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] [1].

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] [2]. 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] [3]. The movement extended over several days, leaving the German military powerless and involving more than 70,000 miners. The movement was savagely repressed [4] [4].

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] [5].

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] [6]. 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] [7]. 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] [8].

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] [9].

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] [10].

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] [11].

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] [12]. 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] [13].

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] [14]. 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] [15].

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] [16]. 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] [44].

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] [45]. 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] [46].

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] [47].

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] [48].

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] [49].

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] [50], 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] [51], 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] [52]. 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] [53], 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] [54].

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] [55]. 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] [56].

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] [57].

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] [58].

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] [59].

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] [60]. 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] [61]. 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] [62]. 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] [63].

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] [64].

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] [65].

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] [66]. 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] [67].

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] [68]. 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] [69].

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] [70].

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] [71].

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] [72].

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] [73].

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 [107]), 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