Introduction
The aim of this report[1] was above all to combat the prevailing bourgeois ideological campaigns about the ‘end of the class struggle’ and the disappearance of the working class’, and defend the view that, in spite of all its current difficulties, the proletariat has not lost its revolutionary potential. As we insisted in the opening sections, omitted here for lack of space, the bourgeoisie’s dismissal of this potential is founded on a purely immediatist conception which identifies the state of the class struggle at any given moment as the essential truth of the proletariat for all time. Against this shallow and empiricist approach, we counterpose the marxist method, which holds that “the proletariat can only exist world historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a world-historical existence” (German Ideology). The report on the class struggle was thus framed in the context of the historic movement of the class since its first epic attempts to overthrow capitalism in 1917-23, and then through the decades of counter-revolution that followed. We begin here as the report focuses more particularly on the evolution of the movement since the resurgence of class combats at the end of the 1960s. Some passages dealing with more recent and short-term developments have also been left out or compressed.
1968-89: the reawakening of the proletariat
…And here resides the whole significance of the May-June events in France in 1968: the emergence of a new generation of workers who had not been crushed and demoralised by the miseries and defeats of the previous decades, who had become accustomed to a relatively higher standard of living in the “boom” years after the war, and who were not prepared to bow down in front of the exigencies of a national economy once more sliding into crisis. The ten-million strong general strike in France, which was accompanied by a huge political ferment in which the notion of revolution, of changing the world, once again became a serious matter to discuss, marked the re-entry of the working class onto the scene of history, the end of the counter-revolutionary nightmare which had lain on its chest for so long. The importance of Italy’s “rampant May” and “hot autumn” the following year is that it provided firm proof of this interpretation, especially against all those who tried to prevent May 68 as little more than a student revolt. The explosion of struggle among the Italian proletariat, politically the most developed in the world, with its powerful anti-union dynamic, showed quite clearly that May 68 was no flash in the pan but the overture to a whole period of rising class struggles on an international scale. Subsequent massive movements (Argentina 69, Poland 70, Spain and Britain 72, etc) provided further confirmation.
Not all the existing revolutionary organisations were able to see this: the older ones, particularly in the Bordigist current, had grown myopic over the years and were unable to see the profound change in the global balance of forces between the classes; but those who were able both to encapsulate the dynamic of this new movement, and to reassimilate the “old” method of the Italian left which had made it such a pole of clarity in the depths of the counter-revolution, were able to declare the opening of a new historic course, markedly different from the one that had prevailed during the height of the counter-revolution, dominated by the course towards war The reopening of the world economic crisis would certainly lead to a sharpening of imperialist antagonisms which, if left to their own dynamic, would drag humanity towards a third, and almost certainly final, world war. But because the proletariat had begun to respond to the crisis on its own class terrain, it acted as a fundamental obstacle to this dynamic; not only that, by developing its struggles of resistance, it could open up its own dynamic towards the second world revolutionary onslaught on the capitalist system.
The massive and open nature of this first wave of struggles, coupled with the fact that that they had once again made it possible to talk about revolution, led many of the more impatient offspring of the movement to “take their desires for reality” and think that the world was already on the brink of a revolutionary crisis in the early 70s. This kind of immediatism was based on a failure to grasp:
- that the economic crisis which provided the impetus for the struggle was still very much in its initial phases; and, in contrast to the 1930s, this crisis was being met by a bourgeoisie armed with the lessons of experience and the instruments that enabled it to “manage” the descent into the abyss: state capitalism, the use of bloc-wide organs, the capacity to put off the worst effects of the crisis through the resort to credit and through spreading its impact out onto the peripheries of the system;
- that the political effects of the counter-revolution still had a considerable weight on the working class: the almost complete break in organic continuity with the political organisations of the past; the low level of political culture in the proletariat as a whole, with its ingrained distrust for “politics” resulting from its traumatic experience with Stalinism and social democracy.
These factors ensured that the period of proletarian struggle opened up in 68 could only be a long drawn out one. In contrast to the first revolutionary wave, which had arisen in response to a war and thus very rapidly hurtled onto the political level - too rapidly in many ways, as Luxemburg noted with regard to the November revolution in Germany - the revolutionary battles of the future could only be prepared by a whole series of defensive economic combats which - and this was in any case a fundamental feature of the class struggle in general - would be forced to go through a difficult and uneven pattern of advances and retreats.
The response of the French bourgeoisie to May 68 set the tone for the world bourgeoisie’s counter-attack: the electoral trick was used to disperse the class struggle (once the unions had successfully corralled it); the promise of a left government was dangled in front of the workers, conveying the dazzling illusion that it would sort out all the problems that had motivated the upsurge and institute a new reign of prosperity and justice, even a little bit of “workers’ control”. The 1970s could thus be characterised as “years of illusion” in the sense that the bourgeoisie, faced as it was with a relatively limited development of the economic crisis, was far better placed to sell these illusions to the working class. This counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie broke the impetus of the first international wave of struggles.
The inability of the bourgeoisie to actually realise any of its false promises meant that it was only a matter of time before the struggle resurfaced. The years 1978-80 witnessed a very concentrated burst of important class movements: Longwy-Denain in France, with its efforts to extend beyond the steel sector and its challenge to union authority; the Rotterdam dock strike, which saw the emergence of an autonomous strike committee; the massive movement in Iran which led to the fall of the regime of the Shah; in Britain, the “winter of discontent” which saw a simultaneous outbreak of struggle in numerous sectors, and the steel strike of 1980; and finally, Poland 1980, the culmination of this wave, and in many ways of the entire period of the resurgence so far.
At the end of this turbulent decade, the ICC had already announced that the 80s would be “years of truth”: by which we meant not, as is often misconstrued, that this would be the decade of the revolution, but a decade in which the illusions of the 70s would be worn away by the brutal acceleration of the crisis and of the resulting assault on working class living standards. A decade in which the bourgeoisie itself would speak the language of truth, of “blood sweat and tears”, of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”; a change in language that also corresponded to a change in the ruling class’s political line up, with a hard-nosed right in power openly implementing the necessary attacks, and a falsely radicalised left in opposition, charged with derailing the workers’ response from the inside. And finally, the 80s would be years of truth because the historic alternative facing mankind - world war or world revolution - would not only become clearer, but would in some sense be decided by the events of the ensuing decade. And indeed the opening events of the decade showed this to the case: on the one hand, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan sharply highlighted the bourgeoisie’s “answer” to the crisis, and opened up a period of greatly sharpened tensions between the blocs, typified by Reagan’s warnings about the Evil Empire and the gigantic military budgets invested in such schemes as the “Star Wars” project. On the other hand, the proletarian response could be glimpsed very clearly through the mass strike in Poland.
The ICC always recognised the crucial importance of this movement, which provided the “answers” to all the questions posed by the preceding combats: “The struggle in Poland has provided answers to a whole series of questions which were posed to previous struggles without being answered in a clear way:
- the necessity for the extension of the struggle (Rotterdam);
- the necessity for self-organisation (steel strike in Britain);
- the attitude towards repression (Longwy/Denain).
On all these points the struggles in Poland represent a great step forward in the world-wide struggle of the proletariat, which is why these struggles are the most important for half a century” (Resolution on the Class struggle, 4th ICC Congress, 1980, published in International Review no.26)
In sum, the Polish movement showed how the proletariat could pose itself as a unified social force capable not only of resisting capital’s onslaught, but also of raising the perspective of workers’ power (a danger well appreciated by the bourgeoisie who temporarily shelved their imperialist rivalries to smother the movement, particularly through the construction of the Solidarnosc union).
Having answered the question: how to extend and organise the struggle - to unify it - the Polish mass strike posed another question: that of the generalisation of the mass strike across national frontiers, which would be a precondition for the development of a revolutionary situation. But as our resolution expressed it at the time, this could not be an immediate prospect: the question of generalisation had been posed in Poland, but it was up to the world proletariat, and particularly the proletariat of Western Europe, to answer it. In trying to keep a clear head about the significance of the event in Poland, we had to fight two different deviations: on the one hand, a serious underestimation of the importance of the struggle (for example, in our section in Britain, among the partisans of the union strike committees in the British steel strike, who considered the movement to be of lesser importance than what had taken place in Britain); and on the other hand, a dangerous immediatism which exaggerated the short-term revolutionary potential of this movement. In order to criticise these symmetrical errors, we were obliged to develop the critique of the theory of the weak link.
The central element of this critique is a recognition that the revolutionary breakthrough requires a concentrated and above all a politically experienced or “cultured” proletariat. The proletariat of the Eastern countries has a glorious revolutionary past but this has been all but erased by the horrors of Stalinism, which explains the huge gap between the level of self-organisation and extension of the movement in Poland, and its political consciousness (the domination of religion but above all of democratic and trade unionist ideology). The political level of the proletariat in Western Europe, which has had decades of experience of the delights of democracy, is considerably higher (a fact expressed among other things, by the fact that the majority of the world’s revolutionary organisations are concentrated in Western Europe). It is to Western Europe, first and foremost, that we must look for the maturation of the conditions for the next revolutionary movement of the working class.
All the same, the profound counter-revolution that descended on the working class in the 1920s has taken its toll of the entire proletariat. It could be said that the proletariat of today has one advantage over the revolutionary generation of 1917: today there are no large workers’ organisations who have only just gone over to the ruling class, and who are thus capable of commanding tremendous loyalty in a class that has not had time to assimilate the historic consequences of their betrayal. This was a major reason for the defeat of the German revolution at the hands of social democracy in 1918-19. But there is a down side to this. The systematic destruction of the proletariat’s revolutionary traditions, the proletariat’s acquired distrust for all political organisations, its growing amnesia about its own history (a factor that has accelerated considerably in the last decade or so) constitute a grave weakness for the working class of the entire globe.
At all events, the Western European proletariat was not ready to take up the challenge posed by the Polish mass strike. The second wave of struggles was blunted by the bourgeoisie’s new strategy of placing the left in opposition, and the Polish workers found themselves isolated at precisely the time they most needed the struggle to break out elsewhere. This isolation (consciously imposed by the world bourgeoisie) opened the gates to Jaruzelski’s tanks. The repression of 1981 in Poland marked the end of the second wave of struggles.
Historic events on this scale have long term consequences. The mass strike in Poland provided definitive proof that the class struggle is the only force that can compel the bourgeoisie to set aside its imperialist rivalries. In particular, it showed that the Russian bloc - historically condemned, by its weakened position, to be the “aggressor” in any war - was incapable of responding to its growing economic crisis with a policy of military expansion. Clearly the workers of the Eastern bloc countries (and of Russia itself) were totally unreliable as cannon fodder in any future war for the glory of “socialism”. Thus the mass strike in Poland was a potent factor in the eventual implosion of the Russian imperialist bloc.
Though unable to pose the question of generalisation, the working class of the West did not go into retreat for long. With the first series of public sector strikes in Belgium in 1983, it launched a very long “third wave” which, though not starting at the level of the mass strike, did contain an overall dynamic towards it.
In our resolution of 1980 cited above, we compared the situation of the class today to that of 1917. The conditions of world war had ensured that any class resistance would immediately have to confront the full force of the state and thus pose the question of revolution. At the same time, the conditions of war brought numerous disadvantages - the capacity of the bourgeoisie to sow divisions between the workers of “victor” and “vanquished” nations; to take the wind out of the revolution’s sails by ending the war, etc). A long drawn out and world wide economic crisis, on the other hand, not only tends to create uniform conditions for the whole class, but also gives the proletariat more to time to develop its forces, to develop its class consciousness through a whole series of partial struggles against capitalism’s attacks. The international wave of the 1980s definitely did have this characteristic; if none of the struggles had the spectacular features of a France 1968 or a Poland 1980, they nevertheless combined to bring important clarifications about the goals and aims of the struggle. For example: the very widespread appeals for solidarity across sectoral boundaries in Belgium in 1983 and 1986, or Denmark in 1985, showed concretely how the problem of extension could be solved; the efforts at taking control of the struggle (railway workers’ assemblies in France 1986, school-workers’ assemblies in Italy 1987) showed how to organise outside the unions. There were also fledgling attempts to draw lessons from defeats: in Britain for example, following the defeat of the militant but long drawn out and isolated miners’ and printers’ struggles of the mid 80s, struggles in Britain towards the end of the decade showed that workers were unwilling to be drawn into the same traps (the British Telecom workers who struck quickly and then returned to work before they could be ground down; the simultaneous struggles in various sectors in the summer of 1988). At the same time the appearance of workers’ struggle groups in various countries provided answers to the question how should the most militant workers act towards the struggle as a whole; and so on. All these apparently separate streams were running towards a point of convergence, which would have represented a qualitative deepening of the world-wide class struggle.
Nevertheless, at a certain point, the time factor began to play less and less in favour of the proletariat. Faced with the deepening crisis of a whole mode of production, a historic form of civilisation, the workers’ struggle, though slowly advancing, was not keeping pace with the overall acceleration of events, was not raising itself to the level required to affirm the proletariat as a positive revolutionary force, even if its combats continued to block the road to world war. Thus, for the vast majority of mankind, and of the proletariat itself, the reality of the third wave remained more or less concealed - by the blackouts of the bourgeoisie, certainly, but also by the slow, unspectacular nature of its progress. The third wave was even “hidden” from the majority of the proletarian political orgaisations, who tended to see only its most overt expressions, and only then as separate and unconnected phenomena.
This situation, in which, despite an ever-deepening crisis, neither major class was able to impose its solution, gave rise to the phenomenon of decomposition, which became more and more identifiable in the 1980, at various inter-related levels: social (growing atomisation, gangsterism, drug addiction, etc), ideological (development of irrational and fundamentalist ideologies), ecological, etc etc. Arising out of the impasse in the class struggle, decomposition then acted in its turn to sap the capacity of the proletariat to forge itself into a unified force; as the decade moved to a close, decomposition had moved more and more to centre stage, culminating in the gigantic events of 1989, which mark the definitive opening of a new phase in the long descent of obsolete capitalism, a phase in which the whole social edifice begins to crack, shudder, and fall apart.
1989-99: The class struggle faced with the decomposition of bourgeois society
The collapse of the Eastern bloc thus confronted a proletariat which, while still combative and slowly developing its class consciousness, had not yet reached a point where it was able to respond to such an enormous historic event on its own class terrain. The collapse of “communism” stopped the third wave dead in its tracks and (except for a very restricted politicised minority) had a profoundly negative impact on the key element of class consciousness - the ability to develop a perspective, an overall goal for the struggle, more vital than ever in an epoch in which there can be no Chinese wall between the defensive combat and the offensive, revolutionary struggles of the class. The collapse of the Eastern bloc assaulted the class in two ways:
- it enabled the bourgeoisie to develop a whole series of campaigns around the theme of “the end of communism”, the “end of the class struggle”, which deeply affected the capacity of the class to invest its struggles with the perspective of building a new society, to pose itself as an independent force hostile to capital, with its own interests to defend. The self-confidence of the class, which played absolutely no autonomous role in the actual events of 1989-91, was shaken to the core. Both its fighting spirit and its consciousness went into a very considerable retreat, certainly the deepest since the resurgence of 1968; the trade unions profited greatly from this loss of confidence by enjoying a major comeback as the “only thing the workers have” to defend themselves;
- at the same time the collapse of the Eastern bloc further unleashed all the forces of decomposition which already lay behind it, more and more subjecting the class to the putrid atmosphere of every man for himself, to the nefarious influences of gangsterism, fundamentalism, etc. The bourgeoisie, moreover, while equally, if not more affected by the decomposition of its system, was able to turn its manifestations against the class: a classic example being the Dutroux affair in Belgium, where the sordid practices of bourgeois cliques were used as an excuse to drown the working class in a vast democratic campaign for “clean government”. In fact, the use of the democratic mystification became more and more systematic, since it was both the logical “conclusion” to be drawn from the “failure of communism”, and is the ideal instrument for atomising the class still further and tying it hand and foot to the capitalist state. The wars provoked by decomposition - Gulf massacre of 1991, ex-Yugoslavia, etc - though allowing a minority to see the militarist nature of capitalism more clearly, also had the more general affect of increasing the proletariat’s feelings of powerlessness, of living in a cruel and irrational world where there is no solution but to bury your head in the sand.
The situation of the unemployed sharply highlights the problems facing the class here. In the late 70s and early 80s, the ICC identified the unemployed workers as potential source of radicalisation for the class movement as a whole, comparable to the role played by the soldiers in the first revolutionary wave. But under the weight of decomposition it has proved harder and harder for the unemployed to develop their own collective forms of struggle and organisation, being particularly vulnerable to its most destructive social effects (atomisation, deliquency, etc). This is true above all of the generation of young unemployed proletarians who have never experienced the collective discipline and solidarity of labour. But at the same time, this negative weight has not been lightened by capital’s tendency to “de-industrialise” those “traditional” sectors where workers have a long experience of class solidarity - mines, shipbuilding, steel, etc. Rather than being able to bring their collective traditions to the other unemployed workers, these proletarians have tended to become drowned in a more amorphous mass. The decimation of these sectors had also of course had its effects on the struggles of the employed as well, since it has helped to disperse important sources of class identity and experience.
The dangers of the new period for the working class and the future of its struggle cannot be underestimated. While the class struggle was definitely a barrier to war in the 70s and 80s, the day to day struggle does not halt or slow down the process of decomposition. To launch a world war, the bourgeoisie would have had to have inflicted a series of major defeats on the central battalions of the working class; today the proletariat faces the more long term, but in the end no less dangerous threat of a “death by a thousand cuts”, in which the working class is increasingly ground down by the whole process to the point where it has lost the ability to affirm itself as a class, while capitalism plunges from catastrophe to catastrophe (local wars, ecological breakdown, famine, disease, etc) until it reaches the point where the very premises of a communist society have been destroyed for generations - if we are not talking about the very destruction of humanity itself…
For us, however… despite the problems posed by decomposition, despite the reflux in the class struggle than we have been through over the past few years, the proletariat’s capacity to struggle, to respond to the decline of the capitalist system, has not vanished, and the course towards massive class confrontations remains open. To show this, it is necessary to re-examine the broad dynamic of the class struggle since the onset of the phase of decomposition.
The evolution of the struggle since 1989
As the ICC had predicted at the time, in the first two or three years after the fall of the Eastern bloc, the reflux was very marked, both at the level of consciousness and of combativeness. The working class was under the full force of the campaign about the death of communism.
By 1992, the effects of these campaigns were beginning, if not to wear off, then at least to diminish, and the first signs of a revival of class militancy could be discerned, in particular with the mobilisations by the Italian workers against the Amato government’s austerity measures in September of 1992. This was followed by miners’ demonstrations against pit closures in Britain in October. The end of 1993 saw further movements in Italy, Belgium, Spain, and in particular Germany, with strikes and demonstrations in a number of sectors, notably construction and automobiles. The ICC, in an editorial aptly entitled “The difficult resurgence of the class struggle” (International Review no.76), declared that “the calm that has reigned for nearly four years has been definitively broken”. While saluting this revival of fighting spirit in the class, the ICC also emphasised the difficulties it faced: the renewed strength of the trade unions; the capacity of the bourgeoisie to manoeuvre against the class, particularly by choosing the time and issues around which the bigger movements would break out; similarly, the capacity of the ruling class to make full use of the phenomena of decomposition to reinforce the atomisation of the class (at that moment, the use of scandals was highlighted in particular - for example the “Clean Hands” campaign in Italy).
In December 1995, the ICC, and the revolutionary milieu in general, faced an important test. In the wake of disputes on the railways and a highly provocative attack on the social wage of all workers, it appeared as if France was on the verge of a major class movement, with strikes and general assemblies in many sectors and workers raising slogans which stressed that the only way to win demands was to struggle all together. A number of revolutionary groups, sceptical of the class struggle in general, became wildly enthusiastic about this movement. The ICC, however, warned the workers that this “movement” was above all the product of a gigantic manoeuvre by the ruling class, aware of the mounting discontent within the class and seeking to strike a pre-emptive blow before this simmering anger could express itself in a real militancy, a real will to action. In particular, by presenting the trade unions as champions of the workers’ struggle, as the best defenders of working class methods of struggle (assemblies, massive delegations to other sectors, etc), the bourgeoisie was trying to boost the credibility of its trade union apparatus, in preparation for more important confrontations ahead. Though the ICC was widely criticised for its “conspiratorial” view of the struggle, this analysis was confirmed in the period that followed. The German and Belgian bourgeoisies launched virtual carbon copies of the French strikes, while in Britain (the Liverpool docks campaign) and the USA (the UPS strike), there were further attempts to strengthen the image of the trade unions.
The scale of these manoeuvres did not call into question the underlying reality of a revival of class struggle. In fact, it could be said that these manoeuvres, for all that the bourgeoisie was usually one step ahead of the workers, provoking movements in unfavourable conditions and often around false issues, were a measure of the danger posed by the working class.…
The most important confirmation of our analyses was provided by the huge strike in Denmark in the early summer of 1998. At first sight, this movement bore many similarities to the events of December 1995 in France, but as we said in the editorial of our International Review no.94, this was not the case: “despite the failure of the strike and the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, the significance of this movement is not the same as that of December 95 in France. In particular, whereas in France the return to work went along with a certain euphoria, a feeling of victory which left no room for putting unionism in doubt, the end of the Danish strike brought with it a feeling of defeat, and few illusions in the unions. This time, the bourgeoisie’s objective was not to launch a huge operation to restore credibility to the unions internationally, as in 1995, but to ‘wet the powder’, to anticipate the discontent and growing combativeness which is asserting itself little by little in Denmark, as it is in other European countries and elsewhere”.
The editorial also points out other important aspects of the strike: its sheer scale (a quarter of the workforce out for two weeks), which was a real testimony to the level of anger and militancy building up in the class, and the intensive use of rank and file unionism to mop up this militancy and the workers’ dissatisfaction with the official union machinery.
Above all, it was the international context which had changed: a growing atmosphere of combativeness which was expressing itself in numerous countries, and has continued to do so:
- in the USA over the summer of 1998, with the strike of nearly 10,000 workers at General Motors, of 70,000 Bell Atlantic telephone workers, of health care workers in New York, and the violent confrontations with the police during a massive demonstration of 40,000 construction workers in New York;
- in Britain, with the unofficial strikes by care workers in Scotland, of postal workers in London, and the two electricians’ strikes in London which showed a clear willingness to struggle despite the opposition of the union leadership;
- in Greece, in the summer, where struggles around the education sector led to running battles with the police;
- in Norway where a strike comparable in scale to the one in Denmark took place in the autumn
- in France, where there has been a whole series of struggles in different sectors, including education, health, post, and transport, most notably the strikes by bus drivers in Paris in the autumn, where workers reacted on a class terrain to one of the consequences of decomposition - the growing number of attacks on transport workers - by calling for more jobs rather than more policing;
- in Belgium where a slow but definite growth in combativeness, expressed in strikes in the car industry, in transport, in communications, has been countered with a huge campaign of the bourgeoisie around the theme of “fighting trade unionism”. This has taken an absolutely explicit form with the promotion of a “Movement for Union Renewal” which uses very radical, “unitary” language and whose leader, D’Orazio, has been given a halo of radicalism by being put on trial for “violence”;
- in the third world, with strikes in Korea, rumours of massive social discontent in China, and most recently, in Zimbabwe, where a general strike was called to channel workers’ anger not only with government austerity measures but also with the sacrifices demanded for the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo; this strike coincided with desertions and protests amongst the troops.
Other examples could be given, although it has been difficult to obtain information because - in contrast to the big, well-publicised manoeuvres of 95-96 - the bourgeoisie has responded to most of these movements with the black-out tactic, which is additional evidence that these movements express a real and mounting militancy which the bourgeoisie certainly does not want to encourage.
The responses of the bourgeoisie and the perspectives for the class struggle
Faced with this growth of combativeness, the bourgeoisie will not remain inactive, but has already launched or intensified a whole series of campaigns, both on the direct terrain of the struggle, and in the more general political sense, to undermine the militancy of the class and impede the development of its consciousness: a revival of “fighting” trade unionism (eg in Belgium, in Greece, in the British electricians’ strikes); the propaganda barrage about “democracy” (victory of left governments, Pinochet affair, etc); mystifications about the crisis (“critiques” of globalisation, calls for a “third way” which uses the state to rein in a rampant “market economy”); continuation of the slanders against October 1917, Bolshevism, and the communist left, and so on.
In addition to these campaigns, we will certainly see the ruling class making maximum use of all the manifestations of social decomposition to aggravate all the difficulties faced by the working class. There is thus a very long road to travel between the kind of movement we saw in Denmark and the development of massive class confrontations in the heart-lands of capital, confrontations that will once again offer the perspective of revolution to all the exploited and oppressed of the earth.
Nevertheless, the development of the struggle over the recent period has shown that, for all the difficulties it has faced in the last decade, the working class remains undefeated, and still retains a huge potential for fighting against this moribund system. Indeed, there are several important factors which can serve to radicalise the present movements of the class and take them towards higher level;
- the increasingly open development of the world economic crisis. Despite all the bourgeoisie’s attempts to minimise its significance and distort its causes, the crisis remains the “ally of the proletariat” in that it tends to lay bare the real limitations of the capitalist mode of production. Over the last year we have already seen a major deepening of the economic crisis, and yet we know that the worst of it still lies ahead; above all, the great capitalist centres are only just beginning to feel the effects of this latest plunge;
- the acceleration of the crisis also means the acceleration of the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the working class. But it also means that the bourgeoisie is less and less in a position to stagger these attacks, to dilute them, to aim them at particular sectors. More and more the entire working class will be under the cosh, and all aspects of its living standards will be under threat. Thus the necessity for massive attacks by the bourgeoisie will increasingly highlight the necessity for a massive response from the working class.
- at the same time, the bourgeoisie of the main capitalist centers will also be compelled to engage in more and more military adventures; society will be increasingly permeated with an atmosphere of war. We have noted that in certain circumstances (ie immediately after the collapse of the Eastern bloc), the development of militarism can increase the proletariat’s sense of powerlessness. At the same time we noted even at the time of the Gulf War that such events can also have a positive effect on class consciousness, particularly amongst a more politicised or more militant minority. And it remains the case that the bourgeoisie is unable to mobilise the proletariat en masse for its military adventures. One of the factors explaining the wide “opposition” among the ruling class to the latest raids on Iraq was the difficulty of selling this war policy to the population in general and the working class in particular. These difficulties are going to increase for the ruling class, as it will be forced to show its military teeth more and more overtly
***
The Communist Manifesto describes the class struggle as a “more or less veiled civil war”. The bourgeoisie, in trying to create the illusion of a social order in which class conflict is a thing of the past, is nevertheless forced to accelerate the very conditions that polarise society into two camps, divided by irreconcilable antagonisms. The more bourgeois society sinks into its death agony, the more the veils hiding this “civil war” will be cast aside. Faced with ever-increasing economic, social and military contradictions, the bourgeoisie is obliged to increase its totalitarian political grip over society, to outlaw any challenge to its order, to demand more and more sacrifices for less and less reward. As at the beginning of capitalism’s life, when the Manifesto was written, the workers’ struggle tends once again to become the struggle of an “outlaw” class, a class which has no stake in the existing system, and where all its rebellions and protests are effectively forbidden by law. Herein lies the importance of three fundamental aspects of the class struggle today:
- the struggle to build a balance of forces in the workers’ favour: this is the key to the working class being able to reassert its class identity against all the corporatist divisions imposed by bourgeois ideology in general and the trade unions in particular, and against the atomisation aggravated by capitalist decomposition. It is above all a practical key, because it arises as an immediate necessity in every struggle: the workers can only defend themselves by enlarging the front of their struggle as widely as possible;
- the struggle to break out of the union jail: it is the unions which everywhere enforce capitalist “legality” and corporatist divisions on the struggle, which seek to prevent the workers from constituting a balance of forces in their favour. The ability of the workers to confront the unions and develop their own forms of organisation will thus be a crucial yardstick for the real maturation of the struggle in the period ahead, no matter how uneven and difficult this process may be;
- the confrontation with the unions is at the same time the confrontation with the capitalist state; and the confrontation with the capitalist state - and its anticipation by the more advanced minority - is the nub of the politicisation of the class struggle. In many ways it is the bourgeoisie which takes the initiative for making “every class struggle a political struggle” (Manifesto), because it cannot, in the end, integrate the class struggle into its system. The “confrontational” approach has been, and will more and more be, inaugurated by the ruling class. But the working class will have to respond, not simply on the terrain of immediate self-defence, but above all by developing an overall perspective for its struggles, by locating each partial struggle in the wider context of the fight against the whole system. This consciousness will necessarily be limited to a minority for a long time to come, but it will be a growing minority, and this growth will be expressed by the increasing impact of the revolutionary political organisations on a wider stratum of radicalised workers. Hence the vital necessity for these organisations to follow very closely the real development of the class movement, and to be able to intervene within it as effectively as their means permit.
The bourgeoisie may try to sell us the lie that the class struggle is dead. But it is already preparing for the “unveiled civil war” that is inevitably contained in the future of a social order which has its back to the wall. The working class, and its revolutionary minorities, must also be prepared.
28/12/1998
[1] This report was written in December 1998, well before the outbreak of the war in ex-Yugoslavia.
In a previous article, we showed how the international isolation of the revolution in Russia - due to the revolution’s failure to spread to Western Europe - caused the degeneration of the Communist International and the rise of Russian state capitalism, which in turn hastened the workers’ defeats in Germany
After the signing of the secret treaty of Rapallo the international capitalist class realised that the Russian State was more and more making the Comintern its tool. Within Russia itself there was strong opposition to this trend, which led to a series of strikes in the Moscow area during the summer of 1923, and which found expression above all through an increasingly vociferous opposition within the Bolshevik party. In autumn 1923 Trotsky, after many hesitations, finally decided to join a more determined struggle against the state capitalist orientation. Even if the Comintern became more and more opportunistic after the policies of the United Front and the backing of national-bolshevism, and degenerated all the more quickly as a result of its strangulation by the Russian state, there remained within it a minority of internationalist comrades, who still defended the orientation of world revolution. After German capital dropped its promise of a common struggle between the “oppressed nation” and Russia, this internationalist minority felt disoriented because it was convinced that as a result the chances of “saving” the October revolution from outside and relaunching the world revolutionary wave were receding further and further. Out of fear of rising state capitalism in Russia, and in the hope of a revolutionary resurgence they were looking desperately looked for a last spark, the last possibility of a revolutionary onslaught.
Convinced that a revolutionary potential still remained, and that the moment of insurrection had not yet passed, Trotsky urged the Comintern to do everything they could to support a revolutionary development: “You can see comrades, this is finally the big onslaught, that we waited for so many years, and which will change the face of the world. These unfolding events will have a tremendous importance. German revolution means the collapse of the capitalist world”.
At the same time the situation in Poland and Bulgaria was accelerating. On 23rd September, communists in Bulgaria launched an attempted rising, supported by the Comintern, which failed. In October and November, a new wave of strikes erupted in Poland, involving some two thirds of the country’s industrial labour force. The Polish CP was itself surprised by the class’ combativity. These insurrectional risings were also smashed on 23rd November.
Within the framework of the political struggle going on within the Russian party, Stalin stood against supporting the movement in Germany, inasmuch as its success could have been a direct threat to the existing Russian state apparatus, within which he held some of the most important positions: “My point of view is that the German comrades have to be held back and we should not encourage them” (Letter from Stalin to Zinoviev, 5.8.23).
The Comintern launches an adventurist insurrection
Clinging to the last hope of a revival of the revolutionary wave, the Comintern’s Executive Committee (the ECCI) decided on its own, without any prior consultation with the KPD, to force the movement in Germany and to prepare for insurrection.
When the news of the end of Germany’s policy of “passive resistance” against France, and of the opening of Franco-German negotiations reached Moscow on 11th September, the ECCI pushed for an insurrection at the end of September in Bulgaria, to be followed shortly afterwards by one in Germany. The representatives of the KPD were summoned to Moscow, in order to prepare the insurrection together with the ECCI. These discussions, in which representatives of countries bordering Germany also took part, lasted for more than one month from the beginning of September to early October.
The Comintern was to take another disastrous turn. The catastrophic policy of the United Front with the counter-revolutionary Social-Democratic forces, whose destructive consequences could still be felt, and the flirt with national-bolshevism, were now to be followed by the desperate adventure of an attempted rising, without the conditions being ready for any possibility of success.
Unfavourable conditions
Although the working class in Germany remained the strongest and most concentrated sector of the international proletariat, the sector which – alongside the Russian proletariat – had been at the forefront of the revolutionary combat, in 1923 the international wave of struggles was already on the retreat, leaving it relatively isolated.
In this situation, the ECCI wrongly assessed the balance of forces and it failed to see how the tactical reorientation of the SPD-led government in August 1923 had managed to swing the tide in favour of the bourgeoisie. To assess a situation correctly, to understand the strategy of the enemy, an internationally organised and centralised party must be able to rely on the correct evaluation of the situation on the spot by its local section. But the KPD itself was blinded by its national-Bolshevik policy and did not understand the real dynamic of the movement.
The movement in Germany itself had laid bare a number of weaknesses:
- Up until August it had mostly been limited to economic demands. The working class had not yet come forward with its own political demands. Although the movement developed more strength coming out of the factories, moving towards the streets, although more and more workers were united in general assemblies, and some workers councils had been founded, it was still not possible to speak of a period of dual power. Several members of the ECCI thought that the formation of workers councils could only be a distraction from what they considered the primary task - military preparation of insurrection - and that the councils would even serve as a pretext for repression by the government. The new government had indeed forbidden the factory councils. A majority of the ECCI therefore proposed that the Soviets only be set up after the seizure of power.
- Instead of drawing the lessons of the disastrous policy essentially based on a “national alliance”, a policy in which the United Front was only the first step, the preparation of the insurrection was entirely based on the formation of a workers’ government composed of the SPD and the KPD.
- Last not least: the vital condition for a successful insurrection was missing: the KPD, undermined and weakened by its opportunist evolution, did not play a really decisive political role within the class.
Preparing the insurrection
Various questions were debated in the ECCI. Trotsky insisted forcefully on the necessity of fixing a date for the insurrection. He proposed 7th November, the day of the successful October rising in Russia 6 years earlier. By fixing a date, he wanted to pre-empt any attitude of “let’s wait and see”. Brandler, president of the KPD, refused to fix a precise date. The decision was taken at the end of September, for an insurrection sometime during the next 4-6 weeks, i.e. during the first days of November.
Since the German party leadership considered itself too inexperienced, Brandler suggested that Trotsky himself, who had played such an outstanding role during the organisation of the October insurrection in 1917, should come to Germany in order to help organise the rising.
This proposal came up against the resistance of the other ECCI members. As chairman of the Comintern, Zinoviev demanded this leading role. This quarrel can only be understood against the background of the growing power struggle within Russia itself. In the end, it was decided that a collective body should be sent, composed of Radek, Guralski, Skoblevski and Tosmki. The ECCI also decided that help should be provided on three levels:
- military support was the most important. Officers of the Red Army, who had gained experience during the civil war in Russia, were sent secretly to Germany to help the Red Centuries and to build up a Red Army. They also offered their help in setting up an intelligence service in Germany whose task was to maintain ties with opposition officers in the Reichswehr. In addition, it was planned that very experienced party members should be waiting at the border in order to reach Germany as quickly as possible.
- material (food) help, in particular one million tons of wheat which were to be transported to Russia’s western border in order to send immediate food supplies to Germany, if the revolution was successful.
- on the level of propaganda, public meetings were organised on the theme “The German October is ahead of us”, and “How can we help the German revolution?”, where reports were given about the development in Germany. Funds were raised and money and other items collected. Women were called to donate their jewellery for the “German cause”.
While discussions were still going on in Moscow, Comintern emissaries in Germany had already pushed ahead with preparations for the insurrection. At the beginning of October many of the KPD’s leaders had already gone underground. But while in Moscow the leadership of the KPD and the ECCI were still debating the plans for insurrection, in Germany itself there does not seem to have been any deeper debate on this question or the immediate perspectives.
Since the beginning of 1923, and especially since the Leipzig party conference, the KPD had started to set up combat units of Red Centuries. Initially these armed troops were to protect demonstrations and workers’ assemblies. Any worker with combat experience could join, irrespective of his political convictions. Now, Red Centuries were busily training in military skills, practising alerts and undergoing special training in the handling of weapons.
In comparison to March 1921 much more attention was paid to preparations in this field and considerable means were invested in military preparation. By now, the KPD had built up a military intelligence service. There was the M-Apparat, the Z-Gruppe for infiltrating the Reichswehr and the T-Terrorgruppe in the police force. Secret arsenals were set up, military maps of all sorts collected.
The Russian military advisers had half a million rifles at their disposal. They hoped to be able to mobilise very quickly 50-60,000 troops. However, the Reichswehr and the right wing’s armed groups which supported it, along with the police, were some 50 times stronger than the military formations headed by the KPD.
Against the background of these preparations the Comintern worked out a plan based on a strategic military strike.
If, in certain regions, the KPD were to apply the tactic of the United Front by the joining the SPD to form a “workers government”, this could not help but light a powder keg. Saxony and Thuringia were chosen because the SPD already held government posts in these Länder, and because the Reichswehr disposed of fewer units there than in Berlin and the rest of the country.
The basic idea was that the formation of a SPD-KPD workers’ government would be seen as a provocation by the “fascist forces” and the Reichswehr. It was supposed the fascists would set off from Bavaria and Southern Germany for Saxony and Central Germany. At the same time a reaction of the Reichswehr was expected with a mobilisation of its troops in Prussia. This offensive of the bourgeoisie could be countered by the mobilisation of gigantic armed workers’ units. It was even planned that the Reichswehr and the fascists would be defeated by drawing them into a trap near Kassel. The Red Centuries were to be the starting point for the formation of a Red Army, whose Saxon units were to march on Berlin, while the Thuringians marched on Munich. Finally, it was planned that the government, set up on a national level, should comprise communists, left Social-Democrats, Trade unionists, and national-Bolshevik officers.
A decisive situation therefore would arise, as soon as the KPD joined the government in Saxony.
Could the insurrection be based on a governmental alliance with the SPD?
In August the SPD joined the national government in order to head off an insurrectional movement by making a lot of promises to calm the situation.
On 26th September the government announced the official end of “passive resistance” against the French forces of occupation, and promised the payment of wage arrears; on 27th September a strike erupted in the Ruhr area. On 28th September the KPD called for a general strike throughout the country and the arming of workers in order to establish a “workers’ and peasants’ government”. On 29th September, a state of emergency was declared, whereupon the KPD called upon the workers to stop their strikes on 1st October. As in the past, its aim was not so much to try progressively to strengthen the working class through the struggle in the factories, but to focus everything on the decisive moment, which was to occur later. Thus instead of increasing the pressure from the factories, as the Comintern pointed out critically later, in order to unmask the real face of the new SPD-led government, it tended on the contrary to block the initiative of the workers in the factories. Thus workers’ combativity, their determination to fight back against the attacks of the new government, were undermined not only by the promises of compromises by the new government, but also by the KPD itself. At its 5th Congress, the Comintern was to conclude: “After the Cuno strike the mistake was made of wanting to delay elementary movements until the decisive struggle. One of the biggest mistakes was that the instinctive rebellion of the masses was not transformed into a conscious revolutionary will to fight by focussing systematically on political goals... The party failed to pursue an energetic, living agitation for the task of setting up political councils. Transitional demands and partial struggles had to be linked as best as possible to the final goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The neglect of the factory council movement made it impossible for the factory councils to take over temporarily the role of the workers’ councils, so that during the decisive days there was no authoritative centre, around which the wavering masses of workers might have gathered, and which might have been opposed the influence of the SPD.
Since other unitary organs (action committees, control committees, struggle committees) were not used in a systematic manner, in order to prepare the struggle politically, the struggle was mainly seen as a party question and not as a unitary struggle of the proletariat”.
By preventing the working class from developing its defensive struggle, on the grounds that it should “wait for the day of insurrection”, the KPD in fact prevented it from gaining strength in the confrontation with capital, and from winning over those workers who remained hesitant thanks to the propaganda of the SPD. Thus the Comintern later made the following critique:
“Overestimating the technical preparations during the decisive weeks, focussing on the actions as a party struggle and waiting for the ‘decisive blow’ without a movement of partial struggles and mass movements preparing them, prevented assessment of the real balance of forces and made it impossible to set a real date... In reality it was only possible to notice that the party was in the process of winning the majority, without, however, really holding the leadership in the class.” (The lessons of the German events and the tactics of the United Front).
On 1st October members of a “black Reichswehr division” (a unit sympathising with the fascists) staged a revolt in Küstrin. But their revolt was smashed by Prussian police troops. Clearly, the democratic State did not yet need the fascists.
Thus on 9th October Brandler arrived from Moscow with the new orientation for an insurrection initiated by the KPD joining the government.
On 10th October the formation of a government with the SPD was decided for Saxony and Thuringia. 3 Communists (Brandler, Heckert, Böttcher) joined the Saxon government, while two (K.Korsch and A. Tenner) joined the government of Thuringia.
Whereas in January 1923 the party conference still emphasised: “participation of the KPD in a government of a Land, without posing conditions to the SPD, without a strong mass movement and without sufficient extra-parliamentary support – could only have a negative effect on the idea of a workers’ government and have a destructive effect within the party itself” (p. 255, Dokumente), only a few months later the KPD leadership was ready to follow the instructions of the Comintern and enter an SPD government practically without posing any conditions. The KPD was hoping to find a lever for insurrection, since it hoped to arm the working class once it was in government.
But whereas the KPD had expected a violent reaction from the fascists and the Reichswehr, in fact it was the SPD-Reichspresident, Ebert, who, on 14th October declared the Saxon and Thuringian governments be deposed. On the same day Ebert ordered the Reichswehr to occupy Saxony and Thuringia.
It was the “democratic” Social-Democrat president who sent the armed forces against the SPD governments of Saxony and Thuringia, despite their being “democratically elected‘. Once again it was the SPD, which through a clever political manoeuvre decided and took over the repression of workers on behalf of capital.
At the same time fascist troops left Bavaria for Thuringia.
The KPD counter-attacked by calling the workers to take up arms. In the night of 19/20th October the KPD distributed 150,000 leaflets demanding that party members get hold of all possible weapons. At the same time it called a general strike, which was to trigger the insurrection.
Chronicle of a predictable defeat
To avoid the party taking the decision to launch an insurrection, and to make sure that it was decided by a workers’ general assembly, Brandler tried to convince the workers’ conference in Chemnitz to vote for a strike. Some 450 delegates were present, of whom about 60 were official delegates of the KPD, 7 were from the SPD while 102 were representatives of the Trades Unions.
In order to “test the atmosphere”, Brandler suggested that the meeting vote for a general strike. Hearing this proposal, the Union representatives and the SPD delegates protested vigorously and threatened to leave the meeting. Nobody even mentioned insurrection. The SPD minister present in the meeting spoke up energetically against a general strike. The meeting thus submitted to the SPD and the union representatives. Even the other KPD delegates failed to utter a word. Thus the conference, which the KPD had counted on providing the spark for an insurrectional movement by deciding a general strike, decided to reject the latter.
Brandler and the KPD leadership nonetheless remained convinced that the delegates in the meeting would recover their ardour once they heard of the troops moving on Saxony and that they would surely call for a struggle because of the “predictable” overthrow of the Berlin government. After wrongly assessing the balance of forces in August, the KPD once again misjudged both the balance of forces and the mood of the workers.
In the Chemnitz meeting, which had been chosen by the KPD leadership as the key moment for insurrection, the majority of the delegates were influenced by the bourgeois SPD. Even in the factory committees and in the general assemblies the KPD had not yet won the majority. Unlike the Bolsheviks in 1917, the KPD had neither correctly assessed the situation, nor been able to exercise a decisive influence on the course of events. For the Bolsheviks the question of insurrection could only be put on the agenda once they had won the majority of the delegates in the councils and when the party could therefore play a leading and determining role.
The Chemnitz meeting thus broke up without having decided for a strike, still less an insurrection. Following this disastrous outcome, the KPD leadership voted unanimously - including the “left wing” members of the Zentrale and all the foreign comrades who were present in Germany at the time - to retreat.
When the party’s local sections, whose members were standing ready, “rifle in hand”, throughout the country were informed, their disappointment was enormous.
Although there exist different versions of what exactly happened in Hamburg, it seems that the message to cancel the insurrection failed to arrive in time. Convinced that the insurrection would be implemented as planned, the party members had already set out without waiting for confirmation from the KPD leadership. In the night of 22nd-23rd October the Communists and Red Centuries started to implement the insurrection plan in Hamburg. Several hundred Communists fought the police according to their previously established instructions. The fighting lasted for several days. But most of the workers remained passive, whereas a large number of SPD members reported as volunteers at the police stations in order to fight the insurgents.
When on 24th October instructions arrived to stop the fighting, arrived in Hamburg, an orderly retreat was no longer possible. A defeat was inevitable.
On 23rd October troops of the Reichswehr marched into Saxony. Once again, repression was directed against the KPD. Shortly afterwards, on 13th November, Thuringia was also occupied by the army. In the other parts of the country, there was no significant reaction from the workers. Even in Berlin, where the “left wing” dominated the KPD, only a few hundred workers could be mobilised for solidarity demonstrations. Many of its members left the party in disappointment.
The lessons of the defeat
The Comintern’s attempt to stage an adventurist insurrection, hoping to revive the world-wide revolutionary wave and turn around the situation in Russia, was a failure.
In 1923 the working class in Germany found itself more isolated than at the beginning of the revolutionary wave in 1918 and 1919. Moreover, the bourgeoisie was already more aware of the danger posed by the working class, and had closed ranks against it. It is obvious that the conditions were not ripe for a successful rising in Germany itself. The combativity which did exist within the working class had been countered by the bourgeoisie in August 1923. The pressure from the factories, the efforts to unite in general assemblies, had all ebbed significantly. “From our point of view, the criteria of our revolutionary influence were the Soviets... The Soviets offered the political framework for our conspiratorial activities; they were also organs of government after the actual seizure of power” (L. Trotsky, Can a counter-revolution or a revolution be determined for a fixed date?, 1924). In Germany in 1923 the working class had not succeeded in setting up workers’ councils, which are one of the principal conditions for the seizure of power.
The political conditions within the class as a whole were not yet ripe, but above all the KPD showed itself incapable of playing its political leading role. Its political orientation – the orientation of national-Bolshevism until August, its policy of a United Front and the defence of bourgeois democracy – contributed to the confusion in the class and was a factor in its political disarmament. A successful insurrection is only possible if the working class has a clear vision of its political goals and if it has a party within it, capable of clearly showing the direction to take, and of determining the right moment for action. Without a strong and solid party, no insurrection can be successful, since it is only the party which can have a real overview, correctly assess the balance of forces and draw the appropriate conclusions. Understanding the strategy of the enemy class, measuring the temperature within the class especially in its main battalions, throwing all its weight into the battle in decisive moments: it is these abilities, when they are put into effect, that make the party indispensable.
The Comintern had focussed all its attention on military preparations. The comrade in charge of the military preparations in the KPD, K. Retzlaw, relates in his biography that the Russian military advisers mostly discussed purely military strategy, without ever taking account of the broad masses of the working class.
Although the insurrection needs a precise military plan, it is not a mere military operation. The military preparations can only be tackled once the process of political maturation and mobilisation of the class has already substantially advanced. This process cannot be left to one side.
This means that the working class cannot neglect and reduce its pressure from the factories, as the KPD proposed in 1923.
Whereas the Bolsheviks knew how to apply the “art of insurrection” in October 1917, the insurrection plan of October 1923 was a pure farce, which led to tragedy.
The internationalists within the Comintern, not only made a wrong evaluation of the situation, they clutched at vain hopes. In September, Trotsky himself, clearly ill-informed as to the real situation, was the more convinced that the movement was still on the rise, and was amongst those who urged most strongly for insurrection.
Trotsky’s critique after the events is largely invalid. He reproached the KPD for having in 1921 attempted an adventurist and impatient putsch, and in 1923 of having fallen into the other extreme, of waiting and neglecting its own role: “The maturation of the revolutionary situation in Germany was understood too late... so that the most important measures of combat were tackled too late.
The Communist Party cannot – in relation to a growing revolutionary movement - take up a position of ‘wait and see’. This is the attitude of the Mensheviks: act as a hindrance to the revolution as long as it develops, use its successes, when there is a little victory do everything you can, to oppose it” (Trotsky, op.cit.).
On the one hand he correctly insisted on the subjective factor and that insurrection needs the clear, determined and energetic intervention of the party whatever the hesitations and wavering of the class. Moreover, Trotsky also understood perfectly the destructive role of the Stalinists: “the Stalinist leadership... hampered and put a brake on the workers when the situation demanded a bold revolutionary onslaught, proclaimed revolutionary situations, when their moment had already passed, formed alliances with the phrase mongers and the big talkers of the petty-bourgeoisie, and trod relentlessly behind the Social-Democracy under the facade of the United Front policy” (The tragedy of the German proletariat, May 1933).
But on the other hand Trotsky himself was dominated by vain hopes in the recovery of the revolutionary wave than guided by a correct analysis of the balance of forces.
The defeat of October 1923 was not only a physical defeat of the German workers. Above all, it led to a profound political disorientation throughout the working class.
The wave of revolutionary struggles, which peaked during 1918-1919, in effect came to an end in 1923. In Germany, the bourgeoisie succeeded in inflicting a decisive defeat on the working class.
The defeats of the struggles in Germany, Bulgaria and Poland left the class in Russia even more isolated. Although there were still some important struggles to come, amongst them those of 1927 in China, the working class had begun a retreat, which was to lead to a long and terrible period of counter-revolution, which only ended with the revival of the class struggle in 1968.
The Comintern proved unable to draw the real lessons of events in Germany.
The inability of the Comintern and KPD to draw the real lessons
At its 5th World Congress in 1924, the Comintern (and the KPD within it) concentrated its criticisms mainly on the accusation that the KPD had wrongly applied tactics of the United Front and the workers’ government.
But this policy itself was absolutely not called into question.
The KPD even absolved the SPD for its responsibility in the workers’ defeat, asserting that: “One can say without any exaggeration: the present German Social-Democracy is in reality only a loose knit network of poorly linked organisations with very different political attitudes”. It persisted in its opportunist and damaging policy towards the traitor Social-Democracy: “the permanent communist pressure on the Zeigner-government [in Saxony] and the left-wing fraction which formed within the SPD will lead the SPD to fall apart. The point is that under the KPD’s leadership the pressure of the masses on the Social-Democratic government must be increased, sharpened and that the emerging left Social-Democratic leading group under the pressure of a big movement must be confronted with the alternative, either of entering into the struggle against the bourgeoisie with the communists or of unmasking themselves and thus destroying the last illusions of the Social-Democratic masses of workers” (9th Party Congress, April 1924).
Since the First World War, the SPD had been totally integrated into the bourgeois state. This party, whose hands were stained with the blood of workers slaughtered during the Great War, and from smashing the workers’ struggles in the revolutionary wave, was in no way in a process of falling apart. On the contrary, while still a part of the state apparatus it continued to hold great influence over the workers. Even Zinoviev had to concede on behalf of the Comintern that “a large number of workers still trust the ‘left’ Social-Democrats, ... who in reality only serve as a cover for the dirty, counter-revolutionary politics of the right wing of Social-Democracy”.
History has shown repeatedly that it is not possible for the working class to reconquer a party which had betrayed, and changed its class nature. The attempt to try and radicalise a part of the working class with the help of the SPD, was at the time already an expression of the opportunist degeneration of the Comintern. While Lenin in his famous April Theses of 1917 rejected the support of the Kerensky-government and demanded the biggest possible demarcation from it, the KPD in October 1923 rejected any idea of demarcation from the SPD government and in the end joined it without any conditions whatsoever. Instead of radicalising the combat, the KPD’s participation in the government tended to demobilise the workers. The class frontier between KPD and SPD was glossed over. The working class was increasingly disarmed politically and repression by the army became easier.
An insurrection can only develop if the working class succeeds in getting rid of its illusions in bourgeois democracy. And the revolution can only vanquish by crushing those political forces which defend that democracy, which is the main barrier to the revolution.
In 1923, not only did the KPD fail to combat bourgeois democracy, it even went as far as to call on the workers to mobilise in its defence.
Particularly as regards the SPD, this was in flagrant contradiction with the position defended by the Comintern at its founding Congress, when it denounced this party with the greatest possible clarity as the butcher of the 1919 German revolution.
Thereafter, the KPD was not content to remain in error, it asserted itself as a champion of opportunism. Amongst the parties of the Comintern, the KPD became the most faithful lackey of Stalinism. Not only did it become the driving force for the United Front and “workers’ government” tactic, it was also the first party to apply the policy of factory cells and “Bolshevisation” proposed by Stalin.
The defeat of the working class in Germany also strengthened the position of Stalinism. Both in Russia and internationally the bourgeoisie could henceforth intensify its offensive and so impose on the working class the worst counter-revolution it has ever been subjected to. After 1923, the Russian state was recognised by the other capitalist countries and by the League of Nations.
In 1917, the successful seizure of power in Russia had been the beginning of the first world-wide revolutionary wave. But capital had managed to prevent successful revolutions above all in key countries like Germany.
The lessons of the proletariat’s successful conquest of power in Russia in 1917 as well as those of the failure of the revolution in Germany, notably understanding how the bourgeoisie managed to prevent a victory of the revolution in Germany, and the consequences this had on the international dynamic of the struggles and the degeneration of the revolution in Russia flowing from this, all these elements are part of one and the same international revolutionary wave, one and the same historic experience of the class.
For the next revolutionary wave to be possible, and the next revolution a success, it is vital for the working class to recover this priceless experience. Dv
The working class is still living with the heavy consequences of the defeat of the Russian revolution. Primarily because its defeat was really the defeat of the world revolution, of the first attempt by the international proletariat to overthrow capitalism, and the result of this failure was that humanity has since been subjected to the most tragic century in its entire history. But also because of the manner of its defeat: the Stalinist counter-revolution that stifled it assumed its mantle, the mantle of Lenin and Bolshevism. This has permitted the world bourgeoisie to get away with the immeasurable lie that Stalinism is communism. This has been a factor of profound confusion and demoralisation within the working class for decades, but never more so than after the final collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s.
For communist organisations today, the combat against this lie therefore remains a primordial task. It is one in which we can be very sure of our ground: “the statified regimes which arose in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba etc and were called ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ were just a particularly brutal form of the universal tendency towards state capitalism, itself a major characteristic of the period of decadence” (political positions of the ICC, reprinted in every publication). But this gift of clarity was by no means easily obtained. On the contrary, it took at least two decades of reflection, analysis and debate before the “Russian enigma” can be said to have been definitively solved. And prior to that, when the revolution in Russia was still alive, but showing signs of going off the tracks, revolutionaries were faced with the challenge of criticising its errors and warning of the dangers it faced, while at the same time defending it from its enemies - a task that in some ways was even more difficult.
In the next group of articles in this series, we will look at some of the key moments in this long and arduous struggle for clarity. While it is beyond our ambitions to write a complete history of this struggle, it is equally impossible to omit it from a series whose declared goal is to show how the proletarian movement has progressively developed its understanding of the goals and methods of the communist revolution; and it is perfectly evident that understanding why and how the Russian revolution went down to defeat is an indispensable guide to the path that the revolution of the future must follow.
Marxism is first and foremost a critical method, since it is the product of a class which can only emancipate itself through the ruthless criticism of all existing conditions. A revolutionary organisation that fails to criticise its errors, to learn from its mistakes, inevitably exposes itself to the conservative and reactionary influences of the dominant ideology. And this is all the more true at a time of revolution, which by its very nature has to break new ground, enter an unknown landscape with little more than a compass of general principles to find its way. The revolutionary party is all the more necessary after the victorious insurrection, because it has the strongest grasp of this compass, which is based on the historical experience of the class and the scientific approach of marxism. But if it renounces the critical nature of this approach, it will both lose sight of these historical lessons and be unable to draw the new ones that derive from the groundbreaking events of the revolutionary process. As we shall see, one of the consequences of the Bolshevik party identifying itself with the Soviet state was that it increasingly lost this capacity to criticise itself and the general course of the revolution. But as long as it remained a proletarian party it continuously generated minorities who did continue to carry out this task. The heroic combat of these Bolshevik minorities will be the main focus of the next few articles. But we will begin by examining the contribution of a revolutionary who was not in the Bolshevik party: Rosa Luxemburg, who, in 1918, in the most trying of conditions, wrote her essay The Russian Revolution, which provides us with the best possible method for approaching the errors of the revolution: the sharpest criticism based on unflinching solidarity in the face of the assaults of the ruling class.
The Russian Revolution was written in prison, just prior to the outbreak of the revolution in Germany. At this stage, with the imperialist war still raging, it was extraordinarily difficult to obtain any accurate information about what was happening in Russia - not only because of the material obstacles to communication resulting from the war (not to mention Luxemburg’s imprisonment), but above all because from the very start the bourgeoisie did everything it could to hide the truth of the Russian revolution behind a smokescreen of slander and bloodthirsty fabulation. The essay was not published in Luxemburg’s lifetime; Paul Levi, on behalf of the Spartacus League, had already visited Rosa in prison to persuade her that, given all the vicious campaigns against the Russian revolution, publishing articles criticising the Bolsheviks would add grist to these campaigns. Luxemburg agreed with him, and so sent the essay to Levi with a note saying “I am writing this only for you and if I can convince you, then the effort isn’t wasted” (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, p 366). The text was not published until 1922 - and by then Levi’s motives for doing so were far from revolutionary (for Levi’s growing break with communism, see the article on the March Action in Germany in International Review no.93).
Nevertheless, the method of criticism contained in The Russian Revolution is entirely in the right spirit. From the very start, Luxemburg staunchly defends the October revolution against the Kautskyite/ Menshevik theory that because Russia was such a backward country, it should have stopped short at the “democratic” stage, showing that only the Bolsheviks were able to uncover the real alternative: bourgeois counter-revolution or proletarian dictatorship. And she simultaneously refutes the social democratic argument that formal majorities have to be obtained before revolutionary policies can be applied. Against this deadening parliamentary logic she praises the revolutionary audacity of the Bolshevik vanguard: “As bred-in-the bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry out anything you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first let’s become a ‘majority’. The true dialectic of revolution, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is the way the road runs.
Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (‘all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’) transformed them overnight from a persecuted, slandered, oulawed minority whose leaders had to hide like Marat in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation” (ibid, p 374-5).
And, like the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg was perfectly well aware that this bold policy of insurrection in Russia could only have any meaning as a first step towards the world proletarian revolution. This is the whole significance of the famous concluding words of her text: “theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problems of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’” (ibid, p395).
And this solution was, in Luxemburg’s mind, entirely concrete: it demanded that the German proletariat above all must fulfil its responsibility and come to the aid of the proletarian bastion in Russia by making the revolution itself. This process was under way even as she wrote, although her assessment, in this very essay, of the relative political immaturity of the German working class was also an insight into the tragic fate of this attempt.
Luxemburg was therefore well placed to develop the necessary criticisms of what she saw as the principal errors of the Bolsheviks: she judged them not from the detached heights of an “observer”, but as a revolutionary comrade who recognised that these errors were first and foremost the product of the immense difficulties that isolation imposed on the Soviet power in Russia. Indeed, it is precisely these difficulties that required the real friends of the Russian revolution to approach it not with “uncritical apologetics” or a “revolutionary hurrah spirit”, but with “penetrating and thoughtful criticism”: “Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the harshest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the worldwide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the completest failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection” (ibid p 368-9).
Luxemburg’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks were focussed on three main areas:
1. The Bolsheviks had won peasant support for the October revolution by inviting them to seize the land from the big landowners. Luxemburg recognised that this was “an excellent tactical move” But she went on: “Unfortunately it had two sides to it; and the reverse side consisted in the fact that the direct seizure of the land by the peasants has in general nothing at all in common with socialist economy…Not only is it not a socialist measure, it even cuts off the way to such measures; it piles up insurmountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian relations” (ibid, pp375-376). Luxemburg points out that a socialist economic policy can only start from the collectivisation of large landed property. Fully cognisant of the difficulties facing the Bolsheviks, she does not criticise them for failing to implement this straight away. But she does say that by actively encouraging the peasants to divide the land up into innumerable small plots, the Bolsheviks were piling up problems for later on, creating a new stratum of small property owners who would be naturally hostile to any attempt to socialise the economy. This was certainly confirmed by experience: though prepared to support the Bolsehviks against the old Czarist regime, the “independent” peasants later became an increasingly conservative weight on the proletarian power. Luxemburg was also very accurate in her warning that the division of the land would favour the richer peasants at the expense of the poorer. But it has also to be said that in itself the collectivisation of the land would be no guarantee of the march towards socialism, any more than the collectivisation of industry; only the success of the revolution on a world scale could have secured that - just as it could have overcome the difficulties posed by the parcellisation of the land in Russia.
2. Luxemburg’s most trenchant criticisms concern the question of “national self-determination”. While recognising that the Bolsheviks’ defence of the slogan of “the right of peoples to self-determination” was based on a legitimate concern to oppose all forms of national oppression and to win to the revolutionary cause the masses of those parts of the Czarist empire which had been under the yoke of Great Russian chauvinism, Luxemburg showed what this “right” meant in practise: the “new” national units which had opted for separation from the Russian Soviet republic systematically allied themselves with imperialism against the proletarian power: “While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom, even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus etc into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used the newly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself” (p 380). And she goes on to explain why it could not be otherwise, since in a capitalist class society, there is no such thing as the “nation” separate from the interests of the bourgeoisie, which would far rather subject itself to the domination of imperialism than make common cause with the revolutionary working class: “To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the ‘people’ who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes, who - in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses - perverted the ‘national right of self-determination’ into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class policies. But - and here we come to the very heart of the question - it is in this that the utopian, petty bourgeois character of this nationalistic slogan resides: that in the midst of the crude realities of class society and when class antagonisms are sharpened to the uttermost, it is simply converted into a means of bourgeois class rule. The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt, and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to ‘determine itself’ in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the standpoint of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism” (ibid).
Furthermore, the Bolsheviks’ confusion on this point (although it must be remembered that there was a minority in the Bolshevik party - in particular Piatakov - who fully agreed with Luxemburg’s point of view on this question) was having a negative effect internationally since ‘national self-determination’ was also the rallying cry of Woodrow Wilson and of all the big imperialist sharks who were seeking to use it to dislodge their imperialist rivals from the regions that they themselves coveted. And the whole history of the twentieth century has confirmed how easily the “rights of nations” has become no more than a cloak for the imperialist desires of the great powers and of their lesser emulators.
Luxemburg did not dismiss the problem of national sensitivities; she insisted that there could be no question of a proletarian regime ‘integrating’ outlying countries through military force alone. But it was equally true that any concession made to the nationalist illusions of the masses in those regions could only tie them more closely to their exploiters. The proletariat, once it has assumed power in any region, can only win those masses to its cause through “the most compact union of revolutionary forces”, through a “genuine international class policy” aimed at splitting the workers from their own bourgeoisie.
3. On “democracy and dictatorship” there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg’s position. On the one hand there is no doubt that she falls into a real confusion between democracy in general and workers’ democracy in particular - the democratic forms used in the framework and in the interest of the proletarian dictatorship. This is shown by her resolute defence of the Constituent Assembly, which the Soviet power dissolved in 1918, in perfect consistency with the fact that the very appearance of the latter had made the old bourgeois democratic forms entirely obsolete. And yet somehow Luxemburg sees this act as a threat to the life of the revolution. In a similar vein she is reluctant to accept that, in order to exclude the ruling class from political life, “suffrage” in a Sovietregime should be based primarily on the workplace collective rather than on the individual citizen’s domicile (albeit her concern was also to ensure that the unemployed would not be excluded by this criterion, which was certainly not its intention). These inter-classist, democratic prejudices are in striking contrast to her argument that “national self-determination” can never express anything else than the “self-determination” of the bourgeoisie. The argument is identical as regards parliamentary institutions, which do not, whatever the appearance, express the interests of the “people” but of the capitalist ruling class. Luxemburg’s views in this text are also totally at odds with the programme of the Spartacus League formulated soon after, since this document demands the dissolution of all municipal and national parliamentary type bodies and their replacement by councils of workers’ and soldiers’ delegates: we can only presume that Luxemburg’s position on the Constituent Assembly - which also became the rallying cry of the counter-revolution in Germany - had evolved very rapidly in the heat of the revolutionary process.
But this does not mean that there is no validity to any of Luxemburg’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks’ approach to the question of workers’ democracy. She was fully aware that in the extremely difficult situation facing the beleaguered Soviet power, there was a real danger that the political life of the working class would be subordinated to the necessity to bar the road to the counter-revolution. Given this situation, Luxemburg was right to be sensitive to any signs that the norms of workers’ democracy were being violated. Her defence of the necessity for the widest possible debate within the proletarian camp, and against the forcible suppression of any proletarian political tendencies, was justified in light of the fact that the Bolsheviks, having assumed state power, were drifting towards a party monopoly that was to damage themselves as much as the life of the proletariat in general, particularly with the introduction of the Red Terror. Luxemburg did not at all oppose the notion of the proletarian dictatorship. But as she insisted “this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class - that is, must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people (ibid, p 394).
Luxemburg was particularly prescient in warning of the danger of the political life of the Soviets being emptied out more and more as power became concentrated in the hands of the party: over the next three years, under the pressures of the civil war, this was to become one of the central dramas of the revolution. But whether Luxemburg was right or wrong in her specific criticisms, what inspires us above all is her approach to the problem, an approach that should have served as a guide to all subsequent analyses of the revolution and its demise: intransigent defence of its proletarian character, and thus criticism of its weaknesses and its eventual failure as a problem of the proletariat and for the proletariat. Unfortunately, all too often the name of Luxemburg has been used to pour scorn on the very memory of October - not only by those councilist currents who have claimed descent from the German left but who have lost sight of the real traditions of the working class; but also, and perhaps more importantly, by those bourgeois forces who in the name of “democratic socialism” use Luxemburg as a hammer against Lenin and Bolshevism. This has been the speciality of those who descend politically from the very forces who murdered Luxemburg in 1919 to save the skin of the bourgeoisie - the social democrats, particularly their left wing factions. For our part, we have every intention, in analysing the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and the degeneration of the Russian revolution, of remaining faithful to the real content of her method.
Almost simultaneously with Luxemburg’s criticisms, the first important disagreements arose within the Bolshevik party about the direction of the revolution. This debate - provoked in the first instance by the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but subsequently moving on to the forms and methods of proletarian power - was carried out in a completely open manner within the party. It certainly gave rise to sharp polemics between its protagonists, but there was no question of minority positions being silenced. Indeed, for a while, the “minority” position on the signing of the treaty looked as if it might become a majority. At this stage, the groupings who defended different positions took the form of tendencies rather than clearly defined fractions resisting a course of degeneration. In other words, they had come together on a temporary basis to express particular orientations within a party that, despite the implications of its entanglement with the state, was still very much the living, breathing vanguard organism of the class.
Nevertheless, there are those who have argued that the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was already the beginning of the end, if not the end, for the Bolsheviks as a proletarian party, already marking their effective abandonment of the world revolution (see the book by Guy Sabatier, Brest-Litovsk, coup d’arrêt à la révolution, Spartacus editions, Paris) And to some extent the tendency within the party that most vociferously opposed the treaty - the Left Communist group around Bukharin, Piatakov, Ossinski and others - feared that a fundamental principle was being breached when the representatives of the Soviet power signed a highly disadvantageous “peace” agreement with a rapacious German imperialism rather than committing itself to a “revolutionary war” against it. Their views were not dissimilar to those of Rosa Luxemburg, although her main concern was that the signing of the treaty would retard the outbreak of the revolution in Germany and the West.
In any case, a simple comparison between the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918 and the Rapallo treaty four years later shows the essential difference between a principled retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, and a real marketing of principles which paved the way towards Soviet Russia being integrated into the world concert of capitalist nations. In the first case, the treaty was debated openly in the party and the Soviets; there was no attempt to hide the draconian terms imposed by Germany; and the whole framework of the debate was determined by the interests of the world revolution, rather than the “national” interests of Russia. Rapallo, by contrast, was signed in secret, and its terms even involved the Soviet state supplying the German army with the very weapons that would be used to defend capitalist order against the German workers in 1923.
The essential debate around Brest-Litovsk was a strategic one: did the Soviet power, master of a country that had already been exhausted by four years of imperialist slaughter, have the economic and military means at its disposal to launch an immediate “revolutionary war” against Germany, even the kind of partisan warfare that Bukharin and other Left Communists seemed to favour? And secondly, would the signing of the treaty seriously delay the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, whether through the “capitulationist” message it sent out to the world proletariat, or more concretely through providing German imperialism with a life line in the East? On both counts, it seems to us, as it did to Bilan in the 1930s, that Lenin was correct to argue that what the Soviet power needed above all was a breathing space in which to regroup its forces - not to develop as a “national” power but so that it could make a better contribution to the world revolution than by going down in heroic defeat (as it did, for example, by helping to found the Third International in 1919). And it could even be said that this retreat, far from delaying the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, helped to hasten it: freed from the war on the Eastern front, German imperialism then attempted to launch a new offensive in the west, and this in turn provoked the mutinies in the navy and army that sparked off the German revolution in November 1918.
If there is a principle to be drawn from the signing of the treaty, it is the one drawn by Bilan: “The positions of the fraction led by Bukharin, according to which the function of the proletarian state was to liberate the workers of other countries through a ‘revolutionary war’, are in contradiction with the very nature of the proletarian revolution and the historic role of the proletariat”. In contrast to the bourgeois revolution, which could indeed be exported by military means, the proletarian revolution depends on the conscious struggle of the proletariat of each country against its own bourgeoisie: “The victory of a proletarian state against a capitalist state (in the territorial sense of the word) in no way means a victory of the world revolution” (‘Parti-Etat-Internationale: L’Etat prolétarien’, Bilan no.18, April-May 1935). This position had already been confirmed in 1920, with the debacle around the attempt to export revolution to Poland on the bayonets of the Red Army.
The position of the Left Communists on Brest-Litovsk - especially in the “death rather than dishonour” way that Bukharin defended it - was not therefore their strong point, even if it is the position that they are best remembered for. With the conclusion of “peace” with Germany, and the suppression of the first wave of bourgeois resistance and sabotage that arose in the immediate aftermath of the October insurrection, the focus of the debate shifted. The breathing space having been won, the priority was to determine how the Soviet power should set about consolidating itself until the world revolution had moved on to its next stage.
In April 918, Lenin made a speech to the Bolshevik central committee that was subsequently published as The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Power. In this text he argues that the primary task facing the revolution - assuming, as he and many others did, that the worst moments of the civil war were behind rather than in front of the new power - was the task of “administration”, of rebuilding a shattered economy, of imposing labour discipline and raising productivity, of ensuring strict accounting and control in the process of production and distribution, of eliminating corruption and waste, and, perhaps above all, of struggling against the ubiquitous petty bourgeois mentality that he saw as the ransom paid to the huge weight of the peasantry and of semi-mediaeval survivals.
The most controversial parts of this text concern the methods that Lenin advocated to achieve these aims. He did not hesitate to make use of what he himself termed bourgeois methods, including: the use of bourgeois technical specialists (which he described as a “step backwards” from the principles of the Commune, since in order to “win them over” to the Soviet power they had to be bribed with wages much higher than that of the average worker); the recourse to piecework; the adoption of the “Taylor system” which Lenin saw as “a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 27, p 259). Most controversial of all, Lenin, reacted against a certain degree of “anarchy” at the level of the workplace especially where the factory committee movement was strong and was disputing control of the plants with the old or the new management. He therefore called for “One man management”, insisting that “unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry” (p269). This latter passage is often quoted by anarchists and councilists who are keen to show that Lenin was the precursor of Stalin. But it must be read in the proper context: Lenin’s advocacy of “individual dictatorship” in management did not at all preclude the extensive development of democratic discussions and decision-making about overall policy at mass meetings; and the stronger the class consciousness of the workers, the more this subordination to the “manager” during the actual work process would be “something like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra”. (ibid)
Nevertheless, the whole orientation of this speech alarmed the Left Communists, particularly as it was accompanied by a push to curb the power of the factory committees at shop-floor level and to incorporate them into the more pliant trade union apparatus.
The Left Communist group, which was extremely influential both in the Petrograd and Moscow regions, had established its own journal, Kommunist. Here it published two principal polemics with the approach contained in Lenin’s speech: the group’s “Theses on the Current Situation” (published by Critique, Glasgow, as a pamphlet in 1977), and Ossinski’s article “On the construction of socialism”.
The first document shows that this group was by no means animated by a spirit of “petty bourgeois childishness” as Lenin was to claim. The approach is profoundly serious, beginning by trying to analyse the balance of forces between the classes in the aftermath of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Certainly, this reveals the weak side of the group’s analyses: it both clings to the view that the treaty has dealt a serious blow to the prospects of revolution, while at the same time predicting that “during spring and summer the collapse of the imperialist system must begin” - a piece of fortune-telling that Lenin rightly lambasts in his reply to this document. This contradictory stance is a direct product of the false assumptions the Lefts had made during the debate over the treaty.
The strong side of the document is its critique of the use of bourgeois methods by the new Soviet power. Here it must be said that the text is not rigidly doctrinaire: it accepts that bourgeois technical specialists will have to be used by the proletarian dictatorship, and does not rule out the possibility of establishing trade relations with capitalist powers, although it does warn against the danger of “diplomatic manoeuvring on the part of the Russian state among the imperialist powers”, including political and military alliances. And it also warned that such policies on the international level would inevitably be accompanied by concessions to both international and “native” capital within Russia itself. These dangers were to become particularly concrete with the retreat of the revolutionary wave after 1921. But the most immediately relevant aspect of the Lefts’ criticisms concerned the danger of abandoning the principles of the commune state in the Soviets, in the army, and in the factories:
“A policy of directing enterprises on the principle of wide participation of capitalists and semi-bureaucratic centralisation naturally goes with a labour policy directed at the establishment among the workers of discipline disguised as ‘self-discipline’, the introduction of labour responsibility for the workers (a project of this nature has been put forward by the right Bolsheviks (piecework, lengthening of the working day, etc).
The form of state control of enterprises must develop in the direction of bureaucratic centralisation, of rule by various commissars, of deprivation of independence from local Soviets and of rejection in practise of the type of ‘Commune state’ ruled from below…
In the field of military policy there must appear, and can in fact be noted already, a deviation towards the re-establishment of nationwide (including the bourgeoisie) military service…With the setting up of army cadres for whose training and leadership officers are necessary, the task of creating a proletarian officer corps through broad and planned organisation of appropriate schools and courses is being lost from sight. In this way in practise the old officer corps and command structures of the Czarist generals is being reconstituted” (‘Theses…’).
Here the Left Communists were discerning worrying trends that were beginning to appear within the new Soviet regime, and which were to be rapidly accelerated in the ensuing period of War Communism. They were particularly concerned that if the party identified itself with these trends, it would eventually be forced to confront the workers as a hostile force: “The introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist leadership in production cannot essentially increase the productivity of labour, but it will lower the class autonomy, activity and degree of organisation of the proletariat. It threatens the enslavement of the working class, and arouses the dissatisfaction both of the backward sections and of the vanguard of the proletariat. To carry this system through with the sharp class hatred prevailing in the working class against the ‘capitalists and saboteurs’, the communist party would have to draw its support from the petty bourgeoisie against the workers and therefore put an end to itself as the party of the proletariat” (ibid).
The final outcome of such an involution, for the Lefts, was the degeneration of the proletarian power into a system of state capitalism:
“In place of a transition from partial nationalisation to general socialisation of big industry, agreements with ‘captains of industry’ must lead to the formation of large trusts led by them and embracing the basic branches of industry, which may with external help take the form of state enterprises. Such a system of organisation of production gives a base for evolution in the direction of state capitalism and is a transitional stage towards it” (ibid).
At the end of the Theses, the Left Communists put forward their own proposals for keeping the revolution on the right path: continuation of the offensive against the bourgeois political counter-revolution and capitalist property; strict control over bourgeois industrial and military specialists; support for the struggle of the poor peasants in the countryside; and, most importantly, for the workers, “Not the introduction of piece-work and the lengthening of the working day, which in circumstances of rising unemployment are senseless, but the introduction by local economic councils and trade unions of standards of manufacture and shortening of the working day with an increase in the number of shifts and broad organisation of productive social labour.
The granting of broad independence to local Soviets and not the checking of their activities by commissars sent by the central power. Soviet power and the party of the proletariat must seek support in the class autonomy of the broad masses, to the development of which all efforts must be directed”. Finally, the Lefts defined their own role: “They define their attitude to the Soviet power as a position of universal support for that power in the event of necessity - by means of participation in it…This participation is possible only on the basis of a definite political programme, which would prevent the deviation of the Soviet power and the party majority onto the fateful path of petty bourgeois politics. In the event of such a deviation, the left wing of the party will have to take the position of an active and responsible proletarian opposition”.
A number of important theoretical weaknesses can be discerned in these passages. One is a tendency to confuse the total nationalisation of the economy by the Soviet state as being identical with a real process of socialisation - ie as already part of the construction of a socialist society. In his reply to the Theses, ‘Left wing childishness and the petty bourgeois mentality’ (May 1918, CW, vol 27), Lenin pounces on this confusion. To the statement in the Theses that “the systematic use of the remaining means of production is conceivable only if a most determined policy of socialisation is pursued”, Lenin replies: “One may or may not be determined on the question of nationalisation or confiscation, but the whole point is that even the greatest possible ‘determination’ in the world is not enough to pass from nationalisation and confiscation to socialisation. The misfortune of our ‘Lefts’ is that by their naïve, childish combination of words they reveal their utter failure to understand the crux of the question, the crux of the ‘present situation’…Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by ‘determination’ alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability” (p333-4). Here Lenin is able to show that there is a difference in quality between mere expropriation of the bourgeoisie (especially when this takes the form of statification) and the real construction of new social relations. The Lefts’ weakness on this point was to lead many of them into confusing the almost complete statification of property and even distribution that took place during the War Communism period with authentic communism: as we have shown, Bukharin in particular developed this confusion into an elaborate theory in his Economics of the Transformation Period (see International Review no.96). Lenin, by contrast, is much more realistic about the possibility of the besieged, depleted Russian Soviet power taking real steps towards socialism in the absence of the world revolution.
This weakness also prevents the Lefts from seeing with full clarity where the main danger of counter-revolution comes from. For them, “state capitalism” is identified as a central danger, it is true, but this is seen rather as an expression of an even greater danger: that the party will end up deviating towards “petty bourgeois politics”, that it will line up with the interests of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat. This was a partial reflection of reality: the post-insurrectionary status quo was indeed one in which the victorious proletariat found itself confronting not only the fury of the old ruling classes, but also the dead weight of the vast peasant masses who had their own reasons for resisting the further advance of the revolutionary process. But the weight of these social strata made itself felt on the proletariat above all through the organism of the state, which in the interests of preserving the social status quo was tending to become an autonomous power in its own right. Like most of the revolutionaries of their day, the Lefts identified “state capitalism” with a system of state control that ran the economy in the interests either of the big bourgeoisie, or the petty bourgeoisie; they couldn’t yet envisage the rise of a state capitalism which had effectively crushed these classes and still operated on an entirely capitalist basis.
As we have seen, Lenin’s reply to the Lefts, ‘Left wing Childishness’, hits the group on its weak points: their confusions about the implications of Brest-Litovsk, their tendency to confound nationalisation with socialisation. But Lenin in turn fell into a profound error when he began to laud state capitalism as a necessary step forward for backward Russia, indeed as the foundation stone of socialism. Lenin had already outlined this view in a speech delivered to the executive committee of the Soviets at the end of April. Here he took issue with the best intuition of the Left Communists - the danger of an evolution towards state capitalism - and went off in entirely the wrong direction:
“When I read these references to such enemies in the newspaper of the Left Communists, I ask: what has happened to these people that fragments of book-learning can make them forget reality? Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory, How is it that they cannot see that it is the petty proprietor, small capital, that is our enemy? How can they regard state capitalism as the chief enemy? They ought not to forget that in the transition from capitalism to socialism our chief enemy is the petty bourgeoisie, its habits and customs, its economic position…
What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism was established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book-learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.
I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would be easy, would be within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralised, calculated, controlled and socialised, and that is exactly what we lack; we are threatened by the element of petty bourgeois slovenliness, which more than anything else has been developed by the whole history of Russia and her economy… ” (Works, 27, p293-4).
There is in this discourse a strong element of revolutionary honesty, of warning against any utopian schemes for rapidly building socialism in a Russia which has hardly dragged itself out of the Middle Ages, and which does not yet enjoy the direct assistance of the world proletariat. But there is also a serious mistake, which has been verified by the whole history of the 20th century. State capitalism is not an organic step towards socialism. In fact it represents capitalism’s last form of defence against the collapse of its system and the emergence of communism. The communist revolution is the dialectical negation of state capitalism. Lenin’s arguments, on the other hand, betray the vestiges of the old social democratic idea that capitalism was evolving peacefully towards socialism. Certainly Lenin rejected the idea that the transition to socialism could begin without the political destruction of the capitalist state, but what he forgets is that the new society can only emerge through a constant and conscious struggle by the proletariat to supplant the blind laws of capital and create new social relations founded on production for use. The “centralisation” of the capitalist economic structure by the state - even a Soviet state - does not do away with the laws of capital, with the domination of dead labour over living labour. This is why the Lefts were correct to say, as in Ossinski’s oft-quoted remarks, that “If the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour, no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the Soviet power; but the Soviet power will then be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (eg the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up - state capitalism” (“On the construction of socialism”, Kommunist 2, April 1918). In short, living labour can only impose its interests over those of dead labour through its own efforts, through its very struggle to take direct control over both the state and the means of production and distribution. Lenin was wrong to see this as a proof of the petty bourgeois, anarchist approach of the Lefts. The Lefts unlike the anarchists, were not opposed to centralisation. Although they were in favour of the initiative of local factory committees and Soviets, they were for the centralisation of these bodies in higher economic and political councils. What they saw, however, was that there was no choice between two ways of building the new society - the way of proletarian centralisation and the way of bureaucratic centralisation. The latter could only lead in a different direction altogether, and would inevitably culminate in a confrontation between the working class and a power which, even though born out of the revolution, had increasingly estranged itself from it.
This was a general truth, applicable to all phases of the revolutionary process. But the criticisms of the Left Communists also had a more immediate relevance. As we wrote in our study of the Russian communist left in International Review no.8.
“Kommunist’s defence of factory committees, Soviets and working class self-activity was important not because it provided a solution to the economic problems facing Russia, still less a formula for the ‘immediate construction of communism’ in Russia; the Lefts explicitly stated that ‘socialism cannot be put into operation in one country and a backward one at that’(cited by L Schapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, 1955, p137). The imposition of labour discipline by the state, the incorporation of the proletariat’s autonomous organs into the sate apparatus, were above all blows against the political domination of the Russian working class. As the ICC has often pointed out, the political power of the class is the only real guarantee of the successful outcome of the revolution. And this political power can only be exercised by the mass organs of the class - by its factory committees and assemblies, its Soviets, its militias. In undermining the authority of these organs, the policies of the Bolshevik leadership were posing a grave threat to the revolution itself. The danger signals so perceptively observed by the Left Communists in the early months of the revolution were to become even more serious during the ensuing Civil War period”.
***
In the immediate aftermath of the October insurrection, when the Soviet government was being formed, Lenin had a momentary hesitation before accepting his post as chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars. His political intuition told him that this would put a brake on is capacity to act in the vanguard of the vanguard - to be on the left of the revolutionary party, as he had been so clearly between April and October 1917. The position that Lenin adopted against the Lefts in 1918, though still firmly within the parameters of a living proletarian party, already reflected the pressures of state power on the Bolsheviks; interests of state, of the national economy, of the defence of the status quo, had already begun to conflict with the interests of the workers. In this sense there is a certain continuity between Lenin’s false arguments against the Lefts in 1918, and his polemic against the international communist left after 1920, which he also accused of infantilism and anarchism. But in 1918 the world revolution was still in the ascendant, and had it extended beyond Russia, it would have been far easier to correct its early mistakes. In subsequent articles, we will examine how the communist left responded to the real process of degeneration that took hold of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet power when the international revolution entered into reflux.
CDW
After Kosovo, East Timor; after East Timor, Chechnya. Barely has the blood from one massacre dried than it is flowing again somewhere else on the planet. At the same time, the African continent is in agony: the endemic wars in Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Congo, and other countries, have been joined by new massacres in Burundi and a confrontation between Rwanda and its Ugandan "allies", just as the war gets under way again in Angola. We are far indeed from the prophecies of President Bush, exactly ten years ago after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, predicting "a new world order of peace and prosperity". The only peace that has made any progress is the peace of the grave.
In reality, every day that passes brings further confirmation of capitalism’s plunge into chaos and decomposition.
The slaughter (thousands dead) and destruction (between 80% and 90% of houses burned down in some towns) that have ravaged East Timor are not new to that country. One week after Portugal granted it independence in May 1975, Indonesian troops invaded it, and a year later it became Indonesia’s 27th province. The killings and famine that followed left between 200-300,000 dead, out of a population of less than 1 million. However, this does not mean that today’s events in East Timor are simply a pale "remake" of the events of 1975.
There were already many bloody conflicts under way at the time (the Vietnam war only came to an end in 1975), but the systematic extermination of civilian populations solely on the basis of their ethnic origins was still an exception, rather than the rule it has become today. The 1994 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda is not an "African" peculiarity caused by the backwardness of the continent. The same tragedy took place in the heart of Europe only a few months ago, in Kosovo. And the repetition of these acts of barbarity in East Timor must be seen, not as a specific problem linked to a failed decolonisation 25 years ago, but as an expression of the barbarity of capitalism, of the chaos into which the system is plunging.
The clear distinction between the present period and the one that preceded the collapse of the Eastern bloc is perfectly illustrated by the new war which today is ravaging Chechnya. Ten years ago, the USSR lost the imperialist bloc which it had ruled with a hand of steel for four decades, in the space of a few weeks. This collapf a few weeks. This collapse was primarily the result of a catastrophic economic and political crisis which had led to the complete paralysis of the bloc’s dominant power. As such, it bore within it the disintegration of the USSR itself: the republics of the Baltic, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and even Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Byelorussia) all wanted to follow the example of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc. In 1992, the Russian Federation thus found itself alone. But Russia itself is constituted by multiple nationalities, and began to fall victim to the same process of disintegration, concretised by the war in Chechnya (1994-96). After 100,000 deaths on both sides, and the destruction of the country’s major towns, the war ended in a defeat for Russia and de facto independence for Chechnya.
In August, the entry of Islamic troops led by the Chechen Chamil Bessaiev and the Jordanian Khattab kicked off a new war in Chechnya. This war is a concentrate of the expressions of decomposition which affect the whole of capitalism.
On the one hand, it is part of the fallout from the collapse of the USSR which to date has been the most important expression of the decomposition of bourgeois society. On the other hand, it brings into play the rise of Islamic fundamentalism which reveals the decomposition of society in a whole series of countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria, etc), and whose counterpart in the advanced countries is the rise in urban violence, drug addiction and religious sects.
Moreover, if it is true as many sources say (and as is perfectly possible) that Bessaiev and his clique are in fact financed by the Mafia millionaire Berezovsky, the power behind Yeltsin’s throne, or that the explosions in Moscow were the work of the Russian secret services, then we would be confronted here with another expression of capitalist decomposition, which is far from being limited to Russia: the ever more frequent use of terrorism by the bourgeois states themselves (and not just by little uncontrolled groups), and the rise of corruption within them. At all events, even if the Russian "services" are not behind the bomb attacks, they have been used by the authorities to create a powerful sentiment of xenophobia in Russia and so to justify the new war against Chechnya.
The war is wanted by every player on the Russian political scene (except Lebed, who signed the August 1996 agreement with the Chechens), from Zhuganov’s Stalinists to the "democrats" behind Lujkov, the mayor of Moscow. That Russia’s entire political apparatus, despite the fact that most of them denounce the Yeltsin clique’s corruption and incompetence, should support the latter’s plunge into an adventure which can only aggravate country’s economic and political disaster is eloquent testimony to the chaos which is gripping it more and more.
A few months ago, the NATO offensive in ex-Yugoslavia was dressed in the fig-leaf of "humanitarian intervention". It took an intensive barrage of images of the distress of Kosovar refugees, and the mass graves discovered after the retreat of Serb troops from Kosovo to make the populations of the NATO countries forget that the first result of the military operation was to unleash the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo’s Albanians by Milosevic’s militia.
Today, hypocrisy is beating new records over East Timor. When the region was annexed by Suharto’s Indonesia in 1975-76, leading to the death of nearly two thirds of the population, the Western media, and still less the governments, barely noticed this tragedy. Although the UN General Assembly refused to recognise the annexation, the great Western powers offered unstinting support to the Suharto regime, which they saw as a bulwark of Western order in that part of the world. Clearly, the USA has particularly distinguished itself in its support for the butcher of Timor, in particularly with arms deliveries and training for the Indonesian special forces, who organised the anti-independence militias recruited from the Timorese underworld.
But it was not alone, since France and Britain have also continued to deliver weapons to Indonesia (the latter’s SAS also helped to train Indonesia’s crack troops). As for Australia, which today is presented as the "saviour" of the East-Timorese population, it was the only country to recognise the annexation of East Timor (for which it was rewarded in 1981 by a stake in East Timor’s offshore oil fields). Still more recently, in 1995, Australia signed a military co-operation treaty with Indonesia, aimed in particular at combating "terrorism" - which of course included the independentist guerrilla of East Timor.
Today, all the media have mobilised to reveal the barbarity which the East Timorese population has suffered ever since the massive vote for independence. And this media mobilisation has of course supported the intervention of the UN mandated forces under Australian command. As in Kosovo, military intervention is preceded by campaigns about "human rights". Once again, the humanitarian organisations (the swarms of NGOs) have arrived with the army’s baggage, making it possible to put over the lie that an armed intervention has no other aim than to defend human life (and of course not to defend imperialist interests).
However, while the massacre of the Albanians in Kosovo was perfectly foreseeable (and was in fact desired by the NATO leaders as a justification a posteriori of their intervention), that of the East Timorese was not only foreseeable but openly announced by its perpetrators, the anti-independence militias. Despite all the warnings, the UN sponsored the preparation of 30th May, and delivered the East Timorese to the slaughter.
When UN leaders asked why they had behaved with so little foresight, one of its diplomats calmly replied that "the UN is only the sum of its members". And indeed, for its main member, the USA, the discredit which overshadowed the UN was no bad thing. It was a means of restoring the balance after the end of the war in Kosovo, which had begun under the aegis of the USA with the NATO bombing campaign, only to end under the influence of the UN, which the US is less and less able to control because of the weight within it of other powers, like France, that contest US leadership.
The US made its position perfectly clear on a number of occasions: "There can be no question of sending UN troops in the short term. The Indonesians must themselves recover control of the various factions that exist within the population" (Peter Burleigh, aide to the US ambassador to the United Nations). This was well said, when it was blindingly obvious that the anti-independence "faction" was at the beck and call of the Indonesian army. "Just because we bombed Belgrade doesn’t mean that we are going to bomb Dili" (Samuel Berger, chief of the National Security Council at the White House). "East Timor is not Kosovo" (James Rubin, spokesman for the State Department).
These words at least have the merit of highlighting the hypocrisy of Clinton a few months previously, just after the end of the war in Kosovo, when he proclaimed:
"Whether you live in Africa, in Central Europe, or anywhere else, if anyone wants to commit crimes against an innocent civilian population, then he should be aware that as far as we are able, we will prevent him".
In fact, the USA’s refusal to intervene springs not just from a desire to cut the UN down to size. More fundamentally - and apart from the fact that the world’s greatest power did not want to "offend" its faithful ally in Djakarta (with which, on 25th August, it had just conducted joint manoeuvres around the theme of "aid and humanitarian assistance in disaster situations"!) - the USA’s aim was to support the "police operation" of the Indonesian state, which consisted of the massacres perpetrated by the militias.
Although the Indonesian army (the main power in the country) knew that it could not keep control of East Timor indefinitely (which is why it agreed to the intervention of the UN-mandated troops), the massacres it orchestrated after the referendum were intended to deliver a warning to whoever else throughout the vast Indonesian archipelago, such as the people of Northern Sumatra or the Moluccas, who might be tempted by the siren songs of the various nationalist movements. This objective of the Indonesian bourgeoisie is entirely shared by the bourgeoisie of the other states in the region (Thailand, Burma, Malaysia) which all have their own problems with ethnic minorities. It is also entirely shared by the American bourgeoisie, which is worried by the destabilisation of this region, coming on top of so many others.
The operation to "restore order" to East Timor had to happen, since anything else would have discredited the floods of "humanitarian" ideology of recent years. The United States delegated the job to Australia, its most solid ally in the region, which had the advantage of avoiding a direct conflict with Djakarta. For Australia, this represented a good opportunity to advance its own imperialist projects in the region (even at the cost of a temporary cooling of relations with Indonesia). For the US, it is vital to maintain a strong presence, through its allies, in this region, since it knows that the general development of the imperialist tensions contained in the present historic situation brings with it the threat of a growing influence of the other two powers which can claim to have a role to play in the region: Japan and China. region: Japan and China.
The same kind of geo-strategic concerns explain the attitude of the USA and other powers towards the present war in Chechnya, where the civilian population is being crushed under Russian bombs. There are already hundreds of thousands of refugees, and tens of thousands of families are homeless in the face of approaching winter. The Western leaders have spoken out at this "humanitarian disaster". Clinton has declared himself "concerned" at the situation in Chechnya, while Laurent Fabius, president of the French National Assembly, has said outright that all attempts to secede from the Russian Federation should be opposed:
"France supports the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, and condemns terrorism, operations of destabilisation, fundamentalism, which are all threats to democracy".
Although the media continue to play on the humanitarian string, there is a consensus, including amongst countries which are often in confrontation elsewhere (such as France and the USA) to avoid creating the slightest difficulty for Russia, and to let the massacre continue. In fact, every sector of the Western ruling class has an interest in avoiding a new aggravation of the chaos into which the largest country in the world is plunging, and moreover one that possesses thousands of nuclear warheads.
At two extremes of the vast Asian continent, that holds the biggest population on the planet, the world bourgeoisie is confronted with the growing threat of chaos. During the summer of 1997, this continent was subjected to the brutal attacks of the crisis, which had a particularly destabilising effect on certain countries, as we have seen in Indonesia (which although it is not part of Asia properly speaking is nonetheless in close proximity to the continent). At the same time, factors of chaos have been accumulating, especially with the deterioration of traditional conflicts such as that between Pakistan and India at the beginning of the summer 1999. In the end, the same danger threatens the whole Asian continent: the explosion of confrontations such as those engulfing the Caucasus today, the development of a situation similar to that of the African continent, but obviously with far more disastrous consequences for the rest of the planet.
oOo
The chaos affecting ever-wider areas of the world is obviously a matter of real concern for every sector of the world bourgeoisie, especially for the leaders of the great powers. But their concern is impotent. The desire to guarantee a minimum of stability is constantly coming up against the contradictory interests of the different national sectors of the ruling class. As a result, the advanced countries, the "great democracies", more often than not play the pyromaniac firemen, intervening to "stabilise" a situation that they have largely helped to create (as we have seen notably in ex-Yugoslavia, and today in East Timor).
But this spreading chaos in the inter-imperialist arena is itself only an expression of the general decomposition of bourgeois society: a decomposition which is the result of the ruling class’ inability to offer the slightest response - including that of World War as in 1914 and 1939 - to the insoluble crisis of its economy. A decomposition which is expressed in the whole of society rotting on its feet. A decomposition which is not reserved for backward countries, but which also affects the great bourgeois metropolises, as we have seen most recently in the awful rail accident of 5th October in London, capital of the world’s oldest capitalist power, and the nuclear accident of 30th September at Tokaimura in Japaember at Tokaimura in Japan, the country of "Total Quality" and "Zero Defect" manufacturing. A decomposition which will only come to an end with capitalism itself, when the proletariat overthrows this system which has become synonymous with chaos and barbarity.
Fabienne (10/10/1999)
At the end of 1999, a sort of euphoria reigns over "economic growth". In 1998, the collapse of the "tigers" and "dragons" ose of the "tigers" and "dragons" of South East Asia, and of Brazil, Venezuela, and Russia had provoked the fear of a recession, and even a "depression", a fear which today seems "unjustified" if we are to believe the great bourgeois media. The millennium seems to be ending on an optimistic note, which feeds the propaganda aimed at the working masses: the eulogy of capitalism, that "only viable economic system", ever ready to confront its crises. In short, the message boils down to: "capitalism is doing fine and that’s how things will continue".
Whereas in early 1999, some forecasts envisaged a "recession" in the developed countries, today’s figures reveal non-negligible growth rates, accompanied by a fall in unemployment - according to the official figures of course. We ourselves wrote:
"The plunge into a new open recession which will be still deeper than its predecessors - some or even talking of ‘depression’ - is silencing all the talk about lasting economic growth promised by the ‘experts’" (International Review no.96),
or again:
"Although the central countries of capitalism have escaped this fate [ie the bankruptcy of South East Asia] until now, they are certainly facing their worst recession since the war - in Japan it has already begun" ("Resolution on the International Situation", International Review no.97).
Did we adventure too boldly into an unjustified forecast? What is the real economic situation today?
We are being treated to a new sleight of hand, a new and enormous lie about the state of the world economy. At the level of some official figures, we are indeed seeing a slowdown in the world economy which is less rapid than expected, especially in the United States - a phenomenon which the hired hacks falsely describe as a "boom". But the continued seven or eight years of growth, even weak growth, without recession, has not been seen since World War II, and is the sign of a certain "prosperity". However, the figures are deceptive.
Firstly, the bourgeoisie possesses all kinds of tricks whereby it uses financial and monetary manipulation to hide the slowdown in the growth of real production. And while it is fashionable to proclaim the "continuation of uninterrupted growth" and to boast of the economy’s good health when addressing the population, and eessing the population, and especially the working class, in the more select circles of the ruling class, which needs a concrete not a mystified understanding of the state of the economy, the talk is already less optimistic. Some examples are worth citing:
"In the most optimistic scenarios, world growth is forecast to be 50% below last year’s projection, but it will remain at 2% in 1999, as it was in 1998. For the pessimists, growth practically disappears. The threat of a global recession in 2000 thus seems to us to be a real one (…).America booms while the old dragons are in depression: what an incredible turnaround! But let’s be clear: it is the swelling bubble on Wall Street which has saved expansion in the US, and therefore elsewhere in the world also. Historians will call it the ‘Greenspan bubble’. For some, the president of the Federal Reserve remains a magician. For others, he is a sorcerer’s apprentice, for the correction will be on the same scale as the error. It is already present in the experts’ ‘pessimistic’ scenarios: a 13% fall on Wall Street for the IMF, 30% for the OECD… Why? Because the rise on the stock market is absolutely unjustified by the tendency of the real economy, which is in decline" (L’Expansion, October 1999)., October 1999).
Or again:
"The Fed’s stimulus measures last autumn seemed to have averted an immediate catastrophe. Some economists and policymakers fear the easing of monetary policy has significantly increased the gaping imbalances that now dominate the US economy. By pumping up stock prices, it helped inflate an asset price bubble that now poses the greatest threat to global stability, say the critics. By allowing global spending to surge, it widened the already vast US current account deficit to more than $300 billion this year - 3% of gross domestic product. The Fed, of course, has already taken back two of the three quarter-point rate cuts of last year. But the gloomy view is that it is already too late to stop the imbalances ending in a smash. The current account deficit is undermining the dollar; once investors leave the US currency in droves, inflation will pick up speed and the stock market will collapse. That would provoke a new round of global financial instability, significantly damage domestic US demand, and perhaps even precipitate the world recession the G7 worked so hard to avoid a year ago" (Financial Times, October 1999).
Perhaps, one year ago, we were wrong to follow the forecasts of economic "recession". Nonetheless, we persist in our conviction that the crisis has got considerably worse. The bourgeoisie’s experts themselves are forced to recognise it, in their own way: there is no perspective of any lasting improvement of the economic situation. On the contrary, everything points to new tremors on the way, whose cost will as always fall on the proletariat.
Moreover, the recession is far from being the only expression of the capitalist crisis. We have already pointed out the mistake of only taking into account the figures for "growth" provided by the bourgeoisie, which are based on
"the growth of the crude figures of production, without any concern for what was being produced (in reality, mainly weapons), or without asking who was going to pay for it" (International Review no.59, 4th Quarter 1989, "Resolution on the International Situation").
At the time, we pointed to all the other elements which allow us to measure the true gravity of the crisis:
"the dizzying growth in the debt of the under-developed countries (…) the acceleration of the process of creating industrial deserts (…) the enormous aggravation of unemployment (…) the increasing number of calamities hitting the under-developed countries" (ibid.).
Today, not only are all these elements still present, they have got worse. And factors such as debt (not to mention "disasters" in terms of health or safety) are now affecting the heart of industrialised capitalism as well as the peripheral countries.
The US trade deficit, officially estimated at $240 billion, is beating every record, and will widen to more than 3% of GDP this year (see above). Developing domestic consumption, which has been the most "spectacular" factor in this "growth" is not based on rising wages, since despite all the fine talk the tendency during recent years has been for wages to fall. It is based above all on income from shares, whose distribution has been "democratised" (even if this has been above all in the direction of company management, in the form of stock options).
This income has been substantial, because it has been linked to the constant "record-breaking" rise on Wall Street. This growth in consumption is thus extremely volatile, since the slightest downturn on the stock market will be a disaster for those workers a large part of whose income or pensions comes from shares. The "growth rates" hide this fragility, just as they mask a new historical aberration - from the economic standpoint: the fact that today, the rate of savings in the USA is negative, in other words American households overall have more debts than savings! This has not escaped the "specialists":
"American industry is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is incompatible with the rise in share values on Wall Street, whose valuation is at its highest since 1926: expected profit is higher than at any time since the war. All this is untenable, but vital in maintaining the confidence of households and the distribution of the impression of wealth which encourages them to consume more and more on credit. The savings rate has become negative, a phenomenon unseen since the Great Depression. How can the (inevitable) touchdown be made a soft one?" (L’Expansion, op.cit.).
The official indicator of recession - negative growth of production - negative growth in production - has once again been hidden, the recession has been pushed back with the same palliatives: debt, a headlong flight into credit, and speculation (in shares, in this case). And another symbol of this headlong flight which no longer has any tie to the real production of wealth, is that the share prices which have risen the most in recent months have been those of companies offering access to the Internet, which are basically selling hot air! The situation of the world economy is thus more fragile and pregnant with the next "purges" which will once again leave masses of workers on the street.
Finally, inasmuch as the "recession", in other words a negative growth rate, is for the bourgeoisie a symbol of the crisis of its system, it is also a factor of destabilisation and sometimes even panic within capitalist circles which serves to amplify the phenomenon still further. This is one reason that the bourgeoisie has done everything it can to avoid such a situation.
Another reason, perhaps still more important, is the need to hide the system’s bankruptcy from the working class; as the specialists put it, it is
"vital in maintaining the confidence of households and the distribution of the impression of wealth which encourages them to consume more and more on credit".
When the "growth rate" collapses, it jeopardises all the propaganda about the validity of the capitalist system; it encourages the class to struggle, and above all to think, and consequently calls into question the whole system. This is what the bourgeoisie fears more than anything else.
For the millions of proletarians thrown onto the street in the so-called "emerging" countries (like those in South East Asia, which will never recover from the acceleration of the crisis in 1997-98), or for the pauperised masses of the so-called "developing" countries on the capitalist periphery (in Africa, Asia, Latin America), but also for the increasing numbers left out of the "growth" in the industrialised countries, there is no need for great theoretical demonstrations. They already suffer, in their day-to-day living conditions, the bankruptcy of a system which is increasingly incapable of providing them with the most basic means of subsistence.
Some see in this a sort of "natural" fatality, a law according to which the strong are called on to survive, while poverty and death for the "weak" is no more than the "normal" result of this "law". This is obviously nonsense. Today, as it has done since World War I, capitalism is suffocating from a crisis of over-production. Potentially, society today disposes of all industrial and technical means to provide in abundance for the whole of humanity, and has done ever since the beginning of the 20th Century. The millions of workers in the industrialised countries are suffering unemployment and falling living conditions, the tens of millions of human beings in the peripheral countries of capitalism are hurled into direst poverty by the proliferation of local wars, because of the survival of this capitalist system based on the law of profit and the accumulation of capital.
Up to the end of the 19th Century, the developed of capitalism, albeit already in "blood and filth", still corresponded to an increase in the satisfaction of human needs. With the First World War, it entered its period of historical decadence and decline, and ever since has dragged the world down in a spiral of crisis-war-reconstruction, followed by a new and deeper crisis, a new and bloodier war, a new economic crisis; the latest expression of the crisis has lasted for thirty years, and the threat of planetary destruction is still real indeed, even if no longer in the form of a world-wide nuclear war since the two great imperialist blocs disappeared a decade ago.
This irreversThis irreversible decline of the capitalist system does not mean that the ruling class will declare itself bankrupt, give up and go home, as might happen in the case of an individual capitalist company. The whole history of the 20th Century is there to prove it - and especially world capitalism’s "solution" to the Great Crash of 1929: World War II. The capitalists are ready to drag the whole of humanity down to destruction in their merciless struggle for the pie of the world market. And although in thirty years of crisis they have been unable to draw the great masses of workers into war, they have endlessly cheated with the laws of capitalist development themselves in order to keep the system alive, and made the workers and unemployed pay the price for the death-agony of their moribund economy.
Against the ever stronger attacks on their living conditions, understanding the economic crisis - its irreversibility, its constantly worsening dynamic - is an essential factor in the development of an awareness of the vital necessity of the class struggle, not only in self-defence against capitalism, but also to open up the only real perspective left to humanity: the communist revolution, the real one, not the hideous face of Stalinist state capitalism which the bourgeoisie has offered as a travesty of communism.
MG
After some promising indications of a mutual recognition and debate among the groups of the communist left over the past few years, and even a common public meeting on the Russian Revolution between the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party and the ICC in Britain, the recent Nato war in the Balkans came as a sort of test of the capacity of these groups to strengthen their influence through some kind of common defence of internationalism. Unfortunately the groups refused an appeal by the ICC for a common declaration against the imperialist carnage in Kosovo. An article in International Review 97 gave a preliminary balance sheet of the reactions to this appeal.
Here, in this article, we will reply briefly to the idea put forward by the IBRP that the ICC's supposed ‘idealist' political method justified such a refusal.
In their reply to our appeal they say:
"...When you write in your leaflet "Because the world working class, ever since the massive strikes of May '68 in France has developed its struggle and refused to submit to the logic of capitalism, it has been able to prevent a third World War from being unleashed", you show that you've remained tied to your schemas that we've already characterised as idealist and which are today particularly inapt to the need for clarity and theoretic-political solidarity required fro intervention towards the class".
Now, idealism would be a profound defect for a revolutionary organisation. Idealism is one important, if not the only, philosophical rampart of bourgeois ideology. Finding the ultimate driving force of history in the ideas, morals, and truths that are produced by human consciousness, idealism is one of the fundamental bases for the various ideologies of the ruling class that obscure their exploitation of the working classes and deny it any real capacity for its liberation. The division of the world into classes and the possibility and necessity of the communist revolution to overturn this world can only be understood by the materialist conception of history. The history of thinking is explained by the history of being and not the other way around.
But why is the conception of the "historic course" that takes a view on the balance of class forces over a given historical period and draws the conclusion that the perspective is not open to a generalised imperialist war today, but is still open to immense class confrontations.... idealist'?
The Communist Workers' Organisation's (the IBRP in Britain) letter to the ICC refusing a joint public meeting in Britain on the war tries to explain:
"For you it seems a small point but for us it only underlines how far you are not relating to reality. We are absolutely aghast at the turn events are taking with so little proletarian response. ‘Socialism or barbarism' is a slogan which has absolute meaning in this crisis. But how can you maintain that the working class is holding back war when the evidence of all that has happened in Yugoslavia shows how free a hand the imperialists (big and little) have got?...The war is now only 800 miles from London (as the crow flies). Does it have to get to Brighton before you readjust your perspectives? The war is a serious step towards general barbarism. We cannot stand together to fight for a communist alternative if you are suggesting that the working class is a force to be reckoned with in the present situation".
This is hardly a sufficient justification for the serious charge of ‘idealism' since it reduces an entire historical question to a problem of ‘sound common sense'. All we can do is reply by questioning the consistency of the IBRP's own interpretation of events in their short and allegedly sober exposition of reality. At the beginning of the paragraph two fundamental historical tendencies are at work: socialism and barbarism apply ‘absolutely' to the situation. But by the end of it only one tendency - capitalist barbarism is taken into account. Socialism, and its historical vehicle, the proletariat, has disappeared from the reckoning. Only the IBRP are left in the world holding the torch for the communist alternative.
While the ICC has attempted at least to understand the historic weight of the proletariat in the Balkans War without in the least minimising the seriousness of the situation, the IBRP (appropriately speaking from the empiricist homeland of Bacon and Locke[1]), would rather judge events by their geographic proximity to London or Brighton. The proletariat is supposedly not a "force to be reckoned with in the present situation" because there are no immediate tangible facts to prove it, it cannot be empirically verified. The IBRP can't see it, smell it, taste it, or hear it - therefore it doesn't exist. And anybody who says it does is an idealist. This is the limit of the IBRP's critique.
The counter-tendencies to the apparent absence of the proletariat - particularly the lack of adhesion by Western European and North American working classes to the war - are consequently ignored as factors. The latent tendencies in events that may only give a negative imprint on the situation, like footprints in the sand must, however, be taken into account in order to be consistent with the wider historical reality.
The method which sees events as simple facts without all their historical interconnections is only materialist in the metaphysical sense:
"And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. ‘His communication is ‘yea, yea, nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil'. For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. The metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the object, invariably bumps into a limit sooner or later, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions because in the presence of individual things it forgets their connections, because in the presence of their existence it forgets their coming into being and passing away; because in their state of rest it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees" (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific).
Empiricism - sound common sense - despite all these bumps, always equates historical materialism and its dialectical method with idealism because Marxism doesn't, or shouldn't, take facts at their face value.
The IBRP is bumping into the history of the revolutionary movement when it terms the ‘schema' of the historical course idealist. Was the left fraction of the Italian CP, which published Bilan during the 1930s, guilty of idealism when it developed this concept to determine whether history was marching toward war or revolution?[2] It's a question the IBRP should answer since Bilan was intrinsic part of the history of the Italian Left within which the IBRP situates itself.
But if the IBRP thinks itself able to use historical materialism to put forward a supposedly obvious factual truth, it is also capable of using mechanical schemas to invent facts which don't exist. According to its internationalist leaflet against the war, NATO's main aim was to "ensure the control of the oil of the Caucasus". How has the IBRP arrived at such a fantasy? By applying the schema which says that the motive power behind imperialism today is the search of economic profit "to ensure the control and management of oil, of oil revenue, and ot the financial and commercial markets".
This may be a materialist schema, but it is mechanical materialism. Although the main factor behind modern imperialism remains the basic economic contradictions of capitalism, this schema ignores the political and strategic factors which have become predominant in the conflicts between nation-states.
If the IBRP adopts an empiricist approach when confronted with the weight of the working class on the scales of history at any conjuncture, on the broader and more decisive questions it shows that it is perfectly capable to see in a Marxist way what sound common sense cannot. Their leaflet on the war - like the leaflets of other groups of the communist left - revealed that behind the apparently united humanitarian aims of the great powers in Kosovo a wider and unavoidable imperialist confrontation was taking place. They showed that the pacificists and leftists, despite their loud declamations against violence were in reality stoking the fires of war. Finally, although they couldn't see the proletariat as a force in the present situation, they nevertheless asserted that the working class struggle leading to the communist revolution was the only means of escaping the worsening barbarism.
The common internationalist proletarian positions of the different left communist groups on the imperialist war, shared by both the ICC and the IBRP, were eminently Marxist and thus faithful to the method of historical materialism.
So here at least the accusation of idealism against the ICC completely collapses.
In his letter to Wilhelm Bracke in 1875 that introduced his Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx says that "Every step of a real movement is more important than a dozen programmes". And this famous sentence constitutes a reference point for the united action of revolutionaries. It is a restatement of the equally famous Theses On Feuerbach of 1845 demonstrating that historical materialism is not another contemplative philosophy but a weapon of proletarian action.
"The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionary practice" and "The philosophers have only interpreted the world the point is to change it".
In his introductory letter and critique Marx sharply criticises the unity programme of the Social Democratic Party to be and the concessions made to the Lassalleans.[3] He deems an "agreement for action against the common enemy" to be of the highest importance and suggests it would have been better to postpone the writing of the programme "until such time as it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity" (The First International and After, p340, Penguin 1974). Extreme differences were thus no barrier to united action, but on the contrary were to be confronted within this context.
As we have already put forward in our appeal, Lenin and other representatives of the Marxist left applied this same method to the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915 where they signed its ringing manifesto against the first imperialist war. And yet they had expressed criticisms and sharp disagreements with its insufficiencies and submitted their own statement to a vote, where it was rejected by the majority.[4]
The IBRP has already been to work to learnedly demonstrate that such a historical example of the unity of revolutionaries in the past took place in different circumstances and therefore doesn't apply to the present situation. In other words the IBRP don't want to see the threads of the past in the present but as a finished episode that is only relevant for its own time for historians to ponder over. The different circumstances in which revolutionary unity took place in the past instead of proving their inapplicability to the present revolutionary movement, actually emphasise their contemporary relevance all the more.
The most striking thing about Marx and Lenin's advocation of common work between revolutionaries in the two examples given is that differences between the Eisenachers and the Lassalleans on the one hand, and between the Bolsheviks and the socialists at Zimmerwald on the other were far more severe than the differences between the groups of today's communist left.
Marx advocated common work with a tendency that advocated a "free state", "equal rights", "the just distribution of the proceeds of labour" and talked about the "iron law of wages", and other bourgeois prejudices. Zimmerwald was a common stand against the imperialist war between the real internationalists who advocated a civil war against the imperialist war and called for a new International, and pacifists, centrists and other waverers who advocated a reconciliation with the social patriots and questioned the revolutionary slogans of the left. In today's communist milieu on the other hand there are no concessions to democracy or humanitarian illusions, there is a common denunciation of the war as imperialist, a common denunciation of the pacifism and chauvinism of the left, and a common commitment to the "civil war", in other words to opposing to imperialist war the perspective and necessity of the proletarian revolution.
Lenin signed the Zimmerwald Manifesto, with all its inadequacies and inconsistencies, in order to advance the real movement. In an article written immediately after the first Zimmerwald conference, he said: "It is a fact that the [Zimmerwald Manifesto] is a step forward towards an effective struggle against opportunism, towards a break and a split with it. It would be sectarianism to refuse to take this step forward with the minority of Germans, Swedes, French, Norwegians and Swiss, when we keep our full liberty and possiblity to criticise its inconsistency and to try to go further. It would be poor military tactics to refuse to march with the growing international movement of protest against social-chauvinism, on the pretext that the movement is too slow, that it has taken ‘only' one step forward, that it is ready and inclined to take a step backward and look for a conciliation with the old International Socialist Bureau" (Lenin, A first step, October 1915)
Karl Radek arrived at the same conclusion in another article on the conference: "... the left decided to vote the Manifesto for the following reasons. It would be doctrinaire and sectarian to separate ourselves from those forces which have begun, to a certain extent, to struggle against social-patriotism in their own countries when they have to confront the furious attacks of the social-patriots" (from The Zimmerwald Left).
There is no doubt that revolutionaries today should act against the development of imperialist war with the same method as Lenin and the Zimmerwald left against World War I. The central priority is the advance of the revolutionary movement as a whole. The main difference between conditions then and today, is that today there is a far greater convergence of positions between the internationalist groups than there was between the left and the centre at Zimmerwald,[5] and so a much greater justification and necessity for common action.
A common internationalist declaration and other expressions of united activity against the Nato war would of course have increased enormously the political presence of left communism by comparison with the impact of the different groups taken separately. It would have been a material antidote to the nationalist divisions imposed by the bourgeoisie. The common intention to advance the real movement would have created a stronger pole of attraction to elements in search of communist positions who are at present disappointed by the confusing dispersion of the different groups. And the pooling of resources would have had a wider impact on the working class as a whole. Above all, it would have marked a historical reference point of revolutionaries in the future, as of course did the Zimmerwald Manifesto that sent a beacon of hope to future revolutionaries in the trenches. How are we to describe the political method which refuses such common action? The answer is given by Lenin and Radek: doctrinaire sectarianism.[6]
If we have restricted ourselves to two examples, it is for reasons of space not any shortage of examples of common action by revolutionaries in the past. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd Internationals were all formed with the participation of elements who did not even accept the main premises of Marxism, such as the anarchists of the 1st, or the French and Spanish anarcho-syndicalists who defended internationalism and the Russian revolution and so were welcomed into the 3rd.
Nor should we forget that the Spartacist Karl Liebnecht, recognised by the whole Marxist left as the most heroic defender of the proletariat in the first world war, was an idealist in the real sense of the term, since he rejected the dialectical materialist method in favour of Kantianism.
Most of today's groups imagine that by uniting even for a minimum of activity they will be obscuring or diluting the important differences they have with the other groups. Nothing could be further from the truth.
After the formation of the German Social Democratic Party and after Zimmerwald, there was not an opportunist diluting of the differences of its separate constituents but conversely a sharpening of them and a confirmation in practice of the positions of the clearest tendencies. The Marxists came to predominate completely in the German party and then in the second International over the Lassalleans after 1875.
After Zimmerwald, the intransigent positions of the left, which was in a minority, prevailed completely in the subsequent years as the revolutionary wave beginning in Russia 1917 confirmed their policy in the heat of events, while the centrists eventually fell back into the arms of the social patriots.
Yet without testing their positions in the framework, however limited, of a common action, their future success would not have been possible. The Communist International was indebted to the Zimmerwald left.[7]
These examples from the history of the revolutionary movement only confirm another well known second thesis on Feuerbach:
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth , i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of think ing that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question".
The groups of the communist left that deny a practical framework of their common movement within which its differences can be confronted are tending to reduce their disputes on Marxist theory to a scholastic level. Although these groups have the idea of proving their positions through practice in the wider class struggle this objective will remain a vain hope if they cannot put their own house in order - and verify their positions in practical association with other internationalist tendencies.
A recognition of a minimum of common activity is the basis on which the differences can develop be confronted, tested and clarified to those militants who are emerging from the ranks of the proletariat particularly in countries where the Communist left has no organised presence yet. One of the most frustrating proofs of this view, a contrario, is in Internationalist Communist n°17, the review of the IBRP, which is more or less dedicated to expressing its differences with the ICC for the benefit of searching elements in Russia and elsewhere who are unclear on this question. But in its rush on the one hand to minimise or deny the common positions of our two tendencies, and on the other tits refusal to take our mutual differences seriously enough, the reader probably ends up more confused than ever. When we read: "We criticise the ICC (...) for expecting what they call the ‘proletarian political milieu' to take up and debate their increasingly outlandish political concerns" (IC 17) then we can wonder whether the internationalist milieu has even reached the scholastic level of debate due to a fear of confronting opposing views. Today's movement needs to reappropriate the confidence of the Marxists of the past in their ideas.
The accusation that the ICC is idealist doesn't hold water. We await at least more developed critiques on this score. But it should be clear that the materialist method of the Marxist revolutionary movement demands a common response to the worsening international situation and the increasing demands it places on the working class. The communist left may not have been up to all of its responsibilities over Kosovo - but the coming events will force it to bring them into sharper focus.
Como 11/9/1999
[1] Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704) were two English materialist philosophers.
[2] In an article with the explicit title, "The course towards war", this is how Bilan n°29 of March 1936 posed the problem of the historic course: "Those in government today (...) have a right to the eternal gratitude of the capitalist regime for having taken to its ultimate conclusion the work of crushing the world proletariat. By disembowelling the only force capable of creating a new society, they have opened the door to inevitable war, the final expression of the internal contradictions of the capitalist regime (...) When will war break out? Nobody can say. What is certain is that everything is ready for it". Another article in the same issue returns to the question by clarifying the preconditions of the imperialist war: "We are perfectly convinced that the socialo-centrist policy of betrayal which has reduced the proletariat to class impotence in the ‘democratic' countries, and fascism which has achieved the same result by terror, have laid the vital foundations for the unleashing of a new world-wide carnage. The degeneration of the USSR and the CI is one of the most alarming symptoms of the course towards the abyss of war". In passing, it is worth reminding - or informing - the IBRP and the Bordigist groups what was the perspective for action that Bilan proposed to the different communist forces that had survived: "The only response that these communists can oppose to the events we have lived through, the only political expression which could serve as a milestone on the road to the victory of tomorrow, would be an International Conference which would tie together the few poor membranes that are left of the brain of the world working class". Our concern to determin what is the historic course today, and our appeal for a common defence of internationalism, are completely within the tradition of the Italian Left, whether the ignorant like it or not.
[3] The German Social Democratic Party was formed from the unification of two great currents: one petty-bourgeois, known as the Lassalleans from the name of their leader Lassalle, the other marxist and known as the Eisenachers from the name of the town where their tendency created the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1869.
[4] We insisted on the validity, for today's internationalist camp, of the Zimmerwald left's unity policy in International Review n°44 (1986).
[5] In fact, we could even say that the differences within the Zimmerwald left itself were greater than those within today's internationalist camp. In particular, there were at the time important differences on whether national liberation was still possible, and therefore whether the slogan of "nations' right to self-determination" was still part of marxist policy. The clear-cut and opposing positions of Lenin on the one hand, Trotsky and Radek on the other, over the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, sharply revealed the divisions within the Zimmerwald left. Within the Bolshevik Party itself, there were significant differences on national self-determination, with Bukharin and Piatakov defending its obsolescence, as well as on the slogans of "revolutionary defeatism" and the "United States of Europe".
[6] Lenin's policy of internationalist unity was not limited to the Zimmerwald movement. He also applied it within Russian social-democracy, encouraging common work with a non-Bolshevik group like Trotsky's Nache Slovo. And if these efforts were unsuccessful - until the Russian revolution - it was because of Trotsky's own hesitations and sectarianism at the time.
[7] "The Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences had their importance at a time when it was necessary to unite all the proletarian elements ready in one form or another to protest against the imperialist slaughter (...) The Zimmerwald grouping has had its day. Everything that was really revolutionary in the Zimmerwald grouping passes over to and joins the Communist International" (Declaration by the participants at the Zimmerwald conference to the Congress of the CI). The declaration was signed by Rakovsky, Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Platten.
Presentation
Ten years ago exactly, there took place one of the most important events of the second half of the 20th century: the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc and of Europe’s Stalinist regimes, including the largest of them, the USSR itself.
The event was used by the ruling class to unleash one of the most massive and pernicious campaigns ever directed against the working class. By dishonestly identifying disintegrating Stalinism with communism, by pretending that the bankruptcy and barbarity of the Stalinist regimes was an inevitable consequence of the proletarian revolution, the bourgeoisie aimed to turn the working class away from any revolutionary perspective, and to deal a decisive blow to the working class struggle. The document reprinted below was published as a supplement to our territorial press in January 1990, fundamentally with a view to fighting the bourgeoisie’s campaign of lies, whose effects can still be felt today.
When this text was written, the chaos overtaking the USSR and the Stalinist regimes was still far from being what it is today. In particular, the USSR was still formally in existence, led by the Communist Party of Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been trying since 1985 to recover the situation through his policy of "perestroika" (restructuring). However, from the summer of 1989 the situation accelerated, notably with the formation of the Solidarnosc-led government in Poland at the end of August, the increasing defiance of Soviet authority by the various governments of Central Europe (eg Hungary), as well as the rise of nationalism in the republics of the USSR itself. Our organisation analysed the significance and the implications of these events in International Review no.59:
"The convulsions shaking Poland today, though they may take on an extreme form in this country, are by no means specific to it. All the countries under Stalinist regimes are in the same dead-end. Their economies have been particularly brutally hit by the world capitalist crisis, not only because of their backwardness, but because they are totally incapable of adapting to an exacerbation of inter-capitalist competition. The attempts to improve their competitiveness by introducing some of the ‘classical’ norms of capitalist management have only succeeded in provoking a still greater shambles, as can be seen from the utter failure of ‘perestroika’ in the USSR (…)What is in store for the Stalinist regimes is thus not a ‘peaceful democratisation’, still less an economic ‘recovery’. With the deepening of the world-wide capitalist crisis, these countries have entered a period of convulsions to an extent unheard-of in a past which is nonetheless rich in violent upheavals" ("Capitalist convulsions and workers’ struggles").
One week later (5th October), a text adopted by the ICC’s central organ was put up for discussion throughout the organisation, trying to analyse the situation in greater depth and to determine its perspectives:
"Already, the Eastern bloc is in a state of growing dislocation (…) In this zone, the centrifugal tendencies are so strong that they go out of control as soon as they have the opportunity (…) We find a similar phenomenon in the peripheral republics of the USSR (…) The [dynamic of the ] nationalist movements which today are profiting from a loosening of central control by the Russian party (…) is towards separation from Russia.
In the end, if the central power in Moscow does not react, then we will see the explosion, not just of the Russian bloc, but of its dominant power. The Russian bourgeoisie, which today rules the world’s second power, would find itself at the head of a second-rate power, a good deal weaker than Germany for example (…)
But however the situation in the Eastern bloc evolves, the events that are shaking it today mean the historic crisis, the definitive collapse of Stalinism, this monstrous symbol of the most terrible counter-revolution the proletariat has ever known. The greatest lie in history is being stripped bare today.
In these countries, an unprecedented period of instability, convulsions, and chaos has begun, whose implications go far beyond their frontiers. In particular the weakening, which will continue, of the Russian bloc, opens the gates to a destabilisation of the whole system of international relations and imperialist constellations which emerged from World War II with the Yalta Agreements" ("Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern countries", in International Review no.60).
One month later, 9th November 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had symbolised the world’s division between Western and Eastern blocs. It signed the latter’s death sentence, and completely overturned the world order that had emerged from Yalta, thereby implying the eventual disappearance of the Western bloc itself:
"The disintegration of the Eastern bloc, its disappearance as a major consideration in inter-imperialist conflict, implies a radical calling into question of the Yalta Agreements, and the spread of instability to all the imperialist constellations formed on that basis, including the Western bloc which the USA has dominated for the last 40 years. The latter will in turn see its foundations being called into question. During the 1980s, the cohesion of the Western countries against the Russian bloc was an important factor in the latter’s collapse; today, the cement for that cohesion no longer exists. Although it is impossible to foresee exactly the rhythm and forms that this will take, the perspective today is one of growing tension between the great powers of the Western bloc…" ("Collapse of the Eastern bloc, the definitive bankruptcy of Stalinism", in International Review no.60, 19/11/1989).
At the same time, an impressive chain reaction swept away regimes which had governed the countries of the Soviet glacis for four decades:
on 10th November, Todor Jivkov was sacked after governing Bulgaria since 1954;
3rd December saw the scuppering of the East German Communist Party;
on 22nd December, the Ceaucescu regime in Romania was overthrown;in Romania was overthrown;
on 29th December, the long-standing dissident Vaclav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia.
This situation was the basis for the text we are publishing below. But Stalinism’s disintegration did not end there. The USSR’s disappearance was to follow that of its bloc. By early 1990, the Baltic countries declared for independence. Worse still, on 16th July Ukraine, the USSR’s second republic, tied to Russia by centuries of history, declared its sovereignty. It was followed by Belarus, then by all the Caucasian and Central Asian republics.
Gorbachev tried to save what he could by proposing the adoption of a treaty of the Union (planned to be signed on 20th August, 1991), which would maintain a minimum of political unity among the various components of the USSR. On 18th August the Party’s old guard, with the support of a part of the police and military apparatus, tried to oppose this surrender of the USSR. The attempted coup d’Etat was a lamentable failure, and immediately prompted almost all the federated republics to declare their independence. On 21st December, the Community of Independent States was formed, an extremely vague structure which brought together some of the component parts of the USSR. On 25th December, Gorbachev, its last outgoing president, declared its dissolution. The Russian flag replaced the red flag floating over the Kremlin.
As the USSR fell apart, the disappearance of its bloc brought with it, not the "new era of peace and prosperity" predicted by US President Bush, but a series of bloody convulsions, the most important being the Gulf War against Iraq in January 1991, and the wars in Yugoslavia whose latest episode in Kosovo during the spring of 1999 marked a new step in military barbarism at the heart of Europe and only an hour from its main industrial centres.
The upheavals the world has been through since 1989 and the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the enormous ideological campaigns which have accompanied them (both on the failure of "communism", but also the "humanitarian" campaigns which have accompanied every episode of an ever-increasing barbarism), have all provoked a disorientation within the working class, a retreat both in its consciousness and its self-confidence. This does not call into question the general perspective for the present historic period of increasing class confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat, as we show in the report on the class struggle adopted by the ICC’s 13th Congress and published in this issue of the Review. However, if the proletariat is to resume its forward march, it will have to attack the formidable mystifications developed by the ruling class since 1989. It is to contribute to this necessary effort of the class that we are republishing here our document from January 1990.
FM, 15/9/1999
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The proletariat faced with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the bankruptcy of Stalinism
In a few months, the entire bloc of the capitalist world dominated by Russian imperialism has fallen apart, revealing the irreparable bankruptcy of a system maintained for almost half a century by the bloodiest terror mankind has ever known.
Not only have these events, at the very gates of Western Europe, overturned the entire world order as it emerged from World War II; today, they are the object of a deafening media campaign on the supposed "bankruptcy of communism". Like famished vultures, every fraction of the "liberal" and "democratic" ruling class is tearing at the carrion of Stalinism in order to perpetuate the dirty lie that Stalinism is the same as communism, that the Stalinist dictatorship was contained in the programme of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and that when it comes down to it Stalinism was nothing but the logical continuation of the proletarian revolution of October 1917. In short, they aim to drive home the idea that such barbarity was the inevitable price that the working class must pay for having dared to defy the capitalist order and to call it into question 70 years ago.
In its last gasps, Stalinism is thus rendering one last service to capitalism. The most powerful, the most machiavellian, the most hypocritical bourgeoisie is profiting from its death-throes. Not a day passes without the hired hacks of the ruling class exploiting to the hilt every convulsion that shakes the Soviet glacis, the better to vaunt the merits of "democracy" and "liberal" capitalism, presented as "the best of all possible worlds". A world of freedom and plenty, the only one worth fighting for, the only one which can appease all the suffering imposed on the population by the "communist" system.
Stalinism’s death is an ideological victory for the Western bourgeoisie. For the moment, the proletariat must roll with the blow. But it must understand that Stalinism has never been anything other than the most caricatured form of capitalist rule. The workers must understand that "democracy" is only the most hypocritical mask for the bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship, and that it would be a tragedy if they let themselves be taken in by its siren song. They must understand that - West or East - capitalism has nothing to offer the exploited masses but growing poverty and barbarism, ending in the destruction of the planet. They must understand that there is no hope for humanity outside the class struggle of the international proletariat, which by overthrowing capitalism will make it possible to build a real world-wide communist society, a society rid of crises, wars, barbarity and oppression in every form.
***
All the deafening propaganda that we are being served today around the theme of democracy’s "victory" over "communist" totalitarianism is no accident. In reality, the bourgeoisie has a very precise aim when it hammers home the lie that Stalinism was the inevitable result of the revolution of October 1917: by disgusting the workers with any idea of communism, a capitalism at bay hopes to turn the proletariat away from the final goal of the last 20 years’ class struggle against capitalism’s incessant attacks against its living standards.
The total opposition between Stalinism and the October Revolution
The ruling class’ claim that Stalinist barbarism is the legitimate heir to the October revolution, that Stalin only took a system worked out by Lenin to its logical conclusion, is a LIE. All the hired hacks, historians, and ideologues know very well that there is no continuity between proletarian October and Stalinism. They all know that this reign of terror was the work of the counter-revolution which established itself on the ruins of the Russian revolution with the defeat of the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23. It was the isolation of the Russian proletariat after the bloody suppression of the revolution in Germany which dealt the final blow to the power of the workers’ Soviets in Russia.
History has tragically confirmed what marxism declared at the very dawn of the workers’ movement: the communist revolution can only be international.
"The communist revolution (…) will not be a purely national revolution; it will take place at the same time in the civilised countries (…) it will have a considerable effect on all other countries of the planet, and will completely transform and accelerate their development. It is a universal revolution; consequently, it will have a universal terrain"(Engels, Principles of communism, 1847).
Lenin, waiting for the aid of the revolution in Europe, was only keeping faith with the principles of communism and proletarian internationalism when he expressed himself in these terms:
"The Russian revolution is only a detachment of the world socialist army, and the success and triumph of the revolution that we have carried out will depend on the action of that army. This is a fact that nobody amongst us forgets (…) The Russian proletariat is aware of its own revolutionary isolation, and it sees clearly that that the indispensable and fundamental condition for its own victory is the united intervention of the workers of the entire world"(Lenin, Report to the conference of factory committees of Moscow province, 23rd July 1918).
Internationalism has always been the cornerstone of the working class’ struggles, and of its revolutionary organisations’ programmes. This is the programme that Lenin and the Bolsheviks always defended. Armed with this programme, the proletariat was able to take power in Russia and so force the bourgeoisie to put an end to World War I. In doing so, it declared its own alternative: against the generalised barbarity of capitalism, transformation of the imperialist war into class war.
Calling this essential principle of proletarian internationalism into question has always been synonymous with quitting the proletarian camp, and going over to capital.
As the Russian revolution collapsed from the inside, Stalinism made this break in 1925. When Stalin put forward his thesis of "building socialism in one country" this was to be the basis for the most appalling counter-revolution in human history. Henceforth, the USSR was "Soviet" only in name. The dictatorship through the power of the workers’ councils (Soviets) was to be transformed into the merciless dictatorship of the Party-State over the proletariat.
By abandoning internationalism, Stalin, that worthy representative of the state bureaucracy, signed the revolution’s death-sentence. Under Stalin’s orders, the policy of the degenerating IIIrd International was to become a counter-revolutionary policy of the defence of capitalist interests. So, in China in 1927 the Communist Party followed Stalin’s instructions and dissolved itself into the Kuomintang (the Chinese nationalist party). In doing so, it disarmed the proletarian uprising in Shanghai and its own revolutionary militants, to deliver them bound hand and foot to the bloody repression of Chang kai Shek, declared an "honorary member" of the Stalinised International for the occasion.
The Stalinist counter-revolution then directed its bloody hatred against the developing Left Opposition to this nationalist policy: all those Bolsheviks who still tried, come what may, to defend the principles of October, were excluded from the party in the USSR, deported in their thousands, tracked down by the GPU, and finally executed during the great Moscow trials (with the wholehearted support and benediction of all the "democratic" countries!).
This is how the regime of Stalinist terror was set up, on the ruins of the 1917 October revolution. Thanks to this negation of communism - "socialism in one country" - the USSR became once again a wholly capitalist state where the proletariat was subjected at gunpoint to the interests of the national capital, in the name of the defence of the "socialist fatherland".
Thanks to the power of the workers’ councils, proletarian October brought World War I to a halt. The Stalinist counter-revolution, by destroying all revolutionary thought, by muzzling every attempt at class struggle, by subjecting the whole of social life to terror and militarisation, heralded the second world slaughter.
Each step in Stalinism’s development on the international scene during the 1930s was in fact marked by imperialist bargaining with the major capitalist powers, which were preparing to subject Europe once again to blood and destruction. Having used his alliance with German imperialism to thwart the latter’s expansion towards the East, Stalin turned his coat in the nid-30s to ally with the "democratic" bloc (in 1934, Russia joined the "den of thieves" as Lenin had described the League of Nations. 1935 saw the Stalin-Laval pact between the USSR and France.
The CPs took part in the "Popular Fronts" and in the Spanish Civil War, in the course of which the Stalinists did not hesitate to massacre any workers or revolutionaries who questioned their policies. On the eve of war, Stalin turned his coat yet again and sold the USSR’s neutrality to Hitler, in exchange for several territories, before finally joining the "Allied" camp in the imperialist massacre of World War II, where the Stalinist state was to sacrifice the lives of more than 20 million of its own citizens. This was the result of all Stalinism’s sordid dealings with the different imperialist sharks of Western Europe. Over heaps of corpses, Stalinism built its empire, and imposed its will on all the states which the treaty of Yalta brought under its exclusive domination.
But although Stalin was a "gift from heaven" for world capitalism in suppressing Bolshevism, one individual alone, however paranoiac, was not the architect of this terrible counter-revolution. The Stalinist state was controlled by the same ruling class as everywhere else: the national bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie was reconstituted as the revolution degenerated from within, not from the old Tsarist ruling class which the revolution had eliminated in 1917, but on the basis of the parasitic bureaucracy of the state apparatus which under Stalin’s leadership was increasingly identified with the Bolshevik Party.
At the end of the 1920s, this Party-state bureaucracy wiped out all those sectors capable of forming a private bourgeoisie, and with which it had been allied (speculators and NEP landowners). In doing so, it took control of the economy. These conditions explain why, contrary to what happened in other countries, state capitalism in Russia took on this totalitarian and caricatural form. State capitalism is capitalism’s universal mode of domination in its period of decadence, when capitalism has to keep its grip on the whole of social life.
It gives rise to parasitic sectors everywhere. But in other capitalist countries, state control over the whole of society is not hostile to the existence of private, competitive sectors, preventing the complete domination of the economy by its parasitic sectors. The particular form of state capitalism in the USSR was characterised by an extreme development of the parasitic sector, which sprang from the state bureaucracy. Their only concern was not to make capital productive by taking account of market laws, but to fill their own pockets, even to the detriment of the national economy. From the viewpoint of the functioning of capitalism, this form of state capitalism was an aberration which could not but collapse as the world economic crisis accelerated. The collapse of the state capitalism which emerged from the Russian counter-revolution has signalled the irredeemable bankruptcy of the whole brutal ideology which, for more than half a century, had held the Stalinist regime together and held sway over millions of human beings.
This is how Stalinism was born; this is why it died. It appeared on the historical stage covered in the filth and blood of the counter-revolution. And covered in filth and blood, it is now leaving it, as we can see yet again in the horrible events in Romania which do no more than announce the imminence of still worse massacres at the heart of Stalinism: in the USSR itself.
Whatever the bourgeoisie and its venal media may say, this monstrous hydra has nothing whatever in common with the October revolution, either in form or content. The proletariat must become fully aware of this radical break, this total antagonism between Stalinism and the October revolution, if it is not to fall victim to another form of bourgeois dictatorship: that of the "democratic" state.
Democracy is only the most pernicious form of capital’s dictatorship
The spectacular collapse of Stalinism does not in the least mean that the proletariat has at last been liberated from the yoke of capital’s dictatorship. The decadent bourgeoisie is today burying in great pomp its most monstrous offspring the better to hide from the exploited masses the real nature of its class domination. To do so, it is constantly pushing the idea that there is a fundamental opposition between the "democratic" and the "totalitarian" forms of the bourgeois state.
This is nothing but lies. So-called "democracy" is nothing but a disguise for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is the fig-leaf that the ruling class uses to cover its obscene system of terror and exploitation. This disgusting hypocrisy has always been denounced by revolutionaries, and in particular by Lenin addressing the first congress of the Communist International, when he said that the bourgeoisie always tries to find philosophical or political arguments to justify its own rule:
"Among these arguments, the condemnation of dictatorship and the apology for democracy are particularly emphasised (…) Firstly, this demonstration works with the help of the notions of ‘democracy in general’ and ‘dictatorship in general’, without ever asking which class we are talking about. To put the question like this, outside and above classes, supposedly from the viewpoint of the people as a whole, is an insult to the doctrine of socialism, in other words the theory of the class struggle (…) For in no civilised capitalist country does there exist ‘democracy in general’, but only bourgeois democracy, and it is not a question of ‘dictatorship in general’, but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, ie the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, ie the bourgeoisie, with the aim of breaking their resistance in their struggle for domination (…). This is why today’s defence of bourgeois democracy under cover of defending ‘democracy in general’, and today’s outcry against the dictatorship of the proletariat under the pretext of denouncing ‘dictatorship in general’ are nothing but a deliberate betrayal of socialism (…), a refusal of the proletariat’s right to its own proletarian revolution, a defence of bourgeois reformism just at the historic moment when bourgeois reformism is collapsing throughout the world, when the war has created a revolutionary situation (…). The history of the 19th and 20th centuries even before the war has already shown us what this much-vaunted ‘pure democracy’ really means under capitalism. Marxists have always affirmed that the more democracy is developed, the ‘purer’ it is, the more acute, bitter, and merciless becomes the class struggle, the more the yoke of capital and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie appear in all their ‘purity’" (Lenin, "Theses on bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat", 1st Congress of the Communist International, 4th March 1919).
From its very birth, bourgeois democracy has proved itself the most pernicious form of capital’s merciless dictatorship. Already in the mid-17th century, before the proletariat could stand as the only class able to free humanity from capitalist exploitation, the first bourgeois revolution in England showed what democracy would be capable of. In 1648, faced with the first embryonic expressions of the communist movement, Cromwell’s democratic republic unleashed its bloody repression against the Levellers, who demanded that wealth be equally shared amongst all members of society.
In France, the young bourgeois democracy established in 1789 behaved with the same savagery when in 1797 it laid low Babeuf and the "Equals" for defending the same ideas. And the more the working class stood on its own terrain, the more firmly it resisted capital’s encroachments, the more capital’s democratic dictatorship was laid bare. The whole history of the workers’ movement throughout the 19th century is marked by bloody repression carried out by the most "progressive" ruling class of all time. We need only remember the crushing of the Lyon knife-workers’ insurrection in 1841 by an army of 20,000 men despatched by the "democratic" government of Casimir Perier. Remember the bloody days of June 1848 when the Parisian workers in revolt fell by thousands under the guns of the republic general Cavaignac, while the survivors were deported, imprisoned, or condemned to forced labour.
All freedom of association or of the press was forbidden to the working class in the name of the "defence of the Constitution". Remember how Gallifet’s republican troops defended the interests of the bourgeois class with the ferocious repression unleashed against the Communards of 1871, "that vile scum" as Thiers called them: more than 20,000 proletarians were assassinated during the "week of blood", more than 40,000 arrested, hundreds condemned to forced labour, thousands transported to New Caledonia, not to mention the repression of children torn from their parents to be placed in "houses of correction".
Such have been the despicable deeds of parliamentary democracy, with its "Declarations of Human Rights" and its fine principles of "liberty, equality, fraternity". Since its birth, it has fed on workers’ blood. And it has wallowed in blood and filth throughout the decadence of capitalism. In the name of "freedom", the most "free" and "civilised" of Europe’s great democratic powers entered into World War I, and massacred tens of millions of human beings to satisfy their imperialist appetites. And when the proletariat, with the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23, rose up against capitalist barbarity and tried, in Lenin’s words, to "strip away the artificial flowers with which the bourgeoisie tries to cover itself", the latter unveiled its true face once again. Faced with the spreading threat of the workers’ Soviets’ power, all the most "democratic" states (Britain, France, Germany, the USA) united their strength against the Russian revolution.
They supported the White armies throughout the civil war in Russia: the most "advanced" democratic states despatched arms, warships, and troops to arm to the teeth the counter-revolutionary forces engaged in the USSR, Poland, and Romania, in a merciless struggle against the first bastion of the proletarian revolution. In the name of threatened "democracy", the bourgeoisie the world over denounced the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and screamed "death to Bolshevism".
The same tender-hearted "democrats" who today are calling on us to give for the hungry Romanian population, organised an economic blockade of Soviet Russia in 1920, then struck by a terrible famine. They prevented all working class solidarity, the despatch of the most elementary aid, and coldly left hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, to die of starvation. There are no bounds to the cynicism and infamy of this "democratic" bourgeoisie!
Then in January 1919, the new-born republican democracy in Germany, one of the most "democratic" in Europe, headed by the Social-Democratic government of Noske, Scheidemann, and Ebert massacred the Berlin workers and ordered the summary execution of the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In the name of the defence of "democratic" liberties, these republicans pit-bulls used the worst terrorist methods to set up the dictatorship of the very "democratic" Weimar Republic, which was to serve as a stepping stone for Nazism.
Today, the whole of bourgeois propaganda is trying to make us swallow the idea that the proletarian revolution is synonymous with bloody barbarism. The truth is that ever since World War I, the worst barbarity has always been committed by parliamentary institutions in the name of democracy. Under the auspices of democratic institutions, Mussolini came to power as head of a parliamentary government in 1922. In Germany, it was the "democratic" Weimar Republic under Hindenburg which declared Hitler Chancellor in 1933 and opened the way to the Nazi terror.
In the name of democracy threatened by Franco’s hordes, the Spanish "Popular Front" sent thousands of workers to their deaths; the anti-fascist mystification used in Spain prepared the way for the second imperialist holocaust, and more than 50 million deaths. And in this bloody orgy of a desperate capitalism, still in the holy name of democracy, the bourgeoisie of the Allied imperialist bloc "liberated" the world from dictatorship by dropping atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and systematically bombarding the great working-class concentrations of Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin at the cost of almost 3 million casualties.
And ever since the end of World War II, the "Free World" has not ceased sowing death and destruction over the four corners of the planet. All the colonial expeditions, in Algeria, Africa, or Vietnam, were conducted under the flags of Western democracies, under the emblem of the "rights of man", in other words the right to torture, starve and massacre civilian populations under cover of "freedom" and "peoples’ right to self-determination". Under the aegis of these same "human rights", the "democratic" imperialist bloc is today conducting its crusades in the Middle East, perpetrating massacres in Iran and Iraq, in the Lebanon, the Philippines, and Panama in the name of the struggle against terrorism, religious fanaticism and military dictatorship. Still in the name of the defence of "freedom" and "order", the highly democratic states of Argentina and Venezuela put down the hunger riots at the beginning of 1989.
"Human rights" have always been capitalism’s justification for its worst massacres. "Human rights" are the rights of the ruling class to subject the oppressed masses to its rct the oppressed masses to its rule, to impose its class dictatorship by state terror.
This is why today, as Stalinism declares itself bankrupt, there is nothing for the proletariat to support in the democratic camp, which has nothing to offer but, as Churchill said on another occasion, "blood, sweat, and tears". If the Western bourgeoisie is today settling its accounts with Stalinism, and ringing in the triumph of "democracy" over "totalitarianism", it is only the better to make us forget their own crimes. The Western democracies’ shocked rejection of Stalinist terror today should not make us forget that our "democrats" were Stalin’s worst accomplices in the systematic extermination of the last combatants of October 1917.
It was with the support and benediction of the "democratic" world that the Stalinist counter-revolution imposed itself for decades on millions of human beings. Stalinism and democracy are just two sides of the same coin, as were fascism and anti-fascism before them. Two complementary ideologies which cover one and the same reality: the implacable dictatorship of capital, which the proletariat must necessarily answer with its own class dictatorship. This alone will be able to wash humanity clean of all the blood sphumanity clean of all the blood spilled during capital’s domination.
The world proletarian revolution is indeed the only alternative to the barbarity of capitalism. This is the alternative that the bourgeoisie is doing everything it can to distort and disfigure, using the stinking corpse of Stalinism to drive home the message that these regimes’ bankruptcy means the failure of communism.
Faced with the increasing barbarity of capitalism, there is only one perspective: the renewed class struggle of the world proletariat
The irreversible collapse of the Eastern bloc is not due to the failure of communism. It is the most brutal sign so far of the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy: an economy condemned to collapse piece by piece under the blows of a chronic and insoluble crisis. In this sense, the utter bankruptcy of the Eastern bloc countries only heralds that of the most industrialised Western countries, as the crisis inexorably accelerates. Already, the first signs of recession in Great Britain and the USA announce the generalised recession which will hit the world economy in the months and years to come.
Capitalism will be forced to impose on the Western working class still greater poverty and austerity, with lay-offs by the truck-load, falling wages and ever more infernal work rates. In the Eastern countries, the "liberalisation" of the economy will create, as is already the case in Poland, an explosion of unemployment and hunger, which will simply be a preparation for real famine. The proletariat in these countries will endure suffering worse than anything since World War II. The "democratic" governments with all their "humanitarian" aid and "solidarity" are just trying to pull the wool over our eyes. They are only trying to feed the present democratic campaigns, to give some credit to the idea that only Western capitalism is capable of filling hungry bellies, of bringing freedom and plenty to the exploited masses. They aim to turn the workers away from the only real solidarity which can offer humanity a future: class solidarity, the development world-wide of the combat against capitalist exploitation, against this system of poverty, massacres, and endless barbarism.
Today, as Stalinism collapses and capitalism trumpets its "victory" over "communism", the bourgeoisie has scored a point. It has succeeded in provoking a profound confusion in the ranks of the working class. Momentarily, it has succeeded in halting the proletariat’s march towards the affirmation of its own revolutionary perspective. But the ruling class cannot indefinitely escape History’s verdict.
The crisis will continue to accelerate; in doing so, it will prove itself the proletariat’s best ally. This is what will force the working class to take up the combat, once again, on its own terrain: resistance step by step against all the attacks on its own conditions of existence. The worsening world economic situation will lay bare capitalism’s historic impasse. In doing so, it will force the proletariat to look the truth in the face, and through its economic struggles become aware of the need to put an end to this moribund system and build a true world-wide communist society.
In the struggles that must lead it to final victory, the working class will have no choice but to confront openly all the agents of the "democratic" state, and especially the trades unions and their leftist appendages. The latter’s only function is to disarm the proletariat, to hinder the development of its class consciousness, and to try today to inject it with the reformist illusion in the possibility of improving the system, in order to turn it away from its own revolutionary perspective.
The proletariat cannot escape from this difficult struggle against capitalism and all its defenders. If it is to save itself, and the rest of humanity along with it, it will have to confront and overcome the obstacles that the bourgeoisie sows in its path, to denounce the lies spewed out daily, to become aware of what is really at stake in its combat, and of the immense responsibility it carries on its shoulders.
ICC, 8th January 1990
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/brest-litovsk
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/bukharin
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/rosa-luxemburg
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/australasia
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/328/war
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/zimmerwald-movement
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/17/stalinism-eastern-bloc