who called themselves revolutionary and even communist, like the Maoists and Trotskyists whom she also encountered – was a true heir of the marxist tradition, and once she made the commitment to fight inside its ranks, she never deviated from her conviction that revolutionary militancy, dedicating oneself to the construction of the revolutionary organisation and of the ICC in particular, was an absolutely essential factor in the liberation of the working class. Bernadette was present as a member at our second international congress.

Bernadette contributed to the life of the ICC at many levels. She had a sharp perception of the international situation, the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, and the advances and retreats of the class struggle, and her ability to write about them, and her mastery of the French language, led her to work on the publications commission for the French section. She was also accomplished in explaining our ideas at the most basic level, “on the streets”, but also to people she met in various circumstances, such as the ambulance drivers who, each week, took her to hospital for her chemotherapy sessions, and who told us “Bernadette doesn’t have an easy character, but it’s extraordinarily interesting to discuss with her”. At demonstrations, she amazed comrades selling alongside her by the number of publications she managed to sell, since she always found the words and the tone needed to convince demonstrators that it was worthwhile reading our press.

But her greatest strength was undeniably her grasp of the organisational principles of the ICC, and in particular of the need to to defend our organisation from all the attacks and slanders aimed at it. Bernadette was always convinced that the revolutionary organisation is a foreign body within capitalism. This was why she was intransigent when it came to respecting the statutes of the organisation and in particular to the question of security.

Bernadette was one of the comrades of the old generation who was most open to the political heritage of comrade MC, our living link to the communist fractions of the past. Although perfectly capable of posing her questions and disagreements with MC, she had no interest in the petty bourgeois ideology of contesting the “older generation”, which was a particular weakness of the student movement that came out of May 68. What she took from him was an awareness of the central importance of the organisational question as a political question in its own right, and of the necessity for adherence to rigorous principles – to a proletarian morality in fact – in the relations that had to be built up between militants and the organisation and between the militants themselves.

Bernadette militated in several sections of the ICC: Toulouse, Paris, Marseille, London, as well as working closely for a while with the Swiss section. But she always saw herself first and foremost as a militant of the ICC, and comrades in Switzerland and London can testify to her ability to chase out the dust of localism by opening a window on the ICC as an international organisation.

Like all human beings and all militants, Bernadette of course had her faults which could exasperate some comrades, especially when her critical faculties seemed to get out of control and function like a machine gun firing in all directions, an expression of her fiery and passionate character. But her faults were also her qualities: her stubbornness, the iron determination which led one of the doctors caring for her to describe her as a “force of nature”, also made her extremely tenacious in her fight against the cancer which finally claimed her life. In the past two years, Bernadette amazed the medical staff by staying alive far longer than they had thought possible, and with all her awareness, her capacity for reflection and her will to understand. She was fighting her illness not only to continue her militant struggle but also to benefit from the greatest gift offered to her by her son: her little grand-daughter. The birth of her grand-daughter, the latter’s attachment to her grandmother and her joie de vivre was an enormous help to Bernadette in putting up with the pains of her illness.

Bernadette never saw her militancy as something narrowly political in the “common sense” use of the term. Instead, she brought to other areas of her life the same passion and commitment. She took on the name “Flora” as her nom de guerre in the ICC, reflecting her love for flowers and also because she was a great admirer of the books of Flora Tristan. She had an artist’s sensibility: she loved painting, literature, poetry. She was equally devoted to the art of cooking which she loved to share with the comrades of the ICC and her personal friends, who she always welcomed with warmth and generosity. She had a natural eye for beauty, which was reflected in the way she organised and embellished the space she lived in and in the gifts she chose for her family, friends and comrades.

Throughout her illness, Bernadette sustained her love of reading, and this in turn helped her to cope with the pain of cancer and the very taxing treatments she went through. Up to the end of her life, she continued to read the classics of the workers’ movement, Marx and Rosa Luxemburg in particular, and tried for as long as possible to assimilate the texts and contributions generated by the ICC’s internal debates, taking position on them, even if briefly, when her strength allowed.

Bernadette had a very deep sense of solidarity. Even though she suffered so much from the cancer and knew that there was no cure, she continued to be concerned for the health of all the comrades, offering them advice, urging them to be tested and not to neglect their health. So it was only fitting that comrades from all sections of the ICC should mobilise to express their solidarity throughout her illness, writing to her, visiting her, giving all the support she needed to leave life as serenely as possible.

Bernadette was not afraid of her own death, even if she loved life with a passion. She knew that every human being is a link in the long chain of humanity and that those who remain will continue the combat. She gave clear directives to the doctors caring for her: she wanted to die in physical, intellectual and moral dignity and refused any relentless therapy aimed at merely keeping her alive. She wanted to end her days peacefully, surrounded by her comrades in the struggle, and by the affection showed her by her son and grand-daughter. Her wishes were respected. Bernadette left us in full consciousness, Three weeks before her death, she forced herself to read the newspapers and follow the international situation. It’s because she felt in her bones all the sufferings of the proletariat that she said to the doctor looking after her at the end of her life: “it’s necessary to end my pain and it’s necessary to end the barbarism of capitalism”.

Until the end, Bernadette demonstrated an exemplary courage, militancy and lucidity. She really was a force of nature. And this force she drew from the depth of her militant conviction, her devotion to the cause of the proletariat and her unshakeable loyalty to the ICC. To her son and granddaughter, to her niece and all her family, the ICC sends all its sympathy and solidarity.

ICC 15.10.15

A deliberate attempt to kill as many as possible. A carnage. On Friday 13 November the streets of Paris and its suburbs were turned into a macabre theatre of bloody and barbaric acts carried out by a handful of terrorists, armed with Kalashnikovs and suicide vests. Their target? All those “prostituted” by the “western way of life”1, and young people in particular2.

On 11 January, by executing the cartoonists from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Daesh wanted the kill the ‘dads’3 of a libertarian tendency marked by the social movement of May 1968. This time, by attacking places of festivity and entertainment (Stade de France in Saint-Denis, the bistrots and restaurants of the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris, the Bataclan concert hall4, Daesh deliberately targeted young people who had committed the crime of liking to get together, to discuss, to have a drink, to dance and sing, in other words, who liked being alive (which the bourgeoisie, profiting from the emotional atmosphere and the media brainwashing, tries to identify with patriotism!). This is the same generation which had dreamed of reigniting the torch of May 68 during the social movement in France in 20065 and which in January had quite rightly expressed its solidarity with the murdered Charlie Hebdo artists by coming out in massive demonstrations6.

These new crimes, coldly planned, motivated by an obscurantist and morbid ideology worthy of Nazism, are not the fruit of a few “monsters” who simply need to be eradicated7. That is the way the bourgeoisie presents things. It’s an argument that serves only to justify war and engender even more hatred and crimes. At the root of these evils lies the whole capitalist system, a system with no future, no perspective, which is decomposing bit by bit and is dragging the whole of humanity into its murderous descent.

Islamic State, a product of imperialism

Daesh is a particularly revealing manifestation of the suicidal dynamic of capitalism. It is a pure product of decadence, a direct secretion of its final phase of decomposition.

In this framework, the aggravation and multiplication of imperialist conflicts, the accelerating break-up of social bonds, are rooted in a society which has no historical perspective. Neither of the two fundamentally antagonistic classes in society, bourgeoisie and proletariat, have been able to impose their historical project, world war on the one hand, communist revolution on the other. Since the mid-80s, the whole of society has been trapped in the immediate, looking increasingly devoid of any future and little by little rotting on its feet8. The collapse of the USSR in 1991, a product of the dynamic of this last stage in the decline of capitalism, exacerbated all of capitalism’s contradictions. The expressions of this phase are multiple: individualism and every man for himself, gangsterism, a retreat into different kinds of identity, obscurantism, nihilism, and above all the accentuation of the chaos of war. To the point where the weakest states have been destabilised and pushed to the edge of collapse, while military conflicts ravage whole regions of the planet. In this process the main imperialist powers bear a central responsibility, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. A glance at the history of the conflicts in these regions in recent decades illustrates this reality very well. Over this period, the USA has found it harder and harder to impose itself as the world’s cop. It may seem paradoxical, but the existence of the Russian enemy forced all its adversaries to seek protection behind the USA. The nations of the western bloc were obliged to accept Uncle Sam’s bloc discipline. As soon as the USSR fell, the western bloc also broke up and all its components started playing their own imperialist cards. The USA tried more and more to impose its leadership by force. This was the meaning of the huge military display of the 1990 Gulf war, a moment in which the American bourgeoisie managed to oblige all its allies to rally behind it. But the situation for the USA continued to deteriorate, and they were increasingly isolated when it came to the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and the result of these adventures was to completely destabilise both countries. We foresaw this dynamic in 1990:

“The war in the Gulf shows that, faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”9.

Thus, the American intervention in Iraq in 2003, quite apart from the 500,000 deaths it caused, brought down the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein10 without being capable of replacing it with a stable state. On the contrary, the exclusion from power of the Sunni faction and its replacement by a Shia faction has created a permanent state of chaos. It’s on the basis of these ruins, of this void left by the failure of the Iraqi state, that Daesh was born. It goes back to 2006, when al-Qaida, together with five other jihadi groups, formed a “consultative Council of the Muhajadeen in Iraq”. And on 13 October 2006, the Consultative Council proclaimed the “Islamic state of Iraq”, which considered itself to be a real state. Many ex-Saddam generals, militarily competent and haunted by the spirit of revenge against the west, joined the ranks of what was to become Daesh. The destabilisation of Syria then provided the opportunity for Islamic State to develop further. In 2012 it began to spread to Syria and on 9 April 2013 it became “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”.

Each new imperialist conflict, in which the great powers all played a crucial role, would provide Daesh with the occasion to widen its grip, growing on the fertile ground of hatred and revenge. Several jihadi groups have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, such as Boko Haram in the northwest of Nigeria, Ansar Shuras Shabab al-Islam in Libya, Jund al-Khalifa in Algeria and Anar Dawlat al-Islammiya in Yemen. Undeniably, Islamic State has been fed by imperialist war. This is a phenomenon which has grown and extended since the mid-80s: under the weight both of internal economic and political contradictions and of the effects of imperialist war, the weaker states are tending to collapse. In the east in the 1990s, particularly in the Balkans, this took the form of a splintering of nations and of bloody conflicts, such as the explosion of Yugoslavia. From Caucasia (Chechnya) to central Asia (Afghanistan) or Africa (ex-Zaire, the Horn of Africa etc), state instability gave way to the appearance of parallel and uncontrollable proto-states, directed by war lords. Daesh is a new expression of this gangrene, but on a much bigger geographical scale than before.

But let's get back to the responsibility of the great powers, who don’t stop at merely destabilising whole regions for their strategic and military interests. They are also directly involved in the creation of these murderous obscurantist cliques and have tried to make them their instruments. Islamic State is made up of the most 'radical' Sunni factions and their main enemy is thus the great country of Shia Islam: Iran. This is why all the enemies of Iran (Saudi Arabia, the USA11, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait...) have at some point all supported Daesh financially and sometimes militarily. Turkey has also supported Islamic State with the idea of using it against the Kurds. This circumstantial and heterogeneous alliance shows that religious differences are not the real ferment behind this conflict: it is indeed imperialist interests, national capitalist interests which above all determine the lines of scission and transform the wounds of the past into today's hatreds.

But in any case, all of them have had to think again. Saudi Arabia has now forbidden any financial aid to Daesh and jailed all those who continued to act as its advocates; the USA has officially initiated a certain rapprochement with Iran in order to fight against Daesh. Why this turnaround? The answer says a lot about the putrefaction of the capitalist system. The religious obscurantism and above all the destructiveness of Daesh are such that the group has escaped anyone’s control. Such states with no future and dominated by Sharia law have already existed, in central Africa for example, but they have always been limited to a particular region. The Daesh phenomenon is affecting a much wider area, and above all the highly geostrategic region of the Middle East12.

The incessant changes of alliances, this short term outlook, this increasingly destructive approach, like the existence of the Islamic proto-state itself, reveal the dead end that capitalism has reached, the absence of any lasting solution or perspective for all nations.

Here again the compass of marxism enabled us to understand, in 1990, that the whole social order had reached this impasse: quote.

“In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of "every man for himself" will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”13.

The latest turn around: France, through its rapprochement with Russia, is ready to support Bashir el-Assad (officially responsible for 200,000 deaths since the beginning of the civil war!) against Daesh even though since 2011 it has been putting all its diplomatic weight behind the “Syrian opposition”. Putin, with all his shameful crimes in Chechnya then in Ukraine, has become someone you can do business with again.

By waging all these wars, by sowing death and desolation, by imposing terror with their bombing raids and stirring up hatred in the name of 'self-defence”, by supporting this or that killer regime, by offering no other solution than more and more confrontations, and all this to defend their sordid imperialist interests, the great powers have the greatest responsibility for the accentuation of global barbarism, including the barbarism of Daesh. This so-called Islamic state, with its holy trinity of rape, robbery and repression, which destroys all culture (the same hatred of culture as the Nazi regime14), which sells women and children, sometimes for their organs – this is no more than a particularly blatant and 'honest' expression of the capitalist barbarity which all states, all nations, are capable of committing. “Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it in reality. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form”15.

A new step in the decomposition of capitalism

It is thus first and foremost the great powers who are unleashing their own barbarism on the planet and above all in the weakest capitalist nations. And now his barbarism is escaping their control and is hitting the heart of the system like a boomerang. This is the real significance of the November 13 attacks in Paris. They are not just one more terrorist act: they show that there is a new step in the exacerbation of imperialist tensions and in the decay of capitalist society. In effect, while such actions regularly decimate the populations of Africa and the Middle East16, the fact that they are reaching the heartlands of capitalism is particularly significant. At the time of the bombings that hit Paris in 1985 and 1986, we wrote:

“What the current wave of terrorist attacks shows is that this decomposition of capitalist society has reached such a level that the great powers are less and less shielded from its most barbaric manifestations, that they are finding it harder and harder to contain to the Third world these extreme forms of the convulsions of a dying system. Just as in an initial period the capitalist metropolitan centres were able to push the most catastrophic effects of a crisis whose origins lie at the very heart of the system, so they pushed to the peripheral countries the most barbaric forms of the convulsions this crisis engenders, above all armed conflicts. But today just as the crisis is hitting with renewed force the central countries of capitalism, so it also brings back with it some of the barbarism which has been unleashed in the Third World”17

With the November 13 attacks, this process which opened up in the mid-80s, and above all since the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, has got wider and wider. But it has just reached a qualitative new level even in comparison to the outrages in Madrid (2004), London (2005) or Boston (2013). At the time of writing, the number of dead stands at 130 and the number of wounded at 351, 98 of them very serious. This frightful hecatomb is one of the worst in the centre of Europe since the Second World War, even though it would have been much bigger if the attempt to bomb the Stade de France hadn’t failed18. But the real difference isn’t just at the quantitative level – the Madrid bombings also killed many people (200 dead, 14 wounded). But his time, it wasn’t a brief, isolated act: Islamic State succeeded in multiplying the number of places attacked and prolonged the slaughter for three hours in the middle of Paris. Thus, in western Europe, for a whole evening, people experienced the war atmosphere which the population of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria live through on a daily basis (and which so many of them are trying to flee from).The “meticulously”19 prepared scenario engendered a real wave of shock and panic. The direct transmission of the events, of these images of urban warfare, by all the world’s television services, the uncertainty about the number of victims, the number of attacks and of terrorists involved…all this created an unbearable climate of terror. Millions of powerless spectators remained glued to their screens and then were unable to sleep during the night.

Islamic State has managed to prove that a great economic and military power like France is incapable of preventing such actions; even though it had every reason to expect such attacks it couldn’t stop the killing.

Worse still, Daesh was able to use men and women born and living in France and Belgium, capable of committing the worst crimes in the name of a morbid, sickening ideology. In other words, it is above all the decomposition of society at the very heart of capitalism which has given rise to such an atrocity.

Many of those who saw the terrorists at close hand and lived to tell the tale, expressed their astonishment at the banal appearance of the killers: young people between 20 and 30 trembling with fear and sweating profusely20, justifying their murderous actions with the pretext of “avenging the crimes committed by the French army in Syria”. These monstrous acts were not carried out by monsters but by human beings who have been totally ground down and indoctrinated. The majority of these terrorists were born and grew up in “civilised” Europe. Many of the European jihadis now in Syria have come from the petty bourgeoisie which, in the absence of any perspective, jealous of the model up set by the big bourgeoisie, and above all foreign to any project of an alternative society, is deeply infected by nihilism. It’s this same layer of society which in the 1930s and 40s formed a large part of the shock troops of Nazism.

Another considerable part of the army of Daesh has come out of the poor suburbs, street kids with a chaotic history, humiliated by a system which has refused them entry to most forms of economic activity, as well as any social and cultural life. Here again, the wish for revenge on the one hand and nihilism on the other are probably the main driving forces behind their journey. Through these cowardly, shameful and absurd massacres, these elements finally have a sense of their own existence. It matters little to them whether they die as long as they have the idea that they are getting back at the system which has excluded hem. A final part, especially among the kamikaze elements, has been directly recruited from petty criminals. They are often people who have already carried out robberies or acts of aggression and who find themselves a few years later with a Kalashnikov in their hands, now killing with a pseudo-religious pretext.

In sum, in Europe and the Middle East, as in the rest of the world, the absence of any perspective for society, and its consequences – social putrefaction, gangsterism, the development of a lumpenised morality - supply the soil for this toxic growth. The encounter between these young people who have been born in Europe and the Syrian and Iraqi obscurantist gangs who have a real military savoir-faire is not at all an accident.

The great powers use the deaths caused by terrorism to justify war

To summarise: imperialism and decomposition are the two parents who, by getting together, have given birth to today’s terrorism. War, no-future, fear and hatred, moral collapse, terrorism… then war again. It’s an endless vicious circle. Capitalism will drag the whole of humanity towards ruin if it’s not destroyed and replaced with another society.

But what was the reaction of all the grand nations on the very night of the attacks of 13 November? The words of the Socialist prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, pronounced the day after on the biggest TV channel, gives us the tone of it: “there must be a will to annihilate Daesh”; this is a war which “could take months and maybe years”, and which will call for “exceptional measures”, adding “I will do this so that national unity will be preserved”, and finishing by a call to arms: “let’s be patriots in order to crush terrorism”. And all the national newspapers joined the chorus: “Now it’s war!”, “France is under attack!” This patriotic campaign has been relayed on an international scale, orchestrated around the Red, White and Blue and the Marseillaise. All over the world, on all the monuments, on all social networks, in sports stadiums,, the French flag has been displayed; the words of the Marseillaise were published in all the English newspapers so that the public could join in the singing at the England-France game at Wembley on 18 November. There is obviously no real solidarity from the other great powers towards France – all of them are engaged in pitiless competition, economically and sometimes militarily. No, each national bourgeoisie has simply used the 130 deaths in Paris, and the fear they have created, to put across the putrid idea that national unity is the highest and most beautiful possible unity, allowing us to “live together” and to protect ourselves from the “outside”. In reality, national flags are always flags of war! The national flag is the symbol of an ideology which pulls together the different classes of the nation against other nations. Fundamentally, it’s the same ideology as the ideology of Islamic State. And in France today it’s the Socialist party in power which is spearheading this warlike spirit. Result: French military HQ has already carried out reprisals against the outrages, dropping dozens of bombs in a few days and dispatching its aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle in order to treble the strike capacity of the French army in Syria. These attacks can be added to the 4111 targets hit by the Russian army in the last few weeks. Although every day the press relates the “collateral” victim of these massive bombings21, it is impossible to access the real figures. This is true of every war waged by the great democratic nations who intervene in the name of peace, humanitarian, safeguarding the people, etc. And each time, the human balance sheets published some years later are really terrifying. According to a very serious report: Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 years of the ‘War on Terror’22 the war launched by the US after the attacks of 9/11 2001 had in 12 years caused the deaths of at least 1.3 million people in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), with the report making it clear that this was a “low estimate” which didn’t take into account other conflicts (Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria). It’s Iraq that has paid the heaviest price for the war on terror, with around a million deaths, contrary to the 11,000 claimed by the US media and the 30,000 by ex-President George W Bush. The report speaks of a “crime against humanity close to genocide”. This is the real face of imperialist war. This is the real meaning of so-called “surgical” strikes!

The current air strikes in Syria will perhaps do damage to Daesh, which will make it even more desperate and suicidal, but above all they will sow fear and hatred throughout the region. The phenomena which gave rise to Daesh will in the end be strengthened. The “response” of the big powers to terrorism is part of the escalation of barbarism, part of the spiral of irrational violence.

Exacerbating hatred and reinforcing repression

Drawing the lessons from the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo on 7 January, when the bourgeoisie, surprised by the spontaneous demonstrations, was obliged to rapidly leap onto the train and take charge, the French state this time prevented the same spontaneous impetus towards solidarity, which might favour reflection and discussion and contains the possibility that people might see “the street” as a political force. On the contrary, everyone was urged to stay at home and identify with “la patrie”, to accept the logic of war. The idea of national service and a “national guard” is resurfacing. The Socialist party in France has taken advantage of the situation to step up its arsenal of surveillance and repression. The state of emergency was prolonged by three months for the first time since the war in Algeria (in 1958 and 1961) and it applies to the whole mainland and the overseas departments as well (Gaudeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, la Réunion and Mayotte). This state of emergency is a special situation, based on exceptional measures which restrain “freedoms”. It “confers on the civil authorities, in the zones it applies to, exceptional police powers”23, such as the possibility of carrying out raids without a warrant. It’s all about getting the population used to the drastic reinforcement of repression which, as the bourgeoisie knows perfectly well, it will have to use against the working class in the future. A whole array of new laws to tighten “national security” is under discussion, and the same campaign about security is being carried out across the world.

The state thus profits from terrorism, presenting itself as the guarantor of peace in order to wage war; as the protector of human rights to strengthen the control of the population; and as the guardian of social unity in order to exacerbate hatred. Hatred of foreigners, hatred of Muslims, and all the other divisions which allow the capitalist order to rule over the exploited, are being stoked up daily. Actions against immigrants are multiplying, as in Germany, where refugee camps have been set on fire. In France, the discourse of the Front National and right wing politicians like Nadine Morano play on the same reactions as Islamic State: fear, exclusion, the hatred of the other.

One perspective for humanity: class struggle against capitalism!

In such a social context, the few expressions of real solidarity appear heroic. Despite the risks and the danger, people immediately came to help the wounded. In the neighbourhoods under attack, residents didn’t hesitate to open their doors to give refuge to people panicking in the streets. Almost everywhere, a momentary tendency to come together in solidarity and indignation was quickly smothered. All this shows that the indifference and ignorance of the person next to you, which in normal times prevails in capitalist society, can be overcome when there is a conscious wish to express solidarity, to help people facing real danger. We’ve seen this in the last few months when a significant part of the working class welcomed the refugees, especially when they first arrived in Germany. But the present situation also shows that this fragile impetus, given the serious weaknesses of the working class today, can easily be derailed onto the false ground of patriotism and nationalism, behind which lies the murderous and in the end xenophobic logic of the most democratic states. The climate of fear and terror, along with the propaganda barrage after the Paris attacks, will weigh heavily on the consciousness of the working class: the call for national unity behind the nation and the state in danger can only reinforce the influence of deadly illusions about defending democracy and strengthening security, and this on an international scale. And this will make it even harder for a real perspective to emerge, further strengthening the suicidal tendencies of this rotting system.

Real working class solidarity can only be expressed in an independent manner, outside the influence of all forms of bourgeois ideology, and above all during workers’ struggles. The generation which was the prime target of the 13 November attacks was, in the social movement of 2006, able to generate a great wave of solidarity throughout the working class. And when young people from the poor suburbs came to rob people taking part in the demonstrations, this generation of students and precariously employed workers refused to fall into the trap of division. They sent delegations to these neighbourhoods to try to win people to the general struggle. If they had the understanding to do this, it was because the social movement had been able to organise itself through general assemblies which allowed for reflection, discussion and collective elaboration, in other words, the raising of political consciousness. This is the only way to go forward in the face of the worst effects of decomposition: solidarity in the struggle, open and frank debate, the development of class consciousness. In the end, only this logic, contained in massive struggles of the working class, can permit the emergence of a political class identity, the development of the historical perspective of a new society. This is the perspective of a world without classes, without wars and frontiers, a human community based on the satisfaction of human need and not the needs of profit.

“The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers….finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labour’s old and mighty battle cry: Proletarians of all lands, unite!”24

ICC, 21.11.15

In January 2015, the members of the ICC’s section in Turkey announced their resignation from our organisation: their explanation of their departure was published a couple of months later under the name of a new group calling itself "Pale Blue Jadal", with the heading "On our departure from the International Communist Current [151]". Our aim in the article that follows is to address what, in our view, are the main issues posed by the departure of these ex-comrades.

The editorial to the first issue of our International Review, published in 1975, lays out clearly the goal that the fledgling ICC set itself: “In this period of general crisis, pregnant with convulsions and social upheavals, one of the most urgent and arduous tasks facing revolutionaries is that of welding together the meagre revolutionary forces that are currently dispersed throughout the world. This task can only be undertaken by beginning straight away on an international level. This has always been a central preoccupation of our current”. For such an organisation, to lose one militant is a misfortune. To lose an entire section is a failure. We therefore owe it to ourselves, to all those who identify with the tradition of the Communist Left, and to the working class in general, to examine this failure in a ruthlessly critical spirit, and to lay our conclusions before our readers.

This necessity is all the more pressing given the nature of the text written by our ex-comrades from Turkey, who we must now call “Pale Blue Jadal”. There are points in this text with which we can agree, and yet overall it is such a welter of half-truths, distortions, recriminations, and general confusion that it is only barely recognisable to those of us who lived through the events it attempts to describe, and must certainly be completely unintelligible to anyone outside the ICC. This will not, of course, prevent PBJ’s text from having a certain effect: the faint-hearted will find further cause to doubt, and our enemies (some of whom bear us a hatred that lies more in the domain of psychopathology than politics) will read in it what they have been longing to hear.

To answer every one of PBJ’s accusations, we would have to undertake something like Lenin’s dissection of the 1903 RSDLP Congress in One step forward, two steps back, but over a period of almost ten years: we would have to quote in detail from a mass of conference and congress minutes, not to mention correspondence and the minutes of meetings and conferences. This would take too long, it would try our readers’ patience, and moreover it would lay the internal workings of our organisation open to the public gaze, something which no revolutionary in his right mind would do today. We will therefore limit ourselves to stating our case as clearly as possible, and to correcting, in passing, some of PBJ’s more egregious errors and insinuations.

Organisational opportunism

Let us begin with one point where we agree with PBJ: that our integration of the EKS group as the ICC’s Turkish section was a process infested with opportunism. We do not propose here to go into the reasons for this: suffice it to say that we tried to force the pace of history, and this is a classic recipe for opportunism.

“Forcing the pace”, of course, was at our own small level; principally, it meant the decision to “fast-track” the discussions with the EKS group which was to become our section in Turkey. In particular we decided:

1. To drastically reduce the time spent on organisational discussion with the members of EKS before their integration, on the grounds that the art of building an organisation is learnt essentially from experience.

2. To integrate EKS as a group, not as individuals. Although our statutes provide for this, it holds the danger that the new militants will see themselves, not first and foremost as individual militants of an international organisation but as members of their original group.

With hindsight, our cavalier approach to the organisational question was both unpardonable and incredible. What was EKS, after all? As PBJ says, it was “just a collection of politicised circles of friends”, and moreover circles drawn from the politicised petty-bourgeois student milieu. In other words, it was precisely the kind of circle that Lenin had described in 1903. Given all our past experience, not to mention our awareness of the way our own failings derived from much of the ICC’s origins in the student movement of the 1960s-70s, how could we fail to see that one of the biggest questions facing us with the integration of the EKS group would be precisely that of passing on our own organisational experience? How could we lose sight of our own critique of the futility of hasty, opportunist integrations [152] as they have been practiced in the past by the TCI? As it is, our experience with the section in Turkey only serves as further confirmation – if any were necessary – that this critique is fundamentally correct and applies to ourselves just as much as it does to others.

The forthcoming article on our 21st Congress gives a general answer to these questions: "The Congress emphasised that the ICC has always been affected by its ‘youthful error’ of immediatism which has repeatedly caused us to lose sight of the the historical and long-term framework which is the setting for the organisation’s function". Such failings are all the more difficult to overcome inasmuch as they were present in the organisation from the outset.1 Concretely, this laid us open to an illusion particularly prevalent among some members of EKS, that our difficulty in getting across our positions among the newly politicised younger generation (especially in the relatively new medium of the Internet forum) was essentially a matter of presentation,2 and that we could therefore increase our influence by watering down our insistence on organisational principle (this is what PBJ calls “recognising that our traumas posed problems”). As a result, we lost sight of the historical, materialist, foundations of our organisational practice as embodied in our Statutes which can only be understood historically, as political principles,3 and as the result of both the past workers’ movement (Internationals and Fractions) and our own experience. We treated the Statutes as mere "rules of behaviour", and the "discussion" on the subject was rushed through in a day (contrast this with the months of correspondence and discussion with EKS on the positions embodied in the Platform). There was no discussion on the "Commentaries on the statutes" (a text which places our Statutes in the context of the historical experience of the workers’ movement and of the ICC itself) nor on the basic organisational texts. Nor did we insist that these texts be translated into Turkish.4

For all this, let us repeat, the ICC – not the members of EKS – bears the entire responsibility.5

But the result was that the Turkish section’s attitude to the Statutes was not that of militant marxists who seek to understand and put into practice the principles behind them – or if necessary to argue that they should be changed, with all the international debate within the organisation that this would imply: it was more the attitude of the pettifogging taproom lawyer whose only interest is to seize on the surface of words to his own advantage.6

"We had to leave"

This, in the end, is PBJ’s justification for their departure: "we had to leave". But what exactly is meant by this? After all, the Turkish members were not expelled, either collectively or individually, nor were any sanctions applied against them. Their "minority positions" were not suppressed – on the contrary, they were constantly being pressed to express their positions in writing so that these could be published and brought to the knowledge of the organisation as a whole.

If we try to extract the main points from PBJ’s text, the overall picture that emerges is something like the following:

• The ICC suffers from “a culture of agreement” which makes debate difficult. With this at least we can agree, up to a point.7 We will come back to the "culture of agreement" within the Turkish section itself.

• The "old" militants tried to impose a "unilateral transmission" of experience on the young.

• “The section was dissolved”.

• In short, therefore, “We had to leave”.

PBJ, to summarise, is the “critical left” of the ICC, better than that they are the “youth” who refuse to accept the “unilateral transmission”, the “dictatorship” of the old whose “traumas” “pose problems”.

Indeed, barely months before their resignation, the section confronted the organisation with a grandiloquent statement of position in which they declared that they were "the left" within the organisation. Let us take them at their word and consider for a moment what that means: what does it mean to be "the left" in the context of the ICC?

The ICC very consciously claims to derive its origins from the Communist Left, but more explicitly, as far as organisational questions are concerned, from the tradition of the Italian Communist Left. What did it mean to be a "left fraction" in the days of the Italian Left, the days of the Communist International’s degeneration? "The Left Fraction is formed as the proletarian party is degenerating under the influence of opportunism, in other words its penetration by bourgeois ideology. It is the responsibility of the minority, which upholds the revolutionary programme, to conduct an organised struggle for its victory within the party (…) It is the responsibility of the Left Fraction to continue the fight within the party as long as there remains any hope of redressing it: this is why, during the late 1920s and early '30s, the left currents did not leave the parties of the IC, but were excluded, often by means of sordid manoeuvres".8

1. The left, in short, fights for its organisation to the limit:

2. to convince, to win over the organisation as much as possible;

3. to save as many militants as can be saved;

4. for clarity about the reasons of the organisation’s decline, for themselves, for other militants, and for the future.

Finally, the Left does not run away at the first sign of disagreement and opposition. It does everything possible to stay in the organisation and defend its ideas – and is excluded. It does not play the rabbit in wolf’s clothing by running away.

The Italian Left Fraction was formed as a reaction against the degeneration of the Communist International towards the integration of its constituent parties into the political apparatus of the ruling class. Whatever our defects, this is not the situation for the ICC, nor indeed did the members of the Turkish section make any such claim. There was not, therefore, any reason to suppose that the various disagreements voiced by or in the section could justify the formation of a "fraction" in the ICC; on the contrary, we could hope that open discussion within the organisation would make it possible to clarify these disagreements, perhaps leading to a clearer position for the organisation as a whole.

Nonetheless, the underlying point remains valid. It is the responsibility of any minority within a revolutionary organisation, to defend its positions for as long as it is able to do, to try to the utmost to convince the rest of the organisation of their correctness. Nobody will pretend that this is easy – but it is the only way to build an organisation.

Why did the Turkish comrades so signally fail in this respect? We can point to two main factors:

• The first, we already highlighted in 2007, in a text on "The culture of debate",9 which posed the absolutely vital necessity for debate within the organisation, for its own internal health: “The second major impulse for the ICC to return to the question of a culture of debate was our own internal crisis at the beginning of the new century, characterised by the most malignant behaviour we had ever witnessed within our ranks (…) One of the conclusions we came to was that a tendency towards monolithism had played a major role in all the split-offs that we suffered. As soon as divergences appeared, certain members began to assert that they could no longer work with the others, that the ICC was becoming a Stalinist organisation or was in the process of degenerating. These crises broke out in relation to divergences which, for the most part, could be perfectly contained within a non-monolithic organisation, and in all cases should be discussed and clarified before any separation takes place”. The Turkish comrades fell victim to this same "monolithism of the minority".

• The second, is that a precondition for accepting the demand that the Left should fight to the limit rather than quit the organisation in haste, is the conviction that the organisation itself is a vital necessity. This is precisely the problem in the political milieu today, which has no experience of Party life (as it existed, for example, in the Bolshevik Party in Lenin’s day), no experience of revolutionary agitation by a Party with real, determining influence in the class struggle, and moreover is infested not just by the old councilist opposition to the Party but by a much broader, profound suspicion of any form of organised political activity beyond that of the circle, as such. In fact, PBJ does not really take organisation seriously. This is why PBJ is so shocked by "positions which developed in the organization that if the ICC somehow ceased to exist the party couldn’t be founded, the proletariat couldn’t make a revolution and the world would face unavoidable ruin, [and] expressed that we hoped we wouldn’t be alone in continuing communist activity in case a situation like this took place". We should ask PBJ: do you believe (as you supposedly did when you joined the ICC) that the existence of an international, centralised, political revolutionary organisation is critical to the success of any future revolution? Unlike some, we have never pretended to be "the Party", nor to be the only group in the world to defend proletarian internationalism. There are two few revolutionaries in the world, in all probability this will be the case for a long time to come, and the proletariat needs to gather all the forces it can: the existence of a revolutionary organisation is not a matter of individuals but the product of the proletariat’s own historically revolutionary nature. As Bilan pointed during the war in Spain in the 1930s, if there is no Party – no political organisation recognised by the international working class as its own – then there is no revolution. And yet such an organisation will not come into being by some mystical process of self-generation. Building an organisation is immensely difficult, it takes years of painstaking effort, and yet it will always remain so fragile that it can be demolished in a matter of months or even weeks. If the ICC, which is today much the largest organisation of the Communist Left10, finally fails, what will be there to take its place? How and on what basis will the international organisation be built? To these questions, PBJ can only answer "we hope we won’t be alone". "Hope springs eternal", as the saying goes, and in the meantime superficiality reigns supreme.

We want to conclude this point by responding to the supposed "dissolution of the Turkish section". There is no doubt that mistakes were made on both sides in the process that led to the section’s departure; there is no doubt either that a certain mistrust built up, which we were unable to dispel.11 It is untrue, however, to suggest that the section was "dissolved". This claim is based on two points:

• First, that the section was asked by a resolution of the central organ, to replace its own meetings with the participation of all its members (via Internet) in the discussions of other ICC sections.

• Second, that the section was asked to translate all its articles into English and submit them to the IB before publication.

Let’s take these in order.

As PBJ’s own text says, the participation of its members in other section meetings was an attempt to break down the localism in which the section was entrenched – and which they cannot deny. What they fail to mention, is that the same measure was applied in other sections in the run-up to the ICC’s Congress. The purpose was to open up the local life of the sections to international discussion, to try to let in some air and allow all comrades to have an idea of the life of the organisation as a whole beyond their own immediate preoccupations before the delegations arrived at the Congress. The measure was not originally intended to last beyond the Congress itself. Not only that – what PBJ fails to tell its readers is that, once it became clear that the Turkish section did not agree with – because they did not understand – the proposed measure, it was withdrawn by the central organ: communist discipline is not something that can be imposed bureaucratically.

As far as the press is concerned, our Statutes state unequivocally that (even in Turkey) "The territorial publications are entrusted by the ICC to the territorial sections and more specifically to their central organs which can nominate editorial committees to this end. However, these publications are the emanation of the totality of the Current and not of particular territorial sections. Because of this, the IB has the responsibility for orientating and following the contents of these publications". Given that the IB as a whole does not speak Turkish, and that the section – as PBJ would hardly deny – was not in complete agreement with the rest of the ICC on a whole series of points (including for example, the analysis of the "social revolts" in Spain, Egypt, Turkey, and Brazil), it was surely not unreasonable for the IB to ask that articles be submitted to it before publication: at all events, the IB was entirely within its statutory rights to do so. Just how right the IB was, the reader can judge for themselves on the basis of the very article about the Soma mine disaster of whose non-publication PBJ makes so much. In this article we read, for example, that "the deaths of the workers in shipyards, construction sites and wars happen because the bourgeoisie consciously wants them to happen; the massacre in Soma which is called an accident has been consciously conducted", and it goes on to say that "In war or in the workplace, workers are valuable if they die for capitalism". Even for the most vulgar marxist (and the members of the Turkish section did, at the time, claim to be marxist, regaling us at length with ill-digested lessons on "the law of value"), this is arrant nonsense: workers are valuable for capital if they produce surplus value, something they can hardly do if they are dead.

Far from "dissolving" the section, the organisation had every interest in its participation in the international life of the ICC, including and especially its international Congress. One could expect that "the Left" would jump at the chance to express themselves at the Congress, all the more so inasmuch as our Statutes explicitly require the over-representation of minority positions. But not so PBJ: not only did they resign precipitately before the Congress, they rejected our organisation’s invitation to appear, and speak, as an outside group. They had too much "important work" to do – we leave our readers to judge for themselves the results of PBJ’s "important work" on their own web site. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" after all.

The transmission of experience

PBJ makes much of the so-called "conservative comrades",12 who "emphasized that the 68 generation needed to transmit its experience to the youth one-sidedly. This emphasis presupposed that the young comrades were bereft of any experience on the question of organization". That "the young comrades were bereft of any experience on the question of organization" is merely a statement of fact,13 but it is worth taking up this question in a little more depth than PBJ bother to do.

“Each generation forms a link in the chain of human history. Each one is confronted with three fundamental tasks: to receive the collective heritage from the previous generation; to enrich this heritage on the basis of its own experience; to pass it on so that the next generation can achieve more that it was able to.

These tasks, far from being easy, represent a particular challenge. This also goes for the workers movement. The older generation has its experience to offer. But it also bears the wounds and traumas of its struggles, has had to learn to face up to defeats, disappointments, and the realisation that the construction of lasting acquisitions of collective struggle often requires more than one lifetime. It needs the energy and élan of the following generation, but also its new questions and its capacity to see the world with new eyes.

But as much as the generations need each other, their capacity to forge the necessary unity is not automatically given. The more society distances itself from traditional natural economy, the more incessantly and rapidly capitalism "revolutionises" the productive forces and the whole of society, the more the experience of one generation differs from the next. Capitalism, the system of competition par excellence, also pits the generations against each other in the struggle of each against all”.14

Schematically, we can say that there are three possible reactions to this need for the transmission of experience inherent in every human society:

1. The Master’s authority is unquestionable, each new generation has merely to appropriate and repeat the lessons of the previous one. This is the attitude characteristic of old Asiatic societies, and which has infected the proletarian movement in the form of the Bordigists’ caricatural devotion to the untouchable works of the Master.

2. The contestation that dominated the 1960s youth movement, condemned – because it failed to learn from its predecessors – to repeat their errors in boring detail.15

3. Finally, we have the scientific – and marxist – critical appropriation of past experience. As a previous article16 pointed out, it is this ability to appropriate the work and the thinking of previous generations, and critically develop it, that characterised the emergence of scientific thought in Ancient Greece.

Examples of such critical appropriation by a new generation of militants are not lacking in the workers’ movement. We can cite that of Lenin with regard to Plekhanov, or more strikingly still, of Rosa Luxemburg with regard to Kautsky and the SPD in general, as well as to the theories of Marx which she both criticised and developed in The accumulation of capital. These examples show us that a precondition for criticism is, precisely, the appropriation of our predecessors’ ideas, in other words the ability to understand them – and an ability to understand is dependent on an ability to read (since half the section did not read any language other than Turkish, this was clearly a physical impossibility). Having understood the ideas, you can only criticise them, especially in the context of an organisation where the aim is to convince other comrades, by engaging with them, which the members of the Turkish section signally failed to do. PBJ claims this is untrue.17 Yet they would be hard put to point to a single text on organisational issues (other than the "infamous" position on parasitism) which engages with any of the ICC’s basic documents, either internal or external. If our readers need convincing of the vacuity of PBJ’s organisational understanding, we can only invite them to consult a text by Jamal [153] (a frequent contributor to the ICC’s forum) which PBJ have published on their web site without a word of critical comment: it reads like some kind of manager’s manual produced by the HR department of a new start-up.

What it means to join the ICC

At this point, we want to take a step back and return to the words we quoted at the beginning of this article. "One of the most urgent and arduous tasks facing revolutionaries is that of welding together the meagre revolutionary forces that are currently dispersed throughout the world". Confronted with the ICC’s failings (and none are more aware of them than we), it is all too easy to forget how difficult, how ambitious such a task is. To bring together militants from all across the world, from utterly different cultures and backgrounds, into a single international association capable of taking part in and stimulating the reflexion of a world proletariat billions strong, to unite them not in a lifeless homogeneity but in a whole where unity of action is founded on the diversity of debate within an accepted political framework – this is a gigantic undertaking. Certainly, we fall short of our ambitions – but we only need declare them to see how different they are from the circle mentality which dominated EKS, as its members recognise themselves.

In fact, the members of the Turkish section never understood the fundamental difference between being a circle and being militants of a revolutionary organisation, especially an international one. This is not entirely their fault, since we failed in transmitting our organisational conceptions to them – in part because we had, up to a point, lost sight of them ourselves.

We have already dealt extensively with the question of what Lenin called the "circle spirit".18 Here we will just recall some of the main points.

First, the circle is characterised by a membership based on a mixture of personal friendships and political agreement; as a result, personal conflicts and political disagreements are conflated – a sure recipe for the personalisation of political argument. It is hardly surprising that the life of the Turkish section was marked by a series of bitter personal animosities leading to splits and periods of "paralysis".

To maintain its cohesion, the circle closes like an oyster against the outside. This in turn is a recipe for personalised antagonism between the circle and the rest of the organisation: "Under the name of the ‘minority' heterogeneous elements are regrouped in the Party who are united by the desire, conscious or not, to maintain the relations of a circle, previous organisation forms to the party".19 The circle spirit in the organisation leads to an “us and them” attitude, the circle against the “central organs”; the circle completely loses sight of the organisation as a whole, to become obsessed with the "central organs". One example we can cite amongst many is a text written by one member of the section titled “Is there a crisis in the ICC?”; the critique voiced in this text was taken up and both answered and developed by another section, yet this response was completely ignored. Only "the central organs" are deemed worthy of consideration.

The circle maintains its cohesion by opposing the rest of the organisation en bloc, while at the same time avoiding any debate within the circle of its own divergences. This was clearly apparent in the debate on ethics and morality engaged within the ICC: where one comrade developed a critical argument which (cf the note above) was to some extent directly inspired by the organisation’s own texts, another put forward a position which owes more to Hobbes than to Marx – and yet never a word of critique did we hear from the Turkish comrades.20

A more striking case of this closure to the rest of the organisation came with the debate over the events around the massive Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul. According to PBJ, "It was claimed that the section failed to inform the organization of its disagreements during the Gezi process whereas within the heat of the events the section had a meeting with the comrades from the secretariat trying to explain its disagreements". It is certainly true that there was a lengthy discussion between members of the International Secretariat and members of the Turkish section over the editorial modification of their article concerning the events at Gezi. It is also true that the members of the IS had difficulty making head or tail of these "disagreements", and for good reason: at the section’s conference held shortly afterwards it became apparent that there were at least two, if not perhaps three, different positions within the section itself. The members of the section committed themselves to writing down their different positions to carry the discussion into organisation as a whole – our readers will be astonished to learn that these documents have still to see the light of day.

The ex-comrades from Turkey remain silent on yet another of their internal disagreements, on the "tone" of our "Communiqué to our readers: The ICC under attack from a new agency of the bourgeois state [33]".. According to PBJ, "Nevertheless, the members of our section in the central organ of the ICC didn’t fail to criticize the extremely angry tone of the communiqué written in response to this attack". Perfectly true. But the text fails to mention that two other members of the section found the communiqué perfectly appropriate, and said so unambiguously during a meeting held in July 2014 with members of the section in France.

We have already mentioned (cf note 6), the insistence of Leo and Devrim on carrying on their forum debates without any restrictions. This calls to mind, once again, Lenin’s words: "Certain eminent militants of the most influential old circles, not having the habit of organisational restrictions that the Party must impose, are inclined to mechanically confuse the general interests of the Party and their circle interests which can coincide in the period of circles". They "...naturally raise the standard of revolt against the indispensable restrictions of the organisation and they establish their spontaneous anarchism as a principle of struggle (...) making demands in favour of ‘tolerance' etc".21

Whither PBJ?

“An image is worth 1000 words” as the saying goes, and certainly this holds good for PBJ. Thanks to the technical wizardry of the Internet, we discover that the image that Pale Blue Jadal have chosen to represent their group comes straight from the world of sentimental hippiedom.22

Their "political principles" are devoid of any reference to the Communist Left, or indeed to any past heritage at all. PBJ thus declares itself a new group based solely on itself, on ignorance and an assemblage of resentments, discontents, and personal loyalties.23

There is no mention either of capitalism’s decadence, which for the ICC that they have just left is the materialist foundation-stone of its political positions. PBJ has no criticism to make of this theoretical foundation, nor have they any alternative to offer. PBJ may be unaware of it, but by jettisoning any reference to the past and any attempt at giving a materialist grounding to their positions, they are already compromising the process of "political discussion" to which they claim to be committed.24 In for the list of discussion topics proposed in PBJ’s "road map" (which should keep them occupied for the next 20 years at least), it is worth remarking the presence of "The National Question in the Middle East"... and the complete absence on PBJ’s site of the least comment on the concrete situation in Turkey, the renewal of Erdogan’s war on the Kurds, the resurgence of Kurdish nationalism and the Syrian refugee crisis, the bomb attack in Suruç, etc etc.

We have said above that the existence of an international revolutionary organisation is a precondition for the successful overthrow of capitalism. If the proletariat does, one day, prove itself capable of "assaulting the heavens" (to use Marx’s expression) then its decisive strength will be found in those countries with a strong working class and a certain historical experience. Turkey, at the gateway between Europe and Asia, is one of those countries and a rising proletarian movement will necessarily produce a political expression which can only be based on the heritage of the Communist Left. By turning their backs on this heritage, the members of PBJ disqualify themselves from participating in any such political expression, and this is their tragedy.

Let us end on an optimistic note however. All our past experience indicates that PBJ is condemned to go the way of previous circles – those who refuse to learn from history (and you cannot learn from history if you know nothing about it) are condemned to repeat it. But let us remain open to the possibility that we may be wrong, and that PBJ despite all appearances to the contrary may yet produce something worthwhile for the proletariat and the revolution. To do so, they will have to find their way back to the revolutionary theoretical and organisational heritage of the Communist Left.

ICC, November 2015

ICC public meeting, London 10 October 2015

World wars, capitalism’s decline, and the internationalist response

Summary of presentations and discussion

The morning session began with a showing of two videos:

• A short extract from an interview with a 96 year-old veteran who movingly described his experience as a POW in Dresden on the night of the bombing and powerfully denounced the democratic Allied leaders who ordered it;
• The film recently added to the ICC website: WW2. Fascism – alibi for democratic terror [160].

A short presentation then made the following points to focus discussion on the question of war and decadence:

• Like World War 1, World War 2 was a product of capitalist decadence and a continuation of the struggle between the major imperialist powers to re-divide the world. The bourgeoisie also learned the lesson of WW1 and deliberately targeted the working class.
• WW2 was a new twist in a spiral of descent of capitalism deeper into barbarism; genocide was not a preserve of the Nazis.
• Wars in decadence reveal the increasing irrationality of capitalism which can only increase as it spirals into barbarism. Capitalism in its phase of decomposition threatens the future of humanity.

The discussion immediately focused on the post-war reconstruction, raising more general questions about wars, decadence and growth: WW2 gave capitalism a new lease of life, but does this refute the concept of decadence?  Capitalism today seems to be at a new impasse but it also seems more in control and more difficult to destroy...

In response it was emphasised that the post-war reconstruction needs to be seen in the context of the destruction of WW2, which destroyed decades of human labour.  More generally, our understanding of decadence is that capitalist relations become a fetter on the productive forces; not that they stop growing altogether. The real question is whether growth constitutes a progressive factor for humanity or a regressive one. Capital can only ensure growth by destroying itself, increasingly threatening humanity and the planet. Capitalism has already created the conditions for communism and is now eroding these conditions; this is why it is decadent. Marx talks about a whole epoch of wars and crises; Luxemburg talks about a period of a long agony of decline.

For the comrade from the CWO there was a problem with the use of the concept of decadence by the ICC, which kept being redefined until it became a moral view. The Third International was clearly wrong to announce in 1919 that capitalism was in its death throes. Capitalism has found answers to its problems and has continued to grow, especially in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Capitalism can only survive by cannibalising itself to increase the rate of profit; world wars have become the equivalent of the economic crises of the 19th century. But it is not true to say that it faces insuperable barriers. Marx says that no social formation will disappear before all the productive forces of which it is capable have been developed; we can still see capitalism is finding ways around its problems, eg. the Internet, cheapening of labour power, exploitation of China, South America, etc. In the immediate period after 1914 it was still possible to talk about curtailing the life of this system but it is now 100 years since the revolutionary wave and we have to query this.

In answer to the CWO, it was argued that the legacy of the Third International is not so easily dismissed; it’s true that capitalism will not simply disappear and will only be definitively ended by the revolution of the working class, but this was also the understanding of the International, which announced the beginning of a whole epoch of wars and revolutions; it’s true that there has only been one revolutionary wave and many wars, but this does nullify their perspective.

Today’s revolutionary movement historically came out of the struggles after May ’68 which signalled an end to the post-war boom. In fact the boom itself appears as an exception; for the majority of decadence we’ve seen war, stagnation, crisis. But the ICC has now recognised that we were wrong to expect that the re-opening of the crisis would lead to a revolutionary outbreak. We were over-optimistic. But it’s only since the end of the 80s that we’ve seen apparently difficult to explain growth, particularly of China and India. It’s this growth that revolutionaries have been slower to understand and to explain in the wider context of decadence. Capitalism may appear to be getting stronger today because we are not seeing mass movements of the working class, but the fact that the working class has failed to destroy decadent capitalism during the last 100 years does not invalidate the concept of decadence.

The CWO comrade felt that there was a tendency to deny growth in decadence, but insisted that it was a fact, for example there is more steel being produced than ever. He went on to say that for the system to reconstitute itself after a phase of open crisis, capital needs total world war to destroy constant capital. The opening up of India and China created 2 billion new workers, bringing with them very little constant capital, which provided a basis for accumulation up to 2007. Now we are now seeing tremendous signs of crisis: negative interest rates, quantitative easing, lowering of wages and conditions. But this has only had modest results for the bourgeoisie, putting war or revolution on the agenda.

The rest of the morning session developed various points about growth and decadence:

• On the post-war reconstruction, the bourgeoisie learned from the economic crisis after WW1 and especially the Great Depression, which was an affirmation that decadence is associated with economic crisis;
• Part of capitalism’s ‘solution’ to the crisis of the 1930s was precisely the build-up to WW2; the production of armaments is another factor in ‘growth’ during decadence.
• The transformation of the productive forces since 1914 has been enormous (eg. Taylorism and Fordism which are still relevant in the age of robotics). For us the problem is the antithesis of the relations of production and the productive forces; if the productive forces were already too great in 1914 they are even more so now.
• There is a real problem in understanding growth in decadence because we only have the bourgeoisie’s own figures, which have to be evaluated critically. ‘Growth’ includes the effects of waste, repression, war and decay…

There was also a discussion about the ideological mystification of WW2 as a ‘Good War’, which the film addressed, and is still strong today. WW2 is not questioned in the same way as WW1. Unlike previous wars, the anti-fascism of WW2 is still necessary for bourgeois propaganda - even though it was not used as a rationale at the time.

The discussion continued after lunch and further developed points about growth and decadence.

In summary, there has been growth in decadence but it has been much lower than capitalism claims. In decadence growth has been the result of state capitalism, epitomised by Keynesianism. In the 19th century if the economy declined, the bourgeoisie cut state expenditure but in the 20th it’s the opposite. Laissez-faire no longer works.

The ICC has revised some of its ideas about decadence, for example, the notion of a kind of automatic cycle of  ‘crisis, war and reconstruction’; there was no real crisis before WW1, in fact a boom, and the boom that followed World War Two could not be explained simply by the reconstruction of war-shattered economies.  

The example of China is an expression of the historic crisis of the system; the relative stagnation of the west is concomitant to the rise of China. That doesn’t mean that the rapid pace of growth in China is not real, and it needs to be explained theoretically. But this growth, based on brutal levels of exploitation, the devastation of nature and China’s increasing role as a player in the imperialist free for all, does not constitute a factor of progress for mankind. 

Human labour in decadence becomes increasingly unproductive and unrelated to any real need (eg. advertising, call centres, arms production etc). The present use of technology is of no real use to humanity but on the contrary works against it, and the revolution in the west will have to involve the working class resurrecting productive industries or looking for new ways to produce things for human needs.

In conclusion, firstly it was noted firstly that no-one had defended the idea of WW2 as a “good” war.

Different points of view on the question of decadence had been expressed, eg. on what we still defend from the perspectives of the Third International. The economic growth in China is something we still need to study. Similarly, the causes of the post-war boom are a discussion that continues.

We also need to look at the level of the capitalist crisis in relation to the level of the class struggle and the state of the working class. This poses some basic questions, for example about the role of revolutionaries and this was the subject of our second presentation.

Afternoon session

The presentation closely followed the article 1915, 1945: the Development of Internationalist Opposition to Imperialist War [161] (see World Revolution No371).

The discussion tended to concentrate on:

1. Themes developed in the morning session around aspects of the decadence of capitalism, and in particular the attitude of the Third Communist International to the period opening up in front of the proletariat (the period of ‘wars and revolutions’);
2. The period of internationalist opposition to the 2nd World War, in particular aspects of the formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) in Italy in 1943; the split in this organisation in 1952 and the lessons to be drawn. Plus, briefly, the role of the Party;
3. A question relating to fascism/anti-fascism and Isis (Daesh/Isil) v ‘lesser evils’ was also raised.

1:      Was the 3rd Communist International correct in its 1919 assessment of the epoch opened up by WW1 as that of ‘Wars and Revolutions’? The comrade from the ICT had earlier said subsequent history called this into question. All agreed there had been plenty of wars but only one international revolutionary wave (1917-1923). So what was the balance sheet? For the ICC and sympathisers the CI had been correct in its characterisation: the new epoch was indeed that of the decadence of capitalism. 100 years was not a long time in the decadence of any class society and it was no surprise that the proletariat, lacking an economic base within capitalism, found difficulty in demonstrating its revolutionary nature. As for capital, its trajectory of two world wars, the continuing wars of decomposition (Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq x 2, Libya, Syria, etc); two major economic crises, plus the development of state capitalism, the integration of organs like the unions and the use of former workers’ parties to control the class, etc, clearly show a society in ossification, confirming the perspective of socialism or barbarism. This perspective is not contradicted by apparent bursts of growth – or, rather, what the ruling class includes as a measure of economic activity, including the production of the means of destruction, waste production like advertising, etc, etc - all financed by historically unprecedented levels of global debt. Such diseased reproduction (not to mention the environmental degradation) coupled with quasi-constant war is decadence.

At a time when many in the proletarian political milieu were abandoning or denying decadence, where did the ICT – which had once published a discussion paper refuting the concept – stand? Decadence was not a prominent, unifying factor linking the political positions printed on its publications today! The ICT comrade replied that the organisation saw decadence as a reality, but one rooted in the process of capital accumulation and its blockages, rather than in a ‘moral’ sense like the ICC. For its part, the ICC confirmed that decadence was indeed rooted in the inherent contradictions between society’s growing productive capacities and the way capitalism was organised – its relations of production. The tendency for dead labour to dominate living; of the rate of profit to fall – as well as the relative saturation of markets and a growing difficulty of the valorisation of capital – was indeed the basis of decadence. However, decadence had its own history and (increasingly irrational) dynamic which amounted to more than an economic base but which permeated every aspect of social life.

2: Decadence above all means war, but what of the response of proletariat and its political minorities? Superficially, the periods following the outbreak of WW1 and WW2 were similar: disarray within the proletariat and a corresponding confusion in the ranks of its parties and minorities. But in reality, the two moments in history held within themselves different perspectives (see Presentation [161]).

In this context, argued the ICC, the declaration of a ‘Party’ (the Partito Comunista Internazionalista – PCInt) by comrades in Italy in 1943 was an error which has profound repercussions for how revolutionaries understand the questions of where we are in history and how we organise today.

For the ICT, the need for the proletarian party is a constant and in Italy 1943 there was a massive development of strikes and struggles during and against the war. With the Communist Party banned since the mid-1920s, but with militants now returning to Italy, there was thus a real need for intervention, leadership and political direction to avoid the trap of fascism/anti-fascism. The real question here was why did the ‘French’ fraction of the international communist left (fore-runners of the ICC) not contribute to this process?

In answer the ICC agreed that the main axes of the interventions of revolutionaries in Italy at the time were correct but the perspective was deeply flawed. It’s not a question of a constant need for a party, any more than the constant need for communism or revolution. The question was of the material conditions and the subjective balance of class forces. And neither favoured the creation of the party in ’43. The party is not the product of a balance of force in one country but at an international level. The period from the 20s to the 40s saw a growing theoretical confusion in the ranks of communists, a betrayal of principles and a diminution of their numbers. The task of the hour was not just intervention and certainly not the voluntarist declaration of a party but the preservation of previous theoretical acquisitions and the development of new appreciations: the work of a fraction acting as a bridge from the International of yesterday to that of tomorrow.

The mistake that was the formation of the PCInt in ’43 was revealed very quickly: the initial influx of thousands of militants – some of them very ill-informed about what the party actually stood for; the opportunist integration, without any real calling into question of their past errors, of elements who had previously been excluded from the Fraction, like the minority which went to Spain to fight in the POUM militias and Vercesi, who had organised an anti-fascist coalition of Italians in Belgium at the end of the war; the more or less rapid decline in numbers from many thousands to a few hundred, a split in the ‘Party’ in 1952, an absence of international echo, and a tendency to abandon previous clarity on questions like work with the Partisans, national liberation and the class nature of trade unions. It took a great deal of strength and courage for the ‘French’ fraction to insist against the tide that this was still a period of counter-revolution, not a period of revolution like that following WW1, with all that this implied for the work of revolutionaries.

In fact, misjudging the period is a constant problem for revolutionaries. The PCInt in 43; the left communists of in France in 52 who wrongly thought a new world war was imminent and dispersed; the slowness of the PCInt/Battaglia Communista to recognise the recovery of class struggle after 1968; the foreshortened perspectives of many ICC comrades who tended to think that the rapid evolution of both the crisis and the class struggle meant ‘revolution in our time’; while the CWO in the 1980s thought that unless the workers made a revolution, another world war was imminent, betraying a misunderstanding of both the immediate period and the course of history. The ability of capital to adapt, to subdue, to persist, albeit in ever-more life-threatening forms, has in general been underestimated.

A further area of disagreement between the ICT and ICC concerned the role of the party. Did it take power ‘on behalf’ of the workers or not? The ICT insisted that this was not the case – “we would criticise the Bolsheviks for degrading work of soviets till they were empty shells and the state was run by the party” - but said the ICC held a ‘propagandist’ view of the party’s role, while the ICT saw it had a place in organising the revolution. However, the ICC had moved closer to the ICT’s conception since various splits had removed councilist elements from its ranks, the ICT believed.

The ICC acknowledged that its birth following 1968 was marked by many illusions of the time and difficulties in understanding the role and importance of centralised organisation – problems which persist. However, the ICC said the ICT’s vision on the role of the party remained ambiguous in the literature of the ICT and that the concept of the party taking power was once defended by the CWO. In addition, the federalist approach to party work of the ICT was contrasted to the internationalist development of the ICC – a method which must organisationally prefigure any party. The prospect of future joint work between the two organisations was raised but not developed.

3: Finally if, as had been said, that ‘anti-ISIS’, was the new ‘anti-fascism’, what was the internationalist response to ISIS today?

An ICC comrade replied that in every war the proletariat was subjected to propaganda insisting that it was necessary to fight the ‘barbarism’ of the enemy, that ‘the other side’ must be defeated to preserve freedom. In WW1 there was German propaganda against the ‘knout of backward Czarism’; in Britain and France, agitation against ‘German militarism’, etc. Today, we’re being told that ISIS is a nasty, revolting, regressive faction in the Middle East – not the only one, to be sure, but one worse than all the rest and against whom we must ally with anyone in order to rid society of this aberrant scourge. Here lies the comparison to anti-fascism.

So the main role of revolutionaries today is their theoretical understanding, the clarity they can shine, on this question: the method they use. If we’re talking about capitalism being a decadent social system, there isn’t going to be one faction better than another, or one which we can support. We must insist ISIS and other such groups are products of the decomposition of capitalist social relations, a creation of barbarous capital itself. They came out of the war in Afghanistan, before the collapse of the Russian bloc, because they were being used by the West as proxy weapons to fight the Russians. These groups have gone on from there to develop a dynamic of their own. So we don’t have a particular strategy for fighting ISIS or similar phenomena but use our theoretical tools to analyse them, to understand them from a proletarian point of view, to ask who is putting out propaganda for or against them and why; to accelerate a consciousness of what these things represent and to analyse them to permit a greater understanding of the totality of capitalism and what each fragment represents.