The sudden collapse of the Eastern bloc automatically gave a new lease of life to its old Western rival's propaganda. For decades, the world has lived in the shadow of a double lie: the lie of the existence of communism in the East, identified with a merciless Stalinist dictatorship and opposed to the reign of democratic freedom in the West. This ideological combat was the expression, at the level of propaganda, of the imperialist rivalries between East and West, and it was the 'democratic' illusion which emerged the victor. Already, the camp of liberal democracy has proven victorious in the two world wars which have ravaged the planet since the beginning of the century, and in each case this has further strengthened the democratic ideology.

This is not mere coincidence. The countries which could lay the best claim to embody the democratic ideal were the first to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution, and to set up purely capitalist states: in particular, Great Britain, France, and the United States of America. Because they came first, they were best served at the economic level. This economic superiority was concretized on both the military and the ideological level. During the conflicts which ravaged the planet since the beginning of the century, the strength of the liberal democracies has always been to convince the workers, who served as cannon fodder, that in fighting for 'democracy' they were defending, not the interests of one capitalist fraction against another, but an ideal of liberty against barbaric dictatorships. During World War I, the French, British and American workers were sent to the slaughter in the name of the struggle against Prussian militarism; during World War II, the brutality of the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships served to justify democratic militarism. After World War II, the ideological combat between the Eastern and Western blocs was assimilated to the struggle between 'democracy' and 'Communist dictatorship'. The Western democracies have always claimed to be fighting against a fundamentally different system: against 'dictatorship'.

Today, the Western democratic model is presented as an ideal of progress transcending economic systems and classes. Citizens are all 'equal' and 'free' to elect political representatives, and therefore the economic system that they want. In a 'democracy' everyone is 'free' to express his or her opinions. If the voters want socialism, or even communism, they need only vote for parties which claim to embody those aims. Parliament reflects 'the will of the people'. Every citizen can appeal to the law against the state. 'Human rights' are respected, etc.

This naive and idyllic vision of democracy is a myth, something that has never existed. Democracy is the ideology which masks the dictatorship of capital in its most developed regions. There is no fundamental difference between the various models that capitalist propaganda presents as opposing each other. All the supposedly different systems which democratic propaganda has presented as its opponents since the beginning of the century are expressions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of capital. They may differ in form, but not in kind. The naked totalitarianism of the Nazi or Stalinist regimes is not the expression of different economic systems, but the result of the development of the state totalitarianism characteristic of decadent capitalism, and of the universal development of state capitalism which marks the 20th century. In fact the superiority of the old Western democracies lies essentially in their greater ability to hide the signs of state totalitarianism.

Myths have a long life. But the economic crisis which is deepening daily in the most dramatic fashion is uncovering all the lies. Thus the illusion of Western prosperity, which was presented as being eternal at the point when the former Eastern bloc collapsed, died the death some time ago. The lie of democracy is of a different ilk, because it is not based on such immediate fluctuations. However, dozens of years of crisis have led to increasing tensions within the ruling class both internationally and internally within each national capital. As a result, the bourgeoisie has had to maneuver in all areas of its activity, to a far greater extent than ever before. There are more and more examples of how little the bourgeoisie adheres to its democratic ideals. All over the world, the 'responsible' political parties, from right to left, all of whom have followed the same policies of austerity against the working class when they have been in office, are suffering from a general loss of credibility. This loss of credibility, which affects the whole of the state apparatus, is the product of the growing divorce between the state which imposes all the misery and civil society which has to put up with it. But this state of affairs has been still further strengthened in recent years by the process of decomposition which affects the entire capitalist world. In all countries, the hidden rivalries between the various clans who inhabit the state apparatus have come to the surface in the form of endless scandals that expose how rotten the ruling class has become. Corruption and prevarication have become a gangrene throughout the state apparatus, politicians work hand in hand with all kinds of gangsters and swindlers, and all of this goes on in the secret corridors of power, unbeknownst to the public. Little by little the sordid reality of the totalitarian state of decadent capitalism is piercing the veil of democratic appearances. But this does not mean that the whole mystification has vanished. The ruling class knows how to use its own decay to reinforce its propaganda, using the scandals as a justification for a new struggle for democratic purity. Even though the crisis continually saps the bases of the bourgeoisie's domination and undermines its ideological grip on the exploited, the ruling class only becomes more determined to use all the means at its disposal to hold on to power. The democratic lie was born with capitalism; it will only disappear with it.

The 19th Century: bourgeois democracy, but just for the bourgeoisie

The dominant fractions of the world bourgeoisie can claim to be democratic because this corresponds to their own history. The bourgeoisie carried out its revolution and overthrew feudalism in the name of democracy and liberty. The bourgeoisie organized its political system in accord with its own economic needs. It abolished serfdom in the name of individual liberty, to allow the creation of a vast proletariat composed of wage laborers ready to sell their labor power individually. Parliament was the arena where the different parties representing the multiple interests existing within the bourgeoisie, and the different sectors of capital, could confront each other to decide the composition and orientations of the government in charge of the executive. For the ruling class, parliament was then a real place for debate and decision-taking. This is the historic model which our 'democracies' claim to represent today, the form of political organization adopted by the dictatorship of capital in its youthful period. This is the model that was adopted by the bourgeois revolution in Britain, France and the USA.

However, we should note that this classic model was never absolutely universal. Democratic rules were often seriously bent for the bourgeoisie to carry through its revolution, and to accelerate the social upheaval necessary to establish its system. We need only consider, amongst others, the French Revolution and the Jacobin terror, followed by the Napoleonic Empire, and the way the bourgeoisie brushed aside its democratic ideal when circumstances required. Moreover, bourgeois democracy was in some ways akin to Athenian democracy, within which all the citizens could take part in elections, except of course the slaves and foreigners who were not citizens.

In the democratic system first set up by the bourgeoisie, only property-holders could vote: for the workers, there was no right of free speech, nor freedom of organization. It took years of bitter struggle before the working class won the right to organize in trades unions, and to impose the principal of universal suffrage. The active participation of the workers in democratic institutions in order to win reforms, or to support the most progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie, was hardly part of the bourgeois revolution's program. Indeed, whenever the workers' struggle succeeded in winning new democratic rights, the bourgeoisie did its best to limit their effects. For example, when a new electoral law was adopted in Italy in 1882, a friend of Depretis, then head of the government, described his attitude as follows: "He feared that the participation of new social strata in public life would have as a logical consequence profound upheavals in the state institutions. From then on, he did everything he could to build solid dikes against the flood-tide he so feared" (F Martin, cited by Sergio Romano in Histoire de L'Italie du Risorgimento a nos jours, Le Seuil, Paris 1977). This sums up perfectly the ruling class' attitude, and its conception of democracy and parliament during the 19th century. Fundamentally, the workers were excluded from it. Democracy was not made for them, but so that capitalism could be well managed. Whenever the clearest fractions of the bourgeoisie supported certain reforms and proclaimed their approval for a greater participation of the workers in the functioning of 'democracy', through universal suffrage or the right of union organization, it was done the better to control the working class and to avoid social upheavals in production. It is no accident that the first bosses to organize themselves against the pressure of workers' struggles and at the same time the most in favor of reforms were those of big industry. In big industry the capitalists, confronted with the massive strength of the many proletarians that they employed, were fully conscious of the necessity both to control the explosive potential of the working class by allowing parliamentary and union activity, and to permit reforms (limitation of the working day, outlawing child labor) which would improve the health of the labor force and thus its productivity.

However, while the exploited were fundamentally excluded, the parliamentary democracy of the 19th Century was the way the bourgeoisie functioned. The legislative dominated the executive; the parliamentary system and democratic representation were social realities.

The 20th Century: 'Democracy' without content

By the beginning of the 20th century capitalism had conquered the world, and reached the limits of its geographic expansion. It had also reached the objective limit of the markets required for its production. The capitalist relations of production were transformed into fetters on the development of the productive forces. Capitalism as a whole entered into a period of world crises and world wars.

This decisive upheaval in the life of capital led to a profound modification in the political mode of life of the bourgeoisie and the functioning of its state apparatus.

The bourgeois state is in essence the representative of the global interests of the national capital. Everything to do with global economic difficulties, the threats of crisis and the means of overcoming them, and with the organization of imperialist war, is the business of the state. With the entrance of capitalism into its decadent period the role of the state thus becomes preponderant because it alone is capable of maintaining a minimum of order in a capitalist society torn apart by its own contradictions. "The state is the proof that society is caught in an insoluble contradiction with itself" said Engels. The development of an octopus-like state which controls all the aspects of economic, political and social life is the fundamental characteristic of the mode of organization of capitalism in its decadent phase. It is the totalitarian response of capitalist society in crisis. "State capitalism is the form capitalism tends to take in its phase of decline" (ICC Platform).

As a result power in bourgeois society is concentrated in the hands of the executive at the expense of the legislative. This phenomenon was particularly clear during the First World War when the needs of war and the interests of the national capital did not permit democratic debate in parliament and imposed an absolute discipline on all the fractions of the national bourgeoisie. But afterwards it was maintained and reinforced. The bourgeois parliament became an empty shell which no longer played any decisive role.

The Third International recognized this reality at its 2nd Congress when it proclaimed that "the center of gravity of political life today has completely and definitively left parliament", that "parliament cannot in any case, at the present time, be the theatre of a struggle for reforms and for the improvement of the situation of the working class, as it could at certain moments in the previous epoch". Not only could capitalism in crisis no longer grant durable reforms, but the bourgeoisie had definitively lost its economically and socially progressive historic role. All its fractions had become equally reactionary.

In this process the political parties of the bourgeoisie lost their primary function, that of representing different interest groups, different economic sectors of capital within the 'democratic' life of the bourgeoisie in parliament. They became instruments of the state responsible for making the different sectors of society accept the state's policy. From representatives of civil society in the state, the parties became instruments of the state to control civil society. The global interests of the national capital, which were represented by the state, tended to make the political parties of the bourgeoisie fractions of the state totalitarian party. This tendency toward the single party is expressed clearly in Fascist, Nazi or Stalinist regimes. But even when the fiction of pluralism was retained, in situations of sharp crisis such as imperialist war, the reality of a hegemonic party or the domination of a single party was imposed. This was the case at the end of the thirties and during the war which followed, with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party or, in Great Britain during the Second World War with the 'state of emergency', with Churchill and the war cabinet. "In the context of state capitalism, the differences which separate the bourgeois parties are nothing in comparison with what they have in common.  All share a general premise according to which the interests of the national capital are superior to all the others. This premise means that different fractions of the national capital are capable of working very closely together, above all behind the closed doors of parliamentary commissions and in the highest echelons of the state apparatus." ('Notes on the consciousness of the decadent bourgeoisie', International Review 31). The leaders of the parties and  members of parliament have in reality become state functionaries.

Thus all parliamentary activity loses any real connection with the decisions which the state takes in the name of the higher interest of the nation. Parliament only serves to mask the development of the totalitarian grip of the state on the whole of society. The 'democratic' functioning of the dominant class, even within the limits of the 19th century, no longer exists. It has become a pure mystification, a lie.

'Democratic' totalitarianism against the working class

Why then maintain such a costly and complicated 'democratic' apparatus if it no longer corresponded to the needs of capital? In fact, this whole organization retained an essential function at a moment when the permanent crisis was pushing the working class toward struggles for the defense of its living conditions and towards revolutionary consciousness. That function consisted of diverting the proletariat from its class terrain, of tangling it up in the 'democratic' game. In this task the state benefited from the support of the so-called Socialist parties after 1914 and the 'Communist' parties after the mid-thirties when they betrayed the class which gave birth to them. These parties are part of the bourgeois apparatus of control and mystification which tries to lend credit to the democratic lie in the eyes of the working class. In the 19th century the proletariat had to struggle to gain the right to vote. In the 20th century in the advanced metropoles, an intensive propaganda campaign is waged by the 'democratic' state to corral the working class onto the electoral terrain. In some countries, Belgium and Italy for example, the vote is even obligatory.

Moreover, when the struggle for reforms has lost any meaning, the unions, which corresponded to the need of the proletariat to better its situation in the framework of capitalist society, lost their utility for the working class. But they did not disappear - the state took hold of them in order to better control the exploited class. The unions complete the apparatus of 'democratic' coercion by the ruling class.

But then one may legitimately ask the following question: if the apparatus of democratic mystification is so useful to the dominant class, to its state, why isn't this mode of controlling society imposed everywhere, in all countries? It is interesting to note in this respect that the two regimes which most clearly symbolize state totalitarianism  of the 20th century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, were built on the crushing of the proletariat following the defeat of the revolutionary attempts which marked the entry of capitalism into decadence. Faced with a proletariat profoundly weakened by defeat, decimated by repression, the question of its control was posed differently for the bourgeoisie. In these conditions the democratic mystification is hardly useful and totalitarian state capitalism can appear without a mask. Moreover, precisely because, from the strict point of view of the functioning of the state machine, the 'democratic' apparatus inherited from the 19th century became superfluous at the beginning of the century, certain sectors of the bourgeoisie, recognizing this state of affairs, theorized its redundancy. Fascism is an expression of this tendency. The maintenance of a heavy 'democratic' machine is not only dispensable, but also demands an adequate economy to make it credible and a ruling class sufficiently experienced to manage it subtly. In the underdeveloped countries these factors are mostly unavailable and the weakness of the local proletariat doesn't encourage the bourgeoisie to put such a system in place. Consequently, military dictatorships are common in these countries. In these countries the weakness of the economy is expressed in the weakness of the local bourgeoisie, and here the army is the best fraction of the bourgeois state to represent the overall interest of the national capital and to provide the skeleton of the state apparatus. This role can also be played by militarized parties inspired by the Stalinist model, as in China.

Far from being the expression of a sort of perversion of the democratic purity of capitalism, the different dictatorships and openly totalitarian States which mark the whole history of the 20th century are on the contrary the manifestation of the general tendency towards state capitalism's totalitarian hold over all the economic, social and political aspects of life. They show the reality of state totalitarianism in decadent capitalism and show what is hidden behind the democratic veil of the ruling class in the developed countries. There is no qualitative difference in the functioning of those states which pretend to be democratic. The reality is simply better hidden.

In France in the thirties the same parliamentary assembly which had been elected with the Popular Front voted full powers to Marshall Petain. This was not an aberration, but, on the contrary, the clear expression of the inanity of democratic pretensions and the whole parliamentary game in capitalist decadence. Furthermore, after the war, the state which was installed by the Liberation was basically in continuity with the one which collaborated with Nazi Germany. The police, the judiciary, the economic and even political oligarchies who had been distinguished by their collaborationist zeal remained in place, except for some rare exceptions used as expiatory victims. It was the same in Italy where, like in France, some 90% of state functionaries retained their posts after the fall of the Fascist regime.

On top of this it is easy to show that our 'democracies' are never embarrassed to support or use this or that 'dictatorship' when it corresponds to their strategic needs, or even to install such 'dictatorships'. Examples aren't lacking: the USA in Latin America, or France in most of the its ex-African colonies.

The cleverness of the old Western 'democracies' consists in using the most caricatural forms of the barbarism and brutality of state capitalism to mask the fact that they themselves are no exception to this absolute rule of decadent capitalism - the development of state totalitarianism. In fact, only the most developed capitalist countries have the means to maintain the credibility of a sophisticated 'democratic' apparatus, to wield it for the purpose of mystifying and controlling the working class. In the underdeveloped capitalist world the regimes with a 'democratic' appearance are the exception and in general more the product of an effective support from a 'democratic' imperialist power than the expression of the local bourgeoisie. Their existence is more often provisional, subject to the fluctuations of the international situation. It takes all the power and experience of the oldest and most experienced fractions of the world bourgeoisie to maintain the credibility of the great lie about the democratic functioning of the bourgeois state.

In the most sophisticated form of capitalist dictatorship, that of 'democracy', the capitalist state must maintain the belief that the greatest liberty reigns. Brutal coercion, ferocious repression, must, whenever possible, be replaced by subtle manipulation to give the same result without the victim seeing it. It is not an easy task and only the most experienced fractions of the world bourgeoisie can do it effectively. To do so the state must control all the institutions of civil society. It must develop tentacles everywhere.

The democratic state has not only organized a whole visible and official system of control and surveillance of society but has woven a web of hidden threads which allow it to control and survey the parts of society which it pretends are outside of its competence. This is true for all sectors of society. A caricatural example is that of information. One of the great principles which the democratic state boasts of is the freedom of the press. It is true that in the 'democratic' countries there are many newspapers and often a multitude of different television channels. But close up things are not so idyllic. A whole administrative-juridical system allows the state to corrupt this 'liberty' and in fact the media are completely dependent on the good will of the state which has all the means to suppress a press headline. As for the main television companies, their authorization to broadcast is dependent on the agreement of the state. Nearly everywhere the essential means of information are in the hands of a few magnates who usually have a seat reserved for them in the ante-chambers of the ministries. One can imagine that if they benefit from this enviable position, it is because they have been mandated by the state to play this role. The big press agencies are very often the direct mouthpieces of the state's policies. The Gulf War illustrated this perfectly. The whole of the Western 'free press' was given the responsibility of relaying the great lies of war propaganda, filtering the news, and manipulating opinion to best serve the needs of imperialism. At this time there was hardly any difference between the 'democratic' conception of the media and the Stalinist one that is vilified so much, or Saddam Hussein's for that matter. They all churned out the most vile propaganda, and the loyal Western journalists, standing to attention, servilely checked their information with the army before publishing it - no doubt because of their concern for objectivity.

This gigantic democratic state apparatus finds its justification in the developed countries in the vital need for the ruling class to control the greatest proletarian concentrations of the planet. Although the democratic mystification is an essential aspect of imperialist propaganda for the great Western powers, it is on the social level, as an instrument for the control of the proletariat and of the population in general, that it finds its principle reason for existence. It is the need to lock society in a strait-jacket that compels the democratic state to carry out its large-scale maneuvers, using all the resources of propaganda and manipulation. One of the main occasions when the state maneuvers the heavy apparatus of democracy is the great electoral circus in which the citizens are periodically invited to participate. Elections, though they have lost any meaning as regards the actual operations of the totalitarian state, remain a powerful weapon to atomize the working class in an individualized vote, to divert its discontent onto a sterile terrain, and give credibility to the existence of democracy. It is no accident if the democratic states carry on a vigorous struggle against abstentionism and disaffection, because the participation of workers in the elections is essential to the perpetuation of the democratic illusion. However, even if parliamentary representation no longer has any importance for the functioning of the state, it is nonetheless essential that the results of the elections conform to the needs of the dominant class, so that it can make best use of the mystifying game of the parties and prevent them from being used up too quickly. Notably, the so-called 'left' parties have the specific role of controlling the working class; their position vis-a-vis governmental responsibilities determines their capacity to spread their mystifications and thus effectively control the working class. For example, it is clear that when austerity is on the agenda, as a result of the accelerating crisis, having the left in power threatens its credibility as a force claiming to defend the interest of the working class and leaves it badly placed to control the working class at the level of its struggles. It is thus extremely important for the state to manipulate the result of elections. To achieve this, the state puts in place a whole system for the selection of candidates, with rules designed to avoid surprises. But this is not the essential aspect. The servile press orients the choice through intense ideological campaigns. The subtle game of alliances between parties, with candidates manipulated for the needs of the cause, usually makes it possible to obtain the desired result and the intended governmental majority. It is a banality today that whatever the electoral results the same anti-working class policy remains. The democratic state conducts its policies independently of the elections, which are being organized at an accelerated pace. Elections are a pure charade.

Outside of elections, which are the touchstone of the state's 'democratic' self-justification, there are many other occasions where the latter maneuvers its apparatus to ensure its control. Against strikes for example. In each struggle carried out by the working class on its own terrain it comes up against all the forces of the state: press, unions, political parties, the forces of repression, provocations by the police or other less official organisms, etc.

What basically distinguishes the 'democratic' state from the 'dictatorships', is not in the end the means employed, which are all based on the totalitarian grip of the state on civil society, but the subtlety and efficiency with which they are employed. That is particularly true on the electoral level. Often the 'dictatorships' also look for legitimacy in elections or referenda, but the poverty of their means leads to a parody of what goes on in the rich industrialized countries. But there is no fundamental difference. The parody only shows the underlying general truth. Bourgeois democracy is only the 'democratic' dictatorship of capital.

Behind the decor of the 'democratic' state

While during the ascendant period of capitalism the bourgeoisie could base its class rule on the reality of the progress that its system brought to humanity, in the decadent period not only has this basis disappeared, but all capitalism can now offer is the misery of a permanent economic crisis and the murderous barbarism of endless imperialist conflicts. The ruling class can only maintain its rule and the survival of its system through terror and lies. This development has led to deep changes in the internal life of the ruling class, crystallized in the activity of the state apparatus.

What enables the state to cope with this new situation is its capacity to impose its repressive and military force, to make lies believable, and to preserve its secrets.

In these conditions, the sectors of the bourgeoisie most able to rise up in the state hierarchy are naturally those who specialize in the use of force, in lying propaganda, in secret activity and in all kinds of sordid maneuvers. That means the army, the police, the secret services, clans and secret societies, and mafia-type gangsters.

The first two sectors have always played an important, indeed indispensable role in the state. A number of generals made their mark on the political life of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century. But in this period, they usually reached the center of the state power only in exceptional situations, in particularly difficult moments for the national capital, as for example during the Civil War in the USA. This militaristic tendency was not the main one in bourgeois political life, as the example of Louis Napoleon showed. Today, however, it is highly characteristic that a considerable proportion of heads of state in the underdeveloped countries are military men, and even in the western 'democracies' we've had such figures as Eisenhower and Haig in the USA, or De Gaulle in France.

The accession to power of high-ranking members of the secret services, however, is a typical phenomenon of the period of decadence, one which clearly expresses the current concerns of the bourgeoisie and the internal functioning of the highest spheres of the state. Once again, this fact is particularly visible in the peripheries of capitalism, in the underdeveloped world. Most often the generals who take on the role of President were former heads of the army's secret services; and, very frequently, when a civilian figure becomes head of state, his previous career was in the 'civilian' secret services or in the political police.

But this state of affairs is not restricted to the underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia or Latin America. In the USSR, Andropov was the boss of the KGB, Gorbachev was high up in it as well, and the current President of Georgia, Shevardnadze, is a former KGB general. Particularly significant is the example of Bush in the USA, 'the most democratic country in the world'. He was a former director of the CIA. And these are only the best-known examples. We do not have the means to make a complete list, nor is this our aim here, but it would be interesting to note the impressive number of politicians, ministers and parliamentarians who, before taking up these 'honorable' functions, gained their education in one or other branch of the secret services.

The multiplication of parallel police, of services each more secret than the other, of hidden agencies of all kinds, is a highly salient feature of social life in today's pseudo-democracies. This reveals the real nature of the needs and nature of the state's activities. It is obvious on the imperialist level: spying, provocation, threats, assassination, all kinds of manipulations - all this has become common coin in the defense of national imperialist interests on the world arena. But these are just the more 'patriotic' and 'admissible' aspects of the activities of the secret services. The occult activity of the state is even more developed on the internal level. Systematic filing of information on the population, surveillance of individuals, 'official' and secret phone-tapping, all kinds of provocations aimed at manipulating public opinion, infiltration of all sectors of civil society, hidden financing, etc - the list is a long one, and the state has recruited the manpower to do it all in secret, precisely in order to keep up the myth of the 'democratic' state. To carry out these tasks the state has recruited the dregs of society; the services of the mafia have been much appreciated and the distinction between gangster and secret agent has become increasingly vague, because these specialists in crime are quite capable of selling their skills to the highest bidder. For many years, the state has made use of the various networks of influence that existed in society - secret societies, mafia, sects - integrating them into its national and international policies, even raising them up to the higher spheres of the state. In fact the 'democratic' state does exactly what it denounces the 'dictatorships' for, but more discretely. Their secret services are not only at the heart of the state; they are also its antennae within civil society.

Parallel to this process, which has led to the ascent of fractions of the bourgeoisie whose way of life is based on secrecy, the entire functioning of the state has become more and more hidden. Behind the appearance of government, the real centers of decision have become invisible. Numerous ministers have no real power and are there to play to the gallery. This tendency reached its most cynical level with President Reagan, whose rather paltry acting talents allowed him to parade in front of the media, but who had no role at all in defining political orientations. For this there are other centers of decision, most of them unknown to the public. In a world where the ideological propaganda of the media has become increasingly important, the most essential quality for a politician is to know how to talk, to 'come across well' on the TV. Sometimes this is enough to make a career. But behind the political stage-sets erected to give the state a human face lurk a whole plethora of committees, agencies, lobbies animated by grey figures, most of them unknown to the general public, but ensuring the continuity of state policy, and thus the reality of power, without regard to the fluctuations of government.

This increasingly hidden operation of the state does not at all mean that disagreements and opposing interests have disappeared within the ruling class. On the contrary, with the deepening of the world economic crisis, divisions within each national bourgeoisie are sharpened. It's very clear that fractions crystallize around the choice of which imperialist alliances to make. But this isn't the only factor of division within the bourgeois class. Economic choices, the question of what attitude to adopt towards the working class, are other issues which give rise to debates and disagreements; also, the sordid scramble for power and influence as a means to amassing wealth is a permanent source of conflict between different clans of the ruling class, quite apart from real differences in orientation. These differences within the ruling class find their expression not so much through divisions into political parties, i.e. at the visible level, as through the formation of cliques which inhabit all echelons of the state and whose existence is hidden from ordinary mortals. The clan warfare to gain influence within the state is very severe, and yet it seldom sees the light of day. Here again, there is little to choose between the 'dictatorships' and the 'democracies'. Fundamentally, the war for power is waged outside the ken of the great majority.

The present situation of deep economic crisis, of the overturning of alliances following the collapse of the eastern bloc, has sharpened the rivalries and conflicts between the capitalist clans within the state. The various scandals, the 'suicides' of politicians and businessmen that we hear more and more about these days, are the visible manifestation of this shadowy war between the clans of the bourgeoisie. The proliferation of 'affairs' provides us with the opportunity to glimpse the real way the state operates behind the democratic smokescreen. In this respect the situation in Italy is particularly revealing. The P2 Lodge Affair, the Gladio Affair, the mafia scandals and all the scandals about corrupt politicians are an exemplary illustration of the totalitarian reality of the 'democratic' state which we have tried to deal with in this article. The concrete example of Italy will thus constitute the backbone of the second part of this article.

JJ

Reference articles: ICC pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism; International Review no 31: 'Machiavellianism, the consciousness and unity of the bourgeoisie; International Review no 66: 'The massacres and crimes of the 'great democracies').

The "peace" between Israel and the PLO in the Middle East shows itself to be just another prolongation of the unending war in this part of the world. Since the First World War the Middle East has been a major battle-ground for conflicting imperialist interests and it will remain so as long as capitalism exists. In this respect it is no different from all the other regions of the world where war has been continuous in open or latent form.

In Yugoslavia the war continues. Now battles are even taking place within the various camps; between Serbs, between Croats and between Muslims! These most recent conflicts give the lie in a very tragic way to the "ethnic" explanation for this war. And on this question the media has fallen silent! Under the cover of the "peoples'" "right to independence" ex-Yugoslavia has become a sinister experiment for the new confrontations between the great powers, produced by the disappearance of the old imperialist blocs. Here too there can be no turning back; capitalism has a free hand to carry out its war diplomacy in the name of "humanitarian" aid.

In Russia the situation just gets worse and worse. The shipwrecked economy has declined dramatically and the political instability that has already dragged whole areas of the ex-USSR into bloody war is more and more gnawing at the very heart of Russia. The danger that the kind of chaos existing in Yugoslavia will spread is a very real one. Here too capitalism has no perspective other than war.

Wars and crisis, social decomposition; this is the "future" that capitalism offers humanity for the last decade of the century.

In the "developed" countries which form the nerve center of this world capitalist system of terror, death and misery, workers' struggles have erupted over the last few months after four years of reflux and passivity. These struggles show that workers are beginning to mobilize against the austerity plans that are of a brutality unknown seen since the Second World War. They also contain in embryo the only possible response to the decadence and decomposition of the capitalist mode of production. In spite of all their limitations they already constitute a step towards the battle of class against class, a massive and international struggle of the proletariat. This is the only way to check the attacks against living conditions, the misery and wars that today stalk the planet.

The development of the class struggle

For several months now strikes and demonstrations have been on the increase in the main countries of Western Europe. The social calm that had reigned for nearly four years has been definitively broken.

The brutality of the redundancies and wage cuts and all the other austerity measures accompanying them, has provoked a growing discontent. On several occasions this has led to a renewed combativity, and a clear determination not to give up in the face of threatened attacks against all the living conditions of the working class.

The firm control of the movement everywhere by the trades unions does not reduce the importance of this development in the class struggle. In every country, the unions' calls for demonstrations and strikes are symptomatic of the growth in combativity within the ranks of the workers. Because of the place they occupy in the capitalist state as guardians of social order on behalf of the national capital, the unions see clearly that the working class isn't ready to passively accept the attacks against its living conditions. So they take the lead. The unions adopt a strategy that aims to prevent the development of the class struggle. They do so by misdirecting workers' demands and imprisoning them in corporatism and nationalism and by derailing the will to struggle into dead-ends. But the fact that they are adopting such a strategy is an indication that a real resurgence of class struggle is now taking place at an international level.

The resurgence of workers' combativity

The end of 1993 has been marked by strikes and demonstrations in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Britain, France and Spain.

The strikes and demonstrations in Germany[1] at the beginning of autumn set the tone. Every sector was affected by a strong wave of discontent. This forced the unions to orchestrate wide-spread maneuvers in the main industrial sectors. In particular a demonstration of building workers in Bonn on the 28th October in which 120,000 participated, and in the car industry, the "negotiation" of the 4 day working week accompanied by wage reductions at Volkswagen.

The first indications of the resurgence of international class struggle emerged in Italy in September 1992 when there was a large mobilization against the measures of the Amato government and against the official unions who had agreed to the measures. Since September 1993 strikes and demonstrations have increased there. As the large main unions have been severely discredited in the eyes of the workers, the rank-and-file union structures have taken up the baton. On 25th September 200,000 people demonstrated in response to an appeal from the "co-ordinations of the factory councils". On 28th October 700,000 people participated in demonstrations organized throughout the country and 14 million joined the 4 hour strike organized for the same day. On 16th November there was a demonstration of 500,000 workers in the building sector. On the 10th December demonstrations of metal workers at Fiat took place in Turin, Milan and Rome.

In Belgium on 29th October 60,000 demonstrators marched in Brussels in response to the appeal of the FGTB, the socialist union. On 15th November staggered strikes were organized in the public transport sector. On 26th November, which the bourgeois press named "Red Friday", a general strike against the prime minister's "global plan" was called by the two big unions, the FGTB and the Christian union, the CSC. This was the largest strike since 1936 and it paralyzed the whole country.

In France in October there was the strike of the Air France ground staff followed by a whole series of demonstrations and local strikes, including in particular the public transport strike on 26th November. In Britain 250,000 civil servants went on strike on 5th November. In Spain on 17th November 30,000 metalworkers assembled in Barcelona against planned redundancies at the SEAT car factory. On 25th November a big day of union demonstrations was organized throughout the country against the government's "social pact", which includes reductions in wages, pensions and unemployment benefits. Tens of thousands of people participated in Madrid, Barcelona and throughout the country.

The black-out

In every country the media propaganda; press, radio, television tries as much as possible to keep quiet about events concerning the working class.

In particular workers' movements in other countries are practically never "covered". And although some papers sometimes mention strikes and demonstrations very briefly, in the "popular" press and on the television there's almost a total black-out. For example, practically nothing of the strikes and demonstrations in Germany filtered through into the media in other countries. When the reality of "social unrest" cannot be kept hidden because the events are taking place within the country, or because it concerns maneuvers of the bourgeoisie which are useful for propaganda purposes, or because what is happening is sufficiently important to force its way into the news, the media systematically present only what is specific to each situation. It's the problem of this or that particular enterprise or it's the problem of this or that particular sector or it's the problem of this or that specific country. It's always the most corporatist and nationalist of the unions' demands that are presented. Or else it's spectacular and fruitless acts that are publicized such as minority confrontations with the agents of law enforcement (in France during the conflict at Air France, in Belgium during "Red Friday").

But behind the black-out and the misrepresentation of reality, the situation is basically the same in all of the developed countries and in Western Europe in particular; the class struggle has returned. The increase in strikes and demonstrations in itself already marks a resurgence of workers' combativity, a growing discontent with the lowering of the "standard of living" which is daily spreading to every strata of the working population, and with mass unemployment.

This development in the class struggle is only the beginning and it's coming up against difficulties produced by the conditions of the current historic period.

The difficulties of the working class in confronting the strategy of the union and the state's political apparatus

The working class is beginning to rediscover the path of struggle following an important period of reflux in workers' combats which has lasted almost four years.

The lie that Stalinism=communism still weighs heavy

Firstly the working class has been disoriented by the ideological campaigns on the "end of communism" and the "end of the class struggle" which has been hammered home since the Berlin wall went down in 1989. By presenting the death of Stalinism as the "end of communism", these campaigns have directly attacked the latent consciousness in the working class of the need and the possibility to fight for a different kind of society. By using and abusing the grossest lie of the century - the identification of the Stalinist form of state capitalism with "communism" - the propaganda of the bourgeoisie has greatly disoriented the working class. The majority have understood the collapse of Stalinism as a demonstration that it's impossible to create a system other than capitalism. Rather than making the consciousness of the class clearer about the capitalist nature of Stalinism, the end of the latter has made the lie about the "socialist" nature of the USSR and the eastern countries more credible. This has generated a deep reflux in the consciousness of the working class which was gradually escaping the clutches of this lie in the struggles that developed after the end of the 60s. This is mainly why the level of workers' demonstrations and strikes is the lowest known in Western Europe since the second world war.

The confusion about its own perspective - that of communism - which has been so nefariously identified with Stalinism's bloody, capitalist counter-revolution, has reigned in the working class for decades and persists today. It is still maintained by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie; those factions who denounce "communism" in order to laud the merits of liberal or socialist "democracy" as well as those factions who defend the "socialist gains" such as the communist parties and the Trotskyist organizations[2].

The bourgeois media take every opportunity to maintain this confusion. During the confrontation in Moscow in October 1993 between Yeltsin's government and the "parliamentary insurgents", their propaganda relentlessly presented the "conservative" deputies as the "real communists" (insisting that the "communists" could only come to an agreement with "fascists" of course). Thus they again increased the ideological smoke-screen about "communism" and once more used the corpse of Stalinism to drive home their message against the working class. As for the communist parties and Trotskyist organizations, disillusioned by the ravages made by the crisis in the USSR and the ex-"socialist" countries, they're gradually finding their voices again to defend the idea that the "socialist gains"[3] were a boon... before the "return of capitalism".

The bourgeoisie will go on maintaining the lie that Stalinism is identical to communism, a lie which hides the real communist perspective. The working class can only rid itself of this obstacle to the development of its consciousness by laying bare the counter-revolutionary role of the left organizations of capital - whether social-democracy, Stalinism and its "destalinised" variations, or trades unionism. This it can only do through practice, through its struggle.

The weight of trade unionism

The promise of a "new world order" which was to open up a "new era of peace and prosperity" under the banner of "democratic" capitalism has also contributed to a reflux in class struggle, in the capacity of the working class to respond to the attacks on its living conditions.

The Gulf war in 1991 gave the lie to the promises of "peace" and acted upon consciousness as a factor clarifying just what this "peace" resulting from the "triumph" of capitalism really means. But at the same time it produced a feeling of powerlessness that brought combativity to an end.

Today the economic crisis and the generalised attack on living conditions that comes in its wake, is pushing the proletariat to emerge slowly from its past passivity. The fact that combativity is returning is an indication that all the promises of "prosperity" have solved nothing. The facts are these. Capitalism can offer nothing but misery. Sacrifices made are the prelude to more sacrifices demanded. The capitalist economy is sick and the workers have to pay for it.

The present resurgence of class struggle is marked therefore by a confusion that continues to exist in the working class about the general perspective of its struggles historically - the real communist perspective of which it is the bearer. But at the same time it's also marked by an awakening consciousness of the need the fight against capitalism.

This is why what mainly characterizes this resurgence is the hold the unions have over the current struggles, the almost total absence of autonomous initiatives on the part of the workers, the fact that the rejection of unionism is very weak. If the consciousness, however vague, of the possibility of overthrowing capitalism is lacking, combativity is caught in a trap. Restricted to formulating demands within the capitalist framework, it finds itself on the home ground of unionism. This is why at present the unions manage to drag workers off their own class terrain:

- by formulating demands within a corporatist framework, within that of defending the national economy, to the detriment of demands that are common to all workers;

- by "organizing" "actions" aimed at dissipating the discontent, at making the working class believe that through such actions it is fighting for its own demands when it is really being dragged into dead-ends, diverted into isolated actions. That's when it's not simply being trotted out into inoffensive processions for the state.

The bourgeoisie is preparing for the confrontation...

With a few recent exceptions such as at the beginning of the movement of the miners in the Ruhr (Germany) in September, all the movements that have developed have been encapsulated and "organized" by the unions. All of them, including the more radical actions of base unionism, have taken place under the vigilant eye of the main unions and their leadership, when the latter haven't directly inspired them[4]. They are able to maneuver in this way because of the low level of consciousness in the working class of the real role the unions play in sabotaging their struggles. It's also because the bourgeoisie has prepared its strategy against the "social consequences of austerity", in other words against the danger of the class struggle.

The working class may have difficulty recognizing its class nature, becoming conscious of what it is but the bourgeoisie has no difficulty understanding that workers' struggles, strikes and demonstrations are dangerous. The ruling class knows that the class struggle is a danger for capitalism both from its general experience throughout its history and from the specific experience of the waves of struggles that it has had to contain, encapsulate and confront in the course of the last twenty five years[5]. With the particularly brutal measures required by the present economic mess, they are forced to plan the attacks and also the angry reactions that they are bound to provoke.

It is not therefore surprising that the bourgeoisie chose the timing of the explosion of workers' struggles in Italy in September 1992 to allow the anger of the proletariat in this country to erupt prematurely in order to prevent it contaminating other European countries[6]. Similarly most of today's movements more or less follow a timing decided by the unions. The "days of action" and also the publicity given to certain "examples" like Air France or "Red Friday" in Belgium is on the whole programmed by the political and union apparatus of the dominant class with the aim of allowing the working class to "let off steam". And they do so in unison with their "partners" in other countries.

Massive anti-working class measures, the ideological and political disorientation of the working class, illusions in the unions and a bourgeoisie that plans its strategy with great care: this is why the workers' combativity has not really checked the attacks against them. What's more the proletariat also suffers from the pressure of social decomposition. The general mood of "everyone for himself" is a drag on the need to develop solidarity and the collective struggle and facilitates the divisive maneuvers of unionism. Moreover the bourgeoisie uses the consequences of its own decomposition to hinder the working class in the development of its consciousness.

...and uses decomposition

Decomposition eats away at the flesh of bourgeois society. Lies and plots reign supreme in the battle for a slice of the cake getting visibly smaller, and this pushes the members of the bourgeois class into a corrupting attitude of looking out for number one.

The scandals and the various goings-on in the world of politics, finance, industry, sport or royalty, according to country, aren't just a masquerade. They correspond to the sharpening of rivalries within the dominant class. Nevertheless the one thing that anyone who is anyone is agreed upon is the need to publicize these goings-on to the hilt in order to occupy the media terrain.

In Italy, we have the example of the "clean hands" operation. The official explanation is that it aims to make politicians behave more morally and decently. In reality it's the settling of accounts between different factions of the bourgeoisie, between the different clans within the political apparatus. Basically this means between the pro-US tendencies (for 40 years the Christian Democratic Party were the US's zealous servants) and the tendencies that lean towards the Franco-German alliance[7]. In the same way in France the Tapie scandal and other media political soap operas are systematically given pride of place on the "news". To tell the truth no-one gives a damn but that's one of the results it's aiming for. They give as little information as possible and the message between the lines - "politics is dirty" - is very useful at a time when workers are trying to deal with political questions. In Britain it's the soap opera around the royal family that plays this role of monopolizing the "news".

The "humanitarian" campaigns to "take in a foreigner" in Germany or "get a child out of Sarejevo" in Britain, and the inflated coverage of murders committed by children in Britain and France also illustrate how decomposition is used by bourgeois ideology to maintain a feeling of powerlessness and fear. It is also used to turn attention from the real problems - economic, political and social.

To cap it all there's the systematic use of images of war, from the Middle East or Yugoslavia for example. The images are transmitted to hide the underlying imperialist interests and to create a sense of guilt amongst workers in the countries at "peace" to persuade them to accept their conditions of exploitation.

The perspectives for the class struggle

All these difficulties for the class struggle don't mean that the battle is already lost and that the workers can expect nothing. On the contrary. Although it obstructs the struggle, the very fact that the international bourgeoisie is mounting this concerted strategy against the working class shows that there is a real tendency towards mobilization, combativity and reflection on what is at stake in the present situation.

Workers have returned to the unions more "by default" than out of profound conviction. The situation is different to that in the thirties when the historic defeat of the working class was signified by tens of millions joining the unions. It's also more "by default" than out of a conviction in bourgeois politics that the proletariat still tends to follow the left wing parties of capitalism that pretend to be "workers' parties. This too is unlike the 30s when workers were enthusiastic about the "national fronts" (with their corollary of submission to "national socialism" and "Stalinism").

Social decomposition and the use the bourgeoisie makes of it combine with the maneuvers of the unions and their rank-and-file extensions to poison combativity and confuse the development of consciousness in the working class. However the economic crisis and the attacks on living conditions act as a powerful antidote. This is the terrain on which the proletariat has begun to respond. This is only the beginning of a long period of struggles. Repeated failures of economic demands are painful. But they also give rise to a deep reflection on the ends and means of the struggle. The mobilization of the workers is already leading to such a reflection. The bourgeoisie is not making a mistake when they publish a widely publicized "critique of capitalism" from... the pope. Suddenly intellectuals are publishing articles in "defense of Marxism". This kind of maneuver is designed to combat the danger of an early reflection that is taking place in the working class.

In spite of all the difficulties, present historic conditions trace a path towards class confrontations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Today's resurgence in combativity is only the first step towards them.

The job of revolutionary organizations is to actively participate in this reflection and in the development of working class actions. In the struggles we must relentlessly denounce the bourgeoisie's strategy of division and dispersion. We must reject corporatist, categorical, sectional and nationalist demands, oppose the unions' methods of "struggle" which are just maneuvers to damp down the fire. We must defend the perspective of the general struggle of the working class, the perspective of communism. We must call to mind the workers' past experiences in learning how to control the struggle through its general assemblies and with delegates elected and revocable by those assemblies. Where possible we must fight for the extension of struggles beyond sectoral divisions. We must encourage and animate discussion circles and struggle committees in which all workers can discuss and clarify the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the nature of their combat that offers a perspective for the development of broader class confrontations in the years ahead.

OF, 12th December 1993

[1] See International Review no. 75.

[2] As for anarchism which sees Stalinism as the consequence of "Marxism", in spite of its "radicalism" it's condemned to rally to the side of the bourgeoisie. In its anarcho-syndicalist variation it attaches itself directly to the bourgeois state through its unionism. In its political variation it's the expression of the petite-bourgeoisie and makes its stand in the bourgeois camp as do the social strata that it represents. This is what it did in Spain in 1936.

[3] In France the Trotskyist group, Lutte Ouvriere, has mounted an enormous fly-posting campaign throughout France to denounce the "return of capitalism" in the USSR and calling for the defense of the famous "workers gains".

[4] This includes the demonstration in Italy called by the "co-ordinations..." and the brawls on the airport runways in Paris during the Air France strike.

[5] What's more, the generation of men who were twenty years old in 1968 now runs the capitalist state. This is a generation that is particularly experienced on the "social" question. Let's bear in mind that in France Mitterand is surrounded by old leftists from May 68. Also that the first great service that Chirac performed for his class was in May 68 when he organized secret meetings between the Pompidou government (of which Balladur was part...) and the Stalinist union, the CGT. These meetings prepared the agreements that were to bury the movement.

[6] On the struggles in Italy, 1992 see International Reviews no.72 and 71 (supplement).

[7] For more on Italy see International Review no.73.

Since the beginning of the decade, the world economy has been sunk into recession. The multiplication of lay-offs; the brutal growth of unemployment which has reached levels unknown since the 1930s; increasing insecurity for those lucky enough to keep their jobs; a generalized decline in living standards, which have been amputated by endless austerity plans; increasing pauperization, particularly through the marginalization of a whole sector of the population deprived of income and even of a roof over their heads. The working class of the big industrial cities is feeling the full force of such phenomena. Today, the exploited are facing the biggest ever attack on their living conditions. Behind all the abstruse statistics and abstract figures, this reality demonstrates in a terribly concrete way the truth of the economic crisis of the entire capitalist system. And yet, the flatterers of capital never tire of announcing that the recovery is coming ... next year. Up till now, these hopes have foundered every time. But at the end of 1993 this hasn't prevented the media from shouting more loudly than ever about the coming 'recovery'.

What is this new optimism based on? Essentially on the fact that in the USA, after several years of recession, there has been a return to positive national growth rates. Are these figures really significant? Do they herald a bright new capitalist tomorrow? If the workers were to believe that, they would be falling for the worst kind of illusions.

The deafening noise of the media barrage about the end of the recession actually expresses the need of the ruling class to counter-act the growing feeling within the proletariat, which is faced with a day-to-day reality which has been getting worse and worse for many years, that the managers of capital have no solution to the crisis of their system. Over the years, the ideological themes and discourse put forward by the ruling class have varied in form, from Reagan and Thatcher's 'less state' to the reconsideration of the social role of the state by Clinton; governments of left and right have come and gone, but reality has gone on moving in the same direction: the deepening of the world crisis and the generalized deterioration of living conditions for the exploited. All sorts of recipes and bitter medicines have been tried. New hopes have been raised again and again, but all in vain.

In the last few months, capitalist propaganda has found a new theme of mystification: the GATT negotiations. According to this, it's protectionism that has been holding back the development of the economic recovery. Consequently, the opening up of the market, respecting the rules of free competition will be the panacea which will make it possible to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. The USA is the main mouthpiece of this view. But all this is just ideological froth, a smokescreen which is less and less able to hide the ferocious free-for-all between the world's main economic powers in their effort to hold onto their part of an ever-shrinking world market. Under the cover of the GATT negotiations, each fraction of the bourgeoisie is trying to mobilize the proletariat behind the banners of defending the national economy. The GATT agreements are nothing but a moment in the sharpening trade war, and the working class has absolutely nothing to gain from them. The outcome of these negotiations make no difference at all to the trend towards frenzied competition which has been developing for years, and which has taken the form of massive lay-offs and draconian social plans aimed at restoring the competitive edge of enterprises - of attempts to balance the books by imposing drastic economies paid for by the working class. In the future, the capitalists will have yet another argument for justifying lay-offs, wage cuts, immiseration: "it's the GATT's fault", in the same way as we've already heard that it's all down to the EEC or NAFTA[1]. All these false arguments have only one function: to hide the reality that all this misery is the product of an economic system drowning in its own insoluble contradictions.

A recession without end

At the least flicker of the indices for growth, the leaders of capitalism are encouraged to see the signs of a recovery, and thus the justification of the austerity plans they have carried out. This has especially been the case in France and Germany recently. However, the growth figures in the main economic powers over the past few months show that there's very little for them to get happy about.

Thus, for the whole of the European Union (to give the new title of the former EEC), 'growth' was still a tiny +1% in 1992 before falling to -0.6% in 1993. In the last two years it has gone from +1.6% to -2.2% in Germany (not including the eastern part), from +1.4% to -0.9% in France, and from +0.9% to -0.3% in Italy. All the countries of the European Union have seen a fall in their Gross National Product with one exception: Britain, whose GNP has climbed from -0.5% to +1.9%[2].

Behind the required facade of optimism displayed by the politicians when they announce a recovery in 1994, the various specialized institutes, which address themselves to a more select audience, that of the economic 'decision-makers', are much more cautious. Thus, the Nomura Research Institute, having estimated that Japan's GNP would slip by 1.1% in the fiscal year from April 93 to April 94, envisages a further fall of 0.4% in the ensuing period, i.e. up till April 95. In its report it even says that "the present recession threatens to be the worst since the 1930s", and adds "it is important to note that Japan is about to go from a real recession to a full scale deflation"[3]. After a fall in GNP estimated at 0.5% in 1993[4], the planet's second economic power is not seeing any recovery on the horizon.

Apparently the climate is very different in the USA. With a growth in GNP estimated at 2.8% in 1993[5], the USA (along with Britain and Canada) seems to be an exception among the great powers. The country which has always claimed to symbolize liberal capitalism, which has been the latter's ideological champion, has another occasion to raise high the banner of triumphant capitalism. In the current atmosphere of pessimism, the USA presents itself as the spearhead of faith in the virtues of capitalism and in its ability to overcome all the crises it faces; in similar vein, it poses as the incarnation of 'democracy', an ideal which marks the crowning point of human achievement. Unfortunately for our apostles of eternal capitalism, this endlessly repeated ideological verbiage has very little to do with the nasty reality unfolding on the world scene, including in the USA. All this discourse is above all aimed at preventing the working class becoming conscious of the real situation by encouraging false hopes; it also serves as an ideological vector for America's imperialist interests in the face of its European and Japanese rivals. The highly publicized farce of the GATT shows this clearly.

The myth of the fall in unemployment in the USA

To back up its propaganda about the 'recovery', the USA bases itself on an indicator which has a much greater echo in the working class than the abstractions of GNP: the rate of unemployment. Here again, the USA and Canada seem to be an exception. Among the developed countries, they are the only ones who can claim that the number of unemployed has fallen, whereas everywhere else it has risen faster and faster:

Growth in unemployment (percentage rate)[6]

Is the situation of the workers different in the USA from that of other developed countries? Not a day passes without one of the great enterprises which occupy center stage on the world economy announcing a new train of redundancies. We won't repeat here the lugubrious list of lay-offs announced in recent months - that would take pages and pages. The situation is the same all over the world and the USA really is no exception. Thus, 550,000 jobs were eliminated in 1991, 400,000 in 1992 and 600,000 in 1993. From 1987 to 1992, enterprises of more than 500 employees 'slimmed down' their workforce by 2.3 million. It has not been the big enterprises that have created jobs in the USA, but the small ones. Thus, during the period under consideration, enterprises with less than 20 wage-earners saw a 12% growth in their workforce, those of between 20 and 100 a 4.6% growth[7]. What does this mean for the working class? Quite simply that millions of stable and well-paid jobs have been destroyed and that the new jobs are precarious, unstable, and usually badly paid. Behind the triumphalist employment figures of the US administration lurks all the savagery of a brutal attack on the living conditions of the working class. Such a situation has been made possible by the fact that in the USA, in the name of ‘liberalism' and the sacrosanct law of the market, the rules regulating the labor market is practically non-existent, contrary to the situation that prevails in Europe.

This is the model that the European and Japanese leaders are looking at with envy, in the hope of dismantling what they call the 'rigidity' of the labor market, i.e. the whole system of 'social protection' which has stood for decades and which, depending on the country, takes the form of a minimum wage, protection against redundancy in certain sectors (public service in Europe, large enterprises in Japan), precise rules about redundancy pay, unemployment benefit and so on. In fact, behind the slogans, now being voiced in all the industrial countries, about the need for a greater 'mobility' of the workforce, for a more 'flexible' labor market, lies one of the biggest ever attacks against the living conditions of the working class. This is the 'model' proposed by the USA. Behind the appearances contained in the figures, the diminution of unemployment in the USA does not mean good news for the workers. It corresponds to a huge degradation of proletarian living conditions.

What's true for the unemployment figures is also true for the growth figures. They only have a very distant connection to reality. The return to prosperity is no more than a dream for a capitalist economy that has been in open crisis for 25 years. One example that helps put the euphoric claims of American capitalism in perspective: during the 1980s, under President Reagan, we also had the same assertions about 'recovery' repeated over and over again, a recovery that was supposed to lay the specter of capitalist crisis once and for all. In the end, history took its revenge, and the open recession which followed consigned all this guff to oblivion. In fact the 1980s were years of crisis and the 'recovery' was no more than a hidden recession in which, in contrast to all the ideology, the living conditions of the working class got worse and worse. The present situation is worse still. The least that can be said is that the American 'recovery' is particularly wheezy and has very little significance. It has far more to do with reassuring propaganda than with reality.

A headlong flight into credit

As the GATT debates hotted up, an interesting figure was published in the press: the USA, the European Union, Japan and Canada account for 80% of world exports. This gives an idea of the preponderant weight of these countries on the world market. But it also shows that the economy of the planet is based on three poles: North America, Western Europe and Japan in Asia. And two of these poles, who represent nearly 60% of the total production of these countries, are still deep in recession. Despite all the speechifying of Clinton, who at this level is the continuator of his predecessors Reagan and Bush, the recovery of the world economy is not around the corner - far from it. In these conditions, what then is the significance of the American 'recovery'? Will the USA, Canada and Britain, who were the first to officially plunge into the recession, be the first to climb out of it? Are the positive figures they are boasting about the signs of an imminent revival of the world economy?

Let's take a closer look at this famous American 'recovery'. What's going on? Has Clinton made all the ills of the American economy disappear with the wave of a magic wand? Has he overcome its lack of competivity at the level of exports and thus the vast trade deficit, the colossal budget deficit which translated itself into such a level of debt that the problem of paying it back, and thus of the solvency of the American economy, poses a dire threat to the international financial edifice? None of this has disappeared; rather the opposite has happened. On all levels the situation is worse.

The annual deficit of the USA's trade balance, which in 1987 reached the record level of 159 billion dollars, was only partially reabsorbed, falling to a 'mere' 73.8 billion in 1991. But since then it has grown and grown; it was estimated at 131 billion in 1993[8]. As for the budget deficit, it was estimated at between 260 and 280 billion dollars in 1993. In brief, Clinton has done nothing new; he has continued along the same road as his predecessors, the road of massive indebtedness. Problems are put off till tomorrow and their real aggravation in the present is hidden. The fall in interest rates which has meant that today the Federal Bank lends at a rate of 3%, i.e. a rate equivalent to the official inflation level (and thus lower than the real inflation level) has no other goal than to allow enterprises, individuals, and the state to lighten the burden of debt and to provide a staggering economy with an internal market artificially maintained by 'free' credit. An example: after two years of quasi-stagnation, household consumption has started growing again in the last few months; in the third quarter of 1993 it went up by 4.4%. The essential reason for this is that individuals have been able to renegotiate their loans at a rate of 6.5% instead of 9.5%, 10% or more, thus increasing their disposable income and reviving their taste for living on credit. Thus, the amount of consumer credit jumped by 8% in August, 9.7% in September, and 12.7% in October[9]. The rediscovered confidence of the American economy is above all a new headlong flight into credit.

The USA certainly isn't alone in this massive resort to credit. It's a generalized situation.

Evolution of the net public debt (% age of nominal GNP)[10]

With the exception of Japan, which is using its well-lined pockets to keep its economy afloat and is already in its fifth recovery plan, with no great results, all the major countries are resorting to the drug of credit to avoid an even more dramatic recession. However, although according to the OECD's figures the American state's debt is not the biggest, it remains the case that the USA is the country which has resorted most massively to debt at all levels of its economic activity - state, enterprises, individuals. Thus, according to other sources, the gross deficit of the state represents 130% of GNP, that of enterprises and individuals 170%. The scale of the overall debt of the USA - more than 12,000 billion dollars, although other sources put it much higher - weighs heavily on the world economic situation. This situation means that while the idea of a dynamic towards recovery might sow illusions for a short time and find some provisional confirmation outside the US, basically it's destined to fizzle out.

America's counter-offensive

What for any other country would be seen as a catastrophic situation that would stir the IMF to anger is, in the USA's case, constantly being minimized by all the world leaders. The present 'recovery', like the one in the second half of the 80s, under Reagan, which was activated in a totally artificial manner by the drug of credit, is being claimed as proof of the dynamism of American capitalism, and by extension, of capitalism in general. The reason for this paradoxical situation is not only that all the economies of the world are closely dependent on the American market for their exports, and thus have an interest in sustaining it; it's also that the credibility of the USA is not only defined by the strength of its economy. The USA has other assets: above all, its status as the world's premier imperialist power for decades, its position as head of the western bloc from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the eastern bloc, enabled it to organize the world market in line with its needs. One example of this situation: the dollar is the reigning currency on the world market. Three quarters of international trade takes place in dollars. Even if the western bloc is now finished since the disappearance of the Russian ogre made it lose its cement, even if, as a result, the USA's main economic rivals - Europe and Japan, who used to obey the discipline of the bloc, including on the economic level - are now trying to spread their wings, it remains the case that the whole organization of the world market is inherited from the previous period. As a result, the USA will try to draw the maximum benefit from this in the present situation of exacerbated competition and trade war. The free-for-all around the GATT negotiations is a striking illustration of this situation.

The USA has stated its aims very clearly. The President has announced that the USA wants to raise its annual exports from 638 to 1,000 billion dollars. Which means that the US is seeking to redress its economic situation by restoring a favorable trade balance. An ambitious objective which can only be attained at the expense of other economic powers. The first plank of this policy is the revival of investment; Clinton sees a growing role for the state at this level. It is highly significant that in the USA the gross formation of fixed capital (investment) has risen from +6.2% in 1992 to +9.8% in 1993, whereas in 1993 it fell by 2.3% in Japan, 3.3% in Germany, 5.5% in France , and 7.7% in Italy; in Britain it has only gone up by +1.8%. The USA is armor-plating its economy in order to make it more competitive and to redouble its assault on the world market. But in the conditions of sharpening competition now prevailing, this purely economic policy is not enough. There is a second plank in the policy, consisting of using all the resources of American power to open up to US exports those markets guarded by protectionist barriers.

It's in this framework as well that we have to understand the NAFTA accords, the recent Seattle conference of Pacific seaboard nations, as well as the disputes which have dominated the GATT agreements. Imperialist motivations are clearly not absent from these economic negotiations. After the disappearance of their bloc, the USA must reconstitute and restructure its zones of influence. In the same way that they ensure that their economy benefits from their imperialist strength, they are also using their economic strength to further their imperialist interests. This is not new, but before, the USA's main economic rivals were tied by the discipline of the bloc and so used to grin and bear it. They paid the bill in the name of western solidarity. This is no longer the case.

France's defiant attitude towards the USA was not as isolated as media propaganda would have us believe. It had the support of the majority of European countries, notably Germany. Japan, meanwhile, has also been visibly defending its own interests. The negotiations were thus very hard and had all the appearance of a psycho-drama because, faced with American demands, Europe and Japan defended their own economic interests with a determination they have never shown before. But that's not the only reason. All the great powers, which are also the main exporting countries, have an interest in an agreement to limit protectionism. Even if France is the world's second biggest exporter of agricultural products, the French arguments about the Blair House pre-agreement, which only affected a very small part of its exports, were essentially a publicity-seeking pretext to draw attention away from the discrete and difficult negotiations about much more economically important issues. The dramatization of these negotiations was also based on the intensifying imperialist rivalries between the USA on the one hand, and the Franco-German alliance at the heart of Europe, and Japan, on the other.

France and most of the European countries have to mark their differences because behind these economic negotiations we are also seeing the development of the ideological themes that will serve the future imperialist alignments. It is thus particularly significant that there has been no agreement on audio-visual products. The famous "cultural exception", which France in particular has talked about so much, actually masks the need for those challenging US domination to block American control over the media, which are indispensable for any independent imperialist policy.

The argument that the GATT accord is going to help re-launch the world economy has been churned out in abundance. It has been based largely on a study done by a team of OECD researchers who predicted that the GATT accord would lead to a 213 billion dollar growth in annual world revenue, though they didn't lay too much emphasis on the fact that this prediction is for next century! By then of course, knowing how often the specialists of the day have been proved wrong, these handy predictions will have been forgotten. The real significance of these accords is the exacerbation of the trade war, the aggravation of competition, and thus, in the short term, the further decline of the world economy. They will not change the dynamic of the crisis. On the contrary they are a focus for the tensions and rivalries between the great powers of the world.

Beyond all the illusions that the ruling class is trying to sell today, the storm clouds are gathering over the world economy. Financial crisis, an even deeper slide into recession, the return of inflation is the specters looming on the horizon. For the working class they bring the threat of an increasingly tragic deterioration in its living conditions. But they also announce the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult for the ruling class to make people believe in its system. The crisis pushes the proletariat to struggle in defense of its living conditions, while at the same time opening its eyes to the lies of capitalism. Despite the suffering it brings, the crisis remains the main ally of the revolutionary class.

JJ, 16.12.93

[1] NAFTA: North American Free Trade Agreement, encompassing Canada, the USA and Mexico.

[2] Source: European Commission

[3] Deflation: reference to the crisis of 1929 during which the fall in production and employment was accompanied by a fall in prices.

[4] Source: OECD

[5] idem

[6] idem, except for Italy, which in the meantime has changed its methods of calculation; the source here is the European Commission

[7] idem

[8] idem

[9] Source: Federal Reserve

[10] Source: OECD

In the first part of this chapter (IR 75), we began to examine the historical context in which Marx dealt with capitalist society: as the last in a series of systems of exploitation and alienation, as a form of social organization no less transient than Roman slavery or mediaeval feudalism. We noted that, in this framework, the drama of human history could be considered in the light of the dialectic between the original social ties of humanity, and the growth of commodity relations which has both dissolved these ties and prepared the ground for a more advanced form of human community. In the section that follows we concentrate on the mature Marx's analysis of capital itself - of its inner nature, its insoluble contradictions, and of the communist society destined to supplant it.

Piercing the Commodity's Veil

It is surely impossible for anyone to approach Marx's Capital, its various drafts and annexes from the Grundrisse to Theories of Surplus Value, without a considerable degree of trepidation. This gigantic intellectual accomplishment, this work "for which I have sacrificed health, happiness and family" (Marx to Meyer, April 30, 1867), delves into the most extraordinary detail about the historic origins of bourgeois society, examines in all their concreteness the day-to-day operations of capital from the factory floor to the credit system, 'descends' to the most general and abstract questions about human history and the characteristics of the human species, only to 'ascend' again to the concrete, to the harsh and naked reality of capitalist exploitation. But although this is a work which demands considerable concentration and mental effort from its readers, it is never an academic work, never a mere description, or an exercise in scholarly learning for its own sake. As Marx so often insisted, it is both a description and a critique of bourgeois political economy. Its aim was not simply to classify, categorize or define the features of capital, but to point the way to its revolutionary destruction. As Marx put it in his usual colorful language, Capital is "assuredly the most frightening missile which has ever been launched at the heads of the bourgeoisie" (letter to Becker, April 17, 1867).

Our aim in this article is not, and could not be, to examine Capital and its surrounding works on political economy in any great detail. It is simply to draw out what seem to us to be its central themes, in order to emphasize their revolutionary and thus communist content. We begin as Marx began, with the commodity.

In the first part of this article we recalled that in Marx's view, man's history is not only the chronicle of the development of his productive capacities, but also the chronicle of his growing self-estrangement, of an alienation that has reached its peak in capitalism and the wage labor system. In Capital this alienation is dealt with from various angles, but perhaps its most significant application is contained in the concept of the fetishism of commodities; and to a very large extent, Capital itself is an attempt to see through, expose, and overturn this fetishism.

According to Marx in the opening chapter of Capital, the commodity appears to mankind as a "mysterious thing" (Vol One, chap 1) as soon as it is considered as more than an immediate article of consumption - i.e., when it is considered from the point of view, not of its mere use value, but of its exchange value. The more the production of material objects is subordinated to the needs of the market, to buying and selling, the more mankind has lost sight of the real aims and motives of production. The commodity has cast a spell on the producers, and never has this spell been so powerful, never has this "enchanted and perverted world" developed so much (see Vol Three, chap XLVIII), as in the society of universal commodity production, capitalism - the first society in history where market relations have penetrated to the very heart of the productive system, so that labor power itself has become a commodity. This is how Marx describes the process whereby commodity relations have come to bewitch the minds of the producers:

"... in the act of seeing, there is at all events an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relations between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities" (ibid).

For Marx, uncovering and overthrowing the commodity-fetish was crucial at two levels. First, because the confusion that commodity relations sowed in men's minds made it extremely difficult to grasp the real workings of bourgeois society, even for the most learned and acute theoreticians of the ruling class. And second, because a society which was ruled by the commodity was necessarily a society condemned to escape the control of the producers; not only in an abstract and static sense, but also in the sense that such a social order would eventually pull the whole of humanity towards catastrophe unless it was replaced by a society which had banished exchange value in favor of production for use.

The secret of surplus value

Bourgeois political economists had of course recognized that capitalism was a society based on production for profit; some of them had recognized the existence of class antagonisms and social injustices within this society. But none of them had been able to discern the real origins of capitalist profit in the exploitation of the proletariat. The fetishism of commodities again: in contrast to oriental despotism, or classical slavery, or feudalism, there is no institutionalized exploitation in capitalism, no corvee, no legal ownership of one human being by another, no days fixed for working on the lord's estate. In the straightforward, commonsense view of bourgeois thought, the capitalist buys the workers' 'labor' and gives him, in return, a 'fair day's pay'. If a profit arises from this exchange, or from capitalist production in general, its function is simply to cover the cost and effort expended by the capitalist, which seems fair enough as well. This profit might be produced by the capitalist 'buying cheap and selling dear', i.e. on the marketplace, or through the 'abstinence' of the capitalist himself, or, as in Senior's theory, in the "last hour of labor".

What Marx demonstrated, however, through his analysis of the commodity, was that the origin of capitalist profit lies in a real form of slavery, in the unpaid labor-time extracted from the worker. This is why Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the origins of value, explaining that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor-time embodied in its production. Thus far Marx was in continuity with classical bourgeois political economy (though modern economic 'experts' will tell us that the labor theory of value is no more than a charming antique - which is an expression of the utter degeneracy of bourgeois economic 'science' in this epoch). But Marx's achievement was his capacity to go deeper into the exploration of the peculiar commodity labor power (not labor in the abstract, as the bourgeoisie always approached it, but the worker's capacity to labor, which is what the capitalist actually purchases). This commodity, like any other, was 'worth' the amount of labor-time needed to reproduce it - in this case, to fulfill the worker's basic needs, such as food, clothing shelter, etc. But living labor power, in contrast to the machines that it set in motion, had the unique characteristic of being able to create more value in the working day than was required to reproduce it. The worker who works an 8-hour day may thus spend no more than 4 hours working for himself - the rest is given 'free' to the capitalist. This surplus value, when realized on the market, is the real source of capitalist profit. The fact that capitalist production is precisely the extraction, realization and accumulation of this stolen surplus labor makes it by definition, by nature, a system of class exploitation in full continuity with slavery and feudalism. It's not a question of whether the worker works for 8, 10 or 18 hours a day, whether his working environment is pleasant or hellish, whether his wages are high or low. These factors influence the rate of exploitation but not the fact of exploitation. Exploitation is not an accidental by-product of capitalist society, the product of individual greedy bosses. It is the fundamental mechanism of capitalist production and the latter could not be conceived without it.

The implications of this are immediately revolutionary. In the marxist framework, all the sufferings, material and spiritual, imposed on the working class, are the logical and inevitable product of this system of exploitation. Capital is without doubt a powerful moral indictment of the misery and degradation that bourgeois society heaps upon the vast majority of its members. Volume One in particular shows in great detail how capitalism was born "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Vol 1, XXXI); how, in its phase of primitive accumulation, nascent capital ruthlessly expropriated the peasants and punished the vagabonds that it had itself created with the whip and the axe; how, both in the early phase of manufacturing, the phase of capital's "formal domination", and in the industrial system proper, the phase of "real domination", the capitalists' "werewolf greed" for surplus value led with the objective force of a machine in motion to the horrors of child labor, the 18-hour day and all the rest. In the same work Marx also denounces the inner impoverishment, the alienation of the worker reduced to a cog in this vast machine, reduced by repetitive drudgery to a mere fragment of his real human potential. But he does all this not with the aim of appealing for a more humane form of capitalism, but of scientifically demonstrating that the very system of wage labor must lead to these 'excesses'; that the proletariat cannot mitigate its sufferings by relying on the good will and charitable impulses of its exploiters, but only by offering a dogged, organized resistance against the day-to-day effects of exploitation; that this inevitably increasing "mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation" can only be done away with through "the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production" (chap XXXII). In short, the theory of surplus value proves the necessity, the absolute unavoidability, of the struggle between capital and labor, classes with objectively irreconcilable interests. This is the granite foundation for every analysis of capitalist economics, politics and social life, which can only be understood clearly and lucidly from the point of view of the exploited class, since the latter alone has a material interest in piercing the veil of mystification with which capital covers itself.

The insoluble contradictions of capital

As we showed in the first part of this article, historical materialism, the marxist analysis of history, is synonymous with the view that each class society has moved through an epoch of ascendance, in which its social relations provide a framework for the progressive development of the productive forces, and an epoch of decadence, in which the same relations have become of growing fetter on further development, necessitating the emergence of new relations of production. Capitalism, in Marx's view, was no exception to this - on the contrary, Capital, indeed Marx's entire work, can justly be described as the necrology of capital, a study of the processes leading to its demise and disappearance. This is why the crescendo to Volume One is the passage where Marx predicts a time when "the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" (Chap XXXII).

The first volume of Capital, however, is mainly a critical study of "The process of production of capital". Its principal aim is to lay bare the nature of capitalist exploitation, and thus largely restricts itself to analyzing the direct relationship between the proletariat and the capitalist class, keeping to an abstract model where other classes and forms of production are of no importance. It is in the subsequent volumes, particularly Volume Three and the Theories of Surplus Value (part two), as well as in the Grundrisse, that Marx embarks upon the next phase of his missile attack upon bourgeois society: demonstrating that the fall of capital will be the result of contradictions rooted in the very heart of the system, in the production of surplus value itself.

Already in the 1840s, and especially in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had identified the periodic crises of overproduction as the harbingers of the eventual demise of capitalist society. In Capital and the Grundrisse, Marx devotes considerable space to polemicizing against the bourgeois political economists who tried to argue that capitalism was essentially a harmonious economic system in which every product could, all being well, find a purchaser - i.e. that the capitalist market could absorb all the commodities churned out in the capitalist production process. If crises of overproduction did take place, went the arguments of economists like Say, Mill and Ricardo, they were the result of a purely contingent imbalance between supply and demand, some unfortunate 'disproportionality' between one sector and another; or perhaps they were simply the result of wages being too low. Partial overproduction was possible, but not general overproduction. And any idea that the crises of overproduction sprang from insoluble contradictions built into the very system itself could not be admitted, because that meant admitting the limited and transient nature of the capitalist mode of production itself:

"The apologetic phrases used to deny crises are important are so far as they always prove the opposite of what they are meant to prove. In order to deny crises, they assert unity where there is conflict and contradiction. They are therefore important in so far as one can say they prove that there would be no crises if the contradictions which they have erased in their imagination, did not exist in fact. But in reality crises exist because these contradictions exist. Every reason which they put forward against crisis is an exorcised contradiction, and therefore, a real contradiction, which can cause crises. The desire to convince oneself of the non-existence of contradictions is at the same time the expression of a pious wish that the contradictions, which are really present should not exist" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII).

And in the ensuing paragraphs, Marx shows that the very existence of the wage labor system and of surplus value contains within itself the crises of overproduction:

"What the workers in fact produce is surplus value. So long as they produce it, they are able to consume. As soon as they cease to produce it, their consumption ceases, because their production ceases. But that they are able to consume is by no means due to their having produced an equivalent for their consumption ... By reducing these relations to those of consumer and producer, one leaves out of account that the wage-laborer who produces and the capitalist who produces are two producers of a completely different kind, quite apart from the fact that some consumers do not produce at all. Once again, a contradiction is denied, by abstracting from a contradiction which really exists in production. The mere relationship of wage laborer and capitalist implies:

1. that the majority of the producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production and the raw material;

2. that the majority of the producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus value or surplus product. They must always be overproducers, producers over and above their needs, in order to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII).

In short, because the capitalist extracts surplus value from the worker, the worker always produces more than he can buy back. Of course, this is not a problem from the point of view of the individual capitalist, because he can always find a market with some other capitalist's workers; and the bourgeois political economist is likewise prevented by his class blinkers from seeing the problem from the point of view of the total social capital. But as soon as it is grasped from this standpoint (which only a proletarian theorist can do), then the problem indeed becomes a fundamental one. Marx explains this in the Grundrisse:

" ... the relation of one capitalist to the workers of another capitalist is none of our concern here. It only shows every capitalist's illusion, but alters nothing in the relation of capital in general to labor. Every capitalist knows this about his worker that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer and he therefore wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity. But the relation of every capitalist to his own workers is the relation as such of capital and labor, the essential relation. But this is just how the illusion arises - true for the individual capitalist as distinct from all the others - that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money spender, and not as worker. It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, 'the very existence of a profit upon any commodity presupposes a demand exterior to that of the laborer who has produced it', and hence the demand of the laborer himself can never be an adequate demand. Since one production sets the other into motion and hence creates consumers for itself in the alien capital's workers, it seems to each individual capital that the demand of the working class posited by production itself is an 'adequate demand'. On one side, this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the laborer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs" (The Chapter on Capital, notebook IV).

If the working class, taken as a whole, cannot provide an adequate market for capitalist production, neither can the problem be solved by the capitalists selling each other their products: "If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it" (Capital, vol III, chap XV). Because the aim of capital is the expansion of value, reproduction of value on an ever-extending scale, it requires a constantly expanding market, an "expansion of the outlying fields of production" (ibid), which is why in its ascendant period capitalism was driven to conquer the globe and subject more and more of it to its laws. But Marx was quite aware that this process of expansion could not go on indefinitely: eventually capitalist production would encounter the limits of the market both in the geographic and the social sense, and then what Ricardo and the others refused to admit would become manifest: "that the bourgeois mode of production contains within itself a barrier to the free development of the productive forces, a barrier which comes to the surface in crises and, in particular, in overproduction - the basic phenomenon in crises" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII, section 14).

Just as the bourgeois economists were compelled to deny the reality of overproduction, they were no less troubled by another basic contradiction contained in capitalist production: the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Marx located the origins of this tendency in the imperious necessity for capitals to compete, to constantly revolutionize the means of production, i.e. to increase the organic composition of capital, the relation between the dead labour embodied in machines, which produce no new value, and the living labor of the proletariat. The contradictory consequences of such 'progress' are summarized as follows:

" ... proceeding from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved a logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of the employed living labor is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialized labor set in motion by it, i.e. to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of labor, unpaid and congealed in surplus value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall" (Capital, Vol Three, chap XIII). What worried the more serious bourgeois political economists like Ricardo about this phenomenon was again its inescapable nature, the fact that "the rate of profit, the stimulating principle of capitalist production, the fundamental premise and driving force of accumulation, should be endangered by the development of production itself", because this again implies that capitalist production "has its barrier, that it is relative, that it is not an absolute, but only a historical mode of production corresponding to a definite limited epoch in the development of the material requirements of production" (Vol Three, chap XV).

Marx's unfinished work

Capital is necessarily an unfinished work. Not only because Marx did not live long enough to complete it, but also because it was written in a historical period in which capitalist social relations had not yet become a definitive barrier to the development of the productive forces. And it is surely not unconnected to this that when Marx comes to define the basic element in the capitalist crisis, he sometimes emphasizes the problem of overproduction and sometimes the falling rate of profit, although there is never a mechanical and rigid separation made between the two: for example, the chapter in Volume Three devoted to the consequences of the falling rate of profit (Chap. XV, 'Internal contradictions of the law') also contain some of the most elucidating passages about the problem of the market. Nevertheless this apparent gap or inconsistency in Marx's theory of crisis has led, in the actual epoch of capitalism's decline, to the emergence within the revolutionary movement of different theories about the origins of this decline. Not surprisingly, they fall under two main headings: those based on Rosa Luxemburg's work, stressing the problem of realization, and those deriving from the work of Grossman and Mattick, emphasizing the falling rate of profit.

This is not the place for a detailed examination of these theories, a task we have at least initiated elsewhere (see in particular 'Marxism and crisis theory', IR 13). At this point we simply want to reiterate why for us Luxemburg's approach is the most coherent.

'Negatively', it's because the Grossman-Mattick theory, which denies the fundamental character of the realization problem, seems to regress to the bourgeois political economists denounced by Marx for claiming that capitalist production created a sufficient market for itself. At the same time, the adherents of the Grossman-Mattick theory often resort to the arguments of revisionist economists like Otto Bauer, whom Luxemburg ridiculed in her Anti-critique for arguing that the abstract mathematical schemas on expanded reproduction that Marx constructed in Capital Vol Two 'solved' the problem of realization and that Rosa Luxemburg's whole approach was a simple misunderstanding, the raising of a non-problem.

In a more positive sense, Rosa Luxemburg's approach provides an explanation for the historically concrete conditions determining the onset of the permanent crisis of the system: the more capitalism integrated the remaining non-capitalist areas of economy into itself, the more it created a world in its own image, the less it could constantly extend the market and find new outlets for the realization of that portion of surplus value which could be realized neither by the capitalists nor the proletariat. The inability of the system to go on expanding in the old way brought about the new epoch of imperialism and inter-imperialist wars, signaling the end of capitalism's progressive historical mission and threatening humanity with a relapse into barbarism. All this, as we have seen, was fully in line with the 'problem' of the market as posed by Marx in his critique of political economy.

At the same time, while the Grossman-Mattick approach, at least in its pure form, simply denies this whole question, Luxemburg's method allows us to see how the problem of the falling rate of profit becomes increasingly acute once the world market no longer has a field of expansion around it: if the market is glutted, there is no longer the possibility of compensating for the fall in the rate of profit, i.e. the decreasing amount of value contained in each commodity, by a rise in the mass of profit, i.e. by producing and selling more commodities; on the contrary, the attempt to do so only exacerbates the problem of overproduction. Here it becomes evident that the two essential contradictions uncovered by Marx act on each other and aggravate each other, deepening the crisis and making it ever more explosive.

"In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII). This is certainly true of the economic disaster that has ravaged the capitalist world over the past quarter century. Despite all the mechanisms that capitalism has installed to delay the crisis, indeed to cheat the consequences of its own laws (mountains of debt, state intervention, the organization of world-wide fiscal and trade organisms, etc), this crisis has all the hallmarks of the crisis of overproduction, revealing as never before the true absurdity and irrationality of the bourgeoisie's economic system.

In this crisis we are faced, to a far greater degree than in the past, with the insane contrast between the vast potential for wealth and enjoyment promised by the development of the productive forces, and the actual misery and suffering induced by the social relations of production. Technically speaking, the whole world could be provided with adequate food and shelter: instead millions starve while food is dumped in the ocean, farmers are paid not to farm, and unimaginable scientific and financial resources are cast into the abyss of military production and war; millions go homeless while building workers are thrown onto the dole; millions are forced to work more and more intensively, for longer and longer hours, in order to meet the needs of capitalist competition, while millions more are ejected from work into the idleness and poverty of unemployment. And all because there is this crazy epidemic of overproduction. Not, as Marx pointed out, overproduction in relation to need, but overproduction in relation to the capacity to pay. "There are not too many necessities of life produced, in proportion to the existing population. Quite the reverse. Too little is produced to decently and humanely satisfy the wants of the great mass ... On the other hand, too many means of labor and necessities of life are produced at times to permit of their serving as means for the exploitation of laborers at a certain rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced to permit of a realization and conversion into new capital of the value and surplus value contained in them under the conditions of distribution and consumption peculiar to capitalist production ... Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms" (Capital, Vol Three, chap XV).

In short, the crisis of overproduction, which can no longer be attenuated by a new expansion of the market, exposes the fact that the productive forces are no longer compatible with their "capitalist integument", and that this integument must be "burst asunder". The fetishism of commodities, the tyranny of the market, must be overthrown by the revolutionary working class, the only social force capable of taking hold of the existing productive forces and orienting them towards the satisfaction of human needs.

Communism: a society without exchange

The definitions of communism in Marx's 'mature' theoretical work operate at two connected levels. The first derives logically from the critique of commodity fetishism, of a society ruled by mysterious, non-human forces, and caught up in the terrible consequences of its inner contradictions. It is, in fact, Marx's attempt to concretize a project already announced in The Jewish Question in 1843: that human emancipation requires man to recognize and organize his own social powers instead of being dominated by them. He thus outlines the solution to the insoluble contradictions of commodity production: an essentially simple form of social organization where the divisions based on private property have been superseded, where production is carried on for need, not profit, and where calculations of labor time, instead of being applied as a wrack for each individual worker and the working class as a whole, are directed solely towards working out how much social labor should be expended on the production of such and such necessities:

"The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip itself of its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan" (Capital, Vol One, Chap I).

"Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of a change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor-power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson's labor are here repeated, but with the difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labor, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as a means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organization of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labor-time. Labor-time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of common labor borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labor and its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but to distribution" (ibid).[1]

For all that these features seem transparently simple, even obvious, it has time and again been necessary for marxists to insist on this minimal definition of a communist society against all the false 'socialisms' that have plagued the workers' movement for so long. In the Grundrisse, for example, there is a long polemic against Proudhonist fantasies about a socialism based on fair exchange, a system where the worker is paid in full for the value of his product, and money is replaced by a kind of non-money to measure this exchange. Against this, Marx insists both that "it is impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products" (Chapter on Money), and that in a real communist society, "the labor of the individual is posited from the outset as social labor. Thus, whatever the particular material form of the product he creates or helps to create, what he has bought with his labor is not a specific and particular product, but rather a specific share of the communal production. He therefore has no particular product to exchange. His product is not an exchange value" (ibid).

In Marx's day, when he criticized "the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists" (Grundrisse, Chapter on capital, notebook V), he was referring to confused elements in the workers' movement. But in the period of capitalist decay such ideas are not simply wrong; they have become part of the arsenal of the counter-revolution. One of the distinguishing features of the entire left wing of capital from the Labor Party through the Stalinists to the most radical Trotskyists, is that all of them identify socialism as a capitalist society without private capitalists, a system where capital has been nationalized and wage labor statified, and where commodity production still reigns supreme, if not within each national unit then on world scale, as a relation between the various 'socialist nations'. Naturally, as we saw with the Stalinist system in the old eastern bloc, such a system in no way avoids the fundamental contradictions of capital and is just as doomed to collapse as the more classical variants of bourgeois society.

The realm of freedom

Thus far, Marx has described the material underpinnings of communist freedom, its basic prerequisites:

"Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis." (Capital, Volume Three, chap XLVIII).

The true goal of communism, therefore, is not merely a negative freedom from the domination of arbitrary economic laws, but the positive freedom to develop human potential to its utmost, and for its own sake. As we have noted before, this far-reaching project was announced by Marx in his early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and he never deviated from it at any stage in his later work.

The passage just cited is preceded by the statement that "the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production". This is true insofar as the enormous development of labor productivity under capitalism, the automation of production (which is clearly glimpsed by Marx in a number of passages in the Grundrisse), make it possible to reduce to a minimum the amount of time and energy spent on repetitive and unrewarding tasks. But when Marx actually begins to examine the content of the free activity characteristic of a communist humanity, he recognizes that such an activity will overcome any rigid separation between free time and working time:

"It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labor time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labor cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labor requires practical use of hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise" (Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital, notebook VII).

Thus, if Marx criticizes Fourier for thinking that labor can become "mere fun, mere amusement" (a misunderstanding kept alive by the successors of Fourier who abound on the margins of the revolutionary movement, such as the Situationists), he offers instead not a greyer, more mundane goal, but one far more epic in scope, pointing out that "the overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity - and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits - hence as self-realisation, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely labor" (Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital, notebook VI). And again: "Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion" (ibid).

The worldview of the first laboring class to be a revolutionary class, and thus one which recognizes labor to be the specifically human form of activity, marxism cannot envisage human beings finding real satisfaction in mere 'leisure' conceived in abstract opposition to work; it thus affirms that humanity will find its true fulfillment in a form of active creation, an inspired fusion of labor, science and art.

**********

In the next part of this series, we will follow Marx's 'return' from the abstract world of economic studies to the practical world of politics, in the period that culminated with the first proletarian revolution in history, the Paris Commune. In so doing, we will trace the development of the marxist understanding of the political problem par excellence: the problem of the state, and how to get rid of it.

CDW

[1] We will return in another article to the question of labor-time as a measure of individual consumption. But let's note that here labor-time no longer dominates the worker or society; society uses it consciously, as a means of planning the rational production and distribution of use-values. And, as Marx points out in the Grundrisse, it certainly no longer measures its real wealth in terms of labor-time, but in terms of disposable time. 

IR76, 1st Qtr 1994

As a new recovery in proletarian combativity develops across the world, the need for greater unity within the revolutionary milieu is posed more sharply than ever. Consequently, it is important that revolutionary organisations should show themselves capable of drawing up a balance sheet of what has been achieved in this domain during the last few years, and of learning its lessons for the future.

This article aims to contribute to this effort. It is concerned in particular with a critique of the experience of the IBRP, in a spirit not of “competition”, but of a sincere and fraternal confrontation of positions. Our aim is not to criticise the IBRP’s practice for its own sake, but to illustrate the mistakes to be avoided, through this organisation’s experience.

During the last two years, something has begun to change within the international proletarian milieu: an awareness is beginning to emerge, fitfully and with many hesitations it is true, that revolutionaries must stand together if they are to live up to their responsibilities.

The ICC’s Appeal

In 1991, the ICC’s 9th International Congress published an “Appeal to the Proletarian Milieu”. It called upon the milieu to combat the sectarianism that weighs on it, and urged it to regard this combat as a vital matter for the working class. It expressed the first stirrings of a change in the atmosphere within the proletarian political movement.

“Instead of a total sectarian isolation, we find today in the different groups a greater will to air their reciprocal critiques in the press or in public meetings. Furthermore there is and explicit appeal from the comrades of Battaglia Comunista (BC) to overcome the present dispersion: an appeal whose arguments and aims we largely share. Finally there exists - and this must be encouraged to the full - a ‘push from below’ against sectarian isolation, which comes from a new generation of young elements that the earthquake of these last two years has pushed towards communist positions and who remain baffled by this politically unexplained dispersion (...)

“The threat today posed to the working class by capitalism in decomposition is the destruction of the proletariat’s class unity in a thousand fratricidal confrontations, from the sands of the Gulf to the frontiers of Yugoslavia. It is for this reason that the defence of its unity is a question of life or death for our class. But what hope can the proletariat have to maintain this unity, if even its conscious vanguard renounces the fight for its unification? Don’t anyone tell us that this is an appeal to “Kiss and make up”, an “opportunistic avoiding of divergences”. Remember that it was precisely their participation at Zimmerwald which allowed the Bolsheviks to unify the left at Zimmerwald, embryo of the Communist International, and make the definitive separation with Social Democracy” (International Review no 67).

The Appeal continued:

“It’s not a question of hiding divergences in order to rush into “marriages” between groups, but of beginning to discuss openly the divergences which are at the origins of the existence of different groups.”

The point of departure is to systematise the reciprocal critique of positions in the press.

“Another step which can be taken immediately is to systematise the presence and intervention at public meetings of other groups. A more important step is the confrontation of positions in jointly convoked public meetings...”.

Small Steps Forward

Our Appeal has not met with any explicitly favourable response from the other proletarian organisations. Nonetheless, some positive steps have continued to be taken:

 - the Bordigist group which publishes Il Comunista and Le Prolétaire has engaged in open polemics with other Bordigist organisations and with BC;

 - the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO, from GB) has opened its pages to other groups, has taken part with other groups in a discussion circle in the north of England, and recently took the unusual step of inviting the ICC to participate in a “readers’ meeting” in London;

 - for the last two years, the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP: formed by the CWO and BC in 1984) has made space for the ICC’s publications on their stand at the annual “Fête de Lutte Ouvrière” in Paris [1] [20];

 - BC has published BC Inform, a newsletter designed to circulate information among the proletarian groups internationally;

 - several proletarian groups in Milan (including the ICC, BC, and Programa Comunista) took part in a joint demonstration against the visit by Ligachev (one-time member of the USSR’s Politburo) to that city at the invitation of the local stalinists. Although there are some serious criticisms to be levelled at this action, it nonetheless expressed a desire to break with isolation; a desire which was concretised again shortly afterwards by the same groups’ participation in a day of debates and sale of the internationalist press.

These initiatives are certainly a step in the right direction. But are they enough for us to say that the proletariat’s political organisations are really living up to their responsibilities, at the level demanded by the gravity of the present situation? We do not think so.

In fact, while we may welcome the newfound “openness” of the proletarian groups, we are forced to conclude that it is more an empirical response to the new situation than based on any deeply considered reappraisal.

The need for method

The regroupment of revolutionary militants cannot be left to chance. It demands a consistent method, based on openness to debate combined with a rigorous defence of principle.

Such a method must avoid two dangers: on the one hand, that of falling into “debate for debate’s sake”, mere academic chatter in which everyone says what they like without any concern to establish a dynamic towards common action; on the other hand, the illusion that it is possible to engage in “common work”, on a “technical” basis, without first being clear on principles - principles which can only be determined by open debate.

A lack of method may be excused in new groups who lack experience in revolutionary work: on the part of organisations which lay claim to the heritage of the Italian Left and the Communist International, it cannot. When we look at the history of the IBRP we can only conclude: first that no solid method exists for developing a work of revolutionary regroupment; second, that lack of any method has led to the complete sterility of their efforts.

If we criticise the IBRP’s failure, let it be said straight away that we take no satisfaction from it. We have had our own share of difficulties during the 1980’s. Moreover, we are only too well aware of the terrible fragility of the revolutionary movement as a whole today, especially if we compare this weakness with the enormous responsibilities confronting the working class and its political organisations in the present period. The object of studying the movement’s failings, past and present, is to overcome them and so better to prepare ourselves to confront the future. Revolutionaries study the history of their class, not slavishly in search of “recipes” or “formulae”, but in order to benefit from their class’ historical experience in confronting the problems of the present. They may sometimes forget, however, that they themselves are part of that history. After all, Battaglia Comunista has existed since 1952, while the ICC is the longest-lived fully international centralised political organisation in working class history. The International Conferences held at the turn of the 70’s have their place in the proletariat’s history, as much as those of Zimmerwald and Kienthal. The history of the proletarian milieu since the Conferences is not just a matter of “archaeological interest” as BC would have it (Workers’ Voice no.62): it has been the testing ground for the different conceptions of intervention and regroupment that were expressed by the different groups at the Conferences.

The proletariat has a historic task to accomplish: the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of communist society. In carrying out this task, it has only two weapons: its consciousness, and its unity. The revolutionary organisations therefore have a dual responsibility: to intervene in the working class, in order to defend the communist program, and to work for the regroupment of revolutionaries as an expression of the unity of the class.

We should be in no doubt about the eventual purpose of this regroupment: the formation of the world Communist Party, the last International, without which a successful communist revolution is an impossibility.

The work of regroupment has several facets, related but distinct:

 - the integration of individual militants into communist organisations, since the very principle of proletarian activity is that of organised collective action on the basis of a common commitment to the communist cause;

 - the organisations of the capitalist heartlands, where the proletariat’s historical experience is the greatest, have a special responsibility to the groups emerging in the capitalist periphery in the most difficult conditions of material deprivation and political isolation. These groups can only survive, and play their role in the worldwide unification of the working class, if they can break out of their isolation and become part of a wider movement;

 - finally, all the communist organisations, and above all what we may term the “historic groups” (i.e. those with a direct historical affiliation to the working-class organisations of the past) have a responsibility to show their class that there is a fundamental difference, a class line, drawn between all those groups and organisations which stand firm on the defence of internationalist principles, and those “Socialist” or “Communist” parties whose sole purpose is to strengthen the bourgeois hold over the oppressed. In other words, the communists must clearly delimit and defend a proletarian political milieu.

In the basis of an abandonment of the lack of method, opportunistic attitudes, and sectarianism that the IBRP has demonstrated ever since its formation in 1984.

The International Conferences of the Communist Left

This article is not the place for a detailed history of the International Conferences [2] [21] but we do need to recall some aspects of them. The first Conference, called by BC [3] [22], met in Milan in 1977; the second in Paris, in November 1978; the third also met in Paris in 1980. Apart from BC, the CWO and the ICC, a number of other groups that stood on the terrain of the Communist Left took part [4] [23]. The criteria for participation in these Conferences, as defined and clarified during the first two Conferences, were as follows:

“ - Recognition of the October revolution as a proletarian revolution;

 - Recognition of the break with Social-Democracy carried out by the First and Second Congresses of the Communist International;

 - Rejection without reservations of state capitalism and self-management;

 - Rejection of all communist and socialist parties as bourgeois parties;

 - Orientation towards a revolutionary organisation that takes marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat;

 - Recognition of the refusal of the proletariat’s enrolment, in any form whatever, under the banners of the bourgeoisie” [5] [24]

The ICC stood foursquare behind the Conferences, as they were proposed in BC’s initial circular letter:

“In the kind of situation we are living today, where the dynamic of things progresses much more quickly than the dynamic of the world of men, it is the duty of the revolutionary forces to intervene in events with a will to achieve something on the terrain which gave birth to them, and is now in a state to receive them. But the Communist Left would fail in the task if it did not provide itself with effective weapons from the viewpoint of theory and political practice. This means:

a) above all, leaving the state of impotence and inferiority into which they have been led by a provincialism fostered by cultural factors marked with dilettantism, by an incoherent self-satisfaction which has taken the place of revolutionary modesty, and especially the weakening of the concept of militantism understood as a hard and disinterested self-sacrifice;

b) establishing a historically valid programmatic base; for our party, this is the theoretical and practical experience of the October Revolution, and on the international level the critical acceptance of the theses of the Communist International’s 2nd Congress;

c) recognising that it is impossible to arrive either at class positions, or at the creation of a world party of the revolution, still less at a revolutionary strategy, without first resolving the need to set in motion a permanent international centre of liaison and information, which will be the anticipation and the synthesis of what will be the future International, just as Zimmerwald, and above all Kienthal, were prefigurations of the IIIrd International” (Proceedings of the 1st International Conference).

“The Conference should also indicate how and when to open a debate on problems such as the trades unions, the party and so many others which today divide the international Communist Left, if we want the Conference to have a positive conclusion, and be a step towards a broader objective, towards the formation of an international front of groups of the Communist Left which will be as homogeneous as possible, so that we can finally leave the political and ideological tower of Babel and avoid a dismemberment of the existing groups” (2nd Letter from BC, ibid).

There was a further objective to the Conference: “the gravity of the situation (...) demands the taking up of precise and responsible positions, based on a unified vision of the various currents of the international communist left” (BC’s 1st Letter).

During the Conferences, however, it can hardly be said that BC shone by its coherence. Far from “taking up precise and responsible positions”, BC consistently refused the slightest common position: “We are opposed in principle to common declarations, for they do not express a political accord” (BC intervention at the 2nd Conference); “it is not the greater or lesser number of groups signing the resolution [on the international situation, proposed by the ICC] which will give it a greater or lesser weight in the class” (BC intervention at the 3rd Conference).

It is worth remembering that the 3rd Conference was held just after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and that all the groups present agreed on the imperialist nature of the USSR, the inevitability of war under capitalism, and the responsibility of the proletariat in holding back the march to war - which was certainly enough to set the Communist Left apart from the Trotskysists, Stalinists, Socialists, and democrats who were all urging the workers to support one side or another in the confrontation between the imperialist blocs of the USA and the USSR in Afghanistan [6] [25].

Following the Conferences’ demise, BC could write, in 1983: “The Conferences have accomplished their essential task which was to create a climate of confrontation and debate at an international level within the proletarian camp”; “we consider them as instruments of classification and political selection within the revolutionary camp” (BC’s reply to the address launched by the ICC’s 5th International Congress in 1983). Whatever happened to the “permanent international centre of liaison and information”? Where is “the international front of groups of the Communist Left”?

The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party

Of course, anybody can change their minds, even a “serious leading force”, as BC likes to call itself. Having defined a “revolutionary camp” of serious groups (which in fact boiled down to... themselves!), within the “proletarian camp” (which includes the ICC amongst others, thank you very much!), BC and the CWO set about calling a 4th International Conference, and founding the IBRP.

As BC said in one of their last interventions at the 3rd and final Conference: “We want to undertake a 4th Conference which is a place for work and not merely for discussion... To work together requires common ground. For example, common work can only be undertaken with groups which recognise the need to create vanguard workers’ groups, organised on a revolutionary platform”. In Revolutionary Perspectives no.18, the CWO also announced their intention “to develop discussions and joint work with a view to the CWO regrouping with the PCInt. This does not mean that the process is near an end, nor does it mean that issues will be pushed aside or forgotten, but our recent cooperation at the Third Conference gives us the optimism that a positive conclusion can be realised”. A 4th International Conference was declared necessary which “does not reproduce the limitations of its predecessors but which is the preliminary condition for possible common political work on an international scale”.

By the time the IBRP was formed, the 4th “Conference” had been and gone: it was a complete fiasco [7] [26], and the experiment has not been repeated since. Nevertheless, the first issue of the IBRP’s Communist Review could still state, “In the Conferences groups and organisations belonging to the proletarian political camp meet, converge, and confront each other”. The Bureau’s platform, meanwhile, was supposed to represent “a moment in the synthesis of the groups’ platforms at the national level”.

Nine years later, what is the situation? The International Conferences have remained a dead letter. There has been no regroupment between BC and the CWO: indeed, as far as we can tell from their press there have not even been any discussions between them to resolve their differences, for example on the parliamentary or trades union questions. The French comrades, who in 1984 had “the intention of laying the foundations for an organisational recovery of the revolutionary movement on the organic positions now put forward by the IBRP” have disappeared without a trace. The only other group to join the IBRP - Lal Pataka in India - has foundered in a welter of sectarian anti-IBRP diatribe, and likewise disappeared.

The thirteen years since the 3rd Conference have sorely tried the proletarian milieu: militant forces that the working class can ill afford to lose have gone down with all hands. Just look at the fate of the groups which took part in the Conferences, even if only by correspondence: PIC (France), Forbundet Arbetarmakt (Sweden), Eveil Internationaliste (France), Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste d’Algérie, have all disappeared. The GCI has moved towards leftism with its support for Sendero Luminoso; the NCI in its various permutations has gone over completely to the bourgeoisie by supporting Iraq during the Gulf War. The Fermento Obrero Revolucionario is foundering in complete stagnation.

Certainly, the disappearance of some of these groups was due to a necessary decantation. Nor is there any point in trying to remake history with “ifs”. Nonetheless, we can say that the failure of the Conferences as a place where the Communist Left could define itself and affirm its revolutionary nature against the 57 varieties of leftism, has deprived new groups searching for coherence, of any kind of solid anchorage in the ideological storms of decomposing capitalism. As it is, emerging groups which cannot identify completely with the positions of an existing organisation within the Communist Left are condemned to isolation, with all that that entails in terms of political stagnation, demoralisation and opening to the infiltration of bourgeois ideology.

And the IBRP has failed to provide any kind of substitute. Their alternatives have remained nothing but proposals. Thirteen years after the CWO announced the perspective of a regroupment with BC, none has taken place.

The IBRP in India

To understand why the IBRP has been unable to conduct any solid regroupment, it is useful to look at the attempt to integrate the Indian Lal Pataka group into the IBRP.

For one thing, the IBRP has constantly deluded itself as to the potential for regroupment of groups whose origins lie in the enemy camp, especially in leftism. These delusions are themselves tied to an ambiguous attitude to mass movements on a non-proletarian terrain, which Battaglia at least has never overcome. At the 2nd International Conference, BC could say that the task of communists is to “lead the movements of national liberation” and to “work in the direction of a class cleavage within the movement, not by judging it from outside”. These positions were repeated in the “Draft Theses on the Tasks of Communists in Capitalism’s Periphery”, which went on to conclude that “Capital’s domination in these countries [ie of the periphery] is not yet total over society, it has not subjected the entire collectivity to the laws of the ideology of capital as it has in the metropolitan countries. In the peripheral countries the political and ideological integration of individuals into capitalist society is not the mass phenomenon of the metropolitan countries because the exploited individual, poverty-stricken and oppressed, is not yet the citizen-individual of the original capitalist formations. This difference with the metropolitan countries makes mass communist organisations a possibility in the periphery (...) Such ‘better’ conditions imply the possibility of organising masses of proletarians around the proletarian party” (Communist Review no. 3).

We have said, over and over again, that it is a fatal mistake to think that communists can somehow “take over the leadership” of national liberation struggles, national revolutionary struggles, or whatever else one may want to call these struggles between “nations”. Such struggles are in fact a direct attack on proletarian consciousness, because they drown the only revoutionary class in the mass of “the people” - a danger which is especially great in the peripheral countries, where the proletariat is already heavily outnumbered by the peasantry and the masses of the landless poor.

We know this, not just from theory but from practice. The ICC’s oldest section, in Venezuela, was formed in direct opposition to all the Guevarist “national liberation” ideologies prevalent in the left at the time. More recently, our experience in forming our section in Mexico has confirmed - if that were necessary - that a solid communist presence can only be established by confronting all the varieties of leftism head-on, and by establishing a totally rigorous class line between bourgeois leftism, however radical, and proletarian positions.

The IBRP has consistently failed to establish this clear separation, from the “4th International Conference” held with Iranian CP supporters, to the fraternal correspondence with the “Marxist-Leninist” Revolutionary Proletarian Platform (RPP) group in India. Not surprisingly, the leftists themselves are often clearer about the real divisions between themselves and the communists than is the IBRP. Thus the Indian RPP: “... on the question of participation in reactionary trade unions and bourgeois parliaments it is difficult for us to be in agreement with you or any other trend who rejects such participation outright. Even though we recognise that your position on trade unions (...) is much saner in comparison with the ICC (who consider trade unions to have been integrated into the bourgeois state and hence need only to be smashed), we feel that in essence it remains a critique of the Bolshevik Leninist approach to the question from an extremely ‘left wing’ standpoint, since it starts from the same theoretical premise as that of the ICC and similar trends” (letter from RPP to the IBRP in Communist Review no. 3).

Ironically, the CWO now seems to have arrived at our own position as to the impossibility of groups (as opposed to individuals) moving from the bourgeois to the proletarian camp: “The politics of these [Trotskyist] organisations are without doubt within the left wing of capitalism and it would be a massive error to imagine that any such organisation could move back into the camp of Internationalist Communism” (Workers’ Voice no 65).

But neither the CWO, BC, or the IBRP, proved capable of understanding this in their attitude towards the supporters of the Iranian CP in exile (SUCM), or to the Indian Maoist organisation RPP (and it’s worth pointing out that, unlike Trotskyism, Maoism never belonged to the proletarian camp). On the contrary, just as the exclusion of the ICC from the 3rd International Conference was followed by the fiasco of the 4th, held with the former group as sole “visiting team”, so the IBRP was quite happy to team up with RPP in India in “the political battle against [the ICC’s] supporters” (Communist Review no 3), and to accept RPP’s Bengali section and newspaper moving bodily “into the camp of Internationalist Communism”.

In Communist Review no. 11, the “Statement on Lal Pataka” remarks that “Some cynical spirits might assume that we had too readily accepted this comrade into the Bureau”. We are not among such “cynical spirits”. The problem lies, not in the IBRP’s “haste” in “accepting” Lal Pataka, but in the congenital weaknesses of the IBRP itself. Given its own ambiguities on questions like trade unionism, and its own inability to draw a red line between communists and leftists, how can it help others to overcome their own confusions and to break completely with bourgeois ideology? Given the inability of BC and the CWO to carry their own discussions to the point of regroupment, how can the IBRP provide a solid international reference point for those coming towards communist politics?

The IBRP’s opportunist flirts with leftism are only matched by their sectarian attitude to groups not immediately within their “sphere of influence”. Communist Review no. 3 (1985), which deals to a large extent with groups in India, makes no mention of the Communist Internationalist group, nor of the group which was later to publish Kamunist Kranti, although both were known to the CWO at least. By 1991, Lal Pataka has disappeared from the pages of Workers’ Voice, to be replaced by Kamunist Kranti: “we hope that fruitful relations will be established between the International Bureau and Kamunist Kranti in the future”. Two years later, nothing much has come of this, since Communist Review no. 11 tells us that “it is a tragedy that, despite the existence of promising elements no solid nucleus of Indian communists yet exists”. There are only “sparks of consciousness in the midst of this turmoil”. In the meantime, the nucleus of the Communist Internationalist group has become an integral part of the ICC.... The IBRP would contribute more to the difficult process of revolutionary regroupment if it were prepared to recognise the existence of other groups in the movement.

The IBRP in the ex-Eastern bloc

After the failures with the Iranian SUCM, and the Indian RPP, one might have thought that the IBRP would have learnt something about the line dividing bourgeois organisations from the working class. The account of the IBRP’s intervention, with the Austrian Gruppe Internazionalistische Kommunisten (GIK), in the Eastern bloc leads us to doubt this.

While we salute the IBRP’s effort to defend communist positions within the turmoil of the ex-Eastern bloc (and wasn’t this a situation crying out for an "international front of the communist left” to use BC’s words?), it is nevertheless disturbing to see BC’s apparent illusions in the possibility of something positive emerging from the old CP’s. “Our comrades therefore decided to go and see the remnants of the Czechoslovak “Communist” Party. It might have been dangerous to go to communicate to the Stalinists all our hatred for their state capitalist régime of exploitation of our class, but it would be worth it if there were any residue of their working class base present, disorientated and witnessing the last breaths of the Party”. At another meeting, “there was no lack of discussion (including an exchange of ideas with foreign representatives of the IVth International)” (Workers’ Voice no 53, Sept 1990).

How can there be an “exchange of ideas” between those whose one aim is to prop up the putrid corpse of stalinism, and the Left Communists determined to bury it forever? The GIK’s report (in Workers’ Voice no 55) echoes this idea that there can somehow be a “mixture” of proletarian marxism and bourgeois ideology in the East: “There is a broader knowledge of Marxist ideas among the population, some elements of a Marxist materialist analysis are not unknown even if distorted in a bourgeois manner and mixed with a bourgeois content”. But is there anything to choose, in terms of working class consciousness, between a worker in Western Europe who has never heard of “proletarian internationalism”, and one in the East who thinks that it means the Russian invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan? Worse still, the GIK seems to prefer fishing amongst the defrocked Stalinists to intervening in the class itself:

“More important than our street interventions was our single intervention in the new KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) which was reformed in January 1990. It is not homogeneous and the common element of its founders is that they want to maintain “communist ideals” (...) Many of the KPD (...) defend the GDR as a “socialist system with mistakes”. Others are divided between pure Stalinism and those who support the anti-Stalinist left oppositions (both Trotskyist and Communist Left)” (Workers’ Voice no 55, our emphasis). Once again, the distinction is blurred between Trotskyism and Left Communism, as if both could belong to some kind of “anti-Stalinist” common front. This is hardly the kind of intervention which is likely to contribute to a clear-cut break with Stalinism and its Trotskyist defenders.

A New Beginning... or more of the same?

As far as we can tell, nothing has come of the IBRP’s attempts to extend its presence in the nine years of its existence, or of the regroupment between BC and the CWO announced in 1980. The “first serious selection of forces” that BC spoke of after the break-up of the International Conferences has remained... very selective. In summer 1991, the CWO announces: “The historical alternative in our time is either the present capitalist barbarism which will ultimately end in the extinction of human life, or the establishment of socialism by the proletariat (...) To assist in this process requires a greater concentration of forces than we ourselves (or indeed any other group of the proletarian political camp) presently possess. We are therefore trying to find a new and principled means to hold a political dialogue with all who consider themselves to be fighting for the same goals as ourselves”. Thirteen years after BC and the CWO “assumed the responsibility that one has a right to expect from a serious leading force” and broke up the International Conferences, we have come full circle. But as Marx said, history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, and the CWO’s “New Beginning” has not so far led to anything but a semi-regroupment with the CBG. But aren’t the CBG precisely the kind of people of whom BC wrote (in April 1992): “The political importance of a division which is sometimes necessary for precise theoretical interpretation and definition of strategy, has given way, in a certain political milieu and amongst certain personalities, to an exasperating practice of splitting for splitting’s sake, of the individual rejection of any centralisation, any organisational discipline, or any “inconvenient” responsibility in collective party work”?

How can the CWO, which never misses an opportunity to denounce the ICC’s “spontaneism” and “idealism” propose to fuse with the CBG, which insofar as it has any principles at all (i.e. not far) is supposed to defend the ICC’s platform? This unprincipled mish-mash is destined to go the same way as the rest of the IBRP’s efforts [8] [27].

Which way forward?

Twenty years of experience - with its successes and its setbacks - in building an international organisation present on three continents and in twelve countries has taught us one thing at least: there are no short cuts in the work of regroupment. The lack of mutual understanding, the ignorance of each others’ positions, the downright distrust that are the legacy of the thirteen years since the Conferences broke up - none of this will disappear overnight. If we are to rebuild any unity in the proletarian camp, then we must first have a return to “revolutionary modesty” as BC have termed it, and take the very limited steps outlined in the ICC’s “Appeal”: regular polemics, presence at each others’ meetings, common public meetings etc. And when a return to the spirit of the International Conferences does become possible, then it must be on the basis of the lessons of the past:

“There will be other Conferences. We will be there, and we hope to encounter, if their sectarianism hasn’t killed them by then, those groups which have not yet understood the Conferences’ importance, including your’s. And whether or not they be considered as continuators of the three Conferences we have just been through (...), they will profit from their gains:

 - importance of these Conferences for the revolutionary milieu and the whole class;

 - the necessity of criteria for selection;

 - the necessity of taking position

 - rejection of any haste;

 - necessity of deeper discussion on the crucial questions confronting the proletariat.

To build a healthy body, the future World Party, demands a healthy method. These Conferences, in their strong as well as their weak poionts, will have taught those revolutionaries who “have not forgotten how to learn” as Rosa Luxemburg said, what such a method is” [9] [28].

Sven

Communism: a society without a state

According to the popular misconception, which is systematically upheld and disseminated by all the mouthpieces of bourgeois ideology from the tabloid press to the professors of academe, communism means a society where everything is run by the state. The whole identification between communism and the Stalinist regimes in the East rested on this assumption.

And yet it is a total falsehood, reality turned on its head. For Marx, for Engels, for all the revolutionaries who followed in their footsteps, communism means a society without a state, a society where human beings run their affairs without a coercive power standing over them, without governments, armies, prisons or national frontiers.

Of course, the bourgeois world-view has its answer to this version of communism: yes. yes, but that's just a utopia, it could never happen; modern society is too big, too complex; human beings are too untrustworthy, too violent, too greedy for power and privilege. The very sophisticated (professors like J Talmon, author of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, for instance) even inform us that the very attempt to create a stateless society must lead to the kind of monstrous Leviathan state that arose in Russia under Stalin.

But wait: if the vision of stateless communism is no more than a utopia, an idle dream, why do the present-day masters of the state spend so much time and energy repeating the lie that communism=state control over society? Could it be because the authentic version is actually a subversive challenge to the existing order, and because it corresponds to the needs of a real movement that is inevitably force to confront the state and the society that it protects?

If marxism is the theoretical standpoint and method of this movement, the movement of the international working class, then it becomes easy to see why bourgeois ideology in all its forms - not least those that label themselves 'marxist' - has always sought to bury the marxist theory of the state under a huge tip of intellectual refuse. When he wrote The State and Revolution in 1917, Lenin talked about the need to "excavate" the real marxist position on the state from underneath the rubble of reformism. Today, in the wake of all the bourgeois campaigns identifying Stalinist state capitalism with communism, this work of excavation still needs to go on. Hence this article, which focuses on a monumental event - the Paris Commune, first proletarian revolution in history -  which bequeathed to the working class the most precious lessons on precisely this question.

The First International: Once again, the political struggle

In 1864 Marx emerged from more than a decade of submersion in profound theoretical investigation to return to the world of practical politics. In the decade that followed, his principal energies were to be directed towards two questions that were political through and through: the formation of an international workers' party, and the conquest of power by the working class.

After the long retreat in the class struggle initiated by the defeat of the great social upheavals of 1848, the proletariat in Europe began to show signs of reawakening consciousness and militancy. The development of strike movements around both economic and political demands, the formation of trade unions and workers' cooperatives, the mobilization of workers around questions of 'foreign policy' such as support for Polish independence or for the anti-slavery forces in the American Civil War, all this convinced Marx that the period of defeat was at an end. This is why he gave his active support to the initiative of English and French trade unionists to form the International Workingmen's Association[1] in September 1864. As Marx put it in the report of the General Council to the 1868 Brussels Congress of the International, "this Association has not been hatched by a sect or a theory. It is the spontaneous growth of the proletarian movement, which itself is the offspring of the natural and irrepressible tendencies of modern society". Thus, the fact that the motives of many of the elements who formed the International had little in common with Marx's views (the chief concern of the English trade unionists, for example, was to use it as a means to prevent the import of foreign strike-breakers) did not prevent him from taking a leading role within it, sitting on the General Council for most of its life and writing many of its most important documents. Since the International was a product of the movement of the proletariat at a certain stage in its historical development, a stage in which it was still forming itself as a force within bourgeois society, it was both possible and necessary for the marxist fraction to work alongside other working class tendencies within the International, to participate in its immediate activities around the day-to-day combat of the workers, while at the same time trying to free the organization from bourgeois and petty bourgeois prejudices and to imbue it as far as possible with the theoretical and political clarity it required if it was to act as the revolutionary vanguard of a revolutionary class. 

This is not the place to go into a history of all the doctrinal and practical struggles which the marxist fraction fought within the International. Suffice it to say that they were based on certain principles that had already been laid out in the Communist Manifesto and reinforced by the experience of the 1848 revolutions, in particular:

- that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves" (opening lines of the Provisional Rules of the IWMA). Hence the need for an organization "established by the working men themselves and for themselves" (speech on the 7th anniversary of the International, London, 1871) and to break free of the influence of bourgeois liberals and reformers - in short, to work out an independent class policy and action for the proletariat even in a period where alliances with progressive bourgeois fractions was still on the agenda. Within the International itself, the defense of this principle was to lead to a rupture with Mazzini and his bourgeois-nationalist followers;

- that, consequently, "the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all parties formed by the propertied classes" and that "this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end - the abolition of classes" (resolution of the London Conference of the International on Working Class Political Action, September 1871). This defense of the class party -  a centralized, international organization of the most advanced proletarians[2] - was waged against all the federalist, 'anti-authoritarian' anarchist elements, notably the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin, who believed that all forms of centralization were inherently despotic, and that in any case the International certainly should have nothing to do with politics, either in the defensive or the revolutionary phases of the proletarian movement. Marx's 'Inaugural Address' to the International in 1864 had already insisted that "To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes". The 1871 resolution was thus a reiteration of this founding principle against all those who believed that the social revolution could come to pass without workers taking the trouble to form a political party and to fight for political power as a class.

In the period between 1864 and 1871, the debate about involvement in 'politics' was largely related to the question of whether or not the working class should enter the sphere of bourgeois politics (the call for universal suffrage, participation of the workers' party in elections and parliament, struggle for democratic rights, etc) as a means to obtaining reforms and strengthening its position within capitalist society. The Bakuninists and the Blanquists[3], champions of the omnipotent revolutionary will, refused to analyses the objective material conditions within which the workers' movement was operating, and rejected such tactics as a diversion from the social revolution. Marx's materialist fraction, on the other hand, recognized that capitalism as a global system had not yet completed its historical mission, had not yet laid down all the conditions for the revolutionary transformation of society, and that consequently it was still necessary for the working class to fight for reforms both at the economic and political levels. In so doing, it would not only improve its immediate material situation, but would be preparing and organizing itself for the revolutionary showdown that would inevitably be produced by capitalism's historical trajectory towards crisis and collapse.

This debate was to continue in the workers' movement for decades to come, though in different contexts and with very different protagonists. But in 1871 momentous events in Continental Europe were to add a whole new dimension to the debate on working class political action. For this was the year of the first proletarian revolution in history, the actual conquest of political power by the working class - the year of the Paris Commune.

The Commune and the materialist conception of history

"Every step of a real movement is more important than a dozen programs" (Marx to Bracke, 1875)

The drama and tragedy of the Paris Commune are brilliantly described and analyzed in Marx's The Civil War in France, which was published in the summer of 1871 as an official address of the International. In this passionate diatribe, Marx shows how a war between nations, France and Prussia, was transformed into a war between the classes: following France's disastrous military collapse, the Thiers' government based in Versailles had concluded an unpopular peace and sought to impose its terms on Paris; this could only be done by disarming the workers regrouped in the National Guard. On 18 March 1871 troops sent by Versailles tried to seize cannons under the control of the Guard; this was to be the prelude to a massive repression against the working class and its revolutionary minorities. The workers of Paris responded by taking to the streets and fraternizing with the Versailles troops. In the days that followed they proclaimed the Commune.

The Commune of 1871, in name, was an echo of the revolutionary Commune of 1793, organ of the sans culottes during the most radical phases of the bourgeois revolution. But the second Commune had a very different meaning, looking not to the past, but to the future  - to the communist revolution of the working class.

Although Marx had, during the siege of Paris, warned that an uprising in conditions of war would be "a desperate folly" ('Second Address of the General Council of the IWMA on the Franco-Prussian War'), when the uprising did come Marx committed himself and the International to expressing the most unwavering solidarity with the Communards - among whom the International's members in Paris played a leading role, even though hardly any were of a 'marxist' political persuasion. He could have no other reaction in the face of the vile slanders that the world bourgeoisie threw at the Commune, and of the horrifying revenge that the ruling class exacted from the Parisian proletariat for daring to challenge its 'civilization': after slaughtering thousands of fighters on the barricades, thousands more - men, women and children - were shot down in mass executions, incarcerated in the most abject conditions, deported to hard labor in the colonies. Not since the days of ancient Rome had such a slave-holders' blood orgy been enacted.

But beyond the elementary question of proletarian solidarity, there was another reason why Marx was driven to recognize the fundamental significance of the Commune. Even though the Commune was 'historically' premature in the sense that the material conditions for a world-wide proletarian revolution had not yet matured, the Commune was none the less an event of world-historical importance, a crucial step on the road to this revolution; it was a treasure-house of lessons for the future, for the clarification of the communist program. Before the Commune, the most advanced fraction of the class, the communists, had understood that the working class had to take political power as a first step towards building the classless human commonwealth. But the precise manner in which the proletariat would establish its dictatorship had not yet been clarified because such a theoretical advance could only be based on the living experience of the class. The Paris Commune was such an experience, perhaps the most vivid proof that the communist program is not a fixed and static dogma but something that evolves and grows in intimate connection to the practice of the working class; not a utopia, but a great scientific experiment whose laboratory is the actual movement of society. It is well known that Engels made a particular point, in his later introductions to the Communist Manifesto of 1848, of stating that the experience of the Commune had rendered obsolete those formulations in the text which conveyed the idea of capturing the existing state machine. The conclusions that Marx and Engels drew from the Commune, in other words, are a demonstration and a vindication of the historical materialist method. As Lenin put it in The State and Revolution:

"There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or 'invented' a new society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a natural-historical process. He examined the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it. He 'learned' from the Commune, just as all the great revolutionary thinkers learned unhesitatingly from the experience of great movements of the oppressed classes ..."

Our aim here is not to retell the story of the Commune. The main events are already described in The Civil War in France, as well as in many other works, including those by revolutionaries like Lissagaray who fought on the barricades himself. What we shall try to do here is to examine exactly what it was that Marx learned from the Commune. In another article we will look at how he defended these lessons against all the prevailing confusions in the workers movement of his day. 

Marx against state-worship

"This was ... a revolution not against this or that Legitimist, Constitutional, Republican or Imperialist form of state power. It was a revolution against the state itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life" (Marx, first draft of The Civil War in France).

The conclusions that Marx drew from the Paris Commune were not, on the other hand, an automatic product of the workers' direct experience. They were a confirmation and an enrichment of an element in Marx's thought that had been a constant since he first broke from Hegelianism and moved towards the proletarian cause.

Even before he clearly became a communist, Marx had already begun to criticize the Hegelian idealization of the state. For Hegel, whose thought was a contradictory mélange of radicalism derived from the impetus of the bourgeois revolution, and of conservatism inherited from the stifling atmosphere of Prussian absolutism, the state - and the existing Prussian state at that - was defined as the incarnation of the Absolute Spirit, the perfected form of social existence. In his critique of Hegel, Marx by contrast shows that far from being man's highest and noblest product, the rational subject of social existence, the state, and above all the bureaucratic Prussian state, was an aspect of man's alienation, of his loss of control over his own social powers. Hegel's thought was upside down: "Hegel proceeds from the state and conceives of man as the subjectivised state; democracy proceeds from man and conceives of the state as objectified man" (Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, 1843). At this point, Marx's standpoint is that of radical bourgeois democracy (though very radical, as he was already arguing that true democracy would lead to the disappearance of the state), a standpoint which saw human emancipation as something that lay first and foremost in the sphere of politics. But very rapidly, as he began to view things from the perspective of the working class, he was able to see that if the state alienated itself from society, it was because the state was the product of a society founded on private property and class privilege. In his writings on the Wood Theft Law, for example, he was beginning to adopt the view that the state was the guardian of social inequality, of narrow class interests; in The Jewish Question he was beginning to recognize that real human emancipation could not be restricted to the political dimension but demanded a different form of social life. Thus at its very inception Marx's communism was busy demystifying the state, and it never deviated from this path.

As we have seen in the articles on the Communist Manifesto and the revolutions of 1848 (International Reviews 72 and 73), as communism emerged as a current with a definite political program and organization, it carried on in the same vein. The Communist Manifesto, written before the great social upheavals of 1848, looked forward not only to the seizure of political power by the proletariat, but to the ultimate extinction of the state once its roots - a class-divided society - had been dug out and discarded. And the actual experiences of the movements of 1848 enabled the revolutionary minority organized in the Communist League to cast considerable light upon the proletariat's road to power, stressing the need, in any revolutionary upheaval, for the working class to maintain its own arms and class organs, and even (in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) first suggesting that the task of the insurrectionary proletariat was not to perfect the bourgeois state machine but to smash it.

Thus the marxist fraction did not set about interpreting the experience of the Commune without any theoretical patrimony: the lessons of history are not 'spontaneous' in that the communist vanguard builds on an already-existing framework of ideas. But these ideas themselves must be constantly examined and tested in the light of working class experience, and it was to the glory of the Parisian workers that they offered convincing proof that the working class cannot make its revolution by taking charge of a machine whose very structure and mode of functioning is adapted to the perpetuation of exploitation and oppression. If the first step of the proletarian revolution is the conquest of political power, this can only come about through the violent destruction of the existing bourgeois state.

The arming of the workers

That the Commune arose out of the attempt by the Versailles government to disarm the workers is highly symbolic: it demonstrated that the bourgeoisie cannot tolerate an armed proletariat. Conversely, the proletariat can only come to power with arms in hand. The most violent and ruthless ruling class in history will never allow itself to be voted out of power - it can only be forced out, and the working class can only defend its revolution against all attempts to reverse it by maintaining its own armed force. Indeed, two of the most stringent criticisms that Marx made of the Commune were that it didn't make sufficient use of this force, standing "in superstitious awe" in front of the Bank of France instead of occupying it and using it as a bargaining counter, and failing to launch an offensive against Versailles when the latter still lacked the resources to launch its counter-revolutionary attack on the capital.

But despite its weaknesses in this respect, the Commune made a decisive historical advance when, with one of its first decrees, it dissolved the standing army and introduced the general arming of the population in the National Guard, which was effectively transformed into a popular militia. In so doing, the Commune took the first step towards the dismantling of the old state machine, which finds its expression par excellence in the army, in an armed force standing guard over the population, obeying only the highest echelons of the state machine and totally divorced from any control from below.

Dismantling bureaucracy through workers' democracy

Alongside the army, indeed deeply interpenetrated with it, the institution which most clearly identifies the state as a "parasitic excrescence" that has alienated itself from society is the bureaucracy, that Byzantine network of permanent officials who regard the state almost as their own private property. Again, the Commune took immediate measures to free itself from this parasite. Engels summed these measures up very succinctly in his introduction to The Civil War in France:

"Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society - an inevitable transformation in all previous states - the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts - administrative, judicial and educational - by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides".

Marx also pointed out that by combining executive and legislative functions in itself, the Commune was a "working, not a parliamentary body". In other words, it was a higher form of democracy than bourgeois parliamentarism: even in the latter's hey-day, the division between legislative and executive meant that the latter tended to escape the control of the former and so spawn a growing bureaucracy. This tendency has, of course, been fully confirmed in the epoch of capitalist decadence, in which the executive organs of the state have turned the legislature into a mere facade.

But perhaps the most important proof that the proletarian democracy embodied in the Commune was more advanced than anything evolved under bourgeois democracy is this principle of revocable delegates.

"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes" (The Civil War...). Bourgeois elections are founded on the principle of the atomized citizen in the polling booth, casting a vote which gives him no real control over his 'representatives'. The proletarian conception of elected and revocable delegates, by contrast, can only function on the basis of a permanent and collective mobilization of the workers and the oppressed. In the tradition of the revolutionary sections from which the Commune of 1793 had emanated (not to mention the radical 'agitators' elected from the ranks of Cromwell's New Model army in the English revolution), the delegates to the Commune's Council were elected by public assemblies held in each arrondissement of Paris. Formally speaking, these electoral assemblies had the power to formulate the mandates of their delegates and revoke them if necessary. In practice, it would appear that much of the work of supervising and pressurising the Communal delegates was carried out by the various 'Vigilance Committees' and revolutionary clubs which sprang up in the working class neighbourhoods and which were the focal points of an intense life of political debate, both about general, theoretical questions confronting the proletariat, and about immediate questions of survival, organisation and defence. The declaration of principles by the Club Communal, which met in the church of St-Nicholas-des-Champs in the Third Arrondissement, gives us a glimpse of the level of political consciousness attained by the proletarians of Paris during the heady two months of the Commune's existence:

"The aims of the Club Communal are as follows:

To fight the enemies of our communal rights, our liberties and the republic.

To defend the rights of the people, to educate them politically so that they may govern themselves.

To recall our mandatories to their principles if they should stray from them, and to support them in all their efforts to save the Republic.

Above all, however, to uphold the sovereignty of the people, who must never renounce their right to supervise the actions of their mandatories.

People, govern yourselves directly, through political meetings, through your press; bring pressure to bear on those who represent you - they cannot go too far in the revolutionary direction...

Long live the Commune!"

From semi-state to no-state

Based as it was on the permanent self-mobilization of the armed proletariat, the Commune, as Engels said, "was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word" (letter to Bebel, 1875). Lenin, in his State and Revolution, cites this line and expands on it:

"The Commune was ceasing to be a state since it had to suppress, not the majority of the population, but a minority (the exploiters). It had smashed the bourgeois state machine. In place of a special coercive force the population itself came onto the scene. All this was a departure from the state in the proper sense of the word. And had the Commune become firmly established, all traces of the state in it would have 'withered away' of themselves; it would not have had to 'abolish' the institutions of the state - they would have ceased to function as they ceased to have anything to do".

Thus the 'anti-statism' of the working class operates at two levels, or rather in two stages: first, the violent destruction of the bourgeois state; second, its replacement by a new kind of political power which as much as possible avoids the "worst sides" of all previous states and which ultimately makes it possible for the proletariat to do away with the state altogether, to consign it, in Engels evocative phrase, "to the Museum of Antiquities alongside the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe" (Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State)

From Commune to communism: the question of social transformation

The withering away of the state is predicated upon the transformation of the social and economic infrastructure - upon the elimination of capitalist relations of production and the movement towards a classless human community. As we have already remarked, the material conditions for such a transformation did not exist on a world scale in 1871. In addition to which, the Commune was in power only for two months, and only in one besieged city, even though it inspired revolutionary attempts in other cities in France (Marseilles, Lyons, Toulouse, Norbonne, etc).

When bourgeois historians try to debunk Marx's claims about the revolutionary nature of the Commune, they point to the fact that most of the social and economic measures it took were hardly socialist: the separation of Church and State, for example is entirely compatible with radical bourgeois republicanism. Even the measures which had a more specific impact on the proletariat - abolition of nightwork for bakers, assistance with the formation of trade unions, etc - were designed to defend workers against exploitation rather than do away with exploitation itself. All this has led some 'experts' on the Commune to argue that it was more the last gasp of the Jacobin tradition than the first salvo of the proletarian revolution. Others, as Marx noted, mistook the Commune "for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of ... the  modern state power" (The Civil War...).

All these interpretations are based on a total failure to understand the nature of the proletarian revolution. The lessons of the Paris Commune are fundamentally political lessons, lessons about the forms and functions of proletarian power, for the simple reason that the proletarian revolution can only begin as a political act. Lacking any economic seat inside the old system, the proletariat cannot undertake a process of social transformation until it has taken over the reins of political power, and this on a world scale. The Russian revolution of 1917 took place in a historic epoch where world-wide communism was a possibility, and it was victorious on the scale of a vast country. And still the fundamental legacy of the Russian revolution relate to the problem of working class political power, as we shall see later on in this series. To have expected the Commune to have introduced communism in a single city would have been to expect miracles, and as Marx insisted "the working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic circumstances, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society is pregnant" (The Civil War...).

Against all the false interpretations of the Commune, Marx insisted that it was "essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor" (ibid).

In these passages, Marx recognizes that the Commune was first and foremost a political form, and that there could be no question of any overnight utopias being established under its rule. And yet at the same time, there is a recognition that once the proletariat takes power into its hands, it can and must inaugurate, or rather "set free", a dynamic leading to the "economic transformation of labor", despite all the objective limitations placed on this dynamic. This is why the Commune, like the Russian revolution, does also contain valuable lessons about the future social transformation.

As an example of this dynamic, this logic towards social transformation, Marx pointed to the expropriation of the factories abandoned by capitalists who had fled the city, and their handing over to workers' cooperatives, who were to be organised in a single union. For him, this was an immediate expression of the Commune's ultimate aim, the general expropriation of the expropriators:

"It (the Commune) wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But this is communism, 'impossible' communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system - and they are many - have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production - what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, 'possible' communism?" (ibid).

The working class as vanguard of the oppressed

The Commune has also left us with important elements for understanding the relationship between the working class, once it has seized power, and the other non-exploiting strata of society, in this case the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. By acting as the determined vanguard of the entire oppressed population, the working class showed its capacity to win the confidence of these other strata, who are less capable of acting as a unified social force. And to keep these strata on the side of the revolution, the Commune introduced a series of economic measures that lightened their material burdens: abolition of all kinds of debts and taxes, transformation of the immediate embodiments of the peasant's oppression, "his present bloodsuckers - the notary, advocate, executor - into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself" (ibid). In the case of the peasants, these measures remained largely hypothetical, since the Commune's authority did not extend to the rural districts. But the workers of Paris did to a considerable extent win the support of the urban petty bourgeoisie, particularly through the postponement of debt obligations and the cancelling of interest. 

The state as a necessary evil

The Commune's electoral structures also enabled the other non-exploiting strata to participate politically in the revolutionary process. This was inevitable and necessary, and was to be repeated during the Russian revolution. But at the same time, from the retrospective of the 20th century we can see that one of the main indications that the Commune was an 'immature' expression of the proletarian dictatorship, that it was the creation of a working class which had not yet reached its full development, was the fact that the workers did not have a specific and independent organization within it, or a preponderant weight in its electoral mechanisms. The Commune was elected exclusively from territorial units (the arrondissements) which, while being dominated by the proletariat, could not have allowed the working class to impose itself as a clearly autonomous force (especially if the Commune had spread to embrace the peasant majority outside Paris). This is why the workers' councils of 1905 and 1917-21, elected by workplace assemblies and grounded in the main industrial centers, were an advance upon the Commune as a form of the proletarian dictatorship. We would go so far as to say that the Commune-form corresponded more closely to the state composed of all the Soviets (workers', soldiers', peasants', town residents') which emerged out of the Russian revolution.

The Russian experience has made it possible to clarify the relationship between the specific organs of the class, the workers' councils, and the Soviet state as a whole. In particular, it showed that the working class cannot identify directly with the latter, but must exert a constant vigilance towards and control over it through its own class organizations, which participate in it without being engulfed by it. This is a question which will be examined later on in this series, though it has already been dealt with extensively in our publications (see in particular the ICC pamphlet The State in the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism). But it is worth nothing that Marx himself had a glimpse of the problem. The first draft of The Civil War in France contains the following passage:

"...the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organized means of action. The Commune does not do away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes and therefore of all class rule ... but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way".

Here is a clear insight into the fact that the real dynamic towards the communist transformation does not come from the post-revolutionary state, since the function of the latter is, like all states, to contain class antagonisms, to prevent them tearing society apart. Hence its conservative side in comparison to the actual social movement of the proletariat. Even in the brief life of the Commune, we can determine certain tendencies in this direction. Lissagaray's History of the Paris Commune, in particular, contains a good deal of criticism of the hesitations, confusions, and, in some cases, empty posturings of some of the Commune Council delegates, many of whom indeed embodied an obsolete petty bourgeois radicalism that was frequently outflanked by the more proletarian neighborhood assemblies. At least one of the local revolutionary clubs declared the Commune to be dissolved because it was not revolutionary enough!

Engels, in a more famous passage, is surely delving into this same problem when he says that the state - even the semi-state of the period of transition towards communism - "is at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat will have to lop off as speedily as possible, just as the Commune had to, until a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to discard the entire lumber of the state" (Introduction to The Civil War in France). Further proof that, as far as marxism is concerned, the strength of the state is the measure of man's unfreedom.

From national war to class war

There is another vital lesson of the Commune which relates not to the problem of the proletarian dictatorship, but to a question which has been a particularly thorny one in the history of the workers' movement: the national question.

As we have already indicated, Marx and his tendency in the First International recognized that capitalism had not yet reached the apogee of its development. Indeed, it was still being held back by the vestiges of feudal society and other archaic remnants. For this reason, Marx supported certain national movements in so far as they stood for bourgeois democracy against absolutism, for national unification against feudal fragmentation. The support the International gave to Polish independence against Russian Tsarism, for Italian and German unification, for the American North against the slaveholding South in the Civil War, was based on this materialist logic. They were also causes which mobilized the sympathy and active solidarity of the working class: in Britain for example, there were mass meetings in support of Polish independence, and large demonstrations against British intervention on the side of the American South, even if the cotton famine resulting from the war led to real hardships amongst textile workers in Britain.

In this context, where the bourgeoisie had not yet exhausted its progressive historical tasks, the problem of wars of national defense was a very real one that had to be considered seriously by revolutionaries in each war between states; and it was posed with great acuity when the Franco-Prussian war broke out. The policy of the International towards this war was summarized in the 'First Address of the General Council of the IWMA on the Franco-Prussian War'. In essence, this was a statement of basic proletarian internationalism against the "dynastic" wars of the ruling class. It cited a manifesto produced by the French section of the International when war broke out: "Once more, on the pretext of the European equilibrium, of national honour, the peace of the world is menaced by political ambitions. French, German, Spanish workmen! let our voices unite in one cry of reprobation against war! ... war for a question of preponderance or a dynasty, can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity..." Such sentiments were not restricted to a socialist minority: Marx recounts, in the First Address, how internationalist French workers chased the pro-war chauvinists off the streets of Paris.

At the same time, the International held that "on the German side, the war is a war of self-defense". But this did not mean poisoning the German workers with chauvinism: in answer to the statement of the French section, the German affiliates to the International, while sorrowfully accepting that a defensive war was an unavoidable evil, also declared "the present war to be exclusively dynastic ... we are happy to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France ... Mindful of the of the watchword of the International Workingmens' Association: proletarians of all countries unite, we shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries our enemies" (resolution of a meeting at Chemnitz of a delegation representing 50,000 Saxon workers).

The First Address also warned that German workers should beware that the war did not turn into a war of aggression on the German side as well, and it already contained a recognition of Bismarck's complicity in the war, even though this was before the revelations about the Ems telegram, which proved the extent to which Bismarck actually lured Bonaparte and his 'Second Empire' into the war. In any case, with the collapse of the French army at Sedan, the war did become a war of conquest by Prussia. Paris was besieged and the Commune itself arose around the issue of national defense. The Bonaparte regime was replaced by a Republic in 1870 because the Empire had proved itself incapable of defending Paris; now the same Republic proved that it would rather deliver the capital to Prussia than allow it to fall into the hands of the armed workers.

But although in their initial actions the Paris workers were still thinking in terms of a defensive kind of patriotism, of preserving the national honor besmirched by the bourgeoisie itself, the rise of the Commune in fact marked a historic watershed. Faced with the prospect of a workers' revolution, the Prussian and French bourgeoisies closed ranks to crush it: the Prussian army released its prisoners of war to swell the counter-revolutionary French forces under Thiers, and allowed the latter through their lines in their final push against the Commune. From these events, Marx drew a conclusion of historic significance:

"That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat - this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!" (The Civil War...)

For its part, the revolutionary Parisian proletariat had already begun to take a number of steps beyond its initial patriotic stance: hence the decree enabling foreigners to serve on the Commune, "because the flag of the Commune is the flag of the Universal Republic"; the public destruction of the Vendome Column, symbol of France's martial glory ... the historic logic of the Paris Commune was to push towards the world-wide Commune, even if this was not possible at that time. This is why the uprising of the Paris workers during the Franco-Prussian war, for all the patriotic phrases that accompanied it, was in reality the harbinger of the explicitly anti-war insurrections of 1917-18 and the international revolutionary wave which followed them.

Marx's conclusions also pointed towards the future. He may have been premature to say that bourgeois society was crumbling to dust in 1871: this year may have marked the end of the national question in Europe, as Lenin noted in his Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism, but it continued to be a question in the colonies as capitalism entered into its last phase of expansion. But in a deeper sense Marx's denunciation of the humbug of national war anticipated what would become a general reality once capitalism had entered its decadent phase: henceforth, all wars would become imperialist wars and there could no longer be any question of national defense as far as the proletariat was concerned. And the revolutionary upheavals of 1917-18 also confirmed what Marx had said about the capacity of the bourgeoisie to unite against the threat of the proletariat: faced with the possibility of a world-wide workers' revolution, the bourgeoisies of Europe, who had been tearing each other apart for four years, suddenly discovered that they had every reason to make peace in order to stifle the proletariat's challenge to their blood-soaked 'order'. Once again, the governments of the world were "one as against the proletariat".

**********

In the next article, we will look at the struggle that Marx and his tendency waged against those elements in the workers' movement who failed to understand, or even sought to undermine, the essential lessons of the Commune, in particular the German Social Democrats and Bakunin's anarchists.  CDW

[1] The name International Workingmen's Association was of course a reflection of immaturity in the class movement, since the proletariat has no interest whatever in institutionalizing sexual divisions in its own ranks. As in most great social upheavals, the Paris Commune saw an extraordinary ferment amongst proletarian women, who not only vociferously challenged their 'traditional' roles but also were often the bravest and most radical defenders of the Commune, in the revolutionary clubs as well as on the barricades. This ferment also gave rise to the formation of women's sections of the International, which was an advance at the time even if such forms have no function in today's revolutionary movement.

[2] The term "constitution of the proletariat into a party" reflects certain ambiguities about the role of the party which were also a product of the historical limitations of the period. The International contained some of the features of a unitary organization of the class; and throughout the 19th century, the notion that the party either represented the class, or was the class in its organized form, was very deeply implanted in the workers' movement. It was not until the 20th century that such ideas were overcome, and then only after much painful experience. Nevertheless, there already existed a basic grasp of the fact that the party is the organization not of the whole class, but of its most advanced elements. Such a definition is already outlined in the Communist Manifesto, and the First International also saw itself in such terms when it said that the workers' party was "that section of the working class which has become conscious of the common class interest" ('The Prussian Military Question' and the German Workers' Party', written by Engels in 1865).

[3] The Blanquists shared the Bakuninists' voluntarism and impatience, but they were always clear that the proletariat had to establish its dictatorship in order to create a communist society. This is why Marx was, on certain crucial occasions, able to form an alliance with the Blanquists against the Bakuninists on the question of working class political action. 

To listen to the bourgeoisie's propaganda, one would think that they only had the good of humanity at heart. The talk about the "defense of freedom and democracy", "human rights", or "humanitarian aid" are completely at odds with reality. All the noise that accompanies the speeches is proportional to the size of the lie it carries. As the master of Nazi propaganda, Goebbels, said: "The bigger the lie, the better its chance of being believed". The whole bourgeoisie applies this rule assiduously. The decadent capitalist state has developed a monstrous propaganda apparatus, rewriting history, drowning out events with media noise to mask capitalism's barbaric and criminal nature, which no longer brings any progress to humanity. This propaganda weighs heavily on the consciousness of the working class. That is what is designed for.

The two articles that follow - "The secret workings of the Italian state", and "The Mexican bourgeoisie in the history of imperialism" - show how, behind all the propaganda, the bourgeoisie of decadent capitalism is a class of gangsters, whose various fractions are ready for anything to defend their interests in their confrontations in the capitalist and imperialist arena, or united against the common danger of the proletariat.

To fight the enemy, you must first know him. This is especially true for the proletariat, whose main weapon is its consciousness and clarity in the struggle. The class' ability to lay bare the lies - especially "democratic" - of the ruling class, to discern, behind the propaganda mask - the reality of barbaric capitalism and the class that incarnates it, will determine its future ability to play its historic role: through communist revolution, putting an end to the most somber chapter in human history.

In February, the imperialist war in ex-Yugoslavia moved up a step. For the capitalist world, the stakes were raised, as the massacre in the market at Sarajevo was followed by direct military intervention by Russia and ther USA. The madness of war is spreading throughout the planet: to the old southern and eastern republics of the ex-USSR, to the Middle East, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Africa.

At the same time, the economic crisis is spreading, ravaging the lives of billions of human beings. Here too, disaster and the threat of a drastic fall into poverty is covering the planet, which cannot help but nourish still further conflict and war.

Capitalism is leading the world to desolation and destruction. The war in ex-Yugoslavia is neither a survival from the past, nor the mark of a transitional period, the price to pay for the end of Stalinism: it is a modern imperialist war, born of the situation created by the disappearance of the Eastern bloc and the USSR. It is a war of decadent capitalism's phase of decomposition, which heralds the only future that capitalism can offer humanity.

Nationalism and imperialist interests have exacted a toll of some 200,000 dead, and who knows how many wounded and crippled, from the population of Bosnia and the other Yugoslav republics. Lives torn apart, massive "ethnic cleansing", families chased from their homes and deported or broken up - maybe never to see each other again - this is the reality of capitalism. We denounce the terror imposed by each side, by militias and military drunk with blood, rape, and torture. We denounce the terror exercised by the Bosnian, Serb and Croat states, against refugees press-ganged into the contending armies under pain of death in the case of desertion. We denounce the misery and the hunger, the horror of old people reduced to beggary, picked out by snipers because they do not run fast enough to dodge the bullets, of mothers and fathers ripped to pieces by a mortar shell while looking for supplies, of children traumatized for life, both mentally and physically. We denounce the barbarity of capitalism. It alone is responsible for these tragedies.

We also denounce the new "values" and "principles" emerging from the "new world order" that the bourgeoisie promised us following the fall of the Berlin Wall: chaos and every man for himself. Shifting alliances and betrayals are the order of the day: cease-fires are violated when the ink on them is scarcely dry. Bosnians, Serbs, Croats have all been each other's allies, only to turn against their allies of yesterday. Croats and Bosnians slaughtered each other in Mostar under the benevolent eye of the Serb militia, while at the same time fighting together against the Serbs in Sarajevo. The "Muslims" of the Bihac enclave even turned against each other while encircled!

Once the present conflict comes to an end, if it ever does, there will be no return to the pre-war status quo. The surviving states will be devastated, and will never recover in a surrounding atmosphere of world economic crisis. The local bourgeoisie could not have escaped this even were it not blinded by its own nationalism its own local interests; the war in ex-Yugoslavia will not give birth to strengthened and viable states. At best a few war-lords or local chieftains will be able to set up their own rackets, until a rival comes to supplant them. This is what happened in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Cambodia; it is what is happening in Georgia, Palestine, Tadjikstan and elsewhere. Yugoslavia is now being "Lebanonised" in its turn.

Great powers' imperialist intervention is responsible for the worsening war

While the break-up of Yugoslavia was a direct result of decomposition, this same decomposition, there as elsewhere, has proved a fertile terrain for imperialism's sinister maneuvering. At the outset, it was Germany that encouraged the Croats and Slovenes to declare independence, while the USA and France supported the Serb reaction to teach both Croats and Germans a lesson.

"Nobody is disinterested. As soon as the Bosnian problem became a Balkan problem, it also became a problem of the political balance of power, and the interests of the great powers came to dominate the conflict" (Liberation, 22/2/94).

For two years, the great powers have intervened directly in the conflict, both diplomatically and militarily under cover of the UN and NATO. If anyone still doubted its imperialist nature, the events of February, with the threats of aerial bombardment, the dispatch of UN troops, NATO's F16 fighters shooting down Serbian aircraft have all shown the imperialist powers defending their interests against their rivals: "Effective international policy continues to be thwarted by the competing interests of major European powers. With Britain, France and Russia effectively shielding the Serbs, and the United States doing what it can on behalf of the Muslim-led government, the United States is now putting pressure on the third party to the struggle, the Croats, whose traditional protector, Germany, finds it impolitic to stand up to the other powers" (International Herald Tribune, 3/3/94)

The "humanitarian" mask feels a long time ago. The bourgeoisie's press no longer talks about it. And all of a sudden, the real aim of all the grand "humanist" and pacifist declarations for an end to the massacre, and the "salvation" of Bosnia, appear for what they are. For two years, they have been used to try to mobilize the population, and especially the working class, of the great industrialized nations behind the imperialism of their own national bourgeoisie. Once again, the great pacifists - "philosophers", writers, artists, vicars, ecologists - have shown themselves up as dangerous war-mongers in the service of imperialism.

The US counter-offensive

During the Gulf War, the US clearly demonstrated their world leadership. Since then, the American bourgeoisie has suffered a series of setbacks, if not defeats, in Yugoslavia. To begin with, they were unable to prevent the latter's disintegration, and so the independence of Croatia, which represented a step forward for Germany. Then, the US betted on Bosnia as a bridgehead in the region, but despite their power proved incapable of ensuring the new state's integrity and unity. The result was an independent Slovenia and Croatia under German influence, Serbia falling under first French then largely Russian influence, and the dismantling of Bosnia which is now hardly a firm anchorage point. The end result was negative for the world's greatest imperialist power. The United States could not allow such a defeat to damage their credibility and weaken their leadership in the eyes of the rest of the world. They could not allow it to encourage either their great European and Japanese imperialist rivals, or the "second-rate" imperialisms to assert themselves and call the American "new world order" into question.

Reduced to impotence in the Balkans, the US counter-offensive developed around two axes: the intervention in Somalia, and the opening of peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO - at the cost of a bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 93.[1] The US thus demonstrated their military and diplomatic ability to "settle conflicts", which only served to highlight, by contrast, the Europeans' inability to put an end to the war in Bosnia. All the more so, since the US did everything they could to sabotage the European plans to put an end to the war in Bosnia by dividing it up in the Serbs' favor: in particular, by encouraging the Bosnian government to remain intransigent, and by re-equipping the Bosnian army so that it was able to go back on the offensive against both Serbs and Croats during the winter.

However, this was not enough to recover the ground lost, or to wipe out the impression of weakness given by the world's greatest power. It had succeeded in blocking the Europeans' plans, but without being able to regain the initiative itself. The more the bloody conflict continued, the more it damaged the "credibility" of the US themselves. The massacre in the market of Sarajevo could not have come at a better time to reshuffle the imperialist pack.

Although Clinton was still justifying the American air force's failure to intervene on the grounds of French and British refusal, more and more voices in the American state machine were pushing for action: "We will continue to have a problem of credibility if we do not act" said Tom Foley, Speaker of the House of Representatives (Le Monde, 8/2/94). Clearly, Tom Foley is more concerned with US military credibility than with any of the "humanitarian" considerations that are put forward on the TV for the consumption of the working class.

The NATO ultimatum gives the initiative to the United States

Following the massacre of the market in Sarajevo, the NATO ultimatum was a punishment for the impotence of the Europeans, especially the British and the French who were forced to agree to air strikes which they had rejected and sabotaged ever since the conflict began. It demonstrated the greater weight of NATO, dominated by the Americans, over the UN where Britain and France played a greater role. The withdrawal of Serb canons under the threat of NATO air power was a success for the USA. Their ultimatum allowed them to regain the initiative, and to put a foot in the door both militarily and diplomatically, but nonetheless the success remained limited. It was only a first step, and could not efface the setbacks of the previous months, especially the partition of Bosnia.

"European governments have been playing a cynical game. (...) The Europeans were perfectly willing to use the shelling of Sarajevo and other cities to pressure the Bosnian government to accept a bad partition plan that denied them vital territory and transit routes. If they now agree to endorse NATO air strikes against the siege guns, they fully expect Washington, in return, to join in their diplomatic gang-up, at the very moment when the Bosnian government has begun to gain military strength, reversing some of its earlier losses" (New York Times, 9/2/94).

Moreover, the American display of strength was diminished by the reluctance of the Serb retreat, and its protection by the arrival of Russian blue berets. "The [NATO] alliance has not proven itself. Its will and capacity will continue to be doubted" (Courrier International, 24/2/94). The Americans tried to correct this bad impression somewhat, by shooting down four Serbian aircraft violating Bosnian air space (whereas almost 1000 violations had already taken place without provoking any reaction from NATO). US "credibility" demanded that they seize an appropriate occasion, and they did so.

The US ultimatum sidelines the Europeans

The USA's return to the game has been concretized by the signature of the Croat-Muslim agreement. US pressure has been applied to Croatia since February: "It is time now to make Croatia pay a price, economic and political" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94). Threats gave way to blackmail. The Croats understood this straight away, as can be seen from the removal of the ultra-nationalist Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban, and his replacement by someone more "reasonable" and more easily controlled. After the threat came the "deal", the proposal: "The only way Croatia can get international support for reclaiming the Krajina (...) is to reforge its alliance with Bosnia" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94).

It goes without saying that this new alliance, under the American aegis, which promises the return of occupied Krajina to Croatia, is directly aimed at the Serbs. Here is a step towards "peace" which brings with it a still more terrible aggravation of the war, both on the quantitative level - spreading it to the whole of ex-Yugoslavia - and on the qualitative level by involving the regular armies of both Serbia and Croatia in total war.

As we write this, the confrontations between Croats and Muslims have not yet come to an end, especially around Mostar. But there is no doubt that this is a success for the USA, since the European countries have been forced to "welcome" the initiative, despite their lack of enthusiasm for it. The Muslim-Croat agreement has sidelined the Geneva negotiations, at least for the moment, and revealed the impotence of their European Union sponsor. Revenge was sweet for the Americans after two years of European insolence, when Warren Christopher the US Secretary of State was photographed on the White House Lawn between the two signatories to the accord. "Europe has had its day as the main arbiter of the Yugoslav crisis" (The Guardian).

Russia's aggressive imperialism

Another expression of the rearrangement of the imperialist game since the massacre at the Sarajevo market, is Russia's return in strength to the "concert of nations", with its firm opposition to the NATO ultimatum, its diplomatic success in saving the Serbs' face by "persuading" them to withdraw their artillery from Sarajevo, and the dispatch of its own blue berets. Russia's imperialist arrogance has reawaken, and Russia now clearly aspires to play a major role on the world stage.

Up till now, the United States has given unfailing support to Yeltsin, both internally against the conservative Stalinist fractions, and externally when Russia has intervened in its old empire.

The US bourgeoisie could not but be satisfied to see Russia oppose the imperialist aspirations of "Islamic" Iran, or of a Turkey inclining more and more towards Germany; or to see Russia imposing its conditions on Ukraine, which is still the world's third greatest nuclear power despite its economic collapse, and so forcing Ukraine to abandon its flirt with Germany.

But when Russia turned its attention to the ex-Warsaw Pact countries to oppose their integration into NATO, this alarmed the European bourgeoisies, Germany in particular, and even raised doubts amongst the Americans, although Clinton did accede to this demand by putting off the enlargement of NATO. But when Russia at last gains a military foothold, for the first time in its history, in the Balkans, and through them access to the centuries-old objective - the Mediterranean - then alarm bells rang in the White House. Enough is enough! The Russian aspiration to Mediterranean access, like that of Germany, is simply unacceptable to the French, British and US bourgeoisies, whether Yeltsin is in power or no. "We are not dealing with black and white, but with grey. Inevitably, there will be things that we don't like", said Clinton about Russia (Le Monde, 27/2/94).

Worse still as far as the Western powers are concerned, as the situation in Russia runs more and more out of control, while chaos and anarchy deepen, the pro-US "reformers" like Gaidar have been forced ut of the Yeltsin government to make way for the "conservative" fractions of the Russian ruling class, whose ultra-nationalist and revengeful spirit is most clearly expressed by the outrageous Zhirinovsky.

Clearly, whatever the fraction in power, Russia's return to the forefront of imperialist antagonisms does not mean a return to the situation of international "stability" which prevailed from Yalta to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and which fed the imperialist conflicts of the day. It does not mean the reappearance of two great powers able to impose limits on their respective vassals. There will not be a return to the situation where an imperialist Eastern bloc led by Russia opposed the US bloc in the West. The return of Russia, dangerously fuelled by the chaos overwhelming the country, and the Russian bourgeoisie's desperate search for a way out of its terrible situation, will increase imperialist tensions and antagonisms; it will encourage still more chaos and war at the international level.

The use of NATO (founded to contain the USSR in 1949) to impose an ultimatum on Serbia, is a real slap in the face for the Russians. It was designed as a warnming to Russia: to Yeltsin, of course, but also to the other fractions of the Russian state, especially the nostalgics for the past glory of the USSR. The Americans intended to send a clear message to their "partner" (the US press no longer talks about their "ally"): take care, there are lines which cannot be crossed. And in case the Russians missed the point, the destruction of Serbian planes by the American F16s was there to drive it home. This is the first time in its 45 year history that NATO has fired in anger.

The direct military interventions of both the USA and Russia in ex-Yugoslavia are new elements, of extreme importance, in the international situation. They mark a new step in the war, another step in the exacerbation of imperialist tensions, a new step into chaos and "every man for himself" both in the Balkans, whose wretched populations are not at the end of their suffering, and internationally.

European impotence

The new international situation is marked by the return in strength of Russian and American imperialism in ex-Yugoslavia. It is marked also by its corollary: the impotence of the European powers, in particular France and Britain. For two years, the latter have been able to sabotage the American efforts to intervene militarily and to play a major role on the military and diplomatic stage; today they have been forced to swallow their pride and support the NATO air strikes against the Serbs that before they had systematically refused. As for Germany, it has had to watch, impotently, the American counter-offensive, which although it was directed against the Serbs (which could only please the Germans), also put pressure on their Croatian allies.

The German advance is halted

Recent events have placed a whole series of barriers in the way of Germany's asserting itself as an alternative leading imperialist power to the United States. Russia, with American agreement, is contesting its influence over Central Europe and the Ukraine. Unthinkable only two months ago, America is now contesting German influence in Croatia, which is hoping the obtain from the Americans what Germany proved unable to offer: the Krajina. "Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia can no longer count on clear German leadership" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94). The US has even prevented Germany from playing any real role in the negotiations between Muslims and Croats. Absent from the terrain, because it does not have its own troops in the NATO contingent, and with Japan alone among the great powers in not having a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, Germany can only play an underhand game, and in the meantime watch impotently the American counter-offensive.

The new-found Russian arrogance is also alarming Germany. Even if Germany attempts sometimes to flirt with Russia, since both have in common the aim of reaching the Mediterranean, in the long term both powers' imperialist interests are contradictory, especially in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Germany is thus caught between its aspiration to a place among the great imperialist powers, and so assert itself against the USA especially, and its fear of a chaotic Russia, against which only the Americans can offer military protection.

Unable to raise the American stakes, France has been forced out of the game

Although "Maintaining French-German political cooperation as the core of the European Community continues to be France's diplomatic priority" (idem), on a general and historic level, it has opposed the German advance towards the Mediterranean in Croatia. At the same time, it has opposed any American interference. It has thus tried to play its own game, with the British, and has found this beyond its capacity.

No longer listened to by the Serbs, threatened by the Bosnian offensive, the peace negotiations they sponsored paralysed, France and Britain found themselves in a dead-end. Uncomfortable situation. Having played all its trump cards, the French bourgeoisie could only ask the Americans and NATO to intervene. They had to accept defeat in this round, to be allowed to stay at the table of the imperialist game, just as they did during the Gulf War: this is what Mitterand calls "maintaining one's station in life".

Britain under American pressure

Britain's failure has been of much the same order. Britain is the US historic lieutenant, its most faithful ally in the imperialist game, and just as hostile to any German advance into the Balkans. Nonetheless, the British bourgeoisie has tried to defend its own specific interests in Yugoslavia, and has not wanted to "share" its own military and political influence in the region with the American bourgeoisie. The new situation created by the bombardment of the Sarajevo market, and the NATO ultimatum which had been opposed by the Major government, have been accompanied by a strong pressure before the Prime Minister's voyage to Washington.[2]

"The short-term approach to the Bosnian disaster orchestrated by Britain threatens to destabilize much of Europe (...) John Major should leave Washington in no doubt that his Bosnia policy is being closely scrutinized and that any more flights of expediency that exacerbate the Balkan crisis will not be lightly forgotten or forgiven"  (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94).

This American pressure, and the difficult situation confronted by Britain in Bosnia, has forced the British bourgeoisie back into line: they have had to give their approval to the NATO ultimatum (especially since the French had left them in the lurch). As the Guardian said: "In a speech to the Commons, Douglas Hurd betrayed the hidden motive behind this about-face. He emphasized three times the need to re-establish credibility and solidarity within NATO, and especially the US support for the Organization".

The US uses NATO to force the Europeans back into line

The USA has strikingly reasserted its world leadership. They have finally succeeded in bringing off the same coup as in the Gulf War: they have forced the main European powers back into their orbit - at least in Yugoslavia and for the moment. This is especially true for France, Germany, and second-rank countries like Italy, Spain and Belgium for example, which try to defend their own imperialist interests by playing the European, so anti-American, card. Moreover, the impotence of the Europeans, who have been forced to call in the Americans, has a wider meaning for all those imperialisms throughout the world which might have been tempted to oppose American interests. It is a victory for the American bourgeoisie, but a victory which bears within it the exacerbation of imperialist antagonisms and wars.

Towards the worsening of imperialist tensions and chaos

The US success in ex-Yugoslavia is not yet complete. They have to go further. If it is concluded, the Muslim-Croat alliance they have sponsored will take the confrontation with Serbia to a higher level. The European powers have taken a hiding, and will not hesitate to throw oil on the fire. Yeltsin, pushed by the conservative and nationalist elements, cannot but strengthen Russia's imperialist policies. But worse still, since all states are imperialist, the chain of conflicts will drag countries down into an irreversible and inextricable process of confrontations and antagonisms: in the Balkans there are Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Turkey; in ex-Soviet Asia there are Turkey, Russia and Iran; in Afghanistan there are Turkey, Iran and Pakistan; in the Kashmir, Pakistan confronts India, both of them nuclear powers; India faces China in Tibet; China and Japan are lined up against Russia over frontier disputes and the Kurile islands, etc. The war is one of all against all, and this list is very far from being exhaustive.

This chain of conflicts, dragging countries down one after the other into chaos and disorder, is stretching more and more.  It is pulling the capitalist world into the most terrible military barbarism. And so the situation confirms the marxist position: capitalism is imperialist war; "peace" is only a preparation for war. It confirms the marxist position that in decadence all nations, great or small, are imperialist. It confirms the marxist position that the international proletariat can give no support to nationalism, to its own ruling class, and that such a political surrender leads to the abandonment of its class interests, its struggles, and to sacrifice on the altar of nationalism. Decadent capitalism has nothing to offer humanity. It is dragging it to destruction. As communists have said since the beginning of this century, there is only one alternative: socialism, or barbarism.

At the price of immeasurable suffering, blood and tears, the decisive historic moment is approaching. Destroy capitalism, before it destroys the whole human race: this is the dramatic, gigantic mission of the proletariat!

RL

[1] The Hebron massacre perpetrated by a fanatical religious Jewish settler, whom the Israeli soldiers apparently allowed to act at will, expresses the reality of the "peace" that the United States are imposing on the Middle East. While the crime is useful to the Israeli state, which will use it to justify the disarming and gagging of its own extremists, it deepens the chaos into which the Occupied Territories and Israel itself are sinking. While the peace negotiations and the formation of a Palestinian state represent a success for the United States, which has thus eliminated all its imperialist rivals in the region, the situation of disorder, anarchy, and decomposition in both states and the region as a whole will continue to get worse.

[2] The visa granted by the US government to the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, the publicity given to his visit to the USA, and his interview with the famous CNN journalist Larry King during prime time, were also the expression of American pressure on the Major government.

Rejecting the notion of Decadence demobilises the Proletariat in the face of War

In numbers 90, 91, and 92 of the review Programme Communiste, published by the International Communist Party (which also publishes the papers Il Comunista in Italian and Le Proletaire in French) [1] [54], there is a long study on ‘Imperialist war in the bourgeois cycle and in marxist analysis', which conveys this organisation's conception of this vitally important issue for the workers' movement. The fundamental political positions that these articles affirm constitute a clear defence of proletarian principles faced with all the lies spread around by the various agents of the ruling class. However, some of the theoretical developments upon which these principles are based, and the predictions that follow from them, are not always equal to the statements of principle and run the risk of weakening rather than reinforcing them. This article proposes to criticise these erroneous theoretical conceptions in order to draw out the most solid possible basis for the defence of proletarian internationalism.

A firm defence of class positions

The ICP (Il Comunista) claims descent from the tradition of the Italian communist left, i.e. one of the international currents that held onto class positions in the face of the degeneration of the Communist International in the 1920s. In the article published in Programme Communiste (PC), we can see that, on a whole series of essential questions, this organisation has not lost sight of this current's. In particular, this article contains a clear reaffirmation of the foundations of the communist position on imperialist war:"Marxism is completely foreign to the empty and abstract formulae which hold that being ‘anti-war' is a suprahistorical principle and which see war, in metaphysical fashion, as an Absolute Evil. Our attitude is based on a historical and dialectical analysis of war crises in liaison with the birth, development and death of social formations.We therefore make a distinction between:a) wars of bourgeois progress (or development) in the European zone between 1792 and 1871;b) imperialist wars, characterised by the reciprocal clash of highly developed capitalist nations...c) revolutionary proletarian wars" (PC no. 90, p 19)."The fundamental orientation is to take a position for wars which push forward the general development of society, and against wars which obstruct and hold it back. Consequently, we are for the sabotage of imperialist wars, not because they are more cruel and more frightful than the previous ones, but because they run counter to the historic future of humanity; because the imperialist bourgeoisie and world capitalism can no longer play any ‘progressive ‘ role, but have become on the contrary an obstacle to the general development of society" (PC no. 90, p 22).The ICC could sign these passages with both hands. They concur with what we have written many times in our territorial press and in this Review [2] [55].Similarly, the ICP's denunciation of pacifism is particularly sharp and clear:"... capitalism is not the ‘victim' of war provoked by this or that tub-thumper, or by ‘malign spirits' left over from a previous barbaric epoch, against whom it is periodically necessary to defend itself ... bourgeois pacifism necessarily ends up in war-mongering. The idyllic dream of a peaceful capitalism is not in fact innocent. It's a dream soaked in blood. If you say that capitalism and peace can go together, not in a momentary and contingent manner, but permanently, you are compelled, when the war crisis mounts, to argue that something alien to civilisation is threatening the peaceful and humanitarian development of capitalism; and that the latter has to defend itself, including with weapons if other means are not sufficient, by gathering together all men of good will, all the ‘peace-loving' elements. Pacifism then accomplishes its final pirouette and turns into war-mongering, as an active factor, a direct agent for the war mobilisation. This is an obligatory process; it derives from the internal dynamic of pacifism, which naturally tends to transform itself into war-mongering..." (PC no. 90, p 22).From this analysis of pacifism, the ICP develops a correct orientation towards so-called the anti-war movements which from time to time flourish in the present period. Along with the ICP, we obviously consider that there can be a proletarian anti-militarism (like the one that developed during the First World War and which led to the revolution in Germany and Russia). But this anti-militarism cannot develop on the basis of the mobilisations orchestrated by all the good souls of the bourgeoisie:"With regard to the current ‘movements for peace', our ‘positive' policy is one of intervening from the outside, to propagandise and proselytise towards those proletarian elements captured by pacifism and caught up in petty bourgeois mobilisations, in order to draw them away from this kind of political action. In particular we say to these elements that the anti-militarism of tomorrow cannot be prepared by the pacifist parades of today, but only by the proletariat's intransigent struggle to defend its living and working conditions, against the interests of the company and the national economy. Just as the discipline of labour and the defence of the national economy prepare the discipline of the trenches and the defence of the fatherland, today's refusal to defend and respect the interests of the company and of the national economy prepare the anti-militarism and defeatism of tomorrow" (PCno. 92, p 61). As we will see later on, defeatism is no longer an adequate slogan for the present or future. However, we can only stress the validity of the ICP's general approach here. Finally, the article in PC is also very clear on the role of bourgeois democracy in preparing for and conducting imperialist war:"... in ‘our' civilised states, capitalism reigns thanks to democracy ... when capitalism puts its generals and cannons centre stage, it does so by relying on democracy, its mechanisms and its hypnotic rites" (PC no. 91, p 38)."The existence of a democratic regime gives the state greater military efficiency because it allows it to use its maximum potential both in preparing the war and in waging it" (ibid)."... fascism can only appeal politically to national sentiments, pushed to the level of racist hysteria, in order to cement ‘national unity'; whereas democracy possesses a more powerful resource for binding the whole population to imperialist war: the fact that the war emanates directly from the popular will freely expressed in elections; in other words, thanks to the mystification of electoral consultation, it appears to be a war for the defence of the interests and hopes of the popular masses and the working class in particular" (PC no. 91, p 41).We have reproduced these long quotes from PC (and we could have given others, notably those providing historical illustrations of the theses put forward) because they represent exactly our position on the questions concerned. Rather than reaffirming with our own words our principles about imperialist war, it seemed useful to show the profound unity of views that exists on this question within the communist left, a unity that constitutes our common patrimony.However, as important as it is to emphasise this unity of principles, it is equally the duty of revolutionaries to demonstrate the lack of theoretical consistency and coherence of the Bordigist current, which considerably weakens its capacity to provide the proletariat with an effective compass. And the first of these inconsistencies resides in the refusal of this current to recognise the decadence of the capitalist mode of production.

‘Non-decadence' according to Bordigism

The recognition that, since the beginning of the century, and particularly since the First World War, capitalist society has entered its phase of decadence, constitutes one of the touchstones of the communist movement's perspective. During the first imperialist holocaust, revolutionaries like Lenin relied on this analysis in order to emphasise the necessity for the proletariat to reject any participation in the war, to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war"(see in particular Imperialism, highest stage of capitalism). Similarly, capitalism's entry into its period of decadence was at the heart of the positions of the Communist International at its foundation in 1919. It was precisely because capitalism had become a decadent system that it could no longer be a question of struggling to obtain reforms within it, as had the workers' parties of the Second International. From now on the proletariat's only historical task was to carry out the world revolution. And it was on this granite basis that the international communist left, and its Italian fraction in particular, was able to elaborate the totality of its political positions [3] [56].However, it was the ‘originality' of Bordiga and the current that he inspired to deny that capitalism had entered its decadent phase [4] [57]. And yet the Bordigist current, notably the ICP (Il Comunista) is in fact obliged to recognise that something changed at the beginning of the century, in the nature both of economic crises and of wars. On the nature of wars, the above quotations from PC speak for themselves: they show that there is an essential difference between the wars waged by capitalist states last century, and those of this century. For example, six decades separate the Napoleonic wars against Prussia from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, while the latter was only four decades away from the 1914 war. However, the 1914 war between France and Germany was fundamentally different from all the previous ones between these two countries. That is why Marx could call on the German workers to participate in the war of 1870 (see the First Manifesto of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association on the Franco-Prussian war), and still remain quite clearly on a proletarian class terrain; and why in 1914 the call of the German Social Democrats for the workers to engage in ‘national defence' was definitely on a bourgeois terrain. This is exactly what revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg defended tooth and nail at this time against the social-chauvinists who claimed to take their lead from Marx's position in 1870: this position was no longer valid because war had changed in nature, and this in turn was the result of a fundamental change in the life of the capitalist mode of production as a whole.Furthermore, PC says the same thing when it affirms that imperialist wars "run counter to the historic future of humanity; because the imperialist bourgeoisie and world capitalism no longer play any ‘progressive' role, but on the contrary have become an obstacle to the general development of society". Similarly, taking up a passage written by Bordiga, it considers that "world imperialist wars demonstrate that the crisis of capitalism's disintegration is inevitable because of the opening up of a period in which its expansion no longer represents the augmentation of the productive forces but the accumulation of greater and greater destruction" (PC, no. 90, p 25). However, imprisoned in old Bordigist dogmas, the ICP is incapable of drawing the logical consequences of this from the standpoint of historical materialism: the fact that world capitalism has become an obstacle to the general development of society means quite simply that this mode of production has entered its phase of decadence. When Lenin and Luxemburg affirmed this in 1914, they weren't pulling such an idea out of their hats: they were simply making a scrupulous application of marxist theory to an understanding of the historic facts in front of them. The ICP, like all the other ICPs belonging to the Bordigist current, claims adherence to marxism. This is a very good thing: today, only those organisations that base their programmatic positions on the teachings of marxism can hope to defend a revolutionary perspective. Unfortunately, the ICP provides us with the proof that it has a hard time understanding the marxist method. In particular, it may be very fond of using the term ‘dialectical', but it only reveals that, like someone trying to hide their ignorance by using complicated words, it doesn't know what it's talking about.For example, this is what we can read in PC about the nature of crises:"The ten-yearly crises of youthful capitalism were very minor incidents; they were more crises of international trade than of the industrial machine... They were crises of unemployment, i.e. of closures, the stopping of industries. Modern crises are crises of dis-aggregation of the whole system, which afterwards finds it difficult to reconstruct its different structures" (PC no. 90, p 28). There follows a whole series of statistics, which demonstrate the considerable breadth of 20th century crises, and the fact that they bear no comparison to those of last century. But the ICP doesn't see that the difference in scale between the two kinds of crisis reveals not only a fundamental difference between themselves, but also in the way of life of the system they affect. The ICP puts its regal foot on one of the basic elements of the marxist dialectic: the transformation of quantity into quality. In effect, for the ICP, the difference between the two types of crisis remains purely quantitative and doesn't concern the fundamental mechanisms of the system. It proves this by writing "last century there were 8 world crises: 1836, 1848, 1856, 1883, 1886 and 1894. The average length of the cycle according to Marx was ten years. This ‘juvenile' rhythm was followed, in the period between the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the Second World War, by a more rapid succession of crises: 1901, 1908, 1914, 1920, 1929. To the immeasurable growth of capitalism there corresponded an augmentation of organic composition ... which led to a growth in the rate of accumulation: this is why the average length of the cycle was reduced to 7 years" (PC no. 90, p 27). This arithmetic about the length of the cycles proves that the ICP puts the economic convulsions of last century on the same level as those of this century without understanding that the very nature of the notion of the cycle has fundamentally changed. Blinded by its faith in the divine words of Bordiga, the ICP fails to see that, in Trotsky's words, while the crises of the 19th century were the heartbeats of capitalism, those of the 20th are the rattles of its death-agony. The ICP shows the same blindness when it tries to point to the link between crisis and war. In a way that is argued systematically without being very rigorous (we will come back to this later on), PC tries to establish that, in the present period, the capitalist crisis necessarily leads to world war. This is a laudable concern since it aims to refute the illusory and criminal discourse of pacifism. However, it doesn't occur to the ICP to ask whether the fact that the crises of the 19th century didn't lead to world war, or even to local wars, means that there is a fundamental difference with those of the 20th century. Here again, the ICP's ‘marxism' is rather poverty-stricken: we have here not just a misunderstanding of what the word dialectical means, but a refusal, or at least an incapacity, to go beyond a fixation with apparent analogies between the economic cycles of the past and those of today, and to examine in depth the major, determining phenomena of the life of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, faced with a question as crucial as that of imperialist war, the ICP shows itself to be incapable of adequately applying marxist theory and grasping the difference between the ascendant phase of capitalism and its decadent phase. And the striking concretisation of this incapacity can be seen when the ICP tries to attribute to the wars of the present period an economic rationality similar to that of 19th century wars.

Rationality and irrationality of war

Our International Review has already published numerous articles on the question of the irrationality of war in the decadent period of capitalism [5] [58]. Our position is in no way an ‘original discovery' of our organisation. It is based on the fundamental acquisitions of marxism since the beginning of the 20th century, notably as expressed by Lenin and Luxemburg. These acquisitions were formulated with great clarity in 1945 by the Communist Left of France against the revisionist theory developed by Vercesi on the eve of the Second World War, a theory which led his organisation, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, into total paralysis when the imperialist conflict broke out:"In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars ... expressed the forward march of an enlarging and expanding capitalist economic system ... Each war justified and paid its costs by opening up a new field for greater expansion, ensuring the development of a greater capitalist production ... War was the indispensable means for capitalism to open up possibilities for its further development at a time when these possibilities existed and could only be opened up by violent means. By the same token, the collapse of a capitalist world that has historically exhausted all its possibilities of development finds its clearest expression in modern war, imperialist war, which, without opening up any possibility for the further development of production, simply hurls the productive forces into the abyss and accumulates ruins upon ruins at a rapidly growing rate" (Report on the international situation to the June 1945 conference of the Communist Left of France, republished in International Review59).As we have seen, PC also makes this distinction between the wars of last century and those of this century. However, it doesn't draw the consequences and after taking a step in the right direction, makes two in the wrong direction by looking for an economic rationality in the imperialist wars that dominate the 20th century.This rationality, "the demonstration of the fundamental economic reasons which push all states towards war" (PC no. 92, p 54), PC tries to find in quoting Marx: "a periodic destruction of capital has become a necessary condition for the existence of any current rate of interest ...Considered from this point of view, these horrible calamities which we are used to waiting for with so much disquiet and apprehension ... are probably only the natural and necessary corrective for an excessive and exaggerated opulence, the vis medicatrix thanks to which our social system as it is currently moulded is able from time to time to free itself from a constantly renascent plethora which threatens its existence, and return to a solid and healthy state " (Grundrisse). In reality, the destruction of capital, which Marx evokes here, is the type provoked by the cyclical crises of his time (and not by wars), at a moment when these crises constituted the heartbeats of the capitalist system (even if they already posed the perspective of the historical limitations of this system). In numerous parts of his work, Marx shows that the way capitalism surmounted these crises resided not only in a destruction (or rather a de-valorisation) of a momentarily excessive amount of capital but also, and above all, by the conquest of new markets, particularly those outside capitalist relations of production [6] [59]. And since the world market could not be indefinitely extended, since the extra-capitalist sectors could only get narrower and narrower to the point of disappearing completely as capital subjected the whole planet to its laws, capitalism was condemned to increasingly catastrophic convulsions.This was an idea developed much more systematically by Rosa Luxemburg in her book The Accumulation of Capital, but she didn't invent it, as some ignorant people think. What's more, the outline of such an idea appears in passages of PC's text, but when the latter makes reference to Rosa Luxemburg, it's not to base itself on her remarkable theoretical developments which explained with great clarity the mechanisms of the crises of capitalism and particularly why the laws of this system condemned it historically, but to take up the only really dubious position in The Accumulation of Capital - the thesis that militarism is a ‘field of accumulation' which can partially relieve capitalism from its economic contradictions (see PC no. 91, p 31-33). It was just such an idea that Vercesi unfortunately fell into in the 1930s, and which led him to think that the formidable development of arms production after 1933, by allowing capitalist production to get going again, made the prospect of world war more remote. At the same time, when PC tries to give a systematic explanation of the mechanism of the crisis, in order to show the link between the latter and imperialist war, it adopts a unilateral vision based mainly on the thesis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall:"Since the bourgeois mode of production became dominant, war has been decisively linked to the law, established by Marx, of the fall in the average rate of profit, which is the key to capitalism's tendency towards final catastrophe" (PC no. 90, p 23). There follows a resume, which PC borrows from Bordiga (Dialogue with Stalin) of Marx's thesis according to which the constant elevation, within the value of commodities, of the part supplied by machines and raw materials (due to constant progress in productive techniques), in relation to that part supplied by the labour power of the workers, results in a historic tendency for the rate of profit to fall, since it is only the worker's labour power that can produce profit, i.e. produce more value than it costs.It should be pointed out that, in its analyses, PC (and Bordiga, whom it quotes abundantly), does not ignore the problem of markets and the fact that imperialist war is the consequence of the competition between capitalist states: "The geometrical progression of production requires each national capitalism to export, to conquer on its external markets outlets adequate to its production. And as each national pole of accumulation is subjected to the same rule, war between capitalist states is inevitable. From economic and trade wars, financial conflicts, disputes over raw materials, from the political and diplomatic confrontations that result, we finally arrive at open warfare. The latent conflict between states breaks out first in the form of military conflicts limited to certain geographic zones, of localised wars where the great powers don't confront each other directly, but through interposed agencies: but it leads in the end to generalised war, characterised by the direct clash between the great state monsters of imperialism, in which they are thrown against each other by the violence of their internal contradictions. And all the minor states are drawn into the conflict, whose theatre of operations extends to the entire planet. Accumulation-Crises-Local wars-World war". (PC no. 90, p 24).We can only subscribe to this analysis, which actually repeats what marxists have been saying since the First World War. However, the weak point here is that the search for external markets is seen by PC as simply a consequence of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, whereas it remains the case that capitalism has a permanent need for markets outside its own sphere of domination, as Luxemburg masterfully showed, in order to realise that part of value destined to be reinvested in the further cycle of capitalist accumulation. Starting from this unilateral vision, PC attributes to world war a precise economic function, thus giving it a real rationality in the functioning of capitalism:"The origin of the crisis lies in the impossibility of continuing accumulation, an impossibility which manifests itself when the growth of the mass of production can no longer compensate for the fall in the rate of profit. The mass of surplus labour is no longer sufficient to ensure a profit on the capital advanced, to reproduce the conditions for a return on investment. By destroying constant capital (dead labour) on a grand scale, war then plays a fundamental economic role: thanks to the dreadful destruction of the productive apparatus, it permits later on a gigantic expansion of production to replace what has been destroyed, and thus a parallel expansion of profit, of the total surplus value, i.e. the surplus labour which is the source of capital. The conditions for the revival of the accumulation process have been re-established. The economic cycle picks up again ... The world capitalist system enters aged into the war, but there receives a bath of blood which gives it a new lease of life and it comes out with the vitality of a robust new-born child" (PC no. 90, p 24).PC's thesis is not new. It was put forward and systematised by Grossmann in the 1920s and taken up afterwards by Mattick, one of the theoreticians of the council communist movement. It can be summarised simply in the following terms: by destroying constant capital, war reduces the organic composition of capital and thus allows for a rise in the rate of profit. The problem is that it's never been proved that during the recoveries that have followed world wars, the organic composition of capital is lower than what it was before the war. In fact the contrary is the case. If you look at the Second World War, for example, it is clear that, in the countries affected by the destructions of the war, the average productivity of labour and thus the relationship between constant and variable capital very quickly (i.e. by the beginning of the 50s), reached what it had been in 1939. Indeed, the productive potential that was reconstituted was much more modern than the one that had been destroyed. PC even notes this itself, and makes it one of the causes of the post war boom!: "The war economy transmits to capitalism both the technological and scientific progress realised by the military industries and the industrial implantations created for arms production. These were not all destroyed by bombing nor - in the case of Germany - by the dismantling carried out by the allies ... The large scale production of equipment, installations, buildings, means of transport etc, and the reallocation of means of production with a high technological composition coming from the war industry ... all this creates the miracle" (PC no. 92, p 38). As for the USA, in the absence of destruction on its own soil, the organic composition of its capital was much higher in 1945 than it had been 6 years earlier. However, the period of ‘prosperity' which accompanied the reconstruction went on long after that (in fact up to the mid-60s), i.e. well after the point where the pre-war productive potential had been reconstituted, taking the organic composition to its previous level[7] [60].Having already devoted numerous texts to criticising the conceptions of Grossmann/Mattick, which PC, following Bordiga, has taken up, we won't go over all this again here. On the other hand, it is important to show what theoretical aberrations (and aberrations pure and simple) result from Bordiga's conceptions, repeated by the ICP today.

The aberrations of the ICP's vision

The central preoccupation of the ICP is perfectly correct: to show the ineluctable character of war. In particular, it seeks to reject firmly the idea of a ‘superimperialism', as developed during the First World War by Kautsky, who sought to ‘demonstrate' that the great powers could agree amongst themselves in order to establish a shared, peaceful domination over the world. Such a conception was obviously one of the spearheads of the pacifist fraud, which aimed to make workers believe that you could put an end to wars without destroying capitalism. To respond to such a vision, PCcomes up with the following argument: "a superimperialism is impossible; if by some extraordinary means imperialism managed to suppress the conflicts between states, its internal contradictions could compel it to divide once again into competing national poles of accumulation and thus into conflicting blocs of states. The necessity to destroy enormous masses of dead labour could not be satisfied by natural catastrophes alone" (PC no. 90, p 26). In sum, the fundamental function of imperialist blocs, or of the tendency towards their constitution, is to create the conditions for large-scale destructions. With such a point of view, it becomes impossible to see why the capitalist states couldn't simply get together in order to carry out, when necessary, the destruction needed to restore production and the rate of profit. They certainly have the means to do this, while keeping control of the destruction in order to preserve their respective interests as much as possible. But what PCrefuses to take into consideration is that the division into imperialist blocs is the logical result of competition between national sectors of capitalism, a competition which is part of the very essence of this system, and which is exacerbated when the crisis hits with all its force. In this sense, the constitution of imperialist blocs is not at all the result of a sort of incomplete tendency towards the unification of capitalist states, but on the contrary of the necessity for them to form military alliances, since none of them is in a position to make war on all the rest. The most important thing about the existence of blocs is not the convergence of interests that can exist between the allied states (a convergence which can easily be put into question, as shown by all the turnabouts in alliances during the 20th century), but the fundamental antagonism between the blocs, which is the expression at the highest level of the insurmountable rivalries between all national sectors of capital. This is why ‘superimperialism' is a nonsensical term.Because it uses weak or debatable arguments, the ICP's rejection of the idea of a ‘superimperialism' loses a great deal of its force, which isn't the best way to combat the lies of the bourgeoisie. This is particularly evident when, after the above-cited passage, the ICP continues:"These are human wills, masses of human beings who have to do things, human masses arrayed against each other, energies and intelligences straining to destroy what is defended by other energies and other intelligences". Here we can see the whole weakness of thee ICP's thesis: frankly, with the means that capitalist states have at their disposal today, in what way are "human wills" and above all "human masses" indispensable to carrying out a sufficient level of destruction, if, as the ICP says, that is the economic function of imperialist war?In the final analysis, the ‘Bordigist' current pays a high price for the theoretical and political weaknesses of the analysis upon which it bases its positions on imperialist war and blocs. Thus, having chased the notion of superimperialism out of the door, it lets it back in through the window with its idea of a ‘Russo-American condominium' over the world:"The Second World War gave birth to an equilibrium correctly described by the formula of a ‘Russo-American condominium' ... If peace has reigned so long in the imperialist metropoles, it's precisely because of this domination by the USA and the USSR..." (PC no. 91, p 47)."In reality, the ‘cold war' of the 1950s expressed the insolent certainty of the victors of the conflict and the stability of the world equilibrium sanctioned at Yalta; it corresponded, within this framework, to the requirements of ideological mobilisation and control over social tensions within the blocs. The new ‘cold war' which took the place of detente in the second half of the 70s corresponded to a need to master the antagonisms no longer (or not yet) between classes but between states which were finding it more and more difficult to tolerate the old system of alliances. The Russian and American response to these growing pressures consisted in trying to direct the imperialist aggression of their allies in the direction of the opposing camp" (PC no. 92, p 47).In sum, the first ‘cold war' had no other ideological motivation than to ‘master the antagonisms between classes'. This is really the world turned upside down. It's true that at the end of the First World War we saw a real retreat in imperialist antagonisms, and that this was because the main concern of the bourgeoisie was to deal with the revolutionary wave which began in Russia in 1917, to establish a common front against the threat posed by the mortal enemy of all sectors of the bourgeoisie: the world proletariat. But the Second World War immediately led to the development of imperialist antagonisms between the two main victors, and the war economy was kept at a very high level; this was precisely because the danger from a proletariat already deeply affected by the counter-revolution had been completely eradicated during the war and in its aftermath by a bourgeoisie that had learned from its historical experience (cf our article ‘Workers' struggles in Italy 1943' in IR 75). In fact, with PC's vision, the Korean war, the war in Indochina, and later in Vietnam, not to mention all the ones in the Middle East between an Israeli state strongly supported by the USA and the Arab states receiving massive aid from the USSR (and we won't mention dozens of other up to the war in Afghanistan which went on until the end of the 80s) - all these wars were nothing to do with any fundamental antagonism between the two great imperialist monsters but were a sort of ‘bluff', either ideological campaigns against the proletariat or dictated by each super-power's need to keep order in its own stable. Furthermore, this last idea is contradicted by PC itself, which attributes to the ‘detente' between the two blocs, between the end of the 50s and the middle of the 70s, the same function as the cold war:"In reality, detente was simply the response of the two superpowers to the lines of fracture which appeared more and more clearly in their respective spheres of influence. What it meant was an increasing pressure from Moscow and Washington on their allies, aimed at containing their centrifugal tendencies" (PC no. 92, p 43).It is true that communists must never take what the bourgeoisie, its historians and journalists, say at its face value. But to claim that the hands of the superpowers were not behind most of the wars (more than a hundred) that ravaged the world from 1945 to the end of the 80s is to turn one's back on observable reality. It would also mean throwing away what PC itself says quite correctly: "The latent conflict between states breaks out firstly in the form of military conflicts limited to certain geographic zones, of localised wars in which the great powers do not confront each other directly, but through interposed agencies" (see above).In fact, the ICP can always explain, by referring to the ‘dialectic', the contradiction between reality and what it recounts, or between its various arguments: it thus shows us that rigour is not its strong point and that it can end up saying what it likes, which isn't a very good way to fight the lies of the bourgeoisie and strengthen the consciousness of the proletariat.All this turns into a caricature when, to combat the lies of pacifism, it turns to an article by Bordiga written in 1950, where the latter makes the indices of steel production one of the major factors in the evolution of capitalism itself: "War in the capitalist epoch, i.e. the most ferocious type of war, is the crisis inevitably produced by the necessity to consume the steel produced, and to struggle for the right to monopolise the supplementary production of steel" (‘His majesty steel', Battaglia Comunista no. 18, 1950).Always preoccupied by its desire to find a ‘rationality' in war, PC is led to the point of making it seem that imperialist war is not only a good thing for capitalism but for the whole of humanity, and thus for the proletariat, when it affirms that: "...the prolongation of bourgeois peace beyond the limits defined by an economic cycle which involves war, even if it were possible, would only result in situations worse than war". There then follows a quote from Bordiga which is worth its weight in peanuts (or in steel, if you like):"Let us suppose for a moment ...that instead of two (world) wars ...  we had had bourgeois peace, industrial peace. In about 35 years, steel production would have increased by 20 times; it would have become 20 times bigger than the 70 millions in 1915, arriving today (i.e. in 1950, editor's note) at 1400 million. But all this steel would not be eaten or consumed and would not be destroyed if the peoples were not getting massacred. The two billion human beings in the world weigh about 140 million tons; thus in one year they would be producing ten times their own weight in steel. The gods punished Midas by turning him into a lump of gold; capital turns human beings into lumps of steel and turns the earth, the water and the air in which they live into a metal prison. Bourgeois peace is thus a more bestial prospect than war."This was, unfortunately, one of the deliriums that Bordiga was prone to. But instead of taking its distance from it, the ICP goes even further:"Above all if you consider that the earth, transformed into a steel coffin, would become nothing more than a place of putrefaction where men and commodities in excess would peacefully decompose. Here, our dear pacifists, is the fruit of the governments ‘coming to reason', of being converted to the ‘culture of peace'. But this is precisely why it's not Folly, but Reason - of course, the Reason of bourgeois society - which pushes all governments towards war, towards salutary and hygienic war" (PC no. 92, p 54).In writing these lines, which PC lays claim to, Bordiga was turning his back on one of the very bases of the marxist analysis: capitalism produces commodities, and if you are talking about commodities you are talking about the possibility of satisfying a need, however perverted it may be, like the ‘need' of capitalist states for instruments of death and destruction. If capital produces steel in great quantities, it is to a large extent to satisfy the demand of states for heavy industries used for making war. However, this production cannot go beyond the demand of the states: if the steel industrialists are no longer able to sell their steel to the military, because the latter have already consumed a sufficient quantity, they won't carry on producing for long or their enterprises will be in ruins. They are not mad. On the other hand, Bordiga was a bit mad when he imagined that the production of steel could go on indefinitely without any limit than that imposed by the destructions of imperialist war.It's lucky for the ICP that ridicule doesn't kill (and Bordiga himself didn't die from it either): the workers might well greet such meanderings with a loud outbreak of laughter. But in fact it's all very regrettable for the cause that the ICP wants to defend: by using stupid and ridiculous arguments against pacifism, it is unwittingly led into playing the game of this enemy of the proletariat.There's one good thing in all this however: through its delirious arguments justifying the ‘rationality' of war, the ICP demolishes the very idea. And this is no bad thing when this idea leads it to put forward a perspective that could demobilise the proletariat by making it underestimate the danger that capitalism represents for humanity. Such an idea is summarised in particular in the following passage:"It flows from this (war as a manifestation of economic rationality) that inter-imperialist struggle and the confrontation between rival powers could never lead to the destruction of the planet, because this struggle derives not from excessive greed but from the necessity to escape overproduction. When the excess has been destroyed, the war machine stops, whatever the destructive potential of the weapons used, because at that point the causes of the war have also disappeared" (PC no. 92, p 55).In the second part of this article we will come back to this dramatic underestimation of the threat of imperialist war that the ICP's analysis leads to, and more concretely to the way that the slogans of this organisation are a means of demobilising the working class.   FM

[1] [61] It is necessary to make this precision because at present there are three organisations calling themselves the ‘International Communist Party': two of them come from the old organisation of the same name, which broke up in 1982 and which published Il Programma Comunista in Italian; today these two splits publish respectively under this same title and Il Comunista. The third ICP, which was formed on the basis of an older split, publishes Il Partito Comunista.

[2] [62] See in particular the articles published in IR nos. 52 and 53: ‘War and militarism in decadence'.

[3] [63] On this question, see in particular (among many texts devoted to the defence of the notion of the decadence of capitalism) our study ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism' in International Review nos. 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56 and 58. The question of the link between the analysis of decadence and political positions is dealt with in no. 49.

[4] [64] See ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism'. The critique of Bordiga's conceptions is made in particular in IR nos. 48, 54 and 55.

[5] [65] See ‘War in capitalism' (no. 41) as well as ‘War and militarism In decadence' (nos. 52 and 53).

[6] [66] See on this point our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism as well as numerous articles in this Review, notably no. 13 ‘Marxism and crisis theory' and no.76 (‘Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity').

[7] [67] On the study of economic mechanisms of reconstruction see in particular part V and VI of our study ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism' (IR nos. 55 and 56).

There are many factors that confer on Mexico a particular importance within imperialist relations: its role as a reserve of raw material (minerals and oil), and especially its geographic position - a large frontier with the United States - all of which means it is a "priority" for the world's first power. In our article on the NAFTA treaty[1], we have already pointed out that the treaty's fundamental aim is the preservation of stability in Mexico (and throughout Latin America via the "Initiative of the Americas"), since all situations of chaos or war will affect the United States. At the same time, there is also the necessity for the United States to stop some Latin American bourgeoisies flirting with other powers, such as Germany or Japan. But an even greater priority for the bourgeoisie of the United States is to guarantee a stable government on its southern border (and also its northern one, Canada), a government that will be an unconditional ally and not suffer from too much disorder.

It is clear that the capitalist class in Mexico is allied to that of the United States. Nevertheless, in the light of a situation where in other countries, including in Latin America, governments are questioning, to a lesser or greater extent, their loyalty to the United States, where bourgeoisies are inclined more towards Germany (or Japan), or where internal divisions are provoking political crises which shake the unity of the capitalist state, we have to ask ourselves whether Mexico could find itself in a situation of destabilization and even come to question its submission to the United States, as is occurring in other countries; or, on the contrary, is Mexico a territory that is 100% secure for the United States?

In the final decades of the last century, the United States ascended to complete economic and political domination over the countries of Latin America. This domination has not been free from disputes and difficulties. In fact, the application of the so-called "Monroe Doctrine", according to which "America is for the Americans" (which is to say, Latin America is for the bourgeoisie of the United States) primarily meant the liquidation, by the beginning of the century, of the influence of the old powers, who throughout the 19th century had predominated in Latin America, with Britain in first place. Later, in the first half of the 20th century, the struggle was against those trying to take a piece of American's cake. Finally, after the Second World War, the United States had to fight the destabilizing influence of the USSR. Throughout the 20th century, the political crises which have occurred in the countries of Latin America, violent changes of government, assassinations of rulers, coups and wars, have had as their backdrop - when they are not the fundamental cause - these squabbles. The attitude of Latin America bourgeoisies cannot be seen as being passive, but as seeking to take the best advantage; on more than one occasion, spurred on by the other great powers, they have more or less seriously questioned the supremacy of the United States, although of course without shaking it off. Mexico is a classic example.

The so-called "Mexican revolution", or, where does the loyalty of the Mexican bourgeoisie come from?

One of the most important results - if not the most important - of the war of 1910-1920, the so-called "Mexican revolution", was the definitive weakening of the national bourgeoisie which had grown up in the shadow of the old powers, and its substitution by a "new bourgeoisie" submissively and unconditionally allied to the United States. In fact, during the second half of the 19th century and especially during the 30 years of the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, an aggressive and vigorous national capital had arisen (in the mines, railways, oil, textiles, etc as well as finance and commerce) under the influence of such countries as France and Britain. At that time, the Mexican bourgeoisie was preoccupied by the advances and aspirations of the United States towards Latin America and Mexico in particular and tried to counteract it by opening its doors to the other powers, in the vain hope that by increasing the investments and political influence of Europe no power would be able to pre-dominate.

However, by the turn of the century, Diaz's iron dictatorship was beginning to break up. The form of military dictatorship was already too narrow for the advance of economic development and various factors were pushing for its modification. These were expressed by faction fights within the capitalist class in the struggle for the succession of the already old Diaz, especially by the vigorous faction of the landowner\capitalists in the north, who aspired to a predominant role in the government, in accordance with their economic power. At the same time a profound discontent was growing amongst the exploited classes of the countryside (peons on the haciendas throughout the country, rancheros in the north, communeros in the south) and amongst the young industrial proletariat who already could not bear its pitiless exploitation. These factors produced a social upheaval that lead to ten years of internal war, though, contrary to what the official histories say, this did not constitute a real social revolution.

In the first place, the war in Mexico between 1910 and 1920 was not a proletarian revolution. The young and dispersed industrial proletariat did not constitute a decisive class during it. In fact, its most important efforts at rebellion, the wave of strikes at the beginning of the century, had been completely crushed on its eve. To the extent that some sectors of the proletariat participated in the war, they trailed behind some of the bourgeois factions. As for the agricultural proletariat, without the lead of its industrial brothers and still chained to the land, it was integrated into the peasant war.

The peasant war, at the same time, didn't constitute a revolution. The war in Mexico demonstrated for the umpteenth time that the peasant movement is characterized by the lack of its own historical mission, and could only end up by being liquidated or integrated into the movement of the historic classes (the bourgeoisie or the proletariat). In Mexico, it was in the south where the peasant movement acquired its "classical" form, where the peasant masses, still living in the old traditional communities, destroyed the Porfiristas haciendas; however, once they had taken over the land they abandoned their arms. They could never form a regular army or a government capable of controlling for any time the cities they took. These masses end up being attacked as much by the new "revolutionary" regime as by the old one and were finally cruelly defeated. The northern rancheros' war suffered a similar fate. Their tactic was to take cities through assault by cavalry: this had been an effective tactic in the previous century against the Porfirista Federal army, but was a noisy failure against modern trench warfare, barbed wire and the machine guns of the new regime's army. The defeat of the peasants (communeros in the south and rancheros in the north) led to the recovery of their land by the old landlords and the formation of new latifundias in the first years of the new regime.

Finally, it is not possible to see this war as a bourgeois revolution. It did not lead to the formation of a capitalist state, because one already existed and all that happened was that one form of this state was replaced by another. Its only merit was to have put in place the basis for the adoption of capitalist relations in the countryside, with the elimination of the system of "tiendas de rayas" which tied the peons to the haciendas and therefore impeded the free movement of the labor force (although, in general, rapidly developing capitalist relations of production had already fully existed and were predominant even before the war).

The great powers in the Mexican war

The so-called "Mexican Revolution" was not only an internal social conflict, it was also fully inscribed in the imperialist conflicts which unfolded throughout the world at the beginning of the century and which led to the First World War. In fact, the succession of governments that followed the fall of Porfirio Diaz, the government (and assassination) of Madero, then the government and expulsion of Huerta, and then the government and assassination of Carranza, that the official histories call a succession of misfortunes caused by "good" and "bad" men, "traitors" and "patriots" - all this can be explained much more logically by the struggle between the great powers for economic and political predominance in Mexico via control of the government; the sometimes 180 degree turnabouts that took place were thus the result of inter-imperialist struggles. To be exact, behind the scenes, we find the United States trying to establish a government in Mexico that supported and was subordinated to it[2].

The United States actively pushed for the disintegration and fall of the Diaz government, through its support for the northern landowner/capitalist fractions (led by Madero), with the aim of gaining economic and commercial concessions and weakening the influence of the European powers. However, Madero did not seek to destroy in favor of the US the "balance" of forces between the different powers that had existed in the days of Diaz, nor did he really improve the situation of the exploited classes. Unable to deal with the peasant revolts, Madero became an obstacle to the US's plans, who then backed Huerta's conspiracy to assassinate him and to take power.

Then, Huerta tried to use the struggle between the great powers to his own ends. The only result of which was that he ended up being abandoned by them all. Concurrently, the peasant movement reached its peak and Huerta was also cast aside. At the same time, the First World War erupted in Europe and from then on the situation in Mexico began to be influenced by another power: Germany

Germany was struggling with the other powers in order to gain a place in the imperialist arena for the division of the world market, to which it had arrived late. As regards Mexico, though it did have some economic interests there, these were not their main concern. Germany understood Mexico's strategic importance and sought to make good use of it in order to obstruct the United States. Germany's secret and diplomatic services first of all tried to use Huerta and then with better judgment Carranza, as a means of provoking an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico. Through this Germany intended to divert the military efforts of the United States, which was already supplying arms to the "Allies" and was preparing to enter the war. At its peak, the German bourgeoisie dreamt of a Japanese-Mexican-German alliance which would confront the United States in America. However at this time Japan was more concerned about seizing power in China and was not strong enough to challenge the United States. In the end, the "Allies" were able to foil Germany's plans. After this, understanding how close it was to defeat, Germany changed its policy and, through economic treaties, it tried to maintain a certain influence in Mexico, in the hope of better times.

At the beginning of the 1920's, the First World War being over and the internal conflict having died down, a new bourgeoisie was to be found in power in Mexico, whose "original" capital was derived from war profits. The United States was in the ascendant throughout the continent, and the influence of the old powers, Britain and France was in full retreat, although not totally liquidated. For example, Britain would continue to contest the control of oil, with the US, for another two decades. While the governments "emanating from the revolution", after that of Carranza (who was certainly assassinated) did not again call into question the supremacy of their neighbor in the north.

Nevertheless, the old bourgeoisie of the Porfirista period, although profoundly weakened, was not totally defeated. And before accepting it had to adapt it to the new situation and that it had no other option than to live and fuse together with the "new" capitalists, some of its sectors still had enough strength to call into question the new government.

The war of the "Cristeros"

The war of 1910-1920 did not totally settle accounts between the two parts of the national capital: this meant that between 1926-1929 a new and bloody war broke out between them. The war embraced the republic's central and western states (Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacion) and once again the peasants served as cannon fodder. As for the influence that the great powers exercised over Mexico, it is very interesting to observe that the "old" faction once again received support from some sections of European Capital (France, Spain, Germany) via the Roman Catholic church. In fact, this faction had "religious freedom" as its slogan, because this was supposedly being infringed by the "revolutionary regime" (in reality, what it was doing was seizing the "old" faction's areas of economic power, including those inside the Catholic church). And behind this slogan was the ideology of "Synarchy". Behind the "old" faction's cry of "Viva Cristo Rey" (from which the name Cristeros is derived) was the idea of the search for the new "world kingdom" led by the old powers (France, Germany, Italy, Spain...) - the ideological antecedent of European fascism in the 30's. Hence, once again we find European capital (or at least sections of it) trying to use an internal conflict to destabilize the country: only a few years later the same countries would confront the US on the military terrain. The Cristeros were defeated and the "old" fraction had no option but to change colors, integrate themselves with the others and bury its pro-European aspirations. The governments of the 30's and 40's served at the United States table, turning Mexico into a supplier of raw materials during the Second World War. This was the case, not only with the government of Avila Camacho who "declared war" on the Axis powers, but also his predecessor and elector (in Mexico the president is decisive in the election of his successor): Lazaro Cardenas, a distinguished general in the war against the Cristeros, whose mythical "expropriation of oil" in 1938 fundamentally led to the definitive expulsion of the British oil companies and the conversion of Mexico into an exclusive energy reserve for the United States.

The interlude of the Stalinist imperialist bloc

The end of the Second World War opened up what could be called a historical "parenthesis" in the world struggle that the United States and Germany had sustained throughout the century. For more than 40 years Russian imperialism challenged the world supremacy of American imperialism[3]. The formation of a new alignment of imperialist blocs found the old enemies on the same side: Germany on the same side as the United States.

In Latin America, the United States strengthened its economic and political domination, despite the USSR's intensions and intervention in the region (via some guerrilla movements and flirtations with "Socialist" governments). However, given the relative weakness of the USSR, these were - with the exception of Cuba[4] - no more than attempts to destabilize the region, as Germany had tried to do in an earlier period.

Nevertheless, this digression finished at the turn of the present decade, when the eastern imperialist bloc collapsed, the western bloc dissolved and the USSR fell apart. And contrary to what the bourgeois media says, this did not mark the end of the conflicts between the great powers, the "end of history" or anything like it.

Today, imperialist relations are a morass of destabilization, chaos and wars, which covers the whole world. No country, no matter how great or small can escape the sinister logic of imperialist struggles, especially the one around the two great powers, rivals throughout the century: the United States and Germany. However, the "New World Disorder" blunts the tendencies towards the formation of a new pair of imperialist blocs with these two powers as their axes, around which all the other countries would polarize. The allies of yesterday have become today's enemies, in an endless whirlwind of chaos, which does not stop these tendencies but feeds them, while the latter, at the same time, further increase chaos. And there is no way that Mexico can escape this dynamic of international capitalist relations.

Mexico "always loyal"?

We will now try to answer the questions we asked at the beginning of this article about the Mexican capitalist class' "loyalty" to the United States.

The American bourgeoisie has been assured the loyalty of Mexican bourgeoisie throughout the last seven decades, and in general terms, it will continue to receive it.

There are still some sections of the Mexican bourgeoisie who have never adjusted to domination by the United States. However, we would not call them a fraction (that would imply a deep fissure in the ruling class and that is not the case). These sections, although a relative minority, were still able to get one of their men into the president's seat, which was the situation with President Diaz Ordaz in the 60's. This was clearly only possible in a period when the tensions between the "pro-Europeans" and the "pro-Americans" were secondary to the confrontation with the "main enemy", Russian imperialism, and an alliance existed between Western Europe and the United States.

Nothing like that will happen again in the future. The United States will seek a guarantee of absolute loyalty from the Mexican executive, in order to avoid any "mistakes" which could bring to power a representative of the sections more inclined to the powers of the old continent.

Despite this, we can expect to see these minority sectors, fired up by the Germans, showing their heads, getting worked up, "protesting" and "demanding", creating further problems for the pro-American government. Likewise, we can expect to see the United States' rivals using these sectors, not to dispute control over Mexico, but in order to create social instability in its backyard, on the principle that everything that hinders the US and causes it to divert resources (economic, political, military) is a move they can use to their advantage.

We can already see signs of this. For example: the reanimation in recent months of the heirs of Synarchy (the Partido Democrata Mexicano and other similar regroupments). In the split of the Partido Accion Nacional - never more than a secondary electoral force in the country - one part aligning itself with the Salinas government, while the other, which contains the "historic leaders", decided to remain and form another party, that is ideologically closer to the Synarchists. The struggle in the Catholic Church is also significant. It is between one part which is seeking to reconcile itself with the government and the other which constantly attacks it from the pulpit. And finally, there is the resurgence of the ceremonies of "Cristo Rey" and the "Cristeros"; it is no accident that these are being pushed by the Vatican (which, according to the evidence, is drawing closer to Germany). There has been a religious rally in Guanajuato on the hill which symbolizes the Cristeros movement, which was presided over by the governor (a member of PAN). In Mexico City a rally took place in order to celebrate the beatification by the Pope of some thirty martyrs of the War of the Cristeros ...

We want to underline that these minority sections of capital favorable to an "anti-American" and therefore "pro-European" attitude cannot put into question the supremacy of the United States. However, they will certainly be able to create problems, of more or less gravity. We will see this in time.

Should the proletariat support one side or other of the bourgeoisie?

It is vital that the working class understands that its interests have nothing in common with these imperialist struggles. That it has nothing to gain from supporting one faction of the bourgeoisie against another and everything to lose. Two world wars between the different imperialist gangsters for the redivision of the world market have left the working class with tens of millions dead. In Mexico, the wars of 1910-1920 and 1926-1929 have also left it with millions of dead and its chains of oppression strengthened.

The proletariat must be aware that behind the calls for the defense of the "homeland" or "region" lurks the aim of dragging workers into defending interests which are not their own, including killing each other for the benefit of their exploiters. These calls are certainly going to increase in vehemency, until they become deafening, as the bourgeoisie's search for cannon fodder for its struggles becomes increasingly urgent. The proletariat must reject these calls, and oppose the continuation of these imperialist struggles, through developing its own class struggle, which is the only way of definitively putting an end to the capitalist system, which has nothing to offer humanity other than wars and chaos.

Leonardo, July 1993

Some Spanish terms used:

Haciendas and Latifundias: large landed estates

Peon: landless peasants forced to work on these estates

Ranchero: small independent farmer found in north of Mexico

Communero: peasants still working on a communal basis

[1] Revolucion Mundial no 12, "TLC: El gendarme del mundo asegura su traspatio" (TLC are the Spanish initials for NAFTA)

[2] F Katz' book La Guerra secreta en Mexico is a very full study and reveals the level of the influence of the great powers in the "Mexican Revolucion". We have taken from it much of what we have presented here.

[3] We are not able here to develop on our analysis of Stalinism. Thus, we recommend reading our "Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC" and the International Review.

[4] On Cuba read Revolucion Mundial issues 9 and 10

The first part of this article[1] dealt with the general framework for understanding that in decadent capitalism the state develops towards a totalitarian way of functioning even when it has a democratic form. The second part is an illustration of the fact using the example of Italy.

For the last few years recurrent scandals have tainted the political life of the ruling class in Italy. The affairs referred to as the P2 Lodge[2] and the Gladio network and the links with the Mafia in particular have lifted a corner of the virtuous veil that covers the bourgeois state and given a glimpse of the sordid and criminal reality of its workings. The bloody succession of terrorist and Mafia attacks, of "suicides" motivated by financial bankruptcy, traces its origins to the very heart of the state, to its tortuous maneuvers to safe-guard its hegemony. One "affair" follows hard on the heels of another and the ruling class knows exactly how to use the apparent uniqueness of each scandal to make us forget the previous ones. Today the other big western "democracies" point an accusing finger at the Italian bourgeoisie that is guilty of such crimes in an attempt to make us believe that the situation there is peculiar to that country. Aren't Machiavelli and the Mafia as typically Italian as Chianti and Parmesan cheese? In reality the whole scandalous history of the Italian bourgeoisie and all its ramifications demonstrates just the reverse. What is specific to Italy is that its democratic covering is more fragile historically than in the other democracies. A closer inspection shows that what the Italian scandals unveil is not at all peculiar to Italy. On the contrary it's an expression of decadent capitalism's general tendency towards state totalitarianism and of the imperialist antagonisms that have marked the twentieth century in every part of the world.

The history of Italy since the beginning of the century is an ample demonstration.

The Mafia at the heart of the state and of imperialist strategy

In the middle of the 1920s Mussolini declared war on the Mafia: "I'll drain them dry the way I drained the Pontin marshes", he stated. In Sicily this task was assigned to the chief of police Mori and his men. But the years passed and the Cosa Nostra held out. When the prospect of the Second World War loomed the Mafia became an important strategic weapon for the future belligerents as it was firmly implanted both in the south of Italy and in the USA. Mussolini was interested in increasing his influence among Italo-Americans and so forming a "fifth column" in enemy territory. For this reason in 1937 he welcomed with open arms Vito Genovese, nick-named Lucky Luciano, who was the boss of the American Mafia and had a somewhat delicate relationship with US law. Genovese became a protégé of the fascist regime and was invited on more than one occasion to eat a friendly plate of spaghetti at the table of Il Duce in the company of such celebrities as Count Ciano (Mussolini's son-in-law and minister for foreign affairs) and Hermann Goering. In 1943 he received the highest distinction of the fascist regime; Il Duce himself pinned the Ordine di Commendatore on his breast. Genovese carried out little services for the fascist regime. He eliminated members of the Mafia who hadn't understood the new rules of the game; in New York he arranged for the assassination of an Italo-American journalist, Carlo Tresca, who ran an influential anti-fascist newspaper, Il Martello. But more important still, the help he gave put Lucky Luciano in a privileged position which enabled him to set up a network for all kinds of trafficking and also to enlarge his sphere of influence. The chief of police in Naples, Albini, became his man and in 1943 Genovese managed to get him named deputy secretary of state for the Ministry of the Interior. Ciano too was under Genovese's control because, as a drug addict, he depended upon him for his supply of drugs.

During this period the USA, which had entered the war in 1941, was quite aware of the strategic importance of the Mafia. On its home ground the US had to prevent a front being created among immigrants of Italian origin within the US. This meant that it became indispensable for the American state to negotiate with the Mafia as among other things they controlled the dockers' and lorry drivers' unions, sectors that were vital for army transportation and supplies. To reinforce their credibility the Mafia organized the sabotage of the liner The Normandy; it was set alight in February 1942 in the port of New York while being refitted to transport troops. Shortly afterwards a general dock strike, instigated by the Mafia-controlled union, brought the port to a standstill. In the end the American Navy asked Washington for permission to negotiate with the Mafia and its boss, Luciano, although he was in prison at the time, and Roosevelt eagerly agreed. The American state has always denied this and the details of Operation Underworld (as it was called) have always been classified. Lucky Luciano too insisted right up to his death that all this was no more than "bullshit and tall stories made up for idiots"[3]. However after decades of silence on the question it's now generally recognized that the American state negotiated an alliance with the Mafia. In accordance with their promise Luciano was freed after the war and "exiled" to Italy. As public prosecutor Thomas Dewey had arranged for the arrest and sentencing of Luciano ten years earlier and by virtue of the ensuing publicity had become governor of the state of New York in the intervening period. In an interview with the New York Post, he justified Genovese's release in these words: "An exhaustive enquiry has established that the help given by Luciano to the Navy during the war was considerable and valuable".

In fact the Mafia did help the American state a great deal during the war. Initially it placed a foot in both camps but in the middle of 1942 when the balance of forces tipped more clearly in favor of the Allies, the Mafia put its forces at the disposal of the USA. Within the US it did so by committing its unions to the war effort but it was most clearly illustrated in Italy. When American troops disembarked in Sicily in 1943 the support they received from the Mafia there was efficient and of great assistance to them. The disembarkation on 10th July was more like a day's outing; the American soldiers encountered little opposition and only seven days later Palermo was under their control. At the same time the British 8th army, which probably didn't receive the same degree of support from the Mafia, was forced to fight for five weeks and sustained numerous losses just to attain part of its objectives. According to some historians this alliance with the Mafia saved the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. From that time onwards General Patton called the Sicilian godfather, Don Calogero Vizzini, who organized the rout of the Italian-German forces, the "Mafia General". As a reward the latter, who up to then had spent many a year in prison, was elected Mayor of his town Villalba under the benevolent eye of the Allies. On 25th July, a week after the fall of Palermo, the fascist Grand Council removed Mussolini and one month later Italy capitulated. The sphere of influence established by Genovese was to be very important in the events following the disembarkation in Sicily. Ciano helped Badoglio to remove Mussolini. The black market structure set up in the Naples region worked in complete harmony with the Allied forces to their mutual benefit. Vito Genovese became the right hand man of Charlie Poletti, the American military governor of the whole of occupied Italy. Afterwards when he returned to the US Genovese became the most important Mafia boss there in the post-war period.

The alliance between the American state and the Mafia that was born during the war was not to be dissolved when the war ended. The Honorata Societa had proved itself such an efficient and useful partner that the American state couldn't run the risk that its services might be exploited by other interests especially when a new rival imperialist bloc emerged at the end of the Second World War: the USSR.

The Gladio affair: a manipulative structure for the strategic interests of the US bloc

In October 1990 Prime minister Giulio Andreotti revealed the existence of a clandestine organization that was run in parallel with the official secret services, financed by the CIA and integrated into NATO; its function was to counter-attack in the event of a Russian invasion and by extension to fight against Communist influence. This was the Gladio network. The revelation provoked a huge outcry; not only in Italy but internationally as a similar structure had been constituted in every country of the western bloc under the control of the USA.

"Officially" the Gladio network was constituted in 1956 but its real origin goes back to the end of the war. Even before the Second World War was over, once the fate of the Axis forces was sealed, the new rivalry developing between the USA and the USSR was monopolizing the attention of the most important states and their secret services. War crimes and those responsible for them were forgotten in the face of the new war that was beginning against the influence of the new Russian adversary. Throughout Europe the allied services, especially the American ones, were recruiting old fascists and Nazis in abundance, executioners and adventurers of all kinds, all in the name of the holy struggle against "Communism". For the "losers" this was an excellent opportunity to renew their virginity at little cost.

In Italy the situation was particularly delicate as far as western interests were concerned. It had the strongest Stalinist party in Western Europe which came out of the war covered in glory because of the decisive role it had played in the resistance against fascism. During the run up to the 1948 election, held in accordance with the new constitution set up after the Liberation, concern grew among western strategists because they were not at all sure what the result would be, and a victory for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) would be catastrophic. Given that Greece was plunged in civil war and the CP was threatening to take power by force, and that Yugoslavia was still within the Russian orbit, if Italy fell under the influence of the USSR it would represent a strategic disaster of the highest order for western interests. The danger was of losing control over the Mediterranean and therefore over access to the Middle East.

In the face of this danger the Italian bourgeoisie quickly forgot their old wartime divisions. In March 1946 they dissolved the High Commission which had been given the task of purging the state of those who had been too committed to supporting Mussolini. They demobilized the partisans. They replaced those who had been given positions of responsibility by the Liberation Committees, especially at the head of the police, by those who had been chosen by Mussolini in the past. From 1944 to 1948 an estimated 90% of personnel who had formed part of the state apparatus under the fascist regime were reinstated.

The electoral campaign that was supposed to christen the new democratic republic was in full swing. Financial and industrial establishments, the army, the police, all of whom had formed the bulwark of the fascist regime, began trumpeting the virtues of their old enemy, western democracy, and warning of the danger of "Communism". The Vatican, which is an important fraction of the Italian bourgeoisie, had initially supported Mussolini's regime; during the war it played a double game (as it is wont to do). It now threw itself into the electoral campaign. In front of 300,000 believers gathered in Saint Paul's Square the Pope declared that, "whoever offered their assistance to a party that didn't accept the existence of God was a traitor and a deserter". In the south of Italy the Mafia was active in the electoral campaign, financing Christian Democracy and instructing their contacts to vote for them.

All this took place under the benevolent eye and active support of the USA. In fact the American state spared no effort. In the USA the "letter to Italy" campaign was mounted urging Italo-Americans to send letters to their family in Italy advising them to vote the "right" way. The Voice of America radio station, which had vilified the wrong-doings of the fascist regime during the war, now denounced, day after day, the dangers of Communism. Two weeks before the elections the Marshall Plan was approved but the USA had not waited until then to inundate the Italian government with dollars; a few weeks earlier an aid package of $227 million was voted by Congress. Parties and organizations hostile to the PCI and to the Democratic Front which it was part of received aid in hard cash; the American press estimates the sum spent in this way at $20 million.

But, in case all this failed to prevent the PCI's Democratic Front from winning, the USA set in motion a secret strategy that would go into action in the event of a government dominated by the Stalinists coming to power. The American secret services contacted and coordinated the activity of the various clans within the Italian bourgeoisie who were opposed to the PCI, those at the head of the state apparatus, the army, the police, the big industrialists and financiers, the Vatican, the Mafia godfathers. They set up a clandestine resistance network that was to go into action if the "Communists" seized power and which recruited its members from among the "old" fascists, the army, the police, the Mafia milieu and generally among committed "anti-communists". The re-emergence of fascist groups was encouraged in the name of the defense of "liberty". Weapons were distributed secretly. The feasibility of a military coup d'état was considered and it was no accident that a few days before the election 20,000 police carried out maneuvers with armored weapons and that Mario Scelba, minister for the Home Office, announced that he'd set up a structure able to deal with armed insurrection. The decision was made that, in the event of the PCI winning, Sicily would secede. The USA was able to count on the Cosa Nostra to see to this as they supported the "independence" struggle of Salvatore Giuliano for this reason. In the meantime the American general staff would make serious plans for the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia by its armed forces.

In the end, on 16th April 1948 Christian Democracy with 48% of the votes carried the majority with 40 seats. The PCI was relegated to the opposition and Western interests were safe. But the first elections of the new Italian democratic republic that came out of the liberation were not at all democratic. They were the result of enormous manipulation. Anyway even if the result had gone the wrong way the "democratic" forces of the west were ready to organize a coup d'état, to sow disorder, to stir up civil war in order to re-establish their control over Italy. It was under these auspices and in these conditions, which couldn't have been any less democratic, that the Italian republic was born. It carries the marks to this day.

In order to achieve this electoral result a clandestine structure (a far cry from the official framework of how "democracy" functions) was set up under the leadership of the USA. It regrouped those sectors of the bourgeoisie who were most favorable to western interests and who thus formed the dominant clan within the Italian state. This was later to be called the Gladio network. In secret it regrouped a political nerve center (the summit), an economic body, various interest groups who profited from financing it, an armed wing, a rank-and-file who were recruited by the secret services and were responsible for low level tasks. This structure proved effective. It was maintained because the development of imperialist antagonisms in what's called the "cold war" period and the fact that the PCI continued to be a powerful party in Italy means that what was useful for western strategic interests post war remains so today.

However manipulating the election results by means of a tight control over the political parties, the main state organs, the media and the heart of the economy wasn't enough; there remained the danger that the situation would turn to the advantage of the PCI. In order to deal with "Communist subversion" the Gladio organization (or its equivalent under another name) has been preparing a prospective military coup d'état since the end of the war in order to preserve the foundations of western bloc domination:

- in 1967, L'Expresso denounced in its columns the putchist preparations organized three years earlier by the police and secret services. In the subsequent enquiry legal representatives came up against state secrets, the secret services tampering with evidence, obstruction from ministers and influential political figures and a series of mysterious deaths among those involved in the affair.

- on the night of 7/8 December 1970 commandos of the extreme right occupied the Home Office in Rome. But the plot failed and the several hundred armed men who paraded around in the Roman night went home at dawn. An escapade on the part of a few fascist elements? The preliminary investigations that went on for seven years showed that the plot was organised by Prince Valerio Borghese, that the military were involved at the highest level, that politicians within Christian Democracy and the Social Democratic Party were involved, that the military attaché to the American Embassy was in close liaison with those who initiated the coup. From then on the enquiry was gradually stifled, although Admiral Miceli, head of the secret services, was dismissed in 1974 following the issue of a warrant for his arrest which accused him of "having promoted, formed and organized together with others a secret association of military and civil personnel with the aim of stirring up armed insurrection".

- in 1973 another plot to instigate a coup d'état was uncovered by the Italian police. This one was organized by Eduardo Sogno, formerly Italian Ambassador to Rangoon. Once again the enquiry was impeded in the name of preserving "state secrets".

However if you look closely these plots have more the appearance of political maneuvers to maintain a certain political atmosphere than real attempted coups that failed. In fact in 1969 Italy experienced a wave of strikes, the "hot autumn", which marked the re-awakening of the class struggle and which revived the fear in the minds of NATO strategists that the social situation in Italy would be destabilized. After 1969 a strategy was to be developed that was intended to re-establish order and strengthen the state: the strategy of social tension.

The strategy of social tension: provocation as a method of government

In 1974 Roberto Caballero, a bureaucrat in the fascist union Cisnal, stated in an interview with L'Europeo: "When trouble arises in the country (disturbances, union unrest, violence) the Organization goes into action to create the conditions to restore order. If such trouble doesn't arise it's created by the Organization itself through the intermediary of all those groups of the extreme right (if not the groups of the extreme left) who are now involved in black subversion". He also goes on to say that the group of people controlling this organization "who include representatives of the Italian and American secret services as well as influential multinational companies, have chosen a strategy of disorder and tensions which serve as a justification for restoring order".

In 1969, 145 attacks were carried out. The climax that year was reached on 12th December with the bloody explosions in Rome and Milan which left 16 dead and about a hundred injured. The inquiry into these bombings was to spend three years on a false trail in pursuit of anarchists before discovering, in spite of all the obstacles placed in its path, the black trail: that of the extreme right and the secret services. 1974 was marked by two bloody attacks at Brescia (7 dead, 90 injured) and in a train, The Italicus (12 dead, 48 wounded). Once again the trail led to black terrorism. However from 1974 the "black" terrorism of the extreme right gave place to the terrorism of the Red Brigades. This reached its height with the kidnapping and assassination of the Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Then in 1980 the extreme right made a violent come-back with the bloody attack at Bologna station (90 dead) which was finally attributed to them. Once more the preliminary investigations implicated the secret services and once more the general heads of these services escaped trial.

The "strategy of social tension" was set up cynically and efficiently to create a climate of terror in order to justify a strengthening of the state's means of repression and control over society. The link between the terrorism of the extreme right and the secret services emerged clearly from the inquiries conducted even if these were suppressed. On the other hand such links weren't clearly shown by the police inquiries in relation to the terrorism of the extreme left as carried out by groups such as the Red Brigades and Prima Linea. However here too, with the benefit of hindsight, the facts and evidence gathered tend to show that "red" terrorism was encouraged, manipulated, used, if not directly instigated by the state and its parallel services.

It is already evident that the Red Brigade attacks had the same result as those of the neo-fascists: they created a climate of insecurity that served the state's ideological campaigns to justify the strengthening of the forces of repression. In the second half of the 1970s they helped to make the public forget what the earlier enquiries had begun to show: that the bombs from 1969 to 1971 were not the work of anarchists but of fascist elements used by the secret services. Because the perpetrators justified the "red" bombings in terms of a revolutionary phraseology they were more effective in confusing the process of developing consciousness that was taking place within the working class, and they increased the weight of repression that fell upon the most advanced elements of the proletariat and the revolutionary milieu who were lumped together with terrorism. In short, from the point of view of the state it was much more useful than "black" terrorism. That's why the bourgeois media that serves the state's interests attributed the earlier bombings that were carried out by the extreme right to anarchists. That was the whole point of the maneuver, to act as a provocation.

"The situation could arise in which allied countries show themselves to be passive or indecisive when confronted with communist subversion. The military espionage of the United States must be furnished with the means to mount special operations able to convince the governments of allied countries and public opinion that the danger of insurrection is a real one. The military espionage of the United States must try to infiltrate the seats of insurrection by means of agents on special mission with the task of forming action groups within the most radical movements." This quotation is an extract from the US Intelligence Field Manual, the campaign manual for American spies, and the intelligence leaders in Washington claim that it's false. But it's been authenticated by Colonel Oswald Le Winter, an ex-CIA agent and liaison officer in Europe, in a television documentary about Gladio. He also gave a concrete demonstration of what it means when he stated during the interview, "The Red Brigades as well as Baader-Meinhof and Action Directe were also infiltrated. Several of these left-wing terrorist organisations were infiltrated and controlled". He goes on to say that "reports and documents from our bureau in Rome testified that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated and that their nucleus received its orders from Santovito". General Santovito was the head of the Italian secret services (SISMI) at the time. A more reliable source, Frederico Umberto d'Amato, ex-chief of the political police and minister of the Home Office from 1972 and 1974 proudly relates that "The Red Brigades were infiltrated. This was difficult because they had furnished themselves with a very rigid and efficient structure. Nevertheless they were infiltrated spectacularly and with optimum results".

More than any other act committed by the Red Brigades, kidnapping Aldo Moro, killing his escort, holding him in captivity and finally executing him in 1978 arouses suspicion of a maneuver of some clan within the state and the secret services. It's amazing that the Red Brigades who were composed of young elements in revolt, highly motivated and committed but with little experience of clandestine war, were able to carry out an operation of such scope and so well. The enquiry brought to light many disturbing elements: a member of the secret services was present at the place where he was snatched, the bullets found on the scene had been treated in a particular way used by the special services, etc. The scandal provoked by the discovery that the state had had a hand in the bombings from 1969 to 1974, which had been wrongly attributed to the anarchists, had been forgotten. Even so the suspicion reigned within public opinion in Italy that state manipulation had lain behind the Red Brigade attacks. In fact Aldo Moro was kidnapped just before he was due to sign the "historic compromise" which was to seal a governmental alliance between Christian Democracy and the PCI. It was Moro who had master-minded the idea. His widow said that "I learnt from my husband or someone else that around 1975 he had been warned that his attempts to bring together the various political forces to govern for the good of the country had displeased certain groups and individuals. He'd been told that if he persisted with this political project he was likely to pay very dearly for his stubbornness". The "historic compromise" might have opened the doors of government to the PCI. As Prime Minister Moro was aware of the existence of Gladio. He probably thought that the infiltration of the PCI that it had carried out over the years in order to lessen the east's influence, and the fact that the party was distancing itself increasingly from Russian political choices, made it acceptable in the eyes of his western allies. But the way that the state abandoned him when he'd been seized shows that this was not the case. In the end the "historic compromise" wasn't signed. So the death of Moro corresponds perfectly with the interests that Gladio defended, and when D'Amato speaks of the "optimum results" obtained from the infiltration of the Red Brigades one wonders whether he is thinking of Moro's assassination.

The various enquiries have always been obstructed by certain state sectors, administrative delaying tactics and the sacred "secret d'état" but the discovery of the P2 Lodge in 1981 confirmed the suspicions of the judiciary as to the existence of a secret government, a parallel structure that was pulling the strings from the shadows and organizing the "strategy of social tension".

The P2 Lodge: the real hidden power of the state

In 1981 customs officials discovered a list of 963 "brother" members of the P2 Lodge. This list contained the cream of the Italian bourgeoisie: 6 current ministers; 63 high ranking civil servants in government ministries; 60 politicians including Andreotti and Cossiga; 18 judges and prosecutors; 83 big industrialists including Agnelli, Pirelli, Falk, Crespi; bankers such as Calvi and Sindona; members of the Vatican such as Cardinal Caseroli; important figures from the communications sector such as Rizzoli, owner of Corriere de la Sera or Berlusconi, owner of numerous television channels; practically all the heads of the secret services over the years among whom the generals Allavena, the head of SIFAR from June 1965 to June 1966, Miceli, named as head of the secret services in 1970, Admiral Casardi who succeeded him, General Santovito then patron of SISMI; 14 army generals; 9 admirals; 9 police chiefs; 4 air force generals and 4 top customs officials. This is just to mention those in the most prominent positions although names could also be cited from the universities, among trade unionists, the leaders of extreme right wing groups. Apart from radicals, leftists and the PCI the whole Italian political spectrum is represented. This list is certainly not complete however. A number of other names were mentioned at the time of the scandal without any proof being given. Among the rumours that were never substantiated it was even suggested that influential members of the PCI belonged to the P2.

However you can say that there's nothing very unusual in all this. In fact it's quite usual to find within the Freemasons a number of well-known figures who practice rituals and find this a good way to cultivate contacts and fill their address books. Even so the personality of the Grand Master, Licio Gelli, is disturbing.

Gelli was the head of this Lodge and unknown to the general public. However the course of the enquiry and subsequent revelations were to show the determinant influence that he's had over Italian politics over the years. His personal history is edifying. Gelli began his career as a member of the fascist party; at 18 he joined the Black Shirts who were to fight in Spain; during the war he actively collaborated with the Nazis to whom he handed over dozens of partisans and deserters. It seems that from 1943 he started to play both sides. He contacted the Resistance and the American secret services. After the war he fled to Argentina and returned to Italy with no difficulty in 1948. At the beginning of the 60s he joined the Freemasons, was active in the Propaganda Two Lodge, of which he rapidly became Grand Master and where he was joined by the most important heads of the secret services. There are a number of proofs of his subsequent power. When one of his children got married such prominent personalities as Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani and apparently Pope Paul VI sent sumptuous gifts. According to the enquiries Agnelli offered him a telephone in solid gold as a token of friendship. At the beginning of the 1980s, Gelli telephoned almost every day to the prime minister, the minister of trade and industry, the minister for foreign affairs, to the leaders of the main Italian political parties (Christian-Democrat, Socialist, Social-Democrat, Republican, Liberal and neo-Fascist). The cream of the Italian establishment filed to his residence near Florence and his private rooms at the luxury hotel Excelsior. The most noteworthy of these is Andreotti who is in fact his official political representative, his tool.

The conclusion of the commission of enquiry on the P2 Lodge is interesting. It considers that Gelli "belongs to the secret services of which he's the head; the P2 Lodge and Gelli are the expression of an influence exerted by the American masons and the CIA over the Giustiniani Palace since it reopened after the war; an influence that is evidence of the economic dependence on the American masons and its head Frank Gigliotti". Gigliotti is himself a CIA agent. In 1990 an ex-CIA agent, Richard Brenneke, stated, in a television interview that caused a scandal, "The United States government financed P2 to the tune of 10 million dollars a month". Look how clear it is. P2 and Gladio are one and the same. The charge sheet of 14th June 1986 refers to "the existence in Italy of a secret structure composed of military and civil elements whose final goal is to govern the existing political balance by controlling the democratic evolution of the country and who have used various means to realize this objective, including the use of attacks committed by neo-fascist organizations". It also speaks of "a sort of invisible government in which P2, deviant sectors of the secret services, organized crime and terrorism are tightly bound together".

However this lucid opinion of the judiciary will not change the way the Italian state functions to any great extent. Suspected of complicity in the Bologna bombing, Gelli left the country, was arrested in a Swiss bank on 14th September 1982 while he was drawing out 120 million dollars from a numbered account. On 10th August 1983 the old man carried out an incredible escape from his Genevan prison and disappeared into thin air until four years later when he gave himself up to the Swiss authorities. The Swiss extradited him to Italy. But although in 1988 he'd been condemned in his absence to ten years imprisonment, he was re-tried in 1990 and finally acquitted. The P2 scandal was banalised and forgotten. The P2 Lodge has disappeared but no doubt another secret structure, equally efficient, has replaced it. In 1990 Cossiga, ex-member of P2 and then prime minister, could say with satisfaction of Gladio that, "he's proud that the secret was kept for 45 years". The dozens killed in attacks are forgotten; forgotten too the countless murders. New scandals arrive in the nick of time to make us forget the old ones.

Some lessons

All these events, in which Italian history and crime are fused together, have not had much echo outside the country. It's all been presented as an "Italian business", with no link to what happens in the other big western democracies. In Italy itself, the role of the Mafia has been portrayed as a regional product of the south of Italy; the "strategy of tension" as the work of bent sectors of the secret services, and political scandals as the simple product of the corruption of certain politicians. In short, the real lessons have been glossed over and, with all the scandals, revelations, televised trials and resignations of statesmen, the illusion that the state is fighting against these affronts to democratic order has been kept up. However, this brief history of the "affairs" that have shaken the Italian republic since the 1930s shows something quite different:

- these affairs are not a specifically Italian product, but the result of the international activity of the bourgeoisie, in a context of sharpening imperialist rivalries. In these conditions, this means that Italy, far from being an exception, is an example of what's going on everywhere;

- they are not the expression of a corrupt minority of the ruling class, but of the totalitarian operation of the state in decadent capitalism, even if it hides behind the democratic mask.

Both the history of the rise of the Cosa Nostra and the revelations about the Gladio and P2 networks show that these are international, not just Italian affairs.

This is particularly obvious with the Gladio affair. The Gladio network, by definition, was a secret structure of NATO, and so an international one. It was the secret transmission belt for the USA's control over the countries of its bloc, whose function was to oppose by all available means both the maneuvers of the other bloc and the dangers of social instability. This is why it was secret. In the same way as it existed and acted in Italy, it existed and acted in other countries of the western bloc. There is no reason for it to have been otherwise: from the same causes, the same effects.

With this clarification, we can understand more easily the forces at work behind the colonels' coup d'état in Greece in 1967, Pinochet's in 1973, and all the others that followed in Latin America in the 70s. Similarly, it is not only in Italy that, from the end of the 60s, we have seen a wave of terrorist attacks, allowing the state to wage intense ideological campaigns aimed at disorienting a working class that was returning to the path of struggle, and at justifying the reinforcement of its weapons of repression. In Germany, in France, in Britain, in Japan, in Spain, in Belgium, in the USA, we can in the light of Italian events reckon that, behind the actions of terrorist groups of the far right, the far left, or the nationalist ones, lies the hand of the state and the secret services, and an organized international strategy under the auspices of the bloc.

Again, the edifying example of the role of the Mafia in Italy is not something recent, nor a specifically local product. The integration of the Mafia into the heart of the Italian state is not a new phenomenon: it goes back more than 50 years. It is not the product of a slow gangrene affecting only the most corrupt politicians: it is the result of the overturning of alliances that took place during the Second World War. The Mafia, acting on behalf of the Allies, played a decisive role in the fall of Mussolini's regime and, as payment for these services, gained a central place in the state. The alliance formed during the war didn't end with the war. The Mafia remained, as a clique within the Italian bourgeoisie, the USA's main source of support within the Italian state. The weight and role of the Mafia within the Italian state is thus above all the result of American imperialist strategy.

Is this an unnatural alliance between the US champion of democracy and the symbol of crime, dictated by the imperatives of world strategy? Alliance yes, unnatural no. Italian reality simply highlights a worldwide phenomenon of decadent capitalism: in the name of the sacrosanct imperatives of the state and imperialist interests, the great powers which, in front of the media, trumpet their democratic convictions, are behind the scenes engaged in all kinds of alliances which show that their official discourse is nothing but lies. It's a banality to note that the numerous dictators who reign in the peripheries of capitalism do so thanks to the patronage of one great power or another. The same goes for the various mafia-type clans around the world: their activity can only develop with impunity because they render such important services to the dominant imperialisms who have carved up the planet.

These mafia are very often an integral part of the ruling fractions of the bourgeoisie. This is obvious for a whole series of countries where the production and export of drugs is the essential economic activity, thus facilitating the ascent, within the ruling class, of the gangs which control this increasingly important sector of the capitalist economy. But this reality is not limited to the underdeveloped countries and we can find examples in the upper echelons of world capitalism. Thus, the alliance between the American state and the Italian Mafia during the Second World War extended into the USA itself, where at the same time the American branch of the Cosa Nostra was invited to participate in the affairs of state. The situation in Japan is quite similar to that in Italy and the recent scandals that have broken there show the omnipresent links between the politicians and the local mafia. The Italian example is thus also valid for the two biggest economic powers in the world, where a mafia has conquered a choice place within the state. This is not only due to the latter's economic weight, thanks to its control over extremely lucrative economic sectors - drugs, gambling, prostitution, rackets of all kinds - but also to the 'specialized' services that these cliques of gangsters can provide, services that correspond perfectly to the needs of the state in decadent capitalism.

It is true that the most 'respectable' bourgeoisies have always used the services of special agents when this was necessary, or those of its shadier fractions for 'unofficial' (i.e. illegal, according to its laws) activities. There are plenty of examples in the 19th century: espionage of course, but also the resort to criminal strong-arm elements to break strikes or the use of local mafia in the penetration of the colonies. But at this time this aspect of the life of capitalism was limited and circumstantial. Since it entered its phase of decadence at the beginning of the century, capitalism has been in permanent crisis. In order to ensure its domination, it can no longer rely on the progress it used to bring about. Unable to do that anymore, it can only base its power on lies and manipulation. What's more, during the course of the 20th century, which has been marked by two world wars, the exacerbation of imperialist tensions has become a preponderant factor in the life of capitalism. In the free-for-all that reigns all over the planet, everything is permitted, even the lowest blows. In order to respond to such requirements, the functioning of the state has had to adapt. To the extent that lies and manipulation, whether for the needs of imperialist defense or of social control, have become essential to the survival of the system, secrecy has become a central part of the capitalist state; the kind of classical democratic functioning of the bourgeoisie and its state which we saw in the 19th century are no longer possible. It is only kept up as an illusion aimed at hiding the reality of state totalitarianism, which has nothing democratic about it. The realities of power have been hidden because they are so inadmissible. Not only has power been concentrated in the executive, at the expense of the legislative, whose representative, parliament, has become a screen feeding the campaigns of the media; even within the executive, power has become concentrated in the hands of specialists in secrecy and all kinds of manipulations. In these conditions, not only has the state had to recruit an abundance of specialized manpower, creating a multitude of special services, each one more secret than the next; within the state, the result has been the ascent of those cliques of the bourgeoisie most experienced in secrecy and 'illegal' activity. In this process, the totalitarian state has extended its grip to the whole of society, including the underworld, culminating in a symbiosis in which it has become difficult to distinguish a politician from a businessman, a secret agent or a gangster.

This is the basic reason for the growing role of mafia-type bodies in the life of capital. But the Mafia isn't the only example. The P2 Lodge affair shows that Freemasonry, because of its occult functioning and its international affiliations, is an ideal instrument for use as a network of influence by secret services for the needs of imperialist policy. The different Masonic groupings in the world have been used for a long time by the state and the various western imperialist powers. The same is probably true for all the other important secret societies.

But the P2 Lodge was not only a tool of American imperialist policy. It was first of all part of Italian capital and it shows the reality of state totalitarianism behind all the democratic blather. It regrouped within itself bourgeois clans which have been dominating the state in a hidden manner for years. This does not mean that it regrouped the whole Italian bourgeoisie. The PCI was excluded since it represented another fraction whose foreign orientation was directed towards the east. It is also probable that other cliques exist within the Italian bourgeoisie, which could explain why the scandal broke. Furthermore, within the P2 Lodge several clans cohabited, linked by convergent interests under the American aegis and faced with the common danger of Russian imperialism and 'Communist' subversion. The list found at Gelli's house makes it possible to identify certain of these clans: the big industrialists of the north, the Vatican, a very important sector of the state apparatus, notably the upper echelons of the army and secret services, and, in a more discrete manner, the Mafia. The links between the latter and the P2 Lodge appears with the bankers Sindona and Calvi: the first one died of poisoning in prison, the second was found hanging from a bridge in London. Both of them had been involved in financial scandals when they were managing the funds of the Vatican and the Mafia. Strange alliances perfectly typical of contemporary capitalism. The P2 Lodge is a sulphurous cocktail which shows us that reality often outdoes the most outlandish fiction: occult societies, secret services, the Vatican, political parties, the milieux of business, industry and finance, the Mafia, journalists, trade unionists, academics, etc.

In fact, the exposure of the P2 Lodge revealed the veritable center of hidden decision-making which has presided over the destinies of Italian capitalism since the war. Gelli called himself, with cynical humor, "the grand puppet-master", the one who pulled the strings from behind the scenes, and whose "puppets" were the politicians. The great democratic process of the Italian state was thus no more than a skillful bit of stage-management. The most important decisions were taken elsewhere than in the official structures (national assemblies, ministries, presidency, etc) of the Italian state. This secret structure of power was maintained no matter what the result of the numerous electoral consultations which took place over these years. What's more, the P2 Lodge had all the cards it needed to manipulate the elections and keep the PCI out of power, as in 1948. Virtually all the leaders of the Christian Democratic, Socialist and Republican parties were under its thumb and the democratic game of "alternatives" was just sleight of hand. The reality of power did not change. Behind the scenes, Gelli and his P2 Lodge continued to control the state.

Here again, there is no reason why this should be an Italian specificity, even if elsewhere the occult decision-making center may not take the rather romantic form of a Masonic Lodge. For a number of years, the brutal aggravation of the crisis and the overturning of imperialist alignments resulting from the disappearance of the eastern bloc has provoked a shift in alliances between the various cliques within each national capital. Far from being the expression of a sudden desire to restore a more democratic way of operating, the present campaigns developing in a number of countries, stressing the need to clean out the most rotten apples from the state, are no more than a settling of scores between different cliques vying for control over the state. The manipulation of the media, the use of compromising dossiers is the weapons in this struggle, which can also take bloodier forms.

In fact, all this shows, in hindsight, that Italy, far being an exception with its succession of political scandals, is an edifying example and harbinger of what is now happening everywhere.

JJ

Some references:

On the Mafia: Le Syndicat de Crime by J M Charlier and J Marcilly, Presse de la Cite, Paris 1980. On Gladio and the P2 Lodge: Intelligences secretes, by F Calvi and O Schmidt, Hachette, Paris 1988; Gladio, EPO, Bruxelles 1991; as well as the documentary televised in three parts, Gladio, BBC, 1992. On the strategy of tension in Italy: Il partito del golpe, G Flamini, Ferrara, Boloventa, 1981.

[1] See International Review no 76

[2] P2 means "Propaganda Due" - Propaganda Two

[3] Testimony of Lucky Luciano

The beginning of 1994 has been marked by a major reality: the worldwide explosion of unemployment. The governments of the seven biggest western economic powers organized for the occasion, greatly reinforced by  media propaganda, a meeting exclusively devoted to this question, qualified as 'problem number one'. The American president personally presented 'a global plan against unemployment' based on the 'success' of American methods. At the heart of Europe, in the biggest power on the continent, unemployment beat records unknown since the 30s. The German economic minister, Gunter Rexold, recognized: 'The fact that more than 4 million citizens cannot find work is one of the greatest challenges for the state and society since the foundation of the Federal Republic.' A report of the International Labor Organization affirmed that today 30% of workers in the world are unemployed or under-employed. That means 820 million people: 120 million are officially 'registered' unemployed, 700 million are 'under-employed'. What is the significance of this new aggravation of unemployment? Are the methods of the American government an effective remedy against the sickness? What are the perspectives for the class struggle?

An unprecedented situation

The more the dominant ideology, following in the footsteps of the campaigns on the 'collapse of communism', presents capitalism as the only possible form of social organization for modern humanity, the more devastating are the ravages created by the continuation of this system. The plague of unemployment, source of poverty, isolation, despair,  which incarnates to the highest degree the absurd and merciless dictatorship of capitalist profit over the conditions of existence of the immense majority of society, is without doubt the most significant of these calamities.

The present increase in unemployment, expressing the new open recession in which capitalism has been now stuck for four years, did not sweep down on a world of 'full employment'. Far from it. It is now more than a quarter of a century, since the recession of 1967, which marked the end of the prosperity of the post-war reconstruction, that the contagion of unemployment has systematically infected the whole planet. The sickness has extended according to the slower rhythm of economic 'growth', with moments of acceleration and periods of relative stagnation. But the periods of relief have never annulled the effects of the preceding aggravation and through various fluctuations the number of unemployed has continued to increase in every country[1]. Since the beginning of the 70s, even the term 'full employment' has disappeared from the vocabulary. The adolescents of the last two decades are known as the 'unemployed generation'.

The explosion of unemployment which marked the beginning of the 90s did not therefore create a new problem. It only worsened an already dramatic situation. And how.

Germany, the biggest economic power in Europe, has suffered a massive increase in unemployment since 1991. In January 1994 the official figure of job seekers passed the 4 million mark. If we add to this figure those unemployed on 'social security' we get 6 million. Its the highest level since the 30s depression. The official rate of unemployment has reached 17% in former East Germany, 8.8% in the West.  The perspective for the immediate future is also catastrophic: 'experts' have forecast 450,000 more unemployed from now to the end of the year. Massive redundancies are expected in the most powerful and competitive sectors of the German economy: 51,000 at Daimler-Benz, 30,000 in the chemical industry, 16,000 in aeronautics, 20,000 at Volkswagen...

The expenses of German unification momentarily created a market which allowed Europe to delay a little its entry into the open recession after that of the United States and Great Britain. The decline of the German economy into recession was accompanied by an explosion of unemployment in the whole of Western Europe. So in little more than 3 years the rate of (official) unemployment has gone from 9% to more than 12% in France, from 1.5%% to more than 9% in Sweden, from 6.5% to more than 10% in Holland and Belgium, from 16% to 23.5% in Spain.

According to estimates a minimum growth of 2.5% per year in Europe would be necessary simply to prevent the growth of unemployment. We are far from it. Even the most optimistic don't expect unemployment to diminish in Europe until 1995, or even 1996. For 1994 alone the OECD expects another million unemployed on the old continent.

To this quantitative increase, one must add a rapid qualitative deterioration , marked by the development of 'long-term' unemployment and youth unemployment[2] accompanying the generalized decrease in unemployed benefit both in value and over time.

In Japan, which has suffered the worst recession since the Second World War, unemployment is also increasing. Even if the absolute level is still low by comparison with the other powers, the number of 'official' unemployed has passed from 1.3 to nearly 2 million in three years. These figures however only give a very partial idea of the reality. The Japanese government has followed a policy of keeping the unemployed in the factories, paying them less and reducing work time, rather than putting them in the street. But this policy, accompanying that of 'employment for life' in the great industrial conglomerations, is giving way to the increase in redundancies. Toyota has clearly announced the future by proclaiming the end of its policy of guaranteed employment[3].

Faced with this situation, the government of the United States and, those of Canada and the United Kingdom, claim to have succeeded over two years in creating new employment and stopping the growth of unemployment. It is true that in the 'Anglo-Saxon' powers the official statistics show a reduction in unemployment. But this affirmation hides two major realities:

On the purely quantitative level, the present 'recovery' in employment appears insignificant in relation to that which followed the recession of 1979-82.

Thus, in the manufacturing sector in the United States, the number of employed has, at best, only been broadly maintained for 3 years, while certain sectors have even seen substantial falls. The big industrial enterprises continue to announce massive redundancies: in the month of November 1993 alone Boeing, ATT, NCR, and Philip Morris announced 30,000 job losses for the years to come. In the course of the Reagan recovery of the 80s industrial employment increased by 9%, while today this increase hasn't gone beyond 0.3%. In the tertiary sector the Clinton Administration claims to have increased employment by 3.8%, but this figure was 8% after 1982. The budget presented by Clinton for 1995 is one of the most rigorous for years: 'we must distinguish between luxury and necessity'. It anticipates the elimination of 118,000 jobs in the public administrations, a stage toward the 250,000 announced for the five years to come.

As far as the United Kingdom and Canada are concerned, the recovery of employment is limited for the moment to marginal, insignificant changes.

The facts are simple: there are today in all these three countries 4 million more unemployed than there were three years ago.[4]

As for the quality of employment, the reality of the United States illustrates the scale of the economic disaster. Workers are more and more reduced to a situation of permanent instability and insecurity. You are unemployed for six months, then work for three. The famous 'mobility' of employment actually means a sort of sharing of employment. You are unemployed for less time than in Europe but more often. According to a recent poll among the people in work in the United States, 40% are afraid of losing their job in the coming year. The jobs created are, in the main, in the tertiary sector. A great part of them are in 'services' such as parking cars for the big restaurants, walking dogs, minding children, packing shopping at supermarket check-outs, etc.  The unemployed have been transformed into (very) cheap servants...30 million people, 25% of the active American population, are outside the normal circuit of employment, that is, live directly under the pressure of unemployment.

Whatever the forms of the sickness, whether in the United States or in Europe, in the industrialized countries or in the under-developed countries, unemployment has become effectively 'problem number one' of our epoch.

What does this reality mean?

The significance of the massive and chronic development of unemployment.

For the working class the negative significance of unemployment is an everyday reality. The proletarian who cannot find work is expelled from the process of production: the basis of social relations. For some time, when he is able to receive benefit, he has the impression of being a 'parasite' on society, then isolation, total poverty. For those who work still more abuse from the dominant class: 'if you are not happy, there are thousands of unemployed who are ready to take your place'. For the proletariat unemployment, whether a threat or a reality, is one of the most effective forms of repression, one of the worst aggravations of what makes the capitalist machine an instrument of exploitation and oppression.

The negative significance of unemployment may appear however less evident for the capitalist class. On the one hand the latter suffers from the classic blindness of exploiting classes, incapable of really perceiving the social damage of their domination; on the other hand it needs to believe and make believe that the irresistible growth of unemployment for more than a quarter of a century is not a sickness belonging to the historic senility of its system, but a 'natural' phenomenon, a sort of fatality due to technical progress and to the necessary adaptation of the system. "We have to live with it friends, yesterday's jobs are not coming back", declared the US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich during the G7 meeting on unemployment.

In fact, the propaganda on the "new recovery" is trying to theorize a situation that is developing in several countries (United States, Great Britain, Canada), where production has begun to grow without producing any significant fall in unemployment.

But there is nothing either "natural" or "healthy" in the massive development of unemployment. Even from the viewpoint of the health of capitalism itself, chronic mass unemployment is an unequivocal sign of senility.

For the capitalist class, unemployment is a reality which, at least to begin with, increases its power over the exploited by providing a blackmail weapon which forces down wages. This is one reason why the ruling class always needs a reserve of unemployed as part of the labor force.

But this is only one aspect. From the standpoint of capital, once unemployment rises above a certain minimum, it becomes a negative, destructive factor for capital, and the sign of a sickness. Capital feeds on proletarian flesh. Profit is made from living labor. Profit comes neither from raw materials, nor from machines, but from the "surplus value" of the exploited. When capital makes part of the labor force redundant, it deprives itself of a part of the true source of its own accumulation. If it does so, then, it is not for pleasure but because market forces and the demands of profitability oblige it.

The chronic slide into mass unemployment gives an expression in real life to two fundamental contradictions pointed out by Marx, which condemn capitalism historically:

- capitalism's inability to create through its own mechanisms an adequate solvent market to absorb all that it produces;

- the need to "replace men with machines" to maintain competitivity, which leads to a permanent tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Today's explosion in unemployment, added to the mass of unemployed that has built up since 1967, has nothing to do with a "healthy restructuring" due to "progress". On the contrary, it is the practical proof of the definitive impotence of the capitalist system.

Capitalist "solutions"

The G7 meeting devoted to the problem of unemployment was a media manipulation typical of the way that the ruling class governs. The operation's media message could be summed up as: "If you are wondering if you're going to lose your job, or find another one; if you're worried about your children growing up unemployed; then you should know that the governments of the West's seven greatest economic powers are concerned about it, and are taking care of the situation".

Of course, no concrete decisions came out of this, apart from a request to the OECD to keep better count of the unemployed, and a promise to hold a new meeting of the G7 in Naples, in July, to talk about the problem again.

Clinton's "world plan against unemployment" is in fact nothing but an assertion on the part of the Americans of their firm intention to intensify the aggressivity of their commercial war against the rest of the world. When Clinton asks Japanese capital to open its domestic markets, or demands that the Europeans lower their interest rates to relaunch production (and so their imports from the US), he merely confirmed the warning delivered by his trade representative Micky Kantor: "Nobody should have any doubt about our commitment to go forward, to open markets, and to develop trade, just as we have done since President Clinton took office".

The spectacle offered by the G7 has at least demonstrated that the different national capitals are indeed incapable of finding a worldwide solution to unemployment. The only thing they know how to and can do is to exacerbate the trade war of each against all.

The grand principles asserted at the meeting are nothing other than the demands of competitivity for each national capital. And from this point of view, American capital could certainly propose its recent economic policy as a model. It has certainly put into practice all the recipes designed to improve the profitability of an ailing economy and arm it against the competition:

Lay off "excess" labor

"If we are honest with ourselves, restoring industrial competitivity is inimical to employment". These were the words of a highly placed official of the European Union at the G7 summit, one of the authors of the White Book presented by Delors. We have seen how US capital has put this into practice by improving "labor mobility".

Improve the profitability and productivity of labor

To achieve this, the Clinton administration has simply applied the good old capitalist method: pay the exploited less, while making them work harder. Clinton has put it in these, very concrete terms: "A longer working week than 20 years ago, for the same salary". And this is really happening: US manufacturing industry's working week is indeed longer today than it was 20 years ago. As for wages, during his electoral campaign Clinton promised to revise the minimum wage, and even to index-link it to inflation. Nothing has come of it. And since the minimum has been effectively frozen since the beginning of the 1980s, in reality the minimum wage has been steadily falling during the last 10 years. As for the so-called "social protection", in other words that part of the wage which capital pays in the form of certain services and state benefits, the Democrat administration has presented its famous Health Reform plan as a progress. In reality, there will be no extra spending by American capital in favor of the exploited, merely an attempt to rationalize an absurd and anarchic reality, which has led to medical expenses per employee being amongst the highest in the world.

Intensify the exploitation of labor power by modernizing the productive apparatus

Industrial investment has increased markedly during the last two years in the United States (+15% in 1993, with a similar rate forecast for 1994). These investments, though considerable in some sectors, are not accompanied by any significant increase in employment. For example, AT&T is preparing to invest colossal sums to develop "communication highways", which has been put forward as the investment program of the decade, and yet at the same time has announced 14,000 redundancies.

American methods are in fact nothing other than the good old recipes for capitalist economic warfare against both the exploited and its competitors. The policies of other national capitals are not fundamentally different. The governments of old Europe, which claim to have an exemplary system of social protection, have for years been systematically reducing "social spending". "Some measures, such as the Social Chapter [an annex to the Maastricht Treaty] need to be relegated to the museum where they belong" declared recently Kenneth Clarke, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. The same attitude and the same practice have been developed by all governments, though they are not always presented in so provocative a manner.

At best, these policies make it possible to unload the effects of the crisis onto competing capitals[5]. In no way can they provide a general solution.

The growth in the profitability and productivity of labor may favor one capital at others' expense, for a time. But from the global point of view, once this increase in productivity has been generalized, it merely poses the problem of the inability of the market to absorb surplus production still more sharply. Reducing the wages and number of employees means reducing the available outlets. More productivity means that extra markets need to be fund.

Each national capital can only combat the problem at the local level by making it worse at the global level.

Finally, last but not least, the recovery in US investment has been financed, once again, by credit. The net national debt alone has risen from 30% to 39% of GDP. A similar movement has appeared in other countries to confront the recession. This can only aggravate the already fragile and explosive situation of world finance, which has been undermined by two decades of debt and speculation.

To encourage the use of credit, the US government has for three years imposed extremely low rates of short-term interest. The increase in these rates is both inevitable and dangerous for world financial stability. The low cost of short-term money has made possible the accumulation of enormous amounts of speculative capital. Wall Street in particular has been inundated with it[6]. The rise in the cost of credit runs the risk of causing a financial crash which would bring to nothing all the efforts at holding back the rise in unemployment.

The "solutions" that governments offer today to confront the problem of unemployment, apart from the fact that they represent direct attacks on the living conditions of the exploited, are build on the quicksands of colossal debt and unlimited speculation.

What perspectives for the class struggle?

Even if capitalism were to collapse completely, it would not disappear for all that. Without the revolutionary action of the proletariat, capitalism will continue to rot on its feet, dragging humanity down into endless barbarism.

What part will unemployment play in the course of the class struggle?

For the working class, the generalization of unemployment is worse than having police stationed in every home and workplace. It makes the struggle more difficult, because of the ignoble blackmail that it allows the ruling class exercise on the workers.

However, once it reaches a certain point the revolt against this repression itself becomes a powerful stimulant to the class struggle and its generalization. What percentage of unemployed is necessary for this to happen? The question cannot be answered, because it is not a matter of a mechanical relationship between the economy and the class struggle, but of a complex global process where the consciousness of the proletarians has a prime role to play.

Nonetheless, we know that the situation is totally different from the Great Depression during the 1930s.

From the economic viewpoint, the 1930s crisis was resolved by the development of the war economy and the application of Keynesian policies (in Germany on the eve of war, unemployment had almost entirely "disappeared"); today, the effectiveness of the war economy and Keynesianism lies behind us. They have been used to the hilt to bring us to the present situation, leaving a financial time-bomb ready to explode.

From the political viewpoint, the situation of the world proletariat today has nothing to do with that of the 1930s. Sixty years ago, the working class was weighed down by the bloody and dramatic defeats it had suffered during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, especially in Germany and Russia. Ideologically and physically beaten, the proletariat let itself be atomized and enrolled under the banners of its national bourgeoisie, to march into a second world massacre.

Today's generations of proletarians have not suffered any heavy defeats. Starting with the struggles of 1968 - the first response to the beginning of the economic crisis - they have, with ups and downs, with advances and retreats in combativity, opened and maintained a new historic course.

The governments are right to tremble before what the experts call the "social unrest" which may result from the increase in unemployment.

They are still able to use those aspects of unemployment which make the proletarian struggle more difficult: its repressive, divisive, atomizing aspects, the fact that it is pushing more and more fractions of the revolutionary class - and especially the youth, who find it increasingly difficult to "enter active life" - into a decomposed and destructive marginalization.

But because it attacks the living conditions of the working class so violently, because it is universal and strikes without distinction in every sector and every country, unemployment demonstrates that for the exploited class the solution lies not in improved management, in reforming or restructuring capitalism, but in the destruction of the system itself.

The explosion of unemployment reveals the full extent of capitalism's failure, and the historic responsibility of the world working class.

RV

[1] In 1979, after the ‘recovery' which followed the recession of 1974-75 (known as the "First Oil Crisis"), there will still 2 million more unemployed than in 1973 in the United States, 750,000 more in West Germany. Between 1973 and 1990, on the eve of the present recession, the ‘official' number of unemployed in the OECD countries (the 24 industrialized Western countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Japan) increased by 20 million, from 11 to 31 million. And these are only the richest countries. In the "Third World" or the old "Socialist bloc" the extent of the disaster is incomparably worse. Many under-developed countries have never recovered from the recession of 1981-82, and have fallen without a break into the pit of poverty and under-employment.

[2] At the beginning of 1994, 50% of the unemployed in Europe had been without a job for more than a year. The "experts" predict that by the end of 1994, 25% of unemployed will be under 20 (International Herald Tribune, 14th March 1994).

[3] Japan has to confront a sharp drop in exports, which are the main motive force behind its growth. The effects are being felt throughout the economy, but they are especially significant in the consumer electronics sector where Japan is traditionally very strong. This sector's exports fell by almost 25% in 1993, and are now only 50% of their 1985 level. In 1993, Japan for the first time imported more color TVs than it exported. The paradox is that most of these imports came from Japanese subsidiaries set up in other South-East Asia countries to take advantage of lower labor costs. The exceptional economic "boom" of certain Asiatic economies springs in reality from the economic crisis, which forces the capitals of the major powers, subjected to the most merciless trade wars, to "delocalize" some of their production to countries where labor is cheap (and more disciplined) in order to lower their costs.

[4] 2.3 million more in the USA, 1.2 million in the UK, 600,000 in Canada.

[5] For example, the recent American "recovery" was achieved in part at the direct expense of Japanese capital, which lost market share to the US in some sectors.

[6] This is the case with so-called "derivative" stocks, which are based not on economic criteria linked to the health of the companies they are supposed to represent, but on mathematical equations built on purely speculative mechanisms (it is a sign of the times that a large part of recent US computer investments have been designed to modernize and increase the capacity of companies which speculate with these ultra-modern systems). These stocks represent a colossal sum of money: Salomon brothers holds $600 billion, the Chemical Bank $2,500 billion. These two alone come to $3,100 billion, which is the equivalent of the combined GDP of Germany, France and Denmark!  

In France, both CP and SP leaders waved the fascist menace, after long years in power when they used the far right Le Pen as bogeyman. To complete the tableau of the resurgence of the “fascist menace”, a dozen Waffen SS veterans visiting the Normandy beaches was held up as an example of the rising tide of “enemies of democracy”.

The 50 million dead in World War II are invoked as the victims of “Nazi barbarism” alone, from CNN to the most insignificant local paper. In most European countries, the slightest actions of a few hooligans are blown up out of all proportion. Right on time, Hollywood turns out a film on the massacre of the Jews in Europe, and exalts the idealism of the brave GIs who died in their thousands on the Normandy beaches in the name of “freedom”.

These militarist festivities carefully avoid mentioning the crimes of the “victorious democracies”, which are certainly enough [1] [76] to put the democratic leaders in the same company as Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. But even this is a concession to the false personification of “war crimes”. The dictators are only subordinates. It is the bourgeoisie as a social class which is the principal war criminal. When the sinister Goebbels declared that a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth, his cynical opposite number Churchill could assert that “In times of war truth is so precious that it should always be safeguarded by a rampart of lies” [2] [77].

Hitler’s Victory

Most of those enrolled in the two opposing camps hardly went to war enthusiastically, being still traumatised by the deaths of their fathers’ generation 25 years previously. The massive exodus in France, the terror of the Nazi state exercised over the German population, the massive deportations of state capitalist Stalinism: none of this is revealed in the complacent news reports of the time which are being rehashed for us today. All the “objective” but nonetheless abject documentaries and articles are dominated by one name: Hitler! uring the Middle Ages, the Plague was seen as the scourge of God. In the midst of decadent capitalism the bourgeoisie has found an equivalent for Holy Democracy: the Brown Plague. Successive ruling classes throughout history have invoked a higher evil in order to fabricate a commonalty of interest between the oppressed and their exploiters. The personification of events around the dictators, or Allied generals, is very useful to cover the fact that they were nothing but the spokesmen for their respective bourgeoisies. The magic of names is used to make the classes disappear at the moment of war: in a new crusade against evil, everyone is bound to join in unity.

1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, is a key date, as the revolutionaries of the Bilan group showed, not because it marked the “defeat of the democracies”, but because it meant the decisive victory of the counter-revolution, above all in the country were the proletariat was traditionally the strongest component in the workers’ movement. Hitler’s arrival in power cannot be explained solely by the humiliating treaty of Versailles in 1918, whose demand for “reparations” drove Germany to its knees. It was due above all by the proletariat’s disappearance from the social scene, as a threat to the bourgeoisie.

In Russia, the state was beginning to massacre Bolsheviks and revolutionary workers on a grand scale, with the silent approval of the Western democracies which has done so much to arm the White armies. In the Germany, the Weimar Republic’s social-democratic régime had quite naturally given way to Hitler’s Nazis after their victory in the republican elections. The “socialist” leaders who had massacred the revolutionary German workers - Scheidemann, Noske and Co - democratically gave up their ministries. They were never troubled during the next five years of the Nazi régime.

The struggles in France and Spain during the 1930s were only the fag-ends of strikes compared with the size of the defeat suffered by the working class internationally. Fascism’s electoral victory in Italy and Germany was not the cause, but the product of the proletariat’s defeat on its social terrain. In secreting fascism, the bourgeoisie invented, not a new kind of régime, but a state capitalism along the same lines as the Roosevelt New Deal or Stalinist capitalism. In time of war, the bourgeoisie’s factions naturally unite at the national level, since they have eliminated the proletarian threat worldwide, and this unification may take the form of the Nazi or Stalinist parties.

The “rising danger” was organised in complicity with Stalin and the Russian bourgeoisie by the Communist Party vassals of the new Russian imperialism, under the cover of the Popular Front ideology, which kept the workers disoriented behind the programmes of national unity and the preparation for the imperialist war.

The French CP hoisted the patriotic tricolour in 1935, with the signature of the Laval-Stalin Pact, committing the workers to get themselves massacred: “If Hitler, despite everything, starts a war, he should know that he will have to face the united people of France, with the Communists in the front rank, to defend the country’s security, and the liberty and independence of the people”. It was the CP in Spain that broke the last strikes, and shot down the workers with the help of the GPU, before Franco came to finish off their dirty work. The Stalinist leaders then took refuge in France and Russia, as De Gaulle and Thorez were to do when they fled to London and Moscow respectively.

The Road to Imperialist War

From 1918 to 1935, war had continued all over the planet, but these were limited wars far from Europe, or wars of “pacification”, such as those conducted by French imperialism in Syria, Morocco, and Indochina. For the revolutionaries of the Bilan group, the first serious warning came with the war in Abyssinia, involving British imperialism and Mussolini’s army. It served the interests of some of the Western allies to identify fascism and war. The blame for the next World War could thus be laid largely at fascism’s door. The fascist scarecrow was given greater credit with the victory of Franco’s army in 1939. Allied propaganda could prove its case by pointing to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Francoism. A period of status quo followed, in the name of a search for “peace”, while Germany carried out the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, then the Anschluss with Austria in 1938. The Munich Conference of 30th September 1938 was followed in October by Germany’s seizure of the Czech Sudetenland. The Czech’s had not even been invited to attend at Munich, and when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia itself in March 1939, neither France nor Britain lifed a finger. Daladier and Chamberlain, on their return from Munich, were greeted enthusiastically by the crowds who believed that “peace” had been saved, but in fact both sides were playing for time. Official historians have since been content to explain events by the inadequate rearmament of the French and British states. In fact, the war-time alliances had not been finally settled: the German bourgeoisie still cherished the hope of an alliance with France and Britain against Russia. The German people were every bit as deceived as the French and British:

“(...) The Germans acclaimed Chamberlain wildly, seeing him as the man who would save them from war. More people cane to greet him than had come to greet Mussolini (...) Munich was festooned with Union Jacks, the crowds ecstatic. WHen Chamberlain returned to Heston aerodrome he was welcomed like the Messiah. In Paris, a public subscription was proposed to offer a gift to the British Prime Minister” [3] [78].

In 1937, the Japanese began their final invasion of China, seizing Peking and threatening US hegemony in the Pacific. On 24th August 1939, the Russo-German pact burst like a thunder-clap, leaving Hitler’s hands free to begin his assault on Western Europe. In the meantime, the German army invaded Poland on 1st September, joined by the Russians. Unwillingly, the French and British governments declared war on Germany two days later. The Italian army grabbed Albania. Without any formal declaration of war, Stalin’s army invaded Finland on 30th November. In the April of 1940, the Germans landed in Norway.

The French army began its offensive in the Saar, but was halted at the cost of a thousand men on either side. Stalin gave the lie to his supporters, who had pretended that the Russo-German treaty was a pact with the devil to prevent Hitler from attacking Wester Europe, by declaring:

“It is not Germany that has attacked France and Britain, but France and Britain that have attacked Germany (...) After the commencement of hostilities, German made peace proposals to France and Britain, and the Soviet Union openly supported Germany’s proposals. The leading circles of France and Britain brutally rebuffed both Germany’s peace proposals and the Soviet Union’s efforts to bring the war speedily to an end”.

Nobody wanted to take responsibility for starting the war, before the proletariat. After the war, indeed, governments no longer appointed “Ministers of War”, only “Ministers of Defence”. It is likewise striking to see the Nazi state’s desire to appear as the aggressed party in Germany itself. Albert Speer notes in his Memoirs this private declaration by Hitler: “We will not make the same mistake as in 1914. We now have to lay the blame on our enemy”. On the eve of the war with Japan, Roosevelt repeated the same thing: “The democracies must never appear as the aggressor”. The nine months of inactivity, known as the “phoney war”, confirm this hesitation of all the belligerants. The historian Pierre Miquel notes that Hitler put off the attack on the West no less than 14 times due to the German army’s lack of preparation and poor weather conditions.

On 22nd June 1941, Germany turned on the USSR, taking completely by surprise that “brilliant strategist” Stalin. On 8th December, after letting the Japanese massacre its own soldiers at Pearl Harbour (the attack was known well in advance by the secret service), the United States could pose as the “victims” of Japanese aggression and declare war on Japan. Germany and Italy finally declared war on the US on 11th December 1941.

This brief survey of the diplomatic road to world war, in a situation where the world proletariat had been reduced to silence, prompts a few remarks. Two local wars (Abyssinia and Spain) had finally stamped the fascists as war-mongers, after years of media excitement in Europe, denouncing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s demands, as well as their military parades: the latter were certainly better organised than the French 14th July, or the American or British nationalist festivities, but no less absurd. Two more local wars at the heart of Europe (Czechoslovakia and Poland) led to the rapid defeat of the “democratic” countries concerned. The “shameful” failure to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia (and Spain) made the “defence of democracy” and bourgeois freedom inevitable after Poland’s invasion by the two “totalitarian” powers. Politico-diplomatic manoeuvres can drag on for years. Armed conflict can settle matters on the ground in a few hours, at the price of a terrible slaughter. The war did not really become a World War until a year after Germany’s conquest of Europe. For more than four years, the US did not attempt any decisive operations against the invaders, leaving the German army to play the gendarme in Europe. The United States, far away from Europe, were initially more concerned by the Japanese threat in the Pacific. The World War lasted longer than the local wars had done, and this cannot be explained solely by the power of the German army or the ups and downs of imperialist diplomacy. It is well-known, for example, that a part of the American bourgeoisie would have preferred to ally itself with Germany rather than with Stalin’s “communist” régime, just as the German bourgeoisie had tried in vain to make an alliance with France and Britain against the “Reds”. Hitler’s government made peace overtures to Britain in 1940, in 1941 just before the beginning of the Operation Barbarossa onslaught on Russia, and after the defeat of Mussolini’s North African army. The British were all the more hesitant, in that they were tempted to leave the two great totalitarian powers destroy each other. But it would be wrong to rest here, and to argue as if the principal opposing class for every bourgeoisie, the proletariat, had simply disappeared from the concerns of the imperialist leaders thanks to the “unifying” - and “simplifying” - war!

Moreover, marxists cannot reason on war in itself, independently of historical periods. For youthful 19th century capitalism, war was essential in opening the possibility of further development, opening new markets at the point of the bayonet. This was shown in 1945 by the French Communist Left (GCF), one of the rare groups to have held high the standard of proletarian internationalism throughout World War II: “... in its decadent phase, capitalism has historically exhausted all possibilities of development, and finds in modern imperialist war the expression of this decadence which without opening the possibility of any further development of production, engulfs in the abyss the productive forces and heaps ruin on ruin, faster and faster (...) The more the market contracts, the more bitter becomes the struggle to possess sources of raw materials and to dominate the world market. The economic struggle between economic groups is increasingly concentrated, to its most complete form in the struggles between states. The exasperated economic struggle between states can only be resolved, in the end, by armed force. War becomes the only means for each national imperialism to try to extricate itself from its difficulties, at the expense of rival imperialist states” [4] [79].

National Unity during the War

Bourgeois historians tend to gloss over the rapid defeat of the once great French power. The German army’s attack was not delayed solely by the weather. The German state apparatus did not make a mistake in choosing Hitler, nor was it composed of imbeciles only able to march the goose-step. The main reason was once again the play of secret diplomatic consultations. Alliances can be overturned, even in the middle of war. Moreover, ever since the mutinies of German soldiers in 1918, the German bourgeoisie had taken care to see that their troops did not go hungry... The German bourgeoisie of 1938 was the heir of the Weimar Republic, which had bloodily crushed the attempt at proletarian revolution in 1919; the SS battallions were based on the old Frei Korps which a socialist government had used to crush the workers in revolt. Neither the eruption of the Paris Commune in 1870, nor the 1917 October Revolution, nor the Spartakist insurrection of 1919 had been forgotten. Even politically in defeat, the working class remained a danger in the face of a long imperialist war.

German imperialism’s rapid victory in Czechoslovakia was the result of a war of nerves, bluff, and careful manoeuvring, and above all of speculation on other governments’ fear of the consequences of a war generalised too quickly, and without the definite adherence of the proletariat. Whereas the French generals had stuck to the old conceptions of a “war of position” developed during the 1914-18 conflict, the German general staff had modernised its strategy in favour of the Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). According to this conception (much in vogue today, as we can see from the Gulf War), a slow advance without a ferocious strike was doomed to defeat. Worse still, since the population’s readiness for war was fragile, letting the war drag on and giving the combattants the possibility to address each other from the trenches led to the risk of mutinies and social explosions. In the 20th century, the working class has inevitably become the first battalion against imperialist war. Hitler himself at one point confided to Albert Speer: “industry is a favorable factor in the development of communism”. As he also told Speer - who became his Minister for Munitions during the war - following the introduction in 1943 of the forced labour system in France, strikes and revolts which hold back production are a risk to be run in time of war. The German bourgeoisie had inherited its reflexes from Bismarck, whose invasion of France had been blocked by the Parisian workers’ insurrection against their own bourgeoisie. He had been concerned then at the risk of contagion amongst the German workers and soldiers, as in fact happened nearly 50 years later when the German proletariat reacted to the war on revolutionary Russia by an insurrection against their own ruling class.

And yet, after the sudden halt of their first offensive, the Germans conducted a “war of boredom” for almost a year. Germany wanted above all to open up Lebensraum (“living space”) in the East, and would still have preferred to ally itself with the two Western democracies rather than waste its military potential by invading them. Germany supported Laval and Doriot, one-time pacifists claiming to be socialists, and who wanted to help the German war effort. These pro-fascist tendencies, who called for a Franco-German alliance, remained a minority. The bourgeoisie as a whole had no confidence in the proletariat’s readiness to mobilise for war. The French working class had not been defeated head-on, with bayonets and flame-throwers, as it had in Germany in 1919 and 1923.

The German bourgeoisie therefore advanced cautiously in a country which it knew to be fragile, not so much militarily as socially. In fact, they needed only watch the slow decomposition of the French bourgeoisie, with its cowardly generals on the one side and the pacifists, soon to become collaborators on the other, the latter keeping the workers in impotence.

The Popular Front had helped in the effort of rearmament (while disarming the workers politically), but had not completely succeeded in achieving national unity. Certainly, the police had broken many strikes, and interned hundreds of militants, who were not themselves very clear as to how to oppose the war. The left of the French bourgeoisie had calmed the workers with all the claptrap of the Popular Front and the congés payés (paid holidays), during which the workers were mobilised. The extreme left pacifist fractions completed the task of undermining any class alternative. The anarchists, who were still very influential in the unions, finished off the Stalinists’ work of sabotage, publishing the 1939 leaflet “Peace Now” in September 1939, signed by a gaggle of intellectuals “(...) No flowers in the gun-barrels, no heroic songs, no cheers as the troops depart. And we are told that it is like this in all the belligerant countries. The war stands condemned from day one, by the majority of its participants both on the front, and in the rear. Let us then make peace quickly”.

“Peace” cannot be an alternative to war in decadent capitalism. Such resolutions onyl encouraged the “every man for himself”, individual solutions and the flight abroad for those who could afford it. The proletarians’ disarray was increased, their alarm and their impotence concentrated on the general rout of the left parties and groups which had claimed to defend their interests, and left them trapped in anti-fascist “common sense”.

The disintegration of French society was such that the “drôle de guerre” (“phoney war”) on one side, the “komischer Krieg” on the other, was only an interlude allowing the German army, after a bloody bombardment of Rotterdam (40,000 dead) to push through the fragile French Maginot Line on 10th May 1940, almost without resistance. The French officers were the first to flee, leaving their troops flat. The populations of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and the north of France including Paris and the French government, fled in a mass, uncontrolled and panic-stricken dash towards the centre and south of France. This was one of the most gigantic exodus of modern times. This lack of “resistance” by the population was to become a subject for reproach by the ideologues of the maquis (many of home, like Mitterand and the Belgian and Italian “socialists”, only turned their coats in 1942), and was used after the war to blackmail the working class into sacrificing itself for the reconstruction.

The Blitzkrieg nonetheless caused 90,000 deaths and 120,000 wounded on the French side, 27,000 dead on the German. The collapse left ten million people refugees in terrible conditions. One and a half million POWs were sent back to Germany. And this was nothing compared to the 50 million dead in the slaughter to come.

In Europe, the population suffered the worst civilian casualties humanity had ever seen in war-time. Never had so many women and children joined soldiers among the dead. For the first time in history, the civilian casualties were greater than the military.

With its “Bismarckian” reflexes, the German bourgeoisie took care to divide France in two: an occupied zone, the north with the capital, to guard the coast against the British; and a free zone, the south, given legitimacy by the puppet government of General Pétain, the “hero of Verdun”, and the ex-socialist Laval. This collaborationist state took the load off the Nazi war effort for a while, until the Allied advance led German imperialism to boot it out.

The constant fear of a workers’ uprising against the war, weakened as they were, appears even amongst the right. A collaborationist paper, L’Oeuvre, speaks crudely of the occupying forces’ need for trades unions - the so-called social victory of the Popular Front - and in similar terms to those of any Left Wing or Trotskyist party: “The occupiers have the greatest concern not to antagonise the working class, not to lose contact, and to integrate them into a well-organised social movement (...) The Germans hope that all workers will be integrated into corporatism, and for this it seems that cadres will be necessary who have the real confidence of the workers (...) They need men who have authority, and whom others will follow” [5] [80].

From 1941 onwards, some in the collaborationist French government began to worry about the termporary nature of the Occupation, and the guarantee of social order that came with it. The Pétainist bourgeoisie and De Gaulle’s exiled Free French kept up discreet contacts, their main concern being to maintain social and political order in the transition from one epoch to another. The ideology of the - very weak - Resistance movement, propagated by the liberal fraction exiled in Britain and by the Stalinists of the PCF in France, at first had great difficulty in attracting the workers into a National Union for the country’s “Liberation”. In 1943 the German bourgeoisie helped reinforce the ranks of the “terrorists” despite itself, by instituting “the relief” - one worker forced to labour in Germany in exchange for each POW allowed to return to France. But fundamentally, it was the left and far-left parties who succeeded in drawing the workers into the Resistance on the basis of the “victory of Stalingrad”.

Changes of imperialist alliance and the proletariat’s possible reaction are lines of orientation for the bourgeoisie in the midst of war. Formally, the turning-point in the war came in 1942, with the halt to Japanese expansion and the battle of El Alamein, which freed the oil fields. In the same year, began the battle of Stalingrad, where the Stalinist state gained a victory thanks to the help of US military supplies (tanks and weapons that were more sophisticated than Russia itself could produce to confront the modern German army). During secret negotiations, Stalin had used his promise to declare war on Japan as a bargaining counter. The war could then have been brought to a rapid conclusion, especially since a part of the German bourgeoisie was keen to get rid of Hitler, and made an attempt to assassinate him in 1944. The Allies left the plotters isolated, to be wiped out by the Nazi state (Admiral Canaris’ Valkyrie plan).

But this did not take account of the Italian proletariat. It was necessary to prolong the war for two years in order to massacre the proletariat’s best forces, and avoid as hasty a peace as in 1918, concluded with the revolution at its heels.

Following the eruption of the Italian proletariat, 1943 was a turning-point in the war. At a world level, the bourgeoisie used the isolation and defeat of the Italian workers to develop the strategy of the Resistance in the occupied countries, in order to gain the populations’ support for the future capitalist peace. Up till then, most of the Resistance groups had been made up essentially of tiny minorities of nationalist petty-bourgeois, using terrorist methods. The Anglo-American bourgeoisie was to glorify the Resistance ideology more pragmatically after the victory at Stalingrad and the pro-Western turn of the CPs. The workers did not see much difference between exploitation by a German or a French boss. They had shown no desire to die in the name of Anglo-French imperialism to support Poland, they had made no effort to involve themselves in a war which seemed to have nothing to do with their interests. To mobilise them with a view to defending “democracy”, they had to be given a perspective which seemed valid from the class point of view. Stalingrad as the war’s turning-point, and the possibility of putting an end to the demands of the occupying army, of regaining “freedom”, even with “their own” police, raised the workers’ hopes, along with the “liberating communism” represented by Stalin. Without this lie (and the further oppression of “the relief”), the workers would have remained hostile to the armed Resistance bands, whose exactions increased the violence of Nazi terror. Without the support on the ground of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, the bourgeoisie in London and Washington would have had no hoping of bringing the workers into the war. Contrary to 1914, it is was not a question of lining the workers up in ranks to send them to the slaughter, but of gaining their adherence on the civilian terrain, in the Resistance network, behind the cult of the glorious victory of Stalingrad!

In fact, in both Italy and France many workers joined the maquis encouraged by the illusion of returning to the class struggle, and the Stalinists and Trotskyists even offered them the fraudulent comparison with the Paris Commune (weren’t the workers rising against their own bourgeoisie led by the new Thiers - Pétain - while the Germans occupied France, as before?). In the midst of a population terrorised and impotent since the outbreak of war, many workers enrolled in the Resistance bands went to their deaths under the impression that they were fighting for the “socialist liberation” of France or Italy, in other words in a new “civil war against their own bourgeoisie”; just as in 1914, the German and French workers had been sent to the front under the pretence that Germany and France “exported” socialism. The Stalinist and Trotskyist resistance groups concentrated their blackmail on the workers to put them “in the front line of the struggle for the independence of peoples”, in a key sector for the paralysis of the economy: the railways.

At the same time, and unknown to the workers, the domination of pro-Allied right-wing factions in the Resistance, for the restoration of the old capitalist order after the peace, was the object of a bitter struggle. Teams of American secret agents from AMGOT (Allied Military Government of the Occupied Territories) were sent to France and Italy (this was the origin of the P2 Lodge and the US and Italian bourgeoisie’s complicity with the Mafia), to ensure that the Stalinists did not grab enough power to attach themselves to Russian imperialism. From start to finish, the Stalinists new the limits of the role assigned to them, especially where they were most skilled: sabotaging the workers’ struggles, disarming the more utopian Resistance groups, and beating down those workers who protested at the demands of reconstruction. Immediately after the “Liberation” - and as a proof of the complicity of all bourgeoisies against the proletariat - the Western ruling class - while condemning, for form’s sake, a few “war criminals” - recruited a number of ex-Nazi and Stalinist torturers as useful secret agents in most of the European capitals. These new recruits’ first task was of course to counter their opposite numbers on the Russian side, but above all to struggle “against communism”, in other words against the natural goal of any generalised autonomous struggle by the workers themselves, which was inevitably a threat after the horror of war and the shortages that followed it.

The massive destruction of the proletariat

We will leave the bourgeois to debate amongst themselves the exact number of dead in each country [6] [81], but there is no doubt that the Russians suffered most: 20 million dead on the European front. These were conspicuous by their absence from the festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Today’s Russian historians continue to accuse the United States of delaying the landings in order to bleed the USSR further, with a view to the Cold War to come: “The landings came when Germany’s fate was already sealed by the Soviet counter-offensive on the Eastern front” [7] [82].

At the end of the fat years of reconstruction, the bourgeois liberals with their high priest Solzhenitsyn began to wax indignant over the millions dead in Stalin’s gulags, pretending to forget that the real crowning of the counter-revolution came with the utter complicity of the West... in the war. We know how merciless is the bourgeoisie after a proletarian defeat (tens of thousands of Communards, their wives and children, were slaughtered and deported after the defeat in 1871). The way that World War II was conducted allowed it to increase tenfold the massacre of the class which had so frightened it in 1917. The Russians bore the weight of 4 years of war in Europe alone. It was only at the beginning of 1945 that the Americans set foot in Germany, reducing the numbers of their own dead and preserving their social peace. The millions of Russian victims showed a tragic heroism indeed, since without American military assistance the backward Stalinist régime would have been defeated by an industrialised Germany.

After such a blood-letting, the Russian state had no need of democratic niceties to impose order. The Allies let the Russian soldiery take its revenge on millions of Germans, raising Russia to the status of “victorious power”, which experience since 1914 has shown helps to keep the social peace. The Russian government and its dictator let the German’s massacre the proletariat in Warsaw, just as they left hundreds of thousands of civilians die of cold and starvation in Stalingrad and Leningrad, and according to Souvarine attributed the millions of deaths in the gulag to the war.

To satisfy the victorious imperialisms’ appetites (the Stalinist régime dismantled all the factories in Eastern Europe, while the West profited from the reconstruction paid for by the US), it was necessary that the proletariat should not try to steal the bourgeoisie’s “Liberation”.

An intense propaganda campaign was conducted in both the West and the “totalitarian” USSR over the genocide of the Jews, which the Allies had known about since the beginning of the war. As some more serious historians have recognised, the explanation for this genocide is to be found not in the Middle Ages, but in the framework of world war. The massacre reached a fantastic intensity after the beginning of the war with Russia, to resolve more rapidly the problem of the huge masses of prisoners and refugees, especially in Poland. The Nazi state was concerned to feed its own troops, if this meant sending to an early grave a population that held back the war effort (bullets had to be saved for the Russian front, especially since wiping out such huge numbers individually had proved demoralising even for the killers). At Bermuda conference in 1943 the Allies had decided to do nothing for the Jews, preferring to let them be exterminated rather than try to handle the enormous exodus that would have come as a result of a Nazi expulsion of the Jewish population. A number of negotiations were conmducted via Romania and Hungary. All met with Roosevelt’s polite refusal. The best-known proposal, masked today behind the limited humanist action of a Schindler, was made by Eichmann to Allied representatives: 100,000 Jews against 10,000 trucks. The Allies refused the exchange, in the words of the British state: “transporting so many people would be likely to damage the war effort” [8] [83].

This genocide of the Jews, the Nazi “ethnic cleansing” was a perfect excuse for any barbarity in the Allied “victory”. The camps were opened to enormous publicity.

The rampart of lies designed to assign a diabolic status to the defeated camp has served to silence any questioning of the Allies’ terror bombing, designed above all to silence the world proletariat. Some figures are enough to unmask the horror:

 - July 1943, Hamburg, 50,000 dead;

 - 1944, Darmstadt, Königsberg, Heilbronn, 24,000 dead;

 - Braunschweig, 23,000 dead;

 - 13th-14th February 1945, Allied planes carried out an intensive bombardment of Dresden, a town full of evacuees, causing 250,000 deaths: it was one of the war’s most terrible crimes;

 - in 18 months, 45 of Germany’s 60 main towns were virtually destroyed, and 650,000 people killed;

 - in March 1945, the bombardment of Tokyo killed 80,000 people;

 - in France, as elsehwere, the working class areas were the main targets: thousands were killed in Le Havre and Marseille, while during the landings the bombing of Caen and other towns caused thousands of deaths among the civilian population, to add to the 20,000 dead on either side among the troops;

 - four months after the Reich’s surrender, with Japan practically on its knees, the most terrifying weapon of all time obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under the pretext of saving American lives; it was necessary that the proletariat remember for years to come that the bourgeoisie is an all-powerful class...

In a future article, we will consider the working class reaction during the war, passed over in silence by official historians, as well as the positions and activity of the revolutionary minorities of the time.

Damien 

IR78, 3rd quarter 1994

Rejecting the notion of Decadence demobilises the Proletariat in the face of War

At the end of the first part of this article we cited a sentence of the PCI in PC nº92, which is particularly significant of this organisation’s dangerous vision:

“It flows from this [war as a manifestation of economic rationality] that inter-imperialist struggle and the confrontation between rival powers could never lead to the destruction of the planet, because this struggle derives not from excessive greed but from the necessity to escape overproduction. When the excess has been destroyed, the war machine stops, whatever the destructive potential of the weapons used, because at that point the causes of the war have also disappeared”

Such a vision, which puts on the same level the wars of the last century, which had, effectively, an economic rationality, and those of this century, which have lost such rationality, flows directly from the incapacity of part of the Bordigist current to understand the fact that capitalism, as the Communist International said, has entered into its period of decadence since World War I. However, it is important to come back to this vision because it not only turns its back on the real history of the World Wars, but completely demobilises the working class.

Bordigist imagination and real history.

It is not true that the two World Wars ended when the economic causes which engendered them had disappeared. It is obviously necessary to agree on the real economic causes of the war. But, even from the point of view of the PCI that the objective of the war was to destroy enough constant capital to allow a sufficient rate of profit to recover, one can note that real history is in contradiction with the imaginary conception of this organisation.

If we take the case of World War I, to affirm such a thing is a shameful betrayal of the fight by Lenin and the internationalists throughout the war (less so when its a question of a crass ignorance of these historical facts). In fact, the resolution adopted at the 1907 congress of the 2nd International (Stuttgart Congress), with an amendment presented by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, and the Manifesto adopted by the Basle Congress in 1912, made it very clear that Lenin led the struggle, from August 1914, for revolutionaries “to use the economic and political crisis created by the war with all their strength to profoundly agitate the popular layers and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination” (Resolution of the Stuttgart Congress). He did not say to the workers: “the imperialist war will end in any case when the economic causes which engendered it are exhausted”. On the contrary, he showed that the only means of putting an end to the imperialist war, before it led to a catastrophic hecatomb for the proletariat and for the whole of civilisation, consisted in the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. Obviously PC takes up this slogan, and approves the policy of the internationalists throughout this war. But at the same time, it is not capable of understanding that the scenario that it presents of the end of the generalised imperialist war was not realised in 1917-18. On the contrary, the 1st World War ended, very rapidly, in November 1918, because the strongest proletariat in the world, that of Germany, had risen against it and was taking the road of revolution as the Russian proletariat had done one year before. The facts are eloquent: on the 9th November 1918, after several months of workers’ strikes throughout Germany, navy sailors based at Kiel mutinied against their officers, while an insurrectional mood developed within the proletariat; on the 11th November the German authorities signed an armistice with the countries of the Entente. The bourgeoisie had learned very well the lesson of Russia a year before when the decision of the provisional government, emerging from the revolution of February 1917, to continue the war constituted the principal factor in mobilising the proletariat toward the October Revolution and soviet power. Thus, history has proved correct the vision defended by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: it is the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat that has put an end to the imperialist war and not some destruction of excess commodities.

The 2nd World War, contrary to the First (and to the expectations of many revolutionaries) did not open the way to a new revolutionary wave. And it was unfortunately not the action of the proletariat that put an end to it. However, that doesn’t mean that it fulfilled the abstract schema of PC. If one studies seriously the historical facts, and takes off the deforming spectacles of ‘invariant’ Bordigist dogma, one can easily see that the end of the war had nothing to do with some ‘sufficient destruction of surplus’. In reality the imperialist war ended with the complete destruction of the military potential of the vanquished and by the occupation of their territory by the victors. The most explicit case was Germany once again. If the Allies took the trouble to occupy every inch of German territory, dividing it into four military zones, this was not for economic but social reasons: the bourgeoisie remembered the 1st World War. It knew that it could not count on a defeated government to guarantee social order in the enormous proletarian concentrations in Germany. According to PC itself (we can once more note its incoherence):

“During the 3 years from 45-48 a serious economic crisis hit all the European countries affected by the war [well! this was where the most constant capital was destroyed]  (...) One can see that the post-war stagnation affected victors and vanquished alike. But armed with the experience of the period after World War I, the world bourgeoisie knew that this stagnation could give rise to explosions of class struggle and revolution. That’s why the post-war economic depression was also the period of the massive military occupation of Europe. This occupation only began to be reduced, in the western sector, from 1949, when the spectre of ‘social disorder’ became remote” (PC Nº 91, p43).

In reality, in the name of ‘marxism’ and even of the ‘dialectic’, PC gives us a mechanistic, vulgar-materialist vision of the process of the beginning and the end of world imperialist war.

A schematic vision of the beginning of imperialist war

For marxism the economic infrastructures of society in the last analysis determine its superstructures. Moreover all historical facts that affect the political, military or social scene have economic roots. However, it is once more ‘in the last analysis’ that this economic determination plays its role, in a dialectical, not a mechanical, way. There is, particularly at the beginning of capitalism, an economic origin to war. But the link between economic factors and war has always been mediated by a series of historical, political, and diplomatic factors, which allow the bourgeoisie to mask the real nature of war from the proletariat. That is already valid for the last century, when war had a certain economic rationality for capital. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was an example.

On the Prussian side this war had no immediate economic goal (even if, obviously, the victor allowed himself the luxury of imposing a price of 6 million gold francs in exchange for the departure of his occupation troops). Fundamentally the war of 1870 allowed Prussia to create German unity around itself (after it had beaten its Austrian rival for such a role at the battle of Sadowa in 1866). The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had no decisive economic interest, but constituted the wedding present for the different German political entities. And it was through this political unity that the capitalist nation could develop impetuously to become, and remain, the first economic power of Europe.

On the French side the choice made by Napoleon III to go to war was still more remote from a direct economic determination. Fundamentally, as Marx showed, it was a question of the monarch launching a ‘dynastic’ war which would permit the Second Empire, if victorious, to root itself more firmly at the head of the French bourgeoisie (which in its great majority, whether royalist or republican, was not over-fond of ‘Badinguet’ as Napoleon was known) and to allow Napoleon’s son to succeed him. That is why Thiers, representing the most clear-sighted of the capitalist class, was ferociously opposed to this war.

When one examines the causes of the 1st World War, one can equally note how far the economic factor, which is obviously fundamental, acts indirectly. We cannot, in the context of this article, develop on all the imperialist ambitions of the different protagonists of this war (at the beginning of the century revolutionaries devoted many pamphlets to this question). Suffice it to say that for the two principal countries of the Entente, Great Britain and France, the fundamental stakes was the preservation of their colonial empires against the ambitions of Germany, whose growing power and industrial muscle had practically no colonial outlets. That is why in the final analysis, the war was for Germany (which played the role of aggressor in the conflict) a struggle for a re-division of markets at the time when the latter were already in the hands of the older powers. The economic crisis which began to develop in 1913 was obviously an important factor which worsened imperialist rivalries that broke out on the 4th August 1914, but it would be totally false to pretend (which no marxist did at the time) that the crisis had reached such a level that capital could do nothing else than unleash the World War with its immense destruction, in order to overcome it.

In reality, the war could very well have broken out in 1912, during the Balkan crisis. But at this very moment, the Socialist International had mobilised itself and the working masses against the threat of war, notably at the Basle Congress. The bourgeoisie had to halt its advance along the road to generalised confrontation. By contrast, in 1914, the principal reason why the bourgeoisie could begin the World War did not lie in the level reached by the crisis of overproduction, which was far from the level reached today for example. It lay in the fact that the proletariat pacified by the idea that war no longer threatened and more generally by reformist ideology (propagated by the right wing of the socialist parties which in most cases was the leadership) made no serious mobilisation against the threat which increased sharply after the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 20th June 1914. For a month and a half, the bourgeoisie of the principal countries had plenty of time to verify that their hands were free to unleash the massacre. In particular, in Germany as much as in France, the governments directly contacted the leaders of the socialist parties who assured them of their loyalty and of their capacity to drag the workers toward the butchery. We are not inventing anything: these facts were put forward and denounced at the time by revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin.

Concerning the 2nd World War, one can also show how, after the economic crisis of 1929, all the elements which would end up in the outbreak of war in September 1939 fell into place: the arrival of Hitler to power in 1933, the rise to power in 1936 of the ‘popular fronts’ in France and Spain, the civil war in the latter from July of the same year. The fact that the open crisis of the capitalist economy would finally end in imperialist war was moreover seen very clearly by the bourgeois leaders. Cordell Hull, close collaborator of the American president Roosevelt, declared: “When goods circulate, soldiers don’t advance”. Hitler on the eve of the war said clearly that Germany “must export or die”. However, one cannot account for the moment when war broke out uniquely according to PC:

“After 29, the attempt was made to overcome the crisis in the USA by a kind of ‘new model of development’. The state intervened in a massive way in the economy... and launched gigantic plans for public investment. We know today that all that only had secondary effects on the economy, which in 37-38 sank once again into crisis: only the rearmament credits in 38 could spark a ‘vigorous’ recovery and attain historic levels of production. But public indebtedness and the production of armaments could only provide a break, it could not eliminate the tendency to crisis. Let us note that in 39 the war broke out to avoid the descent into a still more ruinous crisis... The crisis before the war lasted 3 years and was followed after 33 by a recovery which led directly to the war” (PC Nº90, p29). This explanation is not false in itself, even though one must reject the idea that the war would be less ruinous than the crisis: one only has to look at the state of Europe after the 2nd World War to see that such an affirmation is not serious. By contrast, such an explanation becomes false if one attempts to understand from it alone why the war broke out in 1939 and not at the beginning of the 30s, when the world and particularly Germany and the United States sank into the deepest recession in history.

To show the incredible schematism of the PC’s analysis, it is enough to cite the following passage:

“The development of the imperialist economy at a certain moment ‘made’ the war. And while it is true that the military confrontation temporarily resolved the problems posed by the crisis, it is necessary to underline however that the military confrontation did not flow from the recession but from the artificial recovery that followed it. Drugged by the intervention of the state, financed by public debt (military industry for a good part), production recovered; but the immediate consequence was the saturation of an already water-logged world market, reproduction under a more acute form of inter-imperialist confrontation and thus war. At this moment the states threw themselves at each other, they made war because of the threat from bulldozers, combine-harvesters and any other pacific machines that one can imagine...The power to launch the war did not come from the barrel of a gun but from the mass of unsold commodities” (PC Nº91, p37)

Such a vision makes a complete abstraction of the concrete conditions through which the economic crisis ended up in war. For PC things are reduced to the mechanism: recession, ‘drugged’ recession, war. Nothing else. One can already note that this schema could not be applied at all to the 1st World War. But, concerning the second, PC doesn’t rely on the form taken by the drugged recovery in Germany after 1933: that of a colossal rearmament effort by the Nazi regime, nor on the significance of the coming to power of this regime itself. Moreover PC doesn’t examine in the least the significance of the coming to power of the Popular Front in France, for example. Finally the events on the international scene as important as the Italian expedition of 1935 against Abyssinia, the war in Spain in 1936, the war between Japan and China a year later are ignored. In reality, no war can be waged with combine-harvesters. Whatever the pressure exercised by the crisis, war can only break out if the military, diplomatic, political and social conditions have been prepared and are mature. The history of the 30s is precisely that of these preparations. Without going over in detail here what we have already developed in other issues of this Review we can only say that one of the functions of the Nazi regime was to drive the reconstitution of German military potential on a grand scale and “at a rhythm which surprised even the generals” [1] [94]. The clauses of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had previously kept this potential in check. In France too, the Popular Front had been responsible for re-launching the armament effort on a scale unknown since the 1st World War. Moreover, the wars mentioned above took place within the perspective of military and diplomatic preparations for the generalised confrontation. The war in Spain must be mentioned particularly. It was the terrain where the two Axis powers, Italy and Germany, not only tested their weapons for the war to come but also reinforced their alliance in view of the latter. But not only that: the war in Spain perfected the physical and political crushing of the world proletariat after the revolutionary wave which had begun in 1917 in Russia and finished in China in 1927. Between 1936 and 1939 it was not only the proletariat of Spain that was defeated, firstly by the Popular Front, then by Franco. The Spanish war had been one of the essential means by which the bourgeoisie of the democratic countries, particularly in Europe, glued the workers to anti-fascist ideology, which allowed them to be used once more as cannon fodder in the 2nd World War. Thus the acceptance of the imperialist war by the workers of the fascist and Nazi regimes as a result of terror was obtained in the other countries in the name of the ‘defence of democracy’ with the active participation, obviously, of the left parties of capital, the ‘socialists, and ‘communists’.

The mechanical schema that led to the outbreak of the 2nd World War, according to PC, coincides with reality. But one can only understand the latter by looking at the specific conditions of this period and not from this single schema. In particular, as far as both Germany, but also countries like France and Great Britain were concerned (with a certain delay for other countries however) the armament effort was one of the causes of the recovery after the depression of 1929. But that was only possible because the principle capitalist states had considerably reduced their military capacity following the 1st World War because the main preoccupation of the world bourgeoisie was to face up to the revolutionary wave of the proletariat. In addition, bolstered by the experience of the 1st World War the bourgeoisie knew very well that it could only launch the imperialist war with the precondition of a totally submissive proletariat in order to avoid a revolutionary resurgence of the latter during the war.

Thus PC method consists in establishing as a historical law a schema that can only be applied once in history (since we have already seen that did not even apply before the First World War). To be valid in the present period the historical conditions of today would have to be fundamentally the same as those of the 30s. This is far from the case: never have armaments been so developed and the proletariat has not suffered a profound defeat as it did during the 20s. On the contrary since the end of the 60s, it has emerged from the profound counter-revolution, which had weighed on it since the beginning of the 30s.

The consequences of the schematic vision of Programme Communiste

PC’s schematic vision ends up in a particularly dangerous analysis of the present period. It is true that from time to time, in its study, PC seems to discover a slightly more marxist conception of the process that leads to World War. For example:

“For such masses of human beings to be sent to the slaughter, the populations must be prepared in time for the war: and for them to stand up to the effects of all-out war, this work of preparation must be followed by a work of constant mobilisation of the energy and consciousness of the nation, of all the nation, in favour of war (...) Without the cohesion of the whole social body, without the solidarity of every class in a war for which their own existence and hopes must be sacrificed, even the troops of the best armies are condemned to disintegrate under the blow of the privations and daily horrors of the conflict” (PC Nº91, p41).

But such completely correct affirmations are in flagrant contradiction with the approach adopted by PC when it tries to predict the years to come. Resting on its schema, recession-drugged recovery-war, PC indulges in studious calculations (which we will spare the reader) to end up with the following conclusion:

“We can now refute the thesis of the imminence of the 3rd World War” (PC Nº90, p27). “We can then situate the date of the presumed economic maturity of the conflict around the middle of the first decade of the next millennium (or if one prefers the next century)” (Ibid. p29).

We can note that PC bases such a prediction on the fact that “the process of drugged recovery typical of the war economy, which followed the crisis, has not happened yet, in a situation where the economic situation, which, from one recession to another is still far from exhausting the tendency to depression inaugurated in 74-75” (Ibid).

Now we can obviously show (see all our analyses on the characteristics of the present crisis in this Review) how, for more than a decade, the ‘recoveries’ of the world economy have been perfectly ‘drugged’. But PC says so itself some lines before:

“We only want to underline that the world capitalist system has used the same means to prevent the crisis, which it used after the 1929 crash”.

Coherence is not really a strong point of PC and the Bordigists: it is perhaps their conception of the ‘dialectic’, since they flatter themselves with being “experienced in the handling of the dialectic” (PC Nº91, p56) [2] [95].

That being said, beyond the contradictions of PC, it is important to underline the perfectly demobilising character of the predictions with which they amuse themselves with on the date of the next world conflict. Since its foundation the ICC has insisted that once capitalism had exhausted the effects of the reconstruction of the 2nd World War, the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production broke out once more in the form of open crisis (at the end of 60s, and not in 1974-75 as the Bordigists would like, in order to prove an old ‘prediction’ of Bordiga) the conditions for a new World War were given. It has also demonstrated that the military and diplomatic conditions for such a war were completely mature with the constitution of the two great imperialist blocs around NATO and the Warsaw Pact behind the two principle military powers of the world. The reason why the economic dead-end of world capitalism has not ended up in a new generalised butchery is to be found fundamentally in the fact that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have its hands free on the social terrain. Since the first bites of the crisis the world working class - in France in May 1968, in Italy in the autumn of 1969, and in all the developed countries afterward - raised its head and detached itself from the profound counter-revolution, which it had suffered for four decades. In explaining this, in basing its propaganda on this idea, the ICC (in a very modest way, obviously, corresponding to its actual strength) has helped to re-forge the self-confidence of the working class faced with the bourgeois campaigns, which permanently try to sap this confidence. By contrast, in continuing to propagate the idea that the proletariat was still totally absent from the historical scene (as if it were still ‘midnight in the century’) the Bordigist current made (involuntarily, certainly, but that doesn’t change anything) its small contribution to the bourgeoisie’s campaigns. Worse still, in letting it be thought that, in any case, the material conditions of a 3rd World War were not yet present, it has helped to demobilise the working class against this threat, playing, on a small scale, the role of the reformists on the eve of the 1st World War when they convinced the workers that the war was no longer a threat. Thus it is not only, as we have seen in the first part of this article, in affirming that a 3rd World War would not risk destroying humanity that PC has helped to mask the real stakes of the combat of the working class today, but also in giving credence to the idea that the class struggle has nothing to do with the fact the World War III has not broken out since the 70s.

The collapse of the Eastern Bloc, at the end of the 80s, has momentarily eclipsed the military and diplomatic conditions for a new World War. However, the mistaken vision of PC continues to weaken the political capacities of the proletariat. The disappearance of the blocs has not put an end to military conflicts, far from it. The large and medium powers continue to confront each other in the conflicts of small states and even through ethnic conflicts. The reason why these powers don’t engage more directly on the ground, or why when they do it effectively (like in the Gulf War in 1991) they only send professional soldiers or volunteers, is the fear that to send conscripts, that is workers in uniform, would provoke reactions and a mobilisation of the working class. Thus, at the present time, the fact that the bourgeoisie is not capable of dragging the proletariat behind its war objectives is a factor of first importance limiting the scale of imperialist massacres. And the more the working class develops its struggles, the more the bourgeoisie will be trapped in its disastrous projects. This is what revolutionaries must say to their class to help it become conscious of its real capacities and its responsibilities. Unfortunately, despite its completely valid denunciation of bourgeois lies on imperialist war, and notably of pacifism, this is not done by the Bordigist current, and not by PC in particular.

To conclude this critique of the analyses of PC on the question of imperialist war, we must return to some ‘arguments’ employed by this review when it tries to stigmatise the positions of the ICC. For PC we are “social-pacifists of the extreme left” on the same level as the Trotskyists (PC Nº92, p61). Our position is “emblematic of the impotent rage of the petit-bourgeoisie” (Ibid. p57). And why, may we ask? Because:

“If the outbreak of war definitively excludes the revolution, then peace, this bourgeois peace, becomes despite everything an advantage which the proletariat, while it doesn’t have the force to make the revolution, must protect like the apple of its eye. And here is, in the end, the old ‘struggle for peace’ ..in the name of the revolution. Wasn’t he fundamental axis of the propaganda of the ICC at the time of the Gulf War denunciation of the warmongers of all kinds, and the lamentations on the ‘chaos’, the ‘blood’ and the ‘horrors’ of the war? Certainly war is horrible, but bourgeois peace is too and the ‘peace-mongers’ must be denounced as severely as the ‘war-mongers’; as for the growing ‘chaos’ of the bourgeois world, it can only be welcomed by real communists because it only signifies the approach of the time when revolutionary violence must be opposed to bourgeois violence” (Ibid.).

Sincerely the ‘arguments’ of PC are a little poor, and above all, lies. When revolutionaries at the beginning of century, the Luxemburgs and Lenins, at each congress of International Socialism and in their daily propaganda, put workers on guard against the threat of imperialist war, when they denounced the preparations for the latter, they did not do the same thing as the pacifists and it seems to us that PC still identifies with these revolutionaries. Moreover, when, in the course of the war itself, they stigmatised with all their energy the imperialist bestiality of the ‘war-mongers’ and other ‘social chauvinists’ they didn’t add their voice to that of pacifists like Romain Rolland. It is exactly the same struggle of these revolutionaries that the ICC is demanding, and without the least concessions to pacifist propaganda, which they denounce with the same vigour as war propaganda contrary to what PC pretends (they should read our press a bit better). In reality the fact that PC is obliged to lie on what we really say only shows one thing: the lack of consistency of their own analysis.

To close, we would say to these comrades that it is no use to spend all their energy to predict the date of the future World War to end up in a ‘prediction’ for the period to come which comprises no less than four possible scenarios (see PC Nº 92, p57-60). The proletariat, to arm itself politically, expects clear perspectives from revolutionaries. To trace such a perspective it is not sufficient for the latter to content themselves with the “strict repetition of classical positions” as the PCI wants to do (PC Nº92 p31). While marxism can only rest on a strict respect of proletarian principles, notably in relation to imperialist war, as the ICC believes as much as the PCI, it is not a dead theory, incapable to taking account of different historical circumstances in which the working class develops its struggle, whether for the defence of its immediate interests or for communism (the two are part of the same whole). It must be able, as Lenin said, to “analyse concretely a concrete situation”. Any other analysis is no longer marxism, and is either useless or spreads still more confusion in the ranks of the working class. This is unfortunately the ‘marxism’ that the PCI gives us.

FM

Behind the banners of 'peace', 'civilization' and 'democracy', the greatest military powers of the world have just celebrated with all due pomp the anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy. The festivities organized for the occasion, the repulsive live shows enacted at the very scene of the butchery fifty years ago, the sonorous congratulations and hymns to their own glory exchanged by the most powerful heads of state on the planet - all this was the subject of a vast media operation on a world scale. The message was put across very clearly: "we, the great industrialized states and our democratic institutions are the heirs of the liberators who freed Europe from that incarnation of evil, the Nazi regime. Today as yesterday, we are the guardians of civilization, peace and humanity against oppression, terror, barbarism and chaos".

These people want us to believe that today, like yesterday, barbarism is the fault of ... someone else. The old lie that the 1939-45 butchery, its 50 million dead, its train of atrocities and suffering, was all the fault of the barbaric madness of Hitler and not of capitalism as a whole, not of the sordid imperialist interests of all the camps involved. We have been sold this lie for half a century, in the hope that a lie repeated a thousand times will become a truth. And if it's all served up to us again now, it's with the aim of once again excusing capitalism, and in particular the great 'democratic' powers, from the responsibility of the massacres, wars, genocides and growing chaos ravaging the planet today.

Half a million people involved in the operation, the most gigantic military expedition of all time, a frightful slaughter which, in the space of a few hours, left tens of thousands of corpses on the ground. This is what, in the name of 'peace', the crowned heads and presidents of the 'international community' celebrated this June 6 1994. Gathering hypocritically in front of the rows of white crosses, upon which are inscribed the ages of these children they call 'heroes' - 16, 18, 20 years old - the only true emotion this crowd felt was regret for the loss of the good old days of fifty years ago, when the working class was defeated and was ready to supply such abundant cannon-fodder (see the article '50 years of imperialist lies ' in this issue).

All of them, Clinton, Major, Mitterand and the rest, go on and on about peace. They did the same thing five years ago, when the Berlin wall fell. And it was in the name of peace that this same 'international community', a few months later, unleashed 'Desert Storm' on Iraq, with its tens of thousands of victims. They told us that out of this unspeakable butchery a 'new world order' would arise. Since then, it's again been in the name of peace and civilization that they've made their presence felt in Yugoslavia, in Africa, in the countries of the former USSR, in the Middle East and the Far East. The more these regions have been ravaged by war, the more the great powers set themselves up as defenders of peace, the more active they have become in all these conflicts, in order to defend the only 'just cause' that any capitalist state knows about: its own imperialist interests.

There can be no peace under capitalism. The end of the Second World War may have pushed war away from Europe and the most developed countries, but it only displaced it towards the periphery of the system. For 50 years, the imperialist powers large and small have not ceased confronting each other through local conflicts. For decades, these incessant local wars were moments in the rivalry between the two great imperialist blocs over the division of the world. The collapse of the eastern bloc and, as a result, the break-up of the western bloc as well, far from putting an end to the war-like and imperialist reality of capitalism, was the signal for it to intensify without limits.

In a world now ruled by the principle of every man for himself, yesterday's allies are fighting over spheres of influence all over the planet. The celebrations of D-Day, where the most powerful states got together to congratulate each other on having chased war away from Europe 50 years ago, took place at the very time that war has returned to this continent, to Yugoslavia - and it is a war that has been nourished actively by the rivalries between the great 'civilized' states.

No, the military chaos ravaging the planet today can't be explained away as the simple result of the return of 'ancestral hatreds' between backward populations - another version of the argument that barbarism is always someone else's fault. Everywhere it is being fed, sharpened, kept up, when it's not provoked outright, by the imperialist rivalries and ambitions of the very same states who give us such fine speeches about their humanitarian, peaceful and civilized intentions.

Rwanda: rivalries between France and America are responsible for the horror

A terrifying bloodbath. Entire populations coldly murdered with machetes and nailed clubs, children slaughtered in their cots, families hunted by hordes of killers to their last places of refuge and savagely massacred. The country transformed into a vast charnel-house and Lake Victoria polluted by thousands of rotting corpses. The number of victims? At least half a million, no doubt more. The scale of the genocide is not known. Never in history has there been such an exodus, in such a short time, of populations blindly fleeing from massacres.

The way the 'democratic' bourgeois media has portrayed this holocaust has been designed to get across this message: "look at the horrors that are the result of the ancestral racial hatreds that divide the backward populations of 'savage' Africa. In the face of all this the civilized states are powerless. But you should be glad to live in democratic countries which are shielded from such chaos. The day-to-day reality of poverty and unemployment that you have to put up with is a paradise compared to the massacres these populations are subjected to".

The lie is all the bigger, this time around, in that the so-called ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis was directly created by the imperialist powers in the period of colonization. At that time Hutus and Tutsis corresponded much less to 'ethnic' criteria than to social castes. The Tutsis were the reigning feudal caste who initially had the support of the colonial powers. Inheriting the Rwandan colony when the German empire was carved up by the victors of the First World War, it was Belgium who introduced the reference to people's ethnic group on their identity cards, sharpening the hatred between the two castes in order to gain support from the Tutsi monarchy.

In 1959, Belgium made an about-face and supported the Hutu majority which had taken power. The famous 'ethnic' identity card was maintained and so was discrimination between Tutsis and Hutus in the various spheres of social life.

Several hundred thousand Tutsis fled the country and wound up in Burundi or Uganda. In the latter country they were to be a recruiting base for the clique around the current President Museveni, who took power in Kampala with their support in 1986. In return, the new Ugandan regime gave arms and aid to the Tutsi guerillas, leading to the formation of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) which entered into Rwanda in October 1990.

In the meantime, Belgian imperialism's control over Kigali was replaced by France. The latter gave unstinting military and economic support to Habyarimana's Hutu regime, which imposed a reign of terror on the country and reinforced ethnic resentments against the Tutsis. It was thanks to the support of French imperialism which armed it and sent military reinforcements to help it that the regime was able to check the advances made by the RPF, which was discretely supported by the US, via Uganda which armed it and trained it.

From there the civil war took off, anti-Tutsi pogroms multiplied at the same time as those carried out by the RPF against all those suspected of 'collaborating' with the regime. In the name of 'protecting the innocent' Paris has sent in an expeditionary force. In reality the French state is simply defending its position against the offensive of the USA, which since the collapse of the eastern bloc has been trying to deprive France of its spheres of influence in Africa. The RPF guerillas are the spearhead of an American offensive aimed at bringing down the pro-French regime in Kigali.

In order to save the regime, France set out a 'peace' plan in August 93, comprising a more 'democratic' constitution, transferring some power to the Tutsi minority as well as the various opposition cliques.

This plan proved to be unrealizable. Not because 'ancestral hatreds' were too strong, but quite simply because the imperialist maneuvers and strategic calculations of the great powers could not accommodate it. On the very eve of the inauguration of the new constitution, the Rwandan and Burundi presidents were assassinated, burying the plan and unleashing the bloodbath.

The recent revelations in the Belgian press (Belgium has its own reasons for doing down its French rival in Africa) directly implicated French military elements in the 6 April assassination, suggesting that Paris could well have ordered the killings in the hope that, by pointing a finger at the RPF rebels, it would give the government army all the justifications it needed to put an end to the Tutsi rebellion. If that was the case, reality went beyond all its hopes. But it matters little which of the two cliques, the government or the RPF, and behind them France or the USA, had the greater interest in elevating the Rwanda conflict from simmering guerrilla war to all-out war. The very logic of capital pushes it in that direction: 'peace' is no more than a myth in capitalism, at best a pause during which new conflicts are being prepared. In the last instance war remains capitalism's only way of life, its only way of resolving its contradictions.

Today the sorcerers' apprentices are making a show of emotion about the scale of the conflagration they themselves have lit. However, for months all these good people allowed the massacre to go on while deploring the "impotence of the UN". The decision adopted by the UN Security Council in mid-May - more than a month after the war had begun and 500,000 were already dead! - to send 5,000 men in under the aegis of UNIMAR, wasn't even supposed to be carried through until July! Even if certain African states in the region have declared that they are ready to supply troops, among the great powers, who are charged with supplying equipment and finances, sloth and apathy have reigned, leading one UNIMAR official to protest: "it's as if we had become totally unfeeling, as though we were indifferent to all this". To which the diplomats of the Security Council replied: "in any case, most of the massacres are over, we have to wait and see what happens next". The other UN resolutions, which are supposed to stop war supplies through Uganda and Zaire, have had no more effect. And quite understandably so: we've see the same 'impotence' in Bosnia. It merely reflects the divergence of imperialist interests between those who present themselves as the 'forces of peace'.

The military-humanitarian pose was adopted most stridently by the French government in June, after a cease-fire was immediately violated. "We can't tolerate this anymore" claimed the French minister for Foreign Affairs, proposing an intervention "in the framework of the UN" but on condition that the operation should be under French command. The initiative immediately provoked the reaction of RPF representatives who said indignantly that "France can't stop the genocide that it has helped set in motion". As for the other big powers, they are doing all they can to hamstring the French, particularly the USA. First because if France aims to take charge of the operation, it's in order to conserve its role as the dominant power in the country, to put all its weight behind stopping the RPF's advance. Second because the USA, for their part, are not only supporting the RPF on the ground, but also want to make it clear that no one else except themselves can take on the job of gendarme. This is what really lies behind this new outbreak of 'humanitarian' posturing; it's got nothing at all to do with the fate of the massacred population.

Yemen: the strategic calculations of the great powers

Born out of the  reunification of the two Yemens four years ago - in the euphoria created by the collapse of the eastern bloc, which suddenly left Aden and its one-party YSP regime without a backer - the newly unified Yemeni republic hasn't lasted long. The secession by the south and the renewed military conflict between the two parts of the country is yet another demonstration of what the 'new world order' really means: a world of instability and chaos, of states being torn to shreds by the pressure of social decomposition. But as in Rwanda or Bosnia, the chaos has been nourished and fed by the imperialist powers of the region and beyond, who are still trying to pull irons out of the fire for their own benefit.

Regionally the Yemen conflict has been fuelled on one side by Saudi Arabia, which reproaches the Islamic factions in the north for being too sympathetic to their menacing neighbor Iraq and to the regime in Sudan. It's Saudi, and behind it its powerful ally America, who has thus supported the secessionist clique in Aden with the aim of weakening the pro-Iraqi factions. On the other side, by supporting the northern offensive, Khartoum is defending its regional imperialist influence, in particular against its local rival Egypt, another American stronghold.

The stakes of this struggle are none other than control of the eminently strategic position of the port of Aden, which faces the French stronghold in Djibouti. And who is behind the military-Islamic Sudanese regime? As it happens, it's discretely backed by France which is seeking to counter the US offensive in Somalia which has threatened its position in Djibouti.

The hidden warfare between the great powers, particularly the US and France, in Africa and the Middle East, has led to this sordid reality which has seen France denouncing Islamic obscurantism in Algeria, where it is destabilizing its own sphere of influence with the blessing of the USA which is supporting the FIS more or less openly; at the same time we have seen the USA denouncing Islamic fundamentalism when it goes against its interests in Arabia, while France, forgetting its anti-clerical soul, finds militant Islam rather to its taste when it helps it to defend its imperialist interests at the entrance to the Red Sea. Yet another ideological justification which has collapsed in the face of the squalid reality of imperialism.

Bosnia: 'peaceful' missions fuel the war

The same cynicism, the same great power duplicity has been revealed in the war in Bosnia (see the article 'The great imperialist powers foment war' in International Review 77). The recent evolution of the diplomatic-military imbroglio between the great powers, as the massacres continue unabated, has given the lie to all their 'humanitarian' pretenses, which are just a cover for using the Serbian, Croatian and Muslim populations to advance their imperialist designs.

The Bosnian theatre, which for a long time has been a favorite hunting ground of the various European powers, has today become one of the cornerstones of the American offensive. With the NATO ultimatum and the threat of air attacks on Serb forces, Washington managed to regain the initiative in a very convincing manner, to slap down Russia's new pretensions in the region and to expose the total impotence of Britain and France, who have had to accept the American intervention that they have up till now rejected and sabotaged with all means at their disposal. And the USA has made further advances by overseeing the creation of the Croat-Muslim Federation. All of a sudden Germany's intention to use Croatia as a springboard to the Mediterranean has been kicked into touch. Here again, all these grand military-diplomatic maneuvers have nothing at all to do with 'the return to peace'.

As we said in our previous issue, "the Croatian-Muslim alliance which the USA is overseeing - if it does get realized - will take the confrontation with Serbia onto another level. The European powers which have just received a slap in the face won't hesitate to throw oil onto the fire". The vote of the American senate for lifting the embargo on arms supplies to the Bosnians - which received unexpected support from a handful of French armchair diehard intellectuals - can only encourage the Bosnian army, which has already been armed by the American bourgeoisie, to resume its military offensive. And the massacres won't be halted by the European plan for the partition of Bosnia, which is totally unacceptable to the Muslims, and to which the White House, in apparent disagreement with Congress, has pretended to support. Its predictable failure, and Washington's support for the new Croat-Muslim anti-Serb front, will make the widening of the war inevitable.

The butchery which has now been raging in ex-Yugoslavia for three years now is not about to end. It is potent proof of how the wars and chaos born out of the decomposition of capitalism are aggravated by the big imperialist powers. And also that, in the name of 'humanitarian intervention', the only alternative they can propose is either to bomb the Serb forces or arm the Bosnians. In other words, faced with the war and chaos provoked by the decomposition of the capitalist system, the most powerful and industrialized nations can only respond by adding more war.

Korea: towards new military clashes

While areas of conflict proliferate, another one is smoldering around North Korea, which is seeking to equip itself with a nuclear arsenal. The reaction of the USA, which has threatened Pyongyang with an escalating series of sanctions, has once again been presented to us as the attitude of a responsible and 'civilized' power concerned to stop the arms race and defend the peace. In fact this 'major crisis' is very similar to the USA's showdown with Iraq four years ago, which ended with the butchery of the Gulf war. And, as then, the pretensions of North Korea (which is already one of the most militarized countries in the world, with a million-strong army), its ambition to add nuclear weapons to an already huge arsenal, are basically just a pretext.

Behind the 'Korean crisis' and the media intoxication about Pyongyang's aggressive intentions towards its southern neighbor, we can see the USA reacting to the threats to its hegemony, to its status as world cop, posed by the alliance being formed between the two giants of the region: China and Japan. In threatening to go "as far as it takes", America's real targets are not Pyongyang but the former two countries. All this is part of the White House's pressure on China, which on the one hand is holding out the carrot of "Most Favored Nation" status, and on the other hand the stick, via its threats against its little North Korean protégé.

The aim behind deliberately raising the tension with North Korea is to force China and Japan to range themselves behind the USA, to oblige Beijing to break solidarity with Pyongyang, cut through the Sino-Japanese axis and stamp on any pretensions towards political independent these countries might have. Exactly the same as in the Gulf crisis, when the USA even provoked the crisis by encouraging Saddam Hussein's ambitions towards Kuwait, with the sole aim of forcing the European powers to line up behind the USA and, contrary to their own interests in the Middle East, to make an act of allegiance to America's military power. The operation was a great success then. The imperialist ambitions of the USA's European rivals were for a while smothered, at the cost of a revolting butchery.

Whether or not the USA goes all the way this time, repeating its bloody 'exploit', whether or not it unleashes its enormous military machine with the aim of bringing the Asian powers to heal, this new crisis shows the future that capitalism is preparing for us.

Capitalism is war

The ceremonies commemorating D-Day also had the aim of reminding everyone that it is the USA which lays down the law in 1994, just as it did in 1944. The slap in the face given to the Germans, who were visibly excluded from the festivities, was intended to remind it who lost the Second World War and to make it understand that it would not be a good idea to try to obtain a new status in the world imperialist balance of forces. The even more striking absence of Russia - which did not fail to protest against the fact that its participation in the victory of 1945 was being 'forgotten', as were the millions of proletarians it sacrificed on the altar of the world butchery - was also aimed at repudiating Moscow's ambition to regain a place among the leading powers of the world. As for the hypocritical speechifying of those who were invited, proclaiming their common concern to act 'for peace', all this cannot really hide the sordid reality of the confrontations between them all over the planet.

There will be no pause in the acceleration and spread of military conflicts. Since its birth, war has been part of capitalism's history. In the period of its decay, it has become the system's permanent way of life. The bourgeoisie wants us to believe that all this is inevitable, that there's nothing we can do except rely on the good intentions of the great powers and their efforts to limit the most devastating effects of all this. Nothing could be more false. As we have just seen, the great powers are the world's main warmongers. And for a very simple reason: this war-like chaos, this militarist folly has its roots in the accelerating downfall of the capitalist economy.

The answer is in the hands of the proletariat

Turn over this coin of the war and barbarism spreading all over the underdeveloped countries, and you will find the poverty and mass unemployment that are growing throughout the big industrialized countries. Permanent war and catastrophic economic crisis are both expressions of the same bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Capitalism is not only incapable of doing away with these scourges; as it rots on its feet, it can only offer more poverty, more unemployment, more wars.

There is an alternative to the frightful future that capitalism promises us. It is in the hands of the international working class and it alone. It is above all up to the workers in the great industrialized countries, who are being hit full tilt by the dramatic consequences of the crisis of the system, to develop this alternative by struggling on their class terrain in the most resolute, united, and conscious manner possible.

Against the feelings of powerlessness that the ruling class wants to inject it with, against its attempts to pull it behind its military adventures, the working class must respond by developing its class response to the attacks of capital. This is the only possible response to the barbarism of the system, because only the working class has the capacity to destroy capitalism before its murderous logic leads to the destruction of humanity. The future of the human species is in the hands of the proletariat.

PE, 19.6.94

The bourgeoisie knows that it is stuck in the crisis. The momentary weakness of the international working class is allowing it to get away with the cynical language of a historically moribund class which knows that it can only survive by intensifying oppression and exploitation.

The doctors have spoken. The economic 'experts' of the OECD Secretariat[1], after two years of intense reflection, declare that they have "carried out the mandate which the Ministers entrusted to them in May 1992". The object of their study? Unemployment, hypocritically called "the problem of employment". But what is the diagnosis? What remedies are being proposed?

The Study begins by attempting to measure the symptoms. "There are 35 million people unemployed in the OECD countries. Fifteen million workers, perhaps, have either given up looking for a job, or have accepted part-time work for want of anything better". The extent of the illness already poses a problem: the definition of unemployment is often different in different countries, and in all cases, it underestimates the reality for obvious political reasons. But even with these defects, the figures are unprecedented: 50 million people directly affected by the problem of unemployment: that's equivalent to the entire working population of Germany and France put together!

How do our medical experts explain why it's come to this - these people for whom capitalism is eternal and is supposed to have gone through a rejuvenation since the collapse of Stalinism?

"The emergence of large scale unemployment in Europe, Canada and Australia and the proliferation of mediocre jobs linked to the appearance of unemployment in the USA thus have one and the same underlying cause: the inability to adapt to the changes in a satisfactory manner".

What changes? "... new technologies, globalization, and the intense competition at national and international level. The existing policies and systems have made the economies rigid and paralyzed the capacity and even the will to adapt".

What does this "inability to adapt", this "rigidity" consist of? Naive types who still believe that economists are something other than charlatans whose job is to justify capitalism might have expected them to talk about the rigidity of the laws which, for example, oblige states to pay farmers not to cultivate the soil, or to close thousands of perfectly efficient factories while hunger and poverty spread all over the planet. But no. The rigidities our doctors are talking about are those which hold up the free and pitiless play of capitalist laws, the very laws that are plunging humanity into a growing chaos.

The Study cynically illustrates this point of view through the remedies, the "recommendations" that it puts forward:

"...Suppressing all negative connotations, in public opinion, relating to the failure of enterprises ...

Increasing the flexibility of the working day ...

Increasing the flexibility of wages, reducing the costs of non-salaried manpower ...

Re-evaluating the role of legal minimum wages ... by sufficiently modulating wage rates with regard to age and regions ...

Introducing "renegotiation clauses" which would make it possible to renegotiate onto a lower level collective accords drawn up at a higher level ...

Reducing the costs of non-salaried manpower ... by lightening deductions at enterprise level (ie, taxes payed by the bosses) and replacing them with other kinds of taxes, notably on consumption or income (ie taxes payed mainly by the workers).

"Fixing remunerations offered by job creation schemes at a lower level than the participant could obtain on the labor market in order to incite people to look for regular work ...

The systems of unemployment benefit have ended up constituting a semi-permanent guaranteed income in many countries, and this doesn't make people want to go out and work ...

Limiting the length of eligibility for unemployment benefit in countries where it is particularly long ..."

Rarely has the bourgeoisie allowed itself to come out with such brutal language at this level. The conclusions of the OECD are basically no different from those formulated by the 'experts' of the European Union or by the US president at the recent G7 meeting[2]. The Study will serve as a basis for the work of the next G7 meeting, which is again devoted to the problem of unemployment.

The ruling class is quite aware that the threat of unemployment can give it immense power over the exploited class. It knows that the workers are finding it hard to fight back at the moment. And this allows it to harden the tone. To speak without any flourishes.

In reality, in practice, all the governments of the world are already carrying out such policies to one degree or another. What this document announces is simply an aggravation of these policies.

But how effective can these 'remedies' be?

Capitalism cannot adapt in a healthy manner to the changes which it itself provokes at the level of the technical productivity of labor and the interdependence of the world economy.

The intensification of competition between capitalists, exacerbated by the crisis of overproduction and the scarcity of solvent markets, pushes the capitalists to continually modernize the process of production, replacing men by machines, in a frenzied search to 'reduce costs'. The same race obliges them to shift part of production to countries where labor power is cheaper (China and South East Asia today, for example).

But in doing so the capitalists don't solve the chronic problem of the lack of outlets which affects the whole world economy. All it can do is to allow some to survive at the expense of others, but at the global level the problem is merely aggravated.

The real inability to adapt does not lie somewhere between capitalism and the policies of the governments, who have for a long time now been attacking the living conditions of the exploited in the most industrialized countries. The real inability to adapt lies in the contrast between the actual technical capacities of society: the productivity of labor, the communications explosion, the internationalization of economic life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the continuation of the laws of capitalism, the laws of exchange, wage labor, of statified or individual private property. It is capitalism itself which cannot adapt to the capacities and needs of humanity.

As the Communist Manifesto put it: "bourgeois institutions have become too narrow to contain the wealth they have created".

The only interesting thing about the 'new' language of the ruling class is that it recognizes that it is faced with an economic crisis that is destined to last. Even if the bourgeoisie always thinks that its system is eternal, even if it talks about the recovery of the world economy, it is admitting today that it is doomed, at least for the years ahead, to go through a situation of constantly growing unemployment; that the trend for the number of unemployed people to go on growing all over the planet for the past quarter-century is far from over.

The Study displays a certain lucidity when it looks into the social future: "Certain people will not be able to adapt to an economy that is progressing (they should say: an economy whose mortal illness is progressing). Their exclusion from the mainstream of economic activity threatens to provoke social tensions which could have heavy human and economic consequences".

What these experts don't and can't see is that these "social tensions" contain the only way out for humanity and that the "heavy human and economic consequences" could be the world communist revolution.

RV, 18 June 1994

[1] The OECD is the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. It regroups the 24 most industrialized countries of the former US bloc (all the countries of Western Europe, the USA and Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand). Mexico is in the process of being integrated.

[2] See the article 'The explosion of unemployment' in International Review 77.

Class consciousness is a living thing. The fact that a part of the proletarian movement has attained a certain level of clarity does not mean that the whole movement has attained it, and even the clearest fractions can, in certain circumstances, fail to see all the implications of what they have seen, and even lose their grip on a previously-reached level of understanding.

This is certainly true for the question of the state and the lessons that Marx and Engels drew about the Paris Commune, which we analysed in the last article in this se­ries (IR 77). In the decades that followed the defeat of the Commune, the ascent of reformism and opportunism in the workers' movement led to the absurd situation, at the turn of the century, in which the 'orthodox' marxist position on the state, as preached by the likes of Karl Kautsky, was the one which asserted that the working class could come to power through parliamentary elections, ie through captur­ing the existing state. So that when Lenin in his State and Revolution, written during the revolutionary events of 1917, undertook the task of "excavating" the real heritage of Marx and Engels on this question, the 'orthodox' accused him of sliding back into Bakuninist anarchism!

In fact, the struggle to disseminate the real lessons of the Paris Commune, to keep the proletarian movement on the right track to the communist revolution, was already underway in the aftermath of the French workers' insurrec­tion. In this combat against the mephitic influence of bour­geois and petty bourgeois ideology on the workers' move­ment, marxism faced a battle on two fronts: against the 'state socialists' and reformists, who were particularly strong in the German party, and against Bakunin's anar­chist tendency, which had a powerful presence in the less developed capitalist countries.

In this three-sided conflict, many issues were in debate, or were the seeds of future debates. With the German party, there was already the problem of confusing the necessary fight for reforms with the ideology of reformism, in which the ultimate revolutionary goals of the movement are for­gotten altogether. The question of reforms was also posed by the Bakuninists, but from the other way round: they had nothing but contempt for the immediate defensive struggles of the class, and wanted to leap over them, straight into the grand "social liquidation". With the latter, as well, the question of the role and the internal functioning of the International was to become one of extreme acuity, hasten­ing the demise of the International itself.

In the next two articles, we shall be concerned mainly with the way these conflicts related to the conception of the revolution and of the future society, though there are inevitably numerous points of contact with the issues mentioned above.

'State socialism' is state capitalism

In the 20th century, the identification between socialism and state capitalism has been one of the most persistent ob­stacles to the development of class consciousness. The Stalinist regimes, in which a brutal totalitarian state has vi­olently assumed control of virtually the entire economic ap­paratus, arrogantly called themselves 'socialist', and the rest of the world bourgeoisie obligingly agreed. And of all Stalinism's more 'democratic' or 'revolutionary' cousins - from social democracy on its right to Trotskyism on its left - have devoted themselves to spreading the same basic falsehood.

No less pernicious than the Stalinist version of this lie is the social democratic idea that the working class can bene­fit from the activity and intervention of the state even in those regimes which are explicitly defined as 'capitalist': in this vision, local councils, central governments controlled by social democratic parties, the institutions of the welfare state, the nationalised industries, can all be used on behalf of the workers, and even as stepping stones towards a so­cialist society.

One of the reasons why these mystifications are so deeply ingrained is that the currents who advocate them were once part of the workers' movement. And many of the ideological tricks they peddle today have their origins in genuine confusions existing in an earlier phase of that movement. The marxist world outlook emerges out of a real combat against bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the proletarian movement, and for this very reason is inevitably faced with an unending struggle to free itself from the sub­tle influences of ruling class ideology. In the marxism of the ascendant period of capitalism, we can thus discern a re­curring difficulty in separating itself from the illusion that the statification of capital amounts to its suppression.

To a large extent, such illusions resulted from the con­ditions of the day, in which capitalism was still mainly per­ceived through the personality of individual capitalists, and where the concentration and centralisation of capital were still at an early stage. Faced with the evident anarchy cre­ated by a plethora of competing individual enterprises, it was easy enough to fall for the idea that the centralisation of capital in the hands of the national state would constitute a step forward. Indeed, many of the measures of state control put forward in the Communist Manifesto (a state bank, nationalisation of the land, etc  - see the article in this series in IR 72) are done so with the explicit aim of devel­oping capitalist production in a period when it still had a progressive role to play. Despite this, the issue remained clouded, even in the more mature writings of Marx and Engels. In the previous article in this series, for example, we cited one of Marx's comments on the economic mea­sures of the Paris Commune, in which he appears to say that if workers' co-operatives centralised and planned pro­duction on a national scale, this would be communism. Elsewhere, Marx seems to advocate, as a transitional mea­sure towards communism, the state administration of typi­cally capitalist operations such as credit (cf Capital, Vol 3, chap. XXXVI).

In pointing to these errors, we are not issuing any moral judgement on our political ancestors. The clarification of such questions has only been achieved by the 20th century revolutionary movement after many decades of painful ex­perience: in particular the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and, more generally, the growing role of the state as the organising agent of economic life in the epoch of capi­talist decadence. And the clarification that has been achieved today is entirely dependent on the method of anal­ysis elaborated by the founders of marxism, and on certain prophetic insights into the role that the state would, or could, assume in the evolution of capital.

What allowed later generations of marxists to correct some of the 'state capitalist' errors of the earlier ones was, above all Marx's insistence that capital is a social relation, and cannot be defined in a purely juridical manner. The whole thrust of Marx's work is to define capitalism as a system of exploitation founded on wage labour, on the ex­traction and realisation of surplus value. From this stand­point, it is entirely irrelevant whether the agent that sucks surplus value from the workers, which realises that value on the market in order to accrue a profit and expand its capital, is an individual bourgeois, a corporation, or a na­tion state. As the economic role of the state gradually in­creased and consequently fed the illusory expectations of parts of the workers' movement, it was this theoretical rigour which enabled Engels to formulate that oft-quoted passage in which he emphasises that "the transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the work­ers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total na­tional capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the na­tional capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head" (Anti-Duhring)[1].

Among the more sophisticated apologists for Stalinism have been those currents, usually Trotskyists or their off­spring, who have argued that while the monstrous bureaucratic nightmare of the former USSR and similar regimes could not be called socialist, neither can it be called capi­talist, because when you have the total nationalisation of the economy (although, in fact, none of the Stalinist regimes ever reached this point), production and labour power lose their commodity character. Marx, by contrast, was able to theoretically envisage the possibility of a coun­try in which all social capital was in the hands of a single agency, without this country ceasing to be capitalist: "Capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were fused into a single capital. In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company" (Capital, Vol 1, chap XXV, section 2).

From the point of view of the world market, 'nations' are in any case no more than particular capitalists or com­panies, and the social relations within them are entirely dictated by the global laws of capitalist accumulation. It makes little difference whether buying and selling has been done away with inside this or that national border: such countries are no more 'islands of non-capitalism' in the capitalist world economy than the kibbutzim are islands of socialism in Israel[2].

Thus, marxist theory contains all the necessary premises for rejecting the identification between state capitalism and socialism. Furthermore, Marx and Engels were already faced with the need to deal with this 'state socialist' devia­tion in their own day.

"German socialism"

Germany had never passed through a phase of liberal capitalism: the weaknesses of the native German bour­geoisie meant that the development of capitalism in Germany was largely overseen by a powerful bureaucratic state dominated by semi-feudal elements. As a result what Engels referred to as "the superstitious belief in the state" (Introduction to the Civil War in France) was particularly marked in Germany, and it strongly infected the emergent workers' movement there. This tendency was typified by Ferdinand Lasalle, whose faith in the possibility of using the existing state on behalf of the workers reached the point of making an alliance with the Bismarck regime against the capitalists. But the problem wasn't restricted to the 'Bismarckian state socialism' of Lasalle. There was a marxist current in the German work­ers' movement, led by Liebknecht and Bebel. But this ten­dency often fell into the kind of marxism that led Marx to declare that he wasn't a marxist: mechanistic, schematic, and above all, lacking in revolutionary audacity. The very fact that this current described itself as "social democratic" was in itself a backward step: in the 1840s, social democ­racy had been synonymous with the reformist 'socialism' of the petty bourgeoisie, and Marx and Engels had deliber­ately defined themselves as communist to emphasise the proletarian and revolutionary character of the politics they espoused.

The weaknesses of the Liebknecht-Bebel current were starkly revealed in 1875 when it fused with the Lasalle group to form the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP, later the SDP). The founding document of the new party, the 'Gotha Programme', made a number of totally unacceptable concessions to Lasalleanism. It was this that prompted Marx to write his Critique of the Gotha Programme in the same year.

This withering attack on the profound confusions con­tained in the new party's programme remained an 'internal' document until 1891: hitherto, Marx and Engels had feared that publishing it more widely would provoke a premature split in the SDP. In retrospect, one can debate the wisdom of this decision, but the logic behind it is clear enough: for all its faults, the SDP was a real expression of the proletar­ian movement - it had shown this in particular through the internationalist stand that Liebknecht and his current - and even many of the Lassaleans -  had taken during the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. What's more, the German party's rapid development had already demonstrated the growing importance of the movement in Germany for the whole international working class. Marx and Engels recognised the need to wage a long and patient fight against the ideological mistakes of the SDP, and they did so in a number of other important documents written after the Critique. But this fight was motivated by the effort to build the party, not destroy it. This was always the method that informed the struggle of the marxist left against the rise of opportunism within the class party: the struggle was for the party as long as that party has any proletarian life within it.

In the criticisms that Marx and Engels made of the German party, we can see in outline many of the issues that were later taken up by their successors, and which were to become matters of life or death in the great historical events of the early twentieth century. And it is by no means acci­dental that all of them were centered around the marxist conception of the proletarian revolution, which was always the key question that distinguished the revolutionaries from the reformists and utopians in the workers' movement.

Reform or revolution

The second half of the 19th century was the period of capitalism's greatest acceleration and world-wide develop­ment. Within this context, the working class was able to wrest significant concessions from the bourgeoisie, consid­erably ameliorating the terrible conditions that had presided over the previous phases of capitalisms' life (limitations on the working day, on child labour, increase in real wages, etc). Combined with this were gains of a more political nature - the right to assemble, to form trade unions, to par­ticipate in elections, etc - which enabled the class to organ­ise and express itself in the battle to improve its situation inside bourgeois society.

Marx and his tendency always insisted on the necessity for this fight for reforms, rejecting the sectarian arguments of elements such as Proudhon, and later Bakunin, who ar­gued that such struggles were futile or a diversion from the revolutionary path. Against such ideas, Marx affirmed that a class which was unable to organise to defend its most immediate interests would never be capable of organising a new society.

But the very success of the struggle for reforms had its negative consequences - the growth of currents who turned this struggle into the ideology of reformism, openly reject­ing the final communist goal in favour of concentrating on immediate gains, or mixing the two up into a confused and confusing medley. Marx and Engels may not have been able to see all the dangers involved in the growth of such currents  - i.e. that they would end up dragging the major­ity of working class organisations into the service of the bourgeoisie and its state - but the combat against reformism as a species of bourgeois ideology inside the proletarian movement, a combat which was to occupy so much of the energies of later revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg, certainly begins in earnest with them.

Thus, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx points out that not only are the immediate demands it con­tains (e.g. over education, child labour) formulated in a con­fused way; more importantly, the newly formed party com­pletely fails to distinguish between such immediate de­mands and the ultimate revolutionary goal. This is particu­larly marked in the call for "producers' co-operatives with state aid and under the democratic control of the working people", which would supposedly pave the way towards "the socialist organisation of labour". Marx mercilessly criticises this Lassallean "prophet's remedy": "Instead of being the result of the revolutionary process of social transformation in society, the 'socialist organisation of the whole of labour' 'arises' from 'state aid' to producers' co­operatives which the state, not the workers, is to 'call into being'. The notion that state loans can be used for the con­struction of a new society as easily as they can for the con­struction of a new railway is worthy of Lassalle's imagina­tion!". This is an explicit warning against listening to those who claim that the existing capitalist state can in some way be used as an instrument for creating socialism - even if they present it in more sophisticated terms than those of the Gotha Programme.

By the end of the 1870s, the advocates of reformism in the German party had become even more brazen, to the point of questioning whether the party should present itself as a working class organisation at all. In their 'Circular letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke et al', written in September 1879, Marx and Engels made what is probably their most lucid attack on the opportunist elements who were more and more infiltrating the  movement:

"The people who appeared as bourgeois democrats in 1848 can now just as well call themselves Social Democrats. Just as for the former the democratic republic was unattainably remote so, too, is the overthrow of the capitalist order for the latter, and it has therefore abso­lutely no significance for the political practise of the pre­sent day; one can mediate, compromise and philanthropise to one's heart's content. And it is just the same with the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. On paper it is acknowledged because its existence can no longer be denied; but in practise it is hushed up, watered down, attenuated. The Social Democratic Party is not to be a workers' party; it is not to incur the hatred of the bour­geoisie or of anyone; above all it should conduct energetic propaganda among the bourgeoisie; instead of stressing far-reaching goals which deter the bourgeoisie and are unattainable in our generation anyway, it should rather de­vote its whole strength and energy to those petty-bourgeois patchwork reforms which could provide the old social order with new supports and hence perhaps transform the final catastrophe into a gradual, piecemeal and, as far as possi­ble, peaceful process of dissolution".

Here in outline is the marxist critique of all the later variants of reformism that were to have such a disastrous effect within the ranks of the international working class.

Proletarian dictatorship versus the 'people's state'

The Gotha Programme's inability to define the real con­nection between the defensive and offensive phases of the proletarian movement was also embodied in its utter confu­sion about the state. Marx lambasted its call for a "free people's state and a socialist society" as a nonsensical phrase, since the state and freedom are two opposed princi­ples: "freedom consists in converting the state from an or­gan standing above society into one completely subordi­nated to it" (Critique). In a fully developed socialist soci­ety, there will be no state at all. But more important still is Marx's recognition that this call for a "people's state", to be realised by the granting of "democratic" reforms which a number of capitalist countries have already conceded, is a way of avoiding the crucial question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is in this context that Marx raises the question: "what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what so­cial functions will remain in existence that are analogous to present functions of the state? The question can only be an­swered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand fold combination of the word people with the word state”.

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolution­ary dictatorship of the proletariat.

“Now the programme does not deal with this nor with the nature of the future state of communist society" (ibid)[3].

As we saw in the last article in this series, this notion of a proletarian dictatorship was, in 1875, something very real for Marx and his tendency: the Paris Commune, only four years earlier, had been the first living episode of the work­ing class in power, and it had shown that such a vast politi­cal and social turn-around can only take place when the workers smash the existing state machine and replace it with their own organs of power. The Gotha Programme demonstrated that this lesson had not been assimilated by the workers' movement as a whole, and as the reformist current grew within the movement, it was to be forgotten more and more.

In the interests of historical accuracy, however, it is necessary to point out that even Marx and Engels them­selves had not fully assimilated this lesson. In a speech to the Hague congress of the International, in September 1872, Marx could still argue that "heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various coun­tries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such a America and England, and if I was familiar with its insti­tutions, Holland, where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour".

It has to be said that this idea was an illusion on Marx's part - a measure of the weight of democratic ideology on even the most advanced elements in the workers' move­ment. In the years that followed, all sorts of opportunists were to seize upon such illusions to give Marx's seal of ap­proval to their efforts to abandon any idea of a violent rev­olution and to lull the working class into believing that it could get rid of capitalism by legally and peacefully using the organs of bourgeois democracy. But the authentic marxist tradition does not lie with them: it lies with the likes of Pannekoek, Bukharin and Lenin, who took the most daring and revolutionary elements in Marx's thinking on the question, those which led inexorably to the conclu­sion that in order to establish the rule of labour in any country, the working class would have to use the lever of force, and first and foremost against the existing state ma­chine, no matter how democratic its forms. What's more, reality, the real evolution of the democratic state, had as­sisted them in reaching this conclusion, for as Lenin put it in State and Revolution:

"Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperial­ist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and last representa­tives - in the whole world - of Anglo-Saxon 'liberty', in the sense that they had no militarist clique and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subor­dinate everything to themselves. Today, in Britain and America, too, "the precondition for every people's revolu­tion" is the smashing, the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery"".

The critique of substitutionism

The International Workingmen's Association had proclaimed that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves". Although it was not possible, in the workers' movement of the 19th century, to clarify all aspects of the relationship between the proletariat and its revolutionary minority, this affirmation is a basic premise of all subse­quent clarifications. And in the polemics within the move­ment after 1871, the marxist fraction had a number of occa­sions to take the issue further than the IWA's general as­sertion. Particularly in the combat against the out-and-out reformist elements infesting the German party, Marx and Engels were led to show that elitist and hierarchical views of the relationship between party and class were the result of the penetration into the movement of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology, which was carried in particular by middle class intellectuals who saw the workers' movement as a vehicle for their own schemes for improving society.

The marxist response to this danger was not to retreat into workerism, the idea that an organisation made up solely of industrial workers was the best guarantee against the penetration of alien class ideas. "It is an inevitable phe­nomenon which is rooted in the course of the development that people from the hitherto ruling class join the strug­gling proletariat and supply it with educative elements. We have already stated this clearly in the Manifesto. But two points must be noted here: firstly, in order to be of use to the proletarian movement, these people must bring real ed­ucative elements with them. But this is not the case with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts ... Secondly, when such people from other classes join the proletarian party the first requirement is that they do not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty bourgeois etc prejudices with them, but that they adopt the proletarian outlook without prevarication. These gentlemen, however, as has been demonstrated, are chock full of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideas ... We cannot ally ourselves, there­fore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liber­ated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois" ('Circular Letter to Bebel ... ').

The notion that the workers can only be emancipated by the benevolent actions of an all powerful state goes hand in hand with the idea of a party of 'benefactors' descending from the clouds to free the poor benighted workers from their ignorance and servitude. Both were part of the same reformist, state socialist package that Marx and his current fought with such energy. It should be said, however, that the delusion that a small elite could act on behalf of the class or in its place was not limited to these reformist ele­ments: it could also be held by genuinely proletarian and revolutionary currents, and the Blanquists were the prime example of this. The Blanquist version of substitutionism was a vestige of an earlier phase of the revolutionary move­ment; in his Introduction to The Civil War in France, Engels shows how the living experience of the Paris Commune had practically refuted the Blanquist conception of revolution:

"Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held to­gether by the strict discipline which went with it, they started from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organised men would be able, at a given moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of lead­ers. This involved, above all, the strictest, dictatorial cen­tralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolution­ary government. And what did the Commune, with its ma­jority of these same Blanquists, actually do? In all its proclamations to the French in the provinces, it appealed to them to form a free federation of all French Communes with Paris, a national organisation which for the first time was really to be created by the nation itself. It was pre­cisely the oppressing power of the former centralised gov­ernment, army, political police, bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and which then had been taken over by every new government as a welcome instru­ment used against its opponents - it was precisely this power which was to fall everywhere, just as it had already fallen in Paris".

That the best of the Blanquists were obliged to go be­yond their own ideology was also confirmed in the debates within the Commune's central organ: when a significant el­ement in the Commune Council wanted to suspend the Commune's democratic norms and set up a dictatorial "Committee of Public Safety" on the model of the French bourgeois revolution, a considerable number of those who openly opposed this move were Blanquists - proof that a genuinely proletarian current can be influenced by the de­velopment of the real movement of the class, something that rarely happened in the case of the reformists, who rep­resented a very material tendency for the organisations of the class to fall into the hands of the class enemy.

The economic content of the communist transforma­tion

Although the Gotha Programme talked about the "abolition of the wages system", its underlying vision of the future society was one of 'state socialism'. We have seen how it contains the absurd notion of a movement towards socialism through state-assisted workers' cooperatives. But even when it talks more directly about the future socialist society (in which a "free state" still exists...), it is unable to go beyond the perspective of an essentially capitalist so­ciety run by the state for everyone's benefit. Marx is able to detect this under the cover of the Programme's fine phrases, in particular the sections which talk about the need for "the co-operative regulation of the total labour with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour", and "the aboli­tion of the wage system together with the iron law of wages". These phrases reflect the Lassallean 'contribution' to economic theory, which was in fact a complete aban­donment of Marx's scientific view of the origins of surplus value in the unpaid labour time extracted from the workers. The programme's empty words about "just distribution" conceal the fact that it actually makes no provision to do away with the basic mechanisms of value production, which is the infallible source of all "injustice" in distributing the proceeds of labour.

Against these confusions, Marx affirms that "within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as an objective quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour. The phrase "proceeds of labour", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning".

But rather than offering a utopian vision of the immedi­ate abolition of all the categories of capitalist production, Marx points out the necessity to distinguish the lower from the higher phases of communism: "what we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, eco­nomically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges".

In this phase, there is still scarcity and still all the ves­tiges of capitalist 'normality'. On the economic level, the old wages system has been replaced by a system of labour-time vouchers: "the individual producer receives back from society ... exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour... He receives a cer­tificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the com­mon funds). and with this certificate he draws from the so­cial stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour costs". As Marx points out in Capital, these certificates are no longer money in the sense that they cannot circulate or be accumulated; they can only 'buy' in­dividual items of consumption. On the other hand, they are not entirely free of thee principles of commodity exchange:

"Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is the exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass into the ownership of individ­uals except individual means of consumption. But, as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form. Hence equal right here is still  - in principle - bour­geois right...", because, as Marx ex­plains, workers have very differ­ent needs and capacities. It is only in the higher phase of commu­nist society when "all the springs of co-opera­tive wealth flow more abundantly" that "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right can be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

What is the exact target of this polemic? Lying behind it is the classical conception of communism not as a 'state' to be imposed but as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs" as The German Ideology had put it thirty years earlier. Marx thus elaborates the vision of the proletarian dictatorship initiating a movement towards communism, of a communist society emerging from the collapse of capitalism and from the proletarian revolution. Against the state socialist view that capitalist society some­how transforms itself into communism through the action of a state acting as society's unique and benevolent employer, Marx envisages a dynamic towards communism founded on a communist basis.

The idea of labour-time vouchers has to be considered in this light. In the first instance they are conceived as an attack on value production, as a means of getting rid of money as a universal commodity, of halting the dynamic of accumulation. They are seen not as a goal but as a means to an end, one which could be immediately introduced by the proletarian dictatorship as a first step towards a society of abundance which will have no further need to measure the individual's consumption according to his individual out­put.

Within the revolutionary movement, there has been and will continue to be a debate on whether this system is the most appropriate way of achieving these ends. For a num­ber of reasons, we would argue that it is not. To begin with, the 'objective' socialisation of many aspects of con­sumption (electricity, gas, housing, transport etc) would in the future make it possible fairly rapidly to supply many such goods and services free of charge, subject only to the total reserves controlled by the workers; as for more indi­vidual items of consumption, a system of rationing con­trolled by the workers' councils would have the advantage of being more 'collective', less dominated by the conven­tions of value exchange. We will come back to these and other problems in a future article. Our main concern here is to uncover Marx's basic method: for him, the system of labour vouchers had its validity as a means of attacking the foundations of the wage labour system, and should be judged against this benchmark; at the same time, he clearly recognised its limitations, because integral communism cannot be introduced overnight but only after a "more or less long period of transition". In this sense, Marx is him­self the severest critic of the system of labour time vouchers, insisting that they do not escape "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right" and embody the persistence of the law of value. And in fact whatever method of distribution the proletariat introduces in the aftermath of the revolution, it will still be marked by the vestiges of the law of value. Any false radicalism here is fatal (and, in fact, conservative in practise) because it would lead the proletariat to confuse a temporary and contingent means with the real goal. This, as we shall see, is a mistake that many revolutionaries fell into during the so-called War Communism period of the revolu­tion in Russia. For Marx, the final communist aim always had to be kept in sight; otherwise the movement towards it would go astray and, in the end, be caught up once again in the orbit of the planet Capital.

The next article in this series will examine Marx's com­bat against the principal version of false radicalism in his day: the anarchist current around Bakunin.

CDW

In the first part of this article we tried to bring out just how ignominious were the commemorations of the 1944 landings which in no way represented a “social” liberation for the working class. On the contrary they represented an unprecedented massacre in the final years of the war; misery and terror throughout the years of reconstruction. All the members of the different capitalist camps that fought one another were responsible for the war and it resulted in a redivision of the world between the great powers. As we’ve stressed many times in this Review, the working class didn’t make an appearance centre stage as it did during the First World War. In every country the workers were petrified by the capitalist terror. But although the proletariat was unable to rise to what it’s capable of historically by overthrowing the bourgeoisie this doesn’t mean that it had “disappeared” or that it had completely lost its combativity or that its revolutionary minorities remained completely inactive.

The working class is the only force able to oppose the unleashing of imperialist barbarism; the First World War was incontestable proof of this. The bourgeoisie went to war only after it had ensured that the international proletariat was enroled in the war and rendered impotent. Today’s democratic bourgeoisie can spout on about its liberation; its predecessors took very careful precautions before, during and after the war to stop the proletariat from shaking once more its barbarous edifice as it had done in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918. The experience of the revolutionary wave that arose during and in opposition to that war confirmed the fact that the bourgeoisie is not an all-powerful class. The mass struggle of the proletariat leading to insurrection is a social bomb a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb built under the auspices of the “democratic” bourgeoisie. Once you refuse to be taken in by all the eulogising of chronological accounts of individual military battles against the evil of Hitler the whole process of the Second World War demonstrates that the proletariat remained one of the central preoccupations of the bourgeoisie in the various antagonistic camps. This doesn’t mean that the proletariat was in a condition to threaten the existing order as it had done two decades earlier but it remained a primary concern for the bourgeoisie. The latter couldn’t completely wipe out the class that produced the fundamental wealth in society so it had rather to destroy its consciousness. It had to obliterate from the minds of the workers the very idea that they exist as a social entity that is antagonistic to the interests of the “nation”, make them forget that once they unite massively they are able to change the course of history.

As we will briefly outline here, each time there was a risk of the proletariat rising up and attempting to affirm itself as a class a holy alliance of imperialisms was formed that crossed their own battle lines. The Nazi, democratic or Stalinist bourgeoisies reacted to preserve the capitalist social order, often without even having to co-ordinate their action. The immunological defences of the reactionary social order arise naturally. It’s only after half a century that the proletariat can draw the lessons of this long defeat, of the capacity of the decadent bourgeoisie to defend its order of terror.

1. Before the War

The 1939-45 war was only possible because in the 1930s the proletariat didn’t have sufficient strength to prevent an international conflict; it had lost its consciousness of its class identity. The bourgeoisie succeeded in annihilating the proletarian threat in three stages:

- the crushing of the great revolutionary wave in the period after 1917 which ended in the triumph of Stalinism and the theory of “socialism in one country” being adopted by the Communist International;

- the dispersal of the social convulsions that took place in the centre of capitalism where the alternative between socialism or barbarism was decisively played out: in Germany this was mainly under the leadership of Social-Democracy with Nazism coming along to finish the job by imposing unprecedented terror on the workers;

- the total derailment of the workers’ movement in the democratic countries under the guise of “freedom against fascism” with the ideology of the “popular fronts” which managed to paralyse the workers of the industrialised countries more subtly than did “national unity” in 1914.

In Europe the “popular front” formula was no more than the forerunner of the National Front of the CP and other left parties during the war. Workers in the developed countries were manipulated into a situation in which they bowed either before anti-fascism or before fascism; symmetrical ideologies both of which entail submission to the defence of the “national interest”, to the imperialism of their respective bourgeoisies in other words. The German workers in the 1930s weren’t “victims of the Treaty of Versailles” as their rulers claimed but of the same crisis that affected their class brothers throughout the world. In the same way the workers of western Europe and of the United States weren’t the victims of Hitler, the unique “causative factor of the war” before the Almighty but of their own “democratic” bourgeoisies in their eagerness to defend their own sordid imperialist interests. In 1936 the mystification around anti-fascism and the “defence of democracy” was accompanied by propaganda aimed at pushing workers to take sides between the rival fractions of the bourgeoisie: fascism/anti-fascism, right/left, Franco/the Republic. In most of the European countries the “Popular Front” ideology which, as the name suggests, was an alliance between enemy classes recycled and aimed at convincing workers to accept unimaginable sacrifices, was created by left governments or left parties “in opposition” and had the ideological support of Stalinist Russia.

On the whole the war in Spain was a rehearsal for the World War with its confrontation between different imperialisms who stood behind the various Spanish fractions. And it served above all as a laboratory for the “popular fronts” and made it possible to concretise and designate “the enemy” (fascism) that the workers of western Europe would be called upon to fight against by mobilising behind their bourgeoisie. The hundreds of thousands of Spanish workers who were massacred were a better “proof” of the need for a “democratic war” than the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo had been twenty years earlier.

The bourgeoisie could only go to war by defeating the workers, by convincing them that it was also their war:

“The bourgeoisie aims to put a stop to the class struggle or more precisely to destroy the proletariat’s power as a class, to destroy its consciousness, derail its struggles when it places its agents within the proletariat to empty the struggles of their revolutionary consciousness and draw them onto the path of reformism and nationalism which is the final and decisive condition for the outbreak of imperialist war” [1] [103].

In fact the bourgeoisie had learned from the experience of the revolutionary wave which began during the First World War; before unleashing the Second World War it made sure that it had completely crushed the proletariat, more effectively beaten it into submission than when it waged the “Great War”.

In relation to the political vanguard of the proletariat specifically we have to say that opportunism had triumphed within the workers’ parties several years before the beginning of the conflict and had transformed them into agents of the bourgeois state. In 1914 this had been less clear cut as in the majority of countries revolutionary currents continued to exist within the parties of the 2nd International. For example the Russian Bolsheviks or the German Spartakists were members of the Social-Democratic parties and they fought within these parties. When the war broke out the Social-Democratic parties were totally under the control of the bourgeoisie but within their ranks there were still signs of proletarian life which upheld the banner of proletarian internationalism notably at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal. On the other hand the parties belonging to the 3rd International ended up in the arms of the bourgeoisie during the 1930s, well before the beginning of the World War for which they were to act as zealous recruiting officers. And they were also reinforced by the Trotskyist organisations which at that moment passed over bag and baggage into the camp of the bourgeoisie by embracing the cause of one imperialist camp against the other (in the name of the defence of the USSR, of anti-fascism and other disgusting themes). Finally the breaking up, the extreme isolation of the revolutionary minorities who continued to defend principled positions against the war further attests to the extent of the defeat suffered by the proletariat.

Atomised, politically fragmented by the betrayal of the parties that spoke in their name and by the near non-existence of their communist vanguard, the workers’ response to the outbreak of war was one of general confusion.

2. During the war

As during the first global conflict it needed at least two or three years before the working class, stunned by the entry into war, could find the path of struggle once more. In spite of the terrible conditions existing in the World War and especially the terror that reigned because of it the working class showed that it was still able to struggle on its own terrain. However the terrible defeat it had suffered during the war meant that most of these struggles weren’t at a high enough level to lead in the medium term to revolution or to seriously unsettle the bourgeoisie. Most of the movements were dispersed, cut off from the lessons of previous struggles and above all they weren’t yet armed with a real reflection on why the international revolutionary wave begun in Russia in 1917 had been defeated.

So albeit in the worst of conditions the workers showed that in most of the belligerent countries they were able to raise their heads once more but censorship and media brain-washing predominated as long as the press was still in existence. In the bombed factories, in the prison camps, in the areas where they lived the workers tended naturally to rediscover their classic means of protesting. In France for example from the second half of 1941 there were dozens of strikes for improved wages and working hours. Workers tended to turn their backs on all participation in the war (although half the country was occupied): “class instinct was stronger than national duty” [2] [104]. The miners’ strike in the Pas-de-Calais is a significant demonstration of this. They laid the responsibility for the worsening of working conditions at the door of their French bosses, they weren’t yet following the Stalinist slogans for the “patriotic struggle”. The description of this strike is telling:

“The strike on the 7th at Douges broke out in the same way that strikes have always broken out in the pits. There was discontent. They’d had enough. The miners didn’t consider the question of legality any more in 1941 than in 1936 or 1902. They weren’t concerned that there were infantry companies at the front line or a popular front government in power or Hitler’s men waiting to deport them. Down the pits they consulted together and agreed. They cried “Long live the strike” and they sang at the top of their voices, tears in their eyes, tears of joy, tears of success” [3] [105]. The movement extended over several days, leaving the German military powerless and involving more than 70,000 miners. The movement was savagely repressed [4] [106].

1942 saw other workers’ strikes, some of them accompanied by street demonstrations. The introduction of the “relief” (forced labour in Germany) provoked strikes even when the country was occupied until the PCF and the Trotskyists derailed the combat into a nationalist struggle. We should note however that the strikes and demonstrations remained restricted to the economic level against food rationing and supplies going for military needs. In the Borinage in Belgium January was marked by a series of strikes and protest movements in the coal mines. In June a strike broke out in the Herstal factory and housewives demonstrated in front of the Hotel de Ville in Liège. When it was announced that thousands of workers would be forcibly deported in the winter of 1942, 10,000 workers once more went on strike in Liège and the movement involved 20,000 others. In the same period there was a strike of Italian workers in Germany in a big aircraft factory and at the beginning of 1943 in Essen, there was a strike of foreign workers, some of them French.

The proletariat was unable to develop a frontal struggle against the war, against its own bourgeoisie, in the way that the Russian workers had done in 1917. If the struggle remains at this level (a protest that doesn’t become general) then although it may be a reaction against the bosses and the unions who break strikes, once the bosses agree to salary increases (as they did in the USA and England for example) it enables the government to continue the war all the more effectively. The risk in this situation is that the nationalist ideology of the Liberation can be grafted onto it. Well before the introduction in France of “forced labour” (the bread and wine for the National Union in 1942-43), the British bourgeoisie possessed a fanatical advocate of forced labour in the form of the British CP and its hysterical reaction to the German attack on Russia in the middle of 1941. From then on and in concert with the Trotskyists through the unions there was no longer any question of strike action but rather of increasing production in order to help the war effort and support the Russian (imperialist) bastion [5] [107].

The continuation of the World War worked against the bourgeoisie in spite of the profound weakness of the proletariat as we can see from the increase in strike days in England. In the period when war was declared there was a drastic fall but from 1941 onwards the number of strikes increased until 1944, then it once more decreased after the “Victory”.

In the assessment it made of this period during the war the Communist Left in France recognised the importance of these strikes and supported them in their immediate objectives but it was “not lured into their vision which is still limited and contingent” [6] [108]. In the face of all these strikes that were relatively dispersed and did not link up most of the time owing to the predominance of military censorship the international bourgeoisie on both the German and the allied sides did all it could to prevent them radicalising, often by making minor economic concessions and always by using the unions which in their various forms were, and remain, an instrument of the bourgeois state. Social relations couldn’t remain peaceful for long during the war when inflation was increasing steadily.

The terrible seriousness of the situation makes it possible to understand why the revolutionary minorities of the period held out more hope for a revolution than was warranted by the real balance of class forces. The whole of Europe lived “on its uppers”, only workers who did fifteen to twenty hours overtime a week were able to afford food products, the price of which had increased tenfold in three years. In this situation of privation and hatred - a hatred that was redoubled by the sense of impotence in the face of internment and deportations - the outbreak of a mass struggle lasting several months by nearly two thousand Italian workers in March 1943, alerted the international bourgeoisie even more than the strikes breaking out in several countries, that it was time to prepare the lie of the Liberation as the only possible outcome of the war. We shouldn’t overestimate the scope of this movement but we must acknowledge that confronted with this autonomous action of the Italian proletariat on its own class terrain the Italian bourgeoisie took prompt and appropriate measures and in this it was assisted by the whole of the world bourgeoisie, which shows that it maintained the same vigilance that it had exhibited before the war.

At the end of March 50,000 workers went on strike in Turin for a “bombing” bonus and an increase in food rations without giving a thought to Mussolini’s views on the matter. Their rapid victory encouraged class action throughout the whole of north Italy against night work in the areas in danger of being bombed. This movement triumphed in its turn. The concessions didn’t placate the working class, new strikes arose accompanied by demonstrations against the war. This frightened the Italian bourgeoisie and in 24 hours it turned tail. But the Allied bourgeoisie was on the alert and occupied the south of Italy in the Autumn.  This resurgence of the proletariat had to be countered by patching up the national Union on a royalist and democratic basis. With the complicity of the old fascist fogeys Grandi and Ciano who’d suddenly been converted to anti-fascism Vittorio Emanuele came out from the woodwork to stop Mussolini. In spite of everything mass demonstrations continued and spread throughout Turin, Milan, Bologna. Railway workers organised impressive strikes. In view of the breadth of the movement the caretaker government of Badoglio fled to Sicily in order to leave Mussolini - who’d been freed by Hitler - to return and carry out the repression with the Nazis and the tacit consent of Churchill. The German forces savagely bombarded working class towns. Churchill, who had said openly that it was necessary to “let the Italians stew in their own juice”  declared that he did not want to negotiate with such a government. The working class certainly shows itself to be a liberator (as long as it’s able to go forward in accordance with its own dynamic) and to block it the Anglo-Saxon allies deemed it wise to change the puppets and pull the strings themselves. After the terrible repression and the consequent swelling of the ranks of the partisans whose resistance was completely within a capitalist framework the Allies were able to advance from the south to “liberate” the north and reinstate Badoglio [7] [109]. The bourgeoisie succeeded in dragging the Italian workers onto their own capitalist terrain with the ideology of the National Union just as it had done in France with the struggle against forced labour. It managed to do so up until the so-called Liberation, all strictly controlled by the Stalinist militias and the mafia.

This impressive movement that began in March 1943 was neither an accident nor a rarity in the midst of the general horror of the global holocaust. As we’ve just emphasised, during 1943 there was a timid international wave of resurgence in the struggle about which we obviously have little information. To give some examples: a strike at the Coqueril factory in Liège; 3,500 workers in struggle at an aircraft factory on the Clyde and a strike of miners near Doncaster, England (May 1943); strike of foreign workers in a Messerschmitt factory in Germany; strike at AEG, an important factory near Berlin where Dutch workers brought Belgian, French and even German workers into a protest against the low standard of the works canteen; strikes in Athens and demonstrations of housewives; 2,000 workers were on strike in Scotland in December 1943.

The mass strike of Italian workers remained encapsulated in Italy and the Resistance had robbed it of its class character. The ensuing massacre is the result of the failure sustained by the workers in the midst of the war: when the proletariat allows itself to be caught in the nationalist groove it is savagely decimated. To impose terror after proletarian actions of this kind is a constant tactic of the bourgeoisie. Moreover this terror was indispensable for the bourgeoisie because it hadn’t finished the war and it wanted its hands free until it had done so, particularly in theatres of operation outside Europe.

In eastern Europe wherever there was the danger of workers rising up, albeit without a revolutionary perspective, the bourgeoisie operated a burnt earth policy.

During the summer of 1944 the workers in Warsaw remained under the control of the Polish SP based in London. They participated in the insurrection launched by the Resistance when they learnt that the Red Army had entered the outskirts of the capital from the other side of the Vistula. And it was with the tacit consent of the Allies and the clear passivity of the Stalinist state that the German state was able to carry out its role of policeman and butcher by massacring tens of thousands of workers and razing the town to the ground. Eight days later Warsaw was a graveyard. Finally the “red” army let the massacre in Budapest take place and then made their entry as an army of grave diggers.

For its part the “liberating” western bourgeoisie did not want to risk social explosions against the war in the defeated countries. To avoid them it carried out monstrous bombings of German towns, bombings that for the most part had no military value but which were aimed at the workers’ districts (in Dresden in February 1945 the death toll was nearly 150,000, more than double that at Hiroshima). The aim was to exterminate as many workers as possible and terrorise the survivors so that they wouldn’t attempt to renew the revolutionary struggles of 1918 to 1923. Likewise the “democratic” bourgeoisie ensured it had the means to systematically occupy territory where the Nazis had had to withdraw. All offers of negotiation or armistice from Hitler’s opponents in Germany were rejected. If Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had allowed the formation of a native German government in a vanquished country they would never have slept easy in their beds, it would have constituted a major threat. As in 1918 a vanquished German state would inevitably be weak in the face of a working class that was revolted by large scale slaughter and profound misery, and in the face of demobilised soldiers. The allied armies took it upon themselves to ensure order throughout Germany for an indefinite period (and they remained there until 1994 though for other reasons) and in doing so gave weight for a long time to one of century’s grossest lies: the “collective guilt” of the German people.

3. Towards the “Liberation”

Throughout the last months of the war Germany experienced a series of riots, desertions and strikes. But a democratic figurehead such as Badoglio was superfluous amidst the hell of the bombings. The German working class had been terrorised, caught between the hammer and the anvil, between the allied armies and the Russian soldiers who were flooding in. Along the route taken by the disintegrating German army deserters were hung to act as a deterrent to others. The situation could have become disturbing if the bourgeoisie hadn’t continued to prepare the terrain in all its wretchedness for the period immediately after war. The ferocious repression was enough and social peace was preserved by the occupation and the shameless partition of Germany. Even though it was quite correct to welcome the reactions of the proletariat in Germany, our comrades at the time over-estimated the strength of the opposition that the bourgeoisie was confronting:

“When soldiers refuse to fight, coming close to civil war in some places, when sailors take up their revolvers against the war, when housewives, the Volkssturm, refugees increase the jitteriness of the German situation, the most formidable of military and police machines disintegrates and revolt is an immediate perspective. Von Rundstedt is repeating the policy of Ebert in 1918, he hopes to avoid civil war by treating for peace. The allies have understood the revolutionary threat contained in what began in Italy in 1943. The peace is now faced with the crisis that is raging savagely in Europe without the means to hide the contradictions which will be resolved by class war. The war effort, the brown plague, the barracks can no longer act as a pretext either to feed industries that have atrophied or to continue holding the working class in the present state of slavery and famine. But what’s more serious is the prospect of German soldiers returning to their ruined homes and the repetition of the 1918 revolution which is increasingly inevitable(...) For great ills there are heroic remedies: destroy, kill, starve, annihilate the German working class. We are a long way from punishing the brown plague, we are very far from the capitalists’ promise of peace. Democracy has demonstrated that it’s better able to defend bourgeois interests than the fascist dictatorship”[8] [110].

In fact the American and Russian armies were present in the  streets in vanquished countries such as Germany, leaving no no-man’s land in the conquered towns and stifling any hint of proletarian resistance. In the victorious countries an incredible degree of chauvinism was generated that was much worse than in the First World War. As the revolutionary minority predicted, the democratic bourgeoisie feared contagion from the demobilised German soldiers, some of whom made no attempt to hide their joy: in old film they can be seen smiling and throwing their hats in the air. So the Western bourgeoisie decided to intern them in France and Britain. Part of the disintegrated German army was held abroad; 400,000 soldiers who were prisoners of war were dispatched to Britain and interned for several years after the end of the war to avoid them fomenting revolution, as their fathers had done before them, once they returned to their own country and the misery of Europe in the immediate post war period [9] [111].

Most revolutionary groups were enthusiastic about these events, grafting onto them the schema of the victorious revolution in Russia and the eruption of the proletariat against the war. The conditions of 1917 could not be repeated because the bourgeoisie had learnt its lessons.

It was nearly two years after the dramatic movement of the workers in Italy in 1943 before the clearest of the revolutionary minority were able to draw the lessons of the defeat the workers had sustained at an international level, and once more to profit from the drastic conditions of the World War to give an orientation for the revolution. The bourgeoisie knew how to keep the initiative and profit from the absence of revolutionary parties.

“Enriched by the experience of the first war and far better prepared for a possible revolutionary threat, international capitalism reacted solidly and with exceptional skill and prudence against a proletariat decapitated of its vanguard. From 1943 the war was transformed into a civil war. In saying this we don’t mean that the inter-imperialist antagonisms had disappeared or that they’d ceased to act in the pursuit of war. These antagonisms continued and increased but to a lesser extent and in a way that was secondary to the seriousness of the threat facing the capitalist world in the shape of a revolutionary explosion. The revolutionary threat will be the central concern and preoccupation of capitalism in both blocs: that’s what primarily determines the course of military operations, their strategy and the direction they take.(...)In the first imperialist war when once the proletariat took the path of revolution it kept the initiative and forced global capitalism to stop the war. By contrast in the present war capitalism seized the initiative at the first sign of the revolution in Italy in 1943 and implacably pursued a civil war against the proletariat. It forcibly prevented any concentration of proletarian forces, refused to stop the war even though Germany repeatedly demanded an armistice after the disappearance of the Hitler government, it resorted to monstrous carnage and a pitiless preventive massacre in order to nip in the bud any hint of a revolutionary threat from the German proletariat(...) The revolt of workers and soldiers who in certain towns got the better of the fascists, forced the allies to hasten their march and finish this war of extermination before they had planned to do so” [10] [112].

4. The action of the revolutionary minorities

As we have said, the war was only possible because the 3rd International had degenerated and the communist parties had gone over into the bourgeois camp. The revolutionary minorities who fought against the rise of Stalinism and fascism from a class perspective were all defeated, expelled from the democratic countries and eliminated and deported from Russia and Germany. Of the international unity that the Internationals have represented in every epoch there remained only scraps, fractions, dispersed minorities often without any links between them. The Left Opposition of Trotsky, a current that had fought against the degeneration of the Russian revolution was gradually drawn towards opportunist positions on the Single Front (the possibility of an alliance with the left parties of the bourgeoisie) and its successor “anti-fascism”. Although Trotsky died, assassinated as was Jaurès (because in the eyes of the world bourgeoisie he symbolised the proletarian threat even more than the great tribune of the 2nd International) by the beginning of the second world holocaust his partisans were no better than the social chauvinists at the beginning of the century since they took the side of one of the imperialist camps; that of Russia and the Resistance.

Most of the minorities were no more than fragile vessels adrift amidst the disarray of the proletariat and they disintegrated when war broke out. In the 1930s only the Italian fraction regrouped around the review Bilan defended the position that the workers’ movement had entered into a period of defeat that would lead to war [11] [113].

The passage to clandestinity brought dispersal and the loss of precious contacts that had been built up over years. In Italy there was no organised group. In France it was only in 1942 in the depth of the imperialist war that the militants who had fought in the Italian fraction and had sought refuge there regrouped together and formulated political class positions against the opportunism of the Trotskyist organisations. They called themselves the French nucleus of the Communist Left. These courageous militants produced a declaration of principles which clearly rejected the “defence of the USSR”:

“The Soviet state is an instrument of the international bourgeoisie and has a counter-revolutionary function. The defence of the USSR in the name of what remains of the gains of October must therefore be rejected and replaced by an uncompromising struggle against the Stalinist agents of the bourgeoisie(...)Democracy and fascism are two aspects of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which correspond to the economic and political needs  of the bourgeoisie at given moments. Consequently as the working class has to establish its own dictatorship after destroying the capitalist state it must not take the side of one or other of these forms.”

Contact was re-established with elements of the revolutionary current in Belgium, Holland and with Austrian refugees in France. In the very dangerous conditions of clandestinity important debates emanated from Marseille around why the workers’ movement had undergone the recent defeat and re-establishing what were the class lines between proletariat and bourgeoisie. This revolutionary minority continued to intervene against the capitalist war and for the emancipation of the proletariat in complete continuity with the struggle of the 3rd International at its origins. Other groups who rejected the defence of the imperialist USSR and all forms of chauvinism emerged more or less clearly from the Trotskyist orbit: Munis’ group in Spain, the Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands of Austria and Dutch councilist groups. The leaflets put out by these groups against the war, distributed clandestinely, left on train seats were vilified by the bourgeoisie of the Resistance from Stalinists to democrats as “Hitler-Trotskyist”. Those who distributed them ran the risk of being shot on sight (see the documents published above and the presentation to them).

In Italy after the powerful struggles in 1943 the dispersed elements of the Left regrouped around Damen and later around Bordiga, a renowned figure of the left in the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. In July 1943 they constituted the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, but as they believed (as did most revolutionaries at the time) that there was to be an insurrectional push of the working class they succumbed to the capitalist Liberation and for all their courage had great difficulty defending clear positions to workers who were mobilised behind the sirens of the bourgeoisie [12] [114]. They were unable to promote the regroupment of revolutionaries at an international level and were reduced to a tiny minority after the war. In particular they refused to carry out any serious work with the French nucleus which from that time on called itself the Communist Left in France [13] [115].

In fact in spite of all their courage the revolutionary groups who defended international class positions during the 2nd World War were unable to influence the course of events because of the terrible defeat that the proletariat had suffered and the capacity of the bourgeoisie to systematically take the initiative and prevent the development of any class movement that could pose a real threat. But their contribution to the historic struggle of the proletariat is not at this level. It resides fundamentally in the process of reflection that it represented and which allowed them to draw the lessons of the important events that had taken place, a reflection that has continued up to the present day.

5. What lessons for revolutionaries?

To continue with their critical method, to ourselves sieve through their errors is a mark of respect to the Marxist tradition that these groups upheld in the past, it is to remain faithful to the struggle that they waged. The Communist Left in France was able to correct the error it made in judging it possible that the process of defeat could be reversed during the Second World War even if they didn’t necessarily draw out all the implications of the fact that the course was not towards revolution. There were nevertheless other groups, in Italy in particular, who continued to apply a schematic view of revolutionary defeatism.

The Italian revolutionaries formed the party in Italy in a voluntarist and adventurist way around figures from the CI such as Bordiga and Damen and so didn’t really arm themselves with the means to re-establish class principles, much less to draw the real lessons from the experience of the past. Not only was this International Communist Party bound to fail - it rapidly found itself reduced to a sect - but it was also led to reject a Marxist analytic method in favour of a barren dogmatism which simply reiterated the schemas of the past on the question of war in particular. Even during the Liberation the PCI continued to believe that a revolutionary cycle would be initiated, parodying Lenin’s: “The transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war begins after the war has ended” [14] [116]. To repeat Lenin’s formula that every proletariat must desire “the defeat of its own bourgeoisie” as a spring board for the revolution - a position that was incorrect even at the time because it inferred that the workers of the conquering countries did not have this same spring board - makes the success of the revolution dependent on the failure of the home bourgeoisie and is no more than a mechanistic abstraction. In fact even during the first revolutionary wave, although the war acted initially as an important stimulus in mobilising the proletariat, it later gave rise to a division between the workers of the defeated countries who were the most clear and combative and those of the victorious countries against whom the bourgeoisie succeeded in using euphoria at the “victory” to paralyse their struggle and the development of their consciousness. Moreover the experience of 1917-18 also showed that if a revolutionary movement develops out of World War the bourgeoisie can play the card of ending the war, a card that it didn’t hesitate to play in November 1918 when the revolution in Germany was developing. This eliminates the main nourishment for the development of consciousness and action on the part of the proletariat.

Our comrades of the Communist Left were wrong when, on the basis of the unique example of the Russian revolution, they under-estimated the debilitating consequences of the world imperialist war on the proletariat. The Second World War was to bring elements towards a clearer analysis of this crucial question. As those groups who claim to be the sole inheritors of the Italian Communist Left unfortunately demonstrate, to repeat the errors of the past today is to block the real path towards class confrontation, it is to affirm the impossibility of enriching the Marxist method and to refuse to act as the guide that the proletariat needs [15] [117].

The question of war has always been of the greatest importance in the workers’ movement. Modern imperialist war, hand in hand with exploitation and the attacks of the economic crisis, remains a major factor in developing the consciousness that the revolution is indispensable. Clearly the permanent nature of war in capitalism’s decadent phase has to be a valuable factor towards reflection. This process of reflection must not stop now that the collapse of the eastern bloc, formerly presented as the devil incarnate, has momentarily postponed the possibility of another World War. The wars that are taking place on the borders of Europe serve as a reminder to the proletariat that “those who forget about war will one day have to endure it” [16] [118]. The great responsibility of the proletariat is still to rise up against this decomposing society. The perspective of a different society, achieved under the leadership of the proletariat, must of necessity entail the development of the class’ realisation that it must fight on its own social terrain and find its strength there. The growing struggle of the proletariat is a struggle that is antithetical to the military objectives of the bourgeoisie.

In spite of all the eulogistic refrains about the “new world order” set up in 1989 the working class of the industrialised countries should not be taken in by promises of a respite before the next round of human destruction. The fate that capitalism inescapably promises us is either a third World War if a new system of imperialist blocs is constituted, or else the total rotting away of society accompanied by famines, epidemics and a plethora of military conflicts in which the nuclear weapons that are produced all over the place will be called into service.

The alternative is still communist revolution or the destruction of humanity. United and determined workers can disarm the minority that pulls the strings and even make atomic bombs obsolete. So we must firmly reject the old argument of the bourgeoisie that claims that from now on modern technology will prevent any proletarian revolution. Technology is the product of men and it obeys a determined policy. Imperialist policy is always strongly determined, as the events of the Second World War demonstrate, by the state of submission of the working class. The historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the 1960s showed what is at stake, even if the international proletariat has not yet drawn all its lessons. In those places that have escaped the ravages of war the economic crisis hits, increases hardship and reveals the bankruptcy of capitalism.

The revolutionary minorities must sieve through the experience of the past. The “midnight of the century” experienced the greatest crime that humanity has ever known but it would be still more criminal to believe that the risk of the total destruction of humanity no longer exists. It isn’t enough to denounce the current wars, revolutionary minorities must be able to analyse the secrets of the imperialist policy of the world bourgeoisie, not in order to light the fuse in every place torn apart by war today and where militarism reigns supreme but rather to show the proletariat that the struggle doesn’t take place “at the front” but is conducted “behind the lines”.

In order to fight against imperialist war, which is always with us, and struggle against the attacks of the bourgeois economic crisis the working class must undergo a whole series of struggles and experiences which will lead towards the revolutionary civil war just when the bourgeoisie believes it’s at peace. A long period of class struggle is still necessary, nothing will be easy.

The proletariat has no choice. Capitalism will lead to the destruction of humanity if the proletariat proves to be powerless to destroy it.

Damien.

In the last article in this series we looked at the combat waged by the marxist tendency in the International Workingmen's Association against the reformist and "state socialist" ideologies in the workers' movement, particularly in the German party. And yet according to the anarchist or "anti-authoritarian" current led by Mikhail Bakunin, Marx and Engels typified and even inspired the state socialist tendency, were the foremost proponents of that "German socialism" which wanted to replace capitalism not with a free stateless society but with a terrible bureaucratic tyranny of which they themselves would be the guardians. To this day, Bakunin's criticisms of Marx are presented by anarchists and liberals alike as a profound insight into the real nature of marxism, a prophetic explanation of why the theories of Marx led inevitably to the practises of Stalin.

But as we shall try to show in this article, Bakunin's "radical critique" of marxism, like all the subsequent ones, is radical in appearance only. The response that Marx and his current made to this pseudo-radicalism necessarily accompanied the fight against reformism, because both ideologies represented the penetration of alien class viewpoints into the ranks of the proletariat.

The petty bourgeois core of anarchism

The growth of anarchism in the second half of the 19th century was the product of the resistance of the petty bourgeois strata - artisans, intellectuals, shopkeepers, small peasants - to the triumphant march of capital, a resistance to the process of proletarianisation which was depriving of them of their former social "independence". Strongest in those countries where industrial capital arrived late, in the eastern and southern peripheries of Europe, it expressed both the rebellion of these strata against capitalism, and their inability to look beyond it, to the communist future; instead it gave voice to their yearning for a semi-mythical past of free local communities and strictly independent producers, unencumbered by the oppressions of industrial capital and the centralising bourgeois state.
The "father" of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was the classical incarnation of this attitude, with his fierce hatred not only of the state and the big capitalists, but of collectivism in all forms, including trade unions, strikes, and similar expressions of working class collectivity. Against all the real trends developing within capitalist society, Proudhon's ideal was a "mutualist" society founded upon individual artisan production, linked together by free exchange and free credit.
Marx had already lambasted Proudhon's visions in his book The Poverty of Philosophy, published in 1847, and the evolution of capital itself in the second part of the century gave practical demonstration of the obsolescence of Proudhon's ideas. To the "mass worker" of capitalist industry, it was increasingly obvious that both for resisting capitalist exploitation and abolishing it altogether, only a collective struggle and a collective appropriation of the means of production could offer any hope.
On the face of it, the Bakuninist current, which from the 1860s onwards tried to combine Proudhon's "anti-authoritarianism" with a collectivist and even communist approach to social questions, looks like a clear advance over classical Proudhonism. Bakunin even wrote to Marx expressing his admiration for his scientific work, declaring himself to be his disciple and offering to translate Capital into Russian. And yet, despite its ideological backwardness, the Proudhonist current had, at certain moments, played a constructive role in the formation of the workers' movement: Proudhon had been a factor in Marx's movement towards communism in the 1840s, and the Proudhonists had helped to found the IWMA. The history of Bakuninism, by contrast, is almost entirely a chronicle of the negative and destructive work it carried out against the International. Even Bakunin's professed admiration for Marx was part of this syndrome: Bakunin himself confessed that he had "praised and honoured Marx for tactical reasons and on grounds of personal policy", the ultimate aim being to break up the marxist "phalanx" which dominated the International (cited in Nicolaevsky, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, chap 18, p 308 of the Penguin edition).
The essential reason for this is that while Proudhonism predated marxism, and Proudhonist groups the First International, Bakuninism developed to a large extent in reaction against marxism and against the development of a centralised, international proletarian organisation. Marx and Engels explain this evolution in relation to the general problem of "sects", but the target is above all the Bakuninists, since the passage is from "The Alleged Splits in the International" (1872), which was the response of the General Council to Bakuninist intrigues against the IWMA:
"The first phase in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is marked by sectarianism. This is because the proletariat has not reached the stage of being sufficiently developed to act as a class. Individual thinkers provide a critique of social antagonisms, and put forward fantastic solutions which the mass of workers can only accept, pass on, and put into practise. By their very nature, the sects established by these initiators are abstentionist, strangers to all genuine action, to politics, to strikes, to coalitions, in brief, to any unified movement ... All these sects, though at first they provide an impetus to the movement, become an obstacle to it once it has moved further forward".

Proletarian organisation versus petty bourgeois intrigues

The main stake in the struggle between the marxists and the Bakuninists was the International itself: nothing more clearly demonstrated the petty bourgeois essence of anarchism than its approach to the organisational question, and it is no accident that the issue which led to the open split between these two currents was not an abstract debate about the future society, but about the functioning of the proletarian organisation, its internal mode of operation. But, as we shall see, these organisational differences were also connected to different visions of the future society and the means to create it.
From the time that they joined the International at the end of the 1860s, but above all in the period following the defeat of the Commune, the Bakuninists raised a hue and cry about the role of the General Council, the central organ of the International which was based in London and thus strongly influenced by Marx and Engels. For Bakunin, the General Council was a mere cover for the dictatorship of Marx and his "coterie"; he thus put himself forward as the champion of the freedom and autonomy of the local sections against the tyrannical pretensions of the "German socialists". This campaign was deliberately linked to the question of the future society, since the Bakuninists argued that the International itself was to be the embryo of the new world, the precursor of a decentralised federation of autonomous communes. By the same token, the authoritarian rule of the marxists within the International betrayed their vision of the future: a new state bureaucracy lording it over the workers in the name of socialism.
It is perfectly true that the proletarian organisation, in both its internal structure and its external function, is determined by the nature of the communist society it is aiming for, and of the class which bears that society within itself. But contrary to the anarchist conception, the proletariat has nothing to fear from centralisation in itself: communism is indeed the centralisation of the world's productive capacities to replace the competitive anarchy of capitalism. And in order to reach this stage, the proletariat has to centralise its own fighting forces to take on an enemy which has frequently demonstrated its capacity to unite against it. This is why the marxists replied to Bakunin's taunts by pointing out that his programme of complete local autonomy for the sections meant the end of the International as a unified body. As the organisation of the proletarian vanguard, the "militant organisation of the proletarian class in every country, linked together in common struggle against the capitalists, the landowners, and their class power organised by the state" ("The Alleged Splits ..."), the International could not speak with hundreds of conflicting voices: it had to be able to formulate the goals of the working class in a clear and unambiguous manner. And for this to be the case, the International needed effective central organs - not facades concealing the ambitions of dictators and careerists, but elected and accountable bodies charged with maintaining the unity of the organisation between its congresses.
The Bakuninists on the other hand sought to reduce the General Council to "no more than an office for correspondence and providing statistics. Its administrative functions being abandoned, its correspondence would obviously be reduced simply to reproducing information already published in the Association's various journals. The correspondence office would therefore barely exist. As for providing statistics, that is a job that can be done without a powerful organisation, and even more, as expressly stated in the original Rules, without a common objective. Now since these things smack strongly of 'authoritarianism', while there should perhaps be an office, it should not be a statistical office. In brief, the General Council should go. The same logic would also disband Federal Councils, local committees and all other centres of "authority". All that would remain would be autonomous sections" (ibid).
Later on in the same text, Marx and Engels argued that if anarchy meant only the ultimate aim of the class movement - the abolition of social classes and thus of the state which guards class divisions - then all socialists were for it. But the Bakuninist current meant something different in its actual practise, since it "designates anarchy in the ranks of the proletariat as the infallible means of destroying the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. It is therefore demanding that the International replace its organisation with anarchy - just at a time when the old world is trying to destroy it. The international police could ask no better means to prolong the Thiers republic forever, while covering it with the mantle of empire".
But there was far more to Bakunin's project than some abstract opposition to all forms of authority and centralisation. In fact, what Bakunin was against was above all the "authority" of Marx and his current; and his tirades against its alleged propensity for secret manoeuvering and plotting was fundamentally the projection of his own deeply hierarchical and elitist conception of organisation. His guerilla war against the Central Council was really motivated by a determination to set up an alternative, if hidden, centre of power.
When Marx and Engels evoked the history of "sectarian" organisations, they were referring not just to the wooly-minded utopian ideas that often characterised such groups, but also to their political practises and functioning, inherited from bourgeois and petty bourgeois secret societies with their cloak and dagger traditions, occult oaths and rituals, sometimes combined with a propensity for terrorism and assassination. As we have seen in a previous article in this series (see International Review 72), the formation of the Communist League in 1847 already marked a definitive break with such traditions. Bakunin, however, was steeped in these practises and never abandoned them. Throughout his political career, his policy was always one of forming secret groups under his direct control, groups based more on personal "affinity" than on any political criteria, and using these hidden channels of influence to gain hegemony over wider organisations.
Having failed to turn the liberal League of Peace and Freedom into his version of a revolutionary socialist organisation, Bakunin formed the Alliance of Socialist Democracy in 1868. It had branches in Barcelona, Madrid, Lyons, Marseilles, Naples and Sicily; the main section was in Geneva with a Central Bureau under Bakunin's personal control. The "Socialist" part of the Alliance was very vague and confused, defining its goal as "the social and economic equalisation of classes" (rather than their abolition), and fixating obsessively on the "abolition of the right of inheritance" as the key to the overcoming of private property.
Shortly after its formation, the Alliance applied for membership of the International. The General Council criticised the confusions in its programme, and insisted that it could not be admitted into the International as a parallel international organisation; it would have to dissolve itself and convert its individual sections into sections of the International.
Bakunin was quite happy to agree to these terms for the simple reason that the Alliance was, for him, only a front for an increasingly esoteric maze of secret societies, some fictional, some real; for a Byzantine hierarchy ultimately answerable to none other than "citizen B" himself. The full story of Bakunin's secret societies has yet to be uncovered, but certainly behind the Alliance (which in any case was not really dissolved upon entering the IWMA) the "International Brotherhood" was an inner circle that had already been operating inside the League for Peace and Freedom. There was also a shadowy "National Brotherhood" midway between the Alliance and the International Brotherhood. There may have been others. The point is that such formations betray a mode of functioning entirely alien to the proletariat. Where proletarian organisations function through elected and accountable central organs, Bakunin's convoluted hierarchy could be accountable to no one but himself. Where proletarian organisations, even when they have to operate in clandestinity, are fundamentally open to their own comrades, Bakunin treats the "average" members of his organisation as mere footsoldiers to be manipulated at will, unaware of the purposes they are really serving.
It is therefore no surprise to find that this elitist conception of relations within the proletarian organisation is reproduced in the Bakuninist view of the function of the revolutionary organisation within the class as a whole. The General council's polemic against the Bakuninists, "The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWMA", written in 1873, picks out the following gems from Bakunin's writings:
"It is necessary that in the midst of popular anarchy, which will make up the very life and all the energy of the revolution, the unity of revolutionary thought and action should be embodied in a certain organ. That organ must be the secret and world-wide association of the international brothers". Admitting that revolutions can't be made by individuals or secret societies, the latter has the task of organising "not the army of the revolution - the army must always be the people - but a revolutionary general staff composed of devoted, energetic and intelligent individuals who are above all sincere - not vain or ambitious - friends of the people, capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instincts. The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be too large. For the international organisation throughout Europe one hundred serious and firmly united revolutionaries would be sufficient ...".
Marx and Engels, who wrote the text in collaboration with Paul Lafargue, then comment:
"So everything changes. Anarchy, the 'unleashing of popular life', of 'evil passions' and all the rest is no longer enough. To assure the success of the revolution one must have 'unity of thought and action'. The members of the International are trying to create this unity by propaganda, by discussion and the public organisation of the proletariat. But all Bakunin needs is a secret organisation of one hundred people, the privileged representatives of the revolutionary idea, the general staff in the background, self-appointed and commanded by the permanent 'citizen B'. Unity of thought and action means nothing but orthodoxy and blind obedience ... we are indeed confronted with a veritable Society of Jesus".
Bakunin's real hatred of capitalist exploitation and oppression is not in question. But the activities he engaged in were profoundly dangerous for the workers' movement. Unable to wrest control of the International, he was reduced to a work of sabotage and disorganisation, to the provocation of endless internal squabbles which could only weaken the International. His penchant for conspiracy and bloodthirsty phraseology made him a willing dupe of an openly pathological element like Nechayev, whose criminal actions threatened to bring discredit upon the entire International.
These dangers were magnified in the period after the Commune, when the proletarian movement was in disarray and the bourgeoisie, which was convinced that the International had "created" the uprising of the Paris workers, was everywhere persecuting its members and seeking to destroy its organisation. The International, led by the General Council, had to react very firmly to Bakunin's intrigues, affirming the principle of open organisation against that of secrecy and conspiracy: "There is only one means of combatting all these intrigues, but it will prove astonishingly effective; this means is complete publicity. Exposure of all these schemings in their entirety will render them utterly powerless" (ibid). The Council also called for, and obtained at the 1872 Hague Congress, the expulsion of Bakunin and his associate Guillaume - not because of the many ideological differences they undoubtedly had, but because their political practises had endangered the very existence of the International.
In fact, the struggle for the preservation of the International had at this moment more of a historical than an immediate significance. The forces of counter-revolution were gathering pace, and the Bakuninist intrigues were only accelerating a process of fragmentation that was being imposed by the general conditions facing the class. To the extent that they were aware of these unfavourable conditions, the marxists considered it better that the International should be (at least temporarily) dismantled than fall into the hands of political currents who would undermine its essential purpose and bring its very name into disrepute. This was why - again at the Hague Congress - Marx and Engels called for the General Council to be transferred to New York. It was the effective end of the First International, but when the revival in the class struggle permitted the formation of the Second nearly two decades later, it was to be on a much clearer political basis.

Historical materialism versus ahistorical idealism

The organisational question was the immediate focus for the split in the International. But intimately connected to the differences on organisation between the marxists and the anarchists was a whole series of more general theoretical issues which again revealed the different class origins of the two standpoints.
At the most "abstract" level, Bakunin, despite claiming to stand for materialism against idealism, openly rejected Marx's historical materialist method. The point of departure here was the question of the state. In a text written in 1872, Bakunin states the differences quite openly:
"The marxist sociologists, men like Engels and Lasalle, in objecting to our views contend that the state is not at all the cause of the poverty, degradation and servitude of the masses; that both the miserable condition of the masses and the despotic power of the state are, on the contrary, the effect of a more general underlying cause. In particular, we are told that they are both the products of an inevitable stage in the economic evolution of society; a stage which, historically viewed, constitutes an immense step forward to what they call the 'Social Revolution'" (cited in Bakunin on Anarchy, edited by Sam Dolgoff, New York, 1971).
Bakunin, on the other hand, not only defends the view that the state is the "cause" of the suffering of the masses, and its immediate abolition the precondition for their deliverance: he also takes the logical step of rejecting the materialist view of history, which considers that communism is only possible as the result of a whole series of developments in man's social organisation and productive capacities - developments which include the dissolution of the original human communities and the rise and fall of a succession of class societies. Against this scientific approach, Bakunin substitutes a moral one:
"We who, like Mr Marx himself, are materialists and determinists, also recognise the inevitable linking of economic and political facts in history. We recognise, indeed the necessity and inevitable character of all events that occur but we no longer bow before them indifferently, and above all we are very careful about praising them when, by their nature, they show themselves in flagrant contradiction to the supreme end of history. This is a thoroughly human ideal which is found in more or less recognisable form in the instincts and aspirations of the people and in all the religious symbols of all epochs, because it is inherent in the human race, the most social of all the species of animals on earth. This ideal, today better understood than ever, is the triumph of humanity, the most complete conquest and establishment of personal freedom and development - material, intellectual and moral - for every individual, through the absolutely unrestricted and spontaneous organisation of economic and social solidarity.
Everything in history that shows itself conformable to that end from the human point of view - and we can have no other - is good; all that is contrary to it is bad" (ibid).
It is true, as indeed we have shown in this series, that the "ideal" of communism has appeared in the strivings of the oppressed and the exploited throughout history, and this striving corresponds to the most fundamental human needs. But marxism has demonstrated why, up until the capitalist epoch, such aspirations were doomed to remain an ideal - why, for example, not only the communist dreams of the Spartacus slave revolt, but also the new feudal form of exploitation which extricated society from the impasse of slavery, were necessary moments in the evolution of the conditions which make communism a real possibility today. For Bakunin, however, while the first might be considered "good", the second could only be considered "bad", just as in the text cited above, he goes on to argue that while the "comparatively higher standard of human liberty" in ancient Greece was good, the later conquest of Greece by the more barbaric Romans was bad, and so on down through the centuries.
From this starting point, it becomes impossible to judge whether a social formation or social class is playing a progressive or regressive role in the historical process; instead all things are measured by an abstract ideal, a moral absolute which remains unchanging throughout history.
Around the margins of the revolutionary movement today there are a number of "modernist" currents who specialise in rejecting the notion of the decadence of capitalism: the most logically consistent of these (eg the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, or the Wildcat group in the UK) have gone on to dismiss the marxist conception of progress altogether, since to argue that a social system is in decline obviously involves accepting that it was once in the ascendant. They conclude that progress is a completely bourgeois notion and that communism has been possible at any time in history.
As it turns out, these modernists are not so modern after all: they are faithful epigones of Bakunin, who also came to reject any idea of progress and insisted that the social revolution was possible at any time. In his "seminal" work, Statism and Anarchy (1873), he argues that the two essential conditions of a social revolution are: extremes of suffering, almost to the point of despair, and the inspiration of a "universal ideal". This is why, in the same passage, he argues that the place most ripe for a social revolution is Italy, as opposed to the more industrially developed countries, where the workers are "relatively affluent" and "so impregnated by a variety of bourgeois prejudices that, excepting income, they differ in no way from the bourgeoisie".
But Bakunin's revolutionary Italian "proletariat" consists of "two or three million urban workers, mainly in factories and small workshops, and approximately twenty million totally deprived peasants". In other words, Bakunin's proletariat is really a new name for the bourgeois notion of "the people" - all those who suffer, regardless of their actual place in the relations of production, their capacity to organise, to become conscious of themselves as a social force. Elsewhere, indeed, Bakunin lauds the revolutionary potential of the Slavic or Latin peoples (as opposed to the Germans, towards whom Bakunin maintained a chauvinistic dislike throughout his life); he even, as the General Council notes in "The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWMA" argues that, in Russia, "the brigand is the true and only revolutionary".
All this is entirely consistent with Bakunin's rejection of materialism: if the social revolution is possible at any time, then any oppressed force can create it, be they peasants or brigands. Indeed, not only does the working class in the marxist sense have no particular role to play in this process, Bakunin positively rails against the marxists for insisting that the working class has to exercise its dictatorship over society:
"Let us ask, if the proletariat is to be the ruling class, over whom is it to rule? In short, there will remain another proletariat which will be subdued to this new rule, to this new state. For instance, the peasant 'rabble', who, as it is known, does not enjoy the sympathy of the marxists who consider it to represent a lower level of culture, will probably be ruled by the factory proletariat of the cities" (Statism and Anarchy).
This is not the place to go into the relationship between the working class and the peasantry in the communist revolution. Suffice it to say that the working class has no interest whatever in setting up a new system of exploitation once it has overthrown the bourgeoisie. But what is revealing in Bakunin's fears is precisely the fact that he does not view this problem from the point of view of the working class, but of the "oppressed in general" - to be precise, from the point of view of the petty bourgeoisie.
Unable to grasp that the proletariat is the revolutionary class in capitalist society not merely because it suffers but because it contains within itself the seeds of a new and more advanced social organisation, Bakunin is also unable to envisage the revolution as anything more than "a vast bonfire", an outpouring of "evil passions", an act of destruction rather than of creation: "A popular insurrection, by its very nature, is instinctive, chaotic and destructive ... the masses are always ready to sacrifice themselves, and this is what turns them into a brutal and savage horde, capable of performing heroic and apparently impossible exploits ... This negative passion, it is true, is far from being sufficient to attain the heights of the revolutionary cause; but without it, revolution would be impossible. Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born" (Statism and Anarchy).
Such passages not only confirm Bakunin's non-proletarian outlook in general; they also enable us to understand why he never broke with an elitist view of the role of the revolutionary organisation. Whereas for marxism the revolutionary vanguard is the product of a class becoming conscious of itself, for Bakunin the popular masses can never go beyond the level of instinctive and chaotic rebellion: consequently, if anything more than this is to be achieved, it requires the work of a "general staff" acting behind the scenes. In short, it's the old idealist notion of a Holy Spirit descending into unconscious matter. The anarchists who never fail to attack Lenin's mistaken formulation about revolutionary consciousness being introduced into the proletariat from the outside are curiously silent about Bakunin's version of the same notion.

Political struggle versus political indifferentism

Intimately connected to the organisational question, the other great point of contention between the marxists and the anarchists was the question of "politics". The Hague Congress was a battleground over this issue: the victory of the marxist current (supported in this instance by the Blanquists) was embodied in a resolution insisting that "the proletariat can act as a class only by constituting itself into a distinct political party, opposed to all the old parties formed by the possessing classes", and that "the conquest of political power becomes the great duty of the proletariat" in its fight for emancipation.
This dispute had two dimensions. The first was an echo of the argument about material necessity. Since for Bakunin, the revolution was possible at any time, any struggle for reforms was essentially a diversion from this great end; and if that struggle went beyond the strictly economic sphere (which the Bakuninists grudgingly accepted, without ever really understanding its significance) onto the terrain of bourgeois politics - of parliament, elections, campaigns for changes in the law - it could only mean capitulating to the bourgeoisie. Thus, in Bakunin's words, "the Alliance, true to the programme of the International, disdainfully rejected all collaboration with bourgeois politics, in however radical and socialist a disguise. They advised the proletariat that the only real emancipation, the only policy truly beneficial for them, is the exclusively negative policy of demolishing political institutions, political power, government in general, and the state" (Bakunin on Anarchy, p 289).
Behind these highly radical phrases lay the anarchists' incapacity to grasp that proletarian revolution, the direct struggle for communism, was not yet on the agenda because the capitalist system had not yet exhausted its progressive mission, and that the proletariat was faced with the necessity to consolidate itself as a class, to wrest whatever reforms it could from the bourgeoisie in order, above all, to strengthen itself for the future revolutionary struggle. In a period in which parliament was a real arena of struggle between fractions of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat could afford to enter this arena without subordinating itself to the ruling class; this strategy only became impossible once capitalism had entered its decadent, totalitarian phase. Of course, the precondition for this was that the working class had its own political party, distinct and opposed to all the parties of the ruling class, as the resolution of the International put it, otherwise it would merely act as an appendage of the more progressive bourgeois parties rather than tactically supporting them at certain moments. None of this made any sense to the anarchists, but their "purist" opposition to any intervention in the bourgeois political game did not equip them to defend the autonomy of the proletariat in real and concrete situations: a prime example of this is given in Engels article "The Bakuninists at Work," written in 1873. Analysing the uprisings in Spain, which could certainly not be of a proletarian, socialist character given the backwardness of the country, Engels shows how the anarchists' opposition to the demand for a republic, their resounding phrases about immediately establishing the revolutionary Commune, did not prevent them, in practise, from tailending the bourgeoisie. Engels acerbic comments are indeed almost a prediction of what the anarchists were to do in Spain in 1936, albeit in a different historical context:
"As soon as they were faced with a serious revolutionary situation, the Bakuninists had to throw the whole of their old programme overboard. First they sacrificed their doctrine of absolute abstention from political and especially electoral activities. Then anarchy, the abolition of the state, shared the same fate. Instead of abolishing the state they tried, on the contrary, to set up a number of new, small states. They then dropped the principle that the workers must not take part in any revolution that did not have as its aim the immediate and complete emancipation of the proletariat, and they themselves took part in a movement that was notoriously bourgeois. Finally they went against the dogma they had only just proclaimed - that the establishment of a revolutionary government is but another fraud, another betrayal of the working class - for they sat quite comfortably in the juntas of the various towns, and moreover almost everywhere as an impotent minority outvoted and politically exploited by the bourgeoisie".
The second dimension of this dispute over political action was the question of power. We have already seen that for marxists, the state was the product of exploitation, not its cause. It was the inevitable emanation of a class-divided society and could only be done away with for good once classes had ceased to exist. But, contrary to the anarchists, this could not be the result of a grand, overnight "social liquidation". It required a more or less long period of transition in which the proletariat would first have to take political power in its own hands, and use this power to initiate the social and economic transformation.
By arguing, in the name of freedom and opposition to all forms of authority, that the working class should refrain from conquering political power, the anarchists were thus preventing the working class from getting to first base. In order to reorganise social life, the working class had first to defeat the bourgeoisie, to overthrow it. This was of necessity an "authoritarian" act. In Engels' famous words:
"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon - authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction" ("On authority", 1873).
Elsewhere, Engels pointed out that Bakunin's demand for the immediate abolition of the state had shown its true value in the farce of Lyons in 1870 (i.e shortly before the real workers' uprising in Paris). Bakunin and a handful of his supporters had stood on the steps of Lyons Town Hall and declared the abolition of the state and its replacement by a federation of communes; unfortunately, "two companies of the bourgeois National Guard proved quite sufficient, on the other hand, to shatter this splendid dream and send Bakunin hurrying back to Geneva with the miraculous decree in his pocket" ("Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWMA").
But because the marxists denied that the state could be decreed out of existence, this didn't mean that they aimed to set up a new dictatorship over the masses: the authority they stood for was that of the armed proletariat, not that of a particular faction or clique. And, following Marx's writings about the Commune, it was simply a slander to claim, as Bakunin repeatedly did, that the marxists were in favour of taking hold of the existing state, that along with the Lassalleans they were for a "people's state" - a notion savaged by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (see the article in this series in International Review 78). The Commune had made it clear that the first act of the revolutionary working class was the destruction of the bourgeois state and the creation of new organs of power whose form corresponded to the needs and aims of the revolution. It is of course an anarchist legend to claim that, in the immediate aftermath of the Commune, Marx opportunistically dropped his authoritarian views and came round to the positions of Bakunin: that the experience of the Commune vindicated anarchist principles and refuted the marxist ones. In fact, reading Bakunin on the Commune (particularly in his The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution), one can only be struck by how abstract his reflections are, how little they attempt to assimilate and relay the essential lessons of this momentous event, how they trail off into some rather vague ramblings about God and religion. They cannot be compared at all to the concrete lessons Marx drew from the Commune, lessons about the real form of the proletarian dictatorship (arming of the workers, revocable delegates, centralisation "from below" - see the article in this series in International Review 77). As a matter of fact, even after the Commune, Bakunin was quite incapable of seeing how the proletariat could organise itself as a unified political force. In Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin argues against the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat with naive questions like "Will perhaps the proletariat as a whole head the government?", to which Marx replies, in the notes he wrote about Bakunin's book (known as the "Conspectus of Bakunin's Book Statism and Anarchy", written in 1874-5 but not published until 1926): "Does in a trade union, for instance, the whole union constitute the executive committee?". Or, when Bakunin writes "The Germans number nearly 40 million. Will, for example, all 40 millions be members of the government?", Marx replies "Certainly, for the thing begins with the self-government of the Commune". In other words, Bakunin had utterly failed to see the significance of the Commune as a new form of political power which was not based on a divorce between a minority of rulers and majority of ruled, but permitted the exploited majority to exercise real power over the minority of exploiters, to participate in the revolutionary process and ensure that the new organs of power did not escape their control. This immense practical discovery of the working class provided a realistic answer to the oft-posed question about revolutions: how do you prevent a new privileged group usurping power in the name of the revolution?. The marxists were able to draw this lesson even if it required correcting their previous position on the possibility of seizing the existing state. The anarchists, on the other hand, were only able to see the Commune as a confirmation of their eternal principle, indistinguishable from the prejudices of bourgeois liberalism: that all power corrupts, and it is best to have nothing to do with it - a conception unworthy of a class which aims to make the most radical revolution of all time.

The future society: anarchisms's artisan vision

It would be a mistake simply to ridicule the anarchists or deny that they ever had any insights. If one plunges into the writings of Bakunin or a close associate like James Guillaume, one can certainly find images of great power together with snatches of wisdom about the nature of the revolutionary process, in particular their constant insistance that "the revolution must be made not for the people but by the people and can never succeed if it does not enthusiastically involve all tthe masses of the people ..." ("National Catechism", 1866). We may even surmise that the ideas of the Bakuninists - who were talking about revolutionary communes based on "imperative, responsible and revocable mandates" at least as early as 1869 (in the "Programme of the International Brotherhood" which Marx and Engels quote from extensively in their "The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWMA") - had a direct impact upon the Paris Commune itself, especially since some of its leading members were followers of Bakunin (Varlin for example).
But as has been said on several occasions, the insights of anarchism are comparable to the stopped clock which tells the right time twice a day. Its eternal principles are a stopped clock indeed; what it lacks, however, is a consistent method that would enable it to grasp a moving reality from the class standpoint of the proletariat.
We have already seen this to be the case when anarchism deals with questions of organisation and political power. It is no less the case when it comes to its prescriptions for the future society, which, in certain texts (Bakunin's "Revolutionary Catechism", 1866, or Guillaume's "On building the new social order", 1876, published in Bakunin on Anarchy), amount to real "cookbooks for the recipes of the future" of the kind that Marx always declined to write. Nonetheless these texts are useful in demonstrating that the "fathers" of anarchism never grasped the root problems of communism - above all, the necessity to abolish the chaos of commodity relations and place the productive forces of the world in the hands of a unified human community. In the anarchists' description of the future, for all their references to collectivism and communism, the artisan's standpoint is never transcended. In Guillaume's text, for example, it may be a good thing for the land to be tilled in common, but the crucial thing is that the agricultural producers win their independence; whether this is obtained through collective or individual ownership "is of secondary importance"; by the same token, the workers will become owners of the means of production through separate trade corporations, and society as a whole will be organisaed through a federation of autonomous communes. In other words, this is a world still divided into a multitude of independent owners (individual or corporate) who can only be linked together through the medium of exchange, through commodity relations. In Guillaume's text this is perfectly explicit: the various producers associations' and communes are to be connected through the good offices of a "Bank of Exchange" which will organise the business of buying and selling on society's behalf.
Eventually, Guillaume argues, society will be able to produce an abundance of goods and exchange will be replaced by simple distribution. But having no real theory of capital and its laws of motion, the anarchists are unable to see that a society of abundance can only come about through a relentless struggle against commodity production and the law of value, since the latter are precisely what is holding the productive capacities of mankind in thrall. A return to a system of simple commodity production certainly cannot result in a society of abundance. In fact such a system cannot exist on a stable basis, since simple commodity production inevitably gives rise to expanded commodity production - to the whole dynamic of capitalist accumulation. Thus, while marxism, expressing the standpoint of the only class in capitalist society that has a real future, looks forward to the freeing of the productive forces as the foundation for an unlimited development of human potential, anarchism, with its artisan's standpoint, is caught up in the vision of a static order of free and equal exchange. This is not a real anticipation of the future, but nostalgia for a past that never was.

CDW

In the ensuing part of this series we will begin to look at the way the marxist movement of the 19th century addressed the "social questions" posed by the communist revolution - questions such as the family, religion, and the relationship between town and country.

On Thursday 8th September 1994, a week after the definitive withdrawal of Russian troops from the whole territory of the former German Democratic Republic, it was the turn of the three allies of yesteryear, the Americans, British and French, to evacuate Berlin. What a symbol! If there was one city that summarized the 45 years of confrontation between East and West, this half century of Cold War -  a cynical historian's euphemism because you couldn't get hotter or bloodier than the wars in Korea and Vietnam - that city was Berlin. A sinister page has thus been turned in the history of imperialist rivalries which started to be written at the end of the Second World War - the rivalries between America and the now defunct USSR which to a large extent had Germany as their prize. However, it has to be said that the end of this epoch, which was really marked by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, has not at all given us the "New World Order" promised by all the leaders of the great capitalist states. We are still waiting for the dividends of peace. In fact, we've never been further away from a world based on harmony between states and on economic prosperity. What's more, with the exception perhaps of the first two world conflicts, humanity has never been through so much barbarism, The decadence of the capitalist mode of production is expressing itself through a litany of massacres, epidemics, exoduses and destructions.

Bombardments in Bosnia, assassinations in the Maghreb, massacres in Rwanda, slaughter in Yemen, ambushes in Afghanistan, exodus from Cuba, famine in Somalia...there are fewer and fewer countries in the world spared from chaos. Every day now, on all the inhabited continents, the list of countries falling into disorder gets longer. What's more everybody knows this. Day after day the bourgeois media and their zealous journalists provide us with plenty of evidence, including the goriest details, to show us how millions of human beings are suffering all over the world. After all, the citizens of the democratic countries can and above all should know. This is the age of the triumph of objective information. In fact, while the bourgeois media are always there to throw at us pictures of the agony endured by hundreds of thousands of people in countries like Rwanda, they never tell us the real causes of all this. They constantly pass off false explanations as the real ones.

The unleashing of chaos bears the stamp of the great powers

With regard to the latest massacre, in Rwanda where 500,000 have perished, the fallacious interpretations of the bourgeoisie have not been missing. Virtually everything possible has been said about the bottomless hatred between Hutus and Tutsis, divisions that apparently go back to the depths of time. This is totally false. The real barbarians are, among others, the French officials, top civil servants and diplomats with their unctuous speeches, ardent defenders of French imperialist interests in the region. Because for years it has been none other than the French bourgeoisie which has provided military equipment to the mainly Hutu troops under President Habyarimana, the sinister FAR who were responsible for the first killings and the massive exodus of mainly Tutsi populations. This murderous orgy had been planned by the local authorities. All the famous journalists and respected experts kept this well hidden before and during the massacres. Similarly, very little leaked out about the massive support given by the USA and Britain to the other, equally murderous faction, the mainly Tutsi RPF. It's not astonishing that France refrained from openly denouncing the Americans' support for the RPF, otherwise it would have been hard for it to pose as the virtuous defender of the Rights of Man, which it claims to have invented in the first place. In fact, Operation Turquoise was just the humanitarian alibi for the criminal French state. Its real motive was the defense of sordid imperialist interests. However, this intervention has not stopped the slaughter (that was not its goal in any case), but neither has it stopped the pro-American RPF from seizing Kigali. This is much more annoying for Paris. But in any case, the FAR, based in Zaire and manipulated by France, will be used to harass the RPF and even take back power from it. Thus, every power shows that it is ready to unleash chaos in its rivals' sphere of influence. The USA and Britain, in order to destabilize a French position, deliberately used the card of disorder by aiding the RPF. The French bourgeoisie is now trying to get its own back. The Calvary being suffered by the Rwandan population is far from over. War, cholera, dysentery and famine continue to claim their victims.

In the light of this example we can better understand the situation in Algeria. The actors, the weapons used, the objectives are the same. Here, the Americans trying to dislodge French imperialism from one of its traditional spheres of influence, the Maghreb. The US, via Saudi Arabia which finances the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), is deliberately trying to chase France from the region. Thus, what with the bomb attacks and executions carried out by the FIS under Washington's sponsorship and the repression and imprisonment meted out by the military government supported by Paris, Algeria is going through the worst kind of convulsions. Here again we can see that the population, caught between the FIS and the military, is walking a Via Dolorosa. And the rest of North Africa is going the same way. The stakes are the same, as recognized by the geo-historian Y. Lacoste in an interview in number 180 of the review L'Histoire: "In the wake of Algeria, Tunisia and even Morocco will also tip over... Thus we are heading for a very difficult period for France".

Even closer to the big industrialized metropoles of Europe than Algeria, there is ex-Yugoslavia where for three years now war and anarchy have reigned supreme. Despite this, we are regularly told that peace is imminent. Reality systematically tears the bourgeoisie's pacifist pipedreams to pieces. Let us recall: last year, we were told that Sarajevo was returning to a bit of calm. Concerts and church services transmitted on TV, collections for the children of this martyred city, nothing was missing in the solemn celebration of the end of the fighting, all thanks to the foreign offices of the great democracies. What do we find now? The shelling and the sniper fire has resumed to the point that Pope John Paul II himself did not want to take the risk of testing whether his popemobile would resist high caliber ammo. He preferred to go to Zagreb, in Croatia. It is less dangerous, for the moment. Only for the moment because all the activities of the great powers are serving to aggravate the conflict. For example, the recent American initiative to constitute a Croatian-Bosnian Federation aimed at detaching Croatia from its alliance with Germany threatens to take the confrontation onto an even higher level. In fact, the policy of the White House, which is ready to support the Croats in their efforts to annex Krajina, the Serb enclave in their territory, will intensify and widen the opposition between the Bosnian-Croat alliance and the Serbs. Here, more surely than in Somalia, Afghanistan or Yemen, given the strategic importance of the Balkans, the exacerbation of tensions between the great powers leads to desolation. The former are under-developed countries where the proletariat is too weak to stop the barbarism. But while, in the past, capitalism was able to displace this chaos onto the periphery of its system, today it is unable to prevent it approaching the big industrialized centers. The convulsions hitting Algeria and Yugoslavia are proof of this. Striking also is the sheer number of geographical zones totally ravaged by war and all its scourges. Speaking very generally, up to the seventies, one conflict broke out when a previous one had finished. Today, as in Afghanistan, they just carry on, but in different forms. This phenomenon is no accident. Like a cancer reaching its terminal stages, capitalism at this end of the century is being devoured by the insane cancer cells of war.

Capitalism is decomposing. Only the proletariat can offer a perspective

Some people will object that there are some regions of the planet where peace is possible. This would seem to be the case in Northern Ireland, where the IRA says it is laying down its arms. Nothing could be more deceptive. By forcing the Catholic extremists of the North to negotiate, the USA is trying to put pressure on Britain so that the latter no longer has any pretext for maintaining its grip on Ulster. Why? Because Britain is no longer the docile ally it once was. Since the collapse of the USSR divergent imperialist interests have grown on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly with regard to ex-Yugoslavia. 'Capitalist peace' is never anything but a particular moment in the combat between states.

In fact, capitalist decomposition is more and more affecting the industrialized countries. Of course, the level of its manifestations is far less catastrophic than in the countries cited above. But it is certainly the case in Italy, precisely because of the inter-imperialist rivalries cutting through this state. While the Italian democratic state has never been noted for its stability (see International Reviews 76 and 77 on this point), this fragility is now being aggravated by the rivalries between different factions opting for opposing imperialist alignments. Here the Berlusconi clique has more or less chosen the American alliance, while the other clique, which controls the judiciary, leans more towards an alliance with France and Germany. This confrontation, which has seen the latter faction revealing scandal after scandal, has led the country to a state of near paralysis. Not that the time has come for a Rwandan-type solution in which the Italian bourgeoisie settles its differences with machetes. No, for the moment car bombs and plastic explosives suffice. The level of development in the country is not the same, their histories are different, but above all, the Italian working class is not prepared to line up behind this or that bourgeois clan. The same goes for the whole proletariat of the industrialized countries. However, the fact that the only class that can offer humanity a perspective is not mobilized behind the bourgeoisie does not stop capitalism from literally rotting on its feet. On the contrary, it is precisely this situation of historical stalemate, where the proletariat is unable in the immediate to impose it historic perspective, ie the overthrow of the system, and where the bourgeoisie is unable to unleash a world war, which is at the origin of the phase of decomposition. However, it is certain that if the working class doesn't manage to carry out its historic mission, the most frightful scenarios are plausible. Through wars and all sorts of abominations, humanity will be wiped out.

The bourgeoisie has absolutely nothing to offer against the bankruptcy of its social organization. It simply proposes that we should resign ourselves to all this barbarism - ie, accept suicide. It doesn't even believe in the 'recovery' of the world economy. And quite rightly it knows that, even if it manages to get production going by launching itself into debt (especially public debt), it can't really absorb unemployment or prevent violent and destructive financial explosions. The saturation of the world market and its consequence, the desperate search for outlets, the trade war, oblige all states and enterprises to sever the branch they are sitting on. Finally, as portrayed in the recent novel by the Frenchman J. Attali, that "brilliant thinker" of the bourgeoisie, the ex-adviser to Mitterand and probably the person with the most honors and diplomas in France, the only future is an abominable world in which human organs are for sale and fathers kill their children. This work is called It's Coming, but it's already here; the book is just a sad summary of today's world and of the void that awaits us if the proletariat doesn't overthrow it.

Arkady 17.9.94

IR79, 4th quarter 1994

The Conception of Decadence in Capitalism

Polemic with IBRP

Is imperialist war solution to the capitalist cycles of accumulation

The future world Communist Party, the new International, will be built on political positions, which will supersede the mistakes, inadequacies, or unresolved questions of the old party, the Communist International. This is why it is vital that the organisations that claim their origins in the Communist Left continue to debate together. We consider that the decadence of capitalism is fundamental among these positions. In previous issues of the International Review, we have shown how their ignorance of this notion led the Bordigist current into theoretical aberrations on the question of the imperialist war, and led to a political disarmament of the working class [1] [140].

In this article, we will look at the positions of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista and the Communist Workers’ Organisation, which together form the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) [2] [141]. Both these organisations clearly base the necessity for the communist revolution on the analysis that capitalism has entered its decadent phase since World War I. However, while in this they are different from the Bordigist groups, both the PCInt and the CWO defend a series of analyses, which in our opinion imply a weakening, or even a rejection, of the notion of capitalist decadence.

In this article, we will examine the arguments that these organisations defend on the role of world wars and the nature of imperialism, which we believe prevent them from defending the communist position on capitalism’s decadence to the hilt, and in all its ramifications.

The Nature of Imperialist War

The IBRP explains world imperialist war, which is a fundamental characteristic of decadent capitalism, as follows: “And just as in the 19th century, the crises of capitalism led to the devaluation of existing capital (through bankruptcies), thus opening the way to a new cycle of accumulation based on the concentration and fusion of capital, in the 20th century the crises of world imperialism can no longer be resolved other than by a still greater devaluation of the existing capital, through the economic collapse of whole countries. This is precisely the economic function of world wars. As in 1914 and 1939, this is imperialism’s inexorable “solution” to the crisis of the world economy” [3] [142].

This vision of the “economic function of world wars”, via “the economic collapse of whole countries”, by analogy with the bankruptcies of the previous century, in fact boils down to regarding world war as a means for world capitalism to launch “a new cycle of accumulation”, in other words according an economic rationality to the phenomenon of world war.

This rationality existed in the wars of the previous century: in the case of national wars (e.g. in Italy, or between France and Prussia), they allowed the formation of great national units, which meant a real advance in the development of capitalism; the colonial wars extended capitalist relations of production to far-flung corners of the globe, and so contributed to the formation of the world market.

The same is no longer true in the 20th century, in the period of capitalist decadence. Imperialist war has no economic rationality. World war’s “economic function” in destroying capital may seem analogous to what happened in the previous century, but this is only in appearance. In the 20th century, war’s function is radically different, and the IBRP must feel this, confusedly, since they put the word “solution” in quotes. Far from being a solution to a cyclical crisis, “thus opening the way to a new cycle of accumulation”, war is the clearest expression of capitalism’s permanent crisis. It expresses the tendency to chaos and disintegration that grips world capitalism, and moreover it accelerates this tendency.

The last eighty years have fully confirmed this analysis. Imperialist wars are the fullest expression of the infernal spiral of disintegration that capitalism has been caught in since entering its period of decadence. The cycle is no longer a phase of expansion followed by a phase of crisis, national and colonial wars, leading to a new phase of expansion and expressing the overall development of the capitalist mode of production; this cycle passes from generalised imperialist war for the re-division of the world market, through post-war reconstruction, to a new, far worse crisis, as has already happened twice in this century.

The nature of reconstruction after World War II

For the IBRP “Of course, the two previous crises [i.e. the two World Wars] had dramatic consequences for capitalism, but they still left enough room for manoeuvre for further development, including in the framework of decadence” [4] [143].

The IBRP realises the seriousness of the destruction and suffering caused by imperialist war; these it calls the “dramatic consequences” of war. But the wars of the ascendant period were also “dramatic” in this sense: they caused terrible destruction, hunger, and suffering. Capitalism was born “in blood and filth” as Marx put it.

Nonetheless, there is a vast difference between the wars of the ascendant and decadent periods: in the former, capitalism still had “enough room for manoeuvre for further development” as the IBRP puts it, while in the latter this room for manoeuvre was drastically reduced, and no longer allowed the further accumulation of capital.

This is the essential difference between wars in the two periods. To think that the two World Wars “left [capitalism] enough room for manoeuvre for further development” is to throw overboard precisely what distinguishes the period of capitalist decadence.

Obviously, this analysis of “room for manoeuvre” in capitalist decadence is closely linked to the IBRP’s explanations of the crisis, based solely on the theory of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, without taking account of the theory developed by Rosa Luxemburg on the saturation of the world market. Without entering into detail, a rapid overview of the reconstruction that followed World War II is enough to do away with the idea that capitalism still had “room for manoeuvre for further development”.

After the cataclysmic 1939-45 war, the world economy seemed not only to “return to normal”, but to have exceeded all previous growth rates. However, we should not let ourselves be blinded by dazzling statistics. If we ignore the problem of statistical massaging by governments and economic institutions - which exists, but is entirely secondary in the case that concerns us here - then we have to analyse the nature and composition of this growth.

If we do so, then we can see that a large part of this growth is made up of arms production and defence spending on the one hand, and of expenditure (state bureaucracy, marketing, publicity, “communication” media), which is totally unproductive from the standpoint of global capital.

Let us begin with the question of armaments. Contrary to the period following World War I, after 1945 the armies were not completely demobilised, and arms spending went on rising almost without interruption until the end of the 80s.

Before the collapse of the USSR, US military spending swallowed 10% of GNP. In the USSR, the figure stood at 20-25%; in the EEC it is currently 3-4%, while in many Third World countries it stands as high as 25%.

Arms production does at first increase the volume of production. However, because the value created does not “return” to the production process, but ends up either being destroyed or rusting in barracks and nuclear silos, armaments in fact represent a sterilisation, a destruction of a part of global production: with military spending, “an ever-growing share of production goes into products which do not reappear in the following cycle. The product leaves the sphere of production, and does not return to it. A tractor returns to the sphere of production in the form of harvested wheat. A tank does not” [5] [144].

In the same way, the post-war period witnessed a huge increase in non-productive spending. The state developed a huge bureaucracy, companies followed the same principle in disproportionately increasing the mechanisms of control and administration of production; faced with ferocious competition, the cost of marketing has grown constantly, to the point where it absorbs as much as 50% of a product’s cost. Capitalist statistics put this huge mass of expenditure on the positive side of the balance-sheet, under the heading of “services”. However, this growing mass of unproductive spending in fact constitutes a drain on global capital. “When capitalist relations of production cease to be the instrument for the development of the productive forces and become fetters, all the “artificial” costs that they entail become simple waste. It is important to note that this inflation of artificial costs is an inevitable phenomenon, which imposes itself on capitalism with as much violence as its contradictions. For half a century the history of capitalist nations has been filled with “austerity programs”, attempts to turn back the clock, struggles against the uncontrollable expansion of government costs and unproductive expenses in general. (...) All these efforts, however, systematically end in failure. (...) The more difficulties capitalism faces, the more it must develop its artificial costs. This vicious circle, this gangrene rotting the core of the wage labour system, is only one of the symptoms of the real disease: the decadence of capitalism” [6] [145].

Having seen the nature of capitalist growth since the second imperialist massacre, let us see how it is shared out among the different zones of world capital.

Starting with the ex-Eastern bloc, a substantial part of the USSR’s post-war “reconstruction” was in fact the wholesale dismantling and transfer of entire factories from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, the GDR, Manchuria, etc to the USSR itself. This was not a real growth, but merely a change in the geographical location of production.

On the other hand, as we have said for years [7] [146], the Stalinist economies produced goods of more than dubious quality, such that a substantial proportion of them were unusable. On paper, the growth in production reached “tremendous” levels, and the IBRP falls headlong for these figures [8] [147], but in reality this growth was largely fictitious.

As far as the ex-colonies are concerned, we have laid bare the lie of their “growth rates in excess of those of the industrialised world” in our article on “Still-born nations” in the International Review [9] [148]. Today, we can see that many of these countries have entered an accelerating process of chaos and decomposition, hunger, epidemics, destruction and wars. These countries have become the terrain for a permanent confrontation between the great powers, with the active complicity of the local bourgeoisies, subjecting them to the devastating plague of imperialist war as the permanent way of life of decadent capitalism.

From the strictly economic standpoint, most of these countries have been trapped for decades in a permanent depression. Nor should we be deceived by the “fantastic” growth rates of the “four Asian dragons”. The latter have carved themselves a niche on the world market by selling some consumer products and electronic components at ridiculously low prices. These prices are possible on the one hand by the massive exploitation of cheap labour [10] [149], and above all by the systematic use of state export credits and dumping (sales at prices below the cost of production).

These countries cannot, any more than the others, escape the implacable law for any country arriving late on the world market: “The law of supply and demand works against any development of new countries. In a world where markets are saturated, supply exceeds demand and prices are determined by the lowest production costs. Because of this, the countries with the highest production costs are forced to sell their commodities at reduced profits or even at a loss. This ensures that they have an extremely low rate of accumulation and, even with a very cheap labour force, they are unable to realise the investments needed for the massive acquisition of modern technology. The result of this is that the gulf which separates them from the great industrial powers can only get wider” [11] [150].

As for the industrial powers, it is true that between 1945 and 1967 they underwent real economic growth (from which we should deduct the enormous volume of military and unproductive spending).

However, there are at least two points that need making here. Firstly, “Some growth rates reached since World War II come close to, or even exceed, those reached during capitalism’s ascendant phase prior to 1913. This is the case for countries like France and Japan. However, it is far from being the case with the greatest industrial power, the USA (50% of world production at the end of the 50s, 4.6% average annual growth rate between 1957-65, as opposed to 6.9% between 1850 and 1880)” [12] [151]. Moreover, world production between 1913 and 1959 (including arms production) grew by 250%, whereas if it had increased at the same rhythm as between 1880 and 1890, the period of capitalism’s apogee, it would have grown by 450% [13] [152].

Secondly, these countries’ growth was achieved at the expense of an increasing impoverishment in the rest of the world. During the 70s, the system of massive loans from industrialised countries to the Third World, to allow the latter to absorb the former’s vast stocks of unsaleable commodities, gave the whole world economy an appearance of “rapid growth”. The 1982 debt crisis burst this enormous bubble, revealing a very serious problem for capital: “for years, a large part of world production has not been sold, but given away. This production may correspond to really manufactured commodities, but it has not produced value, which is the only thing that interests capitalism. It has not allowed a real accumulation of capital. Global capitalism has been reproducing itself on ever-narrower foundations. Taken as a whole, capitalism has not got richer. On the contrary, it has become poorer” [14] [153].

It is significant that the “solution” to the Third World debt crisis of 1982-85 was the massive indebtedness of the USA, which between 1982 and 1988 went from the being a creditor nation to being the world’s biggest debtor.

This demonstrates the dead-end that capitalism has reached, even in its strongholds - the great Western industrial metropoles.

Seen in this light, BC’s explanation of the American debt crisis is wrong and seriously under-estimates the situation: “but the real lever which has been used to drain the wealth of every corner of the world towards the United States has been the policy of rising interest rates”. BC describes this policy as “the appropriation of surplus-value through the control of finance revenue”, emphasizing that “we have gone from the increase in profit through industrial development to the increase in profit thanks to the development of finance revenue” [15] [154].

BC should ask itself why it is that we go “from the increase in profit through industrial development to the increase in profit thanks to the development of finance revenue”. The answer is obvious: whereas during the 1960s, industrial development was still a possibility for the major capitalist countries, and during the 1970s “development” was kept afloat by massive loans to the “Third World” and the Eastern bloc, these outlets were closed in the 1980s, and the only way out was provided by the gigantic arms spending of the United States.

This is why BC is wrong in viewing the massive indebtedness of the USA as part of a “struggle for finance revenue”, and is consequently incapable of understanding the situation in the 1990s, where the possibility of the US taking on more debt as it did in the 1980s simply no longer exists. The world’s “most developed capitalism” has closed another illusory way out of the crisis [16] [155].

The relation between imperialist war and capitalist crisis

For BC, war “is on the historical agenda from the moment that the contradictions of the capitalist accumulation process have developed to the point where they determine an over-production of capital and a fall in the rate of profit” [17] [156]. Historically, and historically only, this position is correct. The era of generalised imperialist war springs from the dead-end that capitalism has entered with its phase of decadence, when it is unable to continue accumulating because of the scarcity of new markets, which had previously allowed it to extend its relations of production.

BC tries to use a series of elements on unemployment before World War I, and on unemployment and the use of productive capacity before World War II, to show that “the data (...) shows unequivocally the close link between the course of the economic crisis and the two World Wars” [18] [157]. Apart from the fact that the data is exclusively limited to the United States, we will repeat here, without developing it, the argument put forward in International Review 77/78 in response to the same idea defended by Programme Communiste. Apart from the economic conditions, the outbreak of war requires one vital condition: that the proletariat of the major industrialised countries should be enrolled for imperialist war. If this condition is not fulfilled, war cannot begin, even if all the “objective” conditions are present. We will not go back over this fundamental position, which BC also rejects [19] [158]. Suffice it to say that the mechanical link that BC claims to establish between economic crisis and war (and in which BC joins with the Bordigists, who reject the notion of decadence altogether), leads them to under-estimate the problem of war in decadent capitalism.

In The Accumulation of Capital Rosa Luxemburg shows that “the greater the violence with which capitalism annihilates both external and internal non-capitalist strata, and debases the living conditions of the working class, the more the day-to-day history of capitalist accumulation worldwide becomes a series of catastrophes and convulsions, which, combined with the periodic economic crises will eventually make continued accumulation impossible, and will raise the international working class against the rule of capital, even before the latter has reached the objective economic limits to its development” [20] [159].

In general, war and economic crisis are not mechanically linked. In ascendant capitalism, war is at the service of the economy. In decadent capitalism, the reverse is true: imperialist war arises from capitalism’s historic crisis, but it then acquires its own dynamic, and becomes progressively capitalism’s very way of life. War, militarism, armaments production, tend to subject all economic activity to their own demands, so creating monstrous deformations in capitalism’s own laws of accumulation, and generating further convulsions in the economic sphere.

This was put forward clearly by the Communist International’s 2nd Congress: “The war has subjected capitalism to a change (...) War has accustomed it, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world, to reduce whole countries to famine by blockade, to bomb and torch peaceful towns and villages, to infect springs and rivers with cholera, to carry dynamite in diplomatic bags, to print counterfeit currency of the enemy country, to make use of corruption, espionage and contraband on an unheard-of scale. Once peace has been concluded, the methods used in the war continue to be used in the world of commerce. Commercial operations of any importance are conducted under the aegis of the state. The latter has become more like a criminal gang, armed to the teeth” [21] [160].

The nature of “cycles of accumulation” in capitalist decadence

According to BC, “each time that the system can no longer counter, by an opposing impulse, the causes that provoke the fall in the rate of profit, then two kinds of problems are posed: a) the destruction of excess capital; b) the extension of imperialist domination over the world market” [22] [161].

First of all, we should point out that BC is a century late: the question of “the extension of imperialist domination over the world market” began to be posed more and more acutely in the last decade of the 19th century. The question has not been posed since 1914, for the simple reason that the entire planet has been inextricably bound in the bloody nets of imperialism. The question, which has been repeated, more and more sharply, since 1914 is not the extension of imperialism but the division of the world among the various imperialist vultures.

BC’s other “mission” for imperialist war - “the destruction of excess capital” - tends to compare the destruction of productive forces as a result of the system’s cyclical crises during the 19th century, with the destruction caused by this century’s imperialist wars. Nonetheless, BC recognises that there is a qualitative difference between them: “whereas then it was part of the painful cost of a “necessary” development of the productive forces, today we are faced with a systematic devastation spread over the entire planet, in the economic sense today, in the physical sense tomorrow, plunging the whole of humanity into the abyss of war” [23] [162]. But this is not enough, and BC has always insisted on under-stating this difference, by insisting much more strongly on the identity between capitalism’s functioning in its ascendant and decadent phases: “the whole history of capitalism is an endless race towards an impossible equilibrium; only crises, in other words famine, unemployment, war and death for the workers, are the moments whereby the relations of production recreate the conditions for a further cycle of accumulation which will end in a still deeper and vaster crisis” [24] [163].

It is true that the system is unable to escape the periodic crises, which lead it to blockage and paralysis, in both ascendant and decadent capitalism. But if we stop here, then we remain on the same terrain as the bourgeois economists, who comfort us by repeating that “recovery always follows recession”.

Of course, BC does not follow such chimera, and clearly defends the need to destroy capitalism and make the revolution. It still remains a prisoner of its schematic “cycles of accumulation”.

In fact:

 - the cyclical crises of the ascendant period are different from the crises of decadence;

 - the root of the imperialist war does not lie in the crisis of each cycle of accumulation; it is not a sort of dilemma reproduced each time the cycle of accumulation enters a crisis: it lies in a permanent historic situation which dominates the whole of capitalist decadence.

During capitalism’s ascendant period, crises were short-lived and occurred fairly regularly every 7-10 years. In the eighty years since 1914, and considering only the great industrialised countries, we have had:

 - ten years of imperialist war (1914-18, 1939-45) which left more than 80 million dead;

 - 46 years of open crisis: 1918-22, 1929-39, 1945-50, 1967-94 (we are not taking account of the brief “drugged recoveries” during the periods 1929-39 and 1967-94);

 - only 24 years (scarcely a quarter of the period) of economic recovery: 1922-29 and 1950-67.

All this shows that the simple schema of accumulation is not enough to explain the reality of decadent capitalism, and prevents us from understanding its accompanying phenomena.

Although BC recognises the phenomenon of state capitalism, which is an essential component of decadence, it fails to follow all its consequences [25] [164]. A vital characteristic of decadence, which decisively affects the expression of “cyclical crises”, is the state’s massive intervention in the economy (closely tied to the formation of the war economy), through a whole series of mechanisms, which the economists call “economic policy”. This intervention profoundly alters the law of value, provoking monstrous deformations throughout the world economy, which systematically exacerbate the system’s contradictions, leading to brutal convulsions not only in the economic apparatus, but in every sphere of society.

State capitalism, and the permanent weight of the war economy, transform radically both the substance and the dynamic of the economic cycle: “Particular conjunctures in the economy are no longer determined by the relationship between productive capacity and the shape of the market at a given moment, but by essentially political causes. (...) In this context, it is no longer the problems of the amortisation of capital that determine the length of phases of economic development but, to a great extent, the level of destruction in the previous war. (...) In contrast to the 19th century, which was characterised by “laisser-faire”, the scale of recessions in the 20th century has been limited by artificial measures carried out by the state and its research institutes aimed at delaying the general crisis (...) [with a] whole gamut of political measures which tend to break with the strictly economic functioning of capitalism” [26] [165].

The problem of war cannot be placed in the dynamic of “accumulation cycles”, which BC moreover stretches out for the decadent period, to make them fit the cycles of “crisis-war-reconstruction”, when in fact, as we have seen, the latter are not purely economic in nature.

“It is however very important to note first of all that this periodic succession of conjunctures and the crisis, while they are essential elements of reproduction, do not constitute the real problem of capitalist reproduction. Successive periods of conjunctures and crisis are the specific form of movement towards capitalist production, but they are not the movement itself” (Rosa Luxemburg) [27] [166].

The problem of war in decadent capitalism must be situated outside the strict oscillations of the economic cycle, outside the ebb and flow of the conjunctures of the rate of profit.

“In this region, not only is the bourgeoisie no longer able to develop the productive forces, it can only survive on condition that it destroys them, and annihilates the accumulated wealth of centuries of social labour. Generalised imperialist war is the main expression of this process of decomposition and destruction, into which the whole of capitalist society has entered” (“Notre réponse à Vercesi”, in Bulletin Interne International de Discussion no 5, published by the Fraction Italienne de la Gauche Communiste in May 1944).

The IBRP’s hands are tied by its theories on the cycles of accumulation, determined by the fall in the rate of profit, and it explains war through an “economic determinism” of crises in the cycles of accumulation.

As marxists, it is clear that we know very well that “the economic infrastructure determines the whole of society’s superstructure”. However, we do not understand this as a stencil, to be applied mechanically to every situation, but as a world-historic viewpoint. This is why we understand that while the chaos of decadent capitalism has an economic origin, it has been exacerbated to such a point that it cannot be understood in the limits of a strict economism.

“The other aspect of capitalist accumulation concerns the relations between capital and non-capitalist modes of production, where it has the whole world for its theatre. The methods used here are colonial policy, the system of international loans, the politics of spheres of interest, war. Violence, swindling, oppression, pillage, show themselves in the open, unmasked, and it is difficult to recognise the rigorous laws of the economic process in the inter-meshing of violence and political brutality.

Bourgeois liberal theory only considers the one aspect of “peaceful competition”, the marvels of technology and the pure exchange of commodities; it separates the economic domain of capital from the other, violent aspect, whose acts are considered as more or less fortuitous incidents of outside politics” [28] [167].

The IBRP rigorously denounces the barbarity of capitalism, the catastrophic effects of its policies and wars. And yet, it is unable to arrive at a unitary and global vision of war and economic evolution, which is necessary for a coherent theory of decadence.

The blindness and irresponsibility implied by this weakness are manifest in this formulation: “From the first signs of the world economic crisis, our party maintained that there was only one way out. The alternative before us is clear: either a bourgeois overcoming of the crisis in a world war leading to a monopolist capitalism further concentrated in the hands of a small group of powers, or the proletarian revolution” [29] [168].

The IBRP is not sufficiently aware of what a third World War would mean: nothing other than the complete annihilation of the planet. Even today, when the collapse of the USSR and the consequent disappearance of the Western bloc make the formation of new blocs difficult, the risk that humanity will be destroyed through a chaotic succession of local wars remains very serious.

The degree of capitalism’s putrefaction, the gravity of its contradictions, have reached a level such that a third World War would lead to the destruction of humanity.

It is an absurd game, played with schemas and “theories” which do not correspond to historical reality, to suppose that a third World War could be followed by “a monopolist capitalism further concentrated in the hands of a small group of powers”. This is science fiction... but unfortunately anchored in the phenomena of the end of the previous century.

The debate among revolutionaries should start from the highest level reached by the old party, the Communist International, which stated very clearly at the end of World War I: “The contradictions of the capitalist régime revealed themselves to humanity after the war, in the form of physical suffering: hunger, cold, epidemics and a resurgence of barbarism. Judgment was passed, without appeal, on the old academic quarrel among socialists on the theory of pauperisation and the gradual passage from capitalism to socialism. (...) Today we are faced, not just with social pauperisation, but with a physiological and biological impoverishment, which appears before us in all its hideous reality” [30] [169].

The end of World War II went still further in confirming this crucial analysis by the CI. Since then, the life of capitalism, in “peace” as in war, has aggravated the tendencies that revolutionaries predicted, but to levels that they could not imagine at the time. What is the point of playing with ridiculous hypotheses of a “monopolist capitalism” after a third World War? The alternative is not “proletarian revolution or war leading to the birth of a monopolist capitalism”, but proletarian revolution or the destruction of humanity.

Adalen, 1/9/94

Around the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (see our book The Italian Communist Left), reconstituted in Marseille in 1942, there formed a nucleus of about ten French elements: some of them had just broken with Trotskyism and others, still young, had only just moved towards revolutionary positions.

A bit of history

The Italian Communist Left is well known to our readers. However, we should take a few lines to recall that the Italian Left had a long political and theoretical tradition, a tradition of struggle in the Italian and international workers’ movement. Its origins go back to a few years before the First World War, to the fight of the younger elements of the Italian Socialist Party against the colonial war in Tripolitania, now Libya, between 1910 and 1912. The Italian Left was the main element in the creation of the Italian Communist Party at Livorno in 1921. In the mid-twenties, it held on to revolutionary positions against the degeneration of the Communist International, fighting within the latter until its definitive expulsion in 1928, along with other currents of the left, including the Russian left opposition under Trotsky. When fascism came to power in Italy, a number of its members were put in prison or exiled to the islands of the Tyrrenian sea. After that, the Italian Left carried on its internationalist political combat in emigration in France and Belgium, first in the International Left Opposition, which was not yet Trotskyist, and then virtually alone, after its exclusion from the latter.

By the 1930s, the revolutionary wave was definitely over. The Russian revolution had been isolated and defeated. The working class had been beaten, and with each year that passed, revolutionaries found themselves on their own, more and more distant from their class. As Victor Serge put it, it was “midnight in the century”, but the communist will of the Italian Left did not weaken. Throughout this period it held onto communist and internationalist principles. It was the only revolutionary organisation which understood that the historic course was no longer favourable to the working class and that the way was open to world imperialist war. This understanding of the political situation enabled it to grasp the fact that the war in Spain in 1936, like the wars in Abyssinia or Manchuria, were simply the preludes to the coming generalised imperialist war. It thus defended the idea that the proletariat was beaten and that the period was not favourable to the formation of new revolutionary parties. Its role, as a fraction of the future communist party, was to hold onto communist principles and to prepare the “revolutionary cadres” of the future party, which would be born when the proletariat re-emerged onto the historic scene.

The beginning of the Second World War got the better of the Italian Left and dispersed its members. It disappeared in August 1939 when war was declared; the International Bureau in Brussels dissolved itself.

However, some elements of the Italian Left managed to regroup in Marseille and decided to carry on the struggle for proletarian internationalism. Alone and against the tide they denounced the imperialist war and called on the workers of all the countries of Europe to fight against all the capitalist states, democratic, fascist or Stalinist (see the Manifesto of the Communist Left to the Proletarians of Europe, published in the book cited above).

An overestimation of the historic period

When powerful strike movements broke out in Italy in 1943 (see International Review 75 [200]), a new perspective at last seemed to be opening up for revolutionaries. They considered that the historic course that had led the working class from defeat to defeat had changed. “After three years of war, Germany, and thus Europe present the first signs of weakness...we can say that the objective conditions are opening up a period of revolution” (“Draft resolution on the perspectives and tasks of the transitional period”, Conference of July 1943, published in Internationalisme no. 5, 1945).

The insurrectionary events which had just taken place in Italy were very important, but the bourgeoisie was on its guard; it was not to make the same errors that it had made at the end of the First World War and which led to the revolutions in Russia and Germany.

The revolutionaries themselves made a double mistake:

 - they underestimated the bourgeoisie (see the article below), thinking that the proletarian revolution would come out of imperialist war, as it had done in 1871, 1905, and above all 1917;

 - they underestimated the defeat suffered by the working class which had been ideologically defeated at the end of the 30s, then physically defeated, then crushed and murdered during the imperialist war.

The documents which we reproduce here express this overestimation: the slogans called on the workers not to march behind the Resistance, but to organise their own “action committees” and to follow the example of the Italian workers.

After the treason of the Communist Parties and the Trotskyist groups which had passed wholesale into the imperialist camp of the democrats and Stalinists, the immense merit of these comrades was to have raised aloft the only revolutionary and internationalist torch during the nationalist, chauvinist and revengeful hysteria of the “Liberation”. Against the tide, against the national unity that extended from the Gaullist right to the Stalinists and Trotskyists, the workers and revolutionaries-with-no-fatherland of the Communist Left of France distributed their leaflets and their papers.

It needed a mad courage to stand up against everyone, to call on the workers to desert the partisans, and in doing so to run the gauntlet between the Gestapo, the Vichy police, the Gaullists and the Stalinist killers.

Rx 

LEAFLET

WORKERS!

The Anglo-American troops have replaced the GERMAN GENDARME in the work of repressing the working class and reintegrating it into the imperialist war.

The RESISTANCE is pushing you into an insurrection, but under its leadership and for capitalist aims.

The COMMUNIST PARTY has abandoned the cause of the proletariat and has sunk into patriotism, which is so inimical to the working class.

More than ever your weapon remains THE CLASS STRUGGLE without any regard for frontiers or nations.

More than ever your place is not on the side either of fascism or of bourgeois democracy.

More than ever, ANGLO-AMERICAN, RUSSIAN AND GERMAN CAPITALISMS ARE THE EXPLOITERS OF THE WORKING CLASS.

The strike now underway has been provoked by THE BOURGEOISIE and for ITS INTERESTS.

Tomorrow, to fight against the unemployment which it cannot solve, YOU WILL BE MOBILISED AND SENT TO THE IMPERIALIST FRONT.

WORKERS!

 - Don’t respond to the insurrection which will be made with your blood for the greater good of international capitalism.

 - Act as proletarians, not as revanchist Frenchmen.

 - Refuse to be reintegrated into the imperialist war.

WORKERS!

 - Organise your action committees, and when the conditions allow it, follow the example of the Italian workers.

INTERNATIONAL CAPITALISM CAN ONLY LIVE THROUGH WAR

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ARMIES WILL PROVE THIS TO YOU JUST LIKE THE GERMAN ARMY!

YOU WILL ONLY GET OUT OF THE IMPERIALIST WAR THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR!

PROLETARIAT AGAINST CAPITALISM!

French Communist Left, August 1944

Lead article from L'Enticelle, August 1944

Organ of the French Communist Left

Workers,

After five years of war, with all its misery, death and carnage, the bourgeoisie is weakening under the blows of a crisis that is opening the doors to civil war. Tomorrow’s Europe will be a vast powder-keg in which the counter-revolutionary British, American and Russian armies will implacably attempt to smother the revolutionary movements of the working class.

The tasks of repression have already been shared out amongst the belligerents. Italy has been a vast field of experience which has shown capitalism the danger, in times of war, of leaving intact workers’ concentrations that could give rise to independent class movements. The Italian workers have proved this.

This is why for two years Germany has been dragging you off to huge factories where, side by side, European workers have been slaved to death producing arms for the imperialist war. This is why for two years patriots in the service of capitalism have been pushing you into the maquis so that you lose your class consciousness and become revanchists. All the important industrial centres of France have been emptied more and more in order to reduce the risk of civil war and eliminate possible sources of revolutionary ferment provoked by the war.

The draining of all the workers’ energies is being done with the political intention of weakening your consciousness and lining you up like animals to be whipped and cut down the moment you whisper any protest.

The war today is no longer being fought between the belligerent imperialisms, but between a capitalism conscious of its will to remain in power despite its historical impossibility, and a proletariat blinded by the demagogy which pours spontaneously from the flanks of the bourgeois system.

The demagogic and repressive weapons of capitalism are already at work.

In addition to the concentration camps, the maquis, the ferocious exploitation of all the workers in Germany, we now have the bombing of the cities, especially where strikes are breaking out, as in Milan, Naples, Marseille. Through the radio, bourgeois propaganda has taken on the language of the October revolution, even though since its death in 1933 the Communist International has led you through defeat after defeat into the imperialist war.

The Red Army, which has usurped a name that is covered in glory because it was once a workers’ army fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, is now carrying on the deadly work of fascism, using the word ‘Soviet’ to disguise the imposition of capitalist exploitation.

De Gaulle, this “blackguard” as the Stalinists called him before 1941, has the backing of the Anglo-Americans and the Russians to mobilise and smother you in khaki once again.

Europe is ripe for civil war; capitalism is preparing to react by leading you towards the imperialist war.

Workers, each weapon of capitalism contains its own danger for capitalism.

To the reduction of revolutionary flashpoints, the situation responds by concentrating the working class even more densely in a nerve-center of capitalism.

Against the politics of patriotism, a proletarian solidarity is created in the German factories and will be fortified by the ineluctable necessity for the workers to defend themselves as workers in a Europe that tomorrow will be abandoned to famine and unemployment.

The crisis that leads to the transformation of imperialist war into civil war will not spare the imperialist armies, who will be affected by social convulsions in the rear, by the revolutionary contamination of insurrections by the European proletariat. The cause of the French proletariat is totally bound up with the cause of the European proletariat after four years of economic centralisation and concentration. The most dangerous enemies of the European and world working class are Anglo-American and Russian capitalisms, which do not intend to be dispossessed.

Workers, whatever the name you give your unitary organs, the example of the Russian Soviets of the 1917 October revolution must show you the way to power without compromise or opportunism.

Neither democracy nor Stalinism with their demagogy about “Bread, Peace and Liberty” can free you from the oppression and famine looming up, in a world where capitalism can bring only war.

Society is at a complete dead-end; the proletarian revolution is the only way out.

The first step to take is to break with the imperialist war through a clear class consciousness which proclaims above all the class struggle always and everywhere. The crisis of the world bourgeoisie, which has opened up in Italy and Germany, is forging the conditions and weapons favourable to the civil war, the spontaneous beginning of the revolution.

Workers!

Break with Anglo-mania, Americano-mania, Russo-mania.

Reject all patriotism, which can only serve capitalism.

Proclaim your class solidarity and organise for the victory of the revolution.

Break now with the parties that have betrayed the working class and led you into this imperialist war and want to keep you in it. Gaullism, social democracy, Stalinism, Trotskyism, these are the screens behind which the enemy class is trying to penetrate into your ranks in order to crush you.

Workers!

Salvation can only come from you, because history has given you all the possibilities of understanding your historic mission and the weapons to accomplish it.

Forward to the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war!

The Italian workers have shown you the way, it’s up to you to respond to the counter-revolution that is camouflaged in your own ranks!

The French Fraction of the Communist Left