In the first article in this series, published in International Review n118, we saw how the theory of decadence is at the very heart of historical materialism, of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the evolution of modes of production. Equally, we find the same notion at the centre of the programmatic texts of the organisations of the working class. Furthermore, not resting at merely adopting this foundation-stone of marxism, some of these organisations have developed the analysis and/or its political implications. It’s from this dual point of view that we aim here to briefly review the main political expressions of the workers’ movement. In this first part we will begin with the movement in the days of Marx, the Second International, the marxist lefts which came out of it, and the Communist International at the time it was formed. In the second part, which will appear in a future issue, we will examine more closely the analytical framework for the political positions developed by the Third International and then by the left fractions which emerged from it as it began to degenerate, and from which we draw our political and organisational origins.

The workers’ movement at the time of Marx

Marx and Engels always clearly expressed the view that the perspective of the communist revolution depended on the material, historical, and global evolution of capitalism. The conception that a mode of production could not expire before the relations of production on which it was based had become a barrier to the development of the productive forces was the basis of the whole political activity of Marx and Engels and of the elaboration of any proletarian political programme. Although there were two moments when Marx and Engels thought that they had discerned the beginning of the decadence of capitalism,[1] [1] they rapidly corrected these appreciations and recognised that capitalism was still a progressive system. Their view - already outlined in the Communist Manifesto and deepened by all their writings from this period - that if the proletariat came to power in this period its principal task would be to develop capitalism in the most progressive manner possible, and not simply to destroy it, was an expression of this analysis. This is why the practice of marxists in the First International was quite rightly based on the analysis that as long as capitalism had a progressive role to play, it was necessary for the workers’ movement to support bourgeois movements which were helping to prepare the historic ground for socialism. As the Manifesto put it:

“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.[…] The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution. In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois. In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846. In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie… Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries”. [2] [2]

In parallel with this, it was necessary for the workers to continue fighting for reforms as long as the development of capitalism made them possible, and in this struggle “the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class”(Manifesto). These materialist positions were defended against the a-historical calls of the anarchists for the immediate abolition of capitalism, and their complete opposition to reforms.[3] [3]

The Second International: heir to Marx and Engels

The Second International made this adaptation of the policy of the workers’ movement to the historical period even more explicit, by adopting a minimum programme of immediate reforms (recognition of the unions, diminution of the working day, etc) alongside a maximum programme, socialism, to be put into effect when the inevitable historical crisis of capitalism arrived. This appears very clearly in the Erfurt Programme which concretised the victory of marxism within social democracy: “So private property in the means of production has changed from what it originally was into its opposite, not only for the small producer, but for society as a whole. From a motive power of progress it has become a cause of social degradation and bankruptcy…Today there is no longer any question as to whether the system of private ownership in the means of production shall be maintained. Its downfall is certain. The only question to be answered is: Shall the system of private ownership in the means of production be allowed to pull society with itself down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which the evolutionary law prescribes to it? The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property upon which it is built. The endeavour to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay – a decay that is accompanied by the most painful convulsions…The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable...As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism…the history of mankind is determined, not by ideas, but by an economic development which progresses irresistibly, obedient to certain underlying laws and not to anyone’s wishes or whims”.[4] [4]

But for the majority of the main official leaders of the Second International, the minimum programme would more and more become the only real programme of Social Democracy: “The final goal is nothing. The movement is everything”, as Bernstein put it. Socialism and the proletarian revolution were reduced to platitudes and sermons reserved for First of May parades, while the energy of the official movement was more and more focussed on obtaining for Social Democracy a place inside the capitalist system, at whatever cost. Inevitably, the opportunist wing of Social Democracy began to reject the very idea of the necessity for the destruction of capitalism and the social revolution, and to defend the idea of a slow, gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism.

The marxist left within the Second International

In response to the development of opportunism in the Second International, left fractions emerged in a number of countries. The latter would be the basis of the formation of the communist parties that would be born in the wake of the betrayal of proletarian internationalism by Social Democracy when the First World War broke out. These fractions were loud and clear in taking up the torch of marxism and the heritage of the Second International; at the same time they were obliged to develop this legacy faced with the new challenge posed by the opening of a new period of capitalism – the period of decadence.

These currents appeared at a moment when capitalism was going through the last phase of its ascent, when imperialist expansion made it possible to see the prospect of confrontation between the great powers on the world arena, and when the class struggle was more and more raising its head (the development of general political strikes and above all of the mass strike in several countries). Against the opportunism of Bernstein and Co., the left wing of Social Democracy – the Bolsheviks, the Dutch Tribunists, Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionaries - would defend all the implications of the marxist analysis: understanding the dynamic of the end of the ascendant phase of capitalism and the inevitable bankruptcy of the system,[5] [5] the reasons for the opportunist deviation[6] [6] and the reaffirmation of the necessity for the violent and definitive destruction of capitalism.[7] [7] Unfortunately, all this theoretical work by the left fractions was not carried out on an international scale; they worked in isolation and with different degrees of understanding of the formidable social convulsions of the first part of the 20th century, represented by the outbreak of the First World War and the development of insurrectionary movements on an international scale. We will not presume here either to present or analyse in detail all the contributions of the left fractions on these questions: we will limit ourselves to a few key position statements of the two organisations which would constitute the two vertebral columns of the new International – the Bolsheviks and the German Communist Party – through its two most eminent representatives: Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

While Lenin didn’t use the terms “ascendance” and “decadence”, but expressions like “the epoch of progressive capitalism”. “once a factor of progress”, “the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie” to characterise the ascendant period of capitalism, and “the epoch of the reactionary bourgeoisie” “capitalism has become reactionary”, “moribund capitalism”, “the epoch of a capitalism which has reached its maturity” to characterise the period of the decadence of capitalism, he nevertheless made full use of the concept and its essential implications, notably in his analysis of the nature of the First World War. Thus, against the social-traitors who, by making use of the analyses developed by Marx during the ascendant phase of capitalism, continued to call for support for certain bourgeois factions and their national liberation struggles, Lenin was able to see the First World War as the expression of a system that had exhausted its historical mission, posing the necessity to overcome it through a world wide revolution. Hence his characterisation of the imperialist war as being totally reactionary and the need to oppose it with proletarian internationalism and revolution: “From the liberator of nations that capitalism was in the struggle against feudalism, imperialist capitalism has become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary; it has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of going over to Socialism or of suffering years and even decades of armed struggle between the great powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind” (Socialism and War, 2, “The principles of socialism and the war of 1914-15”).

“The epoch of capitalist imperialism is one of ripe and rotten-ripe capitalism, which is about to collapse, and which is mature enough to make way for socialism. The period between 1789 and 1871 was one of progressive capitalism when the overthrow of feudalism and absolutism, and liberation from the foreign yoke were on history’s agenda” (“Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International”).

“From all that has been said in this book on the economic essence of imperialism, it follows that we must define it as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as moribund capitalism…It is precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism, characteristic of its highest historical stage of development, i.e., imperialism.

Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale” (Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1920 introduction to French and German editions).

The positions taken up in the face of war and revolution have always been the clear line of demarcation within the workers’ movement. Lenin’s ability to discern the historical dynamic of capitalism, to recognise the end of the “epoch of progressive capitalism”, to see that “capitalism has become reactionary” not only enabled him to clearly characterise the First World War but also to grasp the nature and significance of the revolution in Russia. When the revolutionary situation was maturing in this country, the Bolshevik’s understanding of the tasks imposed by the new period allowed them to fight against the mechanistic and nationalist conceptions of the Mensheviks. When the latter tried to minimise the importance of the revolutionary wave under the pretext that Russia was far too underdeveloped for socialism, the Bolsheviks insisted that the world wide nature of the imperialist war revealed that world capitalism had arrived at the point of maturity where the socialist revolution had become a necessity. They thus fought for the seizure of power by the working class in Russia, which they saw as the prelude to the world proletarian revolution.

Among the first and clearest expressions of this defence of marxism was the pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1899. Here, while recognising that capitalism was still expanding through “brusque expansionist thrusts” (i.e. imperialism), Luxemburg insisted on the fact that capitalism was moving ineluctably towards its “crisis of senility”, which would necessitate the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat. Moreover, with a great deal of political perspicacity, Luxemburg was able to grasp the new demands posed by the change in historical period to the struggles and political positions of the proletariat, in particular as regards the union question, the parliamentary tactic, the national question and the new methods of struggle highlighted by the mass strike.[8] [8]

On the trade unions: “Once industrial development has attained its highest possible point, and capitalism has entered its descending phase on the world market, the trade union struggle will become doubly difficult …Such is the general trend of things in our society. The counterpart of this tendency is the development of the political and social class struggle” (Social Reform or Revolution, 3, “The introduction of socialism through social reforms”)

On parliamentarism: “National assembly or all power to the workers and soldiers’ councils; abandoning socialism or the most resolute class struggle of the armed proletariat against the bourgeoisie – that is the dilemma. Realising socialism through the parliamentary road, through a simple majority decision now appears as an idyllic project…Parliamentarism, it is true, was an arena of the class struggle of the proletariat during the tranquil phase of the life of bourgeois society. It was then a high tribune from which we could rally the masses around the flag of socialism and educate them for the struggle. But today we are at the very heart of the proletarian revolution and it’s a question of chopping down the very tree of capitalist exploitation. Bourgeois parliamentarism, like the class domination which was its basic reason for existence, has lost its legitimacy. Today when the class struggle has openly erupted, Capital and Labour no longer have anything to say to each other. It’s a matter of hand to hand combat and settling this life and death struggle once and for all” (Luxemburg, “National Assembly or Government of Councils”, 17 December 1918)

On the national question: “The world war serves neither the national defence nor the economic or political interests of the masses of the people whatever they may be. It is but a product of the imperialist rivalries between the capitalist classes of the different countries for world hegemony and for the monopoly in the exploitation and oppression of areas still not under the heel of capital. In the era of the unleashing of this imperialism, national wars are no longer possible. National interests serve only as the pretext for putting the labouring masses of the people under the domination of their mortal enemy, imperialism” (“Theses on the tasks of international social democracy”, appendix to The Crisis of Social Democracy).

The decadence of capitalism at the centre of the Communist International’s analysis

Brought into being by the revolutionary movements which put an end to the First World War, the Communist International was founded on the basis of recognising that the bourgeoisie had completed its progressive role, as the left wing of the Second International had predicted. The CI, and the groups which composed it, confronted with the task of understanding the turning point marked by the outbreak of the world war and of insurrectionary movements on an international scale, would - to a greater or lesser degree – see decadence as key to their understanding of the new period. Thus in the platform of the new International it says “A new epoch is born. The epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”, and this framework of analysis would be found to a greater or lesser extent in all the CI’s position statements,[9] [9] as in the “Theses on Parliamentarism” adopted at its Second Congress: “Theoretically clear communism, on the other hand, will correctly estimate the character of the present epoch: highest stage of capitalism; imperialist self-negation and self-destruction”.

This analytical framework would appear with even greater clarity in the “Report on the International Situation” written by Trotsky and adopted the Third Congress: “Cyclical oscillations, we said in refutation in our report and resolution at the Third World Congress, accompany capitalist society in its youth, in its maturity and its decay, just as the beatings of a heart accompany a man even on his deathbed” Trotsky, “Flood-tide”, 1921) It was also attested by the discussions around this report: “We saw yesterday in detail how comrade Trotsky – and all those who are here, I think, agree with him – shows on the one hand the relationship between short crises and short periods of momentary cyclical rises, and,on the other hand, the problem of the rise and decline of capitalism seen on the scale of great historical periods. We are all agreed that the grand rising curve will now irresistibly go in the opposite direction, and that within this grand curve there will be further oscillations up and down” (Authier D, Dauve G, Ni parlement ni syndicats..les conseils ouviers! Edition ‘Les nuits rouges, 2003 [10] [10]). Finally, even more explicitly, this framework would be reaffirmed by the “Resolution on the Tactics of the CI” at its 4th Congress:

“II. The period of the decline of capitalism. On the basis of its assessment of the world economic situation the Third Congress was able to declare with complete certainty that capitalism had fulfilled its mission of developing the productive forces and had reached a stage of irreconcilable contradiction with the requirements not only of modern historical development, but also of the most elementary conditions of human existence. This fundamental contradiction was reflected in the recent imperialist war, and further sharpened by the great damage the war inflicted on the conditions of production and distribution. Obsolete capitalism has reached the stage where the destruction that results from its unbridled power is crippling and ruining the economic achievements that have been built up by the proletariat, despite the fetters of capitalist slavery…What capitalism is passing through today is nothing other than its death throes”.

The analysis of the political significance of the First World War

The explosion of the imperialist war in 1914 marked a decisive turning point in the history both of capitalism and of the workers’ movement. The problem of the system’s “crisis of senility” was no longer a theoretical debate between different fractions of the workers’ movement. The understanding that the war had opened up a new period for capitalism as a historic system demanded a change in political practice which became a class frontier: on the one hand the opportunists who had clearly showed themselves to be agents of capitalism by “adjourning” the revolution in favour of national defence in an imperialist war; and, on the other hand, the revolutionary left, the Bolsheviks around Lenin, the Internationale group, the Bremen left radicals, the Dutch Tribunists etc who gathered at Zimmerwald and Kienthal and affirmed that the war marked the opening of the era of “wars and revolutions”, and that the only alterative to capitalist barbarism was the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat against the imperialist war. Of all the revolutionaries who took part in these conferences, the clearest on the question of the war were the Bolsheviks, and this clarity derived directly from the conception that capitalism had entered its phase of decadence since the “epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie” had given way to “the epoch of the reactionary bourgeoisie” as affirmed without ambiguity in the following passage from Lenin: “The Russian social-chauvinists (headed by Plekhanov), refer to Marx’s tactics in the war of 1870; the German (of the type of Lensch, David and Co.) to Engels’ statement in 1891 that in the event of war against Russia and France together, it would be the duty of the German Socialists to defend their fatherland…All these references are outrageous distortions of the views of Marx and Engels in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists…Whoever refers today to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Marx’s statement that ‘the workers have no fatherland’, a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of the reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution shamelessly distorts Marx and substitutes the bourgeois for the socialist point of view”.

This political analysis of the historic significance of the outbreak of the First World War determined the positions taken up by the whole revolutionary movement, from the marxist fractions inside the Second International[11] [11] to the groups of the communist left via the Communist International. This is also what Engels had predicted at the end of the 19th century. "Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism’. What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales". (Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy, 1915).

It was also this understanding that had animated the revolutionary forces that took part in the foundation of the Communist International. Thus, in its statutes, it is very clearly stated that “The Third (Communist) International was formed at a moment when the imperialist slaughter of 1914-1918, in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the various countries sacrificed twenty million men, had come to an end. Remember the imperialist war! This is the first appeal of the Communist International to every toiler wherever he may live and whatever language he may speak. Remember that owing to the existence of the capitalist system a small group of imperialists had the opportunity during four long years of compelling the workers of various countries to cut each other’s throats. Remember that this imperialist war had reduced Europe and the whole world to a state of extreme destitution and starvation. Remember that unless the capitalist system is overthrown a repetition of this criminal war is not only possible but is inevitable…. The Communist International considers the dictatorship of the proletariat an essential means for the liberation of humanity from the horrors of capitalism”.

Yes, more than ever, we must “remember” the analyses drawn up by our illustrious predecessors and we must reaffirm this all the more forcefully when parasitic grouplets try to dismiss it as “bourgeois moralism and humanism” by turning imperialist war and genocides into banalities. Under the pretext of a critique of the theory of decadence, such groups are actually attacking the most fundamental acquisitions of the workers’ movement: “For example, to demonstrate that the capitalist mode of production is in decadence, Sander affirms that its characteristic is genocide and that more than three quarters of deaths through war in the last 500 years have happened in the 20th century. This type of argument is also present in millenarian thinking. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the First World War was a turning point in history because of its grandeur and intensity. To follow them, the number of deaths during the First World War was ‘seven times greater than all the 901 preceding wars in the 2,400 years before 1914’. According to the polemicist Ruth Leger Sivard, in a work published in 1996, the century left around 110 million deaths in 250 wars. If we extrapolate this result to complete the century we will obtain around 120 million deaths, six times more than the 19th century. If we adjust the figure to take account of population increase, the relative number falls to 2 times…Even then, the effects of wars remains inferior to those of fleas and mosquitoes…It’s not by rallying to concepts that belong to modern bourgeois law (such as genocide), fashioned by democratic ideology and the rights of man in the aftermath of the Second World War that we will take materialism forward; still less will we increase our understanding of the history of the capitalist mode of production” (Robin Goodfellow, “Comrade, one more effort to no longer be revolutionary”).

Comparing the ravages of the imperialist war to something that is “inferior to the effects of fleas and mosquitoes” is a way of spitting on the millions of proletarians who were massacred on the battlefields and on the thousands of revolutionaries who sacrificed their lives to stay the murderous arm of the bourgeoisie and hasten the outbreak of revolutionary movements. It is a scandalous insult to the generations of communists who fought with all their might to denounce imperialist wars. Comparing the analyses bequeathed by Marx, Engels and all our predecessors of the Communist International and the communist left to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and to bourgeois moralism really is insane. In the face of such slander we fully concur with Rosa Luxemburg who argued that the indignation of the proletariat is a revolutionary force!

For these parasitic elements, the whole Third International, the Lenins, Trotskys, Bordigas, fell into a lamentable misunderstanding and stupidly mixed up the First World War, which the CI platform called “the greatest of all crimes” with something whose effects were “inferior to those of fleas and mosquitoes”. All the revolutionaries who thought that the imperialist war was the most gigantic catastrophe for the proletariat - “The catastrophe of the imperialist war has swept away all the conquests of the trade union and parliamentary battles” (Manifesto of the CI) - had committed the greatest of blunders: they had theorised the First World War as having opened up the period of the decline of capitalism. They had foolishly thought that “capitalism had fulfilled its mission of developing the productive forces and had reached a stage of irreconcilable contradiction with the requirements not only of modern historical development, but also of the most elementary conditions of human existence. This fundamental contradiction was reflected in the recent imperialist war, and further sharpened by the great damage the war inflicted on the conditions of production and distribution” (“Theses on the Tactics of the Comintern”, op cit).

The haughty disdain of these parasites for the acquisitions of the workers’ movement, which have been inscribed in letters of blood by our class brothers, is only equalled by the disdain which the bourgeoisie shows towards the misery of the workers and the disembodied cynicism that this class displays when it uses its brutal statistics to show the merits of capitalism. To paraphrase the famous phrase which Marx used about Proudhon: “these parasites see in statistics only statistics and not their revolutionary social and political significance”.[12] [12] All the revolutionaries of that period had grasped the qualitative difference, the whole social and political significance of this “mass slaughter of the elite of the international proletariat”..…

“None the less, the imperialist bestiality raging in Europe's fields has one effect about which the ‘civilized world’ (and today’s parasites) is not horrified and for which it has no breaking heart: that is the mass destruction of the European proletariat. Never before on this scale has a war exterminated whole strata of the population… The best, most intelligent, most educated forces of international socialism, the bearers of the holiest traditions and the boldest heroes of the modern workers' movement, the vanguard of the entire world proletariat, the workers of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia - these are the ones now being hamstrung and led to the slaughter Here capitalism lays bare its death's head; here it betrays the fact that its historical rationale is used up; its continued domination is no longer reconcilable to the progress of humanity” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy).[13] [13]

C Mcl

The 60th anniversary of the liberation from the concentration camps, of the bombing of Dresden, of Hiroshima, of the capitulation of Germany

 

2005 abounds in gruesome anniversaries. The bourgeoisie has just celebrated one of them - the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in January 1945 - with an ostentation that outdid the 50th anniversary of the same event. This comes as no surprise. For the last sixty years, parading the monstrous crimes of the side defeated in World War II has proved the surest means of absolving the Allies from the crimes that they too committed against humanity during and after the war. It has served moreover to present democratic values as the guarantee of civilisation against barbarity. Similarly, we can expect that the anniversary of the capitulation of Germany in May 1945 will also be greeted with a special fanfare. The Second World War, like the first, was an imperialist war fought by imperialist brigands and the slaughter it generated (50 million dead), was a dramatic confirmation of the bankruptcy of capitalism. Nowadays the bourgeoisie is obliged to accord great importance to the commemoration of the Second World War, precisely because the mystifications wreathed around it are beginning to wear thin. An increasing amount of evidence, that has long been denied and dissimulated, is beginning to emerge. One example is the fact that the Allies knew of the existence of the extermination camps and did nothing to put them out of action. Such evidence raises the question of the degree of Allied responsibility for the Holocaust. It is up to revolutionaries, who are always the first to denounce the barbarity of both camps, to wage a battle against bourgeois mystifications that try to keep the crimes of the allies out of sight or at least to play them down. It is also their task to expose the inconsistencies in the bourgeoisie's attempts to "excuse" the barbaric acts committed by the "democratic" camp.

Why such a hubbub about the liberation from the concentration camps?

The commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the allied landings in June 1944 has already been vested with an importance even greater than its 50th.[1] [33] Aware that the memory of such an event must be permanently maintained if it is to remain vivid in the minds of the living, the bourgeoisie has not skimped on the means used to revive the image of all those young recruits, who offered themselves up in their tens of thousands to be massacred on the beaches, believing that they were fighting "for the freedom of their fellow men". For the bourgeoisie it is of the utmost importance that the mystification that made the mobilisation of their elders possible remains in the minds of the new generations; that the illusion remains that to fight in the democratic camp against fascism[2] [34] was to defend human dignity and civilisation against barbarism. That is why it is not enough for the ruling class to have used the American, English, German,[3] [35] Russian or French working class as canon fodder: they are directing their sick propaganda specifically against the present generation of proletarians. Today the working class is not prepared to sacrifice itself for the economic and imperialist interests of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless it is still vulnerable to the mystification that it is not capitalism that produces the barbarity in the world, but that the latter is the responsibility of certain totalitarian powers that are the sworn enemies of democracy. The idea that the Jewish genocide is "unique" (and therefore not to be compared with other instances of genocide) plays a central role in the persistence of this democratic mystification today. In fact it is because of its victory over the totalitarian regime that tortured the Jewish people, that the Allied camp and its democratic ideology could consolidate the lie that it was the guardian against the utmost barbarity.

In the aftermath of World War II, and even in the subsequent two decades, it was only a small minority, mainly limited to the internationalist revolutionary milieu,[4] [36] who placed the barbarity of the Allies side by side with that of the Nazi camp. That was to change gradually following the return of the proletariat to the international scene in 1968. Questions began to be asked about a whole series of mystifications and lies that had been produced and maintained during nearly half a century of counter-revolution (in the first place, the lie about the socialist character of the Eastern bloc countries). The process has been encouraged by the endless stream of military conflicts since the Second World War, in which the great democratic countries have supplied material for critical reflection by showing themselves to be champions of barbarism (the United States in Vietnam, France in Algeria…).[5] [37] The flight towards barbarism and chaos since the 1990s comes across as the coronation of the most barbaric century in history, despite the renewal of the democratic mystification engendered by the campaigns on the collapse of Stalinism.[6] [38] Over the last 15 years the great powers, often the "democratic" ones, have had an obvious responsibility for the outbreak of conflicts. We can cite the United States’ leadership of the anti-Saddam coalition in the first Iraq war that caused, directly and indirectly, up to 500,000 deaths; the great Western powers in Yugoslavia (twice) with their "ethnic cleansing", including that of Srebrenica in 1993, carried out by Serbia and covertly backed by France and Great Britain. Then there is the Rwanda genocide orchestrated by France, which produced almost a million victims;[7] [39] Russia's continuing war in Chechnya, which also involves ethnic cleansing, and the barbaric Anglo-American intervention in Iraq. In some of these conflicts we even see reproduced the scenario of the Second World War: a dictator (Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Milosevic in Yugoslavia) is spotlighted to take the blame for the hostilities and deaths. No matter that this dictator had previously been a respectable person in the eyes of these democrats, with whom they had maintained cordial relations before they found him more useful as a scapegoat.

In this situation, it is not surprising that the pill of the "uniqueness" of the Jewish genocide is increasingly difficult to swallow for those who have not been bludgeoned by such ideological brainwashing for a whole lifetime. To see the Holocaust as a particularly abject and shameful moment in an ocean of barbarity, rather than as a specificity, requires the power of criticism. It requires a refusal to succumb to the really revolting guilt and intimidation campaigns of the bourgeoisie, who label those who reject and condemn the Allied camp as well as that of the fascists, as indifferentists, negationists (those who deny the reality of the Holocaust), as anti-Semites, neo-nazis. This is why the new generations are more inclined to distance themselves from the lies that have poisoned the consciousness of their elders. This is recognised in comments from schoolteachers, who have to give courses on the Shoah. "It is difficult to get them [the students] to accept that it is any different from other acts of genocide" (Le Monde, 26th January, "L' attitude réfractaire de certains élèves oblige les enseignants à repenser leurs cours sur le Shoah").

The bourgeoisie plays hard on the feelings that the description of the suffering of the millions lost in the concentration camps is bound to evoke. It does so in order to hamper a tendency towards a growing awareness of the real character of the second international butchery, and of democracy. They then divert the real responsibility for these horrors and for those of all wars, onto one dictator, one regime, one country in order to cover the back of the system itself, of capitalism. To make the scenario all the more effective, they have to go on hiding and distorting the crimes of the big democracies during the Second World War.

Behind the terror and barbarism of the Allies and of Nazism lie the same motivations of the state

The experience of two world wars shows us what the common characteristics are that explain the heights of barbarity now reached, which are the responsibility of all the camps involved:

• The most sophisticated technology is reserved for the military, which drains society's strength and resources, as does any form of war effort. The technological development between the First and Second World War, particularly in aviation, means that military confrontations are no longer limited to the battle field, where the opposing armies are face to face. Rather the whole of society becomes the theatre of operations.

• An iron corset encircles the whole of society in order to bend it to the extreme demands of militarism and war production. The way that this was done in Germany is a caricature. As military difficulties increased, there was an intense need for manpower. In order to satisfy it, during 1942 the concentration camps became an immense reservoir of cheap human material, that was inexhaustibly renewable and able to be exploited at will. At least a third of workers employed by the big companies, such as Krupp, Heinkel, Messerschmitt or IG Farben were deportees.[8] [40]

• The most extreme means are used to impose oneself militarily: mustard gas during the First World War, which, up until its first use, was said to be the ultimate weapon, that would never be used; the atomic bomb, the supreme weapon against Japan in 1945. Less well known but still more murderous, was the bombing of towns and civil populations during the Second World War, in order to terrorise and decimate them. Germany was the first to use this strategy when it bombed London, Coventry and Rotterdam. The technique was perfected and made systematic by Britain, whose bombers unleashed real fire balls at the heart of the towns, raising the temperature to over a thousand degrees in what became a gigantic inferno,

"The crimes of Germany or Russia should not make us forget that the Allies themselves were possessed of the spirit of evil and outdid Germany in some ways, specifically with terror bombing. When he decided to order the first raids on Berlin on 25th August 1940, in response to an accidental attack on London, Churchill assumed the devastating responsibility for a terrible moral regression. For almost five years, the British Prime Minister, the commanders of Bomber Command, Harris especially, attacked German towns relentlessly (…)

This horror reached its zenith on 11th September 1944 at Darmstadt. In the course of a remarkably concerted attack, the entire historic centre disappeared in an ocean of flames. In 51 minutes, the town was hit by a volume of bombs greater than those dropped on London throughout the whole war. 14 000 people died. As for the industrial zone, situated on the outskirts and which represented only 0.5% of the Reich's economic potential, it was hardly touched." (Une guerre totale 1939-1945, stratégies, moyens, controverses by Philippe Masson).[9] [41] The British bombardments of German towns killed nearly 1 million people.

Far from moderating the offensive against the enemy and so reducing the financial cost, the rout of Germany and Japan in 1945 had quite the opposite effect. The intensity and cruelty of the air raids was redoubled. This was because what was really at stake was no longer victory over these countries; this had already been won. The purpose was in fact to prevent parts of the German working class from rising up against capitalism in response to the suffering caused by the war, as had happened at the time of the First World War.[10] [42] So the British and American air raids were intended to annihilate those workers who had not already perished on the military fronts and to throw the proletariat into impotence and disarray.

There was another consideration as well. It had become clear to the Anglo-Americans that the future division of the world would place the main victors of World War II in opposition to one another. On one side there would be the United States (with Britain at its side, a country that had been bled dry by the war). On the other side would be the Soviet Union, which was in a position to strengthen itself considerably through conquest and military occupation, that would follow its victory over Germany. Churchill expressed his awareness of this new threat in the following unequivocal words. "Soviet Russia had become a mortal danger for the free world, [so] it was necessary to create a new front, without delay, to arrest its advance and this front had to be as far East as possible in Europe".[11] [43] So a concern of the western Allies was to set limits to Stalin's imperialist appetites in Europe and Asia by means of a dissuasive show of force. This was the other purpose behind the British bombardment of Germany in 1945 and it was the sole reason for using atomic weapons against Japan.[12] [44]

The fact that military and economic establishments were targeted less and less, as these had become secondary, demonstrates the new stakes in the bombings, as in the case of Dresden:

"Up to 1943, in spite of the suffering inflicted on the population, the raids still had a military or economic justification, aimed as they were at the large ports in the north of Germany, the Ruhr complex, the main industrial centres or even the capital of the Reich. But from the autumn of 1944, this was no longer the case. With a perfectly practised technique, Bomber Command, which had 1,600 planes at its disposal and which was striking at a German defence that was increasingly weak, undertook the attack and systematic destruction of middle sized towns or even small urban centres that were of no military or economic interest.

History has excused the atrocious destruction of Dresden in February 1945 under the strategic pretext that it neutralised an important rail centre, behind the Wehrmacht's lines as it engaged the Red Army. In fact, the disruption to rail traffic did not last more that 48 hours. However there is no justification for the destruction of Ulm, Bonn, Wurtzburg, Hidelsheim; these medieval cities, these artistic marvels that were part of the patrimony of Europe, disappeared in fire storms, in which the temperature reached 1,000-2,000°C and which cause the death and dreadful suffering of tens of thousands of people" (P. Masson).

When barbarism itself becomes the main driving force towards barbarism

There is another characteristic shared by the two world conflicts: just as the bourgeoisie is unable to maintain control of the productive forces under capitalism, so too the destructive forces that it sets in motion during all-out war tend to escape its control. Equally, the worst impulses that have been unchained by the war take on a life and dynamic of their own, giving rise to gratuitous acts of barbarity that no longer even have anything to do with the aims of the war, however despicable the latter may be.

In the course of the war, the Nazi concentration camps became a huge machine for killing all those suspected of resistance within Germany or in the countries it had occupied or that were its vassals. The transfer of detainees to Germany became a way of using terror to impose order in zones occupied by Germany.[13] [45] But the increasingly hurried and radical nature of the means used to get rid of the population in the camps, the Jews in particular, shows that the need to impose terror or for forced labour was less and less a consideration. It was a flight into barbarism in which the only motive was barbarism itself.[14] [46] At the same time as these mass murders were taking place, the Nazi torturers and doctors carried out "experiments" on the prisoners, in which sadism vied with scientific interest. These individuals would later be offered immunity and a new identity in exchange for collaborating with projects in the United States that were classed as "military defence secrets" (the operation was known as "Project Paperclip").

The march of Russian imperialism across Eastern Europe towards Berlin was accompanied by atrocities that betrayed the same logic:

"Columns of refugees were crushed under tanks or systematically strafed from the air. The entire population of urban centres was massacred with refined cruelty. Naked women were crucified on barn doors. Children were decapitated, had their heads beaten to pulp with sticks, or were thrown alive into pig troughs. All those in the Baltic ports who did not manage to get away or who could not be evacuated by the German navy, were simply exterminated. The number of victims can be estimated at 3 or 3.5 million (…)

“This murderous madness was visited unabated on all the German minorities in Southeast Europe, in Yugoslavia, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, and on thousands of Sudeten Germans. The German population in Prague, which had been established in the city since the Middle Ages, was massacred with a degree of sadism rarely witnessed. Women were raped and then their Achilles tendon cut, condemning them to bleed to death on the ground in terrible agony. Children were machine gunned at school entrances, thrown into the road from the top floors of buildings or drowned in basins or fountains. Some were walled up alive in cellars. In all there were more than 30,000 victims.

“The violence did not spare the young signals auxiliaries of the Luftwaffe, who were thrown alive into burning haystacks. For weeks the Vltava (Moldau) carried thousands of corpses, sometimes of whole families nailed to rafts. To the horror of the witnesses, a whole sector of the Czech population displayed a savagery that belongs to another age.

“In fact these massacres were the product of a political will, of an intention to eliminate, with the help of a stirring of the most bestial impulses. Given Churchill's concern at Yalta at seeing new minorities arise within the framework of the future frontiers of the USSR or Poland, Stalin could not help declaring sarcastically that there could no longer be a lot of Germans in these regions…" (P. Masson).

The "ethnic cleansing" of the German provinces in the East, was not the responsibility of Stalin's army alone but was done with the co-operation of the British and American armed forces. Although, even at this time, the lines for future tension were already drawn between the USSR and the United States, these countries and Britain still co-operated without reservations in the task of removing the proletarian danger, by the mass murder of the population.[15] [47] Moreover, they all had an interest in ensuring that the yoke of the future occupation of Germany could be exercised over a population, that had been made passive by all the suffering it had gone through and that included the least number of refugees possible. This aim in itself incarnates barbarism but it was to become the departure point for an uncontrolled escalation of brutality at the service of mass murder.

Those refugees who escaped Stalin's tanks, were massacred by the British and American bombardments, which employed considerable means to simply exterminate them. The cruelty of the bombardments over Germany, whether they were British, and ordered by Churchill in person, or American, were intended to kill as many as possible with the maximum savagery:

"This will to systematically destroy, which was close to genocide, went on until April 1945, in spite of the growing objections of Air Marshal Portal, the commander-in-chief of the RAF, who wanted to direct the bombings against the oil industry or transport. In the end even Churchill, as a good politician, became concerned, when there were reactions of indignation in the press of the neutral countries and even from a sector of British public opinion" (P.Masson).

On the German front, the American raid of 12 March 1945 on the harbour town of Swinemunde in Pomerania probably caused more than 20,000 victims, according to estimates. It targeted the refugees who were fleeing from Stalin's advancing troops and who were gathered together in the town or already aboard the boats.
"A large belt of parks bordered the beach. It was here that the bulk of the refugees were concentrated. The 8th American army knew this perfectly well, this is why it had loaded its planes with 'tree breakers'; bombs with detonators which explode as soon as they come into contact with branches.

“A witness relates having seen the refugees in the park 'throw themselves to the ground, so exposing the whole of their bodies to the action of the tree breakers’. The bombers had traced the boundaries of the park precisely with tracer lights. So the carpet bombs fell in a particularly restricted zone, meaning that there was no means of escape (…)

Among the large merchant ships, which sailed - the Jasmund, Hilde, Ravensburg, Heiligenhafen, Tolina, Cordillera - it was the Andros which sustained the heaviest losses. It set sail from Pillau, on the coast of Samland, the 5th March, on its way to Denmark with two thousand passengers aboard" (Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 by Jörg Friedrich).

"At the same time and in addition to these massive attacks, there were repeated raids by tactical air command fighter-bombers. These raids (by the Americans as well as the British) targeted trains, roads, villages, isolated farms, as well as farmers in their fields. Farm work was limited in Germany to the hours of dawn or dusk. There were machine gun attacks at school entrances and the children had to learn how to protect themselves from aerial attacks. During the bombardment of Dresden, the allied fighters attacked the ambulances and fire engines that converged on the town from nearby cities." (P.Masson).

On the Far Eastern front, American imperialism acted with the same brutality: "To return to the summer of 1945. Sixty-six of the largest towns in Japan had already been destroyed by fire following napalm bombardments. A million civilians in Tokyo were homeless and 100,000 people had died. To repeat the words of Curtis Lemay, the general of the division responsible for the firebombing, they were 'grilled, boiled and cooked to death'. President Franklin Roosevelt's son, who was also his confidant, said that the bombings had to continue 'until we had destroyed about half of the civilian population of Japan'. On 18th July, the Emperor of Japan sent a telegraph to President Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt, asking once more to make peace. His message was ignored. (…) A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, vice admiral Arthur Radford boasted: 'Japan will end up as a country without towns - a population of nomads'." ("From Hiroshima to the Twin Towers", Le Monde Diplomatique of September 2002).

Ideological fog and lies to cover up the cynical crimes of the bourgeoisie

There is yet another characteristic of the bourgeoisie's behaviour, which is particularly present in war, and even more so in all-out war. Those of its crimes that it does not decide to erase from history (as the Stalinist historians had already begun to do in the 1930s), are dressed up as their opposite; as courageous, virtuous acts that enabled them to save more human lives than they destroyed.

The British bombardment of Germany

With the Allied victory, a whole segment of the history of the Second World War has disappeared from the records:[16] [48] "the terror bombings have fallen into almost total oblivion, as have the massacres carried out by the Red Army or the terrible settling of scores in Eastern Europe." (P.Masson). Of course, these acts are not included in the commemoration ceremonies for these "gruesome" anniversaries. They are banished from them. There remain just a few historical testimonies, that are too deeply rooted to be openly eradicated and so are given a "media make-over" in order to render them inoffensive. This is the case with the bombing of Dresden in particular: "…the most beautiful terror raid of the whole war was the work of the victorious allies. An absolute record was made on 13th and 14th February 1945: 253,000 dead, refugees, civilians, prisoners of war, labour deportees. No military objective." (Jacques de Launay, Introduction to the French 1987 edition of David Irving's book The destruction of Dresden.[17] [49]

Nowadays it is customary for the media, when covering the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, to give the number of victims as 35,000. When the number of 250,000 is mentioned, it is promptly attributed to either Nazi or Stalinist propaganda. The latter "interpretation" is not very consistent with the great concern of the East German authorities, for whom at the time, "there was no question of spreading the correct information that the town had been overrun by hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing from the Red Army." (Jacques de Launay). In fact at the time that the bombardments occurred, Dresden counted about 1 million inhabitants, of which 400,000 were refugees. In view of how the town was devasted,[18] [50] it is hard to imagine that only 3.5% of the population perished!

The bourgeoisie's campaign to render innocuous the horror of Dresden by minimising the number of victims is complemented by another one, aiming to present the legitimate indignation that this barbaric act excites, as an expression of neo-Nazism. All the publicity given to the demonstrations in Germany, mobilising the nostalgic degenerates of the 3rd Reich to commemorate the event, can only serve to discourage any criticism casting doubt upon the Allies, for fear of being taken for a Nazi.

The atomic bombardment of Japan

Unlike the British bombardment of Germany, where great pains are taken to hide its enormity, the use of the atomic weapon for the first and only time in history, by the world's most powerful democracy, has never been hidden or minimised. On the contrary, everything possible has been done to publicise it and to make clear the destructive power of this new weapon. Every provision had been taken to do this even before the bombing of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945. "Four cities were marked out [to be bombed]: Hiroshima (major port, industrial city and military base), Kokura (main arsenal), Nigata (port, steelworks and oil refinery) and Kyoto (industries) (…) From that moment on, none of the cities mentioned above were touched by bombs. They had to be damaged as little as possible in order to put the destructive power of the atomic bomb beyond discussion." (Article "The bomb dropped over Hiroshima" on www.momes.net/dictionnaire/h/hiroshima.html [51]). As for the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki,[19] [52] it expressed the intention of the United States to show that it could use nuclear weapons whenever necessary (which was not true in fact because the other bombs that they were building were not yet ready.)

According to the ideological justification for this massacre of the Japanese population, it was the only way to ensure the capitulation of Japan and save the life of a million American soldiers. This is a gross lie which is still propagated today: Japan had been bled dry and the United States (having intercepted and decoded the communiqués of the Japanese diplomatic corps and headquarters) knew that they were ready to capitulate. But they also knew that for Japan there was a limiting condition to their capitulation; the Emperor Hirohito was not to be removed. So, as they had the means to prevent Japan from accepting total capitulation, the United States made use of it by drafting ultimatums in such a way as to imply that the removal of the Emperor would be required. It must also be stressed that the American administration never explicitly threatened Japan with a nuclear attack, from the time of the first successful attempt at a nuclear explosion at Alamogordo, in order of course to leave it no opportunity to accept America's conditions. Having dropped two atomic bombs to demonstrate the superiority of this new weapon over all conventional arms, the United States achieved its ends, Japan capitulated and …the Emperor remained. The complete futility of using the atomic bomb against Japan in order to force it to capitulate has since been confirmed by the statements of the military, some of them high ranking, who were themselves staggered by such cynicism and barbarity.[20] [53]

The Allies complicity in responsibility for the Holocaust

"The silence of the Allies complemented that of the Europeans. Although completely aware of the fate of the Jews from 1942 onwards, neither the British nor the Americans were particularly concerned about it and they refused to include the struggle against genocide in their war aims. The press reported deportations and massacres but this information was relegated to the twelfth or fifteenth page. This was particularly clear in the United States where there had been a virulent anti-Semitism since 1919" (P Masson, op. cit.)

When the camps were liberated, the Allies pretended to be surprised at their existence and at the massive exterminations carried out inside them. Up until recently they have been denounced only by a few honest historians and by revolutionary minorities. But over the last twelve years this deception has been uncovered by those in an official position or by the official media. For example, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on 23rd April 1998 at the "March of the Survivors" in Auschwitz: "It would not have been difficult to stop it. It would have been enough to bomb the railway lines. They [the Allies] knew about it. They did not bomb them because at the time the Jews had no state, no military and political force to defend themselves". Likewise the French magazine Science et Vie Junior writes: "In the spring of 1944, the Allies took detailed photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau and bombed the factories in the vicinity four times. No bomb was ever dropped on the gas chambers, the railway lines or the crematorium furnaces of the death camp. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were informed as early as 1942 by the representative of International Jewish Congress in Geneva and later by the Polish resistance of what was going on in the camps. The Jewish resistance asked them to bomb the gas chambers and the crematorium furnaces at Auschwitz. They did not do so or, in the case of Churchill, their orders were not executed." (No. 38, October 1999, supplement to the series: the Second World War). The procedure is as old as the world itself: cast blame on the underlings in order to save face! Even the most honest reply to this situation defends the respectability of the allied camp: "Why, given that the Allied air force had bombed a rubber factory 4 kilometres away? The answer is terrible: the military had other priorities. For them the main thing was to win the war as quickly as possible and nothing was to delay this primary objective" (ibid). Every effort is made to avoid raising the real issue: Allied complicity in the Holocaust.2 [54]1 They had refused all the proposals of the Germans to exchange the Jews for lorries, or even for nothing. They did not on any account want to be lumbered with a population that they did not know what to do with, not even if it meant saving these lives.

The bourgeoisie: a class of gangsters

How can we explain the fact that secrets, that had been so well kept over the years, end up being bandied about publicly? In the article that quotes Netanyahu's speech of 23rd April 1998 at Auschwitz (see above), there are elements of a reply. "Obviously the pressure exerted on Netanyahu by the European countries and the United States in particular, before his departure for Poland, regarding the negotiations with Yasser Arafat, explains why he resorted to the subject of the victims of the Shoah" ("The debate on the written history in Israel about the Shoah: the case for Jewish leadership" by Raya Cohen, University of Tel-Aviv). Essentially it was in order to ease the pressure that the United States was exerting on Israel in the negotiations with the Palestinians, that Netanyahu put a spanner in the works, intending to sully the reputation of Uncle Sam. By making it explicit that it wanted to be more independent of the United States so that it could play its own card, Israel did no more than situate itself within the same dynamic traced by all the vassals of the United States within the old Western bloc, after its disappearance in 1990. Other countries, such as France or Germany, have pushed this dynamic further by contesting American leadership openly. This is why the new rivals, and old allies, of the United States are more and more in favour of asking publicly the question: "why did the Allies, who knew about the Holocaust while it was going on, not bomb the camps?" They do so in order to encourage anti-American sentiment, which is developing as antagonisms with the major international power intensify. The United States, and also Britain, must expect to be confronted in the future with the need to answer more explicit criticisms about their own responsibility for the Holocaust.[22] [55]

Germany, in particular, has an interest in breaking the ideological consensus in favour of the victor, which has existed since 1945. At the same time it wants to relinquish its status as a military dwarf, which is a result of its defeat. Since its reunification at the beginning of the 1990s, Germany has availed itself of the means to assume military responsibility internationally in so-called "peace-keeping" operations, in Yugoslavia particularly, and more recently in Afghanistan. German policy to assert its status as main challenger to American leadership (even if it is still far from being able to rival the latter) corresponds to a desire on Germany's part to return to a leading role on the imperialist chessboard. One of the preconditions for it to play the part is that it put an end to the shame of its ingrained Nazi past and "rehabilitate" itself by showing that, during World War II, the barbarism was on both sides. This is not very difficult, given the evidence. It is quite appropriate that the ideological offensive of Germany is undertaken by those who declare that their battle is subordinate to their defence of democracy and who do not spare their denunciation of Nazi crimes. As is shown in an article that appeared in a special issue of Der Spiegel in 2003 and entitled "Jörg Friedrich's book Der Brand, the polemic around the strategic bombardments reopened", this ideological offensive has produced a lively media exchange between Germany and Britain. Der Spiegel writes: "As soon as extracts from this exhaustive work on the bombardments carried out during the war by the Allies against Germany in the period 1940-45, was published in Bild-Zeitung, British journalists attacked the Berlin historian. They ended up by constantly asking the same question: 'How can you depict Winston Churchill as a war criminal?' Friedrich explained repeatedly that in his book he avoided making any judgement of Churchill. 'What's more, he cannot be a war criminal in the legal sense of the term', Friedrich replied, 'as prosecutions are never made against the victors, even when they have committed war crimes'."

Der Spiegel continues: "It is not surprising that the conservative Daily Telegraph should sound the alarm and condemn Friedrich's book 'as an unprecedented attack against the Allies' conduct of the war'. In the Daily Mail the historian Corelli Barnett fumes that the German fraternity has joined the 'heap of dangerous revisionists' and 'is trying to make 'Churchill's support for the carpet bombings morally equivalent to the unspeakable crimes of the Nazis', 'an infamous and dangerous nonsense'. (…)

“Churchill - a real man of war - was also an ambivalent politician. It was this charismatic Prime Minister who pushed for the 'annihilation' attacks against German cities. But when he later saw the films of the cities in flames, he asked:’Are we animals? Are we going too far?'.

“At the same time, it was he himself, who - just like Hitler and Stalin - took upon himself all the important military decisions and he, at the very least, approved the constant escalation of the bombardments."

Moreover, Germany is also developing a diplomatic offensive. The primary aim of the latter is to win moral reparation for the detriment accrued through the loss of its historic influence in a number of Eastern European countries, due to its defeat in the Second World War. In fact, "about 15 million Germans had to flee from Eastern Europe after the defeat. Nazis or non-Nazis, collaborators or resistance fighters, they were chased out of regions, in which they had been settled for centuries: the Sudetens in Bohemia and Moravia, the Silesians, the eastern Prussians and the Pomeranians" ("La 'nouvelle Allemagne' brise ses anciens tabous", Le Temps – a Swiss periodical - of 14th June 2002). In fact, under the pretext of working for humanitarian ends, at Germany's initiative, a "European network against the displacement of populations" has been created. It is motivated by "the idea that the displacement of the German population was an 'injustice' carried out for ethnic reasons, that were hidden by the Potsdam Agreement'" ("Informationen zur Deutschen Außen-politik" of 2nd February 2005; https://www.germanforeignpolicy.com [56]).[23] [57] In a speech supporting this "network" made in November 2004 before a commission of the European Council, Markus Meckel, SPD deputy with special responsibility for international questions, said: "Certainly there are dictators, such as Hitler, Stalin and, recently, Milosevic who have given orders for such displacement of populations. But democrats, such as Churchill and Roosevelt accepted ethnic homogenisation as a means of political stabilisation". The document quoted (Informationen zur…) summarises the speech: "Meckel aggravates the provocation by adding that the whole world would now agree in describing the forced migration of the German populations, as an attack on human rights. 'The international community now condemns', he explains, 'the behaviour of the victors in the war. It seems to think that they acted no differently from the racist dictatorship of National Socialism’."

Obviously we cannot expect that any fraction of the bourgeoisie brings to light the crimes committed by other fractions of the bourgeoisie, for any other reason than the defence of its own imperialist interests. Indeed the bourgeois propaganda using revelations about the crimes of the Allies during the Second World War is to be fought with the same determination, with which we fight against the allied and democratic propaganda, using the crimes of Nazism in order to re-construct their political virginity. All the tears shed for the victims of the Second World War, by whatever fraction of the bourgeoisie, are no more than nauseating hypocrisy.

The most important lesson to draw from the six years of slaughter of the second world slaughter, is that the two camps that fought it out, and the countries that followed them, were all the rightful creation of the vile beast that is decadent capitalism, no matter what ideology they used; Stalinist, democratic or Nazi.

The only denunciation of barbarism that can serve the interests of humanity is that which goes to the root of this barbarity and uses it as a lever for the denunciation of capitalism as a whole. And which does so with a view to overthrowing it, before it buries the whole of humanity under a heap of ruins.

LC-S (16th April 05)

 

 

Tsunami, imperialist rivalries in Iraq, Lebanon, Ukraine, Palestine, Kyrghyzstan

If we were to identify a vice that is characteristic of each epoch of human history, it would certainly be the hypocrisy of the ruling class that would fit the bill in the case of capitalism. The great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, amassed piles of skulls when he conquered towns that had not submitted to him. But he never claimed to do it for the good of their inhabitants. It took bourgeois capitalist democracy to teach us that war is "humanitarian" and that it is necessary to bomb civilian populations in order to bring… peace and freedom to these very populations.

The tsunami in December 2004 hit the coasts of the Indian Ocean when the last issue of this Review was already going to press. This meant that it was not possible for us to include a position statement on such an important event for the world today,[1] [85] so we will do it in this issue. As early as 1902, a little more than 100 years ago, the great revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg denounced the hypocrisy of the great powers. She pointed out that, although they offered their "humanitarian aid" to the populations that were victims of the volcanic disaster on Martinique, they had never hesitated for a moment to massacre the same populations in order to spread their domination throughout the world.[2] [86] Today, when we see the reaction of the great powers to the disaster that occurred in South East Asia at the end of 2004, we have to conclude that things have not changed much since then. If anything, they have worsened.

We now know that the number of deaths directly caused by the tsunami is more than 300 000, on the whole people from the poorest populations, while hundreds of thousands have been left homeless. This hecatomb was by no means an "act of god". Obviously we cannot accuse capitalism of causing the quake that led to the huge tidal wave. On the other hand, we can lay at its door the utter negligence and irresponsibility of the governments in this area of the world and of their Western counter-parts, that led to this enormous human catastrophe.[3] [87]

They all knew that this part of the globe is particularly prone to seismic quakes: "However local experts knew that a drama was about to take place. In December, Indonesian seismologists raised the question with a French expert, outside the official meeting of physicists in Jakarta. They were well aware of the danger of tsunamis because there are repeated quakes in the region" (Libération, 31/12/04).

Not only were the experts aware of the danger but the ex-director of the international centre for information on tsunamis in Hawaii, George Pararas-Carayannis, had even stated that a major quake had taken place two days before the disaster of 26th December.

"The Indian Ocean has basic infrastructures to measure and communicate seismic activity. No one should have been surprised, because a quake of the magnitude of 8.1 occurred on 24th December. The authorities should have been warned. But there is a lack, firstly of any political will on the part of the countries concerned, and also of any international co-ordination on the scale of that which exists in the Pacific" (Libération of 28/12/04).

No one should have been surprised, yet the disaster happened. It happened even though there was enough information available about the catastrophe beforehand to have made it possible to take action to prevent this carnage.

This is not negligence, this is a criminal attitude and it reveals the profound contempt that the ruling class has for the population and the proletariat, who are the main victims of the policies of the local bourgeois governments.

In fact, it is now clearly acknowledged officially that the warning was not given out of fear… that it would harm the tourist industry! In other words, tens of thousands of human beings were sacrificed in order to defend sordid economic and financial interests.

Such irresponsibility on the part of governments is a further illustration of the attitude of this class of sharks, that runs the life and productive activity of society. Bourgeois states are ready to sacrifice as many human lives as is necessary to preserve capitalist exploitation and profits.

The profound cynicism of the capitalist class, the disaster that the survival of this system of exploitation and death represents for humanity, is even clearer if we compare the cost of a system to detect tsunamis with the fabulous sums spent on armaments. The countries bordering on the Indian Ocean are considered to be "developing countries". Yet the sum of $20-30 million, considered necessary to set up a system of warning beacons in the area, is the equivalent of just one of the 16 Hawk-309 planes ordered from Britain by the Indonesian government in the 1990s. If we look at the defence budgets for India ($19 billion), Indonesia ($1.3 billion) and Sri Lanka ($540 million - this is the smallest and poorest of the three countries), the reality of the capitalist system becomes glaringly obvious. It is a system that does not hesitate to spend money in order to reap death but that is stingy in the extreme when it is a matter of protecting the life of the population.

Other victims are to be expected now that new quakes in the region have affected the Indonesian island of Nias. The large number of dead and injured is due to the material used for housing: concrete blocks that are much less resistant to earthquakes than wood, which is the traditional building material in the region. But concrete is cheap. Wood, however, is costly, all the more so in that exporting it to the developed countries is an important source of revenue for the capitalists, for organised crime and for the military in Indonesia. With this new disaster, the return of the Western media to the region, showing us all the good work done by the NGOs that are still there, also shows us the consequences of the grandiose declarations of governmental solidarity following the December 2004 quake.

Firstly, as far as the financial donations promised by the Western governments are concerned, the contrast between arms expenditure and the money devoted to aid operations, is still more glaring than in the case of the countries bordering on the Indian Ocean. At first, the United States promised $35 million in aid ("the amount we spend in Iraq each morning before breakfast", as the American senator, Patrick Leahy, said). Yet their proposed military budget for 2005 -2006 is $500 billion, excluding the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And even though the sum promised in aid is pitiful, we have already had occasion to predict that the bourgeoisie will be rich in promises but mean in practice: "We should remember that the ‘international community’ of imperialist gangsters promised $100 million after the earthquake in Iran (December 2003), of which only $17 million has been paid. The same thing happened in Liberia: $1 billion promised, $70 million paid.”[4] [88] The Asian Development Bank today announced that $4 billion of the money promised has not yet been transferred and, according to the BBC, "The Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, has [said] that his country has not yet received any of the money promised by governments". On Banda Aceh there is still no clean water for the population (ironically, the only ones to benefit from the efforts of the NGOs, which are largely inadequate, are the refugees in their camps…). In Sri Lanka, the refugees from the area around Trincomalee (to take just one example) are still living in tents and suffer from diarrhoea and chicken pox; 65% of their fishing fleet (on which a large part of the island's population depends) was destroyed by the tsunami and still has not been replaced.

The media, under orders of course, explain to us at great length the inevitable difficulties of a large-scale aid operation. It is very instructive to compare these "difficulties" assisting the poverty-stricken population (which brings no profit to capital), with the impressive logistic capacity of the American army during Desert Storm. During the six month build-up for the attack on Iraq, according to an article published by the Army Magazine,[5] [89] the "22nd Support Command received more than 12,447 tracked vehicles, 102,697 wheeled vehicles, 1 billion gallons [3,7 billion litres] of fuel and 24 short [metric] tons of mail during this brief period. Innovations over previous wars included state-of-the-art roll-on-roll-off shipping, modern containerisation, an efficient single-fuel system and automated information management". So when they talk about the "logistic difficulties" of humanitarian operations, let's bear in mind what capitalism is capable of doing when it is a question of defending its imperialist interests.

Moreover, even the sums and the pitiful resources sent there, were not given free of charge: the bourgeoisie does not spend money unless it gets something in return. If the Western powers dispatched their helicopters, their aircraft carriers and their amphibious vehicles to the area, it is because they intended to benefit in terms of their imperialist influence there. As Condoleeza Rice said to the American Senate, when she was confirmed as Secretary of State:[6] [90] "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us".[7] [91] Equally, the Indian government's decision to refuse any Western aid was entirely motivated by its desire to "play in the big boys' playground" and to affirm itself as a regional imperialist power.

Democracy hides barbarism

The indecent discrepancy between what the bourgeoisie spends on disseminating death and the increasingly wretched living conditions of the vast majority of the world's population is telling. However if we remain at this level, we will not get any further than all those of good conscience who defend democracy, that is, the various NGOs.

All the great powers are themselves ardent defenders of democracy and the information they broadcast on TV does not hesitate to expound all the reasons why we can expect a better world, thanks to the irresistible spread of democracy. Following the elections in Afghanistan, the population voted for the first time in Iraq, and Bush Junior was able to welcome the admirable courage of these people, who braved a real risk of death in order to go to the polling stations and say "no" to terrorism. In the Ukraine, the "orange revolution" has followed the example of Georgia and has replaced a corrupt government, a Russian leftover, with the heroic Yushenko. In the Lebanon, young people mobilise to demand that light be thrown on the assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri and that Syrian troops leave the country. In Palestine, the elections gave a clear mandate to Mahmud Abbas to end terrorism and conclude a just peace with Israel. Finally, in Kirghizstan a "tulip revolution" has swept away the old president Akayev. So we are supposed to be in the midst of a real democratic unfolding of "people power", the bearer of the "new world order", promised us when the Berlin wall came down in 1989.

But once we scratch the surface, the perspective immediately becomes less rosy.

To start with, the elections in Iraq have only punctuated a power struggle between the different factions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, which continued unabated with the subsequent negotiations between Shiites and Kurds over the division of power and the degree of autonomy to be given to the Kurdish party. For the moment they have managed to reach an agreement about certain government positions. But this is only by postponing the thorny question of Kirkuk, a rich oil town in northern Iraq, which is coveted both by the Sunnis and by the Kurds. Moreover it continues to be the scene of violent confrontations with the "resistance". We may well ask to what extent the Kurdish leaders take the Iraqi elections seriously given that, on the very same day, they organised an "opinion poll", the results of which showed that 95% of Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. "Self-determination is the natural right of our people and they have the right to express what they wish" according to Kurdish leader Barzani, and "when the moment comes, it will become a reality".[8] [92] The Kurdish situation is pregnant with threats to the stability of the region because any attempt on their part to affirm their independence would be seen as an immediate danger by two neighbouring countries, in which there exist significant Kurdish minorities: Turkey and Iran.

The Iraqi elections have proved to be a media coup in favour of the United States that has, politically, considerably weakened the resistance of its powerful rivals in the region, France in particular. On the other hand, the Bush government is by no means pleased at the prospect of an Iraqi state dominated by the Shiites, allied to Iran and so indirectly to Syria and its Lebanese henchmen, the Hezbollah. The assassination of Rafik Hariri, a powerful Lebanese leader and businessman, must be seen in this context.

All of the Western press - in America and France above all - point the finger at Syria. However all commentators are agreed on two points. Firstly Hariri was by no means an opposition force (he had been prime minister under Syrian tutelage for ten years). Secondly, Syria is the last to benefit from the crime, as it has been obliged to announce the complete withdrawal of its troops for the 30th April.[9] [93] By contrast, those who actually profit from the situation are, on the one hand Israel, as it weakens the influence of Hezbollah and, on the other hand the United States, which leapt at the chance to bring the Syrian regime into line. Does this mean that the "democratic revolution", that brought about this retreat, has, by some stretch of the imagination, won over a new zone to peace and prosperity? We beg leave to doubt this when we note that today's "opposition forces" (such as the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt) are in fact none other than the warlords, the protagonists of the conflict that bathed the country in blood from 1975 to 1990. Several bombings have already been directed against the Christian areas of the Lebanon, while the Hezbollah (with 20,000 men in arms) holds massive demonstrations.

In the same way, the forced resignation of the president of Kirghizstan, Akayev, is no more than a prelude to more misery and instability. This country, one of the poorest in Central Asia, already hosts Russian and American military bases, and is coveted increasingly by China. Moreover, it is one of the main drug routes from Afghanistan to Europe. Given these conditions, the recent "democratic" outcome is no more than a moment in the proxy settling of scores between the great powers.

During the 20th century, imperialist rivalries have twice covered the planet in blood with the appalling butchery of the two world wars. Moreover, there were incessant wars after 1945 involving the two large imperialist blocs that emerged victorious from the Second World War up until the fall of the Russian bloc in 1989. At the end of each orgy of killing, the ruling class swears that this time really is the last; the 14-18 war was "the war to end war", the 1939-45 war was to open up a new period of reconstruction and freedom, guaranteed by the United Nations. The end of the Cold War in 1989 was to herald a "new world order" of peace and prosperity. In case the working class today begins questioning the benefits of this "new order" (of war and misery), 2004 and 2005 have, and will, see sumptuous celebrations of the triumphs of democracy (Normandy landings in June 1944). This also includes moving ceremonies commemorating the horrors of Nazism (liberation of the concentration camps). We suspect that the democratic and hypocritical bourgeoisie will make less palaver about the 20 million deaths in the Russian gulags, as it was itself allied with the USSR against Hitler. Likewise it will be more reticent about the 340,000 deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the greatest democracy in the world used the weapon of Armageddon, the atomic bomb, for the only time in history, against a country that had already been defeated.[10] [94]

This shows how little confidence we can have that this bourgeois class will give us the peace and prosperity they promise us with hand on heart. On the contrary: "Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth - there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretence to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law - but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form."[11] [95] Against this macabre sabbath, only the proletariat can impose a real opposition able to end war, because it will put an end to war-mongering capitalism.

Only the working class can offer a solution

At the end of the Vietnam war, the American army was no longer fit for combat, The soldiers - mainly conscripts - refused repeatedly to go to the front and assassinated those officers who were "zealously inclined". This demoralisation was not the result of a military defeat but was due to the fact that, unlike in the 39-45 war, the American bourgeoisie had not managed to get the working class to join it in its imperialist aims.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon's pro-war factions were convinced that the "Vietnam syndrome" had been overcome. Nevertheless, there is growing refusal on the part of American workers in uniform to give their lives for the military adventures of their bourgeoisie. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, some 5,500 soldiers have deserted, while there is a shortfall of 5,000 men recruited for the National Guard (who make up half the troops). This total of 10,500 men represents nearly 8% of the force of 135,000 present in Iraq.

This kind of passive resistance does not in itself represent a perspective for the future. But the old mole of workers' consciousness goes on digging away. The slow awakening of proletarian resistance to the decline in its living conditions bears with it not only resistance to this old, putrefying world but eventually its destruction to do away for ever with its wars, its misery and its hypocrisy.

 

Jens, 9 April 2005-05-08

 

The last recession (2000-2001) dealt a serious blow to all the theoretical flights of fancy that had developed around the supposed "third industrial revolution" based on the micro-processor and new information technologies, just as the collapse on the stock exchange demolished all the blather about a new "ownership capitalism" where wage labourers were to become participating shareholders – the umpteenth version of the worn-out myth of "popular capitalism", whereby each worker is supposed to become a "proprietor" through the ownership of a few shares in "his" company.

Since then, the US has succeeded in limiting the extent of the recession, while Europe has got stuck in near stagnation. And so we are told, over and over again, that the secret of the American recovery lies in a greater openness to the "new economy", and in its more deregulated and flexible labour market. By contrast, the lethargy of the recovery in Europe is supposedly explained by its backwardness in both domains. To overcome this, the European Union has adopted the objectives laid down in the so-called "Lisbon strategy", which aims to create, by 2010, "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world". In the "employment guidelines" laid down by the European commission, and referred to by the new constitution, we can thus read the member states must reform "overly restrictive employment legislation which affects the dynamic of the labour market" and promote "diversity in terms of Labour contracts, notably as far as working time is concerned". In short, the ruling class is trying to turn the page on the last recession and stock market collapse and to present these as if they were no more than minor details on the road towards growth and competitiveness. They are playing us the old tune of a better future... if only the workers will consent to a few extra sacrifices before they finally reach the earthly paradise. But the reality is very different, as this article aims to show through a marxist analysis of the bourgeoisie's own official statistics. The final part of this article is devoted to refuting the analytical method for understanding the crisis, developed by another revolutionary organisation: Battaglia Comunista.

A systemic crisis

The last recession is far from being a mere unfortunate accident: it is the sixth to strike the capitalist economy since the end of the 1960s (see graph n°1).

In 1967,1970-71,1974-75,1988-82,1991-93 and 2001-02 each recession tended to be both longer and deeper than the previous one, within the context of the constant decline in the average growth rate of the world economy decade on decade. They were not merely setbacks on the way towards "the most competitive and dynamic economy in the world", they were so many stages in the slow but inexorable descent into the abyss which is leading the capitalist mode of production to bankruptcy. Despite all the triumphal speeches about the "new economy", the liberalisation of markets, the enlargement of Europe, the technological revolution, globalisation, not to mention all the repeated puffing of the performance of supposedly emerging countries, at the opening of markets in the Eastern bloc, the development of Southeast Asia and China... the growth rate of world GDP per person has continued to decline decade on decade.[1] [116] Certainly, if we look at indicators such as unemployment, the rate of growth, the rate of profit or international trade, then the present crisis is far from the collapse experienced by the capitalist economy worldwide during the 1930s, and its rhythm is much slower. Since then, and especially since World War II, national economies have increasingly come under an ever more omnipresent direct and indirect control by the state. To this should be added the establishment of economic control at the level of each imperialist bloc (through the creation of organisations such as the IMF for the Western bloc and COMECON for the Eastern bloc).[2] [117] With the disappearance of the blocs the same international institutions have either disappeared or lost their influence on the political level, although in some cases they continue to play a certain role on the economic level. This "organisation" of capitalist production for decades to kept control of the system's own contradictions to a much greater extent than was possible during the 1930s, and explains the slow development of the crisis today. But alleviating the effects of these contradictions is not the same thing as resolving them.

Ever more feeble recoveries

The evolution of the economy today is not like a yo-yo, whose ups and downs are a vital part of its movement. It is part of an overall tendency towards decline, which although it is slow and gradual thanks to the regulatory intervention of the state and international institutions, is nonetheless irreversible.

This is the case with the much vaunted American recovery, so often set up as an example: the United States may have succeeded in limiting the extent of the recession but only at the cost of creating new imbalances which will make the next recession even deeper and its effects still more dramatic for the working class and all the exploited of the earth. If all we did was to note the existence of economic recoveries after each recession, then this would be a pure empiricism, which would not advance us one iota in understanding why the rate of growth of the world economy has declined continuously since the end of the 1960s. The evolution of the economic situation since then reveals the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, and consists of a series of recessions and recoveries, the latter being each time based on more fragile foundations. As far as the recovery of the US economy after the recession of 2000-2001 is concerned, we can see that it is essentially based on three high-risk factors: 1) a rapid and massive increase in the budget deficit; 2) a recovery in consumer spending based on growing debt, the disappearance of national savings, and external financing; 3) the spectacular fall in interest rates that herald increased instability on international money markets.

 

1) A record growth in the budget deficit

Since the end of the 1960s, we can see clearly (graph n°2) that the recessions in 1967,1970, 1974-75 and 1980-82 were increasingly deep (the dotted line tracks the growth rate of American GDP), whereas those of 1991 and 2001 appear to have been less extensive and separated by longer periods of recovery (1983-1990 and 1992-1999). Are we to suppose that these are the effects of the emergence of this new economy that we are so often told about? Do we see here a reversal of the tendency begun in the world's most advanced economy and which asks no more than to spread throughout the world if only others will copy America's recipes? This is what we will now examine.

To say that economic recoveries exist, even if they are less vigorous than before, does not take us much further unless we examine what drives them. To do so, we have matched the evolution of the United States budget deficit (solid line in graph n°2) with growth in GDP: this demonstrates clearly not only that each phase of recovery is preceded by a major increase in the budget deficit, but also that on each such occasion the latter is greater in either size or duration than on the previous one. Consequently, both the longer phases of recovery during the 1980s and 1990s and the relatively moderate nature of the recessions are explained above all by the size of the US budget deficit. The recovery after the recession of 2000-2001 is no exception to the rule. Without a historically unprecedented budget deficit, both in terms of its size and of the rapidity with which it developed, American "growth" would look more like deflation. From a surplus of 2.4% in 2000, the budget deficit has now reached 3.5% as a result of the decrease in taxation (essentially for higher incomes) and increased military spending. Moreover, and contrary to the promises of the presidential campaign, the priorities defined for 2005 should lead to an increase in the deficit, given the increases in military and security spending and substantial tax handouts for the rich.[3] [118] The few measures planned to limit this deficit will lead to still greater austerity for the exploited, since it is planned to reduce spending that benefits the poor.[4] [119]

Moreover, we also need to put paid to the myth of a turnaround begun in the United States, since when we look at growth rates by decade following the decline which set in at the end of the 1960s, these remain stationary at around 3%, in other words at a lower level than during previous decades... and the two hundredths of a percentage point (!) increase for the period 1990-1999 over 1980-1989 can certainly not be considered as a change in tendency (graph n°3).

It is clear that the idea of a new phase of growth led by the United States is nothing but a myth maintained by bourgeois propaganda, refuted by the relative decline in European performance which, up until the 1980s, was catching up with the US.[5] [120] The better health of the American economy comes not so much from its greater efficiency as a result of investment in the so-called "new economy", but from a thoroughly traditional and gigantic level of debt throughout the economy, which moreover has to be financed by the rest of the world. This is true both of the increase in the budget deficit and for the other fundamentals of the American economic recovery which we will examine below.

2) Debt fuels a recovery in consumer spending

One of the reasons for relatively higher growth in the United States is sustained consumer spending thanks to the following measures:

• The spectacular decline in taxation which has maintained the spending of the rich, at the cost of further damage to the federal budget;

• the decline both in interest rates, which have fallen from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 1% in mid-2004, and in savings (graph n°4), which has had the effect of raising household debt to record levels (graph n°5) and unleashing a speculative bubble in the housing market (graph n°6).

Such dynamic consumer spending poses three problems: the growth in debt threatened by a crash in the housing market; a growing trade deficit (rising from 4.8% of US GDP in 2003 to 5.7% in 2004: more than 1% of world GDP) and an increasing inequality in incomes.[6] [121] As graph n°4 shows, at the beginning of the 1980s household savings stood at between 8 and 9% of income after tax. Since then, this rate has declined to about 2%. And consumer spending is at the root of the United States' growing trade deficit. The US imports ever more goods and services than it sells abroad. Such a situation, where the United States increasingly lives on credit from the rest of the world, is only possible because the countries which receive an excess of dollars as a result of their trade surplus with the US are prepared to invest them on the American money markets rather than demand their conversion into other currencies. This mechanism has swollen gross US debt towards the rest of the world from 20% of GDP in 1980 to 90% in 2003, beating a 110 year-old record.[7] [122] This debt relative to the rest of the world inevitably weakens the income of American capital which has to finance the interest. This raises the question of how long the American economy can go on sustaining such a level of debt.

Moreover, American household debt is only part of an overall tendency within the American economy, whose indebtedness has risen to an enormous 300% of GDP in 2002 (graph n°7), which in reality stands at 360% if we add in gross federal debt. Concretely this means that in order to repay its total debt the American economy would have to work for nothing for three years. This demonstrates what we said previously, that the shorter recessions and longer recoveries since the beginning of the 1980s, which are supposedly the proof of a new tendency to growth based on a "third industrial revolution", are in fact meaningless because they are based not on a "healthy", but on an increasingly artificial growth.

 

Graph 4: The rate of saving is the relationship between households’ total spending on goods and services (including housing) and their income after tax. This graph shows clearly that if United States growth rates were higher than those in Europe during the 1980s, this is not to do with the onset of the new phase of growth based on the so-called third industrial revolution tied to the “new economy”, but amongst other things to a constant fall in the rate of savings. The United States is spending its own savings and investments from the rest of the world.

Graph 5: Household debt has reached historically unprecedented levels. The growth in this debt has accelerated since the end of the 1960s, each percentage point of economic growth was based on a much faster increase in household debt. About three-quarters of this debt consists of mortgages: households borrow large sums on the basis of property values all the more readily in that interest rates on these loans are currently very low ("house values" here represents the share of mortgages in the total debt). Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Flow of funds accounts of the US, 6 June 2002

Graph 6: With the notable exceptions of Japan (still digesting its housing crash), and of Germany, the inflation in property prices is affecting the whole OECD. "L'état de l'économie 2005", in Alternatives Economiques n°64

Graph 7: Total US debt increases slowly from 1952 until the early 1980s, then doubles in the space of 20 years. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Flow of funds accounts of the US, 6 June 2002

 

 

 

3) Falling interest rates allow a competitive devaluation of the dollar

Finally, the third factor in the American recovery is the progressive fall in interest rates from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 1% in mid-2004, which has made it possible to support the domestic market and to maintain a policy of competitive devaluation of the dollar on international markets.

These low interest rates have made possible a growing level of debt (notably through cheaper mortgages) and have allowed consumer spending and the housing market to sustain economic activity despite the decline in employment during the recession. That is, the share of household spending in GDP which was around 62% from the 1950s to the 1980s, has increased to over 70% at the beginning of the 21st century.

Furthermore, the response to the US trade deficit has been a considerable decline in the dollar (about 40%) in relation to non-aligned currencies, essentially the euro (and in part the yen). In effect the US economy is growing on credit and at the expense of the rest of the world, since it is financed by foreign capital thanks to the dominant position of the United States. Any other country placed in such a situation would be obliged to raise its interest rates enough to attract foreign capital.

Economic dynamics since the end of the 1960s

As we have seen, the recovery that followed the 2001 recession is even more fragile than its predecessors. It is one in a series of recessions which themselves concretise the tendency to a constant decline in rates of growth, decade on decade, since the end of the 1960s. If we are to understand this tendency towards declining growth rates, and especially its irreversible nature, then we must return to its underlying causes.

The exhaustion of the economic impetus after World War II, as the rebuilt European and Japanese economies began to flood the world with surplus products (relative to the solvent market), was followed by a slowdown in the growth of labour productivity, from the mid-1960s for the United States and the beginning of the 1970s for Europe (graph n°8).

Since the increase in productivity is the main endogenous factor that counters the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a slowdown in the growth of productivity puts pressure on the rate of profit and therefore also on other fundamental variables of the capitalist economy: notably the rate of accumulation[8] [123] and economic growth.[9] [124] Graph n°9 shows clearly this fall in the rate of profit, beginning in the mid-1960s for the United States and the early 1970s for Europe, and continuing until 1981-82.

As this graph clearly shows, the fall in the rate of profit was reversed at the beginning of the 1980s and has remained firmly positive since then. The fundamental question is therefore to determine the cause of this reversal, since the rate of profit is a synthetic variable which is determined by numerous parameters that we can summarise under the following three headings: the rate of surplus value, the organic composition of capital, and labour productivity.[10] [125] Essentially, capitalism can escape from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall either "upwards", by increasing labour productivity, or "downwards" through austerity at the expense of wage earners. The data presented in this article demonstrate clearly that the upturn in the rate of profit is not the result of new gains in productivity engendering a decrease or a slowdown in the growth of the organic composition of capital following a "third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" (the so-called "new economy") but is due to direct and indirect wage austerity and the rise in unemployment (graph n°10,11,12).

Fundamental to the present situation is the fact that neither accumulation (graph n°12), nor productivity (graph n°8), nor growth (graph n°1) have kept up with the 25-year upturn in company profitability: on the contrary, all these fundamental variables have remained depressed. And yet historically, a rise in the rate of profit tends to draw with it the rate of accumulation and therefore of productivity and growth. We therefore need to pose the following fundamental question: why, despite the renewed health and upward orientation of the rate of profit, have capital accumulation and economic growth not followed?

The answer is given by Marx in his critique of political economy and especially in Capital where he puts forward his central thesis of the independence of production and the market: "the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time, [though] in itself capable of expansion. The admission that the market must expand if there is to be no over-production, is therefore also an admission that there can be over-production. For it is then possible – since market and production are two independent factors – that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other";[11] [126] "The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. The first are only limited by the productive power of society, the latter by the proportional relation of the various branches of production and the consumer power of society".[12] [127] This means that production does not create its own market (inversely, by contrast, the saturation of the market necessarily has an impact on production, which is then voluntarily limited by the capitalists in an attempt to avoid total ruin). In other words, the fundamental reason behind capitalism's situation where company profitability has been re-established, but without productivity, investment, the rate of accumulation and therefore of growth, following, is to be sought in the inadequacy of solvent outlets.

This inadequacy of solvent outlets is also at the root of the so-called tendency towards the "financiarisation of the economy". If today's abundant profits are not reinvested this is not because of the low profitability of invested capital (if we were to follow the logic of those who explain the crisis solely through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), but because of the lack of sufficient outlets. This is illustrated clearly by graph n°12 which shows that, despite the upturn in profits (the marginal rate measures the relationship of profit to added value) as a result of the increase in austerity, the rate of investment has continued to decline (and so therefore has economic growth) which explains the rise in unemployment and in non-reinvested profit which is then distributed in the form of financial revenue.[13] [128] In the United States, financial revenue (interest and dividends, excluding capital gains) represented on average 10% of total household income between 1952 in 1979 but rose progressively between 1980 and 2003 to reach 17%.

 

Capitalism has only been able to control the effects of its contradictions by putting off the day of reckoning. It is not resolved them, it has only made them more explosive. The present crisis, as it demonstrates the impotence of the economic organisation and policies established since the 1930s and World War II, threatens to be both more serious and more indicative of the level reached by the contradictions of the system than all its predecessors.

 

Graph 8: Labour productivity in the United States and Europe (Average for Germany, France and Great Britain). Labour productivity as calculated here concerns all companies. The United States is shown as a solid line and Europe as a thin line. Labour productivity is the quotient of production, corrected for inflation (constant 1990 dollars), by the number of hours worked: it is thus expressed in dollars per hour. The logarithmic scale allows us to visualise growth rates by the greater or lesser steepness of the curtain (the increasing shallowness of the curve thus indicates a diminution in the rate of growth of labour productivity). We can readily identify the break point in the mid-1960s for the United States and in the first half of the 1970s for Europe. Thus in Europe, labour productivity rose from seven dollars per hour in 1961 to 14 dollars per hour in 1975, whereas the rise from 14 to 28 dollars per hour in 1998 took 23 years.* The small fluctuations in the curve are the effects of upturns and downturns in activity. Because the graph uses purchasing power parity indexes, the absolute levels are comparable (whereas European labour productivity was half that of the United States in 1960, we can see that Europe has since then caught up). * during the 1950-60s the growth rates for labour productivity in the G6 (United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy) were in the region of 6%. Since the 1980s they have turned around 2.5%, in other words they have fallen by more than half.

Graph 9: The rate of profit is calculated here for the whole private economy, as the ratio between a broad measure of profit (production less the total labour cost) and the stock of fixed capital (net of amortization). Taxes (on profits), interest payments, and dividends, for profits. G Dumesnil and D Lévy, published in La finance mondialisée, editor F Chesnais, ed. La Découverte, 2004, pp71-98

Graph 10: Every year, society produces a certain added value in the form of a given volume of goods and services: the gross domestic product (GDP). For companies, this added value is divided between profit and wages (wages paid directly to the workers, and indirect wages in the form of social security payments). The graph shows the evolution of wages as a percentage of GDP. We can see clearly that the rate has fallen over the last 20 years. M Husson, Les casseurs de l'Etat social, ed. La Découverte, 2003

Graph 11: Multiplied by 1.7 between the end of the war and 1970, weekly industrial wages (in 1990 dollars) have fallen to the level of the late 1950s. G Dumesnil and D Lévy, Crise et sortie de crise

Graph 12: Following the application of austerity programmes, the decline in labour costs has increased the competitivityof production costs, which however have not been wholly reflected in a fall in prices, thus increasing company profit margins. The recovery in profits has not, however, led to an increase in investment, which has continued to decline. It it this phenomenon which explains the so-called "financiarisation of the economy": instead of being reinvested, the increased profit is distributed in the form of finance revenue. But if the stagnation of wage costs has fed finance revenue rather than investment, this is not because "bad finance capital" is a parasite on "good productive capital", as the leftists and anti-globalists would have us believe, but because the intrinsic nature of capitalist social relations limits the development of solvent demand. The source of the crisis lies in the very foundations of the capitalist system, not in a "bad" capitalism chasing out the "good" and which needs to be disciplined by more regulations and "democratic control". M Husson, op. cit.

 

Another analysis of the crisis by Battaglia Comunista

We have seen above that the bourgeoisie's explanations are not worth a penny and are nothing other than a pure mystification to hide its system's historic bankruptcy. Unfortunately, some revolutionary political groups have also adopted these conceptions - voluntarily or not - either in their official or in their leftist and anti-globalist versions. We will look here more particularly at the analyses produced by Battaglia Comunista.[14] [129]

We should start by pointing out that everything we have seen above constitutes a clear refutation of the foundations of the "analysis" of the crisis in terms of a "third industrial revolution" and of the "parasitic financiarisation" of capitalism and the "recomposition of the working-class" which Battaglia seems to have taken directly from the bourgeoisie’s propaganda manuals for the former, and from the leftists and anti-globalists for the latter.[15] [130] Battaglia Comunista is utterly convinced that capitalism is in the midst of a "third industrial revolution marked by the microprocessor" and is undergoing a "restructuring of its productive apparatus" and a "resulting demolition of the previous composition of the class", thus making possible "a long resistance to the crisis of the cycle of accumulation".[16] [131] At this point we should make a number of comments:

1) First of all, if capitalism really were in the midst of a "industrial revolution" as Battaglia Comunista claims, then we should at least - by definition - be seeing an upturn in labour productivity. And indeed this is what Battaglia thinks is happening, since they declare forthrightly and without any empirical verification that "the profound restructuring of the productive apparatus has brought with it a dizzying increase in productivity", an analysis repeated in the latest issue of their theoretical review: "... an industrial revolution, in other words of the processes of production, has always had the effect of increasing labour productivity...".[17] [132] But, as we have seen above, the reality in terms of labour productivity is the opposite to the bluff maintained by bourgeois propaganda and swallowed whole by Battaglia Comunista. This organisation seems to be unaware that the growth in labour productivity began to decline more than 35 years ago and that it has more or less stagnated since the 1980s (graph n°8)![18] [133]

2) We have seen that, for Battaglia, "the third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" is so powerful that it has "generated dizzying gains in productivity" making it possible to "reduce the increase in the growth of organic composition". But even a cursory examination of the real dynamic of the rate of profit demonstrates that the recession of 2000-2001 in the United States was preceded in 1997 by a temporary downturn[19] [134] (graph n°9), notably because the famous "new economy" led to an increase in capital, in other words to a rise in organic composition and not to a decline as Battaglia pretends.[20] [135] The new technologies have certainly made possible some gains in productivity[21] [136] but these have been insufficient to compensate for the cost of investment despite the decline in their relative price, which has in the end weighed on the organic composition of capital and has since 1997 led to a downturn in US profit rates. This point is important since it demolishes any illusions in capitalism's ability to free itself from its fundamental laws. The new technologies are not a magic wand which would make it possible to accumulate capital for free.

3) Moreover, if labour productivity really were undergoing a "dizzying increase" then, for anyone who knows Marx, the rate of profit would be rising. Indeed this is what Battaglia Comunista suggests, though without saying so explicitly, when they declare that "... unlike previous industrial revolutions (...) the one based on the microprocessor (...) has also reduced the cost of innovation, in reality the cost of constant capital, thus diminishing the increase in the organic composition of capital".[22] [137] As we can see, Battaglia does not deduce from this that there has been an increase in the rate of profit. Have they forgotten that "if productivity rises faster than the composition of capital, then the rate of profit does not decline, on the contrary it will rise", as its fraternal organisation, the CWO, wrote some time ago (in Revolutionary Perspectives n°16 old series, "Wars and accumulation", pp 15-17)? Battaglia prefers to talk discreetly of "the diminution in the increase of the growth of organic composition" as a result of "the dizzying growth in productivity following the industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" rather than of a rise in the rate of profit. Why such contortions, why try to hide economic reality from their readers? Quite simply because to recognise such an implication of their own observation (whether right or wrong) of the evolution of labour productivity would contradict their eternal dogma as to the unique source of the crisis: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Battaglia Comunista, which never misses an occasion to reassert its eternal credo that the rate of profit is always pointed downwards, is so preoccupied with "understanding the world" outside the supposedly abstract schemas of the ICC that they seem not to have realised that the rate of profit has been resolutely pointed upwards for a quarter-century (graph n°9) and not downwards as they continue to claim! This 28-year blindness has only one explanation: how else could they continue to talk about the crisis of capitalism without calling into question their dogma explaining crises solely by the tendency of the rate of profit fall, when in fact the latter has been oriented upwards since the beginning of the 1980s?

4) Capitalism survives not by rising, thanks to "an industrial revolution" and "dizzying new gains in productivity" as Battaglia Comunista claims, but by decline, through a drastic reduction in the mass of wages dragging the world into poverty and, at the same time, reducing in part its own outlets. Anyone who analyses attentively the driving forces behind this quarter-century rise in the rate of profit will see that it springs not from "dizzying rises in productivity" and "the diminution in the increase in organic composition" but in an unprecedented austerity at the expense of the working-class as we have seen above (graphs n°10 to 12).

Capitalism's present configuration thus utterly refutes all those who make the mechanism of the "tendency of the rate of profit fall" the sole explanation of the economic crisis, given that for 25 years the rate of profit has been rising. If the crisis continues today despite renewed company profitability, it is because companies no longer expand production as they once did, given the limitation and therefore the inadequacy of their outlets. This reveals itself in anaemic investment and therefore weak growth. Battaglia Comunista is incapable of understanding this because they have not understood Marx's fundamental thesis as to the independence between production and the market (see above), and have traded it in for an absurd idea which makes the development or the limitation of the market depend entirely on the sole dynamic upwards or downwards of the rate of profit.[23] [138]

Given these repeated blunders, which reveal their incomprehension of the most elementary notions, we can only repeat our advice to Battaglia Comunista: revise your ABC of marxist economic concepts before trying to play teacher and excommunicators with the ICC. In fact, Battaglia's recent decision to refuse any reply to our organisation has come just in time to hide their increasingly obvious inability to confront our arguments politically.[24] [139]

Contrary to the "abstract schemas" of the ICC, which are supposedly "outside historical materialism", Battaglia tells us that they have "... studied the administration of the crisis by the West both in all its financial aspects and on the terrain of the restructuring engendered by the wave of the microprocessor revolution".[25] [140] However, we have seen that Battaglia's "study" is nothing other than an insipid copy of leftist and anti-globalist theories about the "parasitism of financial rent".[26] [141] Their copy is not only insipid it is moreover totally incoherent and contradictory since they have failed to master the marxist economic concepts that they claim to work with. And while they do not understand these concepts, they do not hesitate to transform them as they please, as with the marxist thesis on the independence of production and the market which, in the secret world of Battaglia's dialectic, is transformed into a law of the strict dependence between "... the economic cycle and the process of valorisation which make the market 'solvent' or 'insolvent'" (op cit). We expect something better than a string of nonsense from critical contributions that claim to re-establish marxism against the so-called idealist vision of the ICC.

Conclusion

On all major questions of economic analysis Battaglia Comunista fall systematically into the trap of appearances in themselves, instead of trying to understand the essence of things from the standpoint of a marxist analytical framework. We have seen that Battaglia Comunista has swallowed all the bourgeoisie's talk about the existence of a third industrial revolution merely on the basis of the empirical appearance of a few technological novelties in the microelectronics and information technology sectors, however spectacular these may be,[27] [142] and as a result have arrived at the purely speculative deduction that there are "dizzying gains in productivity" and "a reduction in the cost of constant capital thus diminishing the increase in organic composition". On the contrary, a rigorous marxist analysis of the fundamental variables that determine the dynamic of the capitalist economy (the market, the rate of profit, the rate of surplus value, the organic composition of capital, labour productivity, etc.) allow us to understand not only that this is in large part of media bluff, but in valorisation the reality is the opposite of the bourgeoisie's claims, echoed by Battaglia Comunista.

Understanding the crisis is not an academic exercise but essentially a militant activity. As Engels said "The task of economic science is rather to show that the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its approaching dissolution, and to reveal within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses." And this becomes possible with real clarity "Only when the mode of production in question has already described a good part of its descending curve, when it has half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large extent disappeared, and its successor is already knocking at the door".[28] [143] This is the meaning and the aim of revolutionary work at the level of economic analysis. It allows us to understand the context for the evolution of the balance of class forces and certain of its determining factors, since capitalism's entry into its decadent phase provides the material and potentially the subjective conditions for the proletariat to undertake the insurrection. This is what the ICC has always tried to demonstrate in its analyses. Battaglia Comunista, by abandoning the concept of decadence[29] [144] and by adopting an academic and mono-causal vision of the crisis has begun to forget how to do this. Their "economic science" no longer service to demonstrate the " social abuses" of capitalism or the " indications of its approaching dissolution" as the founders of marxism urged us to do, but rather to fob us off with leftist and anti-globalist prose about "capitalism's capacity for survival" through the "financiarisation of the system", the "recomposition of the proletariat", and to cap it all "the fundamental transformation of capitalism" thanks to the so-called "third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor", new technologies, etc.

Today finds Battaglia Comunista completely disorientated and no longer really knowing what to defend in front of the working-class: is the capitalist mode of production in decadence or not?[30] [145] Is it the capitalist mode of production or the capitalist social formation which is in decadence?[31] [146] Has capitalism been "in crisis for more than 30 years"[32] [147] or is it going through "a third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" leading to "a dizzying increase in productivity"?[33] [148] Is the rate of profit rising as the statistical data demonstrates or is it still falling as Battaglia invariably repeats, to the point where capitalism is obliged to proliferate war around the world in order to avoid bankruptcy?[34] [149] Is capitalism today in a dead-end or does it still have before it "a long capacity for resistance" thanks to "a third industrial revolution",[35] [150] or does it even have its own "solution" to the crisis thanks to war: "In the imperialist era global war is capital's way of 'controlling', of temporarily resolving, its contradictions" (IBRP platform)? These questions are fundamental if we are to orientate ourselves in the present situation. On these questions Battaglia Comunista can do no more than go around in circles: they are incapable of offering a clear response to the proletariat.

CC

---

 

In the previous article in this series (“Nucleo Comunista Internacional in Argentina: an episode in the proletariat’s striving for consciousness”, International Review n°120) we retraced the trajectory of a small nucleus of revolutionary elements in Argentina in the Nucleo Comunista Internacional (NCI).

We brought to light the problems encountered by this small group, particularly the fact that one of its elements, Citizen B, had profited from his possession of computer equipment (and especially Internet access) to isolate the other comrades by monopolising correspondence with groups of the proletarian political milieu. He imposed his decisions on them when he was not going behind their backs; he deliberately hid his actions from them and developed a politics which they did not approve since it called in question, overnight, their whole previous orientation. In particular, after expressing the will to be rapidly integrated into the ICC,[1] [191] affirming complete agreement with its political positions and analyses, rejecting the positions of the IBRP and denouncing the thuggish and informer-like behaviour of the so-called “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (IFICC), Citizen B abruptly turned his coat in the summer of 2004.

While a delegation of the ICC was present and was holding a whole series of discussions with the NCI, he made contact with the IFICC and the IBRP to announce his intention to develop work with these two groups, adopting another name, the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” (without saying a word to our delegation nor to the other members of the NCI). In fact “Senor B’s sudden passion for the IBRP and its positions, and for the IFICC, only began when this petty adventurer realised that his manoeuvres would meet short shrift with the ICC. This conversion, more sudden even than that of St Paul on the road to Damascus, gave the IBRP not the slightest pause for thought: the latter hastened to act as Senor B’s spokesman. The IBRP should ask itself one day how it is, and not just once, that elements who have demonstrated their inability to integrate into the communist left should turn towards the IBRP after failing in their 'approach' to the ICC” (ibid).

As far as we know, the IBRP has never asked itself such a question (at least no such question has ever appeared in its press).

One of the aims of this article is to set out some elements of an answer, which may be of some use to the IBRP, but will also be helpful for those coming towards the positions of the communist left and who might perhaps be impressed by the IBRP’s presentation of itself as the “only organisation with the heritage of the Italian communist left”. More generally, it will try to understand why the IBRP has experienced a series of failures in its policy of regroupment of revolutionary forces at the international level.

The IBRP's siren song's irresistible attractiveness for confused elements

The attitude of Citizen B, discovering at one and the same time a profound convergence with the positions of the IBRP and with the (totally slanderous) allegations put forward by the IFICC about the ICC, is really nothing but a caricature of an attitude which we have seen numerous times from elements who, having engaged in a discussion with our organisation, find that they have been mistaken, whether because they are not really in agreement with our positions, or because the demands of militancy in the ICC appear too constraining for them, or even because they have found out that they cannot carry out their personal policy within our organisation. These elements have then very often turned to the IBRP, in which they see an organisation more apt to satisfy their expectations. We have already taken up this type of evolution several times in our publications. That said, it would be worth while returning to these examples to show that this is not a fortuitous or exceptional event, but is a recurrent reality that ought to pose questions for the militants of the IBRP.

Even before the birth of the IBRP…

In the prehistory of the IBRP (and of the ICC) we see a first manifestation of what was be repeated many times thereafter. We are in the years 1973-4. Following an appeal launched in November 1972 by the American group Internationalism (which was to become the ICC section in the United States) for an international correspondence network, a series of meetings was organised between several groups which based themselves on the tradition of the communist left. The most regular participants of these meetings were Revolution Internationale from France and three groups based in Britain, World Revolution (WR), Revolutionary Perspectives (RP) and Workers’ Voice (WV) (from the names of their respective publications). WR and RP came from splits in Solidarity, which was based on anarcho-councilist positions. WV was a small group of workers from Liverpool who had broken with Trotskyism a short while before. Following these discussions, the three British groups came to positions close to those of Révolution Internationale and Internationalism (around which the ICC was constituted the following year). However, the process of unification of these three groups ended in failure. On the one hand the elements of Workers’ Voice decided to break with World Revolution because they felt they had been swindled by WR. The latter had retained semi-councilist positions on the 1917 revolution in Russia: it considered that it was a proletarian revolution but that the Bolshevik Party was bourgeois, a position of which it had convinced the comrades of WV. When WR, at the time of the meeting in January 1974, rejected these last remnants of councilism and rallied to the position of Révolution Internationale, these comrades felt “betrayed” and developed a great hostility to those in WR (who they accused of “capitulating to RI”). This led them to publish a “precision” in November 1974 that defined the groups who were going to form the ICC shortly after as “counter-revolutionaries”.[2] [192] On the other hand, RP asked to be integrated into the ICC as a “tendency” with its own platform (inasmuch as there were still differences between it and the ICC). We responded that our approach was not to integrate “tendencies” as such, each with its own platform, even if we consider that there can be differences on secondary aspects of the programmatic documents within the organisation. We did not shut the door on discussion with RP but this group began to distance itself from the ICC. It attempted to constitute an “alternative” international regroupment to the ICC, with WV, the French group Pour une Intervention Communiste (PIC) and the Revolutionary Workers’ Group (RWG) of Chicago. This “unprincipled bloc” (following Lenin’s term) didn’t last long. It could hardly be otherwise since the only question which brought these four groups together was their growing hostility to the ICC. Finally, however, there was the regroupment between RP and WV in Britain (September 1975) to constitute the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO). RP had to pay a price for this unification: its militants had to accept the position of WV that the ICC was “counter-revolutionary”. It was a position they maintained for some time, even after the departure from the CWO, one year later, of the old members of WV who particularly reproached those of RP for their … intolerance of other groups![3] [193] This CWO “analysis”, considering the ICC as “counter-revolutionary” was based on “decisive arguments”:

“a) They regard state capitalist Russia after 1921 and the Bolsheviks as defensible.

b) They maintain that a state capitalist gang, such as was the Trotskyist Left Opposition, was a proletarian group” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°4).

It was only much later, when the CWO had started to discuss with the Partito Comunista Internazionalista of Italy (Battaglia Comunista) that it renounced the view that the ICC is “counter-revolutionary” (if it had maintained its previous criteria it would also have had to consider BC an organisation of the bourgeoisie!).

So, the point of departure for the trajectory of the CWO was marked by the fact that the ICC did not accept RP's integration into our organisation with its own platform. This trajectory finally led to the formation of the IBRP in 1984: the CWO could at last participate in an international regroupment after its previous failures.

Disappointment with the SUCM

The process which led to the formation of the IBRP was thus itself marked by the sort of approach where those “disappointed with the ICC” turned towards the IBRP. We will not go into the three conferences of the groups of the communist left which were held between 1977 and 1980 following an appeal from BC in April 1976.[4] [194] In particular our press has often stressed that BC and the CWO deliberately scuttled this effort in a totally irresponsible way, solely for petty sectarian reasons, by hastily calling for a vote at the end of the 3rd conference on the question of the role and function of the party as a supplementary criterion. This was specifically aimed at the exclusion of the ICC from future conferences.[5] [195] On the other hand, BC and the CWO decided that it was worth calling the 1982 “conference”, which was presented as the continuation of the three conferences between 77 and 80. This “conference” brought together, apart from BC and the CWO, the “Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants” (SUCM) a group of Iranian students mainly based in Britain that the ICC knew well: it had discussed with them before and concluded that, despite their declarations of agreement with the communist left, it was a leftist group coming from Maoism. The SUCM then turned to the CWO, which did not take account of the warnings against this group from our comrades in the section in Britain. It was thanks to this first-rate new “recruit” that the CWO and BC were able to avoid having a simple tête-à-tête at this glorious 4th Conference of the Communist Left which, now that the ICC was no longer present to pollute it with its “councilism”, could at last pose the real problems of the construction of the future world party of the revolution.[6 [196]] In fact, all the other “forces” that the CWO-BC tandem had “selected” for invitation (according to the term used by BC) with “seriousness” and “clarity” deserted: whether because they could not come, as was the case for Kommunistische Politik from Austria or L’Eveil Internationaliste, or because they had disappeared by the time of the “Conference” as was the case for two American groups, Marxist Worker and Wildcat. Bizarrely, the latter, despite its councilism, was considered as an entrant according to the “criteria” decreed by BC and the CWO.[7] [197]

We should say that the flirtation with the SUCM was not pursued for long, not due to the lucidity of the comrades of BC and the CWO but simply because this leftist group, which could not hide its real nature for ever, ended up integrating itself into the Communist Party of Iran, a Stalinist organisation.

As for the conferences of the communist left, BC and the CWO did not call any others, preferring to avoid the ridicule of a new fiasco.[8] [198]

Two individual trajectories

The attraction of the IBRP for those “disappointed with the ICC” was shown in the same period by an element we will call L, who was their sole representative in France for a time. This element, who had previously attended the classes of a Trotskyist organisation, came close enough to the ICC at the beginning of the 80s to pose his candidature. Evidently we conducted serious discussions with him but we asked him to be patient because we observed that, despite his assertion of complete agreement with our positions, he still maintained traces of his experience of leftism in his political attitude, particularly a marked immediatism. Because of this he had very little patience. When he found that the discussions were lasting too long for his taste, he broke them off unilaterally and turned to the groups who were going to form the IBRP. Overnight his positions suddenly evolved to agreement with the IBRP which, for its part, did not demand the same patience before integrating him. This element then left the IBRP, proving that his convictions were not very solid, to wander among the groups of the Bordigist current, before coming back… to the IBRP, in the mid 1990s. At this point we warned the IBRP against his lack of political reliability, but they did not heed our warning and reintegrated him. However, as one might

have expected, this element did not remain very long in the IBRP: at the beginning of this century he “discovered” that the positions he had adopted for a second time did not really convince him and he came to several of our public meetings to cover the IBRP in mud: the ICC found it necessary to reject his slanders and defend the IBRP.

The series of flirtations of those disappointed in the ICC with the IBRP are not limited to the examples we have already given.

Another element, who also came from leftism, who we shall call E, had a similar trajectory. With him the process of integration went further than with L since he became a member of our organisation after long discussions. However, it is one thing to affirm agreement with the political positions, and another to integrate oneself into a communist organisation. Even though the ICC had explained at length what it means to be a militant in a communist organisation and even though he had approved of our attitude, the practical experience of militancy, which presupposes a particular and constant effort to overcome individualism, fairly rapidly led him to realise that he had no place in our organisation, and he started to develop a hostile attitude towards it. Finally he left the ICC without putting forward the slightest disagreement with our platform (despite our demand that he have a serious discussion about his “reproaches”). That did not prevent him from discovering a profound agreement with the positions of the IBRP shortly after, to the point where they published a polemic against the ICC that he had written.

Coming back to groups which have followed this sort of approach, the list is not exhausted by the examples we have already given above. We should recall the Communist Bulletin Group (CBG) in Britain, Kamunist Kranti in India, Comunismo in Mexico, Los Angeles Workers’ Voice and Internationalist Notes in Canada.

The doomed love between the CBG and the CWO

Our press has carried several articles about the CBG.[9] [199] We will not return to the analysis that we made of this tiny parasitic group, made up of former members of the ICC who left in 1981 with the theft of material and money from our organisation, and whose sole reason for existence was to throw mud at our organisation. At the end of 1983 this group had responded favourably to an “Address to proletarian political groups” adopted by the 5th ICC Congress with the aim of “of establishing a conscious co-operation between all organisations”:[10] [200] “We want to express our solidarity with the approach and concerns expressed in the Address…” However, it made not the slightest critique of its thuggish behaviour. We also wrote “Until the fundamental question of the defence of the political organisations of the proletariat is understood, we are obliged to consider the CBG’s letter as null and void. They got the wrong Address.”

Probably disappointed that the ICC had repulsed their advances, and visibly suffering from isolation, the CBG turned towards the CWO, the British part of the IBRP. A meeting was held in Edinburgh in December 1992 following a “practical collaboration between members of the CWO and the CBG”. “A large number of misunderstandings have been clarified on both sides. It has therefore been decided to make the practical co-operation more formal. An agreement has been written that the CWO as a whole should ratify in January (after which a complete report will be published) and which includes the following points…” There follows a list of different agreements for collaboration and especially: “The two groups will discuss a proposed ‘popular platform’ prepared by a comrade of the CWO as a tool for intervention” (Workers’ Voice 64, January-February 1996).

Apparently this flirtation was not continued for we have never heard any more on the collaboration of the CBG and the CWO. Nor have we ever read anything explaining why this collaboration came to nothing.

Setbacks for the IBRP in India

Another unfortunate adventure with those “disenchanted with the ICC” was with the group publishing Kamunist Kranti in India. This small nucleus emerged from a group of elements that the ICC had discussed with during the 1980s and some of whom had approached the ICC, becoming very close sympathisers or even joining our ranks. However, one of these elements, who we will call S, and who played an important role in the first discussions with the ICC, did not take that path. Probably afraid of losing his individuality in the event of being integrated into the ICC, he started his own group with the publication Kamunist Kranti.

For its part the IBRP has experienced setbacks in India. For this organisation conditions in the countries of the periphery “make mass communist organisations possible” (Communist Review n°3), which obviously supposes that it is easier to create them there than in the central countries of capitalism. The IBRP found that its theses were not concretised in the form of groups rallying to its platform. Their disappointment was all the greater because, already at this time, despite its analyses being misrepresented as “Eurocentrist”, the ICC had a section in Venezuela, one of the peripheral countries. Obviously the abortive flirtation with the SUCM had only aggravated the IBRP’s bitterness. So, when the IBRP engaged in discussions with the Lal Pataka group in India they thought that they had at last hit the jackpot. Lal Pataka was a group of Maoist extraction which, like the SUCM, had not really broken from its origins despite the sympathies that it expressed for the positions of the communist left. Faced with the warnings of the ICC against this group (which ultimately was reduced to just one element), the IBRP responded “Some cynical spirits [meaning the spirits of the ICC] think that we have accepted this comrade into the IBRP too quickly”. For some time Lal Pataka was presented as the constituent part of the IBRP in India, but, in 1991, this name disappeared from the pages of the press of the IBRP to be replaced by that of Kamunist Kranti. The IBRP seemed to place a lot of weight on these “disenchanted with the ICC”: “We hope that in the future productive relations will be established between the International Bureau and Kamunist Kranti” but these hopes were soon dashed because, two years later, you could read in Communist Review n°11: “It is a tragedy that, despite the existence of promising elements, there doesn’t yet exist a solid nucleus of Indian communists”. And indeed, Kamunist Kranti has since disappeared from circulation. There still exists a small communist nucleus in India, that publishes Communist Internationalist, but it is part of the ICC and the IBRP “forgets” to make any reference to it.

Mexican disappointments

 

During the time that the elements in India were approaching the positions of the communist left, the ICC was also engaged in discussions with a small group in Mexico, the “Colectivo Comunista Alptraum” (CCA) which started publishing Comunismo in 1986.[11] [201] Shortly thereafter, the “Grupo Proletario Internacionalista” (GPI) was constituted. It started publishing Revolucion Mundial at the beginning of 1987. The ICC undertook discussions with this group also.[12] [202] From this time the CCA began to distance itself from the ICC: on the one hand it adopted an increasingly academic method in its political positions and, on the other hand, it began approaching the IBRP. Quite clearly, this small nucleus took the establishment of relations between the ICC and the GPI badly.

Knowing the approach of the ICC, which insists on the need for groups of the communist left in the same country to develop close links, the CCA, which had a tenth of the membership of the GPI, probably thought that its “individuality” was being threatened by developing relations with this organisation. Relations between the IBRP and the CCA were maintained for a period, but when the GPI became the section of the ICC in Mexico, the CCA disappeared from circulation.

A stormy “American dream”

 

With the “Los Angeles Workers’ Voice” adventure we come almost to the end of this long list. This group was made up of elements who had taken classes in Maoism (of the pro-Albanian variety). We had discussions with these elements for a long period but we noted their inability to overcome the confusions that they had inherited from their membership of a bourgeois organisation. So when, in the mid-1990s, this small group approached the IBRP we warned the latter against the confusions of the LAWV. The IBRP took this warning very badly, thinking that we didn’t want it to develop a political presence in North America. For several years the LAWV was a sympathising group of the IBRP in the United States, and in April 2000 it participated in Montreal, Canada, in a conference intended to strengthen the political presence of the IBRP in North America. However, a short time afterwards, the Los Angeles elements began to express their disagreements on a whole series of questions, adopting a more and more anarchist vision (rejection of centralisation, depiction of the Bolsheviks as a bourgeois party, etc). But above all it began pouring out sordid slanders against the IBRP and particularly against another American sympathiser of this organisation, AS, who lived in another state. Our press in the US denounced the behaviour of the LAWV elements and expressed its solidarity with the slandered militants.[13] [203] This is why we thought it useful at the time to recall the warnings that we had made to the IBRP at the beginning of its idyll with the LAWV.

The other North American participant in the April 2000 conference, Internationalist Notes, which is today a “sympathising group” of the IBRP, was another of those “disenchanted with the ICC”. The discussion between the ICC and the comrades in Montreal began in the late 1990s. This was a small nucleus whose most experienced element, who we will call W, had had a long experience in unionism and leftism. The discussions had always been very fraternal, particularly with the various visits of ICC militants to Montreal, and we hoped that the comrades would be as frank with us as we were with them. In particular we had always been clear on the fact that we considered that the long period of W’s militancy in a leftist organisation was a handicap for a full comprehension of the positions and the method of the communist left. That is why we asked comrade W on several occasions to draw up a balance sheet of his political trajectory, but clearly this comrade had difficulties in making this balance sheet. Despite his promise to produce one, we never received it.

While the discussions with Internationalist Notes continued, and without the comrades informing us of their eventual rapprochement with the positions of the IBRP, we came across a declaration announcing that IN had become an IBRP sympathising group in Canada. The ICC had encouraged the Montreal comrades to get acquainted with the positions of the IBRP and to contact that organisation. In effect our approach has never been that of “keeping contacts to ourselves”. On the contrary we think that militants who approach the positions of the ICC should be fully aware of the positions of the other groups of the communist left. If they adhere to our organisation, it must be in a fully conscious way.[14] [204] That elements approaching the communist left find themselves in agreement with the positions of the IBRP doesn’t pose a problem in itself. What is surprising is when this rapprochement happens “in secret”. Obviously the IBRP did not make the same demands as the ICC on W breaking with his leftist past. And we are convinced that this is one of the reasons that led him to turn towards the IBRP without informing us of the evolution of his positions.

The IBRP’s speciality: political abortion

One can only be fascinated by the repetition of the phenomenon where elements who are “disenchanted with the ICC” later turn towards the IBRP. Obviously one could consider that this is a normal development: after having understood that the positions of the ICC are erroneous, these elements turn to the correctness and clarity of the IBRP. This is perhaps what the militants of this organisation tell themselves on each such occasion. The problem is that of all the groups which have taken this path, the only one that is still present today in the ranks of the communist left is the last mentioned, Internationalist Notes. ALL the other groups have disappeared or returned to the ranks of bourgeois organisations like the SUCM. The IBRP must ask itself why, and it would be interesting if it could produce a balance sheet of its experiences for the working class. The few reflections that follow might perhaps help its militants to make such a balance sheet.

Quite obviously, what animates the approach of these groups is not the search for a clarity that they have failed to find in the ICC, seeing that they ended up abandoning communist militancy. The facts have amply demonstrated that their distancing from the ICC, as we have said every time, corresponds fundamentally to a distancing from the programmatic clarity and the method of the communist left, most often ending in a refusal of the demands of militancy within this current. In reality their ephemeral flirtation with the IBRP is only one step before their abandonment of combat in the ranks of the proletariat. The question then posed is, why has the IBRP been drawn into such a trajectory?

To this question there is a fundamental answer: the IBRP defends an opportunist method for regrouping revolutionaries.

It is this opportunism on the IBRP's part that allows elements who refuse to make a complete break with their leftist past to find a temporary “refuge”, allowing them to think, or to say, that they are still engaged in the communist left. The IBRP, particularly since the 3rd Conference of the Groups of the Communist Left, has not stopped insisting on the necessity for a “rigorous selection” in the proletarian milieu. But, in reality, this selection is one-way: it says that the ICC is no longer “a valid force in the perspective for the future world party of the proletariat” and that it “can’t be considered by us [the IBRP] as a valid partner in defining any kind of unity of action” (response to our appeal of the 11th February 2003 addressed to groups of the Communist Left for a common intervention on the war and published in International Review n°113). Consequently it is out of the question for the IBRP to establish the least cooperation with the ICC, even for a common declaration of the internationalist camp in the face of imperialist war.[15] [205] However, this great rigour is not exercised in other directions, and notably towards groups that have nothing to do with the communist left, when they are not leftist groups. As we wrote in International Review n°103:

“In order to weigh the full measure of the IBRP’s opportunism in relation to its refusal of our appeal in relation to the war, it’s instructive to re-read an article that appeared in the November 1995 issue of Battaglia Comunista ‘Misunderstandings on the Balkan war’. BC relates that it has received a letter/invitation from the OCI (Organizazione Comunista Internazionalista) to a national assembly against the war to be held in Milan. BC considered that ‘the content of the letter is interesting and a welcome corrective to the position adopted by the OCI on the Gulf War, when it supported the ‘Iraqi people under attack from imperialism’ and was very polemical in relation to our so-called indifferentism.’” BC’s article continued thus: “‘It lacks reference to the crisis in the accumulation cycle (…) and the essential examination of its consequences on the Yugoslav Federation (…). But this doesn’t seem to preclude the possibility of a joint initiative on the part of those who oppose war on a class basis’ [our emphasis]. As we can see, only four years ago, in a situation less serious than that at the time of the war in Kosovo, BC would have been ready to promote a joint initiative with a group that was already clearly counter-revolutionary just to satisfy its activist bent, whereas it had the courage to say no to the ICC because… it has positions that are too different. That certainly is opportunism.”

The IBRP’s one-way selectivity was shown once again during 2003 when it refused the ICC’s proposition for a common position in the face of the war in Iraq. As we wrote in International Review n°116:

“We might expect that an organisation which is such a stickler for detail when it comes to examining its divergences with the ICC would have a similar attitude towards other groups. This is not the case. We refer here to the attitude of the IBRP via its sympathising and political representative, the Internationalist Workers Group (IWG) which publishes Internationalist Notes. This group intervened alongside anarchists and held a joint public meeting with Red and Black Notes, some councilists and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCP), which seems to be a typically leftist and activist group.” (“The proletarian political milieu faced with the war: the scourge of sectarianism in the internationalist camp”)

As can be seen, the opportunism of the IBRP shows itself in its refusal to take a clear position towards groups that are clearly a long way from the communist left, which have made an incomplete break with leftism (therefore with the camp of the bourgeoisie) or who are definitively leftist. This is the attitude it demonstrated toward the SUCM and Lal Pataka. With such an attitude it is not surprising that elements that have not made a clear balance sheet of their experience in leftism feel more comfortable with the IBRP than the ICC.

That said, it seems that with the attitude of the group in Canada we are faced with another variant of the opportunism of the IBRP: the fact that each of its component parts is “free to have its own politics”. What is absolutely impossible to envisage for European groups is completely normal for an American group (since we have read no criticism of the attitude of the comrades in Canada in the columns of Battaglia Comunista or Revolutionary Perspectives). This is federalism, a federalism that the IBRP rejects in its programme, but which it adopts in practice. This federalism is shamefaced but real and encourages certain elements, who find the centralism of the ICC too constraining, to turn towards the IBRP.

The fact that the IBRP recruits elements marked by their passage through leftism, or who can’t put up with centralism and who are allowed to have their own politics in their own corner, is the best way to undermine the basis of an organisation that is to be viable at the international level.

Another aspect of the opportunism of the IBRP is the indulgence that it shows towards elements hostile to our organisation. As we saw at the beginning of this article, one of the bases for the constitution of the CWO in Britain was not only the desire to maintain its own “individuality” (RP’s demand to be integrated into the ICC as a “tendency” with its own platform) but as a means of opposing the ICC (considered at one time as “counter-revolutionary”). More precisely, the attitude of the Workers Voice elements in the CWO - consisting, as we have seen above, in “using RP as a shield against the ICC” - is found with a lot of other elements and groups where the principle motivation is hostility towards the ICC. This was particularly the case with the element, L, who, whatever group he belonged to (and there were a lot of them) always distinguished himself as the most hysterically opposed to the ICC. Similarly, the element E, who we have mentioned above, began to show a violent hostility towards the ICC before moving towards the positions of the IBRP. This is so much the case that, to our knowledge, the only text of his that the IBRP has published was a violent attack on the ICC.

Not forgetting the CBG, with whom the CWO engaged in a short-lived flirtation: the level of their sordid denigrations of the ICC has not been rivalled until recently.

It’s in the recent period that this approach of opening towards the IBRP on the basis of hatred of the ICC has taken the most extreme forms with two illustrations: the advances made to the IBRP by the so-called “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (IFICC) and by citizen B founder, leader and sole member of the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” of Argentina.

We’re not going to recall in detail here the whole range of the IFICC’s behaviour, revealing their obsessional hatred against our organisation.[16] [206] We’ll just cite, very briefly, some of the things in its service record:

• repugnant slanders against the ICC and certain militants (of whom it suggests, having circulated the same behind the scenes in the ICC, that one was working for the police and that another had adopted Stalin's policy of “eliminating” the “founding members of the organisation”);

• theft of money and political material from the ICC (particularly the subscription address list of its publication in France);

• informing - by giving the organs of bourgeois state repression the opportunity to monitor the conference of our section in Mexico which was held in December 2002, and revealing the true identity of one of our militants (who was presented by the IFICC as the “leader of the ICC”).

In the case of citizen B it was particularly illustrated by the production of several despicable communiqués devoted to “the nauseating methodology of the ICC” which is compared to the methods of Stalinism and based on a tissue of gross lies.

If this sinister personage has been able to show such arrogance it is because, for a whole period, the IBRP, that he had flattered in writing texts representing positions close to that organisation (notably on the role of the proletariat in the countries of the periphery) gave him a semblance of credibility. Not only did the IBRP translate and publish on its website the positions and “analyses” of this element, not only did it salute the constitution of the “Circulo” as “an important and sure step forward realised today in Argentina in the aggregation of forces towards the international party of the proletariat” (“Anche in Argentina qualcosa si muove”, Battaglia Comunista October 2004); it also published in three languages on its website its communiqué of 12 October 2004 which is a pack of sordid slanders against our organisation.

The IBRP's love affair with this exotic adventurer sprang a leak when we demonstrated irrefutably that his accusations against the ICC were pure lies and that his “Circulo” was only a sinister imposture.[17] [207] It was in a very discreet fashion that the IBRP began to take the most compromising texts from this personage off its website, but without, however, ever condemning his methods, even after we had sent an open letter to its militants (letter of 7 December 2004, published on our website) asking for such a position to be taken. The only reaction that we have had from this organisation is a communiqué on its website “Last response to the accusations of the ICC” which affirms that the IBRP is “the object of violent and vulgar attacks from the ICC which is angry because it has been hit by a profound and irreversible internal crisis” and that “as of today we will not respond nor follow any of their vulgar attacks”.

As for the love affair with the “Circulo”, events have brought it to an end. Since the ICC unmasked the impostor citizen B, its website, which had been extremely agitated for a monthpreviously , has flatlined.

The IBRP has shown the same sort of indulgence towards the IFICC. Instead of examining with prudence this petty group's infamous accusations against the ICC, the IBRP has preferred to support them by meeting the IFICC on several occasions. The ICC, after the first meeting between the IFICC and IBRP in spring 2002, asked to meet this organisation to give its own version of the facts. But the IBRP refused this request, pretending that it didn’t want to take sides between two protagonists. This was a pure lie because the IFICC’s account of the discussions with the IBRP (and never refuted by them) made clear the latter’s agreement with the accusations against the ICC. But this was only the beginning of the unspeakable behaviour of the IBRP. It has since gone much further. On the one hand, by modestly closing its eyes to the IFICC’s thuggish behaviour, behaviour that could be easily verified through simply looking at its website, the IBRP doesn’t even have the excuse that its didn’t have the proof that the ICC has given on the deviations of the IFICC. Later the IBRP went even further by justifying, purely and simply, the theft by the members of the IFICC of political material from the ICC when the advertisement for an IBRP public meeting on 2 October was sent to subscribers of Révolution Internationale, using the address list stolen by a member of the IFICC.[18] [208] In the same way that the IBRP tried to draw the “Circulo” of Argentina into its orbit by publishing the insanities of citizen B on its website, it didn’t hesitate to get entangled with a gang of thugs and thieves in the hope of extending its political presence in France and establishing an outpost in Mexico (it didn’t hide the fact that it hoped to bring the elements of the IFICC into its ranks).

Unlike the “Circulo” the IFICC still lives and continues to publish bulletins largely devoted to slandering the ICC. The IBRP for its part affirms that “the links with the IFICC exist and persist”. Perhaps it will succeed in integrating the members of the IFICC when they tire of pretending, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that they are the “real continuators of the ICC”. But by doing so the IBRP will be reaching the culmination of its opportunist approach, an opportunism which is already throwing discredit on the memory of the communist left that it continues to lay claim to. And even if the IBRP manages to integrate the elements of the IFICC, it must not rejoice too soon: its own history will show it that you can can’t do much from the remnants that are found in the ICC’s dustbins.

Lies, complicity with informing, slander and theft, betrayal of the principles of honesty and organisational rigour which were a point of honour with the Italian Communist Left: that’s where opportunism leads. And the saddest thing for the IBRP is that it can’t see how this relates to its practice. It still does not understand that with an opportunist method (that is to say a method which holds “immediate success” above a long term perspective, not seeing the need to be based on principles) you’re building on sand; and as a result the only area where the IBRP has shown a certain effectiveness is in its abortions. It is because of this, after more than half a century of existence, the current that it represents is reduced to the state of a small sect, with far fewer political forces than it had at its creation.

In a future article, we will return to what is the basis of the opportunist method of the IBRP which has led it to the sad contortions which we have witnessed in the recent period.

Fabienne