In the final analysis, however, the most important thing about the International Review is not so much its regularity nor its internationally centralised character, but its capacity to act as an instrument of theoretical clarification. "The Review will be above all the expression of the theoretical endeavours of our Current, since only this theoretical endeavour, based on a coherence of political positions and orientation, can serve as the basis for the regroupment and real intervention of revolutionaries" (Preface to the first issue of the International Review, April 1975). Marxism, as the theoretical viewpoint of the revolutionary class, is the most advanced point of human thinking about social reality. But as Marx insisted in Theses on Feuerbach, the truth of a method of thought can only be tested in practice; marxism has demonstrated its superiority over all other social theories by being able to offer a global understanding of the movement of human history and to predict the broad lines of its future evolution. But it is not enough to claim to be marxist to really assimilate this method, to bring it alive and apply it correctly. If we feel that we have succeeded in doing so during the last three decades of accelerating history, it is not because we think such an ability has been granted to us by divine right, but because we feel that we have taken our inspiration throughout this period from the best traditions of the international Communist Left. At least, this has been one of our constant objectives. And in making this claim, we can offer no better supporting evidence than the body of work contained in the 600-odd articles of 100 issues of the International Review.
Marxism is a living historical tradition. On the one hand this means that it is deeply aware of the necessity to approach all the problems it confronts from a historical starting point; to see them not as entirely �new� but as products of a long historical process. Above all, it recognises the essential continuity of revolutionary thought, the need to build on the solid foundations of previous revolutionary minorities. For example, in the 1920s and 30s the Italian left fraction, which published the review Bilan during the 1930s, was faced with the absolute necessity to understand the nature of the counter-revolutionary regime that had arisen in Russia. But it rejected any precipitous conclusions, especially those which, while in hindsight developing quicker than the Italian left a correct characterisation of the Stalinist power (ie that it was a form of state capitalism), only did so at the price of casting aside the whole experience of Bolshevism and the October insurrection as being �bourgeois� from the beginning. There was absolutely no question of Bilan calling into question its own continuity with the revolutionary energy that the Bolshevik party, the soviet power, and the Communist International had once embodied.
This capacity to maintain or restore the links with the past revolutionary movement was especially important in the proletarian milieu which emerged out of the resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 1960s, a milieu largely made up of new groups which had lost organisational and even political links to the previous generation of revolutionaries. Many of these groups fell prey to the illusion that they had come from nowhere, remaining profoundly ignorant of the contributions of this past generation, which had been almost obliterated by the counter-revolution. In the case of those influenced by councilist and modernist ideas, the �old workers� movement� was indeed something that had to be left behind at all costs; in fact, this was a theoretical apology for a break that had actually been imposed by the class enemy. Lacking any anchor in the past, the great majority of these groups soon found that they had no future either, and disappeared. It is therefore not surprising that today�s revolutionary milieu is almost entirely made up of groups which have in one way or another descended from the left current which was clearest in its understanding of this question of historical continuity - the Italian fraction. We should add that the historical anchor is today more important than ever, faced as we are with the culture of capitalist decomposition, a culture which more than ever before seeks to erase the historical memory of the working class and which, itself lacking any sense of the future, can only attempt to imprison consciousness in a narrow immediacy in which novelty is the only virtue.
On the other hand, marxism is not merely the perpetuation of a tradition; it is geared towards the future, towards the final goal of communism, and therefore must always renew its capacities to grasp the direction of the real movement, of the ever-shifting present. Inment, of the ever-shifting present. In the 1950s the Bordigist offshoot of the Italian left tried to take refuge from the counter-revolution by inventing the notion of �invariance�, opposing all attempts to enrich the communist programme. But this approach was very far from the spirit of Bilan which, while never breaking the link with the revolutionary past, insisted on the necessity to examine new situations "without any taboos or ostracism", without fear of breaking new programmatic ground. In particular, the fraction was not afraid to question the theses even of the Second Congress of the Communist International, something which latter day �Bordigism� has been incapable of doing. In the 1930s Bilan was faced with the new situation created by the defeat of the world revolution; the ICC has been compelled to analyse the equally new conditions created first by the end of the counter-revolution in the late 60s, and more recently, by the period inaugurated by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Faced with such changing circumstances, marxists cannot limit themselves to the repetition of tried and trusted formulae, but have to submit their hypotheses to constant practical verification. This means that marxism, as with any branch of the scientific project, is in fact constantly enriching itself.
At the same time marxism is not a form of academic knowledge, of learning for the sake of learning; it is forged in unrelenting combat against the dominant ideology. Communist theory is by definition a polemical and combative form of knowledge; its aim is to advance proletarian class consciousness through exposing and expelling the influences of bourgeois mystifications, whether these mystifications appear in their grossest form within the broad mass of the class, or in a more subtle guise in the ranks of the proletarian vanguard itself. It is therefore a central task of any serious communist organisation to carry out a constant critique of the confusions that can develop in other revolutionary groups and within its own ranks. Clarity can never be advanced by avoiding debate and confrontation, even if this is all too often the case in today�s proletarian political milieu, which has lost its grip on the traditions of the past - the tradition defended by Lenin, who never shirked from any polemic whether with the bourgeoisie, confused groupings within the worker�s movement, or his own revolutionary comrades; the tradition defended as well by Bilan which, in its quest to elaborate the communist programme in the wake of past defeats, engaged in debate with all the different currents within the international proletarian movement of the day (the groups coming from the International Left Opposition, from the Dutch and German lefts, n, from the Dutch and German lefts, etc etc).
In this article we cannot attempt a complete survey of all the texts that have appeared in the International Review, although we do intend to publish a complete list of contents on our web site. What we will try to show is how the International Review has been the main focus of our effort to carry out these three key aspects of marxism�s theoretical struggle.
Given the endless campaigns of defamation against the memory of the Russian revolution, and the efforts of bourgeois historians to conceal the international scope of the revolutionary wave launched by the October insurrection, a large amount of space in our Review has necessarily been given over to reconstructing the real story of these events, to affirming and defending the proletariat�s experience against the bourgeoisie�s outright lies and lies-by-omission, and to drawing their authentic lessons against both the distortions of the left wing of capital and the erroneous conclusions drawn within the revolutionary movement today.
To cite the major examples: International Review 3 contained an article elaborating the framework for understanding the degeneration of the Russian revolution, in response to confusions within the proletarian milieu of the time (in this case the Revolutionary Workers Group from the USA); it also contained a long study of the lessons of the Kronstadt uprising, that key moment in the revolution�s decline. International Review nos. 12 and 13 contained articles re-affirming the proletarian character of the Bolshevik party and the October insurrection against the semi-Menshevik ideas of councilism; these articles originated in a debate in the group that most directly prefigured the ICC - the Internacialismo group in Venezuela in the 1960s, and have been republished as a pamphlet 1917, start of the world revolution. Following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, we published in International Review nos. 71, 72 and 75 a series of articles in response to the vast torrent of propaganda about the death of communism, focusing in particular on refuting the fable about October being no more than a coup d�Etat by the Bolsheviks, and showing in some detail how it was above all the isolation of the Russian bastion that led to its demise. We took these themes further in 1997 with another series which looked more closely at the most important moments between February and October 1917 (see International Review nos. 89, 90, 91). From the beginning the ICC�s position was one of militant defence of the Russian revolution, but there is no doubt that as the ICC matured it progressively threw off the councilist influences that had been strongly present at its birth, and lost any apologetic note in its approach to the question of the party or of seminal historical figures like Lenin and Trotsky.
The International Review also contained an examination of the lessons of the German revolution in one of its first issues (no. 2) and a further two articles on the 70th anniversary of this crucial event which has been so carefully obscured by bourgeois historiography (International Review nos. 55 and 56). But we returned to the German revolution in much more depth in our series published in International Review nos. 81-83, 85, 88-90, 93, 95, 97-99). Here again we can see a definite maturation in the ICC�s approach to its subject, one more critical of the political and organisational lacunae of the German communist movement and based on a more profound understanding of the question of building the revolutionary party. A number of articles have also dealt with the 1917-23 revolutionary wave in a more general sense, notably the articles on Zimmerwald in International Review 44, on the formation of the Communist International in no. 57, on the extent and signif in no. 57, on the extent and significance of the revolutionary wave in no. 80, on the ending of the war by the proletariat, in no. 96.
Other key events in the history of the workers� movement have also been allotted particular articles in the International Review: the Italian revolution (no. 2); Spain 1936, especially the role of anarchism and of the �collectives� (no.15, 22, 47, etc); the struggles in Italy in 1943 (no.75) and more generally, articles denouncing the crimes of the �democracies� during the Second World War (no. 66, 79, 83,); a series on class struggle in the Eastern Bloc which deals with the massive class movements in 1953, 1956, and 1970 (no. 27, 28, 29); a series on China which exposes the mythology of Maoism (81,84, 94, 96); reflections on the meaning of the events in France in May 1968 (14, 53, 74, 93, etc ), and so on.
Closely tied to these studies has been the constant effort to recover the almost lost history of the communist left within these gargantuan episodes, a reflection of our understanding that without this history we could not have come into being. This effort has taken the form both of republishing rare texts, often translated for the first time into other languages, and of developing our own research into the positions and evolution of the left currents. We can mention the following studies, although again the list is not complete: of the Russian communist left, whose history is evidently directly linked to the problem of the degeneration of the Russian revolution (International Review nos. 8 and 9); of the German left (series on the German revolution, already mentioned; republication of texts of the KAPD - Theses on the Party in International Review 41 and its programme in International Review 94); of the Dutch left, with a long series (nos. 45-50, 52) which was the basis for the book which has appeared in French, Spanish and Italian and will shortly come out in English; of the Italian left fraction, particularly through the republication of texts on the Spanish civil war (International Review nos. 4, 6 and 7), fascism (no. 71), and the Popular Front (no. 47); of the French communist left in the 1940s through the republication of its articles and manifestos against the Second World War (nos. 79 and 88), its numerous polemics with the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (nos. 33, 34, 36), its texts on state capitalism and the organisation of capitalism in its decadent phase (nos. 21, 61), and its critique of Pannekoek�s book Lenin as Philosopher (nos. 27, 28, 30); of the Mexican left (texts from the 1930s on Spain, China, nationalisations in IRs 19 and 20), the �Greek left� around Stinas (no. 72).
Also inseparable from this work of historical reconstruction has been the energy put into texts which seek to elaborate our position on the fundamental class positions which derive both from the raw experience of the class combat and from the theoretical interpretation of this experience of the communist organisations. In this context, we should cite issues such as:
- the period of transition, in particular the lessons to be drawn from the Russian experience about the relationship between the proletariat and the transitional state. This was a major debate in the proletarian milieu at the time of the foundation of the ICC, a fact reflected in the publication of a number of discussion texts from different groups in the very first issue of the International Review. This debate continued within the ICC and a number of texts for and against the position of the majority position within the ICC were published (eg nos. 6, 11, 15, 18);
- the national question: a suite of articles examining the way this question was posed in the workers� movement in the first two decades of the 20th century was published in International Review nos. 37 and 42. A second series appeared in nos. 66, 68 and 69, covering a broader sweep from the revolutionary wave to the fate of �national� struggles in the phase of capitalist decomposition;
- the economic foundations of imperialism and of capitalist decadence. In a number of texts, in response to the criticism of other proletarian groups, we have argued for the essential continuity between Marx�s theory of crisis and the analyses developed by Rosa Luxemburg in her Accumulation of Capital and other texts (see for example nos. 13, 19, 16, 22, 29, 30). Parallel to this we have devoted a whole series to defending the basic concept of capitalist decadence against a number of its �radical� detractors in the parasitic camp and elsewhere (nos. 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60);
- other such general issues we have covered include the union question in the Communist International (nos. 24 and 25); the peasant question (no. 24); the theory of the labour aristocracy (no.25 ); the capitalist threat to the natural environment, ie �ecology� (no 63); terror, terrorism and class violence, the latter also being the fruit of an important debate within the ICC, in particular over whether the petty bourgeoisie could have any political expressions in the period of decadence. The ICC in the period of decadence. The ICC�s distinction between state terror and petty bourgeois terrorism, and between both and proletarian class violence amply answered this question (nos. 14 and 15).
This is perhaps the most suitable place to refer to the series on communism which has been running regularly in the International Review since 1992 and still has quite along way to go. Originally this project was conceived as a series of four or five articles clarifying the real meaning of communism in response to the bourgeoisie�s lying equation between Stalinism and communism. But in seeking to apply the historical method as rigorously as possible, the series grew into a deeper re-examination of the evolving biography of the communist programme, its progressive enrichment through the key experiences of the class as a whole and the contributions and debates of the revolutionary minorities. Although the majority of articles in the series are necessarily concerned with fundamentally political questions, since the first step towards the creation of communism is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is also a premise of the series that communism will take humanity beyond the realm of politics and release his true social nature. The series thus poses the problem of marxist anthropology. The interweaving of the �political� and �anthroaving of the �political� and �anthropological� dimensions of the series has in fact been one of its leitmotifs. The first volume of the series began (from International Review 68) with the precursors of marxism and with the young Marx�s grandiose vision of the ultimate goals of communism; it ended on the eve of the mass strikes of 1905 which signalled that capitalism was moving into a new epoch where the communist revolution had graduated from being a global perspective of the workers� movement to placing itself urgently on the agenda of history (International Review 88). The second volume has so far largely focussed on the debates and programmatic documents emanating from the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23; it still has to traverse the years of counter-revolution, the revival of debate about communism in the period after 1968, and to clarify the framework for a discussion about the conditions of tomorrow�s revolution. But in the end it will have to return to the question of what the species will be in the future realm of freedom.
Another very important component of the Review�s effort to give greater historical depth to the class positions defended by revolutionaries has been its constant commitment to clarifying the question of organisation. This has certainly been the most difficult question of all for the generation of revolutionaries that emerged in the late 60s, above all because of the trauma of the Stalinist counter-revolution and the powerful influence of individualist, anarchist and councilist attitudes on this generation. Later on we will mention some of the many polemics the ICC has had with other groups of the proletarian milieu on this question, but it is also the case that some of the most important texts in the Review on matters of organisation are the direct product of debates within the ICC itself, of the often very painful combat the ICC has had to wage within its own ranks to fully reappropriate the marxist conception of the revolutionary organisation. Since the beginning of the 80s the ICC has passed through three major internal crises, each one of which has resulted in splits or departures but through which the ICC has also emerged strengthened politically and organisationally. To support this conclusion we can point to the quality of the articles which emerged from these struggles and encapsulated the ICC�s improved grasp of the organisation question. Thus in response to the split with the Chenier tendency in the early 80s we published two major texts � one on the role of the revolutionary organisation within the class (no. 29), the other on its internal mode of functioning (no. 33). The latter in particular was and remains a key text, since the Chenier tendency had threatened to throw overboard all the basic conceptions contained in our statutes, our internal �rules� of functioning. The text in International Review 33 was a clear restatement and elaboration of those conceptions (here we should also point to a much earlier text on the statutes, in International Review 5). In the mid 80s, the ICC took a further step in settling scores with the remaining anti-organisational and councilist influences in its midst, through the debate with the tendency which went on to form the �External Fraction of the ICC�, now �Internationalist Perspective�, a typical element of the parasitic milieu. The main texts published in the International Review around this debate illustrate its key issues: the assessment of the danger posed by councilist ideas to the revolutionary camp today (nos. 40-43); the question of opportunism and centrism in the workers movement (nos. 43 and 44). Through this debate � and through working out its ramifications for our intervention in the class struggle � the ICC definitely adopted the notion of the revolutionary organisation as an organisation of combat, of militant political leadership within the class. The third debate, in the mid 90s, returned to the question of functioning on a higher level, and reflected the determination of the ICC to confront all the vestiges of the circle spirit which had presided over its birth � to aff had presided over its birth � to affirm the open, centralised, method of functioning, based on statutes accepted by all, against anarchist practices founded on friendship networks and clannish intrigues. Here again a number of texts of real quality express our efforts to re-establish and deepen the marxist position on internal functioning: in particular, the series of texts dealing with the struggle between marxism and Bakuninism in the First International (84, 85, 87, 88) and the two articles �Have we become Leninists?� in nos. 96 and 97.
The second key task outlined at the beginning of this article � the constant evaluation of a constantly changing world situation � has also been a central element of the International Review.
Almost without exception, every issue of the Review begins with an editorial on the major events of international situation. These articles represent the ICC�s overall orientation on these events, guiding and centralising the positions adopted in our territorial publications. By going back through these editorials, it is possible to acquire a succinct picture of the ICC�s response to all the most crucial events of the 70s, 80s and 90s: the second and third waves of international class struggle; the offensive of US imperialism in the 1980s, the wars in the Middle East, the Gulf, Africa, the Balkans; the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the onset of the period of capitalist decomposition; the difficulties of the class struggle faced with this new period, and so on. A parallel feature has been the regular slot given over to the question �what point has the crisis reached?�, which again makes it possible to review the most important trends and moments in capitalism�s long descent into the quagmire of its own contradictions. In addition to this quarterly assessment, we have also published texts which take a longer term view of the development of the crisis since it came out into the open at the end of the 60s, most notably our recent series �30 years of open crisis� (International Review nos. 96-98). More long term analyses of all the aspects of the international situation are also contained in the reports and resolutions of our bi-annual international congresses, which are always published as fully as possible in the International Review (see nos. 8, 11, 18, 26, 35, 44, 51, 59, 67, 74, 82, 90, 92, 97, 98).
In fact, it is not possible to make a rigid separation between texts analysing the current situation and historical-theoretical articles. The effort of analysis inevitably stimulates reflection and debate which in turn give rise to major orientation texts defining the overall dynamic of the period and clarifying certain fundamental concepts. These texts are also often the product of international congresses or meetings of the ICC�s central organ.
For example, the third congress of the ICC, in 1979, adopted such orientation texts on the course of history and on the shift of the left parties of capital into an oppositional stance, providing the basic framework for understanding the balance of class forces in the period opened up by the resurgence of class struggle in 1968, and the bourgeoisie�s primary political response to the class struggle in the 70s and 80s (see International Review 18). Further elucidation of how the ruling class manipulates the election process to suit its own needs was provided by the article on the �machiavellianism� of the bourgeoisie in International Review 31 and in international correspondence on the same question in no. 39. Likewise, the bourgeoisie�s more recent return to the strategy of placing the left parties in government has also been analysed in a text of the ICC�s 13th Congress and published in International Review 98.
The 4th congress � held in 1981, in the wake of the mass strike in Poland � adopted a text on the conditions for the generalisation of the class struggle, stressing in particular that the spread of mass strikes towards the centres of world capital would be a response to capitalist economic crisis rather than to capitalist world war; a further contribution attempted a historical overview of the development of the class struggle since 1968 (International Review 26). Debates about Poland, and indeed about the whole second international wave of struggles of which it was the culminating point, gave rise to a number of other important texts on the characteristics of the mass strike (no.27), on the critique of the theory of the weak link (nos. 31, 37), on the significance of the struggles of the French steelworkers in 1979 and of the ICC�s intervention within them (nos. 17, 20), on workers� struggle groups (no. 21), the struggles of the unemployed (no. 14) and so on. Particularly important was the text 'The proletarian struggle in decadent capitalism' (International Review 23), which aimed to demonstrate why the methods of struggle that had been appropriate in the ascendant period (trade union strikes in single sectors, financial solidarity, etc), had to be superseded in the decadent epoch by the methods of the mass strike. The continual effort to follow and provide a perspective for the international class movement continued in numerous articles written during the third wave of struggles between 1983 and 1988.
In 1989, another major historical shift took place in the international situation: the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc and the definitive opening of capitalism�s phase of decomposition, an exacerbation of all the features of a decadent system marked in particular by the growing war of each against all at the imperialist level. Although the ICC had not previously expected this �peaceful� collapse of the Russian bloc, it was quick to see which way the wind was blowing and was already armed with the theoretical framework to explain why Stalinism could not reform itself (see the articles on the economic crisis in the Russian bloc - International Review nos. 22, 23, 43 - and in particular the theses on �The international dimension of the workers� struggles in Poland� in International Review 24). This framework formed the basis of the orientation text �On the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries� in International Review 60, which predicted the final demise of the bloc well before it was consummated by the fall of the Berlin wall and the break up of the USSR. Equally important as guides to understanding the characteristics of the new period were the theses entitled �Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism� in International Review 62 and the article �Militarism and Decomposition� in International Review 64. This latter text took further and made more precise our articles �War, militarism and imperialist blocs� which we had published in International Review nos. 52 and 53, prior to the collapse of the Russian bloc, and which developed the notion of the irrationality of war in capitalist decadence. Through these contributions it became possible to advance the framework for understanding the sharpening of imperialist antagonisms in a world without the discipline of blocs. The very palpable sharpening of inter-imperialist conflicts, of the chaotic struggle of each against all during this decade, has fully confirmed the framework developed in these texts.
Defending the principle of open debate between revolutionaries
At a recent public forum organised by the Communist Workers� Organisation in London, referring to the ICC�s appeal for common action between revolutionary groups faced with the war in the Balkans, a comrade of the CWO posed the question "what is the ICC up to?". He suggested that "the ICC has made more turns than the Stalinist Comintern" and that its �friendly� approach to the milieu is just the latest one of many. The Bordigist group Le Prolétaire described the ICC�s appeal in similar terms, denouncing it as a "manoeuvre" (see RI�.).
Such accusations make one seriously doubt whether these comrades have followed the ICC press over the last 25 years. A brief flick through the 100 issues of the International Review would be enough to refute the idea that calling for unity between revolutionaries is a �new turn� by the ICC. As we have already said, for us the real spirit of the communist left, and of the Italian fraction in particular, is the spirit of serious political debate and confrontation between all the different forces within the communist camp, and indeed between the communists and those who are struggling to reach the proletarian political terrain. From its inception - and in opposition to the very widespread sectarianism that prevailed in the milieu as a direct result of the pressures of the counter-revolution - the ICC has insisted on:
- the existence of a proletarian political camp made up of different tendencies which in one way or another are expressions of the class consciousness of the proletariat;
- the central importance, within this camp, of those groups which derive from the historic currents of the communist left;
- the necessity for the unity and solidarity between revolutionary groups in the face of the class enemy - its anticommunist campaigns, its repression, its wars;
- the necessity for a serious and responsible debate about the real divergences between these revolutionary organisations;
- the ultimate necessity for the regroupment of revolutionary forces as part of the process leading to the formation of the world party.
In defending these principles, there have been times when it was more necessary to confront differences, other times when unity of action was paramount, but this has never called any of the basic principles into question. We also recognise that the weight of sectarianism affects the whole milieu and we do not claim to be entirely immune from it - even if we are better placed to fight it by the mere fact that we recognise its existence, in contrast to most other groups. In any case, there have been occasions when our own arguments have been weakened by sectarian exaggerations: for example, an article published in both World Revolution and Révolution Internationale carried the title �The CWO falls victim to political parasitism�, which could imply that the CWO has actually passed into the parasitic camp and thus outside the proletarian milieu, whereas in fact the article was fundamentally motivated by the need to warn a fellow communist group of the dangers of parasitism. In a similar way the title of the article we published on the formation of the IBRP in 1985 - �The constitution of the IBRP, an opportunist bluff� (International Review 40 and 41) - could imply that this organisation has entirely succumbed to the virus of opportunism, whereas in fact we have always considered its component groups to be an integral part of the communist camp, even if we have always strongly criticised what we frankly see as its opportunist errors.
From the earliest issues of the International Review, it is easy to see to what our real attitude has been:
- the first issue contained discussion articles on the period of transition, reflecting the discussion both between the groups that formed the ICC and others who remained outside it; the same International Review also points out that some of these groups had been invited to or took part in the founding conference of the ICC; moreover the practice of publishing in the International Review contributions from other groups and elements has continued ever since (cf texts of the CWO, of the Mexican group the GPI; of the Argentinian group Emancipacion Obrera; of individual elements in Hong Kong, Russia, etc);
- in International Review 11 we published a text voted by our second congress in 1977, defining the basic contours of the proletarian political milieu and the �swamp� and outlining our general policy towards other proletarian organisations and elements;
- in the late 70s we gave our wholehearted support to Battaglia Comunista�s proposal for an international conference between groups of the communist left, participated fully in all the conferences that followed, published their proceedings and articles about them in the International Review and, within the context of the conferences, defended the need for the groups involved to make common statements on the central issues of the day (such as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan). By the same token we severely criticised the decision of Battaglia to abort these conferences (See International Review nos. 10, 16. 17, 22) and also the two pamphlets �Texts and proceedings of the international conferences of the communist left�;
- in the early 80s we published a number of articles analysing the crisis which hit a number of groups within the proletarian milieu (International Review nos. 29, 31);
- International Review 35 contains the appeal to proletarian groups launched by our 5th international congress in 1983. This appeal does not propose the immediate re-convocation of international conferences but seeks to establish more �modest� practices such as attendance at the public meetings of other groups, more serious polemics in the press, etc;
- in International Review 46, towards the end of 1986, we express our support for the �international proposal� issued by the Argentine group Emancipacion Obrera in favour of greater co-operation and more organised discussion between revolutionary groups
- in International Review 67 we published a further appeal to the proletarian milieu, this time issued by our 9th congress in 1991.
Thus, the ICC�s policy since 1996 of1>Thus, the ICC�s policy since 1996 of calling for a common response to such events as the bourgeoisie�s campaigns against the communist left, or the war in the Balkans, by no means represents a new turn or some underhand manoeuvre but is fully consistent with our whole approach towards the proletarian milieu since before the ICC was formed.
The numerous polemics we have published in the International Review are equally part of this orientation. We cannot list them all here, but we can say that through the International Review we have carried on a continuous debate on virtually every aspect of the revolutionary programme with all the currents of the proletarian milieu and quite a few on its margins.
Debates with the IBRP (Battaglia and the CWO) have certainly been the most numerous, indicating the seriousness with which we have always taken this current. Some examples:
With the Bordigists, we have debated above all the question of the party (eg nos. 14, 23), but also the national question (no. 32), decaarty (eg nos. 14, 23), but also the national question (no. 32), decadence (no. 77 and 78), mysticism (no. 94), etc.
We should also mention polemics with the latter-day descendants of councilism (eg the Dutch groups Spartakusbond and Daad en Gedachte in International Review 2, the Danish group Council Communism in International Review 25;) and with the current animated by Munis (nos. 25, 29, 52). Parallel to these debates within the proletarian milieu we have written a number of critiques of the groups of the swamp (Autonomia in no. 16, modernism in no. 34, Situationism in no.80), as well as waging the combat against political parasitism which in our opinion is a serious danger to the proletarian camp, posed by elements who claim to be part of it but who play an entirely destructive role against it (see for example the Theses on Parasitism in International Review 94, articles on the EFICC (nos. 45, 60, 70, 92, etc), on the CBG (no. 83,etc).
Even when we have polemicised very sharply with other proletarian groups, we have always tried to argue in a serious manner, basing ourselves not on speculation or distortions but on the real positions of other groups. Today, given the huge responsibilities that weigh on a still tiny revolutionary camp, we have tried to make an even more stringent effort to argue in an accurate and fundamentally fraternal manner. Our readers can go through our polemical articles in the International Review and form their own judgement about how well we have succeeded in this regard. Unfortunately however, we can point to very few serious replies to most of these polemics, or to the many orientation texts which we have explicitly offered as contributions for debate within the whole proletarian milieu. Far too often our articles are either ignored or dismissed as the ICC�s latest hobby-horses, with no real attempt to engage the arguments we have put forward. In the spirit of our previous appeals to the proletarian milieu, we can only call on the other groups to recognise and thus begin to overcome the sectarian barriers that prevent real debate between revolutionaries - a weakness that can only benefit the bourgeoisie in the end.
Comrades! Help us distribute the International Review!
It seems to us that we can be proud of the International Review and are convinced that it is a publication that will stand the test of time. Although situations have shifted profoundly since the International Review began, although the ICC�s analyses have matured, we do not think that the I00 issues of the International Review we have published so far, or the many issues we will publish in future, will become obsolete. It is no accident, for example, that many of our new contacts, once they become seriously interested in our positions, begin to build up collections of back issues of the International Review. But we are also only too aware that our press, and the International Review in particular, still only reaches an extreme minority. We know that there are objective historical reasons for the numerical weakness of communist forces today, for their isolation from the class as a whole, but awareness of these reasons, while demanding realism on our part, is not an excuse for passivity. The sales of the revolutionary press and thus of the International Review can certainly be increased, even in only a modest way, by an effort of revolutionary will on the part of the ICC and its readers and sympathisers. This is why we want to conclude this article with an appeal to our readers to participate actively in an effort to increase the distribution and sale of the International Review - by ordering more back copies and complete collections (which we will be selling at an inclusive price of £50 sterling or its equivalent), by taking extra copies to sell, by helping to find and service bookshops and distribution agencies and so on. Theoretical agreement with the idea of the importance of the revolutionary press also implies a practical commitment to selling it, since we are not anarchists who disdain the grubby involvement with the process of selling and accounting, but communists who want to reach out to our class as widely as possible, but understand that this can only be done in an organised and collective way.
At the beginning of this article, we emphasised our organisation�s ability to publish a quarterly review for 25 years, without a break, when so many other groups have published irregularly or intermittently, or simply disappeared. One could of course point out that after a quarter-century�s existence, the ICC has still not increased the frequency of its theoretical publication. This is obviously the sign of a certain weakness, but not in our opinion a weakness in our political positions or analyses. It is a weakness common to the whole Communist Left within which, despite its meagre strength, the ICC is by far the biggest and most widespread organisation. It is a weakness of the whole working class, which although it has proved capable of emerging from the counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s, has encountered some formidable obstacles in its path, not the least being the collapse of the Stalinist regimes and the general decomposition of bourgeois society. A particular characterists society. A particular characteristic of decomposition, which we have pointed out in our press, is the development throughout society, including within the working class, of all kinds of superficial, irrational, or mystical viewpoints, to the detriment of a profound, coherent, and materialist approach, of which marxism is precisely the best expression. Today, books on esotericism encounter vastly more success than works of marxism. Even had we the capacity to publish the International Review more often, in three languages, its present level of distribution would not justify our making such an effort. This is why we call on our readers to help us in this effort of distribution. By taking part in this effort, they take part in the combat against all the miasma of bourgeois ideology and decomposition which the proletariat will have to overcome in order to open the way to the communist revolution.
Amos, December 1999
In the previous article in this series, we examined the first major debates within the Communist Party of Russia about the direction being taken by the new proletarian power - in particular, the warnings about the rise of state capitalism and the danger of a bureaucratic degeneration. These debates were at their height in early 1918. But over the next two years Soviet Russia was engaged in a life or death struggle against imperialist intervention and internal counter-revolution. Faced with the immense demands of the civil war, the party closed ranks to fight the common enemy, just as the majority of workers and peasants, despite their growing hardships, rallied to the defence of the soviet power against the attempts by the old exploiting classes to restore their lost privileges.
As we have noted in a previous article (see International Review 95), the party programme drawn up at its 8th Congress in March 1919 expressed this mood of unity within the party, without abandoning the most radical hopes generated by the original impetus of the revolution. This was also a reflection of the fact that the left wing currents in the party - those who had been the main protagonists of the debates in 1918 - still had a considerable influence, and in any case were by no means radically separated from those who were more visibly at the helm of the party, such as Lenin and Trotsky. Indeed some former Left Communists, such as Radek and Bukharin, began to abandon their critical stance altogether, since they tended to identify the emergency "War Communism" measures adopted during the civil war with a real process of communist transformation (see the article on Bukharin in International Review 96).
Other former Lefts were not so easily satisfied with the wide-scale nationalisations and the virtual disappearance of monetary forms which characterised War Communism. They did not lose sight of the fact that the bureaucratic abuses which they had warned about in 1918 had not only survived but had become increasingly entrenched during the civil war, while their antidote - the organs of mass proletarian democracy - had been losing their life-blood at an alarming rate, due both to the demands of military expediency and to the dispersal of many of the most advanced workers to the war fronts. In 1919, The Democratic Centralism group was formed around Osinski, Sapranov, V. Smirnov and others; its main focus was the fight against bureaucratism and in the soviets and the party. It had close links with the Military Opposition which waged a similar combat within the army. It was to prove to be one of the most persistent currents of principled opposition within the Bolshevik party.
Nevertheless, as long as the priority was the defence of the soviet regime against its most open enemies, these debates remained within certain bounds; and in any case, since the party itself remained a living crucible of revolutionary thought, there was no fundamental difficulty in pursuing the discussion through the normal channels of the organisation.
The ending of the civil war in 1920 brought about a crucial change in this situation. The economy was essentially in ruins. Famine and disease on a horrifying scale stalked the land, especially in the cities, reducing these former nerve-centres of the revolution to a level of social disintegration in which the daily, desperate struggle for survival could easily outweigh all other considerations. Tensions that had been held in check by the need to unite against a common foe began pressing towards the surface, and in these circumstances, the rigid methods of War Communism not only failed to contain these tensions, but aggravated them further. The peasants were increasingly exasperated with the policy of grain requisitions that had been introduced to feed the starving cities; workers were less and less willing to accept military discipline in the factories; and on another, more impersonal level, the commodity relations which had been forcibly suspended by the state, but whose material roots had remained untouched, were more and more insistently demanding their due: the black market which had flourished like noxious algae under War Communism had only partially eased the mounting pressure, and with deleterious effects on the social structure.
Above all, the developments within the international situation had brought little relief to the Russian workers' fortress. 1919 had been the pinnacle of the world-wide revolutionary wave upon whose outcome soviet power in Russia was totally dependent. But the same year also saw the defeat of the most decisive proletarian uprisings, in Germany and Hungary, and the failure of mass strikes in other countries (such as Britain and the US) to go onto the level of a political offensive. 1920 saw the effective derailment of the revolution in Italy through the isolation of the workers in factory occupations, while in Germany, the most key country of all, the dynamic of the class struggle was already being posed in defensive terms, as in the response to the Kapp putsch (see International Review 90). In the same year, the attempt to break Russia's isolation through the bayonets of the Red Army in Poland had ended in total fiasco. By 1921 - particularly after the "March Action" in Germany had ended in another defeat (see International Review 93), the most lucid revolutionaries had already begun to realise that the revolutionary tide was ebbing, although it was not yet possible or even accurate to say that it had entered into a definitive retreat.
Russia was therefore an overheated pressure-cooker, and a social explosion could not long be delayed. By the end of 1920, a series of peasant uprisings swept through Tambov province, the middle Volga, the Ukraine, western Siberia and other regions. The rapid demobilisation of the Red Army added fuel to the fire as armed peasants in uniform streamed back to their villages. The central demand of these rebellions was for an end to the system of grain requisitioning and the right of the peasants to dispose of their own products. And as we shall see, in early 1921, the mood of revolt had spread to the wokers of those cities which had been the epicentre of the October insurrection: Petrograd, Moscow … and Kronstadt.
Faced with this burgeoning social crisis, it was inevitable that divergences within the Bolshevik party should also have reached a critical juncture. The disagreement was not about whether the proletarian regime in Russia was dependent of the world revolution: all the currents within the party, albeit with different nuances, still held to the fundamental conviction that without the extension of the revolution, the proletarian dictatorship in Russia could not survive. At the same time, since the Russian soviet power was seen as a crucial bastion conquered by the world proletarian army, there was also general agreement that a 'holding operation' must be attempted, and that this necessitated the reconstruction of Russia's ruined economic and social edifice. The differences emerged about the methods the soviet power could and should use if it was to stay on the right path and avoid succumbing to the weight of alien class forces inside and outside Russia. Reconstruction was a practical necessity: the question was how to carry this out in a way that would ensure the proletarian character of the regime. The focal point for these differences in 1920 and early 1921 was the "trade union debate".
This debate had in fact arisen at the very end of 1919, with the unveiling by Trotsky of his proposals for restoring Russia's ravaged industrial and transportation system. Having achieved extraordinary success as the commander of the Red army during the civil war, Trotsky (despite one or two moments of hesitation when he considered a very different approach) came out in favour of applying the methods of War Communism to the problem of reconstruction: in other words, in order to re-gather a working class which was in danger of decomposing into a mass of isolated individuals living by petty trade, petty thieving, or melting back into the peasantry, Trotsky advocated the outright militarisation of labour. He first formulated his view in his 'theses on the transition from war to peace' (Pravda, 16 December 1919) and further defended them at the 9th party Congress in March-April 1920. "The working masses cannot be wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown her and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers." Those accuse of "deserting from labour" would be placed in punitive battalions or labour camps. In the factories, military discipline would prevail; like Lenin in 1918, Trotsky extolled the virtues of one-man management and the "progressive" aspects of the Taylor system. As for the trade unions, their task in this regime would be to subordinate themselves totally to the state: "The young socialist state requires trade unions not for a struggle for better conditions of labour - that is the task of the social and state organisations as a whole - but to organise the working class for the ends of production, to educate, discipline, distribute, group, retain certain categories and certain workers at their posts for fixed periods - in a word, hand in hand with the state to exercise their authority in order to lead the workers into the framework of a single economic plan." (Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 1920; New Park edition 1975, p.153).
Trotsky’s views – though initially, Lenin was largely in support of them – provoked vigorous criticism from many within the party, and not only those accustomed to being on its left. These criticisms only led Trotsky to harden and theorise his views. In Terrorism and Communism – which appears to be as much a response to Trotsky’s Bolshevik critics as to the likes of Kautsky, its main polemical target – Trotsky goes so far as to argue that because forced labour had played a progressive role in previous modes of production, such as Asiatic despotism and classical slavery, it was pure sentimentalism to argue that the workers’ state could not use such methods on a broad scale. Indeed, Trotsky did not even shrink from arguing that militarisation is the specific form of the organisation of labour in the transition to communism: “the foundations of the militarisation of labour are those forms of state compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy by the socialist will forever remain an empty sound” (ibid, p. 152). In the same work, Trotsky reveals the extent to which the notion that the dictatorship of the proletariat is only possible as the dictatorship of the party had become a matter of theory and almost of principle: “We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of the party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the soviets the possibility of being transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. It is quite natural that, in the period in which history brings up those interests, in all their magnitude, on to the order of the day, the communist have become the recognised representatives of the working class as a whole.” (ibid p. 123). This is a far cry from Trotsky’s definition of the soviets in 1905 as organs of power which go beyond bourgeois parliamentary forms, as indeed it is from Lenin’s position in State and Revolution in 1917, and the Bolsheviks’ practical approach in October, when the idea of the party taking power had been more an unconscious concession to parliamentarism than a worked-out theory, and when in any case the Bolsheviks had shown themselves willing to form a partnership with other parties. Now, the party had “a historical birthright” to exercise the proletarian dictatorship, “even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy" (Trotsky at the 10th party Congress, quoted in Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp 508-9).
The fact that this debate developed essentially around the question of the trade unions may seem strange given that the emergence of new forms of workers' self-organisation in Russia itself - the factory committees, the soviets etc - had effectively rendered these organisations obsolete, a conclusion that had already been drawn by many communists in the industrialised west, where the unions had already been through a long process of bureaucratic degeneration and integration into the capitalist order. The fact that the debate had this focus in Russia was thus partly a reflection of Russia' "backwardness", of a condition in which the bourgeoisie had not developed a sophisticated state apparatus capable of recognising the value of trade unions as instruments of class peace. For this reason it could not be said that all the unions which had been formed prior to and even during the 1917 revolution were organs of the enemy class. In particular there had been a strong tendency towards the formation of industrial unions which still expressed a certain proletarian content.
Be that as it may, the real issue in the debate provoked by Trotsky went much deeper. In essence it was a debate about the relationship between the proletariat and the state of the transition period. The question it raised was this: could the proletariat, having overthrown the old bourgeois state, identify itself totally with the new "proletarian" state, or were there compelling reasons why the working class should protect the autonomy of its own class organs - even, if necessary, against the demands of the state?
Trotsky's position had the merit of supplying a clear answer: yes, the proletariat should identify itself with and even subordinate itself to the "proletarian state" (and so, in fact, should the proletarian party which was to function as the executive arm of the state). Unfortunately, as can be seen in his theorisation of forced labour as the method for building communism, Trotsky has largely lost sight of what is specific to the proletarian revolution and to communism - the fact that this new society can only be brought about by the self-organised, conscious activity of the proletarian masses themselves. His response to the problem of economic reconstruction could only have further accelerated the bureaucratic degeneration which was already threatening to engulf all the concrete forms of proletarian self-activity, including the party itself. And so it passed to other currents within the party to give voice to a class reaction against this dangerous tendency in Trotsky's thinking, and against the principal dangers facing the revolution itself.
The fact that deep issues were at stake in this debate was reflected in the number of positions and groupings that arose around it. Lenin himself, who wrote of these differences "the Party is sick. The Party is down with a fever" ( 'The Party Crisis', Pravda, January 21, 1921) was only part of one grouping - the so-called 'Group of Ten'; The Democratic Centralists and Ignatov's group had their own positions; Bukharin, Preobrazhinsky and others tried to form a "buffer group", and so on. But alongside Trotsky's group, the most distinctive approaches were adopted by Lenin on the one hand, and by the Workers' Opposition, led by Kollantai and Shliapnikov, on the other.
The Workers' Opposition undoubtedly expressed a proletarian reaction against Trotsky's bureaucratic theorisations, and against the real bureaucratic distortions that were eating away at the proletarian power. Faced with Trotsky's apology for forced labour, it was by no means demagogy or phrasemongering for Kollontai to insist in her pamphlet The Workers' Opposition, written for the 10th party Congress in March 1921, that "this consideration, which should be very simple and clear to every practical man, is lost sight of by our party leaders: it is impossible to decree communism. It can be created only by the process of practical research, through mistakes, perhaps, but only by the creative powers of the working class itself" (London Solidarity pamphlet no 7, p33). In particular, the Opposition rejected the tendency of the regime to impose a managerial dictatorship in the factories, to the point where the immediate situation of the industrial worker was becoming more and more indistinguishable from what it had been before the revolution. It thus defended the principle of collective workers' management against the over-use of specialists and the practice of one-man management.
On a more global level, the Workers' Opposition offered a keen insight into the relationship between the working class and the soviet state. For Kollontai, this was in fact the key issue: "Who shall develop the creative powers in the sphere of economic reconstruction? Shall it be purely class organs, directly connected by vital ties with the industries - that is, shall industrial unions undertake the work of reconstruction - or shall it be left to the soviet machine which is separated from direct industrial activity and is mixed in its composition? This is the root of the break. The Workers' Opposition defends the first principle, while the leaders of the party, whatever their differences on secondary matters, are in complete accord on this cardinal point, and defend the second principle" (ibid p4).
In another passage of the text, Kollontai explains further this notion of the heterogeneous nature of the soviet state: "any party standing at the head of a heterogeneous soviet state is compelled to consider the aspirations of peasants with their petty bourgeois inclinations and resentments towards communism, as well as lend an ear to the numerous petty bourgeois elements, remnants of the former capitalists in Russia and to all kinds of traders, middlemen, petty officials etc. These have rapidly adapted themselves to the soviet institutions and occupy responsible positions in the centres, appearing in the capacity of agents of different commissariats, etc ... These are the elements - the petty bourgeois elements widely scattered through the soviet institutions, the elements of the middle class, with their hostility towards communism, and with their predilections towards the immutable customs of the past, with resentment and fears towards revolutionary acts. These are the elements that bring decay into our soviet institutions, breeding there an atmosphere altogether repugnant to the working class" (ibid pp6-7).
This recognition that the soviet state - both because of its need to reconcile the interests of the working class with those of other strata , and because of its vulnerability to the virus of bureaucracy - could not itself play a dynamic and creative role in the creation of the new society was an important sight, albeit undeveloped. But these passages also expose the principal weaknesses of the Workers' Opposition. Lenin in his polemics with the group, dismissed it as an essentially petty bourgeois, anarchist and syndicalist current. This was false: for all its confusions, it represented a genuine proletarian response to the dangers besetting the soviet power. But the accusation of syndicalism is not altogether wrong either. This is apparent in its identification of the industrial unions as the main organs for the communist transformation of society, and its proposal that the management of the economy should be placed in the hands of an "All-Russian Congress of Producers". As we have said already, the Russian revolution had already shown that the working class had gone beyond the union form of organisation, and that in the new epoch of capitalist decadence unions could only become organs of social conservation. The industrial unions in Russia were certainly no guarantee against bureaucratism and the organisational dispossession of the workers; the emasculation of the factory committees which had emerged in 1917 largely took the form of incorporating them into the unions, and consequently, the state. It is also worth pointing out that when the Russian workers did enter into action on their own terrain in the very year of the trade union debate - in the strikes in Moscow and Petrograd - they again confirmed the obsolescence of the trade unions, since to defend their most material interests they resorted to the classic methods of the proletarian struggle in the new epoch: spontaneous strikes, general assemblies, elected strike committees subject to immediate revocation, massive delegations to other factories, etc. Even more importantly, the Workers' Opposition's emphasis on the unions expressed a total disillusionment with the most important mass proletarian organs - the workers' soviets, which were capable of uniting all workers across sectional boundaries and of combining the economic with the political tasks of the revolution1. This blindness to the importance of the workers' councils logically extended to a total underestimation of the primacy of politics over economics in the proletarian revolution. The one great obsession of the Kollontai group was the management of the economy, to the point where it was almost proposing a divorce between the political state and the "producers congress". But in a proletarian dictatorship, the workers' management of the economic apparatus is not an end in itself, but only an aspect of its overall political domination over society. Lenin also made the criticism that this idea of a "congress of producers" was more applicable to the communist society of the future, where there are no more classes and all are producers. In other words, the Opposition's text contains a strong suggestion that communism could be achieved in Russia provided the problems of economic management were solved correctly. This suspicion is reinforced by the scant references in Kollontai's texts to the problem of the extension of the world revolution. Indeed, the group seems to have had little to say about the international policies of the Bolshevik party at the time. All these weaknesses are indeed expressions of the influence of syndicalist ideology, even if the Opposition cannot be reduced to nothing more than an anarchist deviation.
As we have seen, Lenin considered that the trade union debate expressed a profound malaise in the party; given the critical situation facing the country, he even felt that the party had been mistaken in authorising the debate at all. He was especially angry with Trotsky for the manner in which he had provoked the debate, and accused him of acting in an irresponsible and factional manner over a number of organisational issues linked to the debate. Lenin also seemed to be dissatisfied with the very focus of the debate, feeling that "a question came to the forefront which, because of the objective conditions, should not have been in the forefront" (report to the 10th party Congress, March 8, 1921). Perhaps his main fear was that the apparent disorder in the party would only exacerbate the growing social disorder within Russia; but perhaps he also felt that the real nub of the question was elsewhere.
Be that as it may, the most important insight Lenin offered in this debate was certainly on the problem of the class nature of the state. This is how he framed the question in a speech given to a meeting of communist delegates at the end of 1920: "While betraying this lack of thoughtfulness, Comrade Trotsky falls into error himself. He seems to say that in a workers' state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake. Comrade Trotsky speaks of a 'workers' state'. May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers' state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: 'Since this is a workers' state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?' The whole point is that it is not quite a workers' state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes ... For one thing, ours is not actually a workers' state but a workers' and peasants' state. And a lot depends on that (interjection from Bukharin: 'What kind of state? A workers' and peasants' state?'). Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout, 'What kind of state? A workers' and peasants' state?' I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets and that will be answer enough.
But that is not all. Our Party Programme - a document which the author of The ABC of Communism knows very well - shows that ours is a workers' state with a bureaucratic twist. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong... We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers' organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state" ('The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky's Mistakes', Collected Works vol 32, pp22-3).
In a later article Lenin retreated a bit on this formulation, admitting that Bukharin had been right to question his terms: "What I should have said is: 'A workers state is an abstraction. What we actually have is a workers' state with this peculiarity, firstly that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and secondly, that it is a workers' state with a bureaucratic distortion'. Anyone who reads the whole of my speech will see that this correction makes no difference to my meaning or conclusions" ('The Party Crisis', Pravda, January 21 1921, CW vol 32 p48).
In fact Lenin showed a great deal of political wisdom in questioning the notion of the "workers state". Even in countries which don't have a large peasant majority, the transitional state will still have the task of encompassing and representing the needs of all the non-exploiting strata in society, and can thus not be seen as a purely proletarian organ; in addition to this, and partly as a result of it, its conservative weight will tend to express itself in the formation of a bureaucracy towards which the working class will have to be especially vigilant. Lenin had intuited all this even through the distorting mirror of the trade union debate.
It is also worth noting that on this point about the class nature of the transitional state there is a real convergence between Lenin and the Workers' Opposition. But Lenin's criticism of Trotsky did not lead him to sympathise with the latter. On the contrary, he saw the Workers' Opposition as the main danger; the Kronstadt events in particular convinced him that it expressed the same threat of petty bourgeois counter-revolution. Under Lenin's instigation. the 10th party Congress passed a resolution on "The syndicalist and anarchist deviation in our party" which explicitly stigmatises the Workers' Opposition: "Hence, the views of the Workers' Opposition and of like-minded elements are not only wrong in theory, but are an expression of petty bourgeois and anarchist wavering, and actually weaken the consistency of the leading line of the Communist party and help the class enemies of the proletarian revolution" (CW vol 32 p248).
As we have already said, these accusations of syndicalism are not entirely without foundation. But Lenin's principal argument on this point is deeply flawed: for him, the syndicalism of the Workers' Opposition resides not in the fact that it emphasised economic management by the trade unions rather than the political authority of the soviets, but in its alleged challenge to the rule of the Communist Party. "The Theses of the Workers' Opposition fly in the face of the decision of the Second Congress of the Comintern on the Communist Party's role in operating the dictatorship of the proletariat" (Summing up speech on the report of the CC of the RCP, March 9 1921, CW vol 32, p199). Like Trotsky, Lenin had definitely come to the view that "the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class" ('The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky's Mistakes', op cit). Faced with Trotsky, this was an argument for the unions to act as "transmission belts" between the party and the class as a whole. But faced with the Workers' Opposition, it was an argument for declaring their views to be outside of marxism altogether - along with anyone else who questioned the notion of the party exercising the dictatorship.
In fact the Workers' Opposition did not fundamentally challenge the notion of the party exercising the dictatorship: Kollontai's text proposes that "the Central Committee of our party must become the supreme directing centre of our class policy, the organ of class thought and control over the practical policy of the soviets, and the spiritual personification of our basic programme" (op cit pp41-2). It was for this very reason that the Workers' Opposition supported the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion; and it was the latter which posed the most explicit challenge to the Bolsheviks' monopoly of power.
In the wake of widespread strikes in Moscow and Petrograd, the Kronstadt rebellion broke out at the very time the Bolshevik party was holding its 10th Congress2. The strikes had arisen around largely economic issues, and had been met with a mixture of concessions and repression by the regional state authorities. But the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, initially acting in solidarity with the strikes, had gone on to raise, alongside demands for relaxing the harsh economic regime of War Communism, a series of key political demands: new elections to the soviets, freedom of the press and of agitation for all working class tendencies, the abolition of political departments in the armed forces and elsewhere, "because no party should be given privileges in the propagation of its ideas or receive the financial support of the state for such purposes" (from the resolution adopted on the battleship Petropavlovsk and at the mass assembly of 1st March). It amounted to a call to replace the power of the party-state with the power of the soviets. Lenin - rapidly echoed by the official mouthpieces of the state – denounced it as the result of a White Guard conspiracy, although he did say that the reactionaries were manipulating the real discontent of the petty bourgeoisie and even a section of the working class that was susceptible to its ideological influence. In any case, “This petty bourgeois counter-revolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak put together, because ours is a country where peasant property has gone to ruin and where, in addition, the demobilisation has set loose vast numbers of potentially mutinous elements" (speech to the 10th Congress, op cit, p184).
The initial argument, that the mutiny was from the outset led by White Guard generals on the spot, was soon proved to be without foundation. Isaac Deutscher, in his biography of Trotsky, notes the unease that set in among the Bolsheviks after the rebellion had been crushed: “Foreign communists who visited Moscow some months later and believed that Kronstadt had been one of the ordinary incidents of the civil war, were ‘astounded and troubled’ to find that the Bolsheviks spoke of the rebels without any of the anger and hatred which they felt for the White Guards and the interventionists. Their talk was full of ‘sympathetic reticences’ and sad, enigmatic allusions, which to the outside betrayed the party’s troubled conscience” (The Prophet Armed, p514, OUP edition, 1954). Certainly Lenin had seen very quickly that the rebellion proved the impossibility of maintaining the rigours of war communism, the NEP was in one sense a concession to the Kronstadters’ call for an end to the grain requisitions, although the central demands of the rebellion – the political ones, centring around the reanimation of the soviets – were totally rejected. They were seen as the vehicle through which the counter-revolution could unseat the Bolsheviks and destroy all remnants of the proletarian dictatorship. “The way the enemies of the proletariat take advantage of every deviation from a thoroughly consistent, communist line was perhaps most strikingly illustrated in the case of the Kronstadt mutiny, when the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and White Guards in all countries of the world immediately expressed their willingness to accept the slogans of the soviet system, if only they might thereby secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and when the Social-Revolutionaries and the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in general resorted in Kronstadt to slogans calling for an insurrection against the soviet government of Russia ostensibly in the interests of the soviet power. These facts fully prove that the White Guards strive, and are able, to disguise themselves as communists, solely for the purpose of weakening or destroying the bulwark of the proletarian revolution in Russia” (draft resolution of the 10th Congress of the RCP on party unity, written by Lenin, CW, vol. 32, pp241-2).
Even when the thesis that the mutiny was actually led by the White Guard generals had to all intents and purposes been abandoned, the basic argument remained: this was a petty bourgeois revolt which would clear the way to the forces of open counter-revolution. Literally so, because Kronstadt was a vital naval port at the gates of Petrograd, and in a more general sense, because it was feared that ‘success’ for the rebellion would have inspired a nation-wide peasant jacquerie. The only possible alternative was for the Bolsheviks to act as the guardians of the proletarian power, even if the proletariat as a whole was no longer participating in this power and sections of it were sympathetic to the rebels. This viewpoint, it must be said, was by no means restricted to the Bolshevik leadership. We have already said that the Workers Opposition put themselves in the front line of the forces sent to recapture the fortress. In fact, as Serge points out, “the Congress mobilised all present, including many oppositionists, for the battle against Kronstadt. Dybenko, a former Kronstadt sailor himself and an extreme Left Communist, and Bubnov, the writer, soldier and leader of the ‘Democratic Centralism’ group, went out to join battle on the ice against rebels who they knew in their hearts were right” (op cit.).
Internationally, the communist left was caught in a quandary. At the third congress of the Communist International, the KAPD delegate Hempel supported Kollontai’s call for greater initiative and self-activity by the Russian workers, but at the same time argued, on the basis of the KAPD’s theory of ‘Russian exceptionalism’, that “we say this because we have for Germany and Western Europe a different conception of the dictatorship of the proletarian party. In our view, this dictatorship was justified in Russia, because of the Russian situation – the lack of sufficiently developed forces among the proletariat means that the dictatorship has had to exercise more from above” (La Gauche Allemande, Invariance, 1973, p72-3). Another delegate, Sachs, protested against Bukharin’s charge that Gorter or the KAPD had taken the side of the Kronstadt insurgents, even though they seemed to recognise the proletarian character of the movement: “After the proletariat at Kronstadt rose up against you, the Communist Party, and after you had declared a state of siege against the proletariat in Petrograd…! This internal logic in the succession of events, not only here in the Russian tactic, but also in the resistances that have been expressed against it, this necessity has always been recognised and underlined by comrade Gorter. This phrase has to be read to see that Gorter did not take the side of the Kronstadt insurgents and it’s the same for the KAPD” (ibid.).
Perhaps the best description of the anguished state of mind of those elements who, though critical of the direction the revolution was taking in Russia, decided to support the crushing of Kronstadt is provided by Victor Serge in Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Serge shows very well how, during the period of War Communism, the regime of the Cheka, the Red Terror, had become more and more unrestrained, engulfing the supporters of the revolution as well as its enemies. He chronicles the disastrous and treacherous treatment of the anarchists, particularly the Makhnovist movement, at the hands of the Cheka. And he records his shame at the official lies that were spread about the strikes in Petrograd and the mutiny in Kronstadt – for this was the first time that the soviet state had resorted to the systematic lying that became the hallmark of the Stalinist regime later on. Nevertheless, as Serge recounts, “after many hesitations, and with unutterable anguish, my communist friends and I finally declared ourselves on the side of the party. This is why. Kronstadt had right on its side. Kronstadt was the beginning of a fresh, liberating revolution for popular democracy: ‘The Third Revolution!’ it was called by certain anarchists whose heads were stuffed with infantile illusions. However, the country was absolutely exhausted, and production particularly was at a standstill: there were no reserves of any kind, not even reserves of stamina in the hearts of the masses. The working class elite that had been moulded in the struggle against the old regime was literally decimated. The party, swollen by the influx of power-seekers, inspired little confidence…Soviet democracy lack leadership, institutions and inspiration: at its back there were only masses of starving and desperate men.
The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for freely-elected soviets into one for ‘soviets without communists’. If the Bolshevik party fell, it was only one short step to chaos, and through chaos to a peasant rising, the massacre of the communists, the return of the émigrés, and in the end, through the sheer force of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian…” (op cit., pp128-9). And he pointed out the pressing danger of the White Guards using the Kronstadt garrison as a spring-board for a new intervention, and of the spreading peasant revolt in the countryside.
There can be no doubt that the active forces of the counter-revolution were slavering at the mouth at the thought of using Kronstadt ideologically, politically and even militarily as a hammer with which to beat the Bolsheviks. And in fact they continue to do so to this day: for the main political ideologues of capital, the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion is one more proof that Bolshevism and Stalinism are two peas in a pod. At the time of the events, it was this overwhelming fear that the White Guards would take advantage of the revolt to settle scores with the Bolsheviks, which tipped many of the most critical voices of communism towards supporting the repression. Many, but not all.
Of course there were the anarchists. In Russia at this time anarchism was a true swamp of diverse currents: some, like the Makhnovists, expressed the best aspects of the peasant revolt; some were products of deeply individualist intelligentsia; some were out and out bandits and lunatics; some, like the ‘soviet anarchists’, the anarcho-syndicalists and others, were proletarian in essence despite the weight of that petty-bourgeois outlook which is the real core of anarchism. There is no doubt, however, that many of the anarchists were correct in their criticisms of the rule of the Cheka and of the crushing of Kronstadt. The problem is that anarchism offers no framework for understanding the historical significance of such events. For them, the Bolsheviks ended up crushing the workers and sailors because they were, in Voline’s words, “marxists, authoritarians, and statists”. Because marxism advocates the formation of a proletarian political party, calls for the centralisation of the proletariat’s forces, and recognises the inevitability of the state in the period of transition, it is doomed to end up as the executioner of the masses. Such timeless ‘truths’ are of no use to understanding the real, evolving historical processes and drawing the lessons from them.
But there were also Bolsheviks who refused to support the suppression of the rebellion. In Kronstadt itself, in fact, the majority of the party members went over to the rebels (as did a number of the troops sent to recapture the fortress). Some of the Kronstadt Bolsheviks simply resigned from the party in protest against the slanders being spread about the nature of events. But a number of them formed a Provisional Party Bureau which issued an appeal denying the rumours that the Kronstadt rebels were shooting communists. It expressed its confidence in the Provisional Revolutionary Committee formed by the newly-elected Kronstadt Soviet and ended with the words “Long live the power of the Soviets! Long live international working class unity!” (quoted in The Kronstadt Commune by Ida Mett, first published in 1938 and reprinted by Solidarity in 1967).
It is also important to mention the position adopted by Gavriil Miasnikov, who went on to form the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party in 1923. At that time Miasnikov had already started to speak out against the increasingly bureaucratic regime dominated by the party and the state, although it seems that he was not yet part of any oppositional grouping within the party. According to an essay entitled “Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group” (The Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984), Miasnikov was deeply affected by the Petrograd strikes and the Kronstadt mutiny (he was in Petrograd at the time). “Unlike the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition, he refused to denounce the insurgents. Nor would he have participated in their suppression had he been called to do so”. Avrich then quotes Miasnikov directly: “if someone dares to have the courage of his convictions, he is either a self-seeker or, worse, a counter-revolutionary, a Menshevik or an SR. Such was the case with Kronstadt Everything was nice and quiet. Then suddenly, without a word, it hits you in the face: ‘what is Kronstadt? A few hundred communists are fighting against us’. What does this mean? Who is to blame if the ruling circles have no common language not only with the non-party masses but with rank-and-file communists? So much do they misunderstand one another that they reach for their weapons. What then is this? It is the brink, the abyss” (Avrich cites Socialtischeskii vestnik, February 23, 1922, as his source for this quote).
Despite these insights, it took a long time for the political lessons of the Kronstadt events to be drawn in any real depth. In our view, the most important conclusions were drawn in the 1930s by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. In the context of a study called ‘The question of the state’ (Octobre, 1938), it wrote of Kronstadt: “It may be that in certain circumstances the proletariat – and we will even concede that they may be the unconscious victims of manoeuvres by the enemy – enters into struggle against the proletarian state. What is to be done in such a situation? We must start from the principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the proletariat by violence and force. It would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have kept it from the geographical point of view, since substantially this victory could only have one result: that of altering the very bases, the substance of the action carried out by the proletariat”.
A number of important issues are raised by this passage. To begin with it affirms clearly that the Kronstadt movement was proletarian in character. Certainly there were petty-bourgeois, especially anarchist, influences in a number of views expressed by the rebels. But to argue, as Trotsky did in his retrospective justification, ‘Hue and Cry over Kronstadt’ (New International, April 1938), that the proletarian sailors of Red Kronstadt in 1917 had been replaced by a petty-bourgeois mass who could not put up with the rigours of War Communism, who demanded special privileges for themselves, and so ‘repelled’ the workers of Petrograd, is in total opposition to reality. The mutiny began as an expression of class solidarity with the workers of Petrograd, and delegates from Kronstadt were sent to the Petrograd factories to explain their case and canvas support. ‘Sociologically’ its nucleus was also proletarian. Whatever changes had taken place within the fleet since 1917, a cursory glance at the delegates elected to the Provisional Revolutionary Committee shows that the majority were sailors with a long record of service and that they had clearly proletarian functions (electricians, telephonists, boilermen, engineers etc.). Other delegates were from local factories and in general the factory workers, particularly those from the Kronstadt arsenal, played a key role in the movement. It is equally untrue that they demanded privileges for themselves: point 9 of the Kronstadt ‘platform’ demands “equal rations for all working people, with the exception of those in trades detrimental to health”. Above all, their demands had a clear proletarian character, and intuitively corresponded to a desperate need for the revolution: the need to revive the soviets and to end the party’s entanglement with the state, which was not only crippling the soviets, but destroying the party from within.
The understanding that this was indeed a proletarian movement is the key to the conclusion drawn by the Italian Left: for the latter, any attempt to suppress a proletarian reaction to the difficulties facing the revolution could only distort the very existence of the proletarian power. Thus the Italian Fraction drew the conclusion that within the proletarian camp, all reactions of violence are to be outlawed, whether to spontaneous movements of self-defence or towards political minorities. Referring explicitly to the trade union debate and the Kronstadt events, it also recognised the necessity for the proletariat to maintain the autonomy of its own class organs (councils, militias etc.), to prevent them from being absorbed into the general apparatus of the state, and even to pit them against the state if need be. And although it had not ditched the formula of the “dictatorship of the party”, the Fraction was most of all insistent on the need for the party to remain quite distinct from the state. We will return to this process of clarification undertaken by the Fraction in a subsequent article.
The bold conclusion drawn by the passage from Octobre - that it would have been better to have lost Kronstadt from the geographical point of view than carry out an act that would distort the very meaning of the revolution – is also the best answer to Serge’s concerns. For him it seemed that the crushing of the revolt was the only alternative to the rise of a new “anti-proletarian dictatorship” that would “massacre” the communists. But from the advantage of hindsight we can see that despite the crushing of the revolt an anti-proletarian dictatorship did arise and did massacre the communists: the Stalinist dictatorship. Indeed, it must be said that the crushing of the revolt only accelerated the decline of the revolution and thus unknowingly helped to clear the way for Stalinism. And the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution was to have much more tragic consequences than the restoration of the White Guard could ever have done. If the White generals had come back to power then at least the issue would have been clear, as was the case with the Paris Commune, where all the world could see that the capitalists had won and the workers had lost. But the most horrible thing about the way the revolution died in Russia is that the counter-revolution won and called itself socialism. We are still living with the awful consequences.
The conflict between the proletariat and the ‘proletarian state’, which appeared openly in the events of 1921, placed the Bolshevik party at a historical crossroads. Given the isolation of the revolution and the terrible conditions this had imposed on the Russian bastion, it was inevitable that this state machine would increasingly be transformed into an organ of capitalism against the working class. The Bolsheviks could either try to remain at the head of this machine – which actually meant being more and more subsumed within it – or ‘go into opposition’, take their place amongst the workers, defending their immediate interests and aiding them to regroup their forces in preparation for a possible revival of the international revolution But although the KAPD did seriously raise this question in the autumn of 19213, it was far harder for the Bolsheviks to see the issue at the time. In practice the party had become so profoundly entangled with the state machine, and so pervaded with substitutionist ideology and methods, that there was no real possibility if the party as a whole taking this audacious step. But what was realistically posed in the period was the struggle of the left fractions against the degeneration of the party, for the maintenance of its proletarian character. Unfortunately, the party compounded the error it had made over Kronstadt by concluding, in Lenin’s words, that “now is not the time for oppositions”, by declaring a state of siege within the party and banning fractions, as it did at the conclusion of the 10th Congress. The Congress “Resolution on party unity” demanded the dissolution of all opposition groups at a time when the party was “surrounded by a ring of enemies”. It was not intended to be permanent, nor to end all criticism within the party: the resolution also called for more regular publication of the party’s internal discussion bulletin. But in seeing only ‘the enemy without’, it failed to give sufficient weight to the ‘enemy within’: the growth of opportunism and bureacratism inside the party, which was making it more and more necessary for opposition to take an organised form. Indeed, by banning factions, the party was tying a noose around its own neck: in the years that lay ahead, when the course of degeneration was becoming more and more evident, the resolution of the 10th Congress was to be used again and again to stifle all criticism and opposition to this course. We will return to this question in the next article in this series.
CDW
1 In his article ‘Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group’, Avrich shows that Miasnikov, though not part of any organised grouping in this debate, had already reached very similar conclusions: “For Miasnikov, on the contrary, the trade unions had outlived their usefulness, owing to the existence of the soviets. The soviets, he argued…were revolutionary rather than reformist bodies. Unlike the unions, they embraced not merely one or another segment of the proletariat, this or that trade or occupation, but ‘all of the workers’, and along the ‘lines of production ‘ rather than of craft. The unions should therefore be dismantled, Miasnikov urged, together with the Councils of National Economy, which were riddled with ‘bureaucratism and red tape’ ; the management of industry, he said, should be vested in the workers’ soviets” Avrich’s source is Zinoviev, ed., Partiia y Soynzy, 1921.
2 For a more detailed account of the events at Kronstadt, see our article in International Review 3. This has recently been republished in English with a new introduction.
3 See the article “The communist left and the growing conflict between the Russian state and the interests of the world revolution” in International Review 97, p18).
War after war. After Kosovo, Timor. After Timor, Chechnya. Each competes to surpas Timor. After Timor, Chechnya. Each competes to surpass the others in horror and bloodshed. The conflict between the Russian army and the Chechen militia is bloody, and tragic for the Chechen population: "The latest Chechen tally is 15,000 dead; 38,000 injured; 220,000 refugees; 124 villages completely destroyed; and a further 280 villages with 80% damage. They say that 14,500 children have been maimed and 20,000 of them orphaned" (The Guardian , 20/12/99).
The country is raped, ravaged; the population starved, exiled, terrorised and desperate. To give some idea of the extent of the "humanitarian" disaster, for a country like the USA these figures would be the equivalent of 2 million dead, 5 million wounded and mutilated, and 28 million refugees! Since the article was written, these figures have certainly increased.
To this, we should add the Russian losses, which according to the Committee of Mothers of Russian Soldiers are at least 1,000 dead and 3,000 wounded (Moscow Times, 24/12/99).
In a Grozny flattened by bombardment, the survivors among the civilian population are hiding in cellars, without water, heating, or food, living like rats; in the outlying devastated villages and towns, the refugees live under the yoke of Chechen mafia gangs, or of the Russian soldiery, itself terrified and drunk with vodka, murder, and loot; in the neighbouring republics, the refugees are parked in veritable concentration camps, without shout supplies, medical attention, heating, in tents often without even a bed. The situation in the camps is dire. Just as it was in the camps for Kosovar refugees, where "international aid" arrived in dribs and drabs - and was largely stolen by the Albanian mafia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) - while the great powers of NATO dropped billions of dollars-worth of bombs on Serbia and Kosovo. Today, more tens of billions of dollars are going to finance the Russian state and its war, while the great powers leave the Chechen population to rot in the camps: "The sick and old go without medical attention. To feed themselves, residents rummage through local garbage bins, hoping to find rotten potatoes for soup. The water, drawn from a fire reservoir, is brown and full of insects, and even after boiling smells bad" (Moscow Times, 24/12/99). In the camps, the refugees are still subjected to the terror of the Russian military, which ransomed, aggressed, bombed and machine-gunned them during their flight. As The Guardian titled (18/12/99), "refugees of Chechen war find no sanctuary in camps" where nobody "can leave the camp without a day pass allowing them past the armed guards at the camp gates".
Between 200 and 300,000 refugees have fled the fighting and bombardments. In fact, the Chechen population is being subjected to collective assassination. The massive bombardment of towns and v villages, the Russian troops terrorising of the population, the machine-gunning of refugee columns in the corridors left open by the Russian army, have all pushed the Chechens to flee. This bloody ethnic cleansing follows that of 1996� carried out by Chechen troops after their victory over the Russian army, and which forced 400,000 Russian inhabitants to leave the region. Just as the Serb militias� ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars was followed by that of Kosovo�s Serb civilians by the UCK.
A lot of this is already said by the TV and the press. One might be surprised at the extent of the media campaign in Western countries, denouncing the Russian intervention, after they supported - and with what fervour! - the massive bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. But this campaign is particularly hypocritical, and attempts to hide the duplicity of the media. For what they do not say, is that the conditions, the methods and the consequences of this war, like the others, will be more and more terrible, and that they are only paving the way to still more numerous, widespread and terrible wars. They do not say, that these wars are the expressions of capitalism�s historical bankruptcy.
Today, imperialist wars are an expression of capitalism�s decomposition
Ten years ago, ethnic cleansing was exceptional and limited to a few particularly backward countrieuntries. During the 1990s, it has become the norm in imperialist war, whether in Africa, Asia, or Europe. Tens of millions of refugees throughout the world will never return to their town, their village, their home. They have been dumped forever in the camps. The situation of the Palestinians is becoming the norm on every continent. The self-assertion of a multitude of minority nationalisms - what the press calls "the explosion of nationalism" - is no longer the exceptional and limited phenomenon of the 1980s. it has provoked the proliferation of national conflicts, and the emergence of states, each one more mafia-ridden and corrupt than the next. Power-struggles between rival mafia have become the norm. Traffic in drugs and weapons of every description, banditry, kidnapping - which are and will continue to be among these "new nations" main resources - have also become the norm. The situation in Afghanistan - or in Africa, or in Colombia - is spreading to every continent. The norm? Chaos, spreading throughout every continent.
By contrast, the massive terror bombing of civilian populations, the destruction of whole towns and villages, is nothing new. It is a characteristic of all the imperialist conflicts, whether localised or world-wide, in the period of capitalism�s decadence, ever since 1914 and World War I. The destruction visited on Europe and Japan in 1945 had nothing to envy that of Chechnya in the year 2000. Groznyny today gives us a good enough idea of Dresden in 1945. What is new, is that the destruction caused by today�s wars will never be rebuilt. Neither Pristina in Kosovo, nor Kabul in Afghanistan, nor Brazzaville in the Congo, nor Grozny after 1996 were ever rebuilt, nor will they be. The economies devastated by war will never recover. There will not be - there cannot be - a new Marshall Plan. This is the situation in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, most of the African countries, Timor, which have all suffered the destruction of the "modern" wars of the 1990s. The permanence and proliferation throughout the 20th century of all these characteristics of imperialist war specific to capitalism�s decadence are an expression of its historical bankruptcy. They are an expression of its decomposition.
We have denounced today�s media campaigns over the war in Chechnya for their hypocrisy and duplicity. In reality, governments, politicians, journalists, "philosophers" and intellectuals are all accomplices in justifying capitalist barbarism and state terror. Chechnya today, like Kosovo yesterday, is witnessing the ethnic cleansing, the flight of civilians, the destruction of their villages and homes, the looting of their possessions, blackmail and murder by militias and troops, refugees in camps by the hundreds of thousands, the repression of a national minority, and the determination to ensure the disappearancnce of a whole population. Not to denounce - or rather not to pretend to denounce - the mass crimes in Chechnya, would make the media, indeed the whole democratic apparatus, the open accomplices of the great powers� humanitarian lies. "Whether you live in Africa, Central Europe, or anywhere else, if someone wants to commit mass crimes against an innocent civilian population they should know that, as far as we are able, we will prevent it" declared Bill Clinton at the end of the war in Kosovo. Not to at least appear to denounce today what was used yesterday as a pretext for military intervention would annihilate all the campaigns on the right of humanitarian interference. And would therefore also reduce the ability to intervene militarily in the future. By contrast, the pretence of denunciation makes it possible to continue the ideological campaign, and even to add a new layer to it.
What interests are at stake in the Chechen war?
But are these anti-Russian media campaigns only propaganda? Do they not reveal an opposition between Russia and the Western powers? Is there not a conflict of economic, political, strategic - in other words imperialist - interest, especially in the Caucasus? Are the US not giving support to projects for oil pipelines, which would avoid Russian territory and pass instead either via Georgia or Turkey? Do the diffeifferent powers not aim to control the oil of the Caucasus, or even to take for themselves the financial profits from its exploitation?
It is true that there are opposing interests among the great powers in the Caucasus. Along with the decomposition of the USSR, then of Russia, they are the other factor in the bloody conflicts throughout the Caucasus, indeed throughout all the ex-"Soviet" republics in Asia. This is the reason for the active presence of the various local powers, with Turkey and Iran to the fore, and world powers, with Germany and the USA vying for influence in Turkey. But what do we mean by "imperialist interests"? Are they simply a matter of the "oil rent", and the profits to be made from it?
What is the real situation as regards oil in the Caucasus? "Oil production in this region is no longer a major factor (�) This industry, along with the maintenance of a refining activity, is undoubtedly a real source of finance for the local clans in power, but is certainly not on the Federal [ie Russian] level" (Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1999).
What directly economic "vital interest" can the United States have in controlling such a small oil production, when they already control without difficulty the major part of world oil production in the Middle East, Venezuela, Meuela, Mexico, and the US itself? The US can hope for no direct financial profit from the Caucasus. So why this active American presence? To control the oil trade routes?
"If the Caucasus remains an object of major geopolitical confrontations, it is for another reason: control over the transit of oil from the Caspian Sea, even if the volumes seem to be less than at first thought. And in this respect, the power struggle between the two slopes of the [mountain chain separating the North Caucasian republics of the Russian Federation from the ex-Soviet republics of the South Caucasus] has sharpened considerably during the last year. The Russians have always insisted that most of the oil should transit by their territory, as it did during the Soviet era, via the Baku-Novorissisk pipeline (�) But on 17th April 1999, a new pipeline was officially opened between Baku and Supsa, a Georgian port on the Black Sea coast which is practically integrated into the NATO security system (�) In mid-October, the presidents of Turkey and Azerbaijan confirmed the construction of a pipeline between Baku and the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan: all the oil from the South Caucasus would thus bypass Russia" (idem).
So is this a matter of gaining control over the economic profits to be made from extracting and shipping Caspian oil? They financial gains to be made are certainly far from negligible for the republicblics of the ex-USSR in the region, or even for Russia and Turkey. But what about the United States?
"But whether the route [the proposed trans-Turkey pipeline] agreed to last week � which is strategically advantageous for the US but costly for the oil companies � can be profitable quickly is still a big question. So, too, is the nature and extent of political fallout with Russia, the loser in the deal" (International Herald Tribune, 22/11/99, our emphasis).
The United States� real interest, its real aim, is not economic but strategic, and it is the American state which is directing the strategic and economic orientations of US capitalism - against the advice of the oil companies, in this case. In capitalism�s decadent epoch, imperialist interests and conflicts are geopolitical, and while directly economic interests continue to exist, they are put at the service of the state�s strategic orientations: "For the Clinton administration, the prime concern has been strategic : guaranting that any pipeline would skirt Russia and Iran and thus denying those nations a choke-hold over a new energy supply for the West" (idem).
The real goal of the United States is not to profit from the "oil rent", but to deprive Russia and Iran of any control over the transit of oilt of oil, and to ensure its own control vis-à-vis its own main European rivals, especially Germany. Just as in professional soccer today, the richest clubs buy great players that they do not really need, and which they don�t let play, simply to prevent them playing for rival teams. The real conflict of Western power strategic interests in this zone is often hidden: it is nonetheless profound. An unstable Russia ready to sell to the highest bidder, an anti-American, pro-European or even pro-German Iran, in control of the region�s oil routes, would represent a strategic threat to US power. The assiduous court being paid to Turkey - an particularly influential imperialist power throughout this Turkish-speaking region - by America and the European powers (the former offering a pipeline, the latter entry into the European Union) indicates clearly enough what is at stake and where are the divisions between the great imperialist powers. For the Americans, control over Caucasian oil would allow them to deprive the Europeans of it if necessary, and so give them a further means of pressure and a significant advantage in the balance of imperialist forces. It would bring no financial benefit - it is even likely to prove expensive - but it would be a particularly important strategic advantage.
The Western pressress� media campaigns about the war in Chechnya are hypocritical and conniving, but they are not directly part of these geo-strategic conflicts. The European press is much more virulent than the Americans in denouncing Russia�s intervention, when one might expect them to denounce the advance of the US. The fact is that although the war in Chechnya is connected to these imperialist antagonisms, especially from the Russian viewpoint, it is not directly part of them. Or more exactly, it is not coveted by the Western powers in the same way as the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), where they are struggling amongst themselves for influence. "We accept the fact that Moscow is protecting its territory" declares Javier Solana, Co-ordinator of European Union foreign policy (International Herald Tribune, 20/12/99), adding for the benefit of public opinion, "but not in this way", which is particularly rich coming from NATO�s ex-Secretary General, the man who gave the order to bomb Serbia and "push it 50 years into the past" last March. "Their [the Russians�] goal, their legitimate goal, is to defeat the Chechen rebels, and to stop terrorism within Russia, to stop their invasion of neighbouring provinces like Dagestan" (Bill Clinton, International Herald Tribune, 10/12/99). To which we can add the declarations of all the main American and European leaders, such as Germany�s ex-pacifist ecologist Foreign Minister in the leftwing Schröder government: "Nobody is questioning Russia's right to combat terrorism (...) but present actions by the Russians are often in contradiction with international law"(Joschka Fischer, in International Herald Tribune, 18/12/99), which is not bad either coming from one of the most fervent supporters of Western military intervention in Serbia, an operation which was even more illegal from the standpoint of international law and organisations like the UN which the ruling class has set up to try to settle its international differences.
How come such unanimity? Why such support for Russia, giving it carte blanche to obliterate Chechnya? Is this not contradictory with the dynamic of imperialist interests in the Caucasus?
The contradiction of the Western powers: against chaos in Russia, or for their imperialist interests?
"It�s not only the USSR which is about to disintegrate: it�s the Union�s biggest republic, Russia itself, which threatens to explode, without having any way of imposing order - except through veritable bloodbaths whose outcome is in any case entirely uncertain" (International Review no.68, December 1991). Since 1991, this tendency towards the decomposition of the ex-USSR has been largely borne out in the facts. The tendency for the whole capitalist world to rot on its feet at the politicalitical, social, economic, ecological levels strikes at all states, but especially the most fragile and those on the periphery. It has shown itself especially clearly in Russia.
Russia�s catastrophic and chaotic situation is cause for concern among the great Western powers. Russian military intervention in Chechnya has done nothing to reassure them, on the contrary: "Generals have talked of massive resignations and even civil war if the politicians interfere with their campaign, an ominous new note in the disintegration of Russian governance after a strong tradition of the military keeping out of politics. The fear that Russia instils now, a decade after the breach of the Berlin Wall, is the turbulence and irrationality of its weakness (...) It may bring the watershed of Russia's past communist evolution, losing the struggle for democracy and unleashing chaos and eventual military rule. That is why governments are so hesitant to react" (Flora Lewis, "Russia risks self-destruction in this irrational war", International Herald Tribune, 13/12/99).
This anxiety and hesitation are shared by all the major Western powers, despite their imperialist antagonisms. And even if the Americans tend to back the Yeltsin clique, while the Europeans at present tend to back the Primakov clique, they are all agreed not to throw too much oil on the flames, and so to limit the country�s slide into chaos. From this sis standpoint, the Yeltsin clique�s success in the December legislative elections was somewhat worrying for the country�s political stability, with the re-election of a particularly unpopular and incompetent - other than in filling its own pockets - ruling team, which owed its success solely to its bloody military victories in Chechnya. As we write, Yeltsin�s resignation and his replacement by his Prime Minister Putin clearly aims to bring on an early presidential election and guarantee the Yeltsin family judicial immunity in which to enjoy its ill-gotten gains. The disintegration of the Russian state may be halted by a "tough" Prime Minister - now President - taking, with the army, the reins of power. At least for the moment. And if the initial military successes in Chechnya continue, which is far from certain despite Russia�s crushing material superiority.
But the ineluctable aggravation of the economic situation, and the centrifugal tendencies of the Russian Federation threatening it with break-up, are a menace for the country itself and the whole capitalist world. Rusting away they may be, the missiles and nuclear submarines of the ex-USSR remain all the more dangerous in a country falling into anarchy and political instability. When Clinton, for the benefit of "public opinion", criticised the excesses of Russia�s intervention, Yeltsin�s threat that Clinton "has for a minute forgotten that Russia has a full arsenenal of nuclear weapons" (International Herald Tribune, 10/12/99) cannot simply be put down to the clowning of an old alcoholic. The mere fact that this corrupt buffoon, pickled in vodka, pinching the bums of his secretaries before the whole world�s TV, has been able to remain in power in Russia for 10 years, says much about the state of decomposition of the Russian bourgeoisie�s political apparatus. The great imperialist powers find themselves in a contradictory situation: on the one hand, the implacable logic of imperialist competition pushes them to grasp every opportunity to gain an advantage over their rivals and so to plunge society still further into chaos and decomposition, especially in countries like Russia; on the other hand, they are relatively conscious of this dynamic of chaos and decomposition, understand its dangers, and from time to time try to hold it back. But let�s be clear, it would be illusory to think that the capitalist world can reverse this tendency towards its own decomposition, just as it would be illusory to think that the infernal logic of imperialist competition could come to an end, and no longer provoke ever more war, chaos, and bloodshed. The common desire not to plunge Russia still further into the mire is only temporary: the implacable logic of imperialist interest will give new impetus to the tendency to chaos and decomposition in the Caucasus, as in other regions of the world.
Confronted with the menace of an uncontrollable Russia, there is a tacit agreement among the Western states not to dispute its control over the Northern Caucasus which is part of the Russian Federation; but accompanied by an equally tacit warning not to try to gain a foothold in the Southern Caucasus, where the great powers are vying amongst themselves. This agreement has been expressed concretely in the "authorisation", to use the terms of the Russian press by the great Western powers for Russia to intervene to defend its "legitimate rights" in Chechnya, and drown the country in blood. "In the framework of the treaty on conventional weapons, the OSCE summit in Istanbul has authorised us to deploy, in the North-Caucasus military region, far more men and material than in 1995 (600 tanks instead of 350, 2200 armoured vehicles instead of 290, 1000 canons instead of 640). Russia will of course concentrate this military power in Chechnya" (reprinted in French from the Russian weekly Obchtchaïa Gazeta by the Courrier International of 16/12/99, our emphasis).
Let us at least give the Russian press credit for speaking clearly and frankly, and of reporting faithfully the intentions of the great Western powers: "We leave you the Northern Caucasus, but we take take the right to fight amongst ourselves for control of the South Caucasus". The tribulations of the Caucasian populations are not at an end. This region is yet another which will never again know peace, and which will never recover from the destruction which will continue to hit it.
The hypocritical and conniving Western media campaigns have no intention of lessening, still less of combating capitalism�s military barbarism. They are aimed essentially at the Western populations, and in particular at the working class, in order to hide the link between imperialist war and capitalism�s economic bankruptcy, in order to hide the disastrous dynamic into which it is dragging humanity. They denounce the war in Chechnya in the name of the "right of humanitarian interference", the better to justify the war in Kosovo. The criticise the inaction of Western governments the better to glorify bourgeois democracy, when all the main protagonists of recent wars in Kosovo, Timor, and now Chechnya are democratic states with democratically elected governments. "Democracy is a not a guarantee against many nasty things" they say, in order to make it a goal with which everybody should identify: "We need to recapture a purpose in world affairs that is morally, intellectually and politically compelling. The democratic visioision retains an enormous vitality. Our duty is to help define the 21st century as a Democratic Century (...) Democracy is now demonstrably a universal value" (Max Kampelman, one-time US diplomat, International Herald Tribune, 18/12/99).
Today�s deceitful media campaigns aim to make us believe that a lack of democracy is the cause of wars and poverty. To think that "our fundamental challenge is to recognise that the political struggle remains between the democratic way of life and the denial of human liberty and political freedom"(idem) is to fall - however little - into the logic of defence of bourgeois democracy, for "more democracy", as we were endlessly told during the great media spectacle during the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. It means identifying with the nation-state, lining up behind the national bourgeoisie. It is a dead-end, a trap. Far from stopping, or even holding back, the descent into hell, any mass adhesion by the population, and above all by the working class, to the "ideals" of bourgeois democracy would only accelerate the world�s slide into capitalist barbarism. Is that not precisely the terrible experience that the world has undergone since the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc and these countries� adoption of Western-style bourgeois democracy? And is that not precisely what the incessant media campaigns about the benefits of democracy are trying to hide? ? The chaos in Russia and the war in Chechnya are both a product of capitalist democracy.
Support the internationalists in Russia
Humanity�s salvation from capitalist barbarism lies down a different road. The international bourgeoisie�s media never mention it, or even its expressions. And yet, they exist, and it is clear that they would encounter a significant echo if they were not stifled, drowned, lost, barely audible, under a constant deluge of ideological campaigns. The road of refusal of sacrifice and war exists; it does find an expression. Faithful to the internationalist principle of the workers� movement, all the groups of the Communist Left have intervened to denounce the imperialist war in Yugoslavia (see International Review nos. 98 and 99). This road has also found expression in Russia itself. In the midst of general hostility and severe repression, at the price of serious personal risks, in the midst of nationalist hysteria, we salute the militants who have spoken out against Russia�s imperialist intervention in Chechnya, and who have defended the only road which can hold back, then put an end to military barbarity.
DOWN WITH THE WAR!
Don�t take us for idiots!
Yeltsin, Maskadov, Putin, Bassaiev�
They are all the same clique!
They are the ones who hthe ones who have organised the terror in Moscow, Vogodonsk, Dagestan, Chechnya. It is their business, their war. They need it to reinforce their own power. They need it to defend their oil. Why should our children die for their interests? Let the oligarchs fight amongst themselves!
Don�t believe the imbecile and nationalist speeches: we must not accuse a whole people of committing crimes which have been perpetrated by nobody knows who, but which are only the interests of the rulers and masters of every nation.
Don�t go to the war, or let your sons go! Resist this war as much as you can! Go on strike against this war and those who started it.
Some internationalists of Moscow.
Oppose the bourgeoisie and reject all nationalism, oppose the state whether democratic or not, refuse capitalism�s war, call the working class to struggle and the defence of its living conditions, stand up against capitalism: that is the road. It is the road that must be taken by the whole working class in every country. It is the road of working class struggle, of struggle against capitalist exploitation, against its sacrifices and poverty. It is the road to the destruction of capitalism, of this system which every day spreads more death and poverty throughout the world. It is the road of communist revolution.
Wars proliferate. The economic crisis is ravaging the world. Disaster follows disaster because of the all-destroying frenzy of capitalist production. Every day, the planet is less liveable, less breathable, more infernal. Only the working class can give an answer to these tragic ills that capitalism bears in itself. Only the world proletariat can offer humanity a perspective.
RL, 1/1/2000
The IBRP has published Theses on Communist Tactics for the Periphery of Capitalism which put forward its position on the existence within capitalism of a division between the central and peripheral countries, and its consequences for the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The Theses give a response to the different questions about the national question and the proletariat, such as:
what links exist between the proletariat of the peripheral countries and that of the central countries?
Is an international movement of the working class more likely to start from the centre of capitalism or from its "weakest link"?
Could the movements of the "dispossessed" of the periphery be transformed into the motor of the world revolution?
Does a progressive bourgeoisie exist in the "dominated" countries that the proletariat could support?
What should be the proletariat’s attitude towards "national liberation movements"?
We think that it is important to examine critically the IBRP’s Theses with the intention of contributing to the clearest possible responses to this kind of questions posed by the working class movement, an aim that should concern all revolutionaries.
The revolutionary and internationalist positionof the groups of the Communist Left
In the first place, the IBRPs Theses make clear its framework of revolutionary and internationalist political principles. We are not saying this to flatter the IBRP, but so that the working class can identify the common principles that unite the groups of the Communist Left, what we call the proletarian political milieu. This is made all the more necessary by the fact that some of these groups - including the IBRP - have at times forgotten, if not denied, that other groups exist which share the same principles. This is what happened during the bombing of Kosovo, when the ICC made a call for common action by these groups in order that in such a critical moment the voice of all internationalists could be expressed in the highest, clearest and most united manner possible. This call was rejected on the grounds of the "differences" that separate us. Furthermore, those political principles that we agree on are the point of departure for discussing our differences, which are certainly not insignificant.
Thus, from the preamble to the Theses, the IBRP expresses positions that we can only agree with. Concerning the character of the proletariat and the revolution, it reaffirms the principle put forward since the beginnings of the workers’ movement as to the international and world-wide character of the proletariat, fro from which it follows that the class will only be able to assert its programme of emancipation on an international scale. From the outset, the Theses declare that the fundamental Stalinist idea about "socialism in one country" was only an ideological cover for the state capitalism which arose from the defeat of the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the last century, and the degeneration of the Soviet state. The Theses’ "socialism is international or it is nothing", is part of the tradition of the communist movement, a position reaffirmed by the Communist Left which arose out of the degeneration of the Third International,
From this comes the corner-stone of the Communist programme: a "single international programme of the proletariat. Thus, one class, one programme! (…) The communist party has only one programme: the dictatorship of the proletariat of the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and for the construction of socialism" (Theses, Preamble). However, the uniqueness of the programme does not only mean the one aim, but also, based on the historical experience of the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the 20th century, the elimination of the distinction between the "minimum programme" and the "maximum programme", an aspect also reaffirmed in the Preamble. Finally, a first general aspect relating to the countries of the peririphery is put forward: there cannot be different programmes for the proletariat of different countries (be they "central" or "peripheral"); the communist programme is the same for the proletariat of all countries and cannot be replaced with programmes that are still bourgeois.
Clearly, there are some concepts which the ICC does not share concerning the general analysis of capitalism; nevertheless, this does not invalidate the clearly internationalist spirit of the preamble. All of the general principles that we have mentioned, we also hold.
The centre and the periphery of capitalism, equilibrium or contradiction?
Theses 1 to 3 are devoted to the characterisation of the present relations between countries. The IBRP rejects the mystifications about the division between the "developed" and "developing countries" as mere ideological tranquillisers. As for the "dominating" and "dominated" countries they simply note that a dominated country can in turn be the dominator in relation to others. Then by a process of elimination, the Theses take up the definition of "peripheral and central countries": "The concept of centre and periphery indicates the Marxist conception of the present historical period. Having super-imposed the laws of its international market and the economic mechanisms which accompany it on different pre-capitalisitalist economic-social forms, imperialism dominates even the remotest corner of the globe" (Thesis 2).
The meaning of this definition is the rejection of a distinction between countries that can carry out a different programme (communist or democratic) or of an alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of the "dominated" countries (aspects which we will return to later). We support the IBRP’s concern to distance itself from any justification for a "national" struggle or an alliance with a bourgeois fraction under the pretext of "different economic conditions" between countries. The Theses, in fact, combat here the ambiguity on this point found amongst the groups influenced by Bordigism.
However, we cannot share the IBRP’s definition, even though we agree with the use of the concept of centre-periphery. The main problem is that in its definition of the central-peripheral countries the IBRP does not see a historical limitation of capitalism, but an economic and political rationality: "In one sense the perpetuation of pre-capitalist economic relations and ‘pre-bourgeois’ social and political systems was necessary and functional for the domination of imperialism.
Necessary in the sense that the super-imposition of capitalism is not determined by an overpowering will to dominate socially and politically but by the generaleneral economic needs of capital (…)
functional for the domination of imperialist capitalism. On the one hand the contrast between the living and working conditions of the industrial proletariat and the rest of the disinherited masses assures the class is divided. On the other hand it means that social and political tensions will find their outlet on the terrain of bourgeois progressivism (…)In conclusion, there is no contradiction between capitalist domination and the perpetuation of pre-capitalist economic relations and social structures which can even be a condition of that very domination" (Theses 3, our emphasis).
The idea of a situation of "equilibrium" or "stability" between the periphery and centre permeates this Thesis, as if the relationship had not undergone an historical development, as if capitalism will control and regulate the same mode of expansion through out the world. Thus, the inequalities between the different countries that fall under the orbit of capital are not the result of the contradictions of capitalism, but rather, they are determined by its "necessities".
For us, on the contrary, capitalism’s inability to equalise the conditions of all the countries of the world expresses precisely the contradiction between its tendency to an unlimited development of its productive forces, a growing expansion of production and the d the capitalist market, and the limit that the realisation of profits encounters in the market. The fundamental aspect of this inability is not the continuation of "pre-capitalist relations", as the Theses pose it, but the accelerating destruction of these relations (the destruction of small scale production) everywhere and their replacement by large scale capitalist production. However, this is only up to a certain point, until the historic limit on capitalism’s expansion of social production begins to appear. From then on the destruction of pre-capitalist relations continues, but absorbing increasingly less of the exploited population into large-scale production. This can be seen as much in the ruin of the peasant and artisan masses and, the constant growth of the under-employed masses in the large cities, as in the existence of countries and regions that remain industrially "backward".
In other words, the process of the destruction of small scale property, during the 20th century has not absorbed all of the working population into large-scale capitalist production, as some currents in the 19th century workers’ movement imagined it would. On the contrary, the formation of masses, ruined by capitalism, who are pulled towards a "peripheral" existence is one of the most marked expressions of the system’s decadence (and accentuates the phenomena of its decomposition).
The Theses implicitly deny a contradiction of capitalism that the Communist Manifesto has already highlighted: the creation of the world market requires capitalism constantly to conquer new markets, new sources of raw materials and labour power, into which to expand. But the destruction of the old relations limits the possibilities for new expansion.
The Theses on the other hand talk about the continuation of pre-capitalist relations, as a condition of capitalist accumulation, when it is precisely capitalist accumulation that leads to the destruction of these pre-capitalist relations.
This is where the IBRP is unclear on the notion of capitalist decadence. It is stuck in a vision that dates from the beginning of the 20th century when it was still possible to talk about regions dominated by "pre-capitalist relations"; but we have to analyse the consequence of the continuation of the capitalist system throughout the 20th century. The IBRP imagines that the same relations on the world market as existed last century (when the capitalist world market had already subordinated the backward regions, but when pre-capitalist production still continued) still remains a permanent feature today. This theoretical position has the consequence of weakening its later rejection of national liberation struggles and alliances with the bou bourgeoisie, because it appears as if the material bases for the existence national struggles and the "progressive" bourgeoisie still pertain, despite the IBRP’s efforts to argue against this.
Moreover, the "functional" aspect of the continuation of the centre-peripheral relation is not developed further in this part of the Theses. However, it does prepare the idea that the non-proletarian masses of the periphery can be more "radical" than the proletariat of the central countries, because the material conditions of the latter are better.
The "radicalisation" of the masses of theperiphery and the subject of the revolution
Thesis 4 defines the different social make-up of the central and peripheral countries. It shows in passing that the bourgeoisie and proletariat are the fundamental and antagonistic classes in the peripheral countries, as they are in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, what the Theses emphasise that in the periphery "The perpetuation of the old economic and social relations and their subordination to the interests of international imperialist domination" determines the subsistence of "intermediate social strata" and thus a "diversity in the forms of domination and oppression". But "when social stratification atypical of capitalism survives it tends to be breaking down, down, in a word, in a state of agony. What tends to increase is the extent of proletarianisation of strata previously occupied in traditional subsistence of local trading".
This idea of the "breaking down" of the other social strata is in contradiction to what the Theses said previously about "the continuation of old relations". That is to say, on the one hand, "the old relations" continue to be "necessary and functional", but on the other, the social classes that correspond to these are in a "state of agony". Today, the fundamental cause of the existence of the growing masses of under-employed and unemployed, who live in the most abject poverty in the countries of the periphery is not the "breaking down" of old social strata, nor their general "proletarianisation"; to remain at this level of analysis is to see today’s situation in terms of the beginning of the 20th century.
The fundamental point is that only the first part of this proletarianisation - the ruin and expropriation of the old strata - is completed, but without this leading to the second: the integration of these expropriated masses into large-scale production.
This phenomenon was already known during the origins of capitalism, when a nascent industry was still not able to absorb the peasant masses who were being violentlylently expelled from the land; now, this phenomenon is occurring again, but not as an indication of the decline of the old forms of production and capitalism’s ascent, but rather as the expression of its historical limit, of its decadence and decomposition.
The situation is worsened by the growth in the number of unemployed proletarians relative to the employed, due both to the growth of a young population which cannot be absorbed by production, and to the mass unemployment produced by "recessions", which is less and less reabsorbed with each new "recovery". This tendency of capitalism in general, is still more serious in the periphery, and forms part of the same historical tendency: the growing inability of capitalism to absorb the work force into large-scale production. What we have then are growing masses who orbit around the proletariat, who in a certain sense live on its back, who do not have experience of collective struggle, who are ideologically closer to petty mind small property owner, who are inclined to revolt in order to loot for their own ends, or who enrol in the armed gangs of all sorts of bourgeois gangsters. These characteristics have nothing to do with the "continuation of old relations", but with the decadence and decomposition of capitalism, which does not decline in a "prolonged" way, but rather increases with the passage of time. The IBRP should recognise and differentiate thehese from the "decomposition of the old social strata".
The characterisation of these non-proletarian masses is important in determining the attitude of the proletariat and revolutionaries towards them. For the IBRP the non-proletarian masses of the peripheral countries have a better "potential for the radicalisation of consciousness" than the proletariat of the central countries: "The diversity of social structures, the fact that the imposition of the capitalist mode of production upsets the old equilibrium and that its continued existence is based on and translated into increasing misery for the growing mass of proletarianised and disinherited, the political oppression and repression which are therefore necessary to subjugate the masses, all this leads to a potential for a greater radicalisation of consciousness in the peripheral countries than in the societies of the metropoles. Radicalisation does not necessarily mean to the left, as is demonstrated by the recrudescence of Islamic fundamentalism following on the real rebelliousness of the poverty-stricken masses (Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon).The material stirring of the masses, produced by the objective conditions of hyper-exploitation, is always and necessarily expressed in the ideological and political terms of those who have an active presence in the given situation. In general the domination of capital in these countries s still does not mean its total domination over the collectivity, nor does it involve the sort of subjugation of the whole society to capitalist ideology and legality as in the metropolitan countries. In many of these countries the ideological and political integration of the individual into capitalist society is not yet the mass phenomenon it is in the metropolitan countries (…) Here there is no democratic opium to lull the masses into submission, only the harshness of repression" (Thesis 5, our emphasis).
Firstly, the concept expressed in this Thesis makes an abstraction of the position and interests of the class that could lead to the development of a revolutionary consciousness, of which the proletariat is the only bearer in our epoch, putting in its place a supposed "radicalisation of consciousness" based only on conditions of generalised poverty. The material expression of this "radicalisation" is nothing other, as the IBRP says itself, than looting and hunger riots; in reality the IBRP confuses "radicalisation" with "desperation". Fundamentalism can feed on the desperation of the masses: revolutionary consciousness on the contrary replaces this desperation with hope for a better society and life. Riot in itself is not the beginning of a revolutionary movement, but a dead end. Only integration into a class movement can turn the energy of the starving masses i into something fruitful for the revolution. This integration does not depend on competition between the Communist Party and the fundamentalists to channel this "radicalisation", but on the presence of a working class movement that can lead in struggle the other sectors exploited by capital.
Moreover, since they make the axis for the possibility of the beginning of a revolutionary movement, not the movement of the working class, but the "radicalisation" of the masses of the periphery, the Theses slip into the old position that the revolution will begin with the "weakest link" of capitalism. The idea that the domination of capitalism in the periphery "does [not] involve the sort of subjugation of the whole society to capitalist ideology and legality as in the metropolitan countries" contradicts the - correct - idea put forward at the beginning of the Theses about the world domination of capitalism. It is enough to see the bourgeoisie of the central countries’ absolute control over the media, that allows them to spread an idea simultaneously in every country in the world (for example the myth of the "surgical bombing" of Iraq or Yugoslavia) to reject the vision of "unequal ideological domination" in the peripheral countries. In recent decades, the creation of new means of communication, transport, weaponry, rapid deployment forces… means that the bobourgeoisie’s political, ideological and military domination really does reach into every corner of the globe.
The fact that democracy can take a much more caricatured form in the peripheral countries does not imply a precarious bourgeois domination, only that it does not need the same form of domination. However, it is always kept in reserve (to be used as a new mystification when the situation demands, as we are seeing today). By contrast, the proletariat of the developed countries has a vast experience of the most refined form of bourgeois political domination: democracy.
It is not the "weakest link" of capital that will tip the balance of the revolutionary movement, but the strength of the working class. This is many times greater in the industrial concentrations of the central countries.
In fact, the idea of a "greater potential for radicalisation" reminds us of the old question of the "introduction of revolutionary consciousness from outside the movement". According to the IBRP if a "potential for radicalisation" present in the peripheral countries is turned into a dead end or towards fundamentalism, instead of being transformed into a revolutionary movement, this is not because of its inter-classist character, but because of the absence of revolution leadership.
With the idea of a "greater potential for radical radicalisation", revolutionary consciousness stops being a class consciousness and is turned into abstract revolutionary consciousness. This is where the concept of the "radicalisation of consciousness" leads. Thus the IBRP takes its reasoning to its logical conclusion: better conditions for the development of consciousness and the revolutionary organisation exist not amongst the industrial proletariat of the central countries… but amongst the "disinherited masses", those desperate masses of the periphery, inclined towards fundamentalism: "It is still likely to be the case that the circulation of the communist programme will be easier and the ‘level of attention’ received by revolutionary communists will be higher than in advanced capitalist societies" (Thesis 5).
This vision turns reality on its head: on the contrary, the difficulty in clearly seeing the class differences between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, produces a heterogeneous vision in the masses of the peripheral countries, an absence of class frontiers and a greater receptivity to the ideas of leftism, religious fundamentalism, populism, ethnicity, nationalism, nihilism, etc. The dispossessed and lumpenised masses are more removed from a collective vision of the proletarian struggle, they are more atomised and receptive to all kinds of bourgeois mystification, and social decomposition strengthens thisis mystification still more. At the same time, the weakness of the industrial proletariat in the peripheral countries makes the revolutionary struggle more difficult, precisely because the proletariat has a tendency to remain diluted amongst the pauperised masses and has more difficulty in putting forward its own autonomous revolutionary perspective.
The idea that it is "likely to be the case that the circulation of the communist programme will be easier" in the periphery is a dangerous illusion, dragged in from who knows where. In fact, the material conditions for communist propaganda are more difficult: illiteracy, the lack of printing presses, of transport, etc. On the other hand, "ideological backwardness" does not mean any kind of "purity" that will allow the spreading of revolutionary propaganda but a jumble of the "old" ideas of the small businessman or of the peasantry, regionalism, religion, etc with "new" ideas marked by atomisation, desperation about the present and the future, dominated by ideas of capital’s eternal rule that the bourgeoisie spreads through radio and television: a jumble that is difficult to break from. Finally, in these peripheral countries there is almost no tradition of proletarian struggle or revolutionary organisation: the reference points for the struggle are therefore the national movements of the bourgeoisie, the "guerrillas", etc, which are yet another sourcrce of confusion.
The Theses, say nothing about the proletariat of the countries of the periphery in relation to that of the central countries, for example, their differences in strength, concentration, or experience, their ability to overcome national frontiers, nor of the possible form that the unity between the proletariat of both parts will take; nor of the particular difficulties that confront the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the periphery. Aspects that in any case could give rise to a particular proletarian "tactic", in relation as much to their class brothers in the central countries as in relation to the dispossessed masses who gravitate around them. These are all "tactical" questions that revolutionaries evidently have to discuss and clarify.
However, the IBRP does not refer to the "fundamental class", the real subject of the revolution, but in a general way about the "proletarianised and disinherited masses" of the periphery, who furthermore are contrasted with the proletariat of the central countries, and whom it considers to have "a better potential for the radicalisation of consciousness" and to be more receptive to the communist programme. That is to say, in the end the Theses don’t express a tactic for the proletariat, but a position that lacks confidence in or is disillusioned with the working class movement, tha that looks for a substitute: the dispossessed masses of the periphery.
The IBRP’s opportunism on the organisation question
The IBRP’s position on the "potential for radicalisation of the disinherited" has important consequences for the organisation question. Thesis 6 refers to this aspect and here we reproduce it in full:
"Such ‘better’ conditions certainly translate into the possibility of organising a greater number of militants around the revolutionary party than in the countries at the centre. [Thesis 5]
6. The possibility of ‘mass’ organisations led by communists is not the same as revolutionary leadership of the trade unions as such. And it doesn’t imply the massification of the communist parties themselves. Rather the opportunity will be used by the communist party to organise strong workplace and territorial groups as its instruments of agitation, intervention and struggle.
Even in the peripheral countries trade unions - as bodies which negotiate the price and terms of sale of labour power - retain the general and historical characteristics of all unions. Moreover, as recent experience in Korea shows, the unions act as mediators in the interests of capital towards the workers. Thus, even tho, even though they remain one of the areas where communists work, intervene, make propaganda and agitate they are not - and never will be - instruments for revolutionary attack.
It is not therefore the leadership of the unions that interests communists, but the preparation - inside and outside of them - for going beyond them. This is found in the mass organisations of the proletariat which are a preparation for the assault on capitalism. Communist militants, organised as a party, are the driving force and political vanguard first of all in the formation of mass struggle organs and then in the struggle for power. And the party will be that much stronger when it has learnt organise appropriate organs throughout the area where it has a direct influence.
For these reasons therefore, even in the peripheral countries, there is the possibility of organising communist territorial groups. Territorial groups because they group together the proletarians, semi-proletarians and the disinherited of a particular area under the direct influence of the communist party; communist precisely because they are directed along communist lines; that is to say, because they are animated and guided by party members and party organisms" (Thesis 6, our emphasis).
It necessary to say, right away, that what the Thesis has to say about the organisation qtion question is sparse and confused. But the main problem is that the IBRP opens many doors to opportunism on the organisation question. We will try to set out the problems one by one:
a) On the party. The Thesis says nothing except that the "better conditions" in the periphery will mean that the party will have a "greater number of militants" than in the central countries. To pose the matter in this way is at least irresponsible and even more so faced with the accumulation of questions left to us, on the one hand by the historic experience of the Third International, and on the other by the social structure of the countries of the periphery.
Does the "greater number of militants" mean that it is possible to have a "mass" party in the periphery? In any case, this is what is implied by the previous thesis; but then we are talking about a conception of the party already superceded by history, the IBRP is taking us back to the epoch of the Second International. If this is the case, then we need to point out not only the danger of removing political criteria for integrating new militants, but also and above all, the danger of blurring the party’s function of political leadership in this epoch. If the Thesis is not talking about the formation of a mass party, then it is absurd to predict whether there are going to be "greater" or "fewer" numbers, because thi this depends on factors which arise from the circumstances of the revolutionary movement, even from the size of the population in each country.
The Third International already posed the question of the centralisation of the world communist party. The Theses do not pronounce on this, but (unless the IBRP has a federal conception of the world party) we might ask, since the IBRP considers that there are "better conditions" in the periphery, whether it thinks that the nucleus of the new international will appear in the peripheral countries? Could the world party spread out from these peripheral countries, giving economic and political support to the formation of new sections throughout the world? Would its political leadership perhaps be in some country in Africa, South America or Indochina? With the development of the international working class movement this type of question is going to have to be answered in increasingly concrete terms, it is going to be more determining for organisations’ activities and, it is already orientating them.
There also remains the question of the class composition of the party. Evidently, the criteria for belonging to a restricted, rigorously militant party, exclude the sociological aspect - whether the militant is a worker, artisan, or peasant: selection will be on political criteria, through a break with ideologies and interests foreign to the workiorking class and the adoption of the interests and aims of the proletariat. This break is not easier in the countries of the periphery, precisely because of the influence of the "backwards" element (the peasantry, petty-bourgeoisie) and the element of disintegration (underemployment in the cities), that can try to penetrate the party of the working class. Petty bourgeois radical leftism (especially "guerrillerism") is a particularly difficult obstacle that confronts the formation of revolutionary organisations in the periphery.
When all is said and done, a numerically larger party in the countries of the periphery could only come about by relaxing the criteria for membership, and the IBRP open the doors to this, with its illusions about "better conditions" and a "higher level of attention". This relaxation, which is a serious danger generally, is still greater in the countries where the proletariat is weaker as a class; it involves opening the door to the penetration of conceptions and ideologies alien to the proletariat. This is what the phrase in the Theses about "the possibility of organising a greater number of militants" boils down to.
b) On the unions. The IBRP’s confused position on the unions being "organs for negotiating the price and conditions of labour power", "mediators of capitalist necessities inside the workers’ movement",I>", in which communist can work… for their overthrow, is inserted into these Theses without any previous explanation
to cap it all, nothing is said about the unions in the peripheral countries (which is supposed to be the Theses’ subject!), an in particular there is no mention of the fact that in the periphery the character of the unions as state instruments is usually brutally open (membership is usually obligatory, the unions have armed bodies for repression, the workers are prohibited from expressing themselves in meetings, etc); a character that the IBRP’s definition tends to hide.
To say, in the peripheral countries, that "communists work in the unions" can only have one of two meanings: either it is a platitude because all workers have to join unions; or it means to work within the union organisational structure, in the union elections, as delegates, etc…which means forming part of the union machinery, and in effect defending their existence. To add that "it is necessary to work in them in order to go beyond them" does not advance the argument one centimetre. In fact, confronted with the workers’ contempt towards the unions, the left of capital in the peripheral countries has always put forward slogans calling for the creation of new unions to replace the old ones.
c) On "mass organisations". The Theses are not explicit about wbout what they mean by "the formation of mass struggle organs". This ambiguity is increased when they refer to some supposed "territorial groups" that gather together proletarians, semi-proletarians and the dispossessed, and that appear to be some kind of intermediary between the party and the unitary organisations. The problem is that such groups, far from being a sort of link between the two, constitute a danger for both types of organisation that the proletariat needs:
* From the Party’s point of view, there exists the danger of a loss of rigour and discipline, since by definition these groups "directed along communist lines" would tend to fuse with the party. On the one hand, we have the present organisational characteristics of the IBRP, such as its implicitly federalist structure (each group within the Bureau has its own organisational structure, etc,), its lack of rigour in the integration of new groups. On the other, we have the Theses, which say that it is "easier" to form "communist groups" in the peripheral countries (ie, groups under the control of the IBRP, but without any requirement as to clarity of principles, or rigorous discipline). We may fear that the IBRP tends to sacrifice the future of solid party organisation on the alter of the immediatist formation of groups with ambiguous frontiers. This is what we mean by opportunism on the organisation question.
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* As for the unitary organisations, the introduction of a kind of organisation which is no longer the mass organisation of the proletariat but something inter-classist, where the radical petty-bourgeois and lumpen elements are mingled with the workers, represents a source of confusion and disorganisation for the proletarian struggle.
This obliges us to insist on the fact that the working class - in all countries, including the periphery - needs its own mass organs, such as the workers’ councils, that exclusively express its own autonomous class point of view for its struggle, and in order for it to be able to lead other classes. If we consider the proletariat to be the only social driving force of the revolution, then the existence in the peripheral countries of "semi-proletarian" masses does not mean that the creation of mass class organs is any less necessary, it is clear that it is just as vital as in the central countries.
The proletariat faced with the national question
A good half of the Theses are devoted to the national question. Here the IBRP make a great effort to liquidate any ambiguity as regards the proletariat supporting "national liberation struggles" or the "democratic-bourgeois revolutions", and the possibility that the proletariat coariat could enter into a "temporary alliance" with "progressive" fractions of the bourgeoisie, especially in the peripheral countries. These ambiguities were inherited from the Third International and Bordigism, and are still held by some of the present day groups who claim descent from the Italian Communist Left. The ICC can only welcome and support the effort of clarification contained in the Theses. We will first of all underline the principles that we share with the IBRP, in order to show the differences that remain, which in our opinion demonstrate the need to go deeper into the liquidating of such ambiguities.
In the first place, the Theses underline that the bourgeoisie of the peripheral countries is, in its exploiting nature, identical to that of the central countries: "The bourgeoisie of the peripheral countries is a constituent part of the international bourgeoisie which dominates the whole system of exploitation because it is in possession of the means of production on an international scale (…) with equal responsibility and with the same historical destiny"; and that the contrasts between the peripheral and metropolitan bourgeoisie "do no, and will not affect the substance of the relationship of exploitation between capital and labour. On the contrary, they both defend these against the dangerous presence of the proletariat" (Thesis 7). It also shows that the particulalar characteristics of capitalism in the periphery, such as its judicial expression (for example, that businesses may be state property) or the agricultural character of production, do not constitute essential differences within the capitalist class.
The Theses declare that "in the imperialist epoch proletarian tactics absolutely exclude any sort of alliance, however temporary, with any bourgeois fraction. A proletarian policy does not recognise any such fraction as ‘progressive’ or ‘anti-imperialist’, arguments which have been used at various times to justify united front tactics (…) the national bourgeoisie of the backward countries (…) is linked by a thousand threads to the imperialist centres (…) Its conflicts with this or that front, with this or that imperialist country, are not class conflicts, but are struggles inside the capitalist process and consistent with its logic" (Thesis 9).
Therefore, there is no sense in the proletariat allying itself with the bourgeoisie. "Communist internationalists consider as immediate enemies all those bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political organisations who (…) who preach and try to reach a class alliance between the proletariat and bourgeoisie" (Thesis 10).
Finally, the Theses reaffirm the aims of the proletariat on the international scale: the internationalist communist forces "reject aject any form of alliance or united front (…) The main task of internationalist communist organisations is the political and organisational preparation for the class’ assault on capitalism on a national scale in each country where they operate. But this is founded on a strategy which sees that only the international proletariat is capable of overthrowing capitalist rule and building a socialist society (Thesis 10).
In the peripheral countries communist internationalists do not put in their programme a regime which guarantees the elementary freedoms and forms of democratic life. Their aim is rather the dictatorship of the proletariat" (Thesis 11).
We share with the IBRP all these positions, which are fundamental for sticking to a class terrain in the present epoch, especially confronted with the present imperialist wars.
Unfortunately, the Theses are sprinkled with ambiguous expressions, that tend to contradict the clear declarations we have just cited. These expressions demonstrate the persistence of the idea of the possibility of certain national struggles, although the Theses repeatedly insist that the proletariat should not fall into the trap of supporting such struggles.
For example, the Theses talk about sections of the national bourgeoisie which are "not directly involved in capitalist internationalnational circles", which "do not directly participate in the joint exploitation of the international proletariat" and which could carry out struggles that could "assume the form of opposition to the domination which metropolitan capital establishes over their country" (Thesis 8). According to the Theses this could be the case in Nicaragua or Chiapas (Mexico). In the very next line it recognises that this will only lead to a "new oppression and the replacement of one group of exploiters by another". In another part of the Theses it is asserted that "National revolutions are therefore destined to finish up on the ground of inter-imperialist equilibrium" (Thesis 9); and further on we find out that "in the case of movements that give way to ‘new democratic’ or ‘revolutionary democratic’ governments [the communist forces] will put forward the true communist programme and play a genuine revolutionary role" (Thesis 10). The problem is that for the IBRP there still exists, despite everything, the possibility of national revolutions, despite the fact that it puts the phrase in inverted commas and despite the fact that it insists that the proletariat has nothing to gain from them. This consideration weakens its general analysis, because it leaves the window open to the concepts that it tried to throw out the door: the division between the "dominated" and "dominating" bourgeoisie, the "progressive" nature of such "national struggles"; and, finally the possibility that the proletariat participate in this in alliance with the bourgeoisie. The fact that the Theses have to repeat time and time again that the proletariat must not ally itself with the bourgeoisie, does not demonstrate clarity, but the intuition that something is not right, that it has left a crack open which has to be blocked up at all costs.
For us, the possibility of bourgeois national revolutions was closed historically with capitalism’s entry into its decadent phase and the opening of the epoch of the proletarian world revolution. In the present epoch, "national liberation movements" are a mere mystification, destined to enrol the proletariat behind inter-imperialist conflicts. The IBRP’s Theses, make an abstraction of the fact that the bourgeoisie of the backward countries also has an imperialist character: either they work under the supervision of a great power - in order to gain imperialist benefits, or to change gangs-; or else act independently but then it has its own imperialist pretensions (as is the case with the middling powers). But the ambiguity of the Theses stops them taking up this point, rather they take an even more dangerous backwards step.
Thesis 12 asserts that "mass national movements are not simply due to the existence of bou bourgeois nationalist organisations. On the contrary, they are due to the widespread disposition to struggle of the oppressed, disinherited and super-exploited masses which bourgeois nationalism is able to play on with its propaganda and take over by means of its organisational activity". But what the IBRP call "mass national movements" are nothing other than today’s imperialist wars, and it is precisely the bourgeoisie that gives them a "nationalist" mask. Here the IBRP falls prey to bourgeois mystification. These supposed "mass national movements" are not the expression of the "disposition to struggle of the oppressed", but the exact opposite; the most complete ideological and political domination over these masses, which has reached such a level that they kill each other for interests that are completely alien to them. The IBRP’s affirmation is the same as and, as absurd as, saying that "World War Two was not only testimony to the existence of imperialist tensions, it also responded to the masses’ extensive willingness to struggle…".
In Thesis 11 we read another slip of the same calibre as the previous one: "In the peripheral countries communists internationalists do not include in their programme a regime which guarantees democratic freedoms. Their aim is rather the dictatorship of the proletariat (…) They will thus make themselves the firmest and most consistent defenenders of freedom. In so doing they will unmask the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organisations which campaign for a bourgeois democratic regime whilst being prepared to deny it immediately after". Here the Theses simply "forget" that, as Lenin clearly put it, democratic freedoms do not exist, only class freedoms; which is to say, the role of revolutionaries is not to be "defenders" of bourgeois democratic liberties, but to denounce their class character.
Politically, these two concepts about, "mass national movements" and the "defence of freedom" leave the door open to the possibility of intervening in "national" or "democratic" movements. They come close to considering that behind these movements lies not only the bourgeoisie, but the "disposition to struggle of the oppressed"; this constitutes another dangerous concession to the enemy camp. Along with the organisational aspects which we criticised above (especially as regards work in the unions) this verges on opportunism.
The need to understand the decadence of capitalism
At the level of theoretical analysis, the Theses’ ambiguities reflect difficulties in understanding the present stage of capitalism. An inadequate distinction between capitalism’s ascendancy and decadence leads to theto theoretically equating phenomena that in reality have completely different causes; to equating the process of the destruction of the pre-capitalist forms of production in the origins of capitalism, with the present process of social decomposition; to minimising the differences between the national movements of the 19th century and today’s imperialist conflicts with a "national" mask.
There is certainly an effort to give these Theses an adequate historical framework. Thesis 9 in particular takes up the position of the 2nd Congress of the Communist International on the national question and the alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, and makes a critique of Lenin’s position and that of the Bolsheviks about supporting national liberation struggles. But in the same Thesis there is a limited vision of the historical changes that took place at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. It is centred exclusively upon the errors of the Theses adopted by the Congress of the CI. It does not mention the existence of a developing discussion in the revolutionary milieu of the time about the end of national struggles with capitalism’s entry into its imperialist and decadent phase, and the danger for the proletariat of falling in behind bourgeois national movements.
In the last Thesis there is a call to the proletarians and dispossessed oed of the peripheral countries, for "class unity with the proletarians of all countries, towards the common objective of the dictatorship of the proletariat and international socialism" (Thesis 13).
We think that there is a very interesting idea at the end of the Theses. It says that the rejection of nationalism is much more important "in those situations where nationalism habitually degenerates into the most mindless and reactionary localism (…) In such situations, where obscurantist ideology has already replaced the elementary principles of class solidarity, it is all the more necessary, though so much more difficult, to reaffirm basic class solidarity. This is the essential precondition for any revival of the revolutionary communist movement".
This quote includes two important aspects which reflect the present situation of capitalism with clarity: the degeneration of nationalism into the "the most mindless and reactionary localism" and the replacement of class solidarity by "obscurantist ideologies". Here the Theses are talking about nothing other than the social decomposition of capitalism. It would be enough to develop these ideas, clearly expressing that it is not a question of isolated cases, in order to open up an understanding that a new and general capitalist tendency exists. These correct ideas of the IBRP should open the doordoor to a recognition of the growing difficulties for the proletariat and its revolutionary organisations particularly in the peripheral countries (in contrast to the "better opportunities", etc, about which they talked above). And it ought, above all, to open the way to a full understanding, and not just a fragmentary one, of capitalism’s decadence and decomposition and the historic dangers it contains.
Leonardo
The 20th century has drawn to a close to the sound of a vast concert celebrating the advance of democracy all over the world, and its supposed benefits. Throughout the century, its victories are celebrated over dictatorships both red and brown, and its heroes - Gandhi, Walesa, Mandela, Martin Luther King et.al. - are fêted for the application of its "great and generous principles". If we are to believe the propaganda, the situation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the struggles which have taken place since to defend and develop democracy are cause for hope in a future of peace and harmony which should be thoroughly encouraging for mankind as a whole. We have been treated to regular crusades by the great democracies, to impose and defend "human rights" in countries which did not respect them, by force if necessary - in other words at the cost of the most barbaric massacres. We have been offered the sight of an International Court of Justice, set up to judge and punish those found guilty of "crimes against humanity". Let the dictators tremble! And for the years to come, we are promised the emergence of a "world-wide democracy" based on a "growing role for civil society". The recent demonstrations during the WTO negotia negotiations, with the Roquefort Revolutionary José Bové at their head, are supposedly forerunners of this "world-wide democracy" or even of a "People�s International" in struggle against the dictatorship of the market, unrestrained capitalism, and bad food. For today�s proletarians, the only worthwhile struggle seems to be for the creation of democratic regimes in every country in the world, which will bring with it equal rights for both sexes and all races, and which will defend an "attitude of good citizenship". The ideology-vendors of every description, and especially on the left, are more mobilised than ever to convince the workers that this is the good fight, and to push them into it. And for any who have doubts, or hesitate to take part, the message is: "Despite its faults, democracy is the only regime which can be reformed and perfected - and anyway there�s no hope of any other". Faced with the growing poverty and barbarism imposed on us by capitalism, there is supposedly no other possibility than to behave as a "good citizen", to accept the system because we are told there is no other choice.
We are reprinting the Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictatorship presented by Lenin on 4th March 1919 to the First Congress of the Communist International, first and foremost to answer this deceitful ideological barrage, aimed especially at the working class, the only classss capable of putting into question and overthrowing the whole system. The Theses remind us in particular that democracy is only the most effective form of the dictatorship which oppresses the working class, and defends the bourgeoisie and its privileges as an exploiting class. They rightly declare that "the more �pure� democracy is (�) the more clearly does the oppression of capital and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie come to light". Finally, the Theses remind us that the World War was fought "in the name of liberty and equality". The 20th century - the most bloody and barbaric in mankind�s history - has seen this lie repeated too many times, to justify World War II and innumerable local wars and massacres since then.
The publication of these Theses today is also justified by the need to give the lie to the bourgeois propaganda which pretends that real communism is the same thing as Stalinism - one of the worst dictatorships the world proletariat has ever suffered - and that Stalin was Lenin�s heir, when in fact he was Lenin�s antithesis. It was Lenin himself who wrote and presented the Theses, which show that communism is the real democracy, that bourgeois democracy is nothing but a sham designed to justify the survival of its system. It was Lenin, better than anyone, who defended the principle that "the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is, the minority of the population, the large landowners and capitalists", and that it is "an extension of actual democratic usages, on a scale never before known in the world, to the working classes whom capitalism enslaved".
The Stalinist dictatorship had nothing in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat put forward by Lenin, it was its gravedigger. Stalinist ideology has nothing in common with the proletarian principles defended by Lenin, it was their monstrous betrayal. As we wrote in International Review no.60, as Stalinism was beginning to collapse: "At first, this will be a difficult period for the proletariat. Apart from the increased weight of democratic mystifications, in the West as well as in the East, it will have to understand the new conditions in which it is fighting". We are publishing these Theses adopted by the Communist International�s First Congress, as a major political weapon for the proletariat to confront its difficulties, and resist the ruling class� present ideological offensive, which aims to poison the workers� consciousness by making them believe that bourgeois democracy is the only "viable and humane" regime.
Text of the Theses
1. The growth of the revolutionary movement of the proletariattariat in all countries has provoked the bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers� organisations to convulsive efforts to find theoretical arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Among these, particular emphasis is placed on the rejection of dictatorship and the defence of democracy. The falseness and hypocrisy of this argument, repeated in a thousand forms in the capitalist press and at the February 1919 Bern conference of the Yellow International, is however clear to anyone who is unwilling to commit treachery to the principles of socialism.
2. In the first place, the argument uses abstract concepts of "democracy" and "dictatorship", without specifying what class is in question. Putting the question in this way, outside or above the class standpoint, as though it were valid as a standpoint of the entire people, is a downright mockery of the basic theory of socialism, namely the theory of the class struggle, which is still recognised in words, it is true, by the socialists who have gone over to the camp of the bourgeoisie, but judging by their deeds is forgotten. For in no civilised capitalist country is there "democracy in the abstract", there is only bourgeois democracy, and the question is not one of "dictatorship in the abstact" but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, that is, of the proletariat, over the oppressers and exploiters, that is, the bourgeoisie, in order to ovovercome the resistance put up by the exploiters in the effort to maintain their rule.
3. History teaches us that an oppressed class has never and can never come to power without passing through a period of dictatorship, that is, without the conquest of political power and the forcible suppression of the most desperate and frenzied resistance, that shrinks from no crime, which is always put up by the exploiters. The bourgeoisie, whose rule is now defended by socialists who express hostility to "dictatorship in general" and stand up body and soul for "democracy in general", won their power in the civilized countries by a series of revolts, civil wars, the forcible suppression of monarchical rule, of the feudal lords and slave-owners, and of their attempts at restoration. Thousands and millions of times, in their books and pamphlets, their congress resolutions and speeches, socialists in every country have explained to the people the class character of these bourgeois revolutions. That is why the present defence of "bourgeois democracy" in speeches about "democracy", and the present outcry against the proletarian dictatorship in the clamour about "dictatorship", is an outright betrayal of socialism, objectively a going over to the camp of the bourgeoisie, a denial of the right of the proletariat to its political revolution, a defence of bourgeois reformism, and this precisely at the historical momoment when bourgeois reformism has gone to pieces throughout the world and when the war has created a revolutionary situation.
4. By recognising the class character of bourgeois democracy, of bourgeois parliamentarianism, all socialists have articulated the ideas expressed with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels when they said that even the most democratic bourgeois republic is nothing but the instrument by which the bourgeoisie oppress the working class, by which a handful of capitalists keeps the working masses. There is not a single revolutionary or a single Marxist among those who now raise such an outcry against dictatorship and advocate democracy who has not loudly and solemnly sworn to the workers that he acknowledges this basic truth of socialism; but now, when ferment and movement have started among the revolutionary proletariat, aimed at breaking this and fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, these traitors to socialism present the case as though the bourgeoisie had made a gift of "pure democracy" to the workers, as though the bourgeoisie renounced resistance and were ready to submit to a workers� majority, as though in the democratic republic there were no State apparatus for the oppression of labour by capital.
5. The Paris Commune, which everyone who wanted to be considered a socialist extolled in words, for they knew tha that the working masses had a great and genuine sympathy with it, proved particularly clearly the historical conditioning and limited value of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois democracy, which are highly progressive institutions in comparison with the Middle Ages, but which in the epoch of proletarian revolution inevitably require to be changed from the ground up. It was Marx himself, who placed the highest value on the historical significance of the Commune, who in his analysis of it demonstrated the exploiting character of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism, under which the oppressed class is given the right, once in several years, to decide which deputy of the possessing classes shall represent and betray the people in Parliament. It is now, when the Soviet movement which is seizing the entire world is carrying forward before all eyes the cause of the Commune, that the traitors to socialism forget the practical experience and the concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeat the old bourgeois rubbish about "democracy in general". The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.
6. The significance of the Commune consists further in this, that it made an attempt to destroy and utterly root out the bourgeois State machine, the apparatus of officials, court, army, and police, and to replace it by the self-governing mass organisation of workers without any separatioion of legislative and executive powers. All bourgeois democratic republics of our time, including the German, which the traitors to socialism, making a mockery of truth, call proletarian, retain this bourgeois State apparatus. That proves once more, clearly and unmistakably, that the outcry in defence of "democracy" is nothing but defence of the bourgeoisie and their privileges of exploitation.
7. "Freedom of assembly" can be used as an example of the demand for "pure democracy". Every class-conscious worker who has not broken with his class grasps immediately that it would be monstrous to promise the exploiters freedom of assembly in times and situations in which they are resisting their overthrow and defending their privileges. Neither in England in 1649, nor in France in 1793, did the revolutionary bourgeoisie guarantee freedom of assembly to the royalists and nobility when these summoned alien troops to the country and "assembled" to organise an attempt at restoration. If the bourgeoisie of today, who have long since become reactionary, demand that the proletariat shall guarantee in advance that "freedom of assembly" shall be assured to the exploiters regardless of the resistance the capitalists put up to their expropriation, the workers will only laugh at such bourgeois hypocrisy. On the other hand the workers know very well that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic "freedom of a assembly" is an empty phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, have also enough leisure for meetings, and enjoy the protection of the bourgeois apparatus of power. The proletariat of town and country, as well as the small peasants, that is the overwhelming majority of the population, have neither the first nor the second nor the third. So long as this is true, "equality", that is, "pure democracy", is a deception. To win real equality, to make a reality of democracy for the workers, the exploiters must first be deprived of all public and private mansions, the workers must be given leisure and their freedom of assembly defended by armed workers and not by the offspring of the nobility or officers from capitalist circles in command of an intimidated rank and file.
Only after such changes is it possible to speak of "freedom of assembly", of equality, without mocking the workers, the labouring people, the poor. But nobody can bring these changes about except the vanguard of the working people, the proletariat, by overthrowing the exploiters, the bourgeoisie.
8. "Freedom of the press" is another leading watchword of "pure democracy". But the workers know, and the socialists of all countries have admitted it a million times, that this freedom is deceptive so long as the best printing works and the biggest paper supplies are in capitalitalist hands, and so long as capital retains its power over the press, a power which throughout the world is expressed more clearly, sharply, and cynically, the more developed the democracy and the republican regime, as for example in America. To win real equality and real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, the capitalists must first be deprived of the possibility of getting writers in their service, of buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And for that it is necessary to throw off the yoke of capital, to overthrow the exploiters and to crush their resistance. The capitalists have always given the name of freedom to the freedom of the rich to make profits and the freedom of the poor to die of hunger. The capitalists give the name of freedom of the press to the freedom of the rich to bribe the press, the freedom to use wealth to create and distort so-called public opinion. The defenders of "pure democracy" reveal themselves once more as defenders of the dirty and corrupt system of the rule of the rich over the means of mass education, as deceivers of the people who with fine sounding but thoroughly false phrases divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capital. Real freedom and equality will be found in the system the communists establish, in which there will be no opportunity to get rich at the expense of others, no objective possibility of subjecting the press, directly or indirectly, to the power of money, where nothing will prevent the workers (or any large group of workers) from having and employing equal rights to use the presses and paper belonging to society.
9. The history of the 19th and 20th centuries showed us, even before the war, what this much-praised "pure democracy" really means under capitalism. Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the more "pure" democracy is, the more openly, sharply, and ruthlessly does the class struggle proceed, the more clearly does the oppression of capital and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie come to light. The Dreyfus affair in republican France, the bloody collisions between striking workers and the mercenaries armed by the capitalists in the free and democratic republic of America, these and a thousand similar facts disclose the truth which the bourgeoisie try in vain to conceal, namely that in reality terror and a bourgeois dictatorship rule the most democratic republic, and come openly to the surface whenever it seems to the exploiters that the power of capital is endangered.
10. The imperialist war of 1914-18 exposed the true character of bourgeois democracy, once and for all, even to the backward workers, even in the freest republics, as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. To enrich a group of German and English mil millionaires and billionaires, dozens of millions of men were killed and the military dictatorship of the bourgeoisie established in the freest republics. This military dictatorship still exists in the Entente countries even after the defeat of Germany. It was the war, more than anything else, that opened the eyes of working people, tore the false tinsel from bourgeois democracy, and revealed to the people the whole pit of speculation and greed for profits during the war and in connection with the war. The bourgeoisie waged this war in the name of freedom and equality; in the name of freedom and equality the war contractors enormously increased their wealth. No efforts of the yellow Bern international will succeed in concealing from the masses the exploiting character of bourgeois freedom, bourgeois equality, and bourgeois democracy, now fully exposed.
11. In the country of Europe where capitalism has been most highly developed, that is, in Germany, the first months of full republican freedom which followed the downfall of imperialist Germany, showed the German workers and the entire world the real class-content of the bourgeois democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg is an event of world-historical significance not only because the best people and leaders of the truly proletarian communist international perished tragically, but also because it finally showed up thehe class character of the leading European state, of, it can be said without exaggeration, the leading state in the world. If prisoners, that is, people who have been taken under protection by the State power, can be murdered with impunity by officers and capitalists under a government of social-patriots, the democratic republic in which this can happen is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Those who express indignation over the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but do not understand this truth only demonstrate their obtuseness or their hypocrisy. In one of the freest and most advanced republics of the world, in the German republic, there is freedom to kill the imprisoned leaders of the proletariat and to go unpunished. It cannot be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy does not blunt but sharpens the class struggle, which has now, as a result of the war and its consequences, reached boiling-point.
All over the civilised world Bolsheviks are being deported, persecuted, imprisoned; in Switzerland, one of the freest bourgeois republics, and in America, there are pogroms against the Bolsheviks. From the standpoint of "democracy in general", or "pure democracy", it is simply ludicrous that progressive, civilised, democratic countries, armed to the teeth, should fear the presence of a few dozen people from backwards, hungry, ruined Russia, described as savages s and criminals in millions of copies of bourgeois newspapers. It is obvious that a social system that can give rise to such glaring contradictions is in reality a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
12. In such a state of affairs the dictatorship of the proletariat is not merely wholly justified, as a means of overwhelming the exploiters and overcoming their resistance, but quite essential for the mass of workers as their only protection against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is getting ready for new wars.
The chief thing that socialists don�t understand, a failure which reflects their intellectual short-sightedness, their dependence on bourgeois prejudices, their political treachery to the proletariat, is that when, in capitalist society, the class struggle on which it rests becomes more acute, there is nothing between dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and dictatorship of the proletariat. The dream of another, third way is the reactionary lament of the petty bourgeoisie. Proof of this can be found in the experience of more than a hundred years of bourgeois democracy and the workers� movement in all advanced countries, and particularly the experience of the last five years. The same proof is furnished by economic theory, by the entire content of Marxism, which analyses the economic necessity of bourgeois dictatorship in very commodity economy, a dictatoratorship which can be abolished by none other than the class which through the development of capitalism itself develops and grows, becomes more organised and powerful, that is, by the class of proletarians.
13. The second theoretical and political mistake of the socialists is their failure to understand that the forms of democracy have inevitably changed in the centuries since it first appeared in the Ancient World, as one ruling class gave way to another. In the republics of Ancient Greece, in the medieval cities, in advanced capitalist States, democracy has different forms and varying scope. It would be the greatest nonsense to assume that the most profound revolution in mankind�s history, the first transference of power from the hands of the exploiting minority to the hands of the exploited majority, could take place within the framework of the old bourgeois parliamentary democracy, without the greatest changes, without the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions, new conditions for their use, etc.
14. The dictatorship of the proletariat is like the dictatorship of other classes in that, like any dictatorship, it originates in the necessity of suppressing by force the resistance of the class which is losing its political power. The fundamental difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of other classes, that of the lhe large landowners in the Middle Ages and that of the bourgeoisie in all civilised capitalist countries, consists in this, that while the dictatorship of the large landowners and the bourgeoisie forcibly suppresses the resistance of the overwhelming majority of the population, namely the working masses, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is, the minority of the population, the large landowners and capitalists.
From this it follows further that the dictatorship of the proletariat must inevitably involve not only a change in the forms and institutions of democracy, but change of a kind which results in an extension of actual democratic usages, on a scale never before known in the world, to the working classes whom capitalism enslaved.
And in fact the forms taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which have already been worked out, that is, the Soviet power in Russia, the workers� councils in Germany, the shop stewards" committees in Britain and similar Soviet institutions in other countries, all these make a reality of democratic rights and privileges for the working classes, that is, for the overwhelming majority of the population; they mean that it becomes really possible to use these rights and privileges in a way and on a scale that was never even approximately possible in the best democratic bourgeoigeois republics.
The essence of Soviet power lies in this, that the permanent and sole foundation of the entire State power, of the entire State apparatus, is the mass organisation of those very classes which were oppressed by the capitalists, that is, the workers and semi-proletarians (peasants who do not exploit labour and who are always forced to sell at least part of their labour). The masses, who even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, where in law they had equal rights, but in fact were prevented by a thousand ways and tricks from taking part in political life and making use of democratic rights and liberties, are now drawn into continuous, unhampered, and decisive participation in the democratic administration of the State.
15.The equality of citizens, regardless of sex, religious belief, race, nationality, which bourgeois democracy always promised everywhere but in fact never carried out, and could not carry out because of the role of capitalism, has been made a complete reality at one stroke by the Soviet regime, or the proletarian dictatorship, for only the power of the workers, who are not interested in private property in the means of production and in the struggle for their distribution and redistribution, is able to do this.
16. The old democracy, that is, bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism, was so organized thzed that it was the working classes who were most alien to the administrative machine. The Soviet power, the proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, is so organized that it brings the working masses close to the administrative machine. The merging of legislative and executive power in the Soviet organization of the State serves the same purpose, as does the substitution of the production unit, the workshop or factory, for the territorial constituency.
17. The army was an instrument of oppression not only under the monarchy; it is still that in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic. Only the Soviet power, as the only established State organisation of the very classes oppressed by the capitalists, is in a position to abolish the dependence of the military on the bourgeois command and really fuse the proletariat with the military, to arm the proletariat and disarm the bourgeoisie, without which the victory of socialism is impossible.
18. The Soviet organisation of the State is designed to give the proletariat, as the class which was most concentrated and educated by capitalism, the leading role in the State. The experience of all revolutions and all movements of enslaved classes, the experience of the world socialist movement, teaches us that only the proletariat is in a position to unite the scattered and backward strata of the working and exploited pop population and carry them along.
19. Only the Soviet organisation of the state is able to destroy, at one stroke and completely, the old, that is, the bourgeois apparatus of bureaucracy and judiciary, which under capitalism, even in the most democratic republic, remained and had to remain, being in fact for the workers and the working masses the greatest obstacle to making democracy effective. The Paris Commune took the first world historical step in this direction, the Soviet regime the second.
20. The abolition of State power is the goal of all socialists, including and above all Marx. Unless this goal is reached true democracy, that is, equality and freedom, is not attainable. But only Soviet and proletarian democracy leads in fact to that goal, for it begins at once to prepare for the complete withering away of any kind of State by drawing the mass organisations of the working people into constant and unrestricted participation in State administration.
21. The complete bankruptcy of the socialists who met in Berne, the complete absence of understanding which they showed of the new, that is, proletarian democracy, can be seen very clearly from the following. On 10th February 1919 Branting declared the international conference of the Yellow International in Berne closed. On 11th February 1919 its members in Be in Berlin published an appeal of the "Independents" to the proletariat in Freiheit. In this appeal the bourgeois character of Scheidemann"s government was admitted. It was reproached for wanting to abolish the workers� councils, which were called "bearers and defenders" of the revolution, and the proposal was made to legalize the councils, to give them statutory rights, to give them the right to veto the decisions of the National Assembly and refer the question at issue to a national referendum.
Such a proposal reflects the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the theoreticians who defend democracy and have not understood its bourgeois character. This ridiculous attempt to unite the system of councils, that is, the proletarian dictatorship, with the National Assembly, that is, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, finally exposes the mental poverty of the yellow socialists and social-democrats, and their reactionary petty-bourgeois policy, as well as their cowardly concessions to the irresistibly growing forces of the new proletarian democracy.
The majority of the Yellow International in Berne, who condemned Bolshevism but did not dare, for fear of the working masses, to vote formally for a resolution on these lines, acted correctly from the class standpoint. This majority is completely at one with the Russian Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries and with the Scheidemanns ins in Germany. The Russian Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, who complain of persecution by the Bolsheviks, try to conceal the fact that this persecution was provoked by their participation in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In precisely the same way the Scheidemanns and their party in Germany took part in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the workers.
It is therefore quite natural that the majority of those attending the Yellow International in Berne should come out in favour of condemning the Bolsheviks. But that did not represent a defence of "pure democracy"; it was the self-defence of people who feel that in the civil war they are on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
For these reasons the decision of the majority of the Yellow International must be described as correct from the class point of view. But the proletariat should not fear the truth, but look it straight in the face and draw the political conclusions which follow.
On the basis of these theses and having heard the reports of the delegates from various countries, the congress of the Communist International declares that the chief task of the Communist Parties in countries where Soviet power is not established are:
1.To explain to the broad masses of the working class the historical meaning of the political and practical necessity of a new proletarian democracy which must replace bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism.
2. To extend and build up workers� councils in all branches of industry, in the army and navy, and amongst agricultural workers and small peasants
3. To win an assured, conscious communist majority in the councils
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/kronstadt
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/lenin
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/kollontai
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/jan-appel
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1965/workers-opposition
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/chechnya
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international