Misery spreads, unemployment gets worse, barbarism deepens: the communist revolution is an absolute necessity

For more than fifteen years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world has been making soothing speeches about the possibility, not to say imminence, of an end to the economic crisis. With each day that passes, reality gives the lie to these dishonest forecasts. Contrary to the speeches of the bourgeoisie, the world economy is today on the verge of a plunge into recession with an abrupt contraction of the world market, an unprecedented aggravation of an already bitter trade war. The present level of the capitalist economic crisis clearly reveals its fundamental cause: generalize a over-production. Inexorably, it is taking the form of the deepest degradation of its living conditions that humanity has ever known. Epidemics, malnutrition or outright famine are the daily lot of billions of human beings. In countries where capitalism is less developed, whole populations live in a veritable hell: 40,000 people die there every day. And this barbaric reality is progressively invading the more industrialized nations. Nations where whole sectors of productive apparatus are being dismantled and disappearing, throwing millions of workers onto the streets. Today 32 million of them are out of work, living on unemployment benefits that diminish drastically from one day to the next. In every country, the bourgeoisie is obliged to attack more and more frontally and massively the population, and especially the working class, through falling real wages and social benefits, pensions, health expenditure, etc. But generalized austerity and poverty is only one expression of the growing barbarity of an increasingly putrefied capitalism. The events at Chernobyl, the radio-active gas leak at the Hinkley Point power station (Britain), the 200,000 injured following the explosion at Bhopal (India). However sophisticated, capitalist production has become a destructive weapon in the hands of a bourgeoisie driven by a sharpening economic war to make the greatest possible profit at the expense of any kind of safety precaution, by pushing to their limit sources of energy that nobody really knows how to control.

Capitalism has always lived fully armed, but never more so than since the beginning of this century: two world wars are there to remind us.

But never before has there been such systematic and permanent use of armed forces, such constant fermentation of local conflicts. The wars that drag on in Lebanon, between Iran and Iraq, in Ethiopia, in Mozambique, Angola, are only the visible part of this enormous iceberg, this gangrene eating away at a rotting society. There are no limits to the degree of barbarity of decadent capitalism. The use of blind terror aimed at whole population, such as the US bombardment of the Tripoli city center, or the recent bombings in Paris during the month of October, is becoming a normal way for the different imperialist cliques to settle their scores, each defending its own sordid interests, its own national capital, its own imperialist masters.

All this misery, the blood and the dirt, reveals capitalism's advanced state of decomposition. Driven by its own contradictions, unable to surmount its economic crisis of over-production, capitalism threatens the whole of humanity with a still worse danger: a new generalized imperialist war.

This means that capitalism must be destroyed from top to bottom. The communist revolution stands revealed as a vital need for humanity, to sweep away forever all this decay, and to create world free from exploitation, poverty, and war. And this will bring to an end the prehistory of humanity.

A widely shared skepticism

Nowhere in the proletarian political milieu is there any difficulty in recognizing    and denouncing   the generalized barbarity of capitalism. Even groups of the "modernist" variety are no exception. Indeed, this is generally their favorite ground. All of them put forward the historic necessity of the communist revolution, and some modernist groups have even adopted evocative names such as "Le Communisme", "Les Fossoyeurs du Vieux Monde" ("The Gravediggers of the Old World"), etc. By contrast, when it comes down to the question of whether communism really has any chance of becoming a reality, It's a different matter altogether. Which force in society is capable of carrying out the communist revolution? What are the conditions necessary for its emergence? How far away from it are we? As soon as these questions are posed, the difficulties begin, and skepticism takes over.

As far as the largely informal "modernist swamp", outside the proletarian milieu, is concerned, permanent doubt is the rule. One meets together in seminars to discuss "alternative activities" (what could they be?!), one proclaims oneself "the Friends of Doubt", or "Ecology and Class Struggle". One proposes to discuss realization of communism through the "ecological struggle", "feminism" and such like idiocies. This terrain is even worse than it used to be: the Situationist International is well and truly buried. Everything is subject to doubt, but above all the only force capable of overthrowing capitalism: the working class. Getting stuck in this kind of interclassist movement means being outside marxism, outside the class struggle. In ‘A Contribution the Critique of Hegel's Right', supposedly one of his ‘youthful works', and a favorite dish of the modernists, Marx wrote:

"The possibility of radical revolution exists in the fact of the formation of a class within civil society, which is not a class of civil society, of a social group which is the dissolution of all groups. A sphere which possesses a character of universality, through the universality of its suffering, and which demands no right in particular, because it is not subjected to a particular injustice, but to injustice as such, which cannot take pride in any historic title, but only in a human title. Which is not exclusively in contradiction with the consequences, but in systematic contradiction with the preconditions of the German political regime. Of a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which in a word is the total loss of man, and which therefore cannot reconquer itself without the total reconquest of man. This dissolution of society, realized in one particular class, is the proletariat." It is the proletariat and none other, we should certainly add here.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that those who that reject the only force capable of overthrowing capitalist society end up as permanent skeptics, incapable of seeing the activity of the working class, and therefore totally unable to understand the development of the process of the class struggle. In the end, they consider the present, as does "La Banquise" (French modernist publication, whose title means literally "The Iced-Floe", in the form of an ice age, an epoch of deep-frozen revolution. As we have said, it is characteristic of the thoroughly heterogeneous petit-bourgeois classes to have no understanding of the historically revolutionary subject of modern society: the proletariat.

Crushed by the effects of the economic crisis on their day-to-day existence, but incapable of putting forward their own perspective, they are as a result particularly receptive to all the bourgeoisie's mystifications: pushed by revulsion at the living conditions imposed on them by capital, some of their members get stuck in the modernist swamp. But they are fundamentally marked by individualism, demoralization, and impatience; others cannot help but fall into the trap of terrorism. This is the only way to explain the existence of terrorist groups such as "Action Directe", the "Baader-Meinnof gang", or the Italian "Red Brigades"... Using terror to try and "shake" capitalism and to "wake up the proletariat" - seen as an amorphous and apathetic mass - they do nothing but prove their own impotence. Contrary to the ideas of these few misled individuals, such like purely spectacular actions do not in the least push the working class to struggle. By contrast, they are a great help in the bourgeoisie's permanent struggle against the proletariat. It is easy enough for the bourgeois, after each terrorist bombing and in the name of the security of the citizen, to develop and deploy its repressive arsenal: the army and the police. This allows them to prepare all the more effectively the direct repression of the working class and its revolutionary organizations. And indeed, this is why all these groups are infiltrated and manipulated by the secret services of the bourgeois state.

But while it is easy enough to explain this skepticism and lack of confidence in the proletariat - and even the desperate adventures of the terrorists - on the part of elements and currents coming from the petit-bourgeoisie, it is, by contrast, far more surprising that is similar skepticism should also exist, and just as strongly, within the proletarian political milieu. This reality takes different expressions in different groups, but it is a constant weakness that reigns throughout the movement.

For the FOR[1], the questions is apparently very simple: the proletariat is either revolutionary or it isn't, and contempt for the workers is uppermost. Alarme writes, on the struggle in the French shipyards: "What does this mean, yet again, if not that the unions take the working class for a bunch of idiots? And the worst of it is, in spite of a few outbursts without any content, that it works, as we can see from all the union comings and goings in the shipyards". In the no. 30 of its review, totally denying any link between the economic crisis and the class struggle, the FOR declares: "The main basis for our judgment of the world political situation is not the difficulties of capitalism, nor unemployment, nor any perspective of industrial reconversion, and still less the so-called crisis of over-production". All this would be pure economism, and therefore "in fact, a way of bowing to the logic and the mental contamination that capitalism wants to impose on us". Well and truly launched, the FOR continues: "The only real problem today is the enormous gap between what is objectivity possible, and the wretched subjective conditions". It would be difficult to be more contemptuous of the proletariat. But contrary to what the FOR chinks, the struggle against unemployment in the present period is one of the major factors in the unification of the workers' struggles. The economic struggle of the working class cannot be rejected like this, without falling into total impotence.

Writing on the 1902 strikes in the Caucasus, Rosa Luxemburg said this: "The crisis caused massive unemployment, which fed the discontent of the proletarian masses. In order to appease the workers' anger, the government therefore undertook progressively to send the "unnecessary labor" back to its home districts. This measure was to affect some 400 oil workers, and provoked a massive protest in Batoum. There were demonstrations, arrests, a bloody repression, and finally a political trial during which the struggle for partial and purely economic demands turned into a political and revolutionary event" ("Mass Strike, Party and Unions").

In the end, not understanding the general conditions necessary to the development of the workers' struggle can only mean succumbing to doubt as to the present, and running away into a hypothetical future. The communist revolution becomes a mirage. We come across this profound skepticism again in no. 4 of IBRP's[2] Communist Review: "Wherever they are, revolutionaries must develop revolutionary political consciousness within the working class and build a revolutionary organization. Such a task cannot wait for the generalized explosion of workers' struggles, and it remains necessary even in the event of war breaking out, for it is just as vital for the proletariat to organize against its own bourgeoisie in time of war as in time of peace". This comes down to saying that anything is possible in the present historical situation: the outbreak of a new world war as much as the communist revolution. But what would the outbreak of a generalized imperialist war mean for humanity as a whole?

Marxism has always rejected the view of history that understands war as being due to a too warlike human nature, so putting all wars on the same footing.

Without going too far back in history, it should be emphasized that wars in 19th century capitalist society were quite different in their causes, the way they were fought, and their implications, from the two generalized imperialist wars of the 20th century. The fundamental significance of 19th century wars lay in the need for ascendant capitalism to open new markets, and to unify them on an ever greater-scale.  This process was accompanied by the constitution of new competing capitalist states. These wars were, therefore, economically rational in an immediate sense. But this process of capitalist expansion was not without limits: limits that in reality were imposed by the creation of the world market. From then on imperialism, the struggle to the death between different capitalist states to extend their zone of influence, became the rule. War and militarism were transformed by the demands of this new reality. Through its own internal contradictions, decadent capitalism was thrust inexorably towards generalized war.

At the KPD's (German Communist Party) founding Congress in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg declared: "Historically, the dilemma facing humanity today is posed as follows: collapse into barbarity, or salvation through socialism. It is impossible for the World War to furnish the ruling classes with a new way out, for one no longer exists on the terrain of capitalist class domination (...) Socialism has become a necessity, not only because the proletariat can no longer live in a material conditions that the capitalist class offers it, but also because, if the proletariat does not carry out its class duty by creating socialism, the abyss will swallow us all, whoever we are". Singularly prophetic words, if we imagine the outbreak of a third World War.

While it is true that the two World Wars were followed by (relatively short) periods of  reconstruction that temporarily allowed capitalism to resume its economic growth, this does not all mean that these two generalized imperialist conflicts were "solutions" to the capitalist crisis, set in motion deliberately by the bourgeoisie. In reality, both were the result of an uncontrollable chain of events, which dragged the whole bourgeoisie remorselessly into the gulf. Economic collapse pushes capitalism towards world war, which itself is the most developed, absurd, and barbarous expression of the system's historic crisis. And the bourgeoisie can no more put a halt to the process that is pushing the world economy into a generalized crisis than it can to the chain of events leading towards a total imperialist war, nor indeed than it can control the use of the means of destruction at its disposal. During World War II, the bourgeoisie used all the weapons existing at the time. The result was the bombardment of London by the German army's V1's (ancestors of today's missiles), and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If today, the bourgeoisie is being inexorably pushed towards a third world war, there can be no doubt that this would mean the near-total destruction of all humanity, which highlights the absurdity of the idea that generalized imperialist wars in the period of capitalist decadence are economically rational for the bourgeoisie!

The massive use of every possible means of destruction (thermo-nuclear weapons, neutron bombs, ad nauseam) would then be inevitable. The bourgeoisie possesses an arsenal perfectly capable of wiping out all life on the planet's surface, reducing it to a true ice-age, according to the sinister ideas of La Banquise. To imagine that it would be possible to "transform the 3rd World War into a civil war", as the IBRP does today, is to reduce the communist revolution to the status of a miracle, and the creation of socialism to a utopia.

The proletariat is the only barrier to imperialist war: history's course towards generalized class confrontations

If we consider the general skepticism that reigns today in the proletarian political milieu - as well as in the modernist swamp - irrespective of the different ways in which it is expressed, or the nature of the groups where it appears, the most surprising thing is that not one of the groups concerned is aware of the apparent contradiction that exists today between the level reached by the economic crisis, the gigantic development of armaments, the constitution of two world-wide imperialist blocs, and the fact that in spite of everything, the 3rd generalized imperialist war has not yet broken out. We can only go beyond this apparent contradiction by taking into account the fact that the outbreak of a world war is only possible if the bourgeoisie can count, not only on the proletariat's neutrality, but on its active support, and its enrollment in support of the ruling class war-mongering and nationalist ideals.

In 194-18, it was only after a whole process of degeneration and betrayal by the whole Social-Democratic workers' parties that the proletariat could be mobilized for war. And yet, as early as 1917 mass movements broke out against the war. The proletarian October Revolution in Russia, the revolutionary movements in Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918-19, brought to the bourgeoisie's attention that a world war cannot be started simply with "the assurance of the proletariat's neutrality". This is why, before the 2nd World War, it took ten years for the bourgeoisie to complete the physical crushing and ideological disarmament of the working class, ten years of hard work by the Stalinist parties, still covered with the glory of their recent history within the workers' movement, ten years of bloody massacres perpetrated by the bourgeoisie's hired gangs. The result was the working class enrollment in the ranks of fascism and anti-fascism. The world war cannot break out until all working class resistance has been both physically and ideologically crushed.

Any organization whose vision is not limited to day-to-day events, that does not impose absurd ultimatum on the working class, that does not take pride in a grandiloquent skepticism, should be able to see that the situation in the present historical period is radically different. Since the eruption of a new cycle of open capitalist crisis at the end of the 60's, the proletariat has developed its struggle, thus laying the ground for the realization of its own historical perspective: the communist revolution which, without being inevitable, has become a real possibility, and humanity's only chance of survival.

At the end of the 60's, then, the world proletariat once again renewed its struggle on a historic scale. At first, during the period from 1968 to 1974 -- with May 68 in France, the ‘hot autumn' in Italy, and the 1970 confrontations in Poland -- the proletariat put an end to decades of particularly dark and bloody counter­revolution which had physically liquidated a good part of a whole generation of proletarians.

The fact that this first wave of struggles took place in a still relatively healthy economic situation left plenty of room for illusions within the working class, of the "Programme Commun" variety in France, or the "Historic Compromise" in Italy. The belief that the crisis was only a passing thing, due to ‘restructuring' was deeply anchored in the class. For the new generations of proletarians involved in these struggles, the practical experience of confrontation with the trade unions in the struggle itself was still to come. Illusions in the unions' ability to carry out a class fight still had a strong grip on the proletariat.

But already, and in spite of these limits, the few revolutionary minorities of the time still had the duty to indicate the profound changes taking place in the historical situation. After four years of relative calm, the years 1978-80 witnessed a new and significant development in the workers' struggle, which culminated in the 1980 mass strike in Poland. This second wave of struggles, developing in the face of much heavier attacks on workers' living conditions, revealed the evolution that had taken place within the proletariat. The combativity was stronger and more widespread than in the first wave of struggles, the illusions as to a possible quick end to the capitalist crisis weaker. The bourgeois mystifications of the "Programme Commun" or "Historic Compromise" variety, while still strong within the working class, were no longer enough to prevent the development of the proletariat's resistance.

To confront this situation of growing class combativity, the bourgeoisie was therefore forced to reorganize the whole of its political apparatus, and to set in motion the process whereby its left wing returned to opposition.

Beginning with the 1983 struggles in Belgium, the present 3rd wave of struggles marks an important step forward in the development of workers' consciousness and combativitv. If springs from massive attacks on the economic front, and several years of struggles sabotaged by the unions and the left in opposition. It has appeared at the heart of world capitalism, in the most industrialized countries, where the working class is most concentrated, in large scale movements involving hundreds of thousands of workers simultaneously (Denmark in 1985, Belgium, then Sweden, in 1986). All these movements have seen the development of concrete tendencies towards the unification of the struggle across different branches of industry -- private and state sectors, the unemployed, etc -- of workers' delegations sent to workers in different branches, of central demonstrations around common slogans and demands. Many of these struggles have begun spontaneously, without any instruct ions from the unions, thus revealing concretely the growing exhaustion of the bourgeoisie's means of control. Today's wave of struggles reveals the extent of the evolution that has taken place within the proletariat since the end of the 60's, and especially the working class disengagement, little by little from the grip of bourgeois ideology and the state. It is characteristic the bourgeoisie's calls to accept sacrifices today, with a view to a hypothetical future improvement find an ever-diminishing echo in the workers' ranks. The ideological campaigns over national liberation struggles (Nicaragua, Angola, etc), "pacifism", "anti-totalitarianism", have less and less effect on the working class, and in no way diminish its combativity.

The present wave of class struggles demonstrates the proletariat's growing determination to refuse more and more consciously the living conditions imposed on it by decadent capitalism; is thus preparing today for the future generalization of struggles in the mass strike. Faced with the proletarian threat, unable to improve the living conditions of those it exploits, but on the contrary forced to exploit them ever more ferociously, the bourgeoisie is developing to the utmost its forces of repression (the army, the police, etc), and further radicalizing its apparatus for controlling the workers' struggle. This state of affairs expresses the bourgeoisie's historic weakening as it has to confront growing movements of struggle. Its first priority is to smash the proletariat ideologically and physically. If the struggle is strong enough, if it continues to develop, then the logical outcome of a capitalism in worldwide crisis - world imperialist war -- is not possible.

Today, the course lies towards rising struggle: the generalization of the crisis remains the proletariat's main ally. Never in the past have conditions been so favorable. The division of the working class that existed in the first revolutionary wave begun in 1917, between workers from defeated and from victorious nations, no longer exists. In the present historical situation, the proletarian political milieu must have a firm confidence in the real possibilities open to the working class.

Skepticism is an attitude that diverts revolutionary organizations from today's tasks

It is obvious that the development of the class struggle is not a linear process. It is made up advances and retreats,    of moments of acceleration and partial defeats: "(The mass strikes) took on the dimensions of a large-scale movement, they did not end with an orderly retreat, but transformed themselves, sometimes into economic struggles, sometimes into street fighting, sometimes collapsing of themselves" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, Party, and Unions)

Nothing could be worse than to be swept to and fro by events, to lose confidence at every pause in the class struggle; to do so means losing the ability to judge the movement's general dynamic.

The road before us is still a long and difficult one; on this level, the worst is still to come for the working class. The present wave of struggle will continue to confront a bourgeoisie that is organized, and perfectly united against the proletariat. It will have to confront unions that will be more and more active within the workers' struggles, and an increasingly "radical" rank-and-file unionism.

It is because revolutionaries understand this reality, but also because conditions have never been so favorable to the workers' movement that they must at all costs avoid falling into skepticism. It can only divert them from the tasks before them.

Already today, the working class struggle is in need of revolutionaries' determined and well-adapted intervention. Whoever now lacks confidence in the working class reveals a profound under-estimation of the development of the class struggle. Such a vision leads to the search, as with the modernists, for cut-price consolation on interclassist ground, outside marxism and outside the class struggle. At best, for a revolutionary organization like the FOR, this means developing an abstract anti-unionism outside the real activity of the class. A permanent attention to the movement of the class struggle, meeting the needs of the combat through propositions adapted to the situation, assuming in fact the role of a class vanguard -- this is the duty of revolutionaries today.

This is the only way to verify in practice the validity   of communist positions: "The communist therefore, are on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement" (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).

PA

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[1] FOR: Alarme, BP 329, 75624 Paris Cedex 13, France

[2] IBRP: c/o CWO, PO Box 145, Head Post Office, Glasgow, Britain

Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism, Part 1

The increasingly apocalyptic character of social life all over the planet is neither a natural inevitability nor the product of so-called ‘human folly’, nor is it a characteristic of capitalism since its beginnings. It is an expression of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production which, having been from the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century a powerful factor in economic and social development, has transformed itself – by becoming locked up in its own contradictions – into a more and more powerful barrier to the continuation of this development.

Through this polemic with a group, the GCI[1] [3], which claims to be marxist but which violently rejects the idea of ‘decadence’, we are aiming to reaffirm the foundation of the analysis of the decadence of capitalism and its burning relevance in the mid-1980s, when the world proletariat is once again raising its head and preparing to engage in decisive battles for its emancipation.

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Why is humanity in the process of posing the question of whether it’s about to destroy itself in a growing barbarism, at a time when it has reached a level in the development of the productive forces which would allow it to move towards the realisation of a society without material scarcity, a unified society capable of modelling its life in accordance with its needs, its consciousness, its desires, for the first time in history?

Thus the proletariat, the world working class, constitute the revolutionary force capable of taking humanity out of the impasse in which capitalism has trapped it? And why can the forms of the proletarian struggle in our epoch no longer be those of the last century (trade unionism, parliamentarism, struggle for reforms, etc)? It’s impossible to keep one’s bearings in the present historic situation, let alone play a guiding, vanguard role in workers’ struggles, without having a global, coherent vision which enables one to respond to these elementary but crucial questions.

Marxism – historical materialism – is the only conception of the world that makes this possible. Its clear and simple response can be summarised in a few words : like the other modes of production which preceded it (primitive communism, oriental despotism, slavery, feudalism), capitalism is not an eternal system.

The appearance of capitalism, then its domination of the world, were the product of a whole evolution of humanity and of the development of the productive forces: as Marx put it, the hand mill corresponded to slavery, the water mill to feudalism, the steam-mill to capitalism. But at a certain degree in their development,  the capitalist relations of production were in their turn transformed into an obstacle to the development of the productive forces. From that point, humanity has been the prisoner of a totality of social relations which have become obsolete, unsuitable, condemned to a growing ‘barbarism’ in all areas of social life. The succession of crises, world wars, reconstructions, crises over the past 80 years is the clearest manifestation of this. This is the decadence of capitalism. From this point on the only way out is the utter destruction of these social relationships through a revolution which only the proletariat can lead, because it is the only class which is really antagonistic to capital; a revolution which can result in a communist society because capitalism has, for the first time in history, created the material means to realise it.

As long as capitalism played a historically progressive role in the development of the productive forces, proletarian struggles could not result in a victorious worldwide revolution, but they could, through trade unionism and parliamentarism, obtain real reforms and lasting improvements in the living conditions of the exploited class. At the point where the capitalist system entered into its decadent phase, the world communist revolution became a necessity and a possibility, and this completely changed the proletariat’s forms of combat, even on the level of the struggle for immediate demands, (the mass strike).

Since the days of the Communist International, founded on the crest of the international revolutionary wave which put an end to the first world war, this analysis of capitalism’s entry into its decadent phase has become the common patrimony of the communist currents which, thanks to this ‘historical compass’, have managed to remain on a coherent and intransigent class terrain. The ICC has merely taken up and developed this patrimony as transmitted and enriched by the work of the German Left, the Italian Left (Bilan) in the ‘30s, then by the Gauche Communiste de France (Internationalisme) in the ‘40s.[2] [4]

Today, at a time when, under the pressure of an unprecedented economic crisis which, for more than 15 years, has been accelerating the manifestations of decadence and exacerbating class antagonisms, the world proletariat has returned to the path of struggle, is confronting a thousand difficulties and a thousand weapons of the ruling class, but with an international simultaneity never before seen – at such a time, it is crucial that revolutionary organisations are equal to their tasks.

Because we are heading towards decisive struggles, it is more than ever indispensable that the proletariat reappropriates its own conception of the world, as elaborated over nearly two centuries of workers’ struggles and of theoretical elaboration by political organisations.

More than ever, it is indispensable that the proletariat understands that the present acceleration of barbarism, the uninterrupted exacerbation of exploitation, are not ‘naturally’ pre-destined, but are the consequences of the capitalist economic and social laws which still rule over the world even though they have been historically obsolete since the beginning of the century.

More than ever, it is indispensable that the working class understands that the forms of struggle it learned last century (the struggle for reforms, support for the constitution of big nation states – poles of accumulation for a developing capitalism), while they had a meaning when the bourgeoisie was still developing historically and could tolerate the existence of an organised proletariat within society, can in decadent capitalism only lead it into an impasse.

More than ever, it is crucial that the proletariat understands that the communist revolution is not a dream, a utopia, but a necessity and a possibility which has its scientific foundations in the understanding of the decadence of the dominant mode of production, a decadence which is accelerating in front of its eyes.

“There can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory” as Lenin said. This idea has to be reaffirmed all the more today when the ruling class no longer defends itself on the ideological level through elaborating new theories with a minimum of consistency, but through a sort of ‘nihilism’ of consciousness, the rejection of any theory as ‘ideological fanaticism’. Taking advantage of the exploited class’ justifiable distrust towards the theories of the ‘left’ which, from social democracy to Stalinism, have been used for decades as instruments of the counter-revolution; incapable of finding any future to offer in a decomposing social reality, the ruling class has nothing to offer except ‘ostrich politics’: not to think, resignation, fatalism.

When the bourgeoisie was a historically revolutionary class it gave rise to men like Hegel who opened doors essential to understanding the evolution of humanity; when it stabilised its power in the second half of the 19th century, it regressed to positivist conceptions like those of Auguste Compte. Today, it no longer even produces philosophers who lay any claim to an understanding of history. The dominant ideology is nothingness, the negation of consciousness.

But just as this negation of consciousness is the expression of decadence which in turn becomes an instrument for the defence of the ruling class, so for the revolutionary class a consciousness of its historic being is a vital instrument for its struggle.

THE ‘ANTI-DECADENTISTS’

What pre-occupies is here is that this tendency towards the nihilism of consciousness also manifests itself in proletarian political groups... often, paradoxically, in the ones with theoretical pretensions.

Thus, at the end of 1985, the GCI published in no. 23 of its organ Le Communiste an article whose content is illustrated perfectly by the second part of its title: ‘Theories of Decadence; Decadence of Theory’. This text, written in a pretentious language with a marxist ring, citing Marx and Engels left and right, claims to destroy what it call the ‘decadentist theories”, whose defenders it ranges alongside “all the reactionary Jakals moaning about the ‘decadence of the west’ from the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the ‘New Philosophers’, and from the Europeo-Centrist Neo-Nazis to the Moonies.”

This text achieves the feat of concentrating in 15 pages the main incomprehensions which you find in the history of the workers’ movement concerning the historic evolution of capitalism and the objective bases for the emergence of a communist society. The result is a soup which is as pedantic as it is uncooked, and which mixes together all the themes that Marx fought so hard against – those of Utopian socialism, of anarchism... and, in modern times, the Bordigist theory from the ‘50s about the ‘invariance of marxism and the continuous development of capitalism since 1848!

Our aim here will be to expose the main aberrations in this document, not so much for the GCI in itself, whose involution towards incoherence is of strictly limited interest, but because its defence of certain class positions, its radical language and its theoretical pretensions can sow illusions among new elements looking for something coherent – among others, those who come out of anarchism[3] [5].

This will enable us to reaffirm some basic elements in the marxist analysis of the evolution of societies, and thus to show what is meant by the decadence of capitalism.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS HISTORICAL EVOLUTION? WAS THERE AN ASCENDANT PHASE OF CAPITALISM?

The GCI is not modest. Like Duhring who claimed to be transforming science, the GCI transforms marxism. It wants to be marxist, but only on the condition that it can reject into the camp of the “reactionary jackals” all those who since the 2nd International have enriched marxism by analysing the causes and the evolution of the decadence of capitalism... and, as we shall see, by ignoring or totally altering the work of Marx himself.

The great discover of the GCI, the one which puts the Bolsheviks, the Spartacists, the German Left in the KAPD, the Italian Left in Bilan at the same level as the Moonies – since all of them shared and elaborated the analysis of the decadence of capitalism – the GCI’s great truth amounts to this: there is no decadence of capitalism because there never was an ascendant ‘progressive’ phase of capitalism. There is no barbarism of decadence because capitalism has always been barbaric.

Well, well: and what about the pre-marxist socialists and their anarchist descendants, who never understood the point of spending one’s time reflecting on the laws of historical evolution, since it was enough to ‘rebel’, and communism had always been on the historical agenda : was it not these currents who said exactly the same thing against marxism?

But let’s take a closer look at the GCI’s main arguments:

“Nearly all the groups who today claim to defend the communist perspective adhere to the decadentist vision, not only of the capitalist mode of production but of the whole succession of class societies (the cycle of value), and this thanks to numerous ‘theories’ going from the ‘saturation of the markets’ to ‘Imperialism Highest Stage of Capitalism’, from the ‘third age of capitalism’ to ‘real domination’, from the ‘halt in the development of the productive forces’ to the ‘falling rate of profit’...What interests us here initially is the common content of all these theories: the moralising and civilising vision they involve,” (‘Theories of Decadence: Decadence No less of Theory’, Le Communiste 23, November 1985).

In what way does saying that capitalist relations of production became at a given moment a barrier to the development of the productive forces express a “moralising and civilising conception,”? Because this implies that there was a time when this wasn’t the case and when these relations constituted a progression, a step forward in history. In other words, that there was an ‘ascendant’ phase of capitalism. Now, for the GCI, this progress was merely the reinforcement of exploitation.

“We have to see how the forced march of progress and civilisation has always meant more exploitation, the production of surplus labour (and for capitalism alone the transformation of this surplus labour into surplus value; in other words, the real affirmation of barbarism through the increasingly totalitarian domination of value,” (ibid: the GCI uses the term ‘barbarism’ here without knowing what it means we’ll return to this). That capitalism has always been a system of exploitation – the most complete and pitiless of all – is neither false nor new, but to leave things here is to join up with the idealist vision – ‘moral’ in the true sense – according to which only those things which immediately advance ‘social justice’ count as progress in history. It certainly does not explain why affirming that the emergence of this mode of exploitation marked a historical progression is proof of a ‘moralising and civilising vision’. The GCI then explains that:

“The bourgeoisie presents all the modes of production which preceded it as ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ and, as historical evolution moves on, they become progressively ‘civilised’. The capitalist mode of production, of course, is the final and highest incarnation of Civilisation and Progress. The evolutionist vision thus corresponds to the ‘capitalist social being’, and it’s not for nothing that this vision has been applied to all the sciences (ie all the partial interpretations of reality from the bourgeois point of view) : the science of nature (Darwin), demography (Malthus), Logical history, philosophy (Hegel)...” (ibid).

At the beginning of its text, in large letters, the GCI has this ambitious sub-heading: “First contribution: methodology.” The morsel we’ve just cited is only a taste of what it offers us in this domain.

“The bourgeoisie,” the GCI says, “presents the capitalist mode of production as the final and highest incarnation of Civilisation and Progress.” There it concludes that “the evolutionist vision corresponds to the ‘capitalist social being’.”

This is well below the most stupid syllogism. With a ‘methodology’ like this, why not think that the ‘fixist’ theories (‘nothing new under the sun’) correspond to the ‘social being of the proletariat’? The bourgeoisie said that the world moves and that history evolves. The GCI deduced that because it’s the bourgeoisie which said this, it must be false: thus, the world does not evolve. However aberrant this may seem, this is what the GCI’s ‘method’ leads to, as we shall see later on with regard to its vision of ‘invariance’.

Marxism obviously rejects the idea that capitalism represents the culmination of human evolution. But it does not at all reject the idea that human history has followed an evolution which can be rationally explained and whose laws can be discovered. In their day Marx and Engels recognised the scientific merit of Darwin and always laid claim to the rational kernel of the Hegelian dialectic (Malthus, whom the GCI throws in here, has nothing to do with this). They were able to see in these efforts to define an evolution, a dynamic vision of history, the expression of the bourgeois struggle to defend its power against feudal reaction, with all the advances and limitations involved in this. This is how Engels talks about Darwin in Anti-Duhring:

“In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years,” (Chapter 1)

And about Hegel:

“From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgement of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself,” (ibid).

What marxism rejects in Hegel’s vision is its still idealist character (history as no more than the realisation of the Idea of history), its bourgeois limitations (the capitalist state as the incarnation of Reason), and quite clearly not the idea that there is a historical evolution which goes through necessary stages. On the contrary, Marx had the merit of discovering the guiding thread to the evolution of human societies and of founding the necessity for communism on this basis:

“In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production...

“In broad outline we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production... With this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society comes to an end.” (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

HAS COMMUNISM ALWAYS BEEN ON THE AGENDA OF HISTORY?

In its ‘anti-decadentist’ delirium, the GCI considers that those who today defend the analysis of the decadence of capitalism only talk about the decline of capitalism in our epoch in order to be ‘pro-capitalist’ ... a century ago! 

“The decadentists are thus pro-slavery up till a certain date, pro-feudal up till another ...pro-capitalist until 1914! Thus, because of their cult of progress, they are at every step opposed to the class war waged by the exploited, opposed to the communist movements which had the misfortune of breaking out in the ‘wrong’ period,” (ibid).

With a great air of radicalism, the GCI does no more than revive the idealist vision which holds that communism has been on the agenda at any moment.

We won’t enter here into the question of the specificities of the proletarian combat during the ascendant phase of capitalism, but why is it that the Communist Manifesto says :

“In the beginning... the proletarians do not yet combat their own enemies, but the enemies of their enemies – the residues of absolute monarchy, the great landowners, the non-industrial bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie."

Why and how did workers’ struggles in the phase that followed take on the objective of the conquest of reforms and the “wider and wider union of the workers”? Why were trade unionism, mass parties, social democracy at the end of the 19th century proletarian instruments...? In another article, devoted specifically to the question of the proletarian nature of social democracy, we will examine all these forms of struggle which the GCI is incapable of understanding and rejects as bourgeois a century afterwards.

For the moment, what’s most important, what has to be understood first, is the marxist conception of history and the conditions for the communist revolution.

Marx, the marxists, have never restricted themselves to saying that capitalism is a system of exploitation which had to be destroyed and which never should have existed, since communism is possible at any moment. It was on this question that marxism constituted a break with ‘utopian’ or ‘sentimental’ socialism; it was on this question that the break took place between marxism and anarchism. The question was also the object of the debate between Marx and Weitling in 1846 which resulted in the constitution of the first marxist political organisation: the Communist League. For Weitling: “either humanity is, necessarily, always, ripe for the revolution or it will never be,” (cited by Nicolaievski, Marx : Man and Fighter,  chapter X).

It was this same problem that was at the basis of the divergence between Marx/Engels and the Willich/Schapper tendency inside the Communist League in 1850. As Marx put it:

“For the critical conception, the minority substitutes a dogmatic conception, for the materialist conception, it substitutes on idealist conception. Instead of real conditions, it considers mere will to be the motor of the revolution,” (Proceedings of the session of the central committee, 15 Sept 1850, cited in Nicolaievski, chapter XV).

What the GCI is rejecting is the conception of historical materialism, of scientific socialism. This is how Engels in Anti-Duhring dealt with a fundamental aspect of the conditions for communism:

“The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labour only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labour engages all or almost all the times of the great majority of the members of society – so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes.. But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces,” (Part III, Chapter 2).

It was in this sense that Marx spoke of the ‘wonders’ accomplished by the bourgeoisie and of  ‘the great civilising influence of capital,’:

“It (the bourgeoisie) has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades,” Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois and Proletarians’).

“Hence the great civilising influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatory. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself,”  (Grundrisse, ‘The Chapter on Capital’).

If the GCI was consistent, if it had any concern for theoretical coherence, it wouldn’t hesitate to throw into the bourgeois dustbin not only the communist lefts, Trotsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, and the whole 2nd International, but also old Marx and Engels, for being fierce defenders of what it calls ‘evolutionist’ and ‘civilising’ conceptions.

Then perhaps the RAIA group, which has done its own deepening on the ‘Marx-Bakunin’ question, could make it understand that what it defends is none other than the old, insipid refrain of utopianism and anarchism, garnished – for who knows what reason – with a marxist verbiage.

THE DECADENCE OF CAPITALIST : “A PERIOD OF SOCIAL REVOLUTION”

At what point does the communist revolution become a historical possibility? Marx replies:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forces of development of the forces of production, these relations turn into their fetters. Then occurs a period of social revolution,” (Preface to a Contribution...)

Marxism doesn’t say that the communist revolution becomes objectively possible at a given day or hour. It determines the general conditions – at the level of what constitutes the skeleton of society, the economy – that characterise a ‘period’, an historical era in which capitalism confronts its own contradictions in a qualitatively different manner, and transforms itself into a fetter on the development of the productive forces.

The principal manifestations of this new historical situation are located at the economic level (economic crisis, slow-down in the growth of the productive forces). But also at the level of other aspects of social life which, in the last instance, are influenced by society’s economic life. Marx talked about:

“...the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out,” (ibid).

At several points during the second half of the 19th century Marx and Engels believed that capitalism had reached this point, in particular during the various cyclical economic crises which shook the system during this period. But on each occasion they were able to recognise that this was not al all the case. Thus, in 1850, after the economic and social crisis of 1848 had been left behind, Marx wrote:

“While this general prosperity lasts, enabling the productive forces of bourgeois society to develop to the full extent possible within the bourgeois system, there can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at a time when two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production... A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself,” (The Class Struggle In France).

In reality, until the beginning of the 20th century, the crises of capitalism were still crises of growth which were rapidly surmounted by the system. It was only with the first world war that striking and unequivocal symptoms could be seen of capitalism arriving at a point where its internal contradictions had reached a qualitatively different level.

The revolutionary marxists, the left of the 2nd International – the same ones who for years had fought against the revisionist currents (Berstein) who had theorised the idea that capitalism would no longer go through crises and that we could get to socialism through a gradual and peaceful evolution – recognised without hesitation the appearance of a new historical situation: capitalism’s entry into its period of decline.

The outbreak of the Russian Revolution, then the international revolutionary wave which followed it, confirmed the marxist perspective in no uncertain terms. It’s from this analysis that we claim descent today: an analysis which 70 years marked by two world wars, two phases of reconstruction and two periods of world economic crisis (1929-39, 1967-87), 70 years of unprecedented barbarism across the whole planet, have verified in full.

A SENSELESS CRITICISM

In order to reject this analysis, the GCI begins by attributing to the ‘decadentists’ an absurd idea which it simply makes up and then criticises at great length. Before going on to their arguments about ‘invariance’, let’s first of all deal quickly with this pitiful manoeuvre.

The GCI pretends that the analysis of decadence holds that during the ascendant phase of capitalism, the system didn’t have any contradictions; these contradictions only appear during the decadent phase. It thus replies:

“There are not therefore two phases: one in which the class contradiction (in other words, the contradiction between ‘social productive force and relation of production’) do not exist: a progressive phase in which the ‘new’ mode of production develops its civilising benefits without antagonisms... and a phase in which, after this ‘progressive’ development of its benefits, it becomes obsolescent and begins to decline, only at this point involving the emergence of a class antagonism.”

This is what we wrote on this question in our pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism:

“Marx and Engels had the genius to extract from the crises of capitalism’s ascendancy the essence of all crises to come. In so doing, they revealed to future generations the bases of capitalism’s most profound convulsions. They were able to do so because from its beginning a social form carries inside itself the seeds of all the contradictions which will carry it to its death.”

The GCI doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

‘INVARIANCE’

Having rejected, with the analysis of the decadence of capitalism, all the consistent marxist currents for over half a century, but afraid of recognising itself as anarchist, the GCI has gone looking in Bordiga’s theories from the ‘50s for a ‘marxist’ justification for its libertarian ramblings: this is the theory of ‘the invariance of the communist programme since 1848’.

The paradox is only an apparent one. Anarchism, which ignores historical evolution in general, can accommodate itself with the Bordigist view which, under the pretext of ‘invariance’, ignores the fundamental changes which marked the evolution of capitalism since its origins.

However, as aberrant as Bordiga’s theory might be, it does at least have the merit of having a certain coherence with the political positions it supports: Bordigism considers that the forms of struggle of the 19th century, such as trade unionism or support for the constitution of new states, are still valid in our epoch. For the GCI, on the other hand, which rejects these forms of struggle, the theory becomes a source of incoherence. It is thus compelled to place 19th century social democracy in the came of the bourgeoisie, and to invent an anti-trade unionist, anti-parliamentarian, anti-social democratic Marx, a bit like Stalinism reinvented the history of the Russian revolution in accordance with the needs of its immediate policy.

But let’s look a bit closer at Bordiga’s critique of the theory of decadence and his analysis of the evolution of capitalism, behind which the GCI tries to hide its regression towards anarchism. [4] [6] Bordiga, whom the GCI cites in the article in question, wrote as follows:

“The theory of the descending curve compares historical development to a sinusoid: every regime, the bourgeois regime for example, begins with a rising phase, reaches a maximum, begins to decline towards a minimum; after this another regime begins its ascent. This is the vision of gradualist reformism: no convulsions, no leap, no jump. The marxist vision can (in the interests of clarity and conciseness) be represented as a number of branches of curves, all ascending until they reach the top (in geometry: the singular point or cusp), after which there comes a sudden and violent fall and, at the bottom, a new social regime arises; we have another historic ascending branch... The current affirmation that capitalism is in its descending branch can only lead to two errors: one fatalist the other gradualist,” (Rome meeting, 1951). Elsewhere Bordiga wrote:  “For Marx, capitalism grows without stopping, beyond all limits,” (Dialogue with the Dead).

Before replying to these fantastic accusations of ‘gradualism’ and ‘fatalism’. let’s briefly confront Bordiga’s vision with reality.

First, an important remark: Bordiga talks about the ascending or descending ‘curve’ of a regime. Let’s make it clear that when marxists talk about an ‘ascendant’ or decadent’ phase, this isn’t a simple matter of a statistical series measuring production in itself. If you want to look at production as an element for determining whether or not a mode of production is in its decadent phase – ie establishing whether or not the relations of production are a fetter on the development of the productive forces – you first have to know what production you’re talking about: the production of arms or of other unproductive goods and services is not a sign of the development of the productive forces, but on the contrary, of their destruction; secondly, it’s not the level of production in itself which is significant, but its rhythm of development, and this not in the absolute, but obviously in relation to the material possibilities acquired by society.

Having made this clear, we can see that when Bordiga affirms that “the marxist vision” (of which he claims to be the ‘invariable’ defender) “can be represented as a number of branches of curves, all ascending till they reach the top... after which there comes a sudden and violent fall,” he comes up with two falsifications.

It’s false to affirm that this is the marxist vision. Marx expressed himself very clearly on the end of feudalism and the birth of capitalism, in a text that is known well enough: The Communist Manifesto:

“...the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal  organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of prosperity, became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder,” (‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’).

This however was a very different situation from the one which accompanies the end of capitalism, since communism can’t begin to be built within the old society. But in the case of feudalism as in that of capitalism, the overturning of the existing social relations is posed when the latter become a “fetter”, when they hold back economic development instead of taking it forward.

It’s also quite false to affirm that history has unfolded through following a schema of a series of ever-ascending branches. Particularly in the case which interests us most – capitalisms.

You’d have to be blinded or dazzled by the immediatist, deceptive propaganda of the decadent bourgeoisie if you can’t see the difference between capitalism since the first world war and 19th century capitalism, or to say that capitalist relations of production are no more a fetter on the development of the productive forces in the 20th century than they were in the 19th.

Economic crises, wars, the weight of unproductive expenditure – all this existed in the 19th century as well as the 20th, but the difference between the two epochs is so great quantitatively that it becomes ‘qualitative’. (The GCI, which uses the word ‘dialectic’ all over its text, must at least have heard of the transformation of quantity into quality).

The blockage on the development of the productive forces represented by the destruction and waste of material and human resources in two world wars is ‘qualitatively’ different from what took place, for example, in the Crimean War (1853-56) or the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). As for economic crises, those of 1929-39 and 1967-87 are hardly comparable to the cyclical crises of the second half of the 19th century, both in their international extent and their duration (see the article ‘The Proletarian Struggle in Decadent Capitalism’ in IR 23, which deals with this specific question). And regarding the weight of unproductive expenditure, its sterilising effect on production is also qualitatively different from what existed in the 19th century.

- the permanent production of arms, scientific research oriented towards military ends, the upkeep of armies (in 1985, the official government figures registered that on a world scale, more than 1.5 million dollars were being spent on military items every minute!);

- unproductive services (banks, insurance, most of the state administration, advertising, etc.).

* * * * *

The GCI cites a few figures on the growth of production in the 19th and 20th century, which are supposed to demonstrate the opposite. We can’t go into details here (see the pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism). But a few remarks have to be made.

The GCI’s figures compare production between 1950 and 972 with that between 1870 and 1914. This is a fairly crude mystification. You only have to compare what can be compared for the argument to collapse. If instead of considering the above dates, which exclude 1914-1949 from the phase of decadence (ie two world wars and the crisis of the ‘30s!), you compare the period 1840-1914 with 1914-’83, the difference gets annulled... But what’s more, production in the 19th century was basically the production of means of production and of consumption, whereas in the 20th century it includes an ever-growing proportion of means of destruction or other unproductive elements (today there is an accumulated destructive power equivalent to 4 tonnes of dynamite for every human being; and in the ‘accounting’ done by the state, a state functionary is considered to ‘produce’ the equivalent at his wage). Finally, and above all, the comparison between the production actually realised and what could have been done given the level of technique existing in this period is totally ignored.

But apart from the falsifications contained in the assertion that “for Marx, capitalism grows without stopping, beyond all limits”, Bordiga’s view turns its back on the marxist, materialist foundations of the possibility of revolution. If “capitalism grows without stopping, beyond all limits.” why would hundreds of millions of men one day decide to risk their lives in a civil war to replace one system with another? As Engels said:

“So long as a mode of production still describes on ascending curve of development, it is enthusiastically welcomed even by those who come worst off from its corresponding mode of distribution.” (Anti-Duhring, Part 2, ‘Subject Matter and Method’).

GRADUALISM AND FATALISM

‘Gradualism’ is the theory that claims that social transformation can and must only come about slowly through a series of small changes: “No convulsions, no leap, no jump,” as Bordiga says. The analysis of decadence says that this is “an epoch of wars and revolutions,” (Manifesto of the Communist International).  Unless you call wars and revolutions painless, gentle change, Bordiga and the GCI are just playing with words.

As far as the accusation of ‘fatalism’, it is no more serious than the preceding one.

Marxism doesn’t say that the revolution is inevitable. It does not deny that will is a factor in history, but shows that it is not enough, that it is realised in a material framework produced by a historical evolution which has to be taken into account if it is to be effective. The importance that marxism ascribes to understanding the ‘real conditions’, the ‘objective conditions’ is not the negation of consciousness and will, but on the contrary the only consistent affirmation of these factors. An obvious proof of this is the importance attributed to communist propaganda and agitation.

There is no inevitable evolution of consciousness in the class. The communist revolution is the first revolution in history in which consciousness really plays a determining role, and it is no more inevitable than the evolution of this consciousness.

On the other hand, economic evolution follows objective laws which, as long as humanity lives in material scarcity, imposes itself on men independent of their will.

In the battle waged by the left in the 2nd International against revisionist theories, the question of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist economy was at the centre of the debate as can be gauged by the importance Rosa Luxemburg gave to this question in Reform or Revolution, a work saluted by the whole left, in Germany as well as Russia (Lenin in particular).

Bordiga’s ‘marxist’ religious orthodoxy ignores Marx and Engels, who wrote without any fear that:

“The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself  the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.” (Marx, Grundrisse, ‘The Chapter on Capital’), and again:

“The capitalist mode of production.... through its own evolution, tends towards the point where it renders itself impossible,” (Engels, Anti-Duhring, Part 2, ‘Subject Matter and Method’).

What marxism insists upon is not that the triumph of the communist revolution is inevitable, but that, if the proletariat is not equal to its historic mission, the future is not a capitalism which “grows without stopping, beyond all limits”, as Bordiga claimed, but Barbarism – real barbarism: the kind which has developed ceaselessly since 1914; the kind whose images include Verdun, Hiroshima, Biafra, the Iran-Iraq war, the last twenty years of uninterrupted increase in unemployment in the industrialised countries, and the threat of a nuclear war that would wipe out the human race.

Socialism or barbarism: to understand that this is the alternative for humanity is to understand the decadence of capitalism.

The Dutch Left (1914-16)

From Tribunism to Communism

Against World War I and the Collapse of Social-Democracy

 

We are publishing here the latest chapters in our series on the Dutch Left, which has already appeared in previous issues of the International Review. The period dealt with in this new series of articles goes from 1914 to the early 1920's: the outbreak of World War I, the Russian revolution, and the revolutionary wave in Western Europe. This first part concerns the attitude of the "Tribunist" current during the First World War.

Although the Netherlands remained neutral during World War I, and so were spared its terrible bloodshed and material destruction, the war remained a constant nightmare for the population. The invasion of Belgium brought the fighting right up to the Butch border. As the war dragged on, the Dutch bourgeoisie's involvement in the war appeared inevitable, either on Germany's side or the Allies'. As in other countries, the socialist movement thus had to determine clearly either its support for, or its struggle against its own government.

In reality, the ‘neutrality' of countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, or Norway was often no more than a facade: they remained discreetly pro-German. But this orientation was all the more discreet in that they made money trading with both sides. More important, the bourgeoisie was deeply divided into two, often equally matched, factions: one pro-German (the Triple Alliance), the other pro-Entente.

In Holland, mobilization was ordered very early, in preparation for entry into the war. For the bourgeoisie, this was above all a means to test both the workers' readiness for an eventual war, and the Social-Democracy's degree of integration into the national state.

As in most of the belligerent countries, the official Social-Democracy joined the nationalist camp. The SDAP crossed the Rubicon by disowning the internationalism still proclaimed in its program. At the very outset of war, Troelstra declared himself "by principal on the side of the government". On 3rd August 1914, even before the German Social-Democracy, the SDAP voted for war credits. It announced clearly its readiness for the "Sacred Union" with the Dutch bourgeoisie: "the national idea is superior to national differences", Troelstra declared in Parliament.

However, although engaged in a "Sacred Union" alongside the government, the SDAP's international policy made it appear "neutral". The SDAP did not declare openly for the German camp, although the majority of the party, and Troelstra in particular, inclined towards the Triple Alliance. It is true that a significant minority around Vliegen and Van der Goes was openly pro-Entente....

The SDAP's tactic consisted in giving new life to the 2nd International, an International broken up into national parties, after falling apart in August 1914 when its major member parties voted for war credits. Troelstra managed to have the international Socialist Bureau, which the French socialist refuse to join, removed to The Hague where it fell under control of the SDAP and .... German Social-Democracy. As for calling a conference of parties from the neutral countries, Troelstra's party would have nothing to do with it.

Nonetheless, the SDAP's pseudo-neutrality in international politics allowed it to avoid the shock of multiple splits. The Dutch proletariat remained resolutely anti-war throughout its duration. Although it never crossed the border, the war meant a drastic drop in Dutch workers' living conditions: the suffocation of the national economy rapidly caused a considerable rise in unemployment. By the end of 1914, there were 40,000 unemployed in Amsterdam. Staple products were rationed very early on. For most workers, the reality of the World War was ever greater misery and unemployment. The massacre's extension to Holland was an ever-present danger: by ordering a general mobilization in August 1914, the government enrolled thousands of workers in the army, with the constant threat of participation in the World War hanging over them. To make this possible, a permanent barrage of propaganda was kept up in favor of the "Sacred Union", and for an end to strikes.

Threatened with the horrors of the battlefield and subjected to deepening poverty, the Dutch proletariat proved its combativity. Strikes such as that of 10,000 Amsterdam diamond workers broke out. Already in 1915, and throughout the duration of the war, demonstrations took to the streets in protest at the cost of living. The audience for meetings against the war and its effects was increasingly attentive and combative.

It should moreover be noted that, right from the start, anti-militarist and internationalist ideas gained a wide hearing within the working class. From the beginning of the century, a well organized anti-militarism had been developing in Holland, under the influence of Nieuwenhuis. The International Anti-Militarist Association (IAMV) had been founded in Amsterdam in 1904. Its Dutch section, which published the review De Wapens Neder (Down with weapons!) was the most active in the Association. Under the authority of Nieuwenhuis, it was never tainted with pacifism. Although remaining libertarian, it had links with the SDP, as well as with Nieuwenhuis' libertarian movement. For a country the size of Holland, the review had a wide circulation: more than 950,000 copies. Alongside the      anti‑militarist movement, the revolutionary syndicalist current also experienced a new upsurge: during the war, membership of the NAS grew from 10,000 to 30,000.

Nor did the SDP remain inactive. On 1st August 1914, De Tribune declared "war on war". A manifesto published in December 1914 calling for the    demobilization of the Dutch army demonstrated the party's intention to conduct a vigorous anti-war propaganda.

However, the SDP's policy was far from clear, and even revealed a movement away from intransigent marxist positions. In August 1914, the SDP had decided to take part, alongside other organizations -- the NAS and the IAMV -- in the formation of an alliance of organizations known as the "Workers' Action Unions' (SAV). This alliance, into which the SDP dissolved itself, appeared in the end less an organization for the revolutionary struggle against the war than an anti-militarist alliance with inevitably pacifist undertones, for lack of a clear
position on the struggle for revolution.

Within the SDP, moreover, a part of the leadership defended positions foreign to the original intransigence of Tribunism. Thus, Van Ravesteyn, amongst others, called for the ‘arming of the people' in the case of an invasion of the Netherlands. This position was already an old one within the 2nd International; it tried to reconcile the irreconcilable: internationalism and patriotism, which the arming of the "people" was to transform into "workers' patriotism". During the war, even revolutionaries as intransigent   as Rosa Luxemburg did not escape this conception inherited from the period of bourgeois revolutions, which led directly to support for one or other imperialist camp. But for Rosa Luxemburg, this passing ambiguity was rapidly overcome by an absolutely unambiguous rejection of all national wars in the imperialist epoch.

In reality, behind Van Ravesteyn's conception lay the idea of the national defense of little countries threatened by the "great" countries. This conception led inevitably to the defense of the imperialist camp that supported the little countries in question. It was this implicit idea of a "just" war that the Serbian socialists had rejected forcefully in August 1914 by refusing to vote war credits, and pronouncing themselves for internationalism and the international revolution.

Only after a bitter struggle on Gorter's part was the idea of a national defense of small countries plunged into a generalized conflict explicitly condemned. A resolution written by Gorter, known as the "Bussum Resolution", was proposed and adopted at the party's June 1915 Congress. It marked the rejection of Van Ravesteyn's position. In the same resolution, Gorter included the rejection of pacifism, which without ever becoming explicit had infiltrated the SDP under cover of an apparently radical, but in fact anarchist language. Gorter particularly attacked the Groningen section which, like the anarchists, declared that, as a matter of principle, it "fought against and rejected all military organization, and all military expenditure".

In reality, by its abstract purism, this kind of position simply evacuated the question of the proletarian revolution. With this vision, the revolution could only be a pacific one, without posing the question of the arming of the workers before the seizure of power, and therefore of the workers' military organization. Such a position, moreover, denied the need for arms production after the seizure of power in order to defend the new revolutionary power against the counter-revolution in case of civil war.

Lastly, the SDP's acceptance of the Groningen section's position would have meant a slide towards pacifism -- a danger all the greater in that the party was involved in an alliance with anarchist organizations, whose orientation was more pacifist than revolutionary. This is why Gorter's resolution, carried by 432 votes to 26, unambiguously condemned pacifist ideology, however anti-militarist, as leading to the abandon of the revolutionary struggle for the armed power of the proletariat: "If one day the workers hold power, they must defend it by force".

These political waverings within the SDP contrasted with its theoretical positions on the World War, whose orientation was the same that defended by the revolutionary left in Russia and Germany. But these were more Gorter's own work than that of the party as a whole. In the end, Gorter's influence, like Pannekoek's, was greater in the international revolutionary movement than in his own party.

At the beginning of the war, Gorter, along with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, was the marxist theoretician who explained most coherently the underlying causes of the international's death, and the nature of war in the imperialist epoch, so drawing out the practical implications for the revolutionary struggle to come.

In December 1914, the SDP's publishing house brought out Gorter's major theoretical and political contribution to the struggle against the war: "Imperialism, the World War, and the Social-Democracy". This pamphlet, which quickly went through several editions in Dutch, was immediately translated into German for the political combat against the Social-Democracy at an international level.

Gorter dealt with the most burning questions posed by the World War and the International's collapse:

a) the nature of the war

Like other revolutionaries at the time, Gorter placed the World War within the framework of the evolution of capitalism. This evolution is one of capital's worldwide expansion in search of new markets. Nonetheless, on the economic level Gorter's analysis remains very succinct, and is more a description of the stages of capitalist development towards the colonies and semi-colonies than a real theoretical explanation or the phenomenon of imperialism. In certain aspects, Gorter is closer to Lenin than to Rosa Luxemburg. It is on the political level that Gorter comes closer to Luxemburg, declaring forcefully that all states are imperialist, and that, contrary Lenin's position during the war, there could no longer exist wars of national liberation:

"All states have an imperialist policy, and aim at extending their territory".

As a result, the proletariat can no longer direct its combat against its "own" bourgeoisie. Unlike Liebknecht, who declared that the "main enemy is in our own country", Gorter insisted that there is no "main enemy" , no "enemy no. 1" and "enemy no. 2", but that on the contrary all imperialisms have to be fought, because the struggle is no longer placed on the national but on the international terrain:

"National imperialism threatens the proletariat quite as much as the imperialism of other nations. Consequently, the proletariat as a whole has to fight in the same way that is to say with the same energy, against all imperialism, its own as well as foreign imperialism".

b) the decline of the capitalist system

Gorter did not see the decadence of capitalism as a theoretician, basing himself on a study of history and economics. He grasped it through its social and cultural effects. The World War meant a direct threat to the very life of the world proletariat; the birth of a worldwide capitalism is the ultimate result of a historical evolution that leads to a fight to the death between the proletariat and world capital:

"Times have changed. Capitalism has developed to such a point that it can only continue to develop by massacring the proletariat of every country. World capitalism is born, and confronts the world working class ... World imperialism threatens the entire world proletariat".

It is no surprise that Gorter the poet was especially sensitive to the crisis of artistic values, an unmistakable sign of the decline of capitalist civilization. His judgment is doubtless a hasty one, since he ignores the new art forms that emerged in the wake of the war, strongly inspired by the revolutionary wave (expressionism, surrealism ...). But Gorter demonstrates above all the inability to recreate great art, in the image of a system in full expansion, as was the case during the 19th century:

"Today, great art is dead. In all countries, great poetry is dead. Great poetry is dead; impressionism, naturalism, bourgeois realism ... great architecture, is all dead. All that remains is heartless, loveless architecture. Music is shadow of its former self. Great painting is dead. Philosophy is dead; the very rise of the proletariat has killed it".

This vision of the decadence of the capitalist system in all its forms was not unique to Gorter. It was at the very foundation of the left communist currents after the war, and in particular of the German Left, influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, as well as by Gorter and Pannekoek.

c) the collapse of the Social-Democracy

The war had been made possible by the treachery of the parties which had "disowned socialist ideas". Like Pannekoek, Gorter showed that the process of the 2nd International's collapse had been prepared by successive defections from both the immediate struggle and the struggle against war. It was the subjective factor which had finally, in 1914, made it possible for the world bourgeoisie to unleash the war' The bourgeois class, condemned by history and living in the midst of its own decay, could grasp better than any - and with the intelligence of a class solely concerned with its own survival - the decay affecting its adversary, in the very heart of the proletariat:

"Thanks to its own rottenness, the bourgeoisie has a finely developed sense of smell for moral decay, and immediately sniffed out the war that this Congress of the International was going to go. It sensed that it had nothing to fear from such a Congress. It put Basle Cathedral at our disposal..."

Thus, for the Dutch Left, which had, moreover, been prevented from speaking during the Congress, Basle was only the end point in a long decline. Basle's mere religious incantation against war, in reality heralded August 14.

However, Gorter does not analyze the 2nd International's betrayal simply in terms of the treachery of its leaders. He digs deeper, by analyzing the organizational and tactical factors that led to this bankruptcy. All the possible causes lead to one burning question: what is the real state of the proletariat's consciousness, its degree of revolutionary maturity?

It is significant that Gorter hesitates explaining the bankruptcy of the International. He insists strongly on the fact that revisionists and Kautskyist centrists "are together responsible for the nationalism and chauvinism of the masses" on the other hand, there is also a hint of his later theory, set out in 1920 in his Reply to Lenin, on the opposition between "masses" and "leaders". It is the bureaucracy that has deprived the proletarian masses of their capacity for revolutionary action:

"The center of gravity shifted ... from the masses to the leaders. A working class bureaucracy was formed. However, the bureaucracy is conservative by nature".

But for Gorter's profoundly marxist vision was not content with a mere sociological analysis; the question of the organization of parties as emanations of the International is the decisive one. Like the Italian Left after him, Gorter sees the International preceding the parties, and not the parties preceding the International. The 2nd International's collapse is to be explained above all by its federalist characteristics:

"The 2nd International really went to disaster because it was not international. It was a conglomeration of national organizations, and not an international organism".

In the end, all these causes explain the retreat of proletarian consciousness in the war. The proletariat was "badly weakened" and "severely demoralized". But for Gorter, as other revolutionaries at the time, this was not a definitive retreat or defeat. From the must necessarily arise the revolution.

d) the future

The very conditions of capital's evolution create the objective conditions for the unification of the world proletariat. The question of revolution is posed on a world scale:

"... thanks to imperialism, and for the first time in world history, the whole international proletariat is now united, in peace as in war, as one body, in a struggle which cannot be fought without the common agreement of the international proletariat, against the international bourgeoisie".

However, Gorter insisted forcefully that the revolution is a long process, "stretching over decades and decades". The "spiritual factors" are decisive. In particular, the struggle involves a radical change in tactics: it no longer uses the union or parliament, but the mass strike. Although in embryonic form, this point heralds the left communist conception that was fully developed in 1919 - 1920.

Just as decisive was the proletariat's political struggle. It had to combat both revisionism and centrism. Furthermore, to take the road to revolution, the proletariat had to reject the struggle for peace, as it was developed by the pacifist currents. Pacifism remained the most dangerous enemy:

" ... as both hypocrisy and self-deception, and as a means to subject and exploit, the pacifist movement is the opposite side of the coin to imperialism ... the pacifist movement is the attempt of bourgeois  imperialism to counter proletarian socialism".

Finally, without the International created by the proletariat, there can be no real revolutionary movement. From the war must arise "a new International", both necessary and possible.

Gorter's pamphlet, which Lenin greeted as an example, thus expressed concretely the SDP's attitude in the renewal of international links with a view to laying the foundations for a new International.

The SDP and Zimmerwald

It is significant that Gorter's position in favor of energetic work for an international regroupment of socialist opposed to the war and aiming at the foundation of a new International remained isolated within the party. With Pannekoek's support, Gorter worked with all his strength for the SDP's participation in the debates and conferences at Zimmerwald in 1915.

In 1915, the opposition to the war was beginning to grow in strength. In the German SPD, the opposition of Rosa Luxemburg and elements in Berlin and Bremen was growing bolder and laying the basis for a reorganization of revolutionary forces. In both the belligerent and the neutral nations appeared an opposition to social-patriotism, which posed in practice the question of the reorganization of revolutionaries within the old parties, or outside them, even at the cost of a split.

In Holland, elements within the SDAP, but opposed to the nationalist policies officially adopted by the party's January 1915 Congress, constituted a "revolutionary socialist" club in Amsterdam. They decided to create a federation of clubs, which adopted the name of "Revolutionaire Socialistisch Verbond" (RSV), in order to develop an opposition to the war and to nationalism outside the SDAP. However, within the RSV's leadership were to be found elements who were not part of Troelstra's SDAP. Roland-Holst, not a member of any organization since leaving the SDAP in 1911, was recognized as the RSV's spokesman. Mostly made up of intellectuals, the RSV had little influence within the working class. Numerically very small, it was more akin to an alliance than a real organization. The organizational confusion of its members was considerable: many were still in the SDAP, and so belonged to two organizations. This situation lasted several months, until they were expelled from, or had definitively left, the SDAP. No less uncertain was the attitude of members of the SDP who, although already belonging to a revolutionary organization, nonetheless joined the RSV. Only at the SDP's Utrecht Congress (20 June 1915) was membership of two organizations formally forbidden. Those who had joined the RSV on 2 May thus had to leave it.

Politically, the RSV, like Roland-Holst, could be considered as a group of center, between the SDAP and the SDP. On the one hand, it declared itself for "national and international mass action"; on the other, it refused to condemn explicitly the SDAP's attitude towards the war, in the name of a unity that was to be concretized in the "concentration of all revolutionary workers". Nonetheless, this hesitant position did not prevent a more and more active collaboration between the RSV and the SDP.

In practice however, the SDP, although clearer politically and theoretically, was to find itself lagging behind the RSV when, in 1915 international relations between revolutionary groups were renewed with a view to a conference.

Lenin had been in contact with the Dutch since the beginning of the war. He quite naturally address himself to the SDP in order "to create a closer contact" between the Dutch and the Russians. He certainly did not think of associating himself with Roland-Holst, in whom - since her attitude towards the Tribunists in 1909 - he saw a Dutch version of Trotsky, or even Kautsky.

But the SDP remained too divided to conduct clearly a policy of tight collaboration with the German and Russian revolutionaries. A small minority of the party leadership around Gorter remained determined to work internationally against social-chauvinism and the Kautskyist center. In this sense, the 8th April 1915, Gorter proposed to Lenin the publication of a Marxist review, with Pannekoek as editor, to replace Kautsky's "Neue Zeit". Lenin agreed with this proposition. But in reality, the SDP's effort, before Zimmerwald, at regroupment with other revolutionary groups in Switzerland, was the work of Gorter and Luteraan, another member of the party's leadership. Luteraan was a delegate at the Bern International conference of young socialists in April 1915, not as an official representative of the SDP, but as a member of "De Zaaier" group of young socialists, independent of the party. This was where Luteraan made contact with Lenin.

It should be noted that, on the contrary, the position of Tribunism's historic leaders - Wijnkoop, Ravesteyn, and Ceton - was more than ambiguous. Lenin hoped to associate the Dutch closely to the preparation of the Zimmerwald conference. In a letter to Wijnkoop, written during the summer, Lenin declared forcefully: "But you and we are independent parties; we must do something: formulate a program of the revolution, unmask and denounce the stupid and hypocritical slogans of peace". And a telegram sent to Wijnkoop just before Zimmerwald urged: "Come at once!".

But the SDP did not send any delegate to the Zimmerwald conference, which took place between the 5th and 8th September 1915. Wijnkoop and his friends circulated within the party the - unconfirmed - information that the conference's organizer, the Swiss Robert Grimm, had, as a member of parliament, voted for mobilization credits at the beginning of the war. De Tribune left its readers in the dark as to the resolutions voted at the conference. Instead of seeing Zimmerwald as "a step forward in the ideological and practical break with opportunism and social-chauvinism", the SDP's leaders - with the exception of Gorter, Pannekoek, and Luteraan - saw in it nothing but pure opportunism, worse still, they completely missed the historic importance of the event as the first organized reaction to the war and as the first stage in the regroupment of internationalist revolutionaries; they saw nothing more than a "historic farce" in what was later become a symbol of the struggle against the war, nothing but "stupidity" in the fraternization across the trenches between French and German socialists:

"Clearly, we should thank God (sic!) ... for having preserved us from the stupidity of the Zimmerwald conference, or, more precisely, from the necessity of assuming the role of opposition on the spot ... We knew in advance what would come of it: nothing but opportunism, and no struggle of principal!".

This attitude of Wiinkoop's, confounding sectarianism and irresponsibility, was  not without consequences for the image of the Dutch Left. It left the stage free for Roland-Holst's current to represent -- through the SDP's default -- the revolutionary movement in the Netherlands. The RSV took its place in the "centrist" current at Zimmerwald, which only considered it possible to struggle for peace, and refused to associate itself with the Zimmerwald left, which took as its basis the revolutionary struggle, and the need for a 3rd International. Within the movement of the Zimmerwald left internationally with which the SDP associated itself, "Tribunism" appeared as a sectarian current.

In the case of Wijnkoop, Ravesteyn and Ceton, their sectarianism only concealed an opportunist policy which appeared in the full light of day from 1916-17. The "sectarianism" of which the Communist International accuses them in 1920 was not the responsibility of Gorter, Pannekoek, and their partisans, who worked determinedly for the international regroupment of revolutionaries.

***********

Some lessons

The lessons for the revolutionary movement of this period of crisis in the workers' movement are not specific to Holland; they are general lessons:

1) The vote for war credits on 3rd August 1914 by Troelstra's SDAP meant that the whole party apparatus took its place in the ranks of the Dutch bourgeoisie. However, as in the other parties, the crisis that this provoked in the party was expressed in two splits on the left. In number, these were very limited: 200 militants for each, out of a party of 10,000 members. The SDAP, unlike the German SPD, was no longer capable of secreting within itself strong minorities, or even a majority, hostile to the war and standing firm on proletarian positions. The question of reconquering the party could no longer be posed. The process of regroupment during the war took place around the "Thibunist" SDP. The SDP's very existence since 1909 had already emptied the SDAP of most of its revolutionary minorities.

2) Antimilitarism and the "struggle for peace" in time of war are an enormous source of confusion. They push the class struggle and the struggle for the revolution, which alone are capable of putting an end to the war, into the background. These slogans, which were to be found within the SDP, express at best the penetration of the petty-bourgeois ideology purveyed in particular by the anarchist, revolutionary syndicalist and "centrist" currents. The SDP's alliance with these currents during the war only encouraged the infiltration of opportunism into the SDP as a revolutionary party.

3) A "narrow" and early split with the old party which has fallen into opportunism is not in itself a guarantee against the return of opportunism in the new revolutionary party. The left-wing split is not a miracle cure. No organization, however carefully selected, theoretically armed, and determined, is spared the constant penetration of bourgeois and/or petty-bourgeois ideology. The history of the SDP during the war is ample proof. Inevitably, minorities appear which tend to become a fraction within the party. Such was the opposition which developed from 1916 onwards around Gorter to the opportunist              danger represented by the Wijnkoop-Ravesteyn, the radical "successor" of Troelstra.

4) In a revolutionary party, opportunism does not always appear in broad daylight. Very often, it hides behind a verbal radicalism and "purity of principles". The Wijnkoop-Ravesteyn-Ceton leadership illustrated this in refusing to take part in Zimmerwald conference, on the pretext that it would be dominated by the opportunist currents. Here, sectarianism is often the other side of the coin to opportunism. It is often accompanied by a very "broad-minded" attitude towards confused, anarchist, or even frankly opportunist currents. The evolution of the SDP leadership, which took with it a large part of the organization, is typical. By giving in to the sirens of opportunism, making alliances with currents foreign to the workers movement -- like the Social-Cnristians - by adopting a pro-Entente attitude towards the end of the war, and by placing itself at beginning of the Russian revolution alongside Kautsky, this leadership went down the same road as Troelstra, but with a more "revolutionary" varnish. Crucial events -- war and revolution -- inevitabiy dissolve such varnish.

5) In the struggle against opportunism, the action of revolutionary minorities is decisive. There is no fatality. The fact that Gorter's and Pannekoek's reactions were dispersed, and at first no more than a simple opposition, weighed heavily on the later evolution of the SDP, when it was transformed into a Communist Party in November 1916.

Ch

Where are we in the economic crisis?

Recession, unemployment, inflation

The great dive of the late eighties

The ‘recovery' of the American economy which began in 1983 and peaked in 1984, is definitive­ly over. The victory cries of the Reagan Admin­istration, which pretended to have overcome a crisis momentarily alleviated by a drop in the rhythm of inflation and galvanized by the growth record of the American economy in 1984 (6.6%), have been silenced. The fine optimism of the American government, after the doubts of 1985, has foundered in view of the bad results of 1986 which have led all the prin­cipal industrialized countries to revise down­wards their expectations of growth.

The rate of growth of the American economy won't necessarily be worse in 1986 than it was in 1985: after having peaked at 2.2% in 1985, the first estimates for 1986 were 4% then revised to 3%; finally they were reduced to nearer 2%. However the rate of growth for 1986 is certainly weak, and this despite a record budget deficit in order to get production mov­ing, essentially thanks to arms procurements, and above all despite a fall in the dollar of more than 40% in relation to the yen and the deutchmark to give exports, and thus production, a boost. This last hope has not been realized despite all the measures taken, and it's with growing concern that political and economic leaders of the entire world see the American economy on the road to recession, drawing behind it the whole of the world economy.

The remedies of the bourgeoisie for the world economic crisis are no such thing and can only push the contradictions of the capitalist economy to an ever higher level. The famous ‘Reaganomics'- only the name was new - has not escaped this rule. This is true both on the level of the growth in unemployment and of inflation which the bourgeoisie still pretends to have conquered.

A new step in the recession

American growth is built on credit. In 5 years, the USA, which was the principal creditor in the world, has become the principal debtor, the most indebted country in the world. The cumulative debt of the USA, internal and external, has reach­ed the prodigious sum of $8000 billion, when it was ‘only' $4,600 billion in 1980 and $1,600 billion in 1970. That means in order to play its role as locomotive for the world economy, US capital in the space of five years, has accum­ulated as much debt as in the previous ten years. And to what end! This policy has not permitted a world recovery; at most good results for the most developed countries (USA, Japan, Germany) while for the rest of the industrialized countries of the OECD, the economy remains stagnant, and for the less developed capitalist countries, this policy of indebtedness means a flight of capital, a dramatic slump in investments, and a plunge into a tragic recession from which there's no escape. The American locomotive has not been sufficient to lead a real world recovery: all this indebtedness has only won some time. And this pol­icy, led by the USA at the price 'of budgetary and commercial deficits, is no longer possible today. The debt of the US government since the beginning of the decade has grown at an average rate of 16.6% a year; the interest repayments alone have increased to $20 billion for 1986. It's become urgent for the USA to reduce its budget deficits ($210 billion in 1986) and commercial deficit ($170 billion in ‘86). The US must re-establish its commercial balance and can only do so at the expense of commercial competitors (notably Europe and Japan) whose growth was stimulated by exports to the USA. The American market, principal capitalist market in the world, is being closed as an outlet for the other count­ries. The fall of 40% in the dollar vis-a-vis the mark and the yen is the first step of this policy, but as the latter has proved insufficient, even more drastic measures are foreseen by the world's premier power: a new fall in the dollar, increased protectionism, etc. The likely consequences, already being felt, are dramatic: sharpened competition, destabilization of the world market and, above all, a new drop in the recession, the terrible effects of which no economist today dares to predict.

Towards a dramatic growth in unemployment   

The fall in unemployment in the USA - from 9.5%, of the active population in 1983 to 7.1% in 1985- has been one of the axes of Reagan's propaganda to justify his economic policy. But this ‘success' is a false victory, because for the European countries of the OECD, unemployment has continued to grow in this period: 10% in ‘83 and 11% in ‘85. Unemployment has not been beaten: on the contrary, it has developed in spite of all the bluster of bourgeois propaganda. Even where the results have been best, in North America, they must be put in perspective, because the figures furnished by the bourgeoisie on this question are a permanent dec­eption, due to the burning needs of propaganda.

In relation to the results of the USA, it must first be noted that even with the lowering of unemployment, the figures remain higher than all those before 1981.

	‘77	78	79	80	81	82	83	84	85
USA	6.9	6.0	5.8	7.0	7.5	9.5	9.5	7.4	7.1
Europe	5.7	6.0	6.2	6.8	8.4	9.5	10.0	10.8	11.0

Moreover, if the policy of Reagan has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, it is essentially in the service sector where employment is less stable, and above all less well paid (about 25%) than in industry where 1 million have been lost.

With the fall in growth and the resulting in­creased competition, a new wave of massive redun­dancies is in progress and today it's typical to see a company like General Motors announce the closure of 11 factories, and tens of thousands of redundancies. The myth of the possible drop in unemployment has been defeated, when there are already 32 million (officially) without jobs in the OECD countries; when the rate of unemployment in 1985 was already 13.2% in Belgium, 13% in GB, 13%, in Holland, 21.4% in Spain - rates comparable with those which followed the great 1929 crisis, the profile of which is appearing on the horizon.

At no time has the American ‘recovery' reduced unemployment to the levels of the ‘70s, and now that this recovery is over, it's a dramatic perspective for the end of the ‘80s.

The return of galloping inflation

If there's a level on which the dominant ideology insists it's won something, its inflation which went from 12.9%, in the OECD countries in 1980, to 2.4% in the 12 months preceding August ‘86. However inflation has not disappeared, far from it. For the world as a whole, it has continued to grow according; to the IMF: 12.6% in 1983, 13.8%, in 1984, 14.2% in 1985. In fact, only the most industrialized countries have benefitted from the fall in inflation which has continued to rav­age the rest of the world, and all the plans of draconian austerity in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil haven't stopped it. Inflation is present at the frontiers of the most industrialized centers, ready to break out anew: in Mexico at the gates of the USA, 66% in 1986; in Yugoslavia, next door to industrial Europe, 100% predicted for 1986!

The anti-inflationist policy led by the USA and the rest of the industrialized countries has only been possible because of:

-- a severe attack against the standard of living of the working class, in order to lower the costs of production: massive redundancies, attacks on nominal wages, cutting social protection, speed‑ups, etc;

-- and above all a dramatic fall in the market price of primary materials, imposed and orchestr­ated by the dominant economic powers which profited from the situation of generalized overproduction, plunging the poorest countries - essentially producers of raw materials - into an even more dreadful poverty. This policy has produced a shrinking of the world market and exacerbated competition. It's the fundamental origin of the recession, the expression of generalized over­production. However, at the same time, the USA's policy of indebtedness in order to maintain activity in the most important concentrations of the capitalist world has been a fundamentally inflationist policy whose effects have only been postponed for the future. In proceeding this way, the dominant class has only bought time, and the specter of inflation, chased from the door by the fall in production costs, can only return through the window, via indebtedness.

Thus it's not by accident if, at the same time, the principal industrialized countries have lowered their growth forecasts, presenting the perspective of a new acceleration in the recession, and an increase in inflation. All the measures taken to break the inevitable recession can only contribute to a recovery of inflation in a situation where the accumulation of gigantic debt has created the conditions for a rapid dev­elopment of the former. The double curve - fall­ing growth, rising inflation for 1986 - is characteristic of the profound degradation of the world economy in recent years.

Japan and Germany in the midst of the crisis

Finally, the feeble results of the US recovery:

-- the world economy has not escaped the recess­ion which began at the start of this decade; it, has been delayed, essentially in the most industrialized countries;

-- unemployment has continued to develop, and where it has decreased from one year to the next, it has nonetheless never returned to the level before the beginning of the ‘80s;

-- inflation has not disappeared, and the con­ditions for its redevelopment have been reinforced.

This wretched result has been obtained at the high price of gigantic indebtedness, in the US but also for the whole world: the debt of the under-developed capitalisms has grown from $800 billion in 1980 to more than $1000 billion today; at the price of a dramatic pauperization of the population, with famines unseen before in human history; at the price of increased inequality between the richest and poorest capitalist count­ries; at the price of a growing instability of the world market which has seen its principal currency, the dollar, acting like a yo-yo, doubl­ing its market price in 3 years only to lose half its value in a year. All this shows a very significant weakening of the world capitalist economy.

And today, even this policy with its catastrophic consequences is no longer possible in order to maintain the activity of the industrial centers; the US economy, locomotive of the world economy, has begun its irresistible plunge into recession. In the light of the foreseeable cat­astrophe to come, it's with a growing concern that the world leaders are desperately searching for new solutions to prolong the ‘soft landing' of the world economy. The Reagan administration pretends to have found the answer with its repeated demands on Japan and Germany to con­tribute to the recovery of the world economy. But this "solution", no less than its predecess­ors, is no such thing. With less means, Japan and Germany cannot succeed in resuscitating the world economy where the American economy has failed.

Together, Japan and West Germany only rep­resent half the GNP of the USA (in 1985: $612 billion for W. Germany, $1233 billion for Japan, against $3865 billion for the USA); at the very most could they, through a policy of internal stimulation, break the fall into recession? If so, at what price? The famous countries of the Japanese and German economic miracles can only produce miraculous delays. Germany and Japan profited the most from the US recovery: the closure of the US market today hits their economies with full force. The example of Japan is particularly significant. Initially estimated at 4% in 1986 (after being 5.1% in 1984, and 4.8%, in 1985) the growth has been revised down­wards throughout 1986. Officially it will be 2.8%, but in view of the results in can only really reach 2.3% During the first quarter of 1986, industrial production fell 0.2% in re­lation to the same period in 1985; the results from the autumn risk being even more alarming. Recession is already a tangible reality in Japan, the second economic power in the world.

As a result, there's a rocketing of unemploy­ment and the figure of 6% announced by Japan­ese newspapers is certainly more realistic than the 3% official rate (which doesn't consider as unemployed someone who has worked only one hour in a month). All the big industrial groups are announcing redundancies. From now to 1988, the five large steel groups have planned 22,500 job cuts. At the end of 1986, 6000 jobs are to go in shipbuilding. The government, for its part, has decided to cut jobs on the railways, and above all in the coal mines: 8 out of 11 mines will be closed, leading to 14,000 redundancies. The myth of an unemployment-free Japan has been definit­ively dashed.

These negative results have been achieved despite the Japanese government's policy of internal stimulation which has seen its discount rate lowered throughout 1986 to today's record low of 3%. But this is not sufficient to compensate for the fall in exports to the USA.

The record commercial balance surplus should not create any illusions. Its due essentially to the drop in imports, linked to the fall in the market price of raw materials, in particular petrol. But this situation is completely provisional. It is only with great effort that Japan has maintained its exports, by trimming its profit margin against the low dollar which has reduced its competivity. This has led for the first time to the big Japanese exporters registering losses.

The German economy has hardly preserved its reputation any better, the situation is not healthy. Unemployment persists at 8.5% of the active population; industrial growth has stag­nated at 1.6% from August 1985 to August ‘86 and the bad results of the autumn have led the German authorities to revise downwards all growth forecasts (for 1987, a rate of no more than 2%, which is perhaps still optimistic). The growth of the monetary mass from 7.9% in August 1985 to August ‘86 has not stimulated growth. Despite the exceptional results obtain­ed at the level of inflation, which are due essentially to the revaluation of the mark, this monetary growth announces inflation in the short term.

Japan and West Germany have begun a policy of internal growth, but the latter has already revealed itself insufficient for their national economies. Thus stimulating the world economy is out of the question. The Reagan recipes applied to these countries can only have even more hazardous results than for the USA. Japan and Germany are also sinking further into the abyss of the world recession.

Both the feet in the economic catastrophe

The perspective is thus black for the world economy. All the ‘solutions' put forward and applied by the bourgeoisie have been exposed as unable to choke off the crisis which contin­ues its long work of degrading the capitalist economy. The dominant class is in the process of firing its last shots to delay as long as possible the plunge into recession. Recent years have shown that the world recovery has become impossible, the crisis has defeated all measures learnt by the bourgeois economists since the crisis of 1929, and even the boost of the war economy has been grounded with the end of the US ‘recovery'. Overproduction is generalized, including the armaments industry, where today one can see a firm like Dassault in France, being obliged to lay off workers. The only question which is posed now, is not if the perspective is catastrophic - it is - but at what speed the world economy is sinking into this catastrophe! The more the bourgeoisie wants to delay the development of the recession, the more inflation develops. The more the bourg­eoisie wants to delay the development of inflat­ion, the more the recession accelerates, and in the end the two tend to develop together.

With the collapse of the world economy, the roots of the last illusions in capitalism are going to be weakened. Poverty and barbarism which is developing more than ever imposes the necessity of the communist perspective. The crisis clears the way for this perspective to become the sole issue. The crisis, despite the poverty that it imposes, is the best ally of the proletariat in destroying the bases of the existence and of the mystification of the dominant class.

JJ 26.11.86.

IR 49 - 2nd Qtr 1987

Last year, two groups in Argentina and Uruguay issued an ‘International Proposal to the Partisans of the World Revolution’, which we published in no. 46 of this Review.

The question of the necessity for the regroupment of revolutionary forces, in the perspective of the development of the class struggle, is vital today. It’s necessary for the different groups to confront and clarify their respective political positions and orientations in the present period in order to envisage the rapprochement and common work which the present situation of the proletarian political milieu does not yet allow. It’s on this basis that we replied to the ‘Proposal’. Emancipacion Obrera has begun to publish in a pamphlet the replies received to its ‘Proposal’, and in particular has replied with a text addressed to the questions raised by the ICC. Here we are publishing broad extracts from this text, as well as a new reply from us on the main issues concerning the conditions and criteria for a regroupment of revolutionary forces in the present historical period.

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LETTER FROM ‘EMANCIPACION OBRERA’ to the ICC

Comrades of the ICC,

First of all we would like to thank you for having translated our Proposal into English and French in order to publish in your International Review, and for dedicating an article to it in your publication in Spain, Accion Proletaria. It’s not just anyone who did this and we have no doubt that thanks to your contribution our concerns have been made public much more widely than we could have obtained with our own resources.

TO ANSWER SOME QUESTIONS AND CLARIFY SOME POSITIONS

...When we elaborate this Proposal we tried to find the most important points of discrimination while taking account of the fact that the whole world has not followed the same route nor given definitions in the same order of ideas. We wanted at the same time to erect an obstacle against opportunists, reformists and the left (of capital) in general, while making possible a minimum basis allowing the establishment of relations, and not an obstacle coming from sectarianism or confusion or definitions which we alone would agree to.

For example, there is a subject which we consider fundamental and which most organisations consider secondary or subsidiary: the condition of women, the relations of exploitation and oppression which exist in domestic labour, the permanent manipulation of the body and life of women in order to guarantee the production and reproduction of labour power in accordance with the general and particular needs and interests of the ruling class. For us, the elimination of the exploitation suffered by the working class (men and women) and that suffered by the majority of women through the system of domestic work (disturbing family and sexual roles too) are integral points of a single struggle for the social revolution. And in the Proposal practically nothing on this appears because we thought that given this question has in general been treated very little and very badly, in couldn’t be a point of departure but the result of a process. We adopted the same criteria for the other subjects and it didn’t seem correct for us to establish priorities without taking a account of the fact that the discriminatory points are a point of departure. In this sense it is necessary to be both broad and strict: broad so that groups and individuals can participate; strict so as to exclude these who express antagonistic politics to those we defend, even if their language contains some marxist residues.

ON DEMOCRACY

It’s thus that we have not put forward all that we defend and we consider certain questions as contained implicitly in the discriminatory points; for example the question of democracy. We have no objection to making it more explicit and it goes without saying that we disagree with parliamentary activity, just as we don’t think we can do anything revolutionary through democracy or participation in its institutions.

And we don’t draw these conclusions a priori from a principle but by analysing  concrete situations, as we concur with Marx on the fact that “historic events seem analogous, but what unfolds from different milieu leads to totally different results,” (1). We don’t reach this conclusion on the basis of the category of “decadent capitalism” for that would give way to two types of errors: to justify, for the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, participation in elections for executive responsibility – ie supporting the parliamentary cretinism that Lenin criticised so correctly – or to define the tactic on the basis of principles, ideas valid at all times and in all places, misunderstanding the fact that the truth is concrete and all tactics must depart from the real situations, not to justify or affirm them, but to modify them. It does not seem to us that the refusal to participate in an electoral campaign should be a discriminatory criterion (2), even if we have never done so, and have no intention of dong so, considering that in the present state of affairs it is completely reactionary and nothing revolutionary can be achieved by it. We insist on the fact that we agree that through democracy or the participation in its institutions one can only strengthen the bourgeoisie’s options and we have no objection to making that explicit.

There are however other points on which it is possible to have differences of two types: one we call “tactical” and the other “strategic”. Let us see the first.

WHY WE DON’T REFER MUCH TO THE PAST

We don’t think that to be able to participate in the Proposal each group must have analysed and defined positions on the whole history of the workers’ movement and the different organisations and parties which have existed. Not that we consider it unimportant, but because we know that not all the groups and persons have a long previous history or the possibility of producing such definitions by themselves and in a limited period of time.

To take one example: you ask us, among other things, to recognise and reclaim the communist left coming from the Third International. To be able to do that it is necessary first to know them and that is not possible without the documents concerning them and the possibility of studying them. For example, we had no idea of their existence when we were first formed...

SHOULD WE CLAIM CONTINUITY WITH SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?

But we have another, more strategic, objection: although we haven’t, as an organisation, documents or strict analyses on the subject, we do not claim continuity, for example, with German Social Democracy, nor the International it was part of (the so-called Second). The fact that sectors of the bourgeoisie (or petit-bourgeoisie) at some moment of their history were revolutionary doesn’t imply that we consider ourselves as their continuators, and we would have difficulty in considering ourselves as the continuators of organisations which have never defended in practice the destruction of the bourgeois state and its replacement by the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, but on the contrary dedicated their efforts to strengthening and widening bourgeois democracy. We could add that there are some comrades of EO who say that Lenin was mistaken when he called Kautsky a renegade, and when he spoke of the bankruptcy of the Second International: for them Kautsky was always coherent and the one who reneged, who broke (and in good time!) was Lenin. What revolutionary orientations and interventions were produced by the Second International? What concrete proletarian revolutionary activity did it push forward? The comrades of our organisation have no hesitation in affirming that they wouldn’t be part of the 2nd International and that the 2nd International wouldn’t ‘enter’ this Proposal...

Let’s take another example: among the different groups there are some which reclaim the Third International up to 1928, others the first four Congresses: we ourselves do not go beyond the second and surely among those who know the Dutch, German and Italian Lefts there must exist different interpretations and evaluations. Must be incorporate all these questions into the points of discrimination? We think not, at least for the moment, but we consider on the contrary that it is necessary to stimulate organically these studies and debates, to learn and know about them and draw the conclusions of these experiences. The definition and homogenisation around these questions will reflect a moment higher than the present one and must have as a point of departure the effective taking of class positions today faced with the situations which require not only general characterisation but concrete political directions and actions...

THIRD-WORLDIST GUERILLAS AND PETIT-BOURGEOIS TERRORISM

You were equally astonished to find nothing on terrorism nor a “categorical rejection of this sort of action”...

It’s perhaps because we have lived with this experience for many years and that we have suffered with our own flesh what these groups were that we have a slightly different approach to this matter. The fundamental combat against them is not so much against their methods, but against the politics which guide their guns, and which extols the formation of armed wings, planting bombs, kidnapping bosses to obtain an increase in pay, etc.

When we say in our Proposal, in point 2, to “All those who don’t support any fraction of the bourgeoisie against another, but who fight against them all...”, or in point 4: “those who fight against the politics of ‘defence of the national economy’, of economic recovery...” or in point 11: “In this sense, in the face of the bourgeoisie’s false alternative of fascism/anti-fascism, to those who denounce the bourgeois class character of anti-fascist fronts and democracy...” our condemnation of these guerrilla groups is implicit as sectors of the bourgeoisie and of the petit-bourgeoisie which struggle violently to take over the bourgeois state and re-divide the surplus value torn from the working class. We do not enter into consideration of whether they pretend to attain their objectives by means of elections or of insurrection, by forming armies of voters or armed groups, by trying to conquer a union or executing one of its leaders.

The struggle for communism is against the bourgeoisie as a whole: it is not correct to chose a “least bad” or to recommend this or that form of struggle to the class enemy. We do not reject guerrilla action only for “its ineffectiveness’ and of its pretensions, at best, to ‘arouse’, and at worst, to substitute itself for the only adequate violence – the workers’ class violence....” as you seem to say in your letter.

Our struggle against groups like the Montoneros, Tupamaros, ERP, etc. does not flow from methodological divergences but from the class content of the politics which impel them and which is that of a sector of capital. Their pacifism, even if they carry arms, is expressed in their politics of class collaboration: national liberation, anti-imperialism, nationalisations, etc. Centring the polemic on a question of method prevents one from seeing clearly the bourgeois content and its political consequences, their counter-revolutionary character, which doesn’t prevent us also putting in question their messianism, their substitutionism, their petit-bourgeois violence, their “methods”...

And in this sense, we taken the example of torture: for us there is not one bourgeois torture and another revolutionary. Just as the bourgeois state cannot be used for revolutionary ends – and this is not a problem of ‘who directs it’ but of its essence -- there are questions like this which, in themselves, conceal a content opposed to the social relations to which we aspire, the reason why we will never defend them and always condemn them whatever justifications they are given.

In summary: we don’t mention the terrorist groups because they are themselves excluded by the majority of the points of discrimination, but we have no objection to condemning them more explicitly.

THE WORKERS’ COUNCILS

It’s true there is no reference to the workers’ councils. In this sense you are right. We talk of the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state but  we don’t develop on how it is going to be ‘replaced’. We talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat in general and no more. It is necessary to elaborate this point. In this point it is necessary also to make clear that the form does not guarantee the content and also that, without certain forms – like those of which we speak – it is not possible to have a real proletarian power and a revolutionary content.

CHARACTERISATION OF THE PRESENT PERIOD

....We are not so convinced, on the other hand, of the characterisation you make according to which there is a generation of the proletariat “which has not experienced defeat and preserves all its potential and combativity.” It is true that after the great counter-revolution which gave rise to the Second World War – and its preceding period – with the massacre of millions of (men and women) workers, the decade of the ‘60s marked a rise in class struggle, of the proletarian struggle. In this zone we saw it, particularly in the period ‘68-’73, but this rise in workers’ struggles, this resurgence of revolutionary class sectors, was crushed or controlled, with more or less violence, by various methods. And that was a sad defeat, the most radical class minorities having been politically dismantled or massacred and the working class in general hit hard.

And we don’t think this concerns this area in particular: we have the question of Poland, the British miners’ strike and other cases fresh in our memory. That’s to say, the decade of the ‘60s marked a qualitative change: the end of a long counter-revolutionary period;  but from there to affirming that the present generation doesn’t know defeat is a little strong: has it not struggled and been defeated, in the majority of cases, if only in a circumstantial way? The period ‘73-81 was black enough, at least in most zones of the planet, and we cannot ignore that in our analyses (3).

We must point out in this decade, the ‘80s, we are seeing a reactivation of the class struggle, although with highs and lows....

Today we are not at the very bottom of the strength of the proletarian class, but, through a number of factors that we won’t analyse here, there are a number of factors that we won’t analyse here, there are beginning to be struggles and movements shaking the class and pulling it from its reflux and its retreat... and us also. But the enemy, despite its economic problems, preserves its political strength and initiative for the most part, that’s why it isn’t rare to find its agents within the workers’ movement, recommending the ‘struggle’ when in reality this ‘struggle’ is the subordination to projects of sectors of the ruling class. That’s why, although we understand what you want to say when you affirm “it’s necessary to be with the current” (instead of swimming against the current as in other periods), we prefer to say that today more than ever it is necessary to swim against the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois currents, particularly the left which justifies reformism and the politics of subordination to the bourgeoisie through the affirmation that ‘the movement is everything’, while in fact defending democracy, the unions, fronts, the nation. Yes, we must fully enter the internationalist proletarian current, combating as much those who search for a utopian purity as those who, in the name of so-called realism, leave to a far-distant future or another stage the proletarian revolutionary principles and objectives (or those who are associated merely to study and discuss while waiting for a far distant future revolutionary wave instead of participating effectively in the concrete struggle of resistance against capital that the working class makes intermittently)....

 

SOME CONCLUSIONS

....For us your response was a stimulant, and not only the letter but also your attitude in circulating our ideas. And in relation to the letter, we consider the criticisms very important – the same for those of the OCI/Italy – not that we agree with each one but because they show a very commendable and responsible attitude of trying to support – with your politics, of course – the development of the revolutionary movement.

Warmest greetings, EMANCIPACION OBRERA

Notes :

(1) Marx 1877, in ‘Correspondence’.

(2) It’s one thing to present oneself for executive posts or to defend the position that through democracy one can obtain revolutionary changes. The phrase ‘participate in an electoral campaign’ is very ambiguous because, for example, if at one moment the question of an active boycott is posed in an election, that implies in fact participation in a campaign and we don’t think that we can include this possibility for ever and everywhere the tactical questions are not determined by general principles but, by basing ourselves on them and then analysing the concrete situations, we determine what is the best course for revolutionary action.

(3) One of the old texts you sent us presently confirm this: you talk of the grave defeat that Poland was, not only for the Polish working class but for the world working class.

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ICC'S REPLY TO “EMANCIPACION OBRERA” IN ARGENTINA

Dear Comrades,

First of all, we want to make it clear that if we have translated and published your “Appeal – Proposition” in our international press, and have given it the widest distribution that our limited forces permit, it is not cut of “revolutionary sentimentalism”, nor because we are “unconditionally” in favour of regroupment “at any price”. Our position here is determined by firm convictions based in a deep-rooted analysis of the present period.

The whole history of the proletarian struggle demonstrates that the emergence and regroupment of revolutionaries, leading to the international revolutionary organisation, are tightly linked to the course of the class struggle. The periods of massive proletarian struggles, and the periods of heavy defeat, inevitably have a direct repercussion on the class revolutionary organisations, on their development or their dispersal, and even on their very existence. Without going into this subject at length, it is enough to bring to mind the history of the Communist League of 1848, and of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Internationals to be convinced of this. We say that this relationship is obvious and inevitable because, for us, the appearance and activity of revolutionary organisations is not the product of the “will” of intelligent people outside classes, but of the class itself. A revolutionary organisation (in capitalist society) can only be the product of the historically revolutionary class: the proletariat; and the life and condition of the organisation cannot therefore be fundamentally different from the life and condition of the class.

The defeat of the first revolutionary wave that followed World War I show us, amongst other things, that the gravity and consequences of a defeat are directly related to the revolutionary project put into action by the working class. The defeat of the first wave of the proletarian revolution ended in the bloody massacre of great masses of proletarians in many countries, in the ruin of the victorious October revolution, in the rapid degeneration of the 3rd international, and the betrayal of the Stalinist CP’s which everywhere passed over to the bourgeois camp, in a Second World War, in 50 years of reaction that engulfed two generations of the proletariat. Such a situation could not but disperse the revolutionary forces, weakening their activity more and more, reducing them to mere islands of resistance: the Fractions of the Communist Left. And these groups could only resist the overpowering avalanche of the counter-revolution by standing firm on programmatic principles that understood the deeply reactionary nature of the period, and the impossibility of having a real impact on the masses, so limiting their activity essentially to a critical re-examination, a balance-sheet, of the experience that the class had just going through, in order to draw out the political lessons absolutely necessary for them to fulfil their tasks with the renewal of the proletarian struggle. Any other orientation, trying come what may and in such a situation to rebuild immediately a new mass organisation, a new (IVth) International, could only spring both from a lack of understanding of the situation, and an inevitably impotent voluntarist method; at worst, as was the case with the Trotskyist current, it meant throwing revolutionary principles overboard and plunging deeper and deeper into opportunism. Another example of an inability to understand a period is the Bordigists’ proclamation of a party at the end of the Second World War, in the midst of a period of reaction. These actions of “revolutionary impatience” are adventures whose price is always immediatism and opportunism.

We have insisted on this point at length, the better to highlight the difference between the previous period and the one that opened up at the end of the 1960’s, which marked the end of the post-war reconstruction and the beginning of the new open crisis in world capitalism, with all that implies from the point of view of the class struggle. Unlike the crisis of the 1930’s, when the proletariat was exhausted by terrible historic defeats of its revolutionary struggle, demoralised by the degeneration of the October Revolution and the CPs betrayal to the bourgeoisie, by fascism’s victory in Germany and the massacre of the Spanish proletariat on the altar of the defence of the Republic opening an inexorable course towards a new World War, the crisis that loomed at the end of the 1960’s found a new generation of workers, who had been through neither decisive battles nor bloody defeat, and so had kept intact all their potential for a renewal of the struggle. This crisis, while it sharpened inter-imperialist tension, above all opened up a period of working class struggle, and the fate of this class struggle will determine the outcome of the historic alternative between socialism or barbarism, between a third World War (with all its catastrophic consequences) and the proletarian revolution.

It is this analysis of the present period of renewed and developing working class struggle that determines the necessity and possibility of a rebirth and reinforcement of a revolutionary organisation capable of carrying out to the full its function within the class and its struggle.

Fifty years of reaction and counter-revolution have broken the organic continuity of the revolutionary movement, annihilated the organisations of the Russian, German, and Dutch Lefts, reduced a large part of the Italian Left to a state of sclerosis, and infected the movement as a whole with the mentality of a sect. But the resurgence of the movement of the proletariat in struggle cannot help but secrete within itself new revolutionary organisations. These new organisations, which have the same roots in this new contemporary situation of the class struggle, do not, however, share the same trajectory and political development; they often suffer from a lack of rigorous theoretical and political training, as well as a serious knowledge of the revolutionary movement’s gains and experience; often, they flounder in confusion, and so run the risk, in their isolation, of getting lost in dead-ends and disappearing. Only the awareness of the need to break with this isolation, to develop contacts with other groups, to exchange ideas, publications, and information, to stimulate international discussion among groups, and eventual agreements for common interventions, can make it possible for the vital process of decantation to take place, and open the way to an international regroupment of revolutionary forces based on solid marxist principles and rigorous working class political positions.

This analysis, these convictions, are the basis of our firm intention to support and encourage any proposition that helps to tighten the contacts between groups, that creates a pole of reflection, clarification, decantation, and regroupment of revolutionary forces, which today are still only too dispersed.

It is because we are convinced that this task is on the agenda today, for the reconstitution of the revolutionary movement, which can only be done on the international level, that we have worked continuously in this same direction since well before the ICC’s formal constitution, and this is why we have saluted your “Call”.

We know by experience that this is no easy task. We know, better than you do , the different groups that make up what we call the proletarian political milieu – this milieu which so many groups ignore or want to ignore, each one in its sectarianism considering itself the one and only revolutionary group in the world. Certainly, it cannot be denied that real disagreements exist, which can only be resolved through discussion, thorough clarification, and an inevitable and salutary political decantation. But we must be able to distinguish between these real disagreements, and those that spring from misunderstanding, incomprehension, and above all from a narrow-minded megalomania. There are no panaceas against the latter. We have to be aware of their existence as so many obstacles, and set against them a firm determination to continue untiringly the effort to break down isolation, to develop contacts and clarification through serious discussion; and with the help of events, we will succeed in bringing groups together with a view to fruitful revolutionary activity.

Let us say, to sum up our opinion on this point, that as long as, on the one hand an understanding of the present period is not based on a correct analysis of the international renewal of the proletarian struggle, and on the other there a persists the sectarian attitude that worries first and foremost about preserving its own “church” – the caricatural heritage of a bygone period – your proposal for a public international review common to all groups, whatever the perfectly correct aim behind it, cannot go beyond wishful thinking, an illusion on the political level, not to mention the virtually insurmountable difficulties on the practical level, under today’s conditions.  At all events and with the best will in the world, your proposal for such a review remains, at the very least, premature given the reality of the present moment.

Only a revolutionary event of extraordinary impact could make it possible to carry out this kind of project.

Does this mean that for the moment there is nothing to be done?  Absolutely not! But it would be wrong, counter-productive even, to look for short cuts, or to think that difficulties can be by-passed by regrouping around political actions or the publication of a joint review. Such short-cuts, far from helping to bring groups together on a clear, solid political basis, on the contrary run the risk of creating confusion, and blurring political problems – fertile ground for all kinds of opportunism.

Minimum criteria for a rapprochement

To avoid any misunderstanding concerning the criteria that must serve as a basis for selecting those groups able to participate positively in discussions of clarification between existing revolutionary groups, with a view to their rapprochement , we entirely share your concern that such criteria should be both “broad and strict: broad enough to allow the participation of groups or individuals whose definitions, because of their historical limitations, do not cover as wide a range as other groups, but which are part of the same tendency; strict enough to exclude those whose politics are antagonistic to our own, even if their language has a marxist flavour”. We think, furthermore, that in applying these criteria, we should also consider whether a group is a longstanding one, whose incorrect or historically outdated positions are encrusted to the point of sclerosis, or a newly emerging group whose mistakes are those of a temporary immaturity that may be largely overcome and corrected during a process of clarification.

However, we disagree partly with you in deciding what are “the most important points of discrimination, taking account of the fact that not everyone has followed the same stages or given the same definitions in the same order. At the same time, we wanted then to create a barrier against the opportunists, reformists, and the left in general...”. The question is one of knowing what are “the most important points of discrimination”.

First of all, we cannot accept the absence of political criteria, nor can we accept as the only one your statement: “For us, the criterion for recognition lies in practice”.  What is this “practice”, sufficient unto itself, and enough to serve as an all-purpose discrimination?  Put like this, it contradicts, or at least creates and ambiguity within, the whole thrust of your “Fropuesta” and the 14 points that define to whom it is addressed.

A “practice” divorced from any political foundations, orientation, or framework of principles, is nothing but a practice suspended in mid-air, a narrow-minded immediatism, which can never become a truly revolutionary activity. Any separation between theory and practice that opts, either for theory, destroys the unity of the immediate struggle and the historic goal. This famous “practice” as such bears a strange resemblance to Bernstein’s no less famous revisionist motto at the turn of the century: “The movement is everything, the goal is nothing”.

Nor is there any escaping that this “practice for practice” is also political: a politics that hides, blurs, avoids the real problems of the concrete class struggle, as they appear in reality to the workers. Incapable of answering these problems, this practice barely hides the poverty of its protagonists’ thought, preferring a loud-mouthed revolutionary phraseology, as pompous as it is hollow, to the slightest effort at reflection and coherent activity.

A revolutionary political practice derives both from its proposed goal, and from an analysis of concrete conditions, the real living situation of the balance of class forces. “Practice-politics”, by contrast, completely turns its back on all reflection or coherence, which it sees as a heavy and useless straitjacket, to be got rid of as quickly as possible so as to be able, not to act, but to bustle about. This “practice-politics” (the politics of self-sufficient practice) has a tradition in the workers movement: a tradition that goes from Weitling to Willitch, from Bakunin to Netchaev, and to all the variations of anarchism both yesterday and today.

Adding the word “common” to practice, and talking about a “common practice” to the point where it becomes the only means to discriminate and “recognise ourselves” doesn’t make things any better. What practice can groups that call themselves revolutionary have in common? First and foremost, it lies in publishing a press, distributing leaflets, distributing them as widely as possible. This practice, “in common”, in no way distinguishes revolutionaries from other organisations in the service of the class enemy. The problem lies not in the practice, but in its POLITICAL CONTENT, and only from this truly political content can we judge which class different organisations belong to. This is why practice in itself cannot serve as a criterion for discrimination and regroupment; only the political positions on which it is founded can do so.

This is why, we would like to recall the political criteria which served as a basis for the three International Conferences of the Groups of the Communist Left between 1977 and 1980; these criteria remain NECESSARY for an initial delimitation. The invitation was addressed to all those groups:

“1) Who defend the fundamental principles embodied in the proletarian revolution of October 1917 and the foundation of the Third International in 1919, and who, with these principles as a starting point and in the light of experience, intend to subject the political positions and practice worked out and put forward by the Communist International to constructive criticise.

2) Who reject unreservedly the supposed existence anywhere in the world of countries under a socialist regime or workers’ government, even if qualified as “degenerated”. Who reject any class distinction between the Eastern bloc countries or China and the Western bloc, and who denounce any call for the defence of these countries as counter-revolutionary.

3) Who denounce the “Socialist” and “Communist” Parties and their acolytes as capitalist.

4) Who reject categorically the ideology of “anti-fascism”, which establishes a class frontier between democracy and fascism and calls on the workers to defend and support democracy against fascism.

5) Who proclaim the necessity for communists to work for the construction of the Party as an indispensable weapon for the victory of the proletarian revolution.

Any worker will understand, simply from reading these criteria, that this is not just a gathering of “men of good will”, but of truly communist groups, clearly setting themselves apart from all the leftist gangs: maoists, trotskyists, modernists, and the bleating “anti-party” councilists.

These criteria are certainly inadequate as a political platform for regroupment; by contrast, they are perfectly adequate for knowing who we are discussing with and in what framework, so that the discussion can be really fruitful and mark a real step forward”. (International Review no. 16, 1st Quarter, 1979)

However, certain aspects contained in these criteria, and especially in the points 1 to 5 quoted above, can and should be made more explicit.

The discrimination based on the historic separation between marxism and the theories of anarchism (the expression of petty bourgeois strata in the process of proletariansation) and populism is all the more important today, with the reawakening of currents that tend to put forward the possibility of a reconciliation of these two antagonistic currents.

The same is true of what we call the modernists, who claim to call into question both marxism and the proletariat as the sole revolutionary class within society, and the sole subject of its overthrow.

The same is also true for all the academic marxologists who gladly accept to lecture on the validity of marxist theory, but who forget the active side of marxism, which is first and foremost the theory and practice of the proletarian class struggle.

The same is true, yet again, of the discrimination against councilism, which rejects the necessity of the proletariat’s political organisation (the party), and denies any political and militant role in the struggle for the revolution, or against the Bordigist theories which substitute the dictatorship of the party for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Another fundamental point is to recognise and understand the capitalist system’s decadent phase today. This understanding explains the impossibility of lasting reforms and therefore of reformism; it categorically defines the “socialist” and “communist” parties as non-working class, and as a mere left wing of capital; it unambiguously rejects parliamentarism, trade unionism, and national liberation movements as definitively outdated, their only function being to mystify the proletariat and draw it onto a bourgeois class terrain.

Your own experience confirms the importance of these criteria:

1) During the Falklands war, you found yourselves alone in denouncing both war, and the calls for the proletariat’s collaboration in it, under the pretext that it was an anti-imperialist struggle. This event alone was enough to create a demarcation of principle between you and the other groups which let themselves be caught in the trap of the so-called anti-imperialist struggle. We will come back to the supposed existence of imperialist and non-imperialist countries later on. What we want to highlight here is that the question of the so-called anti-imperialist struggle has shifted from the theoretical to the practical level as an important criterion of class positions.

2) Concerning your discussions with the OCI in Italy, you write that if the OCI continues to defend its positions on “national liberation”, you will be forced to conclude that continued discussions with this group are impossible and useless. You thus confirm that this question – for or against national liberation – has become a criterion for discriminating between groups that claim to be revolutionary.

3) On the question of revolutionary terrorism, and your discussion with the GCI which “calls for revolutionary terrorism”, your rejection of this anarchist position is clear and categorical as ours was and remains. This question was one of the reasons for the break between the ICC and the GCI eight years ago. Because they did not understand the difference between the revolutionary violence of the working class and petty bourgeois terrorism, the GCI accused us of defending nothing less than bourgeois pacifism. Today, the GCI seems to have gone back on this position. We would hope that this is not just a momentary change, without being absolutely sure. At all events, this question of “revolutionary” terrorism must be a criterion for discrimination.

It goes without saying that we agree totally with your remarks on torture as a method absolutely foreign to the proletariat, and to be fought by revolutionaries. The proletariat cannot use this kind of method because, whereas torture corresponds to a class that is by its nature oppressive, it is in essence antagonistic to the proletarian class which represents, for the first time in history, liberation from all oppression and barbarism.

The historical continuity of the revolutionary movement

We understand perfectly that since, as you rightly say, a large number of authentically proletarian and revolutionary groups which have appeared and will appear still have little knowledge of the past history of the proletariat’s revolutionary movement, you want to avoid making the lessons of this history into discriminatory criteria which are likely to leave groups out of this process of contact and regroupment which has to be encouraged today.

We are neither stupid nor sectarian enough to demand this as a precondition. what we want to insist on, with the greatest possible force, is that without this knowledge, and the assimilation of this experience, no real solid regroupment is possible. This is why we insist so much on discussion and clarification, on the evolution of the movement and its different currents, on the positions they put forward, and on their experience in order to be able to take these indispensable acquisitions as a starting point for our revolutionary activity today.

We have already evoked at length the fifty year break in the revolutionary movement’s organic continuity, following the defeat of the first revolutionary wave, and its dire effect on the movement. But it is not enough just to recognise this: it is necessary to try to re-establish the movement’s historical and political continuity. Many groups recognise the situation, and even make a virtue out of it. They find it more profitable to remain ignorant, or even, purely and simply, to wipe out  the past, to imagine that they come out of nowhere, they are condemned merely to come to nothing.

Just as the working class always remains the same working class, that is to say the class that is both exploited and historically revolutionary, whatever the vicissitudes of capitalism’s evolution, so the political organisms that it gives birth to, through the ups and downs of the class struggle, constitute a continuous historical political movement. The very notion of the proletariat as a united international class determines the reality of the continuity of its political movement.

Only the most narrow-minded can interpret the notion of continuity as being identical with immobility, with a static idea. Continuity has nothing to do with ideas of the “nothing new under the sun” variety, any more than with the idea that with every new day, every new generation, history, begins anew, unconnected either with the past or with the future. On the contrary, continuity is fundamentally dynamic, movement, development, going further, criticism, and new acquisitions.

Hardly surprising that those working class political groups that do not understand or that reject the notion of continuity themselves have no continuity, and traverse the workers’ movement as ephemeral events, disappearing without any trace of their existence.

This is the case of many of the groups that were active during the 60’s and 70’s. It is enough to mention groups such as: in France, ICO (workerist anarchistic), the Situationists (intellectual voluntarist), the GLAT (marxist workerist), Pouvoir Ouvrier (Bordigo-councilist), the PIC (activist councilist), the OCL (libertarian); in Italy Potere Operaio (workerist), Lotta Continua (activist), Autonomia Operaia (workerist modernist); in Holland, Spartakus (councilist); and all the other pseudo-marxist, semi-libertarian, semi-modernist groups scattered throughout Europe and the Americas. All these groups, whose existence was an enormous waste of proletarian forces, had one thing in common: their rejection of the history of the workers’ movement, and more especially of the idea of any political continuity in the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

Hardly surprising that all these groups and elements should more or less recognise themselves in the verdict and sentence pronounced by the eminent university sociologist Mr Rubel during a television debate organised for the centenary of Marx’s death. According to Mr Rubel, Marx (and marxism), are nothing more than a 19th century utopia because Marx announced that “the proletariat would be everywhere and everything, and today the proletariat is nothing and nowhere”. They thus take their own bankruptcy to be that of the proletariat and its theory: revolutionary marxism.

Behind the rejection of continuity lies a negation of the whole history of the workers’ movement, or more correctly a denial that the working class has or can have a history. Behind the modernists’ apparently ultra-radical, and in fact empty, phrase-mongering, there lies in reality a calling into question of the proletariat as a, and indeed the only, revolutionary class within capitalist society.

---

“Sweeping aside the half-heartedness, lies and corruption of the outlived official Socialist parties, we Communists, united in the Third International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

If the First International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the Second International gathered and organised millions of workers; then the Third International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realisation, the International of the dead.”  (Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World!, March 1919).

---

Today, it is considered the thing, for every modernist of refined taste, to turn up his nose in disgust at the very mention of the Second International. Eighty years late, these “revolutionaries” of the empty phrase discover the Second International’s collapse under the weight of opportunism, and see no more than that. They ignore – voluntarily – everything that was positive in the formation of this International, at a precisely given moment in the history of the workers’ movement. By rejecting it en bloc, these “revolutionary” jokers throw out the baby with the bathwater. They block their ears and close their eyes to avoid seeing that this organisation served, at a moment in the history of the workers’ movement, as a rallying point to gather the forces of the working class, as a hotbed of education, training, and propagation of a developing consciousness in the vast masses of the proletariat. They don’t know – apparently – that it was within the International, and nowhere else, that the marxist Left developed and worked, that revolutionaries from Lenin to Luxemburg, from Liebknecht to Bordiga, fought against the penetration of bourgeois ideology and the degeneration of opportunism, not in hollow phrases but both practically and theoretically. Where did today’s ersatz “revolutionaries” learn about the Second International’s collapse, if not from the marxist left, who rebuilt the new International, the Communist International, to continue the old and go beyond it? The question here is not one of identifying completely willy-nilly with all the work, both good and bad, of the Second International, but of placing it in history, in the history of the workers’ movement. Our grandparents may have come to a bad end, destroyed by alcoholism, they nonetheless gave birth to the generation from which we ourselves were born. A new revolutionary generation does not appear through miraculous conception, but as the continuation of those revolutionary generations of the proletariat that preceded it.

Frankly, your critical remarks and objections on this point seem to us too evasive and unsatisfactory.

On Parliamentarism

To start with, we note that you affirm, on the question of participation in elections, that “we have never done so, and have no intention of doing so”. But this clear statement is immediately made ambiguous, to the extent that your confuse participation and denunciation when you write: “if at any time the question is posed of actively boycotting elections, in fact this comes down to taking part in the campaign...”. Perhaps this is the fault of an inaccurate translation, but if we go on like this we will never understand each other. Boycotting, even accompanied by the adverb “actively” cannot, logically, mean taking part, any more than boycotting and denouncing the trade unions means participating in them. Participation means taking a positive part in something: for example, calling on workers to vote, whether by presenting candidates or not. We must therefore clearly distinguish between two things: participation and abstention. So as not to confuse the question still further, it would be better to leave to one side the parliamentary cretinism that developed in the wake of opportunism within the Second International.

During the 19th century, Marx and the majority of the First International defended against Bakunin and the anarchists the political validity of participating in both elections and parliament, not to contest “executive positions” as you seem to say, but to the extent that the struggle for political and social reforms within capitalist society, such as universal suffrage, the freedom of the press, the right for the working class to meet and to organise, or again the limitation of the working day etc... had an obvious purpose and usefulness in defending working class interests. You seem to call this point into question, and thus return, a hundred years late, to the anarchist position, moreover completely forgetting what you say elsewhere, about the necessity to act on “concrete situations”.

This justification for participation in parliament was abandoned by Lenin and the marxists at the foundation of the Communist International. The sole argument that they kept, was the possibility of using electoral campaigns and the parliamentary tribute for revolutionary agitation; this was what they called revolutionary parliamentarism.

You do not seem to give much importance to this fundamental change, nor do you look for the deep-seated reasons that caused it to be adopted by revolutionaries who had absolutely no intention of thereby making a retrospective “concession” to anarchism, but who, as marxists, took account of the changing historical situation, the new objective conditions that appeared in concrete reality.

The question under discussion in the debate today is the validity or otherwise of what Lenin called revolutionary parliamentarism. Was this position of Lenin’s, within the Communist International, ever valid for the present period? And if not, why not? Since you answer neither question clearly, you limit yourselves, after much equivocation, to saying that this cannot be a “discriminatory criterion”, thus leaving the door wide open to all comers.

Even when you write that “it goes without saying that we are against any participation in parliament”, you go on to say that “this is not because of any a priori principle” nor “the category (?) of decadent capitalism”, “but from an analysis of concrete situations”. What concrete situations do you mean? Are they local situations, or the “geographic regions” dear to the Bordigists, or again the “conjunctural situations”, another Bordigist argument, or perhaps a change in historical situation, in historical period? The ambiguity increases still further when you refer out of context to Marx, “on the fact that historical events that are essentially analogous but which take place in different milieu produce totally different results” (our emphasis). What does this mean, if not that you consider that the problem of parliamentarism is still posed today in different milieu according to the country or the geographic region, and so cannot but produce totally different results; that is to say, that in one place (concrete situation!) parliamentarism is still possible, whereas in another it is no longer valid, or that it depends on the moment.

This generality about “concrete situations” can be used for absolutely anything, except for answering the question: why parliamentarism, in Lenin’s revolutionary sense, ceased to have any validity starting precisely with the First World War, in every country in the world.

Would it be too much to ask you to clarify precisely, for us and for the proletarian milieu in general, what is your position on this? This is all the more necessary in that the question of revolutionary parliamentarism is tightly linked to the question both of trade unionism and national liberation.

We must avoid the phenomenological approach, and not treat each of these questions separately and in itself. These questions are no more than different aspects of the same problem with its roots in the same “concrete” reality. Questions that lie within the same global reality demand a global answer.

-- o O o --

We can only regret the somewhat superficial manner in which you touch, in passing, on the question of decadent capitalism. We do not want to go into this question at length here: we will simply draw your attention to the article published in the International Review no. 48, which answers various objections on this question at more depth.

-- o O o --

Elsewhere, you seem to attach great importance to the “women question”. We regret that we do not understand you very well, nor can we follow you on this point. Marxists have never ignored the problem of the oppression to which women are subjected in any society where class divisions, and therefore exploitation and oppression at every level and in every domain, exist. But the solution to this problem is part of the overall solution: putting an end to capitalism, the last society divided into classes, liberating the whole of humanity from the scourge of the exploitation of man by man, and re-establishing, realising the human community. But it must be insisted that only the proletariat is the bearer of this total liberation, because it alone represents universal humanity.

Above all, we must avoid making the question of women’s condition into a separate problem a feminist problem existing above classes, as it developed during the 60’s and 70’s with the so-called “women’s liberation” movement. All these movements for the “liberation” of women, youth, national minorities, homosexuals etc, always tend to be “above” classes, or inter-classist, and their vocation is to divert attention from the fundamental problem: the proletarian class struggle

-- o O o --

To conclude, we would like to clarify once and for al what is called the “Third World” question, so as to remove any misunderstandings on this subject. We agree entirely with you that this term, like that of the “under-developed countries” are incorrect, ambiguous, and lend themselves to all kinds of confusions and distortions. We use them for lack of a more appropriate term, and probably also because they are current throughout Europe and in the World’s press. This is an explanation, but not a justification.

Let it be clear that, for us, capitalism has long since succeeded in creating a world market in which all countries are integrated, and that therefore capitalist production relations are law in every country. Imperialism, for Rosa Luxemburg, is precisely the point where all nations are integrated into the capitalist economic system, whence the saturation of the world market, overproduction, the system’s permanent and insurmountable crisis in which every nation is floundering, trying to sell its own products at the expense of its competitors. Contrary to the claims of the Trotskyists, Maoists and such like, who divide the world into imperialist (dominant) and non-imperialist (dominated) countries, the concept of imperialism cannot therefore be reduced merely to the domination of one country by another. It is much more than that. It is a stage reached by capitalist development, and all nations are therefore branded with its mark.

However, it would be wrong not to recognise the gap between the development and the power of different national capitals. The law of unequal development is inherent to capitalism. This inequality exists not only for historic reasons, but also capitalism as a system does not allow the equal development of economic power in different countries. That will only be possible under socialism. This is above all the  case in those countries that were integrated later into the capitalist system of production. This inequality necessarily has its effects, and plays an enormous part in the balance of class forces in different countries. From this law of unequal development, Lenin deduced the theory of the “weak link of capitalism”, according to which revolutionary tension would break the capitalist chain at its weakest link, in the least powerful capitalist nations. Against this theory, we set the classical vision of Marx and Engels, according to which the communist revolution is most likely to spread from the most advanced, most industrialised countries, where the productive forces conflict most violently with the relations of production, where the proletariat is the most numerous, the most concentrated, and the most experienced, and therefore the strongest for defeating capitalism. These are the countries that they thought would be the epicentre of the earthquake that was to destroy capitalism.

It is this sense that we sometimes use, for lack of a better, the metaphorical terms of centre and periphery that constitute a whole.

Nonetheless, we agree with you that it would be preferable to find more appropriate terms. In the meantime, it would perhaps be more judicious to put them in quotes, in order to avoid any incorrect or deformed interpretation of our ideas.

We hope that this rather long letter will help to dispel any misunderstandings and clarify the real problems under discussion.

With communist greetings, and our best wishes for a new year of struggles for the revolution.

The ICC, 8/1/87.

Begun in autumn 1983, the third wave of struggle since the world proletariat's historic recovery at the end of the 1960's has confirmed both its extent and its depth. Although this wave of struggles weakened somewhat during 1985, due essentially to the bourgeoisie's strategy of selective attacks aimed at scattering the workers' response, during 1986, and especially in Belgium in the spring, we have witnessed a renewal of massive combats corresponding to the more and more frontal attacks on the working class imposed by the continued worsening of the capitalist economy's collapse. This new surge of class struggle has been fully confirmed in recent months: in their turn, Sweden, France, Britain and Holland (ie some of the most advanced and central countries), but also Greece, have been the theatre of important struggles, often at a level unprecedented for years if not decades. These various class combats are rich in lessons that revolutionaries must be able to draw if they are to take an active part in their development.

An atmosphere of working-class combativity

From the extreme North of Europe to the far South, from "prosperous" Sweden to "poor" and relatively under-developed Greece, the working class has entered the battle with determination and often en masse.

In the beginning of October 1986, the third large strike movement in 18 months took place in Sweden, especially amongst state and council workers, but also accompanied by a whole series of wildcat strikes in other branches.

During January-February 1987, widespread strike movements paralyzed the whole of Greece. Strikes hit industry, telecommunications, the post office, electricity, banks, road, air and sea transport, the schools and the hospitals: not for decades had the country seen such a large-scale social movement.

This near simultaneity of workers' struggles in two countries so far apart, but also so apparently different, highlights the unity of the world proletariat, and especially that fraction that works and lives in Western Europe, confronted with the same insoluble capitalist crisis. The fact that Scandinavian workers' living conditions are vastly superior to those in Greece, or the different proportion of the working class in relation to the rest of the population in the two countries, makes no difference: workers everywhere are faced with more and more violent attacks by the ruling class and its state, everywhere they are forced to enter the struggle.

The extremely brutal attacks that the Greek working class reacted against (the worst since the colonels' regime fell in 1974) are not simply due to the catastrophic economic situation of one country. They are a reflection of a considerable deterioration of the world economy over the last year, which has hit the "prosperous" Scandinavian countries as much as the others, and in particular the most important amongst them: Sweden. There too, workers are subjected to unprecedented attacks. In 10 years, real wages have fallen by 12%. In recent months, mass redundancies have been announced in a whole series of branches, while the finance minister has threatened 23,000 job cuts in the state sector (in a country of less than 9 million inhabitants). As everywhere else, the myth of the "Welfare State", which was especially strong in Sweden, is collapsing. And if, as in most of the advanced countries apart from Belgium in spring 1986, the struggles in Sweden have not had the generalized character that they have had in Greece, this is largely because up to now its industrial strength has allowed it to avoid the economic convulsions that have hit the weaker countries. But this is only putting off the inevitable. Whereas during capitalism's ascendant phase last century, it was the world's most advanced capitalist country, Great Britain, which showed other nations the way, today it is the utter dilapidation of the weaker countries' economies that shows what the more developed nations can expect. And with the latter's increasing economic collapse and the resulting attacks unleashed on the working class, the perspective is without a doubt one of a more and more massive and generalized development of the class struggle.

Already, in early 1987, the signs of workers' combativity in several central West European countries, hold the seeds of this perspective.

In Holland, workers have begun to fight back against an unprecedented austerity plan (see International Review no.47). And one of the "leading" sections of the Dutch working class (the dockers of Rotterdam, the world's largest port) is directly involved. It is significant that this time, the workers in the container port, who were not involved in the 1979 or 1984 strikes, came out on wildcat strike. Moreover, in contrast to the great 1979 dockers' strike, the movement from January to February 1987 did not remain isolated. Movements of solidarity occurred in the port of Amsterdam, while strikes broke out simultaneously in several parts of the country (the Rotterdam shipyards, in Amsterdam, and in Arnhem).

Another country at the very heart of Western Europe has just confirmed the characteristics of the present moment in the class struggle: a country that concentrates the most important aspects of the situation throughout the region -- Great Britain.

At the end of January and early February, with the strike at British Telecom, Britain was hit by a large scale strike that involved up to 140,000 workers, including office workers and technicians, thus taking an important step forward in overcoming the trade barriers traditionally so strong in the British working class; in particular, this strike broke out and developed spontaneously in solidarity with workers penalized for refusing to work overtime. Whereas the great 1984-35 miners strike and the 1986 printworkers' strike remained, from beginning to end, wholly under union control, the fact that in the Telecom strike the unions were constantly forced to run after the movement to avoid being completely discredited, that the movement broke out again after 11th February when the union had succeeded in maneuvering a return to work, all bears witness to a profound process of maturation of consciousness within the working class. At the same time, this massive explosion of combativity is the sign that the workers in Britain have recovered from the demoralization that went along with the defeat of the miners' and printworkers' strikes. The fact that this renewed massive combativity has appeared in the country whose working class is the oldest in the world, whose ruling class is the world's most skilful and experienced, is a yet another sign of the strength of this new wind of international class struggle since early 1986.

But in this situation, after the struggles in Belgium during the spring of 1986, the most significant event is undoubtedly the strike which for almost a month paralyzed the entire French railway network.

Lessons of the French rail strike

Although massive movements of class struggle had occurred in almost every country in Western Europe since autumn 1983, in France the working class seemed to be lagging behind. To be sure, these struggles were not foreign to workers in France; the carworkers' strikes during 1983-84, the strikes in the steel industry and the shipyards during 1984, along with other smaller movements, were a demonstration that the struggle's recovery was general in the most advanced countries. Nonetheless, they were a long way from reaching the same level as the movements that hit Belgium, Holland, Britain and Denmark.

The fact that a national fraction of the working class, which had previously -- and especially in May 1968 -- demonstrated its ability to conduct massive combats, had been incapable since 1983 of anything but limited struggles, led some revolutionary groups to conclude that the French working class was in the grip of a lasting apathy, and to under­estimate the importance of the struggles going on in the rest of Europe. In reality, this kind of approach to historical situations is the opposite to that of marxist revolutionaries. Marxists have always been distinguished by their ability to see behind deceptive appearances what is really at stake in the situations they confront. The low level of strikes in France was in no way the sign of a lack, either of a great discontent or of a great potential combativity. The signs of this discontent and combativity had already appeared in the brief wildcat strikes that paralyzed the railways for two days at the end of September 1985, and Parisian public transport for one day two months later.

In reality, this relative weakness of the working class struggle should be analyzed as the result of two specific aspects of the French situation.

The first of these aspects was the relative timidity of the left-wing PS-PC (Parti Socialiste and Parti Communiste) government's attack on the working class. Although revealing itself a faithful manager of national capital by applying, in the name of "rigor" a real austerity policy, this government was hampered by the presence of two left parties in power, leaving the social front uncovered: a stronger attack ran the risk of creating a social situation completely out of the control of any of the unions, which themselves supported this same government.

The second aspect was these same unions, and especially the CGT's (Confederation Generale du Travail, controlled by the Parti Communiste), strategy of immobilization, adopted after the PC's departure from government in 1984 and which consisted of using against the struggle the unions' lack of credibility among the workers: the result of their constant and radical calls for "action" had precisely the opposite effect on those workers who were the most conscious of the unions' role as saboteurs.

But behind the relative working class passivity that resulted from this situation was developing a vast discontent, the ability to transform the unions' lack of credibility into a factor for and longer against the class struggle.

And this is precisely what the strike at the SNCF (French railway network) revealed during the second half of December 1986.

The strike began on 18th December among engine drivers at the Paris Gare du Nord shed, spontaneously, and without either warning the management (legally compulsory in the French nationalized industries), or receiving any instructions from the unions, who were themselves awaiting the opening of negotiations with management planned for 6th January 1987. The initial group of strikers immediately stopped all traffic on the Northern network and called on the rest of the drivers to join the strike. Within 48 hours, all 93 sheds were hit, and 98% of the drivers on strike. It was the largest movement in the industry since 1968. The movement spilled over to other trades among the rail workers. Although less massively, in practically every station and every workshop, the "sedentaries" joined the struggle.

For several days, the unions completely lost control, and took position against the struggle, on the pretext of not disturbing the December holiday traffic. Even the most "radical" amongst them, the CGT, opposed the beginning of the movement, in some sheds going so far as to set up "work pickets" to break the strike. The unions' attitude, and the enormous suspicion towards them that had developed over the years, especially after the fourteen useless "days of action" organized during the previous one, explains why, immediately, one of the strikers' major concerns was to take the struggle into their own hands to prevent the unions from sabotaging it. Everywhere, sovereign mass meetings were held, with the firm intention that they should be the only place where decisions were taken as to how to conduct the struggle. Everywhere, strike committees were elected by the assemblies, and responsible to them. It was the first time that such a degree of self­-organization of the struggle has been seen in France. The strikers felt the need to unite this self-organization on a national scale, which led to the creation of two "national" coordinations.  The first (called the "Paris-Nord" after the shed where its meetings were held) brought together drivers' delegates from almost half the sheds. The second (the "Ivry" coordination, held at a shed in one of Paris' southern suburbs) was open to all workers on the SNCF, but was also less representative, since many of its members had not been mandated by an assembly. And here the movement reached its limits. The Paris-Nord coordination decided to restrict participation to drivers' delegates only, while the Ivry coordination, although initially more open, in its turn decided to forbid workers from other industries from attending its meetings.

Obviously, the struggle's turning in on itself should be laid at the door of the bourgeois state's most radical instruments: "rank and file" unionism, and the leftist groups. The latter were the first, while their press made grand declarations in favor of extending the struggle, to fight its extension in practice. It is no accident that the Paris-Nord coordination, closed to all but the drivers, had as its spokesman a militant of the Trotskyist "Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire", nor that the leading light of the Ivry coordination was a militant of another Trotskyist group, "Lutte Ouvriere". In reality, if these bourgeois groups finally succeeded in derailing the movement into the dead-end of isolation, it is because they flattered a corporatism that already weighed heavily within the working class by radical talk on the lines of: "if we spread the movement to other industries then our own specific demands will be drowned as usual among all the others, and what's more we'll lose control of the movement to the unions, who have the advantage of an existing national structure".

The isolation that the SNCF workers had barricaded themselves into by the end of the strike's first week turned out to be disastrous for the movement: all the more so, because all through late December, large strike movements existed in the Parisian public transport system, and in the docks. These movements revealed a powerful combativity and an extreme suspicion of the unions who had officially launched them. Had the railwaymen's assemblies sent their own mass delegations to other sectors of the working class, or opened their own mass meetings to other workers, this would have been a great example for the whole working class of how to organize outside the unions; in fact, the railwaymen's isolation, expressed in the attitude of the two coordinations, determined their movement's stagnation and then its decline after the 25th December. It had ceased to be a dynamic, positive factor in the general situation in France. By contrast, its exhaustion gave the bourgeoisie the opportunity to launch a counter-offensive aimed at sabotaging workers' combativity in other branches. The division of labor was carefully organized. In particular, for weeks both unions and government put the question of the wage scale (the SNCF management wanted to replace a wage scale based on seniority with one based on "merit") to the fore, when in fact the central question for the whole French state sector is the constant drop in real wages, which is going to get still worse in 1987. After declaring that it would not budge on the wage scale, on the 31st December, the government decided to "suspend" it, which the unions of course hailed as a "victory". When the railwaymen decided to continue the strike, the CGT, followed by the CFDT attached to the PS, now that they were certain of its defeat, adopted an "extremist" attitude, which was to last until the end of the strike in mid-January. At the beginning of January, the CGT also launched a series of strikes in the state sector, in particular in the Post Office, and in one of its strongholds, the electricity and gas industries (EDF-GDF). And the CGT called its strikes in the name of solidarity with the rail workers. The fact that, at this moment, the CGT took up a slogan which is generally defended by revolutionaries does not of course mean that it had suddenly decided to defend workers' interests. In these strike calls, its aim was not to extend the combat, but to extend its defeat. The more workers entered the combat at a bad moment, the more bitter and widespread would be the resulting demoralization: this was how the ruling class calculated. And in some places, like the EDF-GDF, it partially succeeded.

And so the bourgeoisie, despite having at first lost all control of the movement, shared out the dirty work  amongst its different fractions - right, left and leftists     (who in particular succeeded in convincing the most suspicious workers to leave the unions to negotiate with the government) -- and once again managed to get things in hand. However, this strike has left a deep mark on the consciousness of the whole working class in France. In all the smaller movements that have been taking place since then (schools, hospitals, etc), the need for sovereign general assemblies is expressed, and "coordinations" appear, though generally at the prompting of the leftists so that they can keep control of them. Moreover, a profound movement of reflection within the class is today expressed in the still hesitant appearance of "struggle committees"[1], whose aim is to push forward the reflection amongst the workers for the combats to come.

Despite its weaknesses and its final defeat, the recent movement in France is highly significant of the present state of the struggle throughout Europe. The self-organization that it assumed before leftists and unions emptied it of any content, the intense suspicion of the unions that it expressed, reveal the future of the class struggle on an international scale. These characteristics are especially sharp in France, due to the presence in government, for three years, of all the bourgeoisie's left parties. In this sense, the struggles that have just hit France are a demonstration a contrario of the necessity, since the end of the 70's, for the bourgeoisie in every country to place its left forces in opposition in order to cover the social front. They also confirm that the left's coming to power in 1981 was in no way a result of the bourgeoisie's strategy, but an accident due to its archaic political apparatus. But even in countries which have avoided this kind of accident (ie the great majority), the exhaustion of a union apparatus constantly involved in the sabotage of workers' struggles will lead more and more to the appearance of similar spontaneous movements, developing their own self-organization.

The intervention of revolutionaries

It is clear that such an important movement demands that revolutionary organizations intervene actively to make a real contribution to the struggle's development, and to the development of the consciousness of the whole class.

This kind of active intervention proved necessary during the first days of the movement, to call on other sectors of the working class to join it. This is why on the 22nd December, our section in France issued a brief but widely distributed leaflet entitled: "To push back the government's attack, spread the movement, all together in the struggle".

Then, as the movement began to lose momentum after the 25th December, it was vital to insist, for all workers, on the absolute necessity not to leave the railwaymens' strike isolated, if it were not to lead to defeat a of the whole working class; and at the same time, to insist that workers should think deeply over the events of the previous ten days. This was the aim of the second leaflet put out on the 28th December by the French section, entitled: "Call for all workers to spread and unite the struggle".

Finally, once the strike had come to an end, it was up to revolutionaries, once again, to take an active part in the process of reflection and decantation going on within the class so as to be better armed for the struggles to come. This was the aim of our third leaflet, the 12th January, headed: "Lessons of the first combat".

Obviously, the intervention of revolutionaries cannot be limited to distributing leaflets: selling the press in the workplace, speaking at assemblies and meetings, holding public meetings, are also important ways of intervening in such a period. The ICC did its best to put them to use to the utmost of its limited strength.

However, this need to intervene actively did not confront just one organization in the revolutionary milieu, but all of them. And for the majority, this intervention was once again sadly inadequate, if not frankly non-existent.

It is necessary to draw some conclusions from this failing on the part of the proletarian political milieu.

Firstly, a revolutionary organization cannot be an active factor in the struggle's development unless it can analyze clearly the historical moment within which it is situated. It is hardly surprising that those who think that the historical course is still towards war, that the proletariat has still not emerged from the counter-revolution (when exactly the reverse is true, since the end of the 1960's), should completely under-estimate the importance of today's movements and either miss them, or intervene only once the battle is over.

Secondly, revolutionaries must be able, at each moment in the struggle, to grasp the real importance of the events that confront them: to consider that the 1986 student movements were an "example" for the workers' struggles in France is not only to confuse 1986 with 1968, it also means not understanding the fundamentally inter­-classist nature of this kind of movement, and in the end doing no more than adding yet another contribution to all the speeches from leftists and the rest of the bourgeoisie on this very theme.

Thirdly, at every moment revolutionaries must be capable of judging a situation precisely, in order to intervene as appropriately as possible. This day-to-day analysis of the situation's evolution is obviously difficult. It is not the mechanical result of the validity of their programmatic principles, nor of their correctly understanding the historic period. This ability is also largely based on experience gained in the struggle itself.

To bring together all these elements, communist organizations must consider themselves as active participants in the present combats of the working class. And this is certainly what is lacking the most in today's proletarian political milieu.

Saying this brings us no satisfaction. The ICC is not interested in denigrating other organizations in order to highlight our own merits. We consider our criticisms, which we will come back to in more detail, as a call to all revolutionaries to assume fully the responsibility that the class has given them, and whose importance grows daily as the class movement develops.

Perspectives for the struggle's development

In a European, and even world-wide (see the article in this issue on workers' struggles in the USA), context of developing workers' struggles, the combats at the end of 1986 in France following those in Belgium in spring of the same year, are an important step forward in this development. And although they shared many common characteristics, each of these struggles especially highlighted one of the two major necessities of today's class combats.

The struggles in Belgium highlighted the necessity and possibility of massive and generalized movements in the advanced capitalist countries. Those in France have confirmed the necessity and the possibility for the workers to take their combat into their own hands, to organize it themselves outside the trade unions, against them and their sabotage.

These two inseparable aspects of the workers' struggle will be more and more present in the movement of struggles that has already begun.

FM 1/3/87

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[1] See "Revolution Internationale" nos. 153 and 154 for two texts published by committees of this kind.

Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism, Part 2

Trade unionism, parliamentarism, mass parties, the struggle for social reforms, support for struggles to form new states... these are no longer valid forms of struggle for the working class. The reality of the open crisis shaking capitalism, the experience of social struggles which this crisis has engendered, is making this more and more clear to hundreds of millions of workers all over the world. But why were these forms of struggle, which were so important for the workers’ movement last century, transformed into what they are today? It’s not enough to be ‘against’. In order to have a solid intervention in the class struggle, to be able to combat the disorientation which bourgeois ideology always imposes, we also have to know why we are against.

Today, either out of ignorance, or in order to make life easier, certain groups who have arrived at the conclusion that trade unionism, parliamentarism, etc, have a bourgeois nature try to respond to this problem by resorting to anarchist or utopian conceptions, couched in a marxist language to make them seem more serious. Among these is the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste[1] [28]. For the GCI, capitalism hasn’t changed since its origins. The same goes for the proletariat’s forms of struggle. As for the programme formulated by revolutionary organisations, why change it? This is the theory of ‘invariance’. For these sirens of eternal revolt, trade union and parliamentary struggles,  the fight for reforms, have always been, since their inception, what they are today – ways of integrating the proletariat into capitalism. The analysis of the existence of two phases in the history of capitalism, to which correspond different forms of struggle, is nothing but an invention of the 1930s whose aim is to “betray the historic programme”, a programme which can be summarised by the quasi-eternal truth: “violent and world-wide revolution.” This is how they formulate all this: “This theorisation about the opening of a new capitalist phase, the phase of decline, thus makes it possible ‘a posteriori’ to maintain a formal coherence between the ‘acquisitions of the workers’ movement of the last century’ (in other words the bourgeois ‘acquisitions’ of social democracy: trade unionism, parliamentarism, nationalism, pacifism, the ‘struggle for reforms’, the struggle for the conquest of the state, the rejection of revolutionary action...) and, because of the ‘change of period’ (the classic justification for all the revisions and betrayals of the historic programme), the appearance of ‘new tactics’ suited to this ‘new phase’, going from the Stalinists’ defence of the ‘socialist fatherland’, to Trotsky’s transitional programme’ to the rejection of the union ‘form’ to the benefit of that of the ‘ultra-left’ councils (see Pannekoek, The Workers’ Councils). All regard the past in an a-critical manner, particularly social-democratic reformism, justified by the sleight of hand because it was situated in the ‘ascendant phase of capitalism’... “As for the communists, they are once more the iguanodons of history [2] [29], those for whom nothing fundamental has changed, those for whom the ‘old methods’ of direct struggle, class against class, of violent and world-wide revolution, of internationalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat remain – yesterday, today and tomorrow – valid.” (Le Communiste no. 23) The GCI goes on: “The very origin of the decadentist theories (theories of a ‘change in period’ and the opening of a ‘new phase of capitalism, that of its decline’ ...) lies, ‘bizarrely’, in the ‘30s, theorised as much by the Stalinists (Varga) as by the Trotskyists (Trotsky himself) and certain social democrats (Hilferding, Sternberg) and academics (Grossman). It was thus following the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 that certain products of the victory of the counter-revolution began to theorise a ‘long period’ of stagnation and ‘decline’ ”. It’s not easy to pack so many absurdities into so few lines. Let’s leave aside the analysis which the GCI often resorts to and which add nothing to the debate except to show the superficiality of its own reasoning. To put into the same sack the internationalist communist left (Pannekoek) and Stalinism (Varga) because both talked about the decadence of capitalism is as stupid as identifying revolution with counter-revolution because they both have something to do with the class struggle.

THE ORIGINS OF THE THEORY OF DECADENCE

Let’s begin with what is a vulgar lie – or, at best, the expression of the crassest ignorance about the history of the workers’ movement:  according to the GCI, it was ‘bizarrely’ in the ‘30s, ‘a posteriori’, that the theory of the decadence of capitalism was invented. Anyone who knows even a little bit about the history of the workers’ movement, and particularly the combat against reformism waged by the revolutionary left within the social democracy and the Second International, knows that this simply isn’t true. In the article ‘Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism’, (International Review 48), we showed at length how the idea that there are two phases in capitalism – an ‘ascendant’ phase in which capitalist relations of production stimulate the global and economic development  of society, and a ‘decadent’ phase in which these relations are transformed into a fetter on this development opening up an ‘epoch of revolution’ – is at the heart of the materialist conception of history as defined by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto and subsequently. We showed how the founders of scientific socialism were obliged to fight against all the utopian and anarchist currents who wilfully ignored such a distinction of historic phases and who saw the communist revolution as an eternal ideal which could be realised at any time, and not as a social transformation which could only be made historically necessary and possible by the evolution of the productive forces and their entering into contradiction with capitalist relations of production. But Marx and Engels had to fight above all against those who didn’t see that capitalism was still in its ascendant phase. Towards the end of the century, the left in the Second International - in particular through Rosa Luxemburg - had to fight against the opposite tendency, that of the reformists who denied that capitalism was moving towards its decadent phase. Thus in 1898 Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Reform or Revolution: “Once industrial development has attained its highest possible point and capitalism has entered its descending phase on the world market, the trade union struggle will become doubly difficult. In the first place, the objective conjuncture of the market will be less favourable to the sellers of labour power, because the demand for labour power will decrease at a slower rate and labour supply more rapidly than is the case at present. In the second place, the capitalists themselves, in order to make up for losses suffered on the world market, will make even greater efforts than at present to reduce the part of the total product going to the workers...The situation in England already offers us a picture of the beginning of the second stage of trade union development. Trade union action is reduced of necessity to the simple defence of already realised gains, and even that is becoming more and more difficult,” (p. 30, Merlin Press edition). Contrary to what the GCI claims, it was not ‘a posteriori’; it wasn’t after the first imperialist world butchery had brought irrefutable proof that capitalism had entered its decadent phase that these lines were written. It was fifteen years before that. And Rosa Luxemburg had begun to see clearly the political consequences – here at the level of trade unionism – that such a change of phase would have for the workers’ movement. The GCI claims that it was “following the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 that certain products of the victory of the counter-revolution began to theorise a ‘long period’ of stagnation and ‘decline’.” Is the GCI not aware that, in the very heart of this revolutionary wave, the Third International was founded on the basis of the analysis that capitalism had entered a new phase: “A new epoch is born. The epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat,” (Manifesto of the Communist International). And it was within this International that the Communist Left in its turn waged its struggle against the majority tendencies which didn’t see all the political consequences this new historic period would have for the forms of proletarian struggle. This, for example, is how the KAPD, the German communist left in 1921, expressed it at the Third Congress of the CI: “To push the proletariat to take part in elections in the period of the decadence of capitalism means fuelling the illusion that the crisis can be overcome by parliamentary means.” Finally, in the ‘30s, it was not only the “products of the victory of the counter-revolution” but the proletarian vanguards who – with the aim of drawing out the lessons of the great revolutionary wave – “theorised a ‘long period’ of stagnation and ‘decline’.” Thus Bilan, the review  which regrouped the elements of the communist left of Italy, Belgium and France, wrote in 1934: “Capitalist society, owing to the sharpened character of the contradictions inherent in its system, can no longer carry out its historic mission: developing the productive forces and the productivity of labour in a continuous and progressive manner. The clash between the productive forces and their private appropriation, once sporadic, has become permanent. Capitalism has entered into its general crisis of decomposition.” (Mitchell, Bilan 11, Sept. ’34) [3] [30].  The GCI is either ignorant of or is falsifying the history of the revolutionary movement. In either case its affirmations about the “very origin of the decadentist theories” are, enough to show the vacuity of its arguments and the lack of seriousness in its approach.

THE INVARIANCE OF THE PROGRAMME OR THE MARXISM OF THE DINOSAURS

Let’s now deal with the GCI’s argument that to talk about a change in the proletariat’s methods of struggle means “betraying the historic programme.” The programme of a political movement is constituted by defining the totality of means and ends which this movement proposes. In this sense the communist programme contains elements which have indeed been permanent since the Communist Manifesto, published at the time of the 1848 revolutions which for the first time saw the proletariat appearing on the scene of history as a distinct political force. This is the case for example when it comes to defining the general goal – the world communist revolution – or the fundamental means for attaining this goal: the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the communist programme isn’t just this. It also contains the immediate goals, the concrete means, the forms of organisation necessary to attain the final goal. These concrete elements are directly determined by the concrete historical situation in which the struggle of the proletariat takes place. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in Reform or Revolution: “In a word, democracy is indispensable not because it renders superfluous the conquest of political power by the proletariat, but because it renders this conquest of power both necessary and possible. When Engels, in his preface to the Class Struggles in France, revised the tactics of the modern labour movement and urged the legal struggle as opposed to the barricades, he did not have in mind – this comes out of every line in the preface – the question of a definitive conquest of political power, but the contemporary daily struggle. He did not have in mind the attitude that the proletariat must take toward the capitalist state at the time of its seizure of power, but the attitude of the proletariat while in the bounds of the capitalist state. Engels was giving directions to the proletariat oppressed, and not to the proletariat victorious.” (ibid, p. 79-80). For the GCI, the communist programme ignores all this and limits itself to the single war cry: ‘make the world revolution everywhere and at all times.’ Reduced to that, the programme could be deemed invariant, but it would no longer be a programme, merely a declaration of intent. As for its practical application, if this ‘programme’ could have one, it would mean sending the workers to the final confrontation whatever the historic conditions and the balance of class forces. In other words, it’s the road to massacre. Mark himself had to fight these kinds of tendencies within the Communist League: “Whereas we say to the workers: you have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only  to transform the conditions, but to transform yourselves, you, on the other hand, say to them: either we take power straight away, or we might as well go to sleep,” (Marx, speaking against the Willich/Schapper tendency in the Communist League; proceedings of the central committee session of September 1850, cited in Nicolaievski, Marx, Man and Fighter, chap XV). A programme which doesn’t seek to define the specificities of each historical situation and the proletarian activity which corresponds to it – such a programme is no use at all. Furthermore, the communist programme is constantly being enriched by the practice of the class. Questions as crucial as the impossibility of the class taking over the bourgeois state, or the proletariat’s forms of organisation and struggle for the revolution, have resulted in modifications in the communist programme following experiences like those of the Paris Commune of 1871 or of the Russian revolution of 1905. To refuse to modify the programme, to enrich it in connection with the evolution of objective conditions and the practical experience of the class is not to ‘remain loyal’ to the programme but to destroy it by turning it into tablets of law. Communists are not dinosaurs and this programme is not a fossil. Knowing how to modify and enrich the communist programme, as the most consistent revolutionaries have always done in order to be able to respond to each general historical situation and integrate the results of revolutionary praxis – that’s not ‘betraying the programme’, it’s the only serious attitude, the only one that can ensure that the programme remains a real weapon of the class[4] [31].

THE IDEALIST STANDPOINT OF ANARCHISM AND THE METHOD OF MARXISM

For the GCI, the worst crime of the ‘decadentists’ is that they theorise a “formal coherence between the ‘acquisitions’ of the workers’ movement of last century.” And the GCI goes on: “In other words, the bourgeois ‘acquisitions’ of social democracy.” The fundamental danger of the theory of decadence is that it “regards he past in an a-critical manner, particularly social democratic reformism, justified by sleight of hand because it was situated in the ‘ascendant’ phase of capitalism.” For the GCI: “the historic function of social democracy was, directly, not to organise the struggle for the destruction of the system (which is the universal standpoint of the communists), but to organise the mass of workers atomised by the counter-revolution in order to educate them to participate as well as possible in the system of wage slavery,” (Le Communiste 23). In another article we will deal specifically with the class nature of social democracy and of the Second International at the turn of the century. But in order to do this we first have to reply to the absurd simplifications of the GCI according to whom “nothing fundamentally has changed” for the workers’ struggle since its origins. The GCI reproaches social democracy with having organised not the struggle “for the destruction of the system (which is the invariant standpoint of the communists)”, but the trade union and parliamentary struggle for reforms, which has never been anything but a way of getting workers to participate in the system. But to reject trade unionism or parliamentarism solely because they are forms of struggle which don’t immediately result in the “destruction of the system” is to reject them for purely idealist reasons, founded on the wind of eternal ideals and not on the solid ground of the objective conditions of the class struggle. It amounts to seeing the working class only as a revolutionary class, forgetting that in contrast to all past revolutionary classes it is also an exploited class. The struggle for immediate demands and the revolutionary struggle are two moments in the same fight by the working class against capitalism; the destruction of capitalism is nothing other than the defensive struggle against the attacks of capital taken to its final consequences. But these  two moments of the struggle are not identical. Only a totally vacuous view of the proletarian struggle could ignore this dual character. Those who, like the reformists, see the working class only as an exploited class and its struggle as being limited to immediate demands, have a static and historically restricted vision. But those who only see the working class as a revolutionary class and ignore its exploited nature and the fact that every workers’ struggle is also a struggle for immediate demands – such people are talking about a phantom. When revolutionary marxists rejected the trade union or parliamentary form of struggle in the past, it was never in the name of the empty, a-classist radicalism which belongs to anarchism, as expressed for example by Bakunin in his ‘Revolutionary Catechism’ in 1869, when he wrote that the organisation of revolutionaries must devote “all its forces and all its means to aggravating and extending the suffering and misery which must finally push the people into a general uprising”. Anarchism starts from the standpoint of an ideal of abstract ‘revolt’. It has a ‘transcendental disdain’ for the immediate struggles of the working class, as Marx said a propos Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. Marxism starts from the standpoint of a class and its interests, both historic and immediate. When revolutionary marxists came to the conclusion that trade unionism, parliamentarism, the struggle for reforms were no longer valid, it’s not because they were abandoning the struggle for immediate demands, but because they understood that it could no longer be effective by using the old forms. This was the general approach of Rosa Luxemburg when she foresaw that when capitalism entered its “descending phase”, the trade union struggle would become “doubly difficult”, when she noted that at the end of the nineteenth century in the most advanced country, Britain, the trade union movement “is reduced of necessity to the simple defence of already realised gains, and even that is becoming more and more difficult”. This was the approach of the KAPD when it rejected participation in elections not because ‘voting is dirty’ but because parliamentary means have no further use in dealing with the effects of the crisis of capitalism, ie with the impoverishment of the proletariat. As long as the development of capitalism could permit a real and lasting improvement of workers’ living conditions, as long as the state had not yet become a totalitarian power over social life, the immediate struggle could take trade union and parliamentary forms. The objective conditions in which capitalism was reaching its historical highpoint created a sort of economic and political terrain where the immediate interests of the working class could coincide with the necessities of a capitalism expanding on a worldwide scale, and draw real advantages from this. It was the illusion of believing that such a situation could carry on indefinitely which was at the root of the development, within the working class movement, of ‘reformism’ – that bourgeois ideology according to which the communist revolution is impossible and all that can be done is to gradually reform capitalism in the interests of the workers. For marxists, the rejection of the struggle for reforms within capitalism has always been based, in the final analysis, on a recognition of their impossibility. In 1898 Rosa Luxemburg put it as follows: “If our programme contains the formula of the historic development of society from capitalism to socialism, it must also formulate, in all its characteristic fundamentals, all the transitory phases of this development, and it should, consequently, be able to indicate to the proletariat what ought to be its corresponding action at every moment on the road toward socialism.” (Ibid) When capitalism entered its decadent phase, what changed for the workers’ struggle at the level of the objective conditions was the impossibility of obtaining real and lasting improvements. But this didn’t take place in isolation. The decadence of capitalism is also synonymous with state capitalism, with the hypertrophy of the state apparatus, and this entirely alters the proletariat’s conditions of existence. We can’t develop here all the aspects of the profound changes capitalism’s decadence brings to social life in general and the class struggle in particular. We refer the reader to the article ‘The Proletarian Struggle in Decadent Capitalism’ in IR 23. What we have to underline here is the fact that for marxists the forms of the proletarian struggle depend on the objective conditions in which it is taking place and not on the abstract principles of eternal revolt. Only by basing yourself on an objective analysis of the balance of class forces, seen within its historical dynamic, can you judge the validity of a strategy or form of struggle. Without this materialist basis, any position you take up on the means of the proletarian struggle is built on sand; it opens the door to disorientation as soon as the superficial forms of eternal revolt – violence, anti-legalism – appear on the scene. The GCI is a striking example of this. When you don’t understand why certain forms of struggle were valid in ascendant capitalism, you can’t understand why these are no longer so in decadent capitalism. Because its only political criteria are to be against anything that resembles social democracy, because it believes that ‘anti-democracy’ is a sufficient criterion in itself, we find the GCI writing in November 1986 that an organisation like that of the Stalinist guerrillas in Peru, the ‘Shining Path’ , because it’s armed and refused to participate in elections “appears more and more as the only structure capable of providing a coherence to the growing number of direct actions by the proletariat in the towns and the country-side, whereas all the other left groups are objectively united against the interests of the workers in the name of condemning terrorism in general and of defending democracy” (Le Communiste no. 25, our emphasis).  The GCI notes that “all the documents that Shining Path has produced are based on the strictest Stalino-Maoism” and that it considers that in Peru the struggle is “currently at its anti-imperialist and anti-feudal stage”. But this doesn’t prevent the GCI from concluding “We don’t have the elements to consider Shining Path (or the PCP as it defines itself) as a bourgeois organisation in the service of the counter-revolution” (ibid). What the GCI lacks for appreciating the class nature of a political organisation, or any other reality of the class struggle, isn’t ‘elements of information’ but the marxist method, the materialist conception of history – an indispensable element of which is the notion of historic phases of a system, of ascendancy and decadence. RV.

Capitalism's entry into a new phase of recession has not spared USA, chief of the western bloc and the world's premier economic power. Difficulties are growing inexorably for US capital. And the changes taking place at the head of the executive, through the media campaign about ‘Irangate' which aims to prepare a successor for Reagan while keeping the Republican party in government and the Democratic Party in opposition, reveal the American bourgeoisie's preoccupations about the need to impose brutal austerity. And, as in Western Europe and the rest of the world, the American proletariat is not prepared to accept this austerity without reacting. Even if, owing to its historical characteristics, the proletariat in the USA has not yet developed its struggles to the levels reached in Western Europe over the last few years, it has shown a real combativity in a whole series of strikes in different sectors. These struggles are an integral part of the present international wave of class combats.

We are publishing here the part dealing with the class struggle from a report on the American situation adopted by ICC's US section in December 1986 (to obtain the complete text in English, write to Internationalism's address). The events in the months after this report was written have only confirmed perspective drawn out in it; a strengthening of the bourgeoisie's attacks and of the workers' response to them.

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The class struggle

The working class in the US is a full participant in the third wave of class struggles which began in September ‘83. Each phase of the current wave has had a very quick echo in the struggles of American workers. Any lagging behind by American workers relates to depth, not timeliness. The struggles here have not reached the same magnitude as in Western Europe, but have demonstrated the same tend­encies and characteristics, proving once again that the proletarian struggle is inter­national. Whatever differences in degree that are manifest in the US primarily reflect the strength of American capitalism and its position as chief of the western bloc, and the inexperience and lack of maturity of the work­ing class here. These peculiarities only heighten the international significance for the world proletariat of the struggles in the US.

The third phase has had three discernable phases.

First phase: began in September ‘83 in Belgium with the public sector strike, showed from the outset a tendency towards extension - spreading to other sectors as workers saw the need to avoid isolation - and also a high degree of simultaneity of struggle in different industries and different countries. This phase quickly manifested itself in the US in the strike at Greyhound, in which workers fought back against threatened wage cuts. When man­agement attempted to emulate the example of the Reagan administration in the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 by hiring scabs to replace strikers, militant workers from other industries rushed to show their solidarity in demonstrations. These demonstrations, called by the central union councils in city after city, often posed the possibility of breaking free from union control and reflected how workers had learned from the experience of the air controllers. Mass demonstrations, rallies in the streets, called early by the unions under pressure from the workers soon became common. While the preceding months had seen harbingers of the third wave, in strikes at Iowa Beef, which involved violent confrontations with police, Phelps Dodge in Arizona, AT&T Continental, and Chrysler earlier in ‘83, the Greyhound strike was a qualitative step forward, as for the first time workers outside the specific contract dispute sought to participate directly in the struggle. This quest for active solid­arity did not take the form of joining the strike around their own demands, as it did in the Belgium public sector strike in September ‘83. But it clearly reflected the same process, as the first steps were taken to crack the stranglehold of union-nurtured corporatism. Workers who were not employed by Greyhound fought alongside the strikers, block­ing buses, facing arrest, and a construction worker died trying to block a bus in Boston.

This first phase continued to echo events in Europe as several thousand workers in Toledo joined strikers in attacking a scab-run AP auto parts plant in May ‘84, and fought a pitched battle with police that lasted through the night. The violent confrontations and Phelps Dodge, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) strike against wage cuts despite the company's near-bankruptcy, the hospital strike in NY, and the GM strike which spread as an unofficial wildcat strike to 13 militant plants across the country, and the New York City hotel workers' strike in June ‘85 in which workers took to the streets, marching from hotel to hotel in midtown, blocking traffic and striking a responsive chord with workers in the garment center, were some of the notable episodes in this first phase of the third wave of class struggle which demonstrated the growing resistance to wage cuts and other concessions and the tendency towards solidarity.

The second phase began in late 1985 and was characterized by a dispersal of struggles, as the bourgeoisie sought to side step the tend­encies towards extension and active solidarity within the working class by switching to a strategy of dispersed attacks, picking workers off one company, one factory, one sector at a time. The unions no longer waited for pressure to build for solidarity demonstrations and marches but took pre-emptive action announ­cing plans were underway immediately for such forms of struggle, short circuiting spontaneous action. Of course the unions consciously sabotaged these demonstrations. To combat the explosive danger posed by the tendency towards extension, the unions increasingly pushed the false strategy of "battles of attrition" - the long strike. Court injunctions restricting mass pickets, solidarity walkouts, and other valuable weapons of the workers became routine weapons used by union, management and government to derail workers' struggles. Where the situat­ion was so volatile that the traditional union tactics were no longer enough to control and defeat the workers, the bourgeoisie began increasingly to rely upon the base unionists.

The strategy of dispersed attacks and the growing reliance on base unionism led to a dispersal of militant struggles, in which workers showed great combativity, a deepening resistance against cuts, and even a tendency to strain at the bit of union control, but remained isolated. The central struggles in this phase included: the Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel strike, where workers struck against a bank­rupt firm's reorganization plan; Hormel where the bourgeoisie relied upon base unionists to overcome the tendencies towards extension, keep control, and set up the defeat; Watsonville cannery strike, where the first steps towards self-organization were taken by a mass workers' assembly and an elected strike committee, only to be recuperated by the bourgeoisie as base unionists captured control of the strike committee and diverted the workers towards "union reform", eventually taking over control of the local union; the Chicago Tribune printers' strike, which despite dragging out. in a dead-end "battle of attrition" exploded into a tremendous demonstration of working class solidarity in January 1986 as 17,000 workers turned out hours early for a union called demonstration and fought cops and tried to block scab deliveries; the strike by TWA flight attendants, in which the strikers refused to accept drastic wage cuts and initially elicited massive support from mechanics and ground crew workers who refused to cross their picket lines. But the union was successful in using a court injunction to break this solidarity, isolate and help defeat the flight attendants.   

The third phase began in spring of ‘86. With the deepening of the crisis and the onset of  the new global recession, the bourgeoisie has­ less and less room for maneuver, less opportunity to delay its attacks on the working class.                                    

Increasingly the bourgeoisie is under pressure to give up dispersed attacks and switch to a frontal attack on the entire working class - an all out austerity attack. Internationally, the third phase first appeared in Scandinavia as workers fought back against government austerity programs in early spring. This new phase in class struggle reached its highest point thus far in Belgium in late spring, when the workers' militancy and combativity was matched by a conscious effort to seek unity in struggle. In the US the first hints of the changing situation could be seen around the same time, in early spring in the wildcat strike at General Electric which spread to four factories in Massachusetts, and the strike by Maine railroad workers, which soon spread across New England as other rail workers displayed an active solidarity. But it was in the municipal workers' strikes in Philadelphia and Detroit in July and August where the onset of the third phase clearly announced itself in the US, just two months after the events in Belgium.

In Philadelphia workers used mass picketing to shutdown city hall, refused to let the unions use jurisdictional divisions to break the unity of the struggle, didn't let an initial court injunction against mass picketing derail the struggle, and eventually decided to violate a court injunction to return to work. Ultimately, the unions were successful in using the city's threat to fire all the strikers to break the strike because the workers didn't yet understand that the way to fight such tactics is to spread the strike further, bringing more workers from other sectors into the fray.

In Detroit the conscious efforts to achieve unity reached an even higher level, as city workers in such blue collar categories as sanitation and transit workers, who were not directly involved in the immediate contract dispute between the city and clerical workers maintained a militant unity, resisting all efforts by union and management to divide them. Even though the blue collar workers never dir­ectly joined the strike around their own demands, their militant solidarity gave the strike its real strength, and permitted the strikers to beat back the city's austerity attacks for the moment - showing clearly that struggle pays, in successfully resisting the ruling class offensive and in the ability to learn lessons from previous struggles and deepen consciousness. The same tendencies could be seen in the hotel workers' strike in Atlantic City in the autumn of ‘86 where the workers reclaimed the street demonstration as a powerful weapon of the class struggle, rampaging through the streets, blocking tourist traffic and buses transporting scabs, and confronting police for nearly two days before a new contract was hastily ironed out.

The same tendencies towards quickly seeking conscious unity, ignoring court orders, taking to the streets, and avoiding a "battle of attrition" mentality can be seen currently in the hospital workers' strike against the Kaiser‑Permanente chain of medical clinics in California against management's attempts to install a two-tier wages system which would pay newly hired workers 30% less. Mass picketing quickly forced five other unions representing other employees to officially join the strike. Even the registered nurses with a history of corporatist and ‘professional' disdain for other hospital workers (attributable to bourgeois ideology), violated court injunctions and union instructions to stay at their jobs, and instead displayed their solidarity not only by respecting picket lines and staying off the job, but by actually joining the struggle - hundreds of them participating actively in daily picketing.

In identifying the crucial new tendencies that have emerged in the third phase of class struggle, we do not mean to imply that all struggles necessarily demonstrate the same strengths and developments. Clearly the US bourgeoisie with its great economic strength still has the ability to disperse its attacks - though to a lesser degree - and will do so whenever possible. And as the example of the USX steel strike demonstrates, they have the capacity to orchestrate the isolation of struggles and sell the ideology of the strike of attrition. Nevertheless, we must insist that the general tendency favors the development of struggles in which workers consciously seek to unify their struggles and take up an active solidarity.

Given the specificities of the American economy, with its large private sector, and the more indirect manner in which government austerity plans are forced upon the private sector, it is in the public sector workforce where conditions most favor the development of struggles in the short term. However, as the new rash of layoffs and plant shutdowns indicate, resistance in the private workforce will not lag too far behind. With contracts coming in 1987 effecting over 600,000 public sector workers and an additional 450,000 auto workers, a real potential for major struggles is posed, as workers resist the onslaught. The rapid growth in unemployment poses the potential for the unemployed to play an increasingly important role in the class struggle as we have seen in certain countries in Europe. The shutdown of more and more plants following years of union-engineered concessions which were supposed to guarantee a secure future and the layoffs at companies turning huge profits will prompt the growth of militant resistance. The growing pressure on governments and companies to attack workers will lead to greater simultaneity of struggles and create increasingly favorable circumstances for the tendency for struggles to unify against the united attacks.

The American working class' participation in the third phase demonstrates clearly that the same process of the maturation of conscious­ness we have seen in struggles in Europe has taken hold here as well. Workers in America increasingly understand the serious nature of what is at stake in the class struggle. While the number of strikes in 1986 rose dramatically compared with 1985 (which set a record for the lowest number of major strikes since World War Two), it is not anywhere near the level it was in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, But what is more important than the number of strikes is the quality of the struggles that occur in terms of the seriousness of the issues at stake and in the strides the class is making in learning the lessons of past struggles. Fifty per cent of the stoppages today are lockouts, undertaken by management to push through its austerity, its wage cuts, its work rule changes. Workers know that when they go on strike today that they face a real battle, that their jobs are literally at stake, that the danger that scabs will replace them is very real. The bourgeoisie uses its media to try to demoralize workers about the prospects of struggle, focusing on the defeats of the air traffic controllers in ‘81, of the Hormel workers, and the TWA flight attendants - all of whom lost their jobs.

But workers have not been scared away from struggle by these defeats. Instead they are beginning to draw the lessons of these defeats and search for the unity in struggle which is their greatest weapon. At Hormel, at Watson­ville, at TWA, at USX, the unions imposed the strategy of the long strike that set the workers up for defeat. But at Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlantic City and Kaiser-Permanente, the workers moved quickly to broaden their struggle.

The previous chapter on the history Dutch Left which appeared in IR 48, dealt with the passing of the SDAP, led by Troelstra, into the camp of the bourgeoisie when it voted for war credits in 1914; and with the splits in this party, the regroupment of revolution­ary minorities, essentially the ‘Tribunist' current around the SDP, created in 1909. But, the SDP leadership took a closed, sectarian attitude towards the Zimmerwald conference against the war in 1915. The chapter published in this issue shows how this position led to the abandonment of internationalism and the adoption of a pro-Entente position during the war. It examines the revolutionary attitudes and positions taken up by Gorter and others towards the Russian revolution and against the opportunist concessions of the SDP. The fact that the reaction by Gorter and Pannekoek was dispersed, that it began as a simple opposition, weighed heavily on the later evolution of the SDP, when it was transformed into a Communist Party in November 1918.

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Development of the SDP: between revolution and opportunism

Despite the politics of the SDP leadership, Zimmerwald had a considerable echo in the working class in Holland, as it had in the belligerent countries. Roland-Holst carried out a lot of propaganda in the big towns. There was such a response from the workers that even the SDAP, under pressure from oppositional elements, published the Zimmerw­ald Manifesto in its daily, Het Volk.

Finally, in 1916, under the pressure of the workers and of the RSV - which it didn't want to have the sole reputation for carrying out revolutionary activity - the SDP reluct­antly adhered to the international socialist commission created at Zimmerwald[1]. There were several reasons for the SDP's change in attitude and its rapprochement with the RSV.

In the first place, Roland-Holt's RSV had moved much closer towards the ‘Tribunists'. It had even given tangible evidence of this leftward evolution: the members of the RSV who had still been in the SDAP left it in January 1916; in response to this party's explicit condemnation of the Zimmerwald movement at its congress, the small minority hostile to the 2nd International then turned to the SDP, Roland-Holst then argued that fusion with the ‘Tribunist' party was on the agenda. After this departure, there were no further splits in the SDAP except for the one that took place on its left in February 1917.

In the second place, and despite the comings and goings of its leadership, the SDP was gaining a growing sympathy in the working class. It had developed its propaganda to a considerable degree, against the war, the three year military service, unemployment and ration­ing. It was particularly active amongst the unemployed and the committees they had thrown up. Politically the party disposed of theoret­ical instruments which made it appears as the only serious Marxist party in Holland. The theoretical journal De Nieuwe Tijd (Modern Times), which had belonged to neither the SDAP nor the SDP but which since the 1909 split had published contributions from marxist theoret­icians belonging to both parties, now passed entirely into the hands of the revolutionary marxist current. The departure of Wilsaut and Van der Goes from the editorial board put an end to the presence of the opportunist and revisionist current within the only theoretical organ in Dutch.

It's notable that Roland-Holst was associated to Gorter and Pannekoek in order to ensure the editing of the review, which became an organ of combat "for socialism, for the liberation of humanity from capitalism."

In the third place, through the person of Pannekoek, the SDP got more and more involved in trying to gather together the revolutionary forces who were clearly against the war and for the revolution. From 1915, Pannekoek collabor­ated regularly with the German international­ist currents: Borchardt's ‘Lichtslrahlen' group in Berlin, then the ‘Arbeiterpolitik' group in Bremen, which began publishing its review in 1916 after leaving the SDP. In continuous contact with the German internationalists, Pannekoek was quite naturally put in charge - with Roland-Holst's collaboration - of editing the review Vorbote in January 1916. This review, edited in Switzerland, was the organ of the Zimmerwald left[2], hostile to the centrism of the pacifist current at Zimmerwald. It resolute­ly situated itself on the terrain of "the future 3rd International."

All this showed a positive evolution in the SDP and the Roland-Holst group. After a period of fluctuation, the ‘Tribunist' party was taking up its international responsibilities. Roland-Holst, having been with the Zimmerwald centre. Trotsky in particular, had moved left.

The existence of two separate revolutionary groups in Holland no longer made any sense. It was time to regroup. On 16 February 1916, the SDP leadership expressed the hope for a fusion with the RSV. On 26 March, the latter's general assembly pronounced itself in favor of regroupment. Only the sections of The Hague and Rotterdam showed any great confusion, in that they only wanted to accept the fusion if syndicalist elements could also be integrated. These hesitations showed that, as with the SDP, there was still not a clear demarcation between the marxist and the revolutionary syndicalist currents.

Nevertheless, the fusion took place. The SDP, which gained 200 members, was now a party 700 strong. This growth, after a long period of numerical stagnation, allowed the party to put out a daily paper, De Tribune. The SDP also underwent a qualitative development. On 21 June, for the first time in its history, it was able to lead successfully a workers' demon­stration in Amsterdam against hunger and the war. The ‘sect' had really become a workers' party with a capacity to influence the action of broad layers of the proletariat.                                                                       

It is clear that the development of the marxist current in Holland in 1916 was the fruit of the whole reawakening of the inter­national proletariat after a year and a half of slaughter on the battlefields. 1916 was the turning point, prefiguring the revolution­ary upheaval in Russia in 1917. The resurgence of class struggle, after months of torpor and stupor, broke through the Union Sacree, In Germany there were the first political strikes against the war, after the arrest of Karl Liebknecht.

Although Holland was ‘neutral', it saw the same resurgence of workers' struggles. The beginning of an international wave of strikes and demonstrations against the effects of the war was also a reality in ‘little Holland'. In May and June in Amsterdam there were spont­aneous demonstrations by women against rationing. Committees of working class women were constit­uted in Amsterdam and other towns. There was a permanent state of agitation, taking the form of assemblies and demonstrations of working class men and women. These movements were extended into strikes throughout the country in July. These phenomena of profound discontent were undoubtedly pre-revolutionary. The situation in Holland had never been so favorable for the revolutionary current.

However, the SDP leadership would increasingly reveal an ambiguous and even opportunist attitude. Not on the level of the struggle for immediate demands, where the party was very active, but on the level of the political struggle.

First of all, the SDP tirelessly maintained its policy of a front with syndicalist and anarchist type organizations. The old cartel of organizations, the SAV, was dismantled on 25 February[3]. It was replaced in April 1916 by a ‘Revolutionary Socialist Committee' against the war and its consequences. The SDP, with Wijnkoop and Louis de Visser - both future leaders of the Stalinized CP in Holland - were de facto at the head of this cartel of organizations. Although the RSC was very active in the struggle against poverty and war, it appeared in fact as a general staff of struggles, substituting itself for their spontaneity. It was neither a workers' council - the revolution being absent - nor a central strike committee, which by its nature is temporary and linked to the extent of the struggle. It was a hybrid political organism, which far from bringing clarity about the objectives of the class struggle was a very confused compromise between different political currents within the workers movement.

With the RSC were the anarchist groupings which had already worked with the SDP. The most revolutionary of these was incontestably the Nieuwenhuis group. This group - ‘Social Anarchist Action' - was, though in a confused way, definitely a revolutionary group, above all because of the intransigent personality of Nieuwenhuis. This certainly wasn't the case with other groupings, who included the ‘Bond van Christen-Socialiston' whose political coloring was Christian-pacifist and parliamentarist; and the ‘Vrije Meuschen Verbon' (League of Free Men) who were inspired by Tolstoy. When the Nieuwenhuis group (and also the IAMV) left this cartel at the end of 1916, these were the only groups left, though they were soon joined in February 1917 by the small Socialist Party, a split of 200 people from the SDAP, and mainly a trade unionist and parliamentarist group.

This conglomerate of pacifist organizations, most of them alien to revolutionary marxism, had the effect of dragging the SDP leadership more and more into an opportunist practice. By allying itself with the ‘Christian Socialists' and the SP, the SDP was to fall rapidly into parliamentary adventurism and the kind of unprincipled politics it had formerly denounced in Troelstra. In 1917, in response to an increasingly tense social situation, the Dutch bourgeoisie installed universal suffrage. The SDP formed an electoral cartel with the two organizations. In relation to the pre-war situation, it marked some clear successes: 17,000 voters as opposed to 1,340 in 1913. This result certainly reflected a growing disaffection among the workers towards the SDAP. Nevertheless it was the beginning of a policy which within a year had become overtly parliamentarist. It was in reaction to this process that the anti-parliamentarism of the Dutch communist left was to develop.

But the opposition within the party didn't crystallize straight away around anti-parliam­entarism. It began in 1916 in response to the foreign policy of the Wijnkoop leadership. A powerful opposition to this policy grew up in the Amsterdam and Hague sections around Barend Luteraan, a member of the leadership, and Sieuwertsz van Reesema.

In effect, first Ravesteijn, then Wijnkoop, but also the majority of the SDP - which was more serious - had more and more adopted an orientation favorable to the Entente. This had already been expressed, though in an indirect way, in September 1914, through the pen of Ravesteijn. The latter affirmed that the defeat of Germany would be the most favor­able condition for the outbreak of revolution in Holland. It was certainly not new in the marxist camp - and this was to be repeated during the Second World War - to envisage what would be the epicenter of the coming revolut­ionary earthquake. Pannekoek responded in De Tribune, to put an end to this purely theoretical question: even if Germany was more devel­oped economically than Britain, it was a matter of indifference for marxists which of the two imperialist camps would gain the final victory: violent oppression by one camp and the more disguised forms of democratic deception were both unfavorable to the workers' movement. It was exactly the same response that the Italian and Dutch communist lefts made during the Second World War to currents like anarchism and Trotskyism.            

The discussion remained there. Ravestejn was clearly developing pro-Entente positions. But he was still isolated in the party; Wijnkoop himself, the SDP president, still had the same position as Pannekoek and Gorter. During the course of 1916, all this began to change. Wijnkoop suddenly ranged himself alongside Ravestejn, by saying that the main priority was the struggle against German militarism under the pretext - which was in any case false - that the Dutch bourgeoisie as a whole stood behind Germany. During the course of the year 1917, he began to use the same arguments as the social-chauvinists in the Entente countries. In an article approved by the editorial board of De Tribune - which showed that there was a real danger of opportunist gangrene in the SDP - Wijnkoop depicted Germany as the ‘feudal' rampart of reaction in Europe, carrying out the pillage and murder of conquered peoples; France, on the other hand, the heir of the Great Revolution, and a developed country like Britain would be incapable of such acts. This position was a clear abandonment of the internationalist principles of the SDP; it left the way open to a situation in which, if Holland's neutrality was violated by Germany, the SDP leadership wouldn't call for a struggle against both imperialist camps but would support the Entente.

This position, which marked a turning point in history of the SDP, gave rise to violent protests within the party. An opposition led by Barend Luteraan and Van Reesema launched a struggle against the editorial committee, which had allowed conceptions to be published in De Tribune which were totally foreign to the revolutionary essence of the party. This had been made easier by the fact that Gorter, ill and depressed[4] had in 1916 withdrawn from the editorial committee and momentarily found it impossible to participate in the activities of the party.

In order to defuse the opposition, Wijnkoop's leadership used a weapon which it would use more and more against its adversaries on the left: calumny. It claimed that the oppositionists, including Pannekoek and Gorter, were in fact partisans of Germany. Ravestejn wasn't the last to put this story around.

The opposition in reality took up the analysis that Gorter had made in 1914 in his pamphlet on imperialism and which had been officially accepted by the SDP as the basis for its propaganda. It clearly showed the need to fight against all the imperialist camps:

"It's not a question of fighting specially against German imperialism. All imperialisms are equally harmful for the proletariat." (article by Van Reesema in De Tribune, 21 May, 1917).

Unfortunately - and this was a disquieting sign for the party as a whole - the opposit­ion found itself isolated, devoid of support. Gorter was still hesitating about committing himself to the fight. Pannekoek and Roland-Holst were more involved in international activity than in SDP work. This was a sign of organizational weakness which at the time was a constant feature of marxist leaders of an international stature; and it was to have its consequences in 1917 and 1918.

The situation in 1917, particularly the Russian revolution and its repercussions in Holland, further accentuated the cleavages in the SDP.

1917: The SDP and the Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 was not a surprise for revolutionaries like Gorter, who was convinced that the war would give birth to the revolution. In a letter to Wijnkoop in March 1916, Gorter showed an unshakeable confidence in the revolutionary action of the international proletariat: "I am awaiting very big movements after the war."

However, the long-awaited revolutionary events came in the middle of the war. The Russian revolution had an enormous echo in Holland. It showed quite clearly that the proletarian revolution was also on the agenda in Western Europe; that what was happening was not a "Russian" phenomenon but an international wave of revolutionary struggles. From this point of view, the year 1917 was a decisive one for the evolution of the SDP, now confronted with the first signs of the international revolution, with the mass action which it had been calling for since the beginning of the war.

a) First pre-revolutionary signs in Holland

The year 1917 opened a new period of agitation against war, hunger, unemployment. In February, while the revolution was breaking out in Russia, the workers of Amsterdam demonstrated violently against the absence of foodstuffs and the policies of the municipal authorities.

The demonstrations rapidly took a political turn; not only were they directed against the government but also against social democracy. The latter had several elected ‘sheriffs' in the Amsterdam municipality. Wibaut, one of the leaders of the SDAP, had actually been president of the city's provisions committee since December1916. As such, the workers held him responsible for the food shortages.                                    

But Wibaut and Vliegen - another SDAP bigwig, elected to the town hall - called in the army on 10 February to ‘reestablish order' after the looting of the bakeries.                      

This was the first concrete manifestation of the SDAP's commitment to standing alongside the bourgeoisie to repress any reaction by the workers. The SDAP's solidarity with the established order was demonstrated even more clearly in July, during the course of a week which would go down in history as the ‘bloody week'. Following women's demonstrations against shortages and the pillaging of shops, the municipality, with the support of all the social democratic sheriffs, banned all demonstrations. The proletariat reacted straight away: a 24-hour strike called by the RSC was followed by a massive strike by 20,000 workers in Amsterdam. The movement spread rapidly to the majority of big towns in Holland. But in Amsterdam and other towns the troops and the police fired on the workers. For the first time since the beginning of the war, workers fell to the bullets of the bourgeoisie's forces'.

In Amsterdam, Vliegen and above all Wibaut[5] had a heavy responsibility for this bloody repression. Wibaut didn't hesitate to contrast the unemployed and the demonstrators, which he saw as no more than "debauched youth", with "the modern workers' movement" organized in the unions and the SDAP. In an article in Het Volk he even justified the repression, which, according to him, had been "limited". He also called for "other means to ensure order". Such language, which was not disavowed by the SDAP leadership, was the language of the ruling class. Thus, even thought the SDAP officially hesitated to give total support to Wibaut[6], the Dutch social democracy had initiated a policy which was more fully developed in Germany in 1919 by Noske and Scheidemann. On a small scale, Troelstra's party opened the way to open collaboration with the bourgeoisie against the revolutionary movement.

The ‘bloody week' made much clearer the demarcation between the revolutionary SDP and the SDAP, which had become a traitor to the working class. The SDP could thus call on the workers "to break openly from the traitors to the working class, the modern Judases, the valets of capital - the leadership of the SDAP and the NVV." (De Tribune, 23 July, 1917).                                                                                                          

These events in Holland were undeniably connected to the Russian revolution, which not only encouraged demonstrations and strikes in the proletariat, but also agitation in the army. Thus, although the phenomenon was limited, after October 1917 soldiers' councils were formed in some localities, while a whole movement was developing against military discipline.

The SDP drew real benefit from the situation. By participating fully in the strikes and demonstrations, by being subjected to the repression - a number of its militants were in prison - the SDP appeared as a real revolutionary party; not a party of the sectarian ‘phase' but a militant, active organization.

This activity contrasted sharply with the SDP's ambiguities in its foreign policy, vis-a-vis the Entente and above all the Russian revolution. It was as though the development of the party was pushing it - with its concern to hold on to its new found ‘popularity' in the workers' milieu - to make opportunist concessions to reinforce the influence it had acquired on the electoral terrain in 1917.

b) The SDP leadership and the Russian Revolution

The party which, at the beginning of the war Lenin had considered to be, along with the Bolshevik party, the most revolutionary and the most able to work towards the constitution of the new International, was to find itself singularly distant from the Bolsheviks in 1917.

This was true at least for the majority of the party, the leadership of which was totally dominated by the Wijnkoop-Ravestejn-Ceton trio. The minority, after the departure of Gorter and the elimination of Luteraan from the SDP leadership, found itself isolated. It was the minority which - with the moral authority of Gorter and Pannekoek - waged the most resolute struggle to support Bolshevism and defend the proletarian character of the Russian revolution. This attitude was in any case a common feature of all the lefts which formed themselves either as an opposition or as a fraction within the different Socialist parties.

The majority's distrust towards the Bolsheviks derived directly from its pro-Entente positions. In the first place it was expressed when the Bolshevik leaders went across Germany to get back to Russia. This journey was disapproved of by De Tribune who saw it as a compromise with Germany.

In fact, this distrust was a poor cover for a support for the policies of Kerensky who in July 1917 began a military offensive against Germany. To justify this policy, van Ravesteijn ‑ in De Tribune - didn't hesitate to compare Kerensky's Russia with Revolutionary France in 1792. Ideologically Ravestejn's position, and also Wijnkoop's, was identical to that of the Mensheviks: it was a question of realizing the bourgeois revolution and of exporting it militarily in order to crush the ‘feudal and reactionary' German Empire.

This implicit support to the Kerensky government provoked a violent reaction from the opposition. The latter, through the pen of Pannekoek and Gorter, placed itself resolutely on the side of the Bolsheviks, denouncing both Russian bourgeois democracy and the conception of a bourgeois revolution comparable to 1792 in France. For Pannekoek, this was not a ‘bourgeois' revolution on the march, but the counter-revolutionary politics of imperialism. His standpoint was identical to that of the Bolsheviks in 1917:

"Any war ... waged with the bourgeoisie against another state is a weakening of the class struggle, and consequently treason and forfeit against the cause of the proletariat."  (De Nieuwe Tijd, 1917, p.444-445).

The wanderings of the SDP leadership stopped there. When the seizure of power by the councils was known about in November, it was greeted enthusiastically by De Tribune.

But the minority around Gorter, Pannekoek and Luteraan expressed doubts about the leadership's sudden revolutionary enthusiasm. By refusing once again to participate in the third (and last) conference of the Zimmerwald movement in Stockholm in September[7], it showed that it wasn't prepared to commit itself to the building of the 3rd Internation­al. The verbal radicalism used to condemn ‘opportunism' did not really conceal the narrowly national policies of the Wijnkoop leadership. Its internationalism was purely verbal and most often determined by the prevailing atmosphere.

It isn't surprising that, when the debates over Brest Litovsk came to light, on the quest­ion of peace or revolutionary war, the leader­ship announced itself as the champion of revolutionary war at any price. In Russia, Bukharin and Trotsky had been partisans of the revolutionary war in order, as they saw it, to accelerate the expansion of the proletarian revolution in Europe. There was no ambiguity with them: ‘revolutionary war' wasn't a war against Germany within the plans of the Entente; it was a question of breaking the encirclement of revolutionary Russia to extend the revolution not only to Germany but to the whole of Europe, including the Entente countries.

Contrary to all expectations, Gorter - for exactly the same reasons as the Russian left communists - stood alongside the SDP leadership in supporting Trotsky's and Bukharin's pos­ition. Gorter made a vigorous attack on Pannak­oek, who entirely supported Lenin's position for a rapid peace with Germany.

Pannekoek started from the obvious fact that "Russia can't fight any more." In no way could the revolution be exported by military force; its ‘strong side' resided in the outbreak of class struggles in other countries: "Force of arms is the weak side of the proletariat." (De Tribune, 5 December 1917).

Gorter was completely mistaken. For several months he left aside any criticism of the SDP leadership. He thought that Pannakoek's position was a version of the pacifism he had combated in 1915, a negation of the arming of the proletariat. According to him, a revolutionary war had to be fought against the German Empire, because from now on "force of arms was the strong point of the proletariat." (De Tribune, 12 January 1918).

However, Gorter began to change his position. Since the summer of 1917 he had been in Switzer­land, officially for reasons of health. In fact he wanted to get away from the Dutch party and work in collaboration with Russian and Swiss revolutionaries. Through his contact with Platten and Berzin - both ‘Zimmerwaldians' and Lenin's collaborators - he got in touch with Russian revolutionaries. An intensive correspondence began with Lenin. He was convinced of the correctness of Lenin's position on peace with Germany. And it was he who undertook to trans­late into Dutch the Theses on "the unfortunate peace."

Gorter was now free to fight alongside Pannekoek against the SDP leadership, and to support without reservation the revolutionary character of Russia and the internationalism of the Bolsheviks.

c) The Russian revolution and the World Revolution

Contrary to a very tenacious legend, for two years the Dutch left in the SDP defended the proletarian character of the Russian revolut­ion. This was seen as the first stage of the world revolution. Gorter and the minority vigorously denounced the Menshevik idea, ex­pressed by Ravestejn, of a bourgeois revolution in Russia. Such a conception could only reinforce the position favorable to the Entente and perpetuate the imperialist war in the name of ‘revolutionary' war. When, with the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the subordination of the 3rd International to the interests of the Russian state, the left began to defend the idea of a ‘dual' revolution in Russia - part bourgeois, part proletarian - it was in a different perspective from that of Menshevism. For the left, a bourgeois revolut­ion could only mean state capitalism and counter-revolution. It was something emerging not at the beginning but at the end of the revolutionary wave.

In 1917 and 1918, Gorter and the minority were the most ardent partisans of Bolshevism. They were the real introducers and propagators of Lenin's conceptions. It was Gorter who, in 1918, took the initiative of translating State and Revolution. In a naive way, he helped to make a real personality cult of Lenin. In his 1918 pamphlet The World Revolution, the future scourge of ‘leaders' recognized Lenin as the leader of the revolution: "He is the leader of the Russian revolution, he must become leader of the world revolution."[8]

Gorter's pamphlet - which wasn't an official SDP publication - was one of his most import­ant theoretical and political contributions. It had the merit of drawing a certain number of lessons from the Russian revolution, from the point of view of its organization. Like Lenin, Gorter proclaimed that the workers' councils were the finally discovered form of revolution­ary power, a form valid not only for Russia but for all the countries of the world:

"In this organization of workers' councils, the working class of the world has found its organization, its centralization, its form  and its being." (ibid).

The localist and federalist conception of workers' councils which was subsequently devel­oped by the ‘Unionist' current around Ruhle was totally absent in the Dutch left. Neither was there any idea of a federation of proletarian states, a notion developed later in the CI under Zinoviev. The form of the world power of the proletariat would be "in the near future the central workers' council of the world." (ibid).

The proletarian revolution could only take off in the main industrialized countries, and not in a single country. It had to be a simultaneous phenomenon: "socialism has to be born simultaneously in a number of countries, in all countries or at least the main ones." Here Gorter is expressing the oft-repeated idea that Western Europe is the epicenter of the true workers' revolution, given the numerical and historical weight of the prol­etariat in relation to the peasantry: "The truly and completely proletarian revolution will have to be made in Western Europe itself." (ibid). The revolution would be a longer and more difficult process than in Russia, con­fronting a much better armed bourgeoisie; at the same time, "the proletariat of western Europe is alone as a revolutionary class." (ibid). No ‘infantile' impatience about the revolutionary course here - the reproach made later on against the communist left within the 3rd International.

It's notable that the only criticism made, indirectly, against the Bolsheviks in The World Revolution was directed against the slogan of ‘the right of peoples to self-determination'. For Gorter, this was well behind the positions of Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg who rejected the whole framework of the ‘nation'. Such a slogan "could only be guaranteed by socialism, it could only be intro­duced by socialism, or after its establishment." (ibid). It's true that Gorter - who was for the independence of the Dutch East Indies and thus supported the SDP's slogans on this - made an explicit distinction between the west, where only the revolution was on the agenda, and the east, where it was still necessary to demand the independence of the colonies or semi-colonies:

"In dealing with this right, it is important to distinguish western and eastern Europe, between the Asiatic states and the colonies." (ibid).

Lenin could easily show the inconsistency of Gorter's position, which appeared less as a divergence of principles than a tactical question to be examined according to geo-­historical areas[9].

In any case, this pamphlet had a consid­erable echo both in Holland and in a number of other countries where it had been trans­lated immediately.

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[1] However the SDP participated neither in the Kienthal conference or the one at Stockholm. It didn't participate in any of the conferences held between 1915 and 1917.

[2] Only two issues appeared, Radek in Switzerland was effectively in charge of it.

[3] The syndicalist currents, represented by the federation of employees and sailors, were in fact afraid of the SDP's growing hold on the SAV.

[4] Gorter had lost his wife, which made him depressed. At the same time, his illness weakened him. It was impossible for him to speak at the workers' meetings. It's also certain that his return to poetry - he published his great poem Pan in 1917 - almost completely absorbed him.

[5] FM Wibaut (1859-1936) had joined the SDAP in 1897. He was a member of municipal council of Amsterdam from 1907 to 1931 and a sheriff from 1914 to 1931. Vliegen (1862-1947) had been one of the founders of the SDAP in 1894.

[6] Later, Troelstra, in his Memoirs (‘Gedenkschriften'), which came out between 1927 and 1931, cynically supported Wibaut's repressive policies of the party: "A few days later Wibaut wrote in Het Volk an article in which described this violence as inevitable, but he said that it was deplorable that a democratic municipality should have to intervene against the population in this way. In his article he expressed the urgent hope that the professionals of the police could think of a non-violent way of preventing looting. In my opinion, one cannot allow oneself to be led by such sensibilities in one's argumentation. If we social democrats have conquered an important position of strength, that is in the interests of the whole working class, and consequently this position of strength must be defended by all means, by violence if necessary." (Gendenkschriften 4, p. 72-72, Amsterdam, 1931.)

[7] Despite opposition from Lenin, who wanted to form the 3rd International immediately, in April 1917 the Bolsheviks delegated their representatives to the Stockholm conference. This is not to be confused with the conference of the parties of the 2nd International, which was to take place in the same town at the same time. In fact, it never happened, as the French social patriots refused to sit down with the German social patriots.

[8] In this pamphlet Gorter tended to idolize Lenin the individual, no longer seeing him as an expression of a party: "The strength of his mind and his soul is equal to that of Marx. If Marx surpasses him in theoretical knowledge, in dialectical strength, he surpasses Marx in his actions ... and we love him as we love Marx. As with Marx, his mind and soul immediately inspire us with love."

[9] "Gorter is against the self-determination of his country, but for that of the Dutch East Indies, oppressed by ‘his' nation!" (Lenin, ‘The Discussion on National Self-Determination Summed Up', 1916)

The more and more obvious bankruptcy of world capitalism, which is now sinking into a new recession, is beginning to alarm seriously even the most optimistic analysts of the ‘perspectives' for the economy in all countr­ies. At the same time, discontent, anger, combativity continue to mount within the work­ing class against the increasingly generalized attacks on its living conditions:

-- unemployment with less and less benefits, lasting longer, with decreasing prospects of finding a job; on the contrary, we are seeing more and more lay-offs in the name of ‘restruc­turation', ‘reconversion', ‘privatization';

-- the dismantling of the whole apparatus of social benefits, in the spheres of health, pensions, housing and education;

-- the fall in incomes through the suppression of bonuses, the increase in the working day, wage limits and freezes;

-- the deregulation of working conditions: reintroduction of weekend working, night work, ‘flexible' hours;

-- the increase in sanctions at the workplace, the reinforcement of police controls, especi­ally over immigrant workers, in the name of defending ‘security', of fighting ‘terrorism' or ‘alcoholism', etc.

On the level of the economy and the consequences for the lives of the social classes which are exploited and disinherited by this society, it is the less developed capitalist countries which show the future for the industrialized ones. Today the character­istics of the historical bankruptcy of capit­alism manifest themselves very violently in these countries (see the article on Mexico in this issue). However, these characteristics aren't limited to the ‘under-developed' areas and in the most important industrialized centers capitalism is showing the same symptoms of flagrant bankruptcy: the aggrava­tion of unemployment in Japan, the US debt now bigger than that of Brazil, plans for massive lay-offs in West Germany, to give only some of the most significant indications.

Faced with this tendency for the crisis of capitalism to unify the conditions of exploit­ation and poverty for the workers in all coun­tries, the working class has responded inter­nationally. A whole series of workers' strugg­les have developed since 1983 and have been intensified since 1986, ranging across all countries and all sectors. The present wave of struggles constitutes a level of simultaneity in the workers' response to capitalist attacks which is unprecedented in history. In the most industrialized countries of western Europe -Belgium, France, Britain, Spain, Sweden, Italy, the USA, but also in the less developed countries, especially in Latin America, in eastern Europe where there have been signs recently of a revival of class combativity, in Yugoslavia where a wave of strikes has been unfolding for several months - everywhere in the world, in all sectors of the economy, the working class has entered into the fight against the attack on its living conditions. The tendency towards movements involving more and more workers, in all industries, employed and unemployed, the tendencies towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, towards the development of the proletariat's confidence in itself, towards the search for active solidarity, are all present, to various degrees, according to the moment and the country, in the current struggles of the workers. They express the search for unification in the working class, a unification which is the central need in today's struggles.

It is in order to parry this tendency towards unification that the bourgeoisie is using all the tactics it can find to divide and divert the means and aims of the struggle - above all on the terrain of the struggle itself through the intervention of the unions and base unionists:

-- against the extension of struggles: corporatist and regional isolation;

-- against self-organization: false extension by the unions;

-- against unified demonstrations, the use of union and corporatist division, of all kinds of tricks with the date and timing of demos.

All this is wrapped in a verbiage which becomes all the more radical as workers' distrust towards the unions is more and more transformed into open hostility, and workers' militancy results in the mobilization of large numbers of workers in assemblies and demonstrations:

"The struggles in Belgium (spring ‘86) underlined the necessity and possibility of massive and generalized movements in the advanced countries. The struggles in France (winter ‘86-‘87) have confirmed the necessity and possibility of the workers taking control of their struggles, of the self-organization of the struggle outside the unions, against them and their sabotaging maneuvers.

"These are the two inseparable aspects of the workers' combat which will be more and more present in the movement of struggles which has already begun." (IR 49, 2nd quarter, 1987).

After the railway strike in France and the telecommunications strike in Britain at the beginning of the year, the workers' struggles in Spain and Yugoslavia lasting several months, and also the recent struggles in Italy, confirm in their turn the general characteristics of the present wave of struggle. The simultaneity of struggles, and the tendency to take them in hand confronted with the strategy of the left, the extreme left and the unions, confirms the development of a potential for unification.

Spain: Union divisions against workers' unity

In Spain, above all since February, not a day has passed without strikes, assemblies, demon­strations, from the mines to the airlines, from health to steel, from shipyards to trans­port, from teaching to building. The ever-so serious paper Le Monde put it like this: "Many workers now seem to be persuaded, rightly or wrongly, that going into the street is the only way to make themselves heard." (8.5.87).

The working class is obviously ‘right' to feel the need to go into the street to look for solidarity and unity in the face of the bourgeoisie. This is true for the working class in all countries. In Spain it is a tradition, inherited in particular from the Francoist period when the police forbade striking workers to stay in the factories, to demonstrate from factory to factory and to search immediately for solidarity. This is something which already characterized the massive struggles of 1975-76 in this country.                                                 

From the beginning of the movement this year, the first attempts at unification could be seen in certain sectors of the working class: agricultural workers from the Castellon region held a number of demonstrations which brought in other workers and the unemployed; in Bilbao, workers from two factories imposed a joint demonstration against the advice of the unions, and the same thing was done in the Canaries by the port workers of Tenerife and the tobacco workers and truck drivers. However, despite these signs of a push towards active solidarity, in February-March the unions managed to contain the thrust towards extension and in particular the thrust towards extension, and in particular to isolate the movement of 20,000 Asturian miners to the north of the country: in this movement there were hardly any general assemblies or organized demonstrations. From the beginning of April it seemed that the unions would be able to stop the movement thanks to an unprecedented array of divisive tactics. Workers Commissions (the PCE union), the UGT (PSOE union), the CNT (anarchist union) and a whole plethora of professional or branch unions including base unions like the ‘Coordinadora' in the ports, went to work to divide things up into different demands, different sectors, different regions, to disperse the movement through rolling strikes, notably in the transport sector.

But while the union maneuvers managed to contain the important potential which was there, they only succeeded in stifling combativity in one place to see it reappear immediately after­wards somewhere else. Many work stoppages, short strikes and demonstrations took place outside any union directive and in many sectors there is an atmosphere of thinly buried conflict. The bourgeoisie, which can't stop the workers from going into the streets, has done all it can to ensure that they don't join up in common demonstrations and develop an active solidarity between different sectors. It has done this through the game of union divisions completed by the systematic inter­vention of the police forces when these divis­ions no longer suffice. Thus, in certain places all the workers' energies are mobilized towards almost daily confrontations: in the port of Puerto Real in Cadiz, the workers and many elements of the population have been battling with the police for weeks; in the mines of El Bierzo, near Leon in the north, while discontent has been evident since the beginning of the year since the beginning of May there have been daily clashes with the police in which the whole population has been involved. The death of a worker in Reinosa, a steel town near Santander, in some particularly violent confrontations, has once again tragically confirmed the fact that the ‘left' parties - in this instance the governing PSOE - are just as much the guard dogs of capital as those of the right. 

These confrontations with the police in small, relatively isolated industrial towns like Reinosa and Ponferrada in the north of the country, Puerto Real in the south, show the depth of the workers' discontent, of their combativity and of the tendencies to unite all categories together against the attack on living conditions, and against the intervention of the forces of order. However, these systematic confrontations often constitute a trap for the workers. All their energies are mobilized into these street battles, ritually orchestrated by the police and by those who, within the workers' ranks, reduce the question of the means and aims of the struggle to these clashes alone. In this work the unions and ‘radical' base-unionist organs have a division of labor; thus, for several weeks, the battles in Puerto Real are ‘programmed' for Tuesday at the port and Thursday in the town: It's no accident that the media in Europe are only now beginning to talk about events in Spain, and then only about the clashes with the police, whereas the workers' struggle has been developing over several months. The workers can't win in these isolated battles with the forces of order. They can only exhaust their strength to the detriment of a search for extension and solidarity outside the region, because only massive and unified struggles can face up to the state apparatus, to its police and its agents inside the working class.

The tendencies towards the unification of simultaneous struggles through the workers taking control of their own movements have not yet reached their full flowering. However, the conditions which give rise to these tendencies - frontal and massive attacks on the working class, the matur­ation of consciousness about the need to fight together - are far from exhausted, whether in Spain or in other countries.

Italy: base unionism versus the self-organization of the struggle

The tendencies towards the workers taking charge of their own struggles have manifested themselves on several occasions. In France in particular, in the railway workers' strike, at the beginning of the year, the necessity and possibility of self-organization could be seen in broad daylight. This experience has had a profound echo in the whole international working class.

In Italy today this need to organize the struggle outside the traditional union framework has been in the forefront of the movement which has been developing in several sectors: railways, airlines, hospitals, and particularly in the schools. In this last sector, the rejection of the contract accepted by the unions resulted in self-organization through base committees, first in 120 schools in Rome, then on a national scale. In the space of a few months, the movement gained a majority over the unions and organized three national assemblies - in Rome, Florence and Naples - of delegates elected by provincial coordinations. Within the movement there was a confrontation between the tendency which sought to stabilize the committees into a new union (unione Comitati di Base, Cobas, which had a majority in Rome), and the ‘assemblyist' tendency, which had a majority in the national assemblies and which clearly reflected the profound rejection of trade unionism developing throughout the working class. For the moment, this is being expressed more through a general rejection of any notion of delegation - which still leaves the door open to base unionism ‑ than through a clear consciousness of the impossibility of building new unions. But the fact that trade unionism, in order to maintain control over the movement, has been obliged to put up with the ‘base committees' is a sig­nificant expression of the workers' slow disengagement from trade unionist ideology, and of the need for the self-organization and unity of struggles that they represent.

On the railways, the movement began with a ‘self-convened' assembly in Naples which gave rise to a regional coordination, then to similar organs in other regions and a national coordination which assembled in Florence. The need for unity was expressed in the fact that, at a national railway workers' demo in Rome, a leaflet calling for a joint struggle was distributed by the non-unionist minority of the schools' base committees. In the railway workers' coordinations the weight of the left­ists was very strong right from the beginning Democrazia Proletaria (a radical left group like the PSU in France, only more important) straight away tried to fixate the attention of the movement onto the idea of fighting both inside and outside the unions, thus making the unions the main preoccupation of the movement and pushing the question of unity into the background.

The depth of this process of accumulating experience, of reflection, which has gone on over a number of years, is being expressed more and more openly: through short wildcat strikes like that of 4,000 municipal workers in Palermo, Sicily; through regroupments to discuss what has to be done, like the assembly of 120 workers from different categories in the public services, in Milan in March, which debated how to organize faced with the treason of the unions. In response to this ferment there has been a whole ‘sapping' work carried out by various leftist and base unionist groups For the first time in Italy, the Trotskyists played a role, in the teachers' movement. The libertarians have shaken off their torpor to warm up the cadaver of anarcho-syndicalism. Democrazia Proletaria has been working hard to transform the base committees, which began as proletarian organs, into base unions, and to keep control of the demonstration of 40,000 school workers in Rome at the end of May, by polarizing attention around the question of the recognition of the Cobas to ‘negotiate' with the government to the detriment of joining up with other sectors who are beginning to mobilize.

However, while the bourgeoisie, by calling up all the political forces able to contain the working class ‘at the base' has kept overall control of the situation, the present situation in Italy is an illustration of the historic weakening of the left wing of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus in the face of the working class. La Corriere della Serra, a newspaper no less ‘serious' than Le Monde, notes in an article entitled ‘Uncontrolled Malaise' that: "The crisis of the unions is not episodic, but structural ..." From its bourgeois standpoint which can only see the working class in the trade unions, it there­fore considers that: "Class interests are obsolete." But it then immediately asserts that "this doesn't mean that the unions are managing to control the spontaneous and centrifugal manifestations of those (egotistical? wildcat? rebellious?) fringes who don't intend to renounce the defense of their own interests." And this is indeed why the bourgeoisie is trying to control the movements:

-- through the trick of radicalizing the left, since traditional trade unionism is completely discredited among the most combative workers -who are becoming increasingly numerous;

-- through the attempts to discredit the most militant elements of the class by presenting them as ‘egotistical'. But stupid stories such as "the teachers are ruining the holidays of the hospital workers who aren't looking after railway workers who don't transport the bank employees" are less and less able to hide the reality of the growing mobilization.

Although Italy has seen relatively fewer open expressions of the present international wave of struggle, the movement of spring ‘87 shows that the period of fragmentation and dispersion of struggles has come to an end in this country as well. The intensification of attacks against the working class, the accumulation of distrust towards the unions, a greater confidence on the part of the workers about the possibility of action for themselves - all this will lead the class to­ward more massive and determined actions.

The development of the perspective of unification

The general characteristics of the present workers' struggles aren't just being manif­ested in the industrialized countries of Western Europe. In the less developed count­ries, like Mexico (see the communiqué in this issue) but also in the eastern bloc (see also in this issue), the working class is showing a growing combativity which con­firms the international dimension of the struggle.

In Yugoslavia as well: since February ‘87 a wave of strikes against new government measures on wages (which had already fallen by 40% in six years) swept through the country. The measure which consisted of making the workers pay back several months wage increases was the last straw. Beginning with strikes by 20,000 workers in Zagreb -industry, hospitals, schools - the strikes then spread to the province, then to the whole country, and to other sectors like the ports, the shipyards, steel and agriculture. This movement, which for three months the bourgeoisie was unable to get under control, showed all the characteristics of extension, combativity, and initiatives taken directly by the workers. And this all the more strongly because the unions there are evidently part of the state apparatus, as in all the countries of the east. Thus we saw strikes taking place outside of any union directives, collective decisions by workers to leave the official unions - which denounced the strikers as "anti-socialist", numerous assemblies where workers discussed and decided on their actions. Faced with this situation the unions have asked for greater autonomy from the govern­ment in order to regain their grip over the working class.

In all these events, the central question posed has been the unification of struggles - unity in action through the workers taking charge of their own struggles. This has been the case in Spain as it has been in Italy and Yugoslavia. And the working class has been far from passive in the other countries of Western Europe. In Belgium, the miners of Limburg, who sparked off the spring ‘86 movement which marked the beginning of a new acceleration in the current wave of struggles, entered into the fight once again. This was in a context of reviving combativity marked by short strikes in several sectors, after the relative calm which followed last year's movement. In Holland, after the Rotterdam dockers had been tied down by the union tactic of ‘surprise strikes' at the beginning of March, the municipal workers in Amsterdam launched a strike which in two days spread throughout the city. The unions had prepared the same scenario as in the port of Rotterdam, but the workers came out rapidly and spontaneously, threatening to extend the struggle to the coast and the railways and rejecting the union tactic of ‘surprise' actions. However, lacking an alternative to the unions and with the bourgeoisie quickly retreating from its plans, the workers returned to work Nevertheless, this brief movement marked a change in the social climate in the country and deepened the perspective of a development of struggles against the increasingly draconian measures being taken by the bourgeoisie. In Germany as well, in response to the plans to lay-off tens of thousands of workers, particul­arly in the Ruhr, there have been several demonstrations including one which united industrial and municipal workers. This shows that even in this country where the mobilization of the workers lags behind what's going on in other countries, there will be no lack of struggles as the effect of the world recession begins to be felt more keenly in Germany.

Struggle Committees: A general tendency towards the regroupment of combative workers

A particularly significant expression of the maturation going on in the working class is the embryonic appearance of struggle committ­ees, regrouping combative workers around the problems posed by the necessity to struggle and to prepare the struggle, outside of the traditional union structures.

In spring ‘86 in Belgium, a committee was formed in the Limburg mines and took the initiative of sending delegations to push for extension (to the Ford factory in Ghent, to rallies in Bruxelles); in Charleroi, some railway workers came together to send delegat­ions to other stations and other sectors in the region, such as urban transport; in Bruxelles a coordination of teachers (Malibran) was also formed, regrouping unionized and non-unionized teachers with the aim of "fighting divisions in the struggles". These committees, arising out of the spring ‘86 movement, finally disappeared as the movement retreated, after being gradually being emptied of their class life and taken over by the base unionists.

Such regroupments don't only appear as the fruit of an open struggle. In an open struggle they tend to regroup a larger number of partic­ipants, at other moments they regroup smaller minorities of workers. In Italy, for example, in Naples, committees of sanitation and hospital workers have existed for several months. The hospital workers group, made up of a small minority of workers, meets regularly and has intervened through leaflets and posters and by speaking up at assemblies called by the unions in favor of extension and against the proposals of the unions. It has had an import­ant echo in this sector (the unions no longer call assemblies in the hospital!) and even outside it among railway workers. Committees of this kind have also appeared in France. At the beginning of the year, the unions did all they could to involve the whole working class in the defeat of the railway workers, by organizing a dead-end extension under the auspices of the CGT - which hadn't hesitated to condemn the rail strike when it began. In the face of such sabotage, workers in gas and electricity, then in the post office, set up committees to draw the lessons of the railway workers' struggle, to make contacts between different workplaces, to prepare the next round of struggles.

Even if these experiences of struggle committees are at their beginnings, even if the committees haven't managed to keep going for long and fluctuate a lot in the wake of events, this doesn't mean that they are simply ephemeral phenomena linked to partic­ular situations. On the contrary. They are going to appear more and more because they correspond to a profound need in the working class. In the process towards unification of struggles, it is vital that the most militant workers, those who are convinced of the need for unity in the struggle, should regroup in order:

-- to defend, within the struggle, the necessity for extension and unification;

-- to show the necessity for sovereign general assemblies and for strike committees and coordinations elected and revocable by the assemblies;

-- to push forward, both within and outside moments of open struggle, the process of discussion and reflection, in order to draw the lessons of previous struggles and to prepare the struggles to come;

-- to create a focus for regroupment, open to all workers who want to take part, whatever their sector and whether or not they are unionized.

Such regroupments don't have the task of constituting themselves into political groups, defined by a platform of principles; neither are they unitary organs englobing all the workers (general assemblies of the employed and unemployed, committees elected and revocable by the assemblies). They regroup minorities of workers and are not delegations from unitary organs.

In 1985, with the relative dispersal of struggle, the growing distrust towards the unions led many workers to take a wait-and-see attitude; their disgust with the unions made them retreat into passivity. The acceleration of the class struggle in 1986 has been marked not only by more massive struggles and by a tendency for workers to take charge of their own actions, but also by more numerous attempts by the more combative workers to regroup in order to act upon the situation, The first experiences of struggle committees correspond to this dynamic: a greater determin­ation and self-confidence which is going to develop more and more in the working class and which will lead to the regroupment of workers on the terrain of the struggle, outside the union framework. And this isn't just a possibility, but an imperious necessity if the working class is going to develop the capacity to unite, against the bourgeoisie's maneuvers aimed at keeping it divided.

This is something the bourgeoisie has already understood. The main danger facing the struggle committees is trade unionism. The trade union representatives and the leftists are now themselves promoting ‘struggle committees'. By introducing to them criteria for participation, platforms, even membership cards, they are aiming to recreate a variety of trade unionism. And by maintaining them in a corporatist framework and proclaiming them as ‘representatives' of the workers, whereas they are only the emanation of those who participate in them and not of general assem­blies of workers, they again drag them back onto the terrain of trade unionism. For example, in Limburg in Belgium the Maoists managed to deform the reality of the miners' struggle committee by proclaiming it as a ‘strike committee' and thus turning it into an obstacle to the holding of general assemb­lies of all workers. In France militants of the CNT (anarcho-syndicalist) and elements coming from the PCI (Program Communiste - which has now disappeared in France) tried to recuperate the committees of postal workers and gas and electricity workers. They proposed a platform of membership "for a renewal of class unionism". Thus introducing in a ‘radical' manner the same objectives as any union. And against the principle defended by the ICC of the need to open up to any workers who wanted to participate, an element from the CNT even talked about "the danger of seeing in these committees too many ‘uncontrolled' workers"!

Despite the difficulties there are in constituting such workers' groups and keeping them alive, despite the danger of being strangled at birth by base unionism, the struggle committees are an integral part of the constitution of the proletariat into a united, autonomous class, independent from all the other classes in society. Like calling for the extension and self-organization of struggles, supporting and impulsing such committees is something which revolutionary groups must take up in an active manner. The development of struggle committees is one of the conditions for the unification of workers' struggles.

MG, 31.5.'87.

Capitalism is one system. The chronic crisis of capitalism is hitting every country in the world. Everywhere governments with their backs to the wall are resorting to the same policies, the same measures. Everywhere the working class is replying by engaging in the struggle for the defense of its vital interests, and everywhere the struggle is taking on an increasingly massive character. And everywhere the workers find themselves up against an enemy which is refining its strategy: the governments attack head-on, while the 'left', the unions and the leftists have the job of sabotaging struggles from the inside, using a 'radical' language to break the workers' unity, to derail their struggles towards dead-ends and defeats.

Against the ramblings of all those pessimistic and disappointed souls who have such doubts in the combativity of the working class, from those who are scrabbling about on the ‘glacier' - like the modernists of La Banquise - to those like the GCI who spend their time complaining about the ‘passivity' and ‘amorphousness' of the working class, the news arriving from Mexico is a sharp rejoinder and a confirmation of our analysis of the third wave of struggles which is hitting Latin America as well as Europe.

We're publishing here extracts from a communiqué addressed to all the workers and revolutionary groups in the world by the Alptraum Communist Collective on the recent struggles in Mexico. This group is not well known in Europe, so we think it's necessary to give our readers some information on the subject. The ACC was formed at the beginning of the ‘80s as a marxist study and discussion group. It has evolved in a slow and hesitant manner towards becoming a group of political intervention. This slow evolution is not only due to ‘hesitations' faced with the putrid political atmosphere which reigns in Mexico but is also in some way an expression of the seriousness and sense of responsibility of these comrades, who have been trying to ensure a solid theoretical/political foundation before launching into public activity. In this sense, they provide a salutary lesson to many small groups who get carried away by a taste for ‘practical action' alone, and who thus run the risk of having a purely ephemeral life and losing themselves in superficiality and confusion.

In 1986, the ACC - with whom we have been in close contact (see IR 40 and 44) - became a political group in the full sense, regularly publishing its review Comunismo, whose content is as interesting as it is serious. We are sure that our readers will be extremely interested in this communiqué on the situation in Mexico and the workers' struggle developing there. Integrating the situation in Mexico into the international context, the ACC's analysis has the same approach and draws the same conclusions as ours. We salute the ACC, not only for the contents of this communiqué but also because of the concern which guided them to address this for the information of revolutionaries and workers in all countries.

Simultaneously with this communiqué, we received from Mexico the first issue of the review Revolucion Mundial published by the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista (GPI). The GPI was definitively formed in December 1986 by a certain number of elements who have been through a "long and painful process of political decantation." It is a group of militants with a solid political formation. We do not have enough space in this issue to give more detailed information about this new group and its positions; in our next issue we will publish extracts from their theoretical works and statements of political position. For the moment we will restrict ourselves to giving the following extract from the presentation to their review:

"It is in this situation of a historical ‘crossroads' and under the political influence of communist propaganda that the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista has appeared. It's also in this framework that Revolucion Mundial has appeared. This publication is the product of a long and painful process of political decantation, of a period devoted fundamentally to discussion, to clarification, to the attempt to break with all kinds of bourgeois influences and practices."

We can only express our satisfaction at seeing the ranks of the revolutionaries strengthened by the arrival of a new communist group. With the appearance of this group we can see the opening up of a perspective, after the necessary discussions and confrontation of positions, of a process of regroupment of revolutionary forces in Mexico, whose importance and impact will largely transcend the frontiers of this country. Weare convinced of this and will do all we can to help this process reach a positive conclusion. Our warmest communist greetings to the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista.

ICC

********************

1. The growing misery of the proletariat has become palpable with the reduction and liquidat­ion of the ‘social programs' of the state, particularly in the central areas of capitalism; with the accelerated growth of the industrial reserve army, especially in Europe; with the increased rates of exploitation in all areas of capitalism, which in the peripheral countries is combined with very high rates in inflation, making the existence of the proletariat even more difficult.

...The Mexican proletariat is no exception to this. The Mexican fraction of the world bourge­oisie has applied the measures needed to maintain the interests of world capital as a whole.

...During the course of the last three years, the state has closed enterprises in steel, trans­port and communications, docks, automobiles, manure, sugar, as well as in the central sector of administration. State subsidies for basic foodstuffs have been suspended and expenditure on education and health greatly reduced.

The general policy of the state has been to maintain wage increases for all workers below the level of inflation and to ensure that the wage rates fixed by the collective labor contracts are each time closer to the legal minimum wage.

To give a general idea of the situation of the proletariat in Mexico, we will provide a few figures from the bourgeoisie's statistics:

-- 6 million unemployed, or 19% of the active population;

-- 4 million ‘under-employed';

-- the legal minimum for wages has been reduced from $120 a month in ‘85 to $87 in ‘86;

-- in 1986 more than 50% of wage earners received the legal minimum wage.

...In 1987, given the acceleration of deval­uation and of the growth in the rate of inflation (now 115% annually), the deterioration of wage levels has also gathered pace, as have the numbers of unemployed.

2. The reduction in the living standards of the proletariat in Mexico over the past three years thus reached an extreme point in 1987. The wage situation of the electricity workers illustrates what is happening in the public sector. Whereas in 1982 they were getting wages up to 11.5 times the legal minimum, in 1987 they have been getting only 4 times the legal minimum.

Since last year there has been increasing disquiet amongst public sector workers. Between January and April, the great majority of unions obtained revisions of the collective contracts. The growing pressure on them from the workers to negotiate higher wages proved to the public sector unions that there was a possibility of workers mobilizing outside of their control. In February the state informed the workers that it "didn't have the funds" to cover the demands for emergency wage increases, which the unions had fixed at 23% (in Mexico the annual rate of inflation is, as we have seen, more than 110%).

It was in this context that the electricity workers came out on strike, despite the hard blows received by the workers at Dina, Renault and Fundidora in Monterrey (Fimosa) in 1986, and immediately after the end of the students' strike in Mexico City - a typical conflict of the middle classes through which the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie had tried to give the proletariat a ‘lesson' about the bounties of bourgeois democracy. The strike also took place in the midst of the most acute economic crisis for the federal district and the four surrounding departments. Focused on the most important industrial zone and working class concentration in the country, it was a blow to the nerve centre of the productive apparatus.              

...The strike only lasted five days and the workers went back without winning anything. But in this brief lapse of time we saw in clear outline the development of the tendencies which are appearing in many proletarian movements today, especially in Europe, and which were already there in embryo in the strike at Fimosa. In the electricians' strike we saw the tendency towards massive workers' struggles with strong possibilities of extension to other sectors of the class, as manifested recently in Belgium, France and Spain. Also this strike had the characteristic of being of shorter duration, in contrast to the one at Fimosa which lasted nearly two months. The particulars of the strike were as follows.

Unlike what happened at Dina, Renault and Fomosa last year, where the conflicts lasted longer, the electricians' strike immediately took on a political character. Two hours before the outbreak of the strike, the state, through a presidential order, requisitioned the installations of the electricity company "to safeguard the national interest." Certain installations for producing electrical energy were occupied and guarded by the public forces. The army was prepared for an immediate intervention.                                                                       

Faced with the evidently political character acquired by the strike, the union, aided by the left wing of capital, pounded the workers' heads with the idea that the movement was a "national affair in defense of rights, of legality, of the constitution, of national sovereignty," etc ...By continuously insisting that "the only way to prevent the strike being declared illegal is to condemn any act of violence on the part of the workers", the union in most instances managed to prevent the workers from forming pickets and calling on the non-unionized workers or those from other categories (transformed by decree into ‘scabs') to join the strike.                        

...The union showed a great deal of flexibility in adapting to the conditions imposed on it by the movement of workers, in order to recapture and dominate this movement.                                                       

When the unions are more openly tied to the state apparatus, they run a greater risk of losing credibility in front of the workers, especially when they act as brutally as they did at Fimosa (14,000 direct lay-offs and40,000 indirect). In these conditions it becomes necessary for the left of capital and the leftists to enter the arena in order to maintain order and lead the mobilization back along the road to social peace.

In this case, and in contrast to what happened at Fimosa where the workers were beaten down by a union which they clearly identified as being part of the state structure, the Mexican Electricians' Union (SME) is a ‘democratic' union which acts as a bridge between official trade unionism and the base or "class" unionism animated by the left and the leftists. Because of this, from the very first minute of the strike the union was able to pummel the workers with the idea that "union organization is in danger" and that for this reason it was necessary to apply the decisions of the union's central committee. This allowed the SME to maneuver from right to left and back again, radicalizing its language while framing its directives in the purest nationalist ideology. The workers literally allowed themselves to be conducted by the SME's decisions. The great majority of them left their workplaces and concentrated near the union building ... immobilized the whole time in order to "avoid violence"... and allowed the union to look for ‘solidarity' ‑ from other unions.

The SME did exactly the same thing as the car workers' and miners' unions at Dina, Renault and Fimosa, shutting the workers up in corporatism, isolating them from other workers and maintaining the conflict within strict local limits.

In addition the SME, as one of the main animators of the ‘concerted union table' - a veritable ‘council' gathering together the whole gamut of ‘democratic' unions and base unionists with a view to fabricating caricatures of ‘days of solidarity' - took charge of filling the pages of the bourgeois press with paper declarations of solidarity, while the other unions kept ‘their' workers quiet.

For its part, the left of capital, through its political groups and parties and its trade union representatives, took on the task of bombarding the electricians with the idea that they had to defend the SME as a ‘bastion of democracy' and that the fight had to be in favor of ‘national sovereignty' and ‘against the payment of foreign debt', etc, etc...

...The only march the electricians managed to hold was attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico City and concentrated large contingents of electricians from the four departments of the central zone. The march was joined by many workers from the public sector (metro, foreign exchange bank, telephones, trams, workers from the exchange offices, the universities, etc...) and from industry (clothing) as well as small nuclei of workers from medium sized enterprises (the Monteczuma brewery, Ecatepec steel). The march was also joined by groups of residents from the marginal neighborhoods and high school students. Faced with this very visible possibility of a massive extension of strikes to other sectors, the Labor Tribunal declared, two days after the march that the strike was ‘non-existent', calling on the workers to return to work immediately or face massive sackings. The union obliged the workers to go back, saying that "we respect the law". When the union informed the workers' assemblies of this, many strikers showed their discontent.

There were cries of ‘traitors' against the union leaders. But all this anger was diluted with frustration and resignation. Only a minority of workers were able to react against the union...

...While the state was hitting out at the electricians the other unions were sabotaging any attempt at mobilization in the other sectors. On three occasions they prevented strikes from breaking out in key sectors like the telephones, airlines and city trams. They also demoralized the workers from the universities, the cinemas and the primary schools. In sector after sector the unions manipulated the workers into accepting the state's decision not to grant any general emergency wage rises.

After the electricians' strike was ended it was clear that the telephone workers would go on strike. The unions tried to put it off for as long as possible, ‘postponing' it again and again. But in the union assemblies the workers showed a firm determination to come out on strike. The state then applied the same tactic it had used with the electricians: two hours before the outbreak of the strike it requisit­ioned the enterprise, and the union straight away sent the workers back to work...Finally, it became more evident that the unions in all their varieties are an obstacle to the prolet­ariat's struggle for immediate demands. Far from expressing the interests of this struggle they are the incarnation of national bourgeois interests, of the state.

The bourgeois state imposed its wage policy with the help of the unions, who acted to break the workers' resistance and held back the tendencies towards massivity, simultaneity and extension.

Despite all its limitations like corporatism, the workers' surviving confidence in the unions and a lack of confidence in their own strength, despite isolation and the weight of bourgeois nationalist ideology, the electricians' movement of resistance against capital's wage policies was very important, because it showed the workers that the struggle for economic demands is inevitably transformed into a political movement, since there is no way of avoiding a confrontation with the bourgeois state. It also showed that there is a tendency towards the mass strike where the potential for extending the movement to other sectors becomes increasingly obvious.

...It's in these movements that we see the necessity to forge the political instrument of the proletariat to give it the elements of its identity as a class, in other words the inter­national communist party, which in each moment of the struggle embodies the perspective of the communist program.

Comunismo, Mexico, April 1987.

Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism, Part 3

 

Understanding the decadence of capitalism also means understanding the specific forms of proletarian struggle in our own epoch, and how they differ from those of other historical periods. The continuity that ties together the proletariat’s political organisations emerges from the comprehension of these differences.

Those, like the Internationalist Communist Group (ICG), who ignore the decadence of capitalism, “logically” situate the 2nd International (1889-1914) and its constituent parties in the bourgeois camp. In doing so, they ignore this real continuity that is a fundamental element of class consciousness.

For us, defending this continuity does not mean glorifying today the parties that made up the 2nd International. Still less does it mean considering their practice valid for our own epoch. Above all, it does not mean claiming the heritage of the reformist fraction that slid towards “social-chauvinism” and which, when war broke out, passed over definitively into the bourgeois camp. It means understanding that the 2nd International and its constituent parties were real expressions of the proletariat at a given moment in the class’ history.

Not the least of its merits was to complete the decantation begun during the early years of the 1st International by eliminating the anarchist current, the ideological expression of the process of decomposition and proletarianisation of the petty bourgeoisie bitterly resented by certain artisan strata.

From the start, the 2nd International took its stand on the basis of marxism, which it incorporated in its program.

There are two ways of judging the 2nd International and the social-democratic parties: with the marxist method, i.e. critically, placing them in their historic context; or with the anarchist method, which ahistorically, and with no coherent method, is content simply to obliterate them from the workers’ movement. The first method has always been that of the communist lefts; it is the ICC’s method today. The second is that of those irresponsible “revolutionary” phrasemongers, as hollow as they are incoherent, who barely hide their semi-anarchist nature and approach. The ICG belongs to this category.

APOCALYPTIC NIHILISM

“Before me, chaos”. For those who think there is “no future”, past history seems useless, absurd, and contradictory. So much effort, so many civilisations, so much knowledge, only to arrive at the perspective of a starving, sick humanity constantly threatened by nuclear destruction. “After me, the deluge”... “Before me, chaos”.

In its present advanced state of decomposition this kind of “punk” ideology oozes from capitalism’s every pore, and to varying degrees penetrates the whole of society. Even revolutionary elements, supposedly convinced – by definition – of the existence, if not the imminence, of society’s revolutionary future may sometimes be subjected to the pressure of this kind of “apocalyptic nihilism” where the past no longer has any meaning, especially if they are poorly armed politically. The very idea of a historical “evolution” seems absurd to them. And the whole history of the workers’ movement, 150 years of effort by revolutionaries organised to accelerate, stimulate, and fertilise the struggles of their class are considered of little value, or even as part of the existing social order’s “self-regulation”. Such ideas come into fashion from time to time, conveyed especially by elements coming from anarchism, or moving towards it.

For several years, the ICG has more and more been playing this role. The ICG split from the ICC in 1979, but a number of its constituent members came originally from anarchism. After a passing flirt with Bordigism, just after the split, the ICG has evolved towards the anarchist childhood loves of some of its members, with its desperate ahistorical ranting about eternal revolt; but this is no openly proclaimed anarchism, capable for example of stating clearly that Bakunin and Proudhon were basically right, against the marxists of their time; it is an embarrassed anarchism, which doesn’t dare come into the open, and which defends its ideas with quotes borrowed from Marx and Bordiga. The ICG has invented “punk anarcho-Bordigism”.

Like an adolescent having trouble affirming his own identity and breaking with his parents, the ICG considers that before itself and its theory was the void, or almost. Lenin? “(His) theory of imperialism – says the ICG – is nothing but an attempt to justify under another (anti-imperialist!) form, nationalism, war, reformism... the disappearance of the working class as the subject of history” [1]. Rosa Luxemburg? The German Spartakists? “Left-wing social-democrats”. And social-democracy itself, in the 19th and early 20th century, founded in part by Marx and Engels, and where not only the Bolsheviks and the Spartakists, but also those who were to form the communist left of the 3rd International (the Dutch, German, and Italian lefts), got their training? For the ICG, the social-democracy, and the 2nd International that it created, were “essentially bourgeois in nature”. All those within the 2nd and then the 3rd International, against the reformists who denied it, defended first the inevitability and then the reality of capitalism’s decadence? “Anti-imperialist or Luxemburgist, the theory of decadence is nothing but a bourgeois science aimed at justifying ideologically the weakness of the proletariat in its struggle for a world free from value”.

Judging by the quotations it uses, it would appear that the only revolutionaries before the ICG were Marx and perhaps Bordiga... although we might wonder how – according to the ICG – someone like Marx given to founding “essentially bourgeois organisations”, or like Bordiga who only broke with the Italian social-democracy in 1921, could be revolutionary!

In fact, for the ICG, the whole question of identifying the proletarian organisations of the past and their successive contributions to the communist movement is meaningless. For the ICG, claiming a political and historical continuity with proletarian organisations, as communist organisations have always done, and as we do, means giving in to a “family” spirit. This is just one facet of its chaotic vision of history, just one titbit from the theoretical soup that supposedly serves as a framework for the ICG’s intervention.

In the two previous articles [2], devoted to the analysis of capitalist decadence and the ICG’s critique of this analysis, we demonstrated on the one hand the anarchist vacuity hidden behind the ICG’s “marxist” verbiage with its rejection of the analysis of capitalist decadence and of the very idea of historical evolution, and on the other the political aberrations, the frankly bourgeois positions – e.g. support for the Stalinist “Shining Path” guerrillas in Peru - to which this method, or rather this total lack of method, leads. In this article we intend to combat another aspect of this ahistorical conception: the rejection of the need for every revolutionary organisation to understand and to place itself within the historical framework of a historical continuity with past communist organisations.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL CONTINUITY IN THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT

On the back of all our publications, we write: “The ICC traces its origins in the successive contributions of the Communist League, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Internationals, and the left fractions which detached themselves from the latter, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts”. This makes the ICG sick.

“Communists – writes the ICG – don’t have any “parental” problems, attachment to the revolutionary “family” is a way of rejecting the impersonality of the program. The historic wire in which the communist current flows is no more a question of “persons” than of formal organisations, it is a practical question, a practice which is born at one time by such or such an individual, at another by such or such an organisation. Let us then leave the senile decadentists to gabble on their family tree, looking for their papas. Let’s look after the revolution!”

Obsessed with problems of “revolt against the father”, the ICG speaks of the “historic thread” only to make it an ethereal abstraction, devoid of reality, floating above “persons” and “formal organisation”. The ICG calls reappropriating the proletariat’s historical experience, and so the lessons drawn by its political organisations, “looking for papa”. It proposes instead to “look after the revolution”, but this is nothing but empty and inconsequential phrase mongering, if one knows nothing of the efforts, and the continuity of the efforts of those organisations which for more than a century and a half have been... “Looking after the revolution”.

We do not examine the present from the standpoint of the past; we examine the past from the standpoint of the revolution’s present and future needs. But to lack this understanding of history inevitably means being disarmed in the face of the future.

The struggle for the communist revolution did not begin with the ICG. It already has a long history. And although this history is mostly marked by the proletariat’s defeats, it has furnished those who really want to contribute to today’s revolutionary combat with lessons, acquisitions that are vital weapons for the struggle. And it is precisely the proletariat’s political organisations that throughout its history have fought to draw out and formulate these lessons. It is mere Sunday-revolutionary charlatanism to talk about “looking after the revolution” without looking at the proletarian political organisations of the past, and the continuity of their efforts.

The proletariat is a historical class: that is to say, a class that bears a future on a historic scale. Unlike other exploited classes, which decompose as capitalism develops, it develops, it gains in strength and concentration while at the same time acquiring, through the generations, in thousands of daily struggles and a few great revolutionary attempts, an awareness of what it is, what it can achieve, and what is its aim. The activity of revolutionary organisations, their debates, their regroupments and their splits, are an integral part of this historic combat, uninterrupted from Babeuf until its definitive triumph.

Not understanding the continuity that ties these organisations together politically through history means seeing in the proletariat nothing but a class without either a history or a consciousness... at best, a class in revolt. This is the bourgeoisie’s vision of the working class. Not communists’!

The ICG sees a psychological problem of “paternity” and “attachment to the family” in what is in fact the minimum of consciousness to be demanded of any organisation that claims to live up to the role of proletarian vanguard.

WHAT CONTINUITY DO WE CLAIM?

According to the ICG, claiming continuity with past communist organisations means, “denying the impersonality of the program”. It is obvious that the communist program is neither the work nor the property of any one person, or any genius. Marxism bears Marx’s name in recognition of the fact that it was he who laid the foundations of a truly coherent proletarian conception of the world. But ever since its first formulation, this conception has been constantly elaborated through the class’ struggle and through its organisations. Marx himself claimed a descendance from the work of Babeuf’s Society of Equals, the utopian socialists, the British Chartists, etc, and considered his ideas as a product of the development of the proletariat’s real struggle.

But however “impersonal” it may be, the communist program is nonetheless the work of human beings in flesh and blood, of militants grouped in political organisations, and there is nonetheless a continuity in these organisations’ work. The real question is not whether such a continuity exists, but what it is.

The ICG intimates that claiming a continuity with proletarian political organisations comes down to agreeing with what anyone has ever said at any time in the workers’ movement, thereby demonstrating that they have not the slightest understanding of what they claim to criticise.

One of the ICG’s main accusations against those who defend the idea of capitalist decadence is that they “thus uncritically ratify past history, and in particular social-democratic reformism, which is justified by a sleight of hand because it was “in the ascendant phase of capitalism””.

In the ICG’s narrow-minded mentality, assuming a historical continuity can only mean “uncritically ratifying”. In reality, as far as the organisations of the past are concerned, they have already been mercilessly and definitively criticised by history.

The continuity between the old organisations and the new has not been ensured by just any tendency. It has always been the left that has ensured the continuity between the proletariat’s three main international political organisations. It was the left, through the marxist current, which ensured the continuity between the 1st and 2nd International, against the Proudhonist, Bakuninist, Blanquist, and corporatist currents. It was the left, which fought first of all the reformist tendencies, and then the “social-patriots”, which ensured the continuity between the 2nd and 3rd International during the war, then by forming the Communist International. And it was the left, once again, and in particular the Italian and German lefts, which took up and developed the revolutionary gains of the 3rd International, trodden under foot by the social-democratic and Stalinist counter-revolution.

This is to be explained by the difficult existence of proletarian political organisations. The very existence of a truly proletarian political organisation is a permanent combat against the pressure of the ruling class, which is both material – lack of financial resources, police repression – but also and above all ideological. The dominant ideology always tends to be that of the economically ruling class. Communists are men and women, and their organisations are not miraculously proof against the penetration of the ideology that impregnates the whole of social life. The proletariat’s political organisations often die defeated, by betraying, and passing over to the enemy. Only those fractions of the organisation – the lefts – that have had the strength not to let fall their arms in the face of the ruling class pressure, have been able to assume the continuity of the proletarian content these organisations once had.

In this sense, affirming a continuity with previous proletarian political organisations means claiming the heritage of the various left fractions which alone were capable of ensuring this continuity. Tracing our origins to the “successive contributions of the Communist League, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Internationals” does not mean “uncritically ratifying” Willich and Schapper in the Communist League, nor the anarchists in the 1st International, nor the reformists in the 2nd, nor the degenerating Bolsheviks in the 3rd. On the contrary, it means claiming the heritage of the political combat conducted against these tendencies by the lefts, usually in the minority.

But this combat was not fought out just anywhere. It took place within the organisations that regrouped the most advanced elements of the working class; within proletarian organisations, which for all their weaknesses have always been a living challenge to the established order.

These were not the incarnation of an eternal unvarying truth laid down once and for all – as is claimed by the theory of the Invariance of the Communist program, which the ICG has borrowed from the Bordigists. They were the concrete “vanguard” of the proletariat as a revolutionary class at a given moment in its history, and at a given degree of development of its class consciousness.

Through the debates between the Willich and Marx tendencies in the Communist League, through the confrontation between anarchists and marxists within the 1st International, between reformists and the internationalist left in the 2nd, between the degenerating Bolsheviks and the left communists in the 3rd, the working class’ permanent effort to forge political weapons for its combat takes on a concrete form.

Claiming a political continuity with the proletariat’s political organisations means taking position in the line of the tendencies that assumed this continuity, but also of the effort in itself that these organisations represented.

THE CLASS NATURE OF THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY

For the ICG, the main indictment of the idea of any continuity with proletarian political organisations is that it leads to considering the 19th century social-democratic parties, and the 2nd International, as working class. For the ICG, the social-democracy is “essentially bourgeois”.

As we have seen in previous articles, the ICG takes up the anarchist vision of the communist revolution, permanently on the agenda ever since the beginnings of capitalism: there are no different periods of capitalism. The proletarian program can be reduced to one eternal slogan: the world revolution right now. Trade unionism, parliamentarism, the struggle for reforms, were never part of the working class. Consequently, the social-democratic parties and the 2nd International, which made these forms of struggle the essential axis of their activity, could never have been anything but instruments of the bourgeoisie. The 2nd International of Engels’ time was the same as today’s understandings between Mitterand and Felipe Gonzales.

Since we have already dealt with them at length in our two previous articles, we will not here go back over such questions as the existence of two fundamental historic phases in the life of capitalism, nor the central place of the analysis of capitalist decadence in the coherence of marxism (International Review no. 48 [42]); nor will we return to the question of the different practice and forms of struggle in the workers’ movement that result from this change in period (International Review no. 49 [43]).

From the standpoint of revolutionary organisations’ historic continuity, we want here to highlight what was proletarian in the social-democracy, and what it contributed that revolutionary marxists were afterwards to claim, over and above its weaknesses, due to the forms of struggle of the period, and its degeneration.

* * *

What are the criteria for determining an organisation’s class nature? We can define three major ones:

- its program, i.e. the definition of its aims and means of action as a whole,

- the organisation’s practice within the class struggle,

- finally, its origins, and its historic dynamic.

However, these criteria obviously have meaning only if we first place the organisation within the historical conditions in which it existed; not only because it is vital to take account of objective historical conditions to determine what are and can be the proletarian struggle’s forms and immediate objectives, but also because it is vital to bear in mind the degree of consciousness reached historically by the proletarian class at a given moment, to judge the degree of consciousness of a particular organisation.

Consciousness develops historically. It is not enough to understand that the proletariat has existed as a politically autonomous class since at least the mid-19th century. It is also necessary to understand that it has not remained a mummy, a stuffed dinosaur, ever since. Its class consciousness, its historic program, have evolved, becoming richer with experience, and developing as historical conditions have ripened.

It would be absurd to judge a proletarian organisation of the 19th century by the yardstick of an understanding that was only made possible by decades of further experience.

Let us then recall briefly a few elements of the historical conditions within which the social-democratic parties were formed and lived during the last 25 years of the 19th century, until the period of World War I, when the 2nd International died, and the parties died, one after the other, under the weight of the betrayals of their opportunist leaderships.

THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE IN THE DAYS OF THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY

According to the ICG’s static conception of a capitalism unchanged since its beginnings, the end of the 19th century appears identical to the present day. Its judgment of the erstwhile social-democracy thus comes down to identifying it with today’s social-democratic and Stalinist parties. In reality, this kind of childish projection that considers that what one knows is all that has ever existed is nothing but an insipid negation of historical analysis.

Today’s generations live in a world which has been overrun for more than 3/4 of a century by the worst barbarism in mankind’s history: the world wars. Outside open periods of world war, society is hit by economic crisis, with the sole exception of two periods of “prosperity” founded on the “reconstruction” that followed the First and Second World Wars. To this should be added, since the end of World War II, the constant local wars in the less developed zones, and the orientation of the entire world economy towards essentially military and destructive objectives.

The apparatus responsible for preserving this decadent order has unceasingly increased its grip on society, and the tendency towards state capitalism in all its forms and in every country has become ever more powerful and omnipresent in every aspect of social life, and first and foremost in the relations between classes. In every country, the state apparatus has adopted a whole panoply of instruments for controlling and atomising the working class. The trade unions and the mass parties have become cogs in the machinery of the state. The proletariat can only affirm its existence as a class sporadically. Outside moments of social movement, as a collective body the class is atomised, as if it had been expelled from civil society.

The capitalism of the late 19th century is altogether different. On the economic level, the bourgeoisie went through the longest and most vigorous period of prosperity in its history. After the cyclical crises of growth, which had hit the system about every ten years between 1825 and 1873, for almost 30 years until 1900 capitalism experienced an almost uninterrupted prosperity. On the military level, the period was just as exceptional: there were no major wars.

During these years of relatively peaceful prosperity, barely imaginable for people of our epoch, the proletarian struggle took place in a political framework which, although it remained – obviously – that of capitalist exploitation and oppression, nonetheless had very different characteristics from those of the 20th century.

The relationships between proletarians and capitalists were direct, and all the more dispersed in that most factories were still relatively small. The state only intervened in these relationships at the level of open conflicts likely to “endanger public order”. For the vast majority, negotiations over wages and working conditions depended on the local balance of forces between bosses (often of family firms) and workers, who for the most part came directly from the peasantry or the craft trades. The state was not involved in these negotiations.

Capitalism conquered the world market, and spread its form of social organisation to the four corners of the earth. The development of the productive forces was explosive. Every day the bourgeoisie became richer, and even made a profit from the workers’ improving living conditions.

Workers’ struggles were often crowned with success. Long, bitter strikes, even isolated, managed to beat bosses who – apart from the fact that they were able to pay – were often disunited in their resistance. The workers learnt to unite and organise on a permanent basis (so did the bosses). Their struggles forced the bourgeoisie to accept the right of working class organisations to exist: trades unions, political parties, and cooperatives. The proletariat affirmed itself as a social force within society, even outside moments of open struggle. The working class had a life of its own within society: there were the trade unions, (which were “schools of communism”), but also clubs where workers talked politics, and “workers’ universities”, where one might learn marxism as well as how to read and write (Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek were both teachers in the German social-democracy); there were working class songs, and working class fetes where one sang, danced, and talked of communism.

The proletariat imposed universal suffrage, and won representation by its own political organisations in the bourgeois parliament – the parliament had not yet been completely devoured by the circus of mystification; real power was not yet wholly in the hands of the state executive; there were real confrontations between different fractions of the ruling classes, and the proletariat sometimes managed to use the divergences between bourgeois parties to impose its own interests.

The European working class’ living conditions underwent real improvements: the working day reduced from 12-14 hours to 10; the outlawing of child labour and dangerous work for women; an overall rise in living conditions and general culture. Inflation was unknown. The prices of consumer goods fell as new production techniques were introduced. Unemployment was reduced to the minimum reserve army of labour that an expanding capitalism could draw on to satisfy its constantly growing needs for labour power.

A young unemployed worker today might have difficulty in imagining what this could be like, but it should be obvious for any organisation that claims to be marxist.

SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY DOES NOT EQUAL REFORMISM

The workers’ social-democratic parties and “their” trade unions were the products and the instruments of the combats of this period. Contrary to what the ICG implies, the union and parliamentary political struggle of the early 1870’s were not “invented” by the social-democracy. The struggle for the existence of trade unions and universal suffrage (with the Chartists in Britain especially) developed in the proletariat from the first moments of its affirmation as a class.

The social-democracy only developed and organised a real movement that had existed well before it, and developed independently of it. Then, as today, the question has always been the same: how to fight the situation of exploitation in which it finds itself. And at the time, the trade union and parliamentary political struggle really were effective means of defence. To reject them in the name of “the Revolution” would be to reject the real movement and the only path towards the revolution that was possible at the time. The working class had to use it to limit its exploitation, but also to become aware of itself, and of its existence as a united and independent force.

“The great importance of the trade union and the political struggle is that they socialise the proletariat’s knowledge and consciousness, and organise it as a class” wrote Luxemburg in “Reform or Revolution”.

This was the “minimum program”. But it was accompanied by a “maximum program”, to be carried out by the class once it had become capable of taking its fight against exploitation right to the limit: the revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg expressed the link between these two programs: “According to the Party’s current conception, the proletariat, through its experience of the trade union and political struggle, arrives at the conviction that its situation cannot be transformed from top to bottom by means of this struggle, and that the seizure of power is unavoidable”.

This was the program of the social-democracy.

By contrast, reformism was defined by its rejection of the idea of the revolution’s necessity. It considered that only the struggle for reforms within the system could have any meaning. Now, the social-democracy was formed in direct opposition not only to the anarchists – who thought the revolution was possible at any time – but also to the possibilists and their reformism that considered capitalism as eternal.

Here, for example, is how the French workers’ party presented its electoral program in 1880:

“.....Considering,

That this collective appropriation can only derive from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organised as a distinct political party;

That such an organisation must be pursued by all the means at the proletariat’s disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery that it has been up to now, into an instrument of emancipation;

The French socialist workers, in giving their efforts in the economic domain the aim of returning to the collectivity all the means of production, have decided, as means of organisation and struggle, to enter the elections with the following minimum program...” This program was drawn up by Karl Marx.

Whatever the weight of opportunism towards reformism within the social-democratic parties, their program explicitly rejected it. The maximum program of the social-democratic parties was the revolution; the trade union and electoral struggle was essentially the practical means, adapted to the possibilities and the demands of the period, for preparing to realise this aim.

THE GAINS OF THE 2ND INTERNATIONAL

1. The adoption of marxism

Obviously, the ICG recognises no contribution to the workers’ movement on the part of all these “essentially bourgeois” organisations. “Between the social-democracy and communism – they say – there is the same class frontier as between bourgeoisie and proletariat”.

There is nothing new in rejecting 19th century social-democracy and the 2nd International. The anarchists have always done so. What is relatively new [3] is to do so while claiming the heritage of Marx and Engels... (out of a concern for parental authority perhaps).

The problem is, that the adoption of marxist conceptions and the explicit rejection of anarchism is undoubtedly the 2nd International’s major advance over the 1st.

The 1st International, founded in 1864, regrouped, especially at its beginnings, all kinds of political tendencies: Mazzinists, Proudhonists, Bakuninists, Blanquists, British trade-unionists, etc. The marxists were only a tiny minority (the weight of Marx’s personality within the General Council should not deceive us). There was only one marxist, Frankel, in the Paris Commune, and he was Hungarian.

By contrast, with Engels the 2nd International was based on marxist conceptions right from the start. This was explicitly recognised by the Erfurt Congress in 1891.

In Germany, as early as 1869, the Workers’ Social-Democratic Party founded at Eisenach by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel after they split from Lassalle’s organisation (the General Association of German Workers) was based on marxism. After the reunification of the two parties in 1875, the marxists were in the majority, but the program as it was adopted was so full of concessions to Lassalle’s ideas that Marx wrote in the accompanying letter to his famous “Critique of the Gotha Program”:

“After the Unity Congress has been held, Engels and I will publish a short statement to the effect that our position is altogether remote from the said declaration of principles and that we have nothing to do with it”. But he added: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”.

Fifteen years later, his confidence in the real movement was vindicated by the adoption of marxist conceptions by the 2nd International right from its creation.

The ICG reminds us of Marx and Engels’ rejection of the term “social-democrat” which in reality reflected the Lassallean weaknesses of the German party: in “all these texts I never describe myself as a social-democrat, but as a communist. For Marx, as for myself, it is thus absolutely impossible to use such as elastic expression to describe our own conception”. (Engels in the pamphlet “Internationales aus dem Volkstaat”, 1871-1875).

But the ICG “forgets” to mention that the Marxists did not therefore deduce that they should break with the party, but on the contrary that they should make the best of it by engaging the combat on the fundamental question. As Engels went on to say: “Things are different today, and this word can pass if it comes down to it, even though it does not today correspond any better to a party whose economic program is not only socialist in general, but directly communist, i.e. to a party whose final aim is the suppression of all states, and therefore of democracy”.

The International’s adoption of marxism’s fundamental ideas was not a gift from heaven, but a victory won thanks to the combat of the most advanced elements.

2. The distinction between the proletariat’s unitary and political organisations

Another contribution of the 2nd International in relation to the 1st, was the distinction between two separate forms of organisation. On the one hand, unitary organisations regrouping proletarians on the basis of their membership of the class (in the trade unions, and later in soviets or workers’ councils); on the other, political organisations regrouping militants on the basis of a precise political platform.

Especially at the outset, the 1st International regrouped individuals, cooperatives, solidarity associations, unions and political clubs. Which meant that it never, as an organ, really succeeded in carrying out the tasks, either of clear political orientation, or of unifying the workers.

It was therefore quite natural that the anarchists, who reject both marxism and the need for political organisation, should combat the 2nd International right from its foundation. And moreover, many anarchist currents today continue to trace their origins to the IWA (International Workingmen’s Association). Here again, the ICG has not innovated and remains invariantly... anarchist.

WHY AND HOW REVOLUTIONARIES FOUGHT WITHIN THE 2ND INTERNATIONAL

Does this mean that the social-democracy and the 2nd International were perfect incarnations of what a proletarian vanguard political organisation should be? Obviously not.

The Gotha Congress was held four years after the crushing of the Commune; the 2nd International was founded after almost twenty years of uninterrupted capitalist prosperity, under the impulse of an outburst of strikes provoked not by worsening exploitation due to the economic crisis, but by this very prosperity, which placed the proletariat in a position of relative strength. The distance from capitalism’s cyclical crises, and the progress of working class living conditions through the trade union and parliamentary struggle, inevitably created illusions amongst the workers, even in their vanguard.

In the marxist vision, the outbreak of revolution can only be provoked by a violent capitalist economic crisis. The longer the period of prosperity lasted, the more the eventuality of such a crisis seemed to recede. The very success of the struggle for reforms lent credit to the reformists’ idea that the revolution was both pointless and impossible. The fact that the results of the struggle for reforms depended essentially on the balance of forces at the level of each nation state, and not on the international balance of forces – as is the case for the revolutionary struggle – increasingly limited the fighting organisation to a national framework, while internationalist conceptions and tasks were often relegated to a secondary importance, or put off indefinitely. In 1898, seven years after the Erfurt Congress, Bernstein openly called into question, within the International, the Marxist theory of crises and the inevitability of capitalism’s economic collapse (which the ICG also rejects): only the struggle for reforms was viable, “The goal is nothing, the movement is all”.

The party’s parliamentary groups were often all too easily caught in the nets of the bourgeois democratic game, while the union leaders tended to become too “understanding” towards the imperatives of the capitalist national economy. The extent of the combat conducted by Marx and Engels within the emerging social-democracy against the tendencies to compromise with reformism, the combat of Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, or Trotsky within the degenerating social-democracy are proof of the weight this form of bourgeois ideology had within the proletarian organisations... But the weight of reformism within the 2nd International does not make it a bourgeois organ, any more than that of Proudhonist reformism makes the IWA an instrument of capital.

The proletariat’s political organisations have never formed a monolithic bloc of identical conceptions. Furthermore, the most advanced elements have often been in the minority – as we have pointed out previously. But the minorities that go from Marx and Engels to the left communists of the 1930’s knew that the life of the proletariat’s political organisations depended on a struggle not only against the enemy in the street and the workplace, but also against the ever-present influence of the bourgeoisie within these organisations.

___________________________________________________

“Sweeping aside the half-heartedness, lies and corruption of the outlived official Socialist parties, we Communists, united in the Third International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations, from Babeuf, to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

“If the First International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the Second International gathered and organised millions of workers; then the Third International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realisation, the International of the deed”.

(Manifesto of the Founding Congress of the Communist International to the Proletarians of the Whole World! [44] March, 1919)

___________________________________________________

 

For the ICG, this kind of combat was meaningless, and only helped the counter-revolution.

“The presence of marxist revolutionaries (Pannekoek, Gorter, Lenin...), within the 2nd International did not mean that the latter defended the interests of the proletariat (whether “immediate” or historic), but cautioned for lack of a split, the social-democracy’s counter-revolutionary activity”.

Let us note in passing that all of a sudden, the ICG here raises Pannekoek, Gorter, and Lenin – the left wing of an organisation separated from communism by a “class frontier” – to the rank of “marxist revolutionaries”. How nice to them. But in doing so, the ICG gives us to understand that organisations “essentially bourgeois in nature” can have a left wing made up of authentic “revolutionary marxists”... for decades! It is presumably the same kind of “dialectic” that leads the ICG to consider that the left wing of Latin American Stalinism (the “Shining Path” maoists in Peru) can in these countries be “the sole structure capable of giving a coherence to the ever growing number of proletarian direct actions”.

Whether our punk dialecticians like it or not, Peruvian maoist Stalinism is no more a “structure capable of giving a coherence” to the actions of the proletariat than the “marxist revolutionaries” in the 2nd International “cautioned a counter-revolutionary practice”.

Marx and Engels, Rosa and Lenin, Pannekoek and Gorter, were not incoherent imbeciles who thought they could struggle for the revolution as militants giving life to bourgeois organisations. They were revolutionaries who, unlike the anarchists - ...and the ICG – understood the concrete conditions of the workers’ struggle according to the system’s historic periods.

We may criticise Lenin’s lateness in realising the gravity of the opportunist disease within the 2nd International; we may criticise Rosa Luxemburg’s inability really to conduct the organisational work of the fraction within the social-democracy at the turn of the century, but we cannot reject the nature of their combat. By contrast, we should salute Rosa Luxemburg’s lucidity, at the end of the 19th century, in criticising mercilessly the revisionist current emerging within the 2nd International, and the Bolsheviks’ ability to organise as an independent fraction with its own means of intervention within the Russia Social Democratic Workers’ Party. This is why they were in the proletariat’s vanguard in the revolutionary struggles at the end of World War I.

Does the ICG really think that those it sometimes calls “marxist revolutionaries” came from the social-democracy by accident, rather than from anarchism or some other current? It is impossible to answer this elementary question without understanding the importance of the continuity of the proletariat’s political organisations. And this cannot be understood without understanding the analysis of capitalist decadence.

The whole history of the 2nd International can only appear as meaningless chaos if we do not bear in mind that it existed at the watershed between the period of capitalism’s ascendancy, and that of its decadence.

CONCLUSION

Today, the proletariat is preparing to wage a decisive battle against a capitalist system no longer capable of escaping an open crisis that has lasted for almost 20 years, ever since the end of the reconstruction period in the late 1960’s.

It is heading for the combat relatively free of the mystifications heaped on it for 40 years by the Stalinist counter-revolution; in those countries with a long-standing tradition of bourgeois democracy, it has lost many of its illusions in the trade union and parliamentary struggle, while in the less developed countries it has lost those in anti-imperialist nationalism.

However, in breaking free of these mystifications, the workers have not yet managed to reappropriate all the lessons of their past struggles.

The task of communists is not to organise the working class – as the social-democracy did in the 19th century. The communists’ contribution to the workers’ struggle is essentially at the level of conscious practice, the praxis of the struggle. At this level, they contribute not so much by the answers they give, but by showing how problems should be posed. Their conception of the world and their practical attitude always put forward the worldwide and historic dimension of each question confronted in the struggle.

Those like the ICG who ignore the historic dimension of the workers’ struggle by denying the different phases of capitalist reality, by denying the real continuity of the proletariat’s political organisations, disarm the working class at the moment when it most needs to reappropriate its own conception of the world.

It is not enough to be “for violence”, “against bourgeois democracy” to know where you are and to establish at every moment perspectives for the class struggle. Far from it. Maintaining illusions like this is criminally dangerous.

RV

 

IR – 50 3rd quarter 1987

Polemic: Reply to Battaglia Comunista

The course of history

Since 1968, the revolutionary groups which have come to form the ICC have been arguing that the international wave of workers’ struggles which began in France that year marked a new period in the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat: the ending of the long period of counter-revolution which followed the reflux of the 1917-23 revolution wave; the opening up of a course towards generalised was class confrontations. While the accelerating collapse of the capitalist economy could not fail to push the bourgeoisie towards another world war, this same economic disintegration was provoking a vigorous resistance by a new and undefeated generation of workers. Consequently, capitalism cannot go to war without first crushing the proletariat; on the other hand, the growing combativity and consciousness of the proletariat is inevitably leading to huge class battles whose outcome will determine whether the crisis of capitalism is to end in world war or world revolution.

This vision of the historic course is not shared by many groups in the proletarian political milieu, in particular by the main international current outside the ICC, the International Bureau for a Revolutionary Party. After a long period in which the IBRP’s seemed to have little or no interest in debating with the ICC, we can only welcome the recent contribution on this question in Battaglia Comunista, the publication of the IBRP’s affiliate in Italy, the Internationalist Communist Party (‘The ICC and the Historic Course: A Mistaken Method’ in BC No 3, March ’ 87, published in English in Communist Review No 5). Not simply because the text contains passages indicating that BC is waking up to certain realities of the present world situation – in particular the end of the counter-revolution and the   “signs” , at least, of a resurgence of class struggle. But also because, even where the text is fundamentally wrong, it does take us straight to the essential issues: the problem of the marxist method in grasping the unfolding of reality; the conditions for unleashing a new world war; the real level of class struggle today, and the approach to these problems taken by our common political ancestor, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s and 1940s.

THE MARXIST METHOD: INDICATING THE LINE OF MARCH OR AGNOSTICISM?

In IR 36 we published another polemic with BC on the question of the historic course (‘The Course of History: the ‘80s are not the ‘30s’). A text emanating from BC’s 5th congress had affirmed that it was not possible to say whether the social storms stirred up by the crisis would break out before, during or after a world imperialist war. In our reply, as well as in a basic text on the historic course emanating from our third congress in 1979 (see IR 18) , we argued that it is a fundamental and crucial task of revolutionaries to indicate the general lines in which social events are moving. It is a pity that BC’s text doesn’t really address itself to these arguments. Indeed, it does little more than quote again the passage which we criticised at such length in IR 36! But in another part of the article, BC does at least try to explain why it feels it necessary to maintain an agnostic attitude about the historic course, and, rather than simply repeating all the arguments contained in our other two articles, we will address ourselves to this new ‘explanation’ . This is how BC poses the problem: “In relation to the problem the ICC has set us of being precise prophets of the future the difficulty lies in the fact that subjectivity does not mechanically follow objective movements. Although we can precisely follow tendencies, possible counter-tendencies and their reciprocal relations in the structures of the economic world, this is not the case for the subjective world, neither for the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat. No-one can believe that the maturation of consciousness, even the most elementary class consciousness, can be rigidly determined from observable, rationally correlated data.”

It’s perfectly true that subjective factors are not mechanically determined by objective ones, and that, consequently, it is not possible to make exact predictions of the time and place of proletarian outbursts. But this does not mean that marxism historically has confined itself to predicting only the trends in the capitalist economy.

On the contrary: in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels defined the communists as those who were able to see the “line of march” of the “movement going on in front of our eyes” the movement of the proletariat. And throughout their careers they attempted to put this theoretical proposition into practice, closely aligning their organisational activity to the perspectives they traced for the class struggle (stressing the necessity for theoretical reflection after the defeats of the 1848 revolutions, for the formation of the 1st and 2nd Internationals in periods of class revival, and so on). Sometimes they were proved wrong, and they were obliged to revise their predictions, but they never abandoned the effort to be the most far-sighted elements of the proletariat. Similarly, the intransigently revolutionary positions adopted by Lenin in 1914 and in 1917 were based on an unshakable confidence that the ‘objective’ horrors of the imperialist war were giving rise to a profound maturation in the class consciousness of the proletariat. And when the Italian Fraction in the 1930s insisted so strongly on basing its whole activity on a proper analysis of the historic course, it was merely following on in the same tradition.

And what applies to the broader historical dimension also applies to the immediate struggle; in order to be able to intervene concretely in a strike movement, communists must develop the capacity to assess and reassess the momentum and direction of the struggle.

Having to deal with ‘subjective’ factors has never prevented marxists from carrying out this essential work.

THE CONDITIONS FOR GENERALISED WAR TODAY

The ICC has always maintained that, in order to march the proletariat off to a new world war, capitalism requires a situation expressed in “the workers’ growing adherence to capitalist values (and to their political and trade union representatives) and a combativity which either tends to disappear, or appears within a political perspective totally controlled by the bourgeoisie,” (‘The Course of History: the ‘80s are not the ‘30s, IR 36).

Unwilling, perhaps, to go on insisting (as they have done in the past) that the proletariat today is still groaning under the ideological heel of the counter-revolution, BC comes up with a novel response to this: “...the form of war, its technical means, its tempo, its characteristics in relation to the population as a whole, has greatly changed since 1939. More precisely, war today has less need for consensus or working class passivity than the wars of yesteryear. Here we must make it clear that we are not theorising the complete separation of the ‘military’ and the ‘civil’ which are, especially on the level of production, intersecting more and more. Rather, we wish to put the speed and high technical content of warfare in relation to its economic, political and social background. The relation is such that involvement in the actions of war is possible without the agreement of the proletariat. Every bourgeoisie is able to rely on its victory for the re-establishing of consensus as well as for the other things that victory brings: occupation of territory, etc. And it is obvious that every bourgeoisie enters a war thinking of victory.”

Reading this passage, it is difficult to understand what BC is talking about. The above conditions could be applied to very limited imperialist adventure, such as the various raids and expeditions the west has carried out in the Middle east, though even these actions have to be accompanied by intense ideological campaigns to dull the proletariat’s awareness of what is being done. But we are talking not about limited or local actions, but a world war, a third world war in a century whose wars have been ever-more global – embracing the entire planet – and total – demanding the active cooperation and mobilisation of the entire population. Is BC seriously suggesting that World War 3 could be fought with professional armies on some ‘distant’ battlefield, and that the accompanying ‘intersection’ of the civil and military sectors would not involve imposing the most monstrous sacrifices on the entire working population? With such a gentlemanly vision of world war, it’s not surprising that BC can still talk hopefully about the proletarian revolution achieving its victory during and even after the next global conflict! Or else, by the increased “technical means” and “tempo” of modern warfare, BC means that World War 3 will begin straight away as a push-button affair. But if this is the case, then it makes no sense to talk about the victory either of one bourgeois camp or the proletariat, since the entire world would have been reduced to rubble.

In fact, it is practically certain that a third world war would rapidly escalate into a nuclear holocaust – which is a good reason for not talking glibly about the proletarian revolution arising during or after the next war. But we agree that “every bourgeoisie enters a war thinking of victory.” This is why the bourgeoisie doesn’t want to plunge straight into a nuclear war, why it is spending billions searching for ways of winning the war without annihilating everything in the process. The ruling class also knows what the main stakes of the next war would be: the industrial heartlands of Europe. And it is certainly intelligent enough to recognise that for the west to occupy eastern Europe, or for Russia to seize the fleshpots of western Europe, there would have to be a total involvement and mobilisation of the proletarian masses, whether at the military fronts or at the point of production, and particularly in Europe itself. But for this to be a possibility, the bourgeoisie would first have to have ensured not only the “passivity” of the working class, but its active adherence to the war-ideologies of its exploiters. And this is precisely what the bourgeoisie cannot ensure today.

THE HISTORIC RESURGENCE OF THE PROLETARIAT

In 1982, the text from BC’s Congress argued that : “if the proletariat today, faced with the gravity of the crisis and undergoing the blows of repeated bourgeois attacks, has not yet shown itself able to respond, this simply means that the long work of the world counter-revolution is still active in the workers' ’consciousness”; that the proletariat today “is tired and disappointed, though not definitively beaten.”

BC's most recent text on the subject clearly marks an advance from this point. For the first time, it states unequivocably that: “the counter-revolutionary period following the defeat from within of the October revolution has ended,” and that “there are no lack of signs of a revival of class struggle and we do not fail to point them out.”  And in fact we have already noted that the pages of Battaglia have contained a serious coverage of recent massive class movements in Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Spain, etc.
Nevertheless, the IBRP’s underlying attitude remains one of profound underestimation of the real depth of the class struggle today, and it is this above all which renders them incapable of seeing how the proletariat stands as an obstacle to the war-plans of the bourgeoisie. [1] [47]
Battaglia may have noticed some “signs” of a class response in the years 1986-87. But these “signs” are in reality the advanced point of a succession of international waves going back to the events of May ’68 in France. But when the first of these waves manifested itself, whether in France ’68 or the ‘hot autumn’ in Italy in ’69, Battaglia dismissed them as noisy eruptions of the petty bourgeois student strata; derided the arguments of the ICC’s predecessors about the beginning of a new period; and then went back to sleep. At its 5th Congress in 1982, it was still projecting its own tiredness onto the proletariat, despite the fact that there had already been a second wave of struggles between ’78 and ’81, culminating in the mass strike in Poland. And, after a brief reflux after 1981, a new wave began in Belgium in September ’83; but it wasn't until 1986 – i.e. three years into this third wave – that BC began seeing the “signs” of a class revival. It is thus hardly surprising that BC finds it so hard to see where the class movement is going – it has so little idea of where it has come from. Typical of this blindness even in relation to the past is the statement in the most recent article that : “after both ’74 and ’79, the crisis pushed the bourgeoisie into much more serious attacks on the working class but the much-exalted workers’ combativity did not in fact grow.” The wave of struggles from ‘78-81 is thus written out of history...

Because it sees today’s struggles as no more than the first timid beginnings of the class revival, rather than situating them in an evolving historical dynamic going back nearly 20 years, BC is naturally unable to measure the real maturation of class consciousness which has been both a product of and an active factor in these struggles.

Thus when the ICC points out that the ideologies which capitalism used to mobilise the class for war in the ‘30s – fascism/anti-fascism, defence of ‘socialist’ Russia, etc. – are now used up, discredited in the eyes of the workers’ Battaglia asserts that the bourgeoisie can always find alternatives to Stalinism or the fascism/anti-fascism campaigns of the ‘30s. But curiously enough, it avoids telling us which alternatives. If, for example, when it talks about finding “further obstacles” to Stalinism it means obstacles to the left of Stalinism, this only proves our case: because when  the bourgeoisie is forced to put its extreme left in the front line of opposition to the proletarian threat, this can only be a reflection of a real  process of radicalisation within the class.

The truth is that the proletariat’s growing disengagement from the main ideologies and institutions of bourgeois society is a real problem for the ruling class, particularly when it affects the main organs charged with disciplining the workers : the trade unions. And at this level, BC  seems particularly blind to what has been going on throughout the working class: “At this point the ICC should point out the terms in which the course they have adopted presents itself: the revival of combativity, the fall of old myths, the tendency to shake off union shackles... As there are no real pieces of evidence (for this).... it is necessary to tamper with reality, exaggerate it, distort it... invent it.”
By this token, the increasing tendency to ‘de-unionisation’ (which the bourgeois press has lamented in numerous countries); the growing number of strikes which break out spontaneously, ignoring or going beyond union directives (eg Belgium ’83 and ’86, Denmark ’85, British Telecom, French Rail strikes, Spanish miners and steel workers, and countless other movements); the mounting list of examples of workers booing unions speeches, ignoring union pseudo-actions or alternatively turning them into real class actions; the appearance of independent and unitary forms of workers’ self-organisation (as in Rotterdam in ’78, Poland ’80, the French rail strike, the teachers’ struggles in France and Italy...); the emergence of combative nuclei of workers outside the union structures (Italy, Belgium, France, Britain...) – all these “pieces of evidence” about “the tendency to shake off union shackles” which the ICC press has been documenting and publishing for years, all this is a mere ‘invention’ on our part, or at least a ‘distortion’ of reality.

DOES THE CLASS STRUGGLE AFFECT THE BOURGEOISIE?

If the idea of a swelling tide of proletarian resistance is a mere invention of the ICC, then it would follow that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have to take the working class into consideration when formulating its economic or political strategies. And BC doesn’t hesitate to draw this conclusion: “There is not a single policy in political economy in any of the metropolitan countries (with the possible exception of Poland and Rumania) which has been modified by the bourgeoisie in the wake of the struggle of the proletariat or any of its sections.”
If Battaglia is suggesting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t shape its economic attacks (or its propaganda campaigns, election strategies, etc) in anticipation of the reactions they will provoke from the workers, then it is denying an intelligence to the bourgeoisie, a mistake which marxists can ill-afford to make. Alternatively, it is suggesting that the Polish and Rumanian bourgeoisies are the most sophisticated in the world! Actually, the citing of these two cases isn’t accidental, because the Stalinist form of state capitalism often makes explicit tendencies which are less apparent in the ‘western’ varieties of state capitalism. One might well ask, however, what changes in the policy of the bourgeoisie BC discerns in Rumania today? As for the modifications in the policy of the Polish bourgeoisie in order to attack the working class more effectively, we saw these at work against the class struggle in 1980: false liberalisation, the use of ‘renovated’ trade unionism a la Solidarnosc, staggering of the attacks, etc. In other words, the techniques used for decades in the west. The same ones which Gorbachev wants to generalise throughout his bloc in order to confront the revival of class struggle. Even the most rigid and brutal fractions of the bourgeoisie are now being led to modify and adapt their policies in order to cope with the development of the class struggle.

Furthermore, to argue that the proletariat, despite all the massive struggles of the last few years, has not succeeded in pushing back the bourgeoisie’s austerity attacks in any way is to deny all significance to the defensive struggles of the class. Logically it would imply arguing that only the immediate struggle for revolution can defend the workers’ interests. But while in global terms it’s true that the revolution is the proletariat’s only ultimate defence, it’s also true that the present struggles of the class on the terrain of economic demands have both held the bourgeoisie back from making more savage attacks, and have, in a number of circumstances forced the bourgeoisie to postpone attacks it was actually trying to impose. The example of Belgium ’86 is particularly significant here, because it was the real threat of a unification of struggles which obliged the bourgeoisie to make a temporary retreat.
But the most profound significance of the proletariat’s capacity to push back the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie is that it also represents the proletariat’s resistance to capitalism’s war-drive. Because if the ruling class is unable to compel the workers to acquiesce to ever-increasing sacrifices on behalf of the national economy, it will be unable to accomplish the militarisation of labour required for an imperialist war.
For Battaglia, however, the proletariat’s performance is still not up to scratch. The evidence we give of a growing disengagement from bourgeois ideology, of a developing combativity and consciousness, everything in fact “presented by the ICC as ‘proof’ is extremely weak and is insufficient to characterise an historic course.”

The fact is that for Battaglia, the only thing that could have any effect on the war drive is the revolution itself. Our text of 1979 already responded to this argument: “Some groups, like  Battaglia Comunista, consider that the proletariat’s response to the crisis is insufficient to constitute an obstacle to the course towards imperialist war. They consider that the struggle must be of a ‘revolutionary nature’ if it’s really going to counteract this course, basing their argument on the fact that in 1917-18 only the revolution put an end to the imperialist war. Their error is to try and transpose a schema which was correct at the time to a different situation. A proletarian upsurge during and against a war straight away takes the form of a revolution:

-          because society is plunged into the most extreme form of its crisis, imposing the most terrible sacrifices on  the workers;

-          because the workers in uniform are already armed;

-          because the exceptional measure (martial law, etc), which are in force make any class confrontation frontal and violent;

-          because the struggle against war immediately takes on the political form of a confrontation with the state which is waging the war, without going through the stage of less head-on economic struggles.

“But the situation is quite different when war hasn’t yet been declared. In these circumstances, even a limited tendency towards struggle on a class terrain is enough to jam up the war machine, since:

-          it shows that the workers aren’t actively drawn into capitalist mystifications;

-          imposing even greater sacrifices on the workers than the ones which provoked their initial response runs the risk of provoking a proportionally stronger reaction,” (IR 18, The Historic Course’).

To which we can only add that today, for the first time in history, we are moving towards a generalised class confrontation provoked not by a war but by a very long drawn-out crisis. The movement of struggles which is laying the foundation for this confrontation is consequently itself a long drawn-out one and often seems very unspectacular compared to the events of 1917-18. Nevertheless, to remain fixated on the images of the first revolutionary wave and to dismiss today’s struggles as amounting to very little is the very last way to prepare oneself for the massive social explosions that lie ahead.

THE ITALIAN FRACTION AND THE HISTORIC COURSE

The ICC’s approach to the question of the historic course is based to a large extent on the method of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, whose political activity in the 1930s was founded on a recognition that the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave and the onset of the crisis of 1929 had opened up a course towards imperialist war.

Although the Internationalist Communist Party also claims a historical continuity with the Fraction, it has not really assimilated many of its most vital contributions, and this is particularly true with regard to the question of the historic course. Thus whereas for us the clarity of the Fraction’s approach to this position enabled it to make an internationalist response to the events in Spain in 1936-37, in contrast to nearly all the other proletarian currents from Trotskyism to the Union Communiste and the Fraction’s own minority, who succumbed to a greater or lesser extent to the ideology of anti-fascism, Battaglia is only too keen to seek out the “methodological error” of the Fraction: “The Fraction (especially its EC and in particular Vercesi) in the ‘30s judged the perspective as being towards war in an absolute fashion. Did they have reasons to do so? Certainly, the facts in their entirety gave them reason.  But even then the absolutisation of a ‘course’ led the Fraction to make political errors... The political error was the liquidation of any possibility of a revolutionary political intervention in Spain before the real defeat of the proletariat, with the consequent hardening of the differences between the minority and majority on a basis which held little advantage for either of them. The ‘interventionists’ allowed themselves to be absorbed by the POUM militia only to then be rapidly disillusioned and return to the Fraction. The majority remained watching and pontificating that : 'There is nothing to be done’....”

Turning to the ICC today, Battaglia goes on: “Today, the ICC’s error is substantially the same, even if its object has been stood on its head. Absolutisation of the course towards conflict before war; all attention is turned on this in the ingenuous and irresponsible undervaluation of what is in front of everyone’s eyes as regards the bourgeois course towards war.”
This passage is replete with errors. To begin with, BC seems to be mixing up the notions of the course with that of the tendencies produced by the crisis. When they accuse us of “absolutising” the course towards class confrontations they seem to think we are simply denying the tendency towards war. But what we mean by a course towards class confrontations is that the tendency towards war– permanent in decadence and aggravated by the crisis – is obstructed by the counter-tendency towards proletarian upsurges. Furthermore, this course is neither absolute nor eternal: it can be reversed by a series of defeats for the class. In fact, simply because the bourgeoisie is the dominant class in society, a course towards class confrontations is far more fragile and reversible than a course towards war.
In the second place, BC completely distorts the history of the Fractions. We can’t here go into details about the complete history of the groups of the Communist Left [2] [48]. However, a few brief points must be made:

- it is not true that the majority position was that “there is nothing to be done.” while opposing any idea of enrolment in the anti-fascist militias, the majority sent a delegation of comrades to Spain to seek out the possibility of creating a communist nucleus there, despite the evident danger posed by the Stalinist hit squads: these comrades narrowly missed being assassinated in Barcelona. At the same time, outside Spain, the Italian and Belgian Fractions (and also the Mexican ‘Marxist Workers Group’) issued a number of appeals denouncing the massacre in Spain and insisting that the best solidarity with the Spanish workers was for the proletarians in other countries to fight for their own class demands;

- it is true that, in the face of the second world war, a tendency crystallised around Vercesi, denying the “social existence of the proletariat” and rejecting any possibility of revolutionary activity. It was also true that the Left Fractions in general were thrown into disarray and inactivity shortly before the outbreak of the war. But the source of these errors lay precisely in the abandonment of their previous clarity about the historic course. The theory, articulated in particular by Vercesi, of a ‘war economy’ that has overcome the crisis of overproduction, and consequently of all further wars as evidence of an inter-imperialist solidarity to crush the proletarian danger, resulted in the disappearance of the review Bilan and the publication of Octobre on anticipation of a new revolutionary upsurge. This left the Fractions completely disarmed on the eve of the war: far from ‘fixating all attention on the war’ at this point, as BC claims, Octobre saw the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Munich agreement as desperate attempts to forestall the revolution!

- it should be said that this radical revision of the Fraction’s previous analyses was opposed by a significant minority within the organisation. Some of the most articulate spokesmen of this minority were silenced by ­­­­the Nazi death-camps. But in France this position was maintained throughout the war; and it is not accidental that the same comrades who insisted on the necessity to carry on with the communist activity during the war were also able to resist the activist turn provoked by the proletarian movements in Italy in 1943, when the majority of the comrades of the Italian Left – including Vercesi – mistakenly saw a new 1917 and decided that the time had come to form the Party. The Internationalist Communist Party is the direct heir of this error of method;

- in this context it is also worth pointing out that the ‘interventionist’ minority did not return to the Fraction as BC claims. They returned to the Union Communiste, which stood half way between the communist left and Trotskyism. And after 1943 they returned... to the Internationalist Communist Party. No doubt they felt at home within an organisation whose ambiguities concerning the partisan formations in Italy were virtually identical to their own ambiguities towards the anti-fascist militias in Spain... [3] [49]­­­­­

THE DANGER FACING BATTAGLIA

As we have seen, the origins of Battaglia themselves lie in a mistaken analysis of the historic course. The precipitous formation of the ICP during WW2 resulted in an abandonment of the clarity attained by Bilan on many issues, particularly the problem of fraction, party and historic course. These errors have reached their most caricatured form in the ‘Bordigist’ current which split from the Battaglia current in 1952, but it is extremely difficult for the latter to overcome all the remaining ambiguities without calling its own origins into question.
In its recent article BC claims that the ICC’s errors in method, its deformations of reality, have led to splits and will result in more. But the truth is that the ICC’s prognoses have been proved consistently correct ever since 1968. We were the first to reaffirm the reappearance of the historic crisis in the late ‘60s. We have seen our predictions about the development of the class struggle confirmed by the various waves which have taken place since then. And, despite all the scoffings and incomprehensions in the political milieu, it is becoming more and more obvious that the ‘left in opposition’ is indeed the essential political strategy of the bourgeoisie in this period. This is not to deny that we have made mistakes or suffered splits. But with a framework of analysis that is basically sound, in a period full of possibilities for revolutionary work, mistakes can be corrected and splits can result in overall political strengthening of the organisation.
The danger facing Battaglia is of a different order. Since it is so historically bound up with a false analysis if the historic course, since it is tied to a number of obsolete political conceptions, it runs the risk that the apparent ‘homogeneity’ it displays today will give way to a series of explosions brought about by the insistent pressure of the class struggle, by the growing contradiction between its analyses and the reality of the class struggle.

Whether Battaglia like it or not, we are heading towards immense class conflagrations. Those currents who are not prepared for them are in danger of being swept aside by the heat of the blast.

MU

The year 1915 was a decisive year for the Dutch revolutionary movement. The SDP minority, made up of different fractions, became a structural opposition against the Wijnkoop-Van Ravesteyn leadership. This opposition developed numerically in proportion to the growth of the SDP, which proclaimed itself as the Communist Party in November, when the revolution was knocking at Holland's door.

a. The offensive of the minority in the SDP: between fraction and opposition

In the Spring of 1918, the SDP went through an unprecedented crisis. The minority directly threatened with being squashed by the authoritarian leadership around Wijnkoop. The latter - and this was a hitherto unknown in the SDP's history - suspended the Hague section, one of the most militant in its opposition to Wijnkoop. This suspension came after several individual expulsions of opposition militants. These measures, in contradiction to workers' democracy, showed that the leadership were worthy successors to Troelstra.

The opposition ssoon regrouped at a joint meeting held on 26 May 1918. It was composed of groups which up till now had reacted in a dispersed manner to opportunism in the SDP:

-- the Propaganda Union of the Zimmerwald Left in Amsterdam, led by Van Reesema, which wanted the party to be aligned with the Bolshevik Left;

-- Luteraan's group in Amsterdam, working closely with Gorter;

-- the Rotterdam group;

-- the Hague section.

The opposition represented one third of the militants of the party. After June it had a bi-monthly journal, De Internationale. An editorial commission was set up. The press commission, was which met every three months and was made up of representatives of four groups[1] formed a de facto executive organ. This opposition, with its journal and its commission, was very close to forming a fraction within the SDP. However, it lacked a clearly established platform because it was not sufficiently homogenous. It also suffered cruelly from the absence of Gorter, who was in Switzerland and only contributed to the debate through articles, the appearance of which
was subjected to the bad faith of the editorial board of De Tribune, which was entirely controlled by Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn[2].

The cause of this regroupement of the opposi­tion was the growing hostility to the policies of the party, which was more and more turned towards elections. The elections which had been held on 1 July had been a real success for the SDP: Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn became deputies. This had been made possible through an alliance with the small Socialist Party, which had come out of the SDAP in 1917. The latter, led by Kolthek, top man in the NAS[3], was openly pro-Entente. Along with the Social Christians (BvSC) another component of this electoral ‘united front', it won a seat in the Assembly.

The opposition, which denounced this alliance, as a ‘monstrous union' with pro-Entente syndica­lists, underlined that this electoral success was a demagogic one. The votes gleaned from among the syndicalist militants of the NAS had been done so through a campaign which appeared to support the USA. At a time when the USA was holding the Dutch commercial fleet in its ports in order to use them in the war against Germany, in exchange for food shipments to Holland, Wijnkoop stated that any means was justified to get these shipments from the US. Such policies were vigorously denounced by Gorter and the Bussum section, but much later, in November. Like Gorter, the opposition more and more saw Wijnkoop as a new Troelstra, as a man whose love for the Russian revolution was purely platonic[4] and whose politics were essentially parlia­mentarian.

The approach of the war's end, with the revolutionary events that accompanied it, put the opposition's fight against Wijnkoop's pro-Entente policies into second place. More and it began to emphasize the danger of parliamentary politics[5]. It also forcefully combated the revolutionary syndicalism of the NAS, which had begun to work with the reformist union, the NVV, which was dominated by Troelstra's party. Here in embryo were the anti-parliamen­tary and anti-trade union policies of the future Dutch communist left. These policies meant a break with the old ‘Tribunism'.

b. The abortive revolution of November 1918.

It was a party that was growing numerically, but threatened with falling apart, that went into the ordeal of the revolutionary events in November.

The events in Germany, where the government fell at the end of October, created a real revo­lutionary atmosphere in Holland. Authentic mutinies broke out in the military camps on 25 and 26 October 1918. They had come in the wake of a permanent workers' agitation against hun­ger, in September and October in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

It was symptomatic to see Troelstra's official social democracy radicalizing itself. To the great astonishment of the other leaders of the SDAP, the party boss started making inflammatory speeches about revolution, about the seizure of power by the working class. To the stupefaction of the Dutch bourgeoisie, he proclaimed himself their implacable adversary:

"Don't you feel little by little as events unfold that you are sitting on a volcano ... The epoch of the bourgeois governmental system is over. Now the working class, the new rising force, must ask you to give up your place and allow it to take it for itself. We are not your friends, we are your adversaries, we are, as it were (sic) your most determined enemies."

Troelstra, a last minute revolutionary? In fact he was speaking a double language. In the secrecy of a meeting with organs of the SDAP, held on 2 November - that is, three days before this fiery declaration at the chamber of deput­ies - Troelstra said quite crudely that his tac­tic was to head off the action of the revolu­tionaries, who had been encouraged by the revolution in Germany.

"In these circumstances contrasts within the working class are accentuating, and a growing part of it will place itself under the leader­ship of irresponsible elements."

Judging the revolution to be inevitable and in order to neutralize a possible Dutch ‘Sparta­kism', Troelstra proposed adopting the same tac­tic as German social democracy in the workers' councils: taking over the leadership of them in order to destroy them:

"We aren't calling for the revolution now, but the revolution is calling for us ... What has happened in countries which have been through a revolution makes one say: we must take over its leadership as soon as it arrives."

The tactic adopted was to call on 10 November for the formation of workers' and soldiers' coun­cils, if the German example was to be repeated in Holland. "Wijnkoop must not be the first", said Ondegeest, one of the leaders of the SDAP.

But in fact the SDP was to call for the for­mation of soldiers' councils and a strike, on 10 November. It declared in favor of the arm­ing of the workers and the formation of a peoples' government on the basis of the councils. It also demanded the ‘immediate demobilization' of the conscripts, an ambiguous slogan because its consequence was the disarming of the soldiers.

It's this slogan that the SDAP took up, with this very intention. To this it added the prog­ram of German social democracy, in order to defuse more revolutionary demands: ‘socialization' of industry, full unemployment insurance and an 8-hour day.

But events showed that the situation in Holland was still far from revolutionary. On 13 November there was indeed the beginning of fraternization between workers and soldiers in Amsterdam; but the next day, the demonstration came up against the hussars, who fired on the crowd, leaving several dead. The SDP's call for a strike the next day in protest against the repression had little echo among the workers of Amsterdam. The revolution had been crushed be­fore it could really get going. The call for the formation of councils had only a limited success; only a few groups of soldiers, in places isolated from the capital - at Alkmaar and in Frisia - formed themselves into councils. This was of short duration. 

While the movement was not ripe for revolution, it must be said that the activities of the SDAP were decisive in stopping any strike movement in November. More than twenty years later, Vliegen, speaking as leader of the SDAP, stated without equivocation:

"The revolutionaries weren't wrong in accusing the SDAP of strangling the strike movement in 1918, because social democracy did consciously hold it in check."

But apart from the SDAP's strategy for prev­enting the revolution, the policies carried out by the syndicalists of the NAS and the RSC - to which the SDP adhered - also tended to provoke disarray in the workers' ranks. During the Nov­ember events, the NAS approached the SDAP and the NVV with the aim of establishing a joint action program. This tactic of the ‘united front' before the term was coined, strongly criticized in the assemblies of the RSC, gave the impression that the RSC, to which the NAS also belonged, and the SDAP were situated on the same terrain. The latter's policy of sabotaging the strike movement wasn't exposed. At the same time, the SDP leadership made no real critique of revolutionary syndicalism; at its Leiden Congress, on 16 and 17 September, it considered that the NAS had "acted correctly" during the revolutionary week of 11-16 September.

c. The foundation of the Communist Party of Holland (CPN).

The transformation of the SDP into a Communist Party made it the second party in the world, after the Russian party, to have abandoned the ‘social democrat' label. It was even formed bef­ore the German Communist Party.

A small party, the CPN was in full growth: at its founding congress it had 1,000 members, and this figure doubled in the space of a year. This transformation didn't put an end to the authoritarian, maneuvering politics of Wijnkoop. Three weeks before the Congress, he and Gorter announced in De Tribune that they had proclaimed themselves respectively president and secretary of the party. By anticipating the results of the congress, these two gave a curious example of democracy[6].

However, the new party remained the only revolutionary pole in Holland. This fact explai­ned that the results of the founding congress were the disintegration of the opposition. De Internationale, the organ of the opposition, ceased to appear in January 1919. The resigna­tion of 26 members of the Hague section in December 1918, refusing to become members of the CPN, appeared as an irresponsible action. Their formation of a group of ‘International Commun­ists', with the aim of linking up with the Spart­acists and Bolsheviks on the basis of anti­parliamentarism and solidarity with the Russian revolution, came to nothing[7]. Most of its members soon rejoined the party. The Zimmerwald left group, within the party, soon dissolved it­self. All that was left was the ‘Gorterian' opposition in Amsterdam around Barend Luteraan. It was this group which maintained continuity with the old opposition by bringing out its own organ in the summer of 1919: De Roode Vaan (Red Flag).

Contrary to the legend which made him a foun­der of the Communist Party, Gorter was absent from the congress. He had increasingly detached himself from the Dutch movement in order to devote himself entirely to the international commu­nist movement. At the end of December he was in Berlin, where he held a discussion with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. From there he returned to Holland. Despite Luteraan's press­ing request, he refused to put himself at the head of the opposition in the CPN. Leading an opposition was to him "an idea as good as it was impossible" owing to his poor state of health.

This didn't mean he was rejecting any politi­cal activity. A few months later he retired from all activity within the CPN in order to devote himself entirely to the communist move­ment in Germany. He became in fact a militant and the theoretician of the opposition that was to form the KAPD in April 1920. His activity was devoted totally to the Communist Interna­tional, as part of the opposition.

Pannekoek, unlike Gorter, didn't become a member of the KAPD; he remained in the opposition within the CPN until resigning in 1921. His con­tributions were more theoretical than organizational. His main aim was to carry out his theor­etical activities within the world communist movement, but principally in Germany.

Thus, the theoretical leaders of ‘Tribunism' were to detach themselves from the CPN. They constituted the Dutch school of marxism, whose future was henceforth tied theoretically and organically to the KAPD in Germany. From then on, the Communist left in Holland was linked, until the beginning of the thirties, to the German communist left. The latter, strongly dependent on the Dutch school of marxism, cons­tituted the centre of international left communism, both on the organizational level and on the practical terrain of the revolution. As for the CPN, outside of the opposition which ended up leaving it, its history became that of a more and more ‘orthodox' section of the Communist International.

********************

The Third International (1919 - 1920), I

In January 1919 an invitation to the congress of the ‘new revolutionary International' was sent to the different communist parties, which had only just been formed, and to the revolutionary fractions or oppositions within the old parties. Initially it wasn't going to be a congress but simply an ‘international socialist conference' to prepare the foundation of the IIIrd International; it was to be held before the first of February, in clandestinity, either in Berlin or Holland. The crushing of the January uprising in Berlin changed the original plan: the conference was to be held in Moscow, from 2-6 March 1919.

The Dutch Communist Party received the invitation. It had already decided at the congress of November 1918 to send a delegate when the congress of the IIIrd International was convened. However, the attitude of the exactly the same as it had shown towards the three Zimmerwald conferences. Although he had received all the necessary means to make the trip to Moscow, Wijnkoop didn't ‘manage' to get there. In fact he had refused to go. To explain this refusal, still camouflaged behind a sectarian phrase, he published the articles of the bourgeois journalist Ransom who claimed that the Congress of the IIIrd International had been "nothing but a Slavic operation".

In the end, the CPN was represented indirectly, and only with a consultative voice, at the first congress of the new International. Its representative, Rutgers, had not come directly from Holland: he'd left the country for the USA in 1914, where he became a member of the American League for Socialist Propaganda[8]. Arriving in Moscow via Japan, he really only represented this American group, without a mandate. It was through him that the Dutch Left was known in the USA. One of the leaders of American left communism, Fraina, was his friend and was very influenced by Gorter and Pannekoek[9].

In April 1919 the CPN did join the IIIrd International. Rutgers was associated to the work of the Executive Committee.

The Left currents in the International in 1919

The left in the IIIrd International developed during the course of 1919 under the influence of the German revolution. The latter, represented, for all the left currents, the future of the proletarian movement in industrialized Western Europe. Despite the defeat of January 1919 in Berlin, where the proletariat had been crushed by Noske and Scheideman's social democracy, the world revolution had never seemed so close. The republic of councils had been installed in Hungary and Bavaria. The situation remained revolutionary in Austria. Huge mass strikes were shaking Britain and were beginning in Italy. The American continent[10] itself had been hit by the revolutionary wave, from Seattle to Buenos Aires. The proletariat in the most industrialized countries was on the march. The question of the tactic to adopt in the central countries of capitalism, where the revolution would be more purely proletarian than in Russia, had to be examined in the light of the seizure of power - which revolutionaries thought would happen in the very near future.

The revolutionary wave that is the actual experience of the workers confronting the state, brought about a change of tactic as capitalism's era of peaceful growth came to an end. All the revolutionary currents accepted the validity of the theses of the first congress of the IIIrd International:

"1. The present period is one of the decomposi­tion and collapse of the whole world capitalist system, and will be that of the collapse of European civilization in general if capitalism, with its insurmountable contradictions, is not overthrown.

2. The task of the proletariat now consists of seizing state power. The seizure of state power means the destruction of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organization of a new apparatus of proletarian power."[11]

In the new period, it was the praxis of the workers themselves which was putting into ques­tion the old parliamentary and union tactics. The Russian proletariat had dissolved parliament after taking power, and in Germany a significant number of workers had pronounced in December 1918 in favor of boycotting the elections. In Russia as in Germany, the council form had appeared as the only form of revolutionary struggle, in place of the union structure. But the class struggle in Germany had revealed the antagonism between the proletariat and the trade unions. When the unions participated in the bloody repression of January 1919 and when there appeared organs of political struggle - the Unions (AAU) - the slogan was not the reconquest of the old unions but their destruction [12].

By accepting the program of the German Communist Party as well as that of the Bolshevik as a fundamental basis of the CI, the International was de facto accepting the anti-parliamentary and anti-union left currents. Had the Spartakusbond congress not rejected partici­pation in elections? Even if Rosa didn't agree with the majority on this point, she defended an anti-union line:

" ... the unions are no longer workers' organizations, but the most solid protectors of the bour­geois state and bourgeois society. Consequently it goes without saying that the struggle for socialization can't be taken forward without the struggle for the liquidation of the unions. We are all agreed on this."[13]

At the beginning, the Communist International accepted into its ranks revolutionary syndicalist elements like the IWW, who rejected both parlia­mentarism and activity in the old unions. But these elements rejected political activity in principle, and thus the necessity for a political party of the proletariat. This wasn't the case with the elements of the communist left, who were actually very often hostile to the revolutionary syndicalist current, which they didn't want to see accepted into the International because the latter was a political not a trade union organ[14].

It was during the course of 1919 that a left communist current really appeared, on a political and not a trade union basis, in the developed countries. The electoral question was in certain countries the key issue for the left. In March1918, the Polish Communist Party - which had come out of the SDKiL of Luxemburg and Jogisches - boycotted the elections. In Italy, on 22 December 1918 Il Soviet was published in Naples, under the direction of Amadeo Bordiga. Unlike Gramsci and his syndicalist current, which defended participation in elections, Bordiga's current was for communist abstentionism with a view to eliminating the reformists from the Italian Socialist Party and to constituting a "purely communist party". The Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the PSI was formally constituted in October 1919. In Britain, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation took a stand against ‘revolutionary' parliamentarism in order to avoid any "waste of energy"[15]. In Belgium the De Internationale group in Flanders and War van Overstraeten's group were against electoralism[16]. It was the same in the more ‘peripheral' countries. At the congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party, in May 1919, a strong minority was in favor of condemning parliamentary action on principle.[17]  

The Dutch communists, on the other hand, despite a tenacious legend, were far from being so ­radical on the parliamentary question. While the majority around Wijnkoop was electoralist, the minority was hesitant. Gorter himself was for revolutionary activity in parliament[18]. Pannekoek on the other hand defended an anti- parliamentary position. Like all the left communists he underlined the change in historical period and the necessity to break with the democratic principle so firmly anchored in the working masses of Western Europe. For the development of class consciousness, it was necessary to break with ‘parliamentary democracy'.

In 1919 the CI didn't consider that the refusal to participate in bourgeois parliaments was a reason to exclude the left. Lenin, in a reply to Sylvia Pankhurst[19] was of the opinion that:  

"The question of parliamentarism is today a particular, secondary point ... being indissolubly linked to the working masses, knowing how to make constant propaganda within them, participating in each strike, echoing each demand by the masses, this is essential for a communist party ... The revolutionary workers whose attacks are aimed at parliament are quite right to the extent that they express the negation of the principle of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy."[20]

On this question, however, the circular from the Executive Committee of the CI, 1 September 1919, marked a turning point. While parliamentary activities and electoral campaigns were still defined as 'auxiliary means', the conquest of parliament appeared to be a way of conquering the state. The CI returned to the social democratic conception of parliament as the centre of the revolutionary struggle: "(militants) ... go to parliament to seize hold of this machine (our emphasis) and to help the masses, behind the walls of parliament, to overturn it".

An even more serious difference between the CI and the left was the union question. In a period when workers' councils had not yet app­eared, was it necessary to militate in the unions, now counter-revolutionary organs, or on contrary to destroy them by creating real organs of revolutionary struggle? Here the left was divided. Bordiga's Fraction leaned towards creating ‘real' red trade unions. Fraina's Communist Party of America was in favor of working with the revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW, rejecting any ‘entryism' into the reformist unions. The minority of the CPN, with Gorter and Pannekoek, were increasingly hostile to any activity in the NAS, considering that a break with the anarcho-syndicalist current was inevitable.

The exclusion of the German Left from the KPD on the grounds of anti-parliamentarism and anti-unionism was to crystallize the international left opposition. The Dutch minority in fact found itself at the theoretical forefront of German and international ‘Linkskommunismus'.

---

[1] De Internationale no. 1, 15 June 1918 ‘One Organ' p. 1. The lines for this regroupment were: political adherence to the Zimmerwald Left; the fight against the Dutch imperialist state; the sharpest struggle against all the reformist and imperialist tendencies among trade union members organized in the NAS and the NVV (the SDAP union).

[2] Since August 1917, Wijnkoop and van Ravesteyn had been the sole editors of the daily.

[3] Kolthek, who was elected as a deputy, collaborated in a bourgeois paper De Telegraf, which had a vigorously pro-Entente orientation. With his party, the SP, and the BvSC, the SDP won more than 50,000 votes, including 14,000 for Wijnkoop in Amsterdam - half the vote obtained by the SDAP. The three elected deputies formed a ‘revolutionary parliamentary faction' in the chamber.

[4] Gorter wrote an article assimilating Wijnkoop with Troelstra, ‘Troelstra-Wijnkoop', published in De Tribune 18 Sept, 1918. Another article, published in De Tribune on 26 October 1918,  affirmed that:

"The directing committee's love for the Russian revolution is purely platonic. In reality all the force of its love is directed towards the extension of the party's growth and popularity with the aid of the Parliament."

[5] The opposition didn't yet reject parliamentarism; it hope for a serious discussion in the worker's movement to determine the future tactic: "... important problems in this phase of the movement have yet to be clarified ... On the question of parliamentarism, the editors support the view that everyone should give their opinion in De Internationale. This question however is not yet exhausted ... The same goes for participation or non-participation in elections." (De Internationale no. 9, 12 Oct 1918 ‘Landelijke conferentie van De Internationale')

[6] De Tribune 26 Oct 1918. The anticipated nomination was announced as follows:

"Attention! Seeing that Wijnkoop is the only candidate for the post of party president, he is therefore declared elected to this post. Seeing that the only candidate for party secretary is Ceton, he is consequently declared elected. The candidates for the post of vice-president are A. Lisser and B. Luteraan."

[7] De Internationale no. 14, January 1919 ‘Colltif uittreden'. This was the last issue. The ‘International Communists' disappeared as rapidly as they had appeared.

[8] The American League for Socialist Propaganda was born inside the Socialist Party in Massachusetts, against the electoralist orientation of the party leadership. It published the Internationalist which fought the orientation towards pacifism in the majority of the party in 1917. In 1919 it assumed the title of ‘Left Wing of the Socialist Party' and published in Boston, under Fraina's direction, the weekly Revolutionary Age. In its 1919 theses it was for leaving the IInd International and joining the IIIrd, and for eliminating the reformist demands in the SP platform.

[9] Louis Fraina (1894-1953): born in Southern Italy, at the age of two he immigrated to the USA with his parents. At 15 he became a member of the De Leonist SLP, which he left in 1914. He became a member of the Socialist Party and, with John Reed, active in its left wing, which decided on a split at a conference of June 1919. From this split came Reed's Communist Labor Party and Fraina's Communist Party of America - the most advanced theoretically - in September 1919. After the Amsterdam conference of February 1920, Fraina took part in the Second Congress of the CI, after being cleared of suspicions about being an ‘agent provocateur'. After that he took charge, along with Katayana and certain Jesus Ramirez, of the Panamerican Bureau of the Comintern in Mexico, in 1920-21, under the pseudonym Luis Corey. In 1922, he became known as a journalist under this pseudonym. After that he became a university professor of economics, and was known essentially for his work in this field.

[10] The IWW headed the Seattle strike which generalized to Vancouver and Winnipeg in Canada. In the same year, 1919, very hard strikes broke out among the metal workers of Pennsylvania. These strikes were opposed by the unions and brutally repressed by the bosses' police and the federal government. In Argentina, the ‘Bloody Week' in Buenos Aires ended in dozens of dead among the workers. At the extreme south of the continent, the striking agricultural workers of Patagonia were savagely repressed.

[11] ‘Letter of Invitation to the Congress'.

[12] The first Union (AAU) which was not anarcho-sysndicalist as in the Ruhr emerged in the autumn of 1919 in Bremen. It's organ Kampfruf (‘Flugzeitung fur die revolutionare Betrieborganisation') clearly affirmed that it didn't want to "become a new trade union". Declaring itself in favor of "conquering political power", the Bremen AAU denounced the syndicalists as "adversaries of the political dictatorship of the proletariat". (Kampfruf, no. 1, 15 October 1919, ‘Was ist die AAU?')

[13] Cited by Prudhommeaux, Spartacus et la Commune de Berlin 1918-1919.

[14] Bordiga was the firmest partisan of this separation between the political International and the International of economic organizations. Up till 1920, the Communist International accepted both communist organizations and national and regional trade or industrial unions. This lasted until the formation of the Red Trade Union International (Profintern). The KAPD wanted to set up, alongside the Communist International, an International workplace organizations on a political basis: anti-parliamentarism, destruction of the counter-revolutionary unions, workers' councils, destruction of the capitalist state.

[15] S. Pankhurst Communist Thought and Action in the IIIrd International, published in Bordiga's Il Soviet, 20 Sept 1919.

[16] War van Overstraeten (1891-1981), painter, at first anarchist, he became during the war editor-in-chief of the Zimmerwald paper of the Jeunes Gardes Socialistes: Le Socialisme. He was at the origin of the Communist Group in Brussels, founded in 1919, and which on 1 March 1920 began publishing L'Ouverier Communiste (De Kommunistische Arbeider in Flemish). At the Second Congress of the CI he defended Bordiga's anti-parliamentary theses. He was one of the main artisans in the foundation of the Belgian CP in November 1920, which was joined by the Flemish Federation in December (De Internationale). At the Third Congress of the CI, he was very close to KAPD. Under the CI's pressure, he had to admit into the Party, the centrist group, Jacquemotte and Massart's ‘Les Amis de l'Exploite', at the unification congress of September 1021. Unlike Bodiga, he continued to defend anti-parliamentary positions. Hostile to the idea of the mass party and ‘Bolshevization', in 1927 he was part of the unified opposition group. In 1929 he was excluded with the opposition and became close to Hennaut's Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes, formed in 1931 after separating from the Trotskyist wing. In Spain from 1931-35, he was in contact with the groups of the communist left. After that withdrawal from all political activity.

[17] A strong opposition was formed in Bulgarian CP around Ivan Gantochev, a journalist and a translator of Goethe. It was he who translated a certain number of Gorter's works into Bulgarian. In Hungary, anti-parliamentary positions were known about thanks to a group of Hungarian Communists exiled in Vienna, after the end of the ‘Hungarian Commune'. Within this group Lukacs was an anti-parliamentarian, while Bela Kun put forward a curious tactic: participation in elections in order to denounce them; no deputies to be sent to parliament. In Sweden, C J Bjorklund's Federation of Social-Democratic Youth (Social-demokratiska Ungdomsforbundet), which had adhered to the CI in May 1919, was resolutely anti-parliamentarian; in contact with KAPD in 1920, it denounced the opportunism of Hoglund in parliament - after Lenin had presented the latter as the Swedish Liebknecht. Anti-parliamentariam reached as far as Latin America: within the Partido Socialista Internacional in Argentina - which was to become the Communist Party of Argentina in December 1920 - a strong minority had emerged in 1919, referring to Bordiga and calling for a boycott of elections.

[18] On 1 May 1920, a few weeks before writing his Reply to Lenin, Gorter wrote to Lenin saying:

"I am not adversary of parliamentarism. I am writing this only to show you - you and the central committee - how dangerous it is to talk too much in favor of the opportunist communist." 

[19] Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) had militated in the suffragette movement founded by her mother Emma. In 1914, she had founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes which published The Women's Dreadnought. Under the effect of the war, her movement broke with feminism. In 1917 it was transformed into the Worker's Socialist Federation, whose organ The Workers' Dreadnought. Pankhurst declared for the Bolsheviks. In 1919, she was present at the Bologna congress of the PSI. she became a paid correspondent of The Communist International, organ of the CI. On returning from Italy, she participated at the Frankfurt Conference, then at the Amsterdam Conference. Rejecting any parliamentary tactic and any entryism into the Labor Party, she contributed in June 1920 to the foundation of the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). The same year, along with the shop steward Gallacher, she defended anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union positions at the Second Congress of the CI. Her party was obliged, in Leeds in Jan 1921, to fuse with the Communist Party of Great Britain which defended the orthodoxy of the CI. Workers' Dreadnought remained the independent organ of her tendency in the ‘unified' CP. Thrown in prison by the British government, she was freed in Sept 1921 only to be expelled from the CP along with her followers. In February 1922 she and the excluded comrades founded the Communist Workers' Party, the section of Gorter's KAI, which lasted until June 1924. After this Sylvia Pankhurst ceased to be a left communist and a proletarian militant. She returned to her feminist first love and developed a passion for Esperanto. In 1928, she even became the apostle of an ‘anti-fascist' crusade. In 1932 she formed a Women's International Matteoti Committee, an anti-fascist feminist movement. She supported the Negus during the 1935 war between Italy and Ethiopia. She went off to Ethiopia and ended up a Catholic. A friend of the Negus, she died in Addis-Ababa in 1960, where she is buried.  

[20] Pankhurst's letter and the reply by Lenin (August 1919) can be found in Die Kommunistische Internationale no. 4-5, pps 91-98 ‘Der Sozialismus in England'.

Recession, inflation, debt, growing poverty for the working class: in the Eastern bloc, as in the West, the crisis is getting worse. The old Stalinist and Trotskyist refrain about the "socialism" of some or all of the Eastern bloc countries is collapsing in the face of reality. Given the relative under-development of its economy, not only is the crisis particularly harsh in the Eastern bloc, the development of the class struggle clearly reveals the bourgeois and anti-working class nature of its regimes. Their social and economic crisis demonstrates that they are an integral part of world capitalism.

In the previous issue of the ICC's International Review (no.49), our regular column on the economic crisis dealt with Russia; in this issue, we continue our survey of the Eastern bloc, to deal with the other members of COMECON[1].

The economic weakness of the Eastern Bloc

After Russia, the six East European countries (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania) are economically the most powerful countries in the bloc. This gives an idea of its profound weakness in relation to its Western rival: the six East European countries' combined GNP ($507 billion. in 1984) is hardly greater than that of France ($496 billion), and considerably less than West Germany's $616 billion.

	GNP ($ billions)	GNP/inhabitant ($)
East Germany	145	8680
Poland	160	4370
Czechoslovakia	100	6485
Hungary	20	1902
Bulgaria	43	4790
Romania	39	1750
USSR	500	5500

COMECON's total GNP (including Vietnam and Cuba) amounts to $2020 billion, which is slim indeed compared with the rival economic alliance regrouped in the OECD, which totals $8193.4 billion -- 4 times greater. In 1984, the GNP of the EEC alone amounted to $2364 billion, well above that of all COMECON put together.

Moreover, these figures should not be taken literally, since, as certain studies have shown[2], they are, for propaganda purposes and due to different accounting methods, over-estimated by 25% - 30%, with the exception of Hungary, which belongs to the IMF and voluntarily understates its estimations by 50%, in order to gain access to the credits reserved for poor countries!

The Eastern bloc is thus certainly not ready to confront its Western rival on the economic level. For the USSR, the only way to maintain the independence and unity of its own imperialist bloc is by a draconian subjection of its entire economic potential to the demands of its war economy. Arms production, necessary to the strengthening of its military potential, is the only level at which it can compete with, and confront, the power of the opposing bloc. Ever since the end of World War II, the advance of the Russian army and the Yalta agreements have sealed the submission of the East European nations to the demands of Russian imperialism, and this is the reality that fundamentally determines their economic situation.

The East European countries have paid dearly their integration into the Russian bloc, in terms of their own development. Their real situation is very different from what the over­blown statistics churned out for decades by Stalinist economists would have us believe.

The dismantling, immediately after the war, of the most competitive factories in order to export their machinery to Russia, the 180 degree reorientation eastwards of all the traditional lines of communication and commercial circuits, forced "collectivization", systematic pillage, and the imposition of an international division of production within the bloc following the demands of Russia's war economy, all weigh heavily on East European countries' real growth rates. Czechoslovakia is a good case in point: in 1963, while agricultural production was still below that of 1938, its industrial decline was even clearer, in a country renowned before World War II for the quality of its products. In 1980, a Czech institute carried out a survey of 196 supposedly "top-quality" products destined for export; 113 were unsaleable in the West, being below required quality standards. The Russian leaders themselves have protested officially at the poor quality of imported Czech goods.

Eastern Europe's industry is growing on the basis of the declining quality of its products, and increasing technological backwardness, which means that most of its commodities are considered outdated by international commercial standards, and thus cannot be sold on the world market outside COMECON. Eastern Europe's technological backwardness appears, not only in the obsolescence of the productive apparatus (outdated machine tools, high manning levels to compensate for inadequate automation), and what it produces, but also in the waste of the energy required by this production:

	Energy consumption (*)	Energy consumption per unit of GNP
East Germany	86	0.61
Poland	114	0.71
Czechoslovakia	69	0.69
Hungary	28	1.35
Bulgaria	37	0.90
Romania	70	1.57
(*) in millions of tons of oil-equivalent

If we examine the energy necessary to produce one unit of GNP, the most efficient country of Eastern Europe is hardly at the level of Portugal (0.60), behind Greece (0.54), and far behind West Germany (0.38) or France (0.36). And here again, we should examine these figures in the light of what we have said above concerning the estimation of GNP, in other words increase them by 25% - 30%. This expresses perfectly the intolerable industrial backwardness accumulated by the Eastern countries in relation to their West European rivals during decades of post-war "growth". Since World War II, the Eastern bloc countries have developed in a situation of permanent crisis.

The convulsions of capital in crisis, and the reactions of the working class

Since the end of the 1960's, the crisis in the Eastern bloc has taken on less "dynamic" and spectacular forms than in the West, which is the epicenter of the crisis of generalized over­production. During the 70's, the crisis on Eastern Europe has been marked by an overall slowdown in growth, and for the weaker countries (Poland, Romania), by a growth in debt aimed at modernizing an economy still characterized by a large and backward agricultural sector. The crisis' acceleration in the 1980's had serious consequences for all the Eastern bloc countries: declining East-West trade, sources of credit drying up, falling prices for raw materials, the collapse of the "Third World" market, aggravated competition on the world market and the intensification of the arms race, all threaten to strangle COMECON's economy.

The bourgeoisie's attacks on the working class already precarious living conditions are increasing daily. Discontent is growing, and the echo of the workers' struggles is beginning to pierce the wall of silence imposed by the Stalinist bourgeoisie.

Romania

After being forced to interrupt its payments in 1981, Romania has accelerated the repayment of its foreign debt, which has fallen from $9.9 billion in 1981, to $6.5 billion in 1985. This result has been achieved at the cost of brutal rationing and a violent increase in exploitation imposed on the whole population.

In two years (1984-85), household electricity consumption has been halved, heating in homes and offices is limited to 12 degrees centigrade; light bulbs of more than 15 watts are banned, TV programs have been reduced to 2 hours per day. The list of bureaucratic measures imposed by police terror is endless: private cars forbidden in Bucharest to save petrol, drastic rationing of food to save imports and increase exports; faced with a housing crisis in late 1986, Ceausescu "requested" the old-age pensioners of Bucharest to move to the country; confronted with popular resistance, he announced during the summer that "certain categories" of pensioners would be refused medical treatment if they did not.

Although carefully hidden by the bourgeoisie, the death-rate is increasing and famine spreading. In December 1985, starving peasants in Banat tried to seize the grain silos, revealing the deep-seated discontent of the population. The workers are subjected to a violent exploitation: abolition of the guaranteed wage in September 1983, obligation decreed in June 1985 for those who do not "give" a day's labor to the state, to pay the equivalent in cash. Industrial "accidents" have increased in the mines, while the huge Volga canal project has cost hundreds of workers' lives.

Working class discontent has broken out in the months-long strikes in the coal mines and the petrochemical industry during 1983-84. After a bloody repression, the militarization of labor was decreed for these sectors; a measure which has since been extended, in October 1985, to power station workers. Scattered strikes broke out in November 1986 in several Transylvanian towns against the new wage system. In early 1987, leaflets were circulating in Bucharest calling for a general strike to overthrow Ceausescu.

Poland

The Polish economy is plunging into the abyss. The national income fell by 30% between 1978 and 1982; it is still officially 10% below the 1979 level. The positive growth rates announced since 1983 should be treated with caution: in 1983, for example, the growth rate was officially announced at 5.9%, but estimated by the OECD at only 0.7%. The Polish economy is in the midst of recession.

The 25% fall in the price of coal in 1986 (Poland is the world's third largest exporter) and the irradiation of the harvest by the Chernobyl disaster have seriously affected exports to the West, which had already fallen by 3.8% in 1985. Despite successive devaluations of the zloty (the national currency was devalued by more than 30% during 1984-85) to increase export competitivity, and a drastic decline in imports, the resulting trade surplus was not even enough to pay off the interest on the national debt, which itself is growing in leaps and bounds: from $29.5 billion in 1985 to $33.4 billion in 1986, and well on the way to $35 billion in 1987.

Inflation is raging, and price increases come in quick succession: in March 1986, staple food prices rose by 8%, public transport by 66%; on 7th April 1986 gas and electricity rose by 30%; in August, meat prices increased 8%. Between 1982 and 1986, the price of bread has risen from 3 to 28 zlotys.

In the same way, wages have come under attack with the "new company autonomy" reform. Weekend work, abolished by the 1980 Gdansk agreements, has been reintroduced for "vital" sectors like the mining industry.

Faced with growing discontent, the Jaruzelski government has adopted Gorbachev's orientations: successive amnesties have followed repression, the bourgeoisie is trying to present a more "liberal" image, Solidarnosc is tolerated; but all this is only to make the attacks on the working class "acceptable".

Bulgaria

Bulgaria is also hit by recession. Whereas the official estimates of growth in GNP were 4% in 1982 and 3% in 1983, the OECD places them at -0.7% and +0.2% respectively. In 1985, farm output fell 10% and electricity 7%, instead the forecast 4.1% rise. The growth rate has been officially revised downwards: 1.8%, the lowest level since the war. Prices are rising faster: in September 1985, household electricity costs rose by 41%, petrol by 35%....

To save electricity, power cuts are common, and rationing has been imposed: for collectively heated households, electricity consumption has been limited to 350 kw hours per month, to 1100 kw hours for the others; shops shut two hours earlier, lighting is limited to 60 watts in the sitting room and 45 watts in other rooms. In cases of disobedience, electricity is cut off.

To divert the rising discontent onto the question of national minorities, the bourgeoisie has savagely repressed the Turkish minority to make it a scapegoat, and strengthen nationalism. The black-out has been broken by the yet to be confirmed echo of strikes during the winter of 1986-87.

Hungary

Hungary, Eastern Europe's "liberal" showpiece, is also sinking faster and faster into the crisis. The official growth rate of 0.3% in 1983 rose to 2.8% in 1984, only to fall back to -0,6% in 1985; it will probably remain below 1% in 1986.

In 1986, exports to the West stagnated, and the outlook for 1987 is poor. Hungary is essentially an exporter of farm produce; this year's harvest has been rendered unsaleable in the West by the fallout from Chernobyl, while Spain's entry into the Common Market has diminished its main western market.

The official rate of inflation is 7%, Price rises come pell-mell; in 1985, public transport rose by 100%, postal tariffs by 85%, and the tendency accelerated in 1986, constantly eating away at workers' and pensioners' living standards.

The attack on working class living conditions is getting worse: in December the council of ministers decreed a freeze on basic wages, new criteria of quality and productivity control were imposed which had the effect of reducing workers' wages. Workers can maintain their living conditions only by taking two jobs and doubling their working hours.

The relatively well-to-do    model is an exception in Eastern Europe that has now reached its limits, a chimera base on a level of debt per inhabitant higher even than Poland. The attack on the working class can only continue to intensify, which will aggravate the population's growing discontent. The miners' strikes in the Tababanya region reveal the tendency of the working class in Hungary to take up once again the road of class struggle.

Czechoslovakia and East Germany

Czechoslovakia and East Germany, the two most developed East European countries, and those which have stood up best to the crisis' devastating effects. However, the signs of the crisis shaking them are increasingly clear: growth is stagnating and a recession is on the way. For the Deutsche Democratische Republik, official figures put growth, at 2.5% in 1982 and 4.4% in 1983: according to the OECD, these should be 0.02% and 0.8% respectively. The official rate of 4.8% for 1985 is equally largely over-estimated. Similarly, the official figures for Czechoslovakia of 0% in 1982 and 1.5% in 1983 (the latter revised downwards to 0.1% by the OECD) show that this country, weaker than the DDR, has already entered the recession.

Although up to now, both countries have relatively successfully defended their exports on the world market, their future is hardly a bright one, given the perspective of a decline in the West European market, itself hit by the crisis, and which remains the main destination for their exports to the West. Czechoslovakia, whose manufactured products are increasingly outdated and difficult to export, has only managed to maintain its balance of trade by selling more and more semi-finished products, of lesser added value.

The DDR's increasing debt ($13 billion in 1985) towards the West, and Czechoslovakia's towards Russia (15 billion crowns) weighs heavily on both countries, and to balance their accounts they can only increase their attacks on working class living conditions.

Living standards in the DDR and Czechoslovakia are the highest in Eastern Europe; in 1984, their GNP's per inhabitant were respectively $8680 and $6485, comparable to those of Austria ($8685) or Italy ($6190). This "privileged" situation, in terms of material well-being, within Eastern Europe, coupled with a tight police and military control, has up to now made it possible to maintain a certain social calm.

However, this situation is only relative:

-- a true comparison with Western living standards would reduce the figures for GNP by 25% -30%. Moreover, GNP measures production, but not consumption, nor does it take account of the high cost and poor quality of consumer goods, nor of the wretchedness of existence in a police state, that does not appear in any index. Every day 150 East Germans cross clandestinely to the West, which means that every year 50,000 East Germans flee the "highest" living standards in Eastern Europe;

-- the perspective is one of economic decline, not only for Czechoslovakia, but also for East Germany which has proved more resistant up to now. The attacks on the working class will increase. The last party congress in the DDR announced 1 million redundancies. Given the chronic shortage of manpower, and obligatory re-employment, this will not create unemployment but it will make it possible to force workers to accept lower-paid jobs. Here again, double-working, the accumulation of jobs, is the only way for workers to maintain their living standards. Discontent is growing, and even if for the moment it remains mystified in the forms of democratic and religious "opposition" campaigns, it is a sign of class struggles to come.

Like the rest of world capitalism, Eastern Europe is plunging inexorably into the crisis. As in Western Europe, attacks on working class living conditions are increasing; living standards are falling to the level of the dark years of the war and immediate post-war period.

Everywhere, discontent is growing. In the East, the echo of the class struggle is getting louder. Although with difficulty, the East European proletariat is beginning to join the international recovery in the class struggle.

This is why the Russian bourgeoisie, with Gorbachev at its head, is trying to impose a fake liberalization - to break, the emerging thrust of the class struggle with democratic, religious, and nationalist mystifications. However, the still recent experience of the repression in Poland is there to remind workers that Gorbachev's version of Stalinist propaganda's "new course" is no less a lie than his predecessors. In Poland, the difficult process of learning from experience is under way, often this takes the form of defensive struggles on the class terrain against Solidarnosc's "political adventures" and its collaboration with Jaruzelski. Today, Walesa is openly contested and criticized. While the working class has suffered a defeat in Poland, its fighting potential remains strong and the repeated experiences of 1970-76-80 are a guarantee of the Polish proletariat's ability to develop its struggles in the future.

The perspective of the development of workers' struggles in Eastern Europe echoing those in the West, will more and more pose the question of proletarian internationalism and workers' solidarity against the world's division into two antagonistic military blocs, especially with the development of struggles in the most developed countries -- Czechoslovakia and above all the DDR -- in direct contact with the great industrial concentrations of Western Europe.

JJ. 9/05/81

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[1] These articles do not deal with the historic roots of Russian capitalism and its history, which determine the Russian bloc's present characteristics and specificities; we refer our readers to previous texts published by the ICC, in particular the pamphlet on the "Decadence of Capitalism", and the articles on "The Crisis in the Eastern Bloc" (International Review no. 23)

[2] "The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the World Economy", P. Marer.

IR-51, 4th qtr 1987

INTRODUCTION

The proletarian political milieu, with all its strengths and weaknesses, springs from the life of the working class. Its dynamic and its characteristics tend to express the proletariat’s developing awareness of its own nature as a revolutionary class, and of its ability to give reality to the communist perspective. However, the political milieu does not merely reflect the class. It has an active role to play in the process of the class’ coming to consciousness, and in its struggle. The political milieu’s own dynamic is thus also determined by its own self-awareness, and by the active part played within it by its clearest fractions.

This is why the question of the political milieu, its present state, the perspectives for its development, and the ICC’s role within this process, were included in the agenda of the ICC’s 7th Congress.

Concern with strengthening the organised proletarian milieu, and work for its regroupment are constant lynch-pins for revolutionaries’ activity and intervention. As the major pole of reference, and therefore of regroupment, within the international revolutionary milieu, the ICC bears a special responsibility in the process that leads to the formation of the proletarian party, without which the communist revolution is impossible. The ICC intends to live up fully to this responsibility; and this is the substance of the resolution on the political milieu that the ICC’s 7th Congress adopted, and which we are publishing below.

The present development of the proletarian political milieu, marked by the appearance of new groups, bears witness to the growing echo of revolutionary positions within the world working class. Products of the international recovery of the class struggle, these new political groups put into still sharper relief the responsibility of those older organisations which have survived the political decantation of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Today’s development in the proletarian milieu will only become a source of greater political and organisational strength if the older groups are capable of disengaging themselves from the dead-weight of sectarianism, and take the necessary steps towards the political clarification that is vital to any process of regroupment.

The collapse of the 3rd International, and the years of counter-revolution that followed, when revolutionaries were reduced to a tiny minority, still weigh heavily on today’s movement. Despite a real development since the proletariat’s historic recovery in the late 60’s, the political milieu remains very weak. This is an expression, not only of the weight of the organic separation from the communist fractions of the past, but also of today’s milieu’s own difficulty in resolutely setting about the critical reappropriation of the workers’ movement’s political gains. This inadequate reappropriation of political continuity appears on the organisational level in particular, in the milieu’s dispersal, scattered amongst a multitude of organisations, in its incomprehension of the need to work with determination and clarity towards the process of regrouping the revolutionary milieu. It is certainly no accident that it is the question of organisation – and so of regroupment -- that most clearly crystallises the political movement’s weakness, since this question concretises in activity all the other revolutionary positions. It poses the need to reappropriate the gains of the past, not only on the theoretical but on the practical level, and this is where the break in organisational continuity weighs most heavily. The movement’s dispersal, and accompanying sectarianism (the complete opposite to previous communist organisations’ ideas), are a terrible factor of confusion for new elements who emerge in search of a revolutionary coherence. Today’s political milieu is a veritable labyrinth, which for new groups makes the labour of reappropriating the political continuity vital to their survival all the more difficult.

The political milieu is a whole. Defending its identity against the forces of the counter-revolution, rejecting all non-proletarian practice within it, are essential aspects of the life of any revolutionary organisation. However, the milieu is not a homogeneous whole, far from it. Not all its constituent organisations express the same dynamic towards the clarification and organisational regroupment which absolutely must take place for the formation of tomorrow’s communist party to be possible.

To make revolutionary intervention effective, and work clearly towards clarification and regroupment, it is important to make a distinction between:

-- newly emerging groups, which despite the confusions inherent to their youth and their lack of historical continuity with past revolutionary organisations, express a positive will towards clarification and integration into the proletarian revolutionary movement, and which are signs of the developing echo for revolutionaries within the working class;

-- organisations which, because of their origins, constitute the historic and political poles of the proletarian milieu, and whose prime responsibility is to work determinedly to reinforce the new groups’ political maturity, and to engage clearly the vital process of regroupment; these are the ICC and the IBRP, in particular Battaglia Comunista;

-- organisations which express more sharply the weight of sectarianism, and whose existence is based on a sectarian isolation, or on premature splits which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the questions of organisation and revolutionary regroupment. By separating themselves artificially from the major poles of coherence of the political milieu, these groups can only crystallise a loss of political direction which, whether through academicism or activism, opens the door to the abandonment of class positions, and so hinders the process of clarification necessary to regroupment. A clear example of this political parasitism is the EFICC, which incoherently theorises its separation from the ICC, while still standing on the same platform.

Time and tide wait for no man, and the acceleration of the historical process imposes its own demands: the appearance of new groups, the developing echo of revolutionary ideas as the class struggle develops, pose in the medium term the need for new Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left, in order to struggle against the revolutionary milieu’s dispersal, and to accelerate the process of clarification and political decantation that are the precondition for any regroupment. Those organisations that are unable to participate positively in this absolutely necessary process are historically condemned; this is amply demonstrated by the itinerary of the Bordigist PCI (Communist Program), which obstinately refused any contact with the other organisations of the proletarian movement, refused to take any part in the Conferences of the Communist Left at the end of the 70’s, and which finally paid with its existence for its sectarian involution (which prevented it from undertaking its political redressment).

The ICC, far from having any immediatist illusions as to the possibility of a rapid regroupment, and fully aware of its responsibilities, is determined to pave the way for a new round of Conferences, in a framework of political rigour and clarity.

Although the preconditions for a new round of Conferences have yet to be met, it is extremely important that all the organisations making up the proletarian political milieu should be clearly aware of the absolute necessity of working towards making this perspective a reality. To do so, the revolutionary organisations, and above all the major historical poles of reference, must develop the links amongst themselves, against all sectarianism but with the political rigour and firmness necessary to all clarification, by publishing clear polemics which make it possible to highlight the points of agreement and disagreement, and by using all possible occasions, notably public meetings, to confront clearly their points of view.

The future of the class struggle depends on the proletarian milieu’s ability to assume this responsibility, to move towards the convening of new Conferences, and to pose the perspective of regroupment. The outcome of the future is being decided now.

JJ

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Resolution on the PPM

1) The evolution of the proletarian political milieu over the last two years has been especially marked by:

-- its emergence, under the impulse especially of the 3rd wave of struggles since the historic recovery of the late 60’s, from the crisis in which it had been plunged in the early 80’s;

-- the appearance, under the same impulse, of new groups, especially at capitalism’s periphery;

-- the degeneration of some existing groups: for example, the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste) towards anarchism, and the OCI (Organizzazione Comunista Internazionalista) towards Trotskyism.

2) This evolution highlights still further the growing responsibility of those organisations that have been capable of keeping to a consistent  marxist terrain, and which have a real international presence and experience.

In this sense, the development of the ICC’s effort towards the clarification, decantation, and eventually the regroupment of this milieu cannot but continue.

3) In this effort, the ICC’s method remains fundamentally the same as in the past: putting forward the priority of political rigour and clarity against all adventures bringing groups together through activist shortcuts, which can only open the door to superficiality and opportunism.

4) In the framework of this evolution and effort, a new round of Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left is a perspective to be prepared. Despite the inconsistencies of many of the replies, the echo encountered by the “Emancipation Obrera” group’s initiative (an echo to which the ICC contributed by making it known in seven languages and more than ten countries) expresses a greater concern within the movement to combat its present dispersed situation.

However, although the need for such Conferences is making itself more and more urgently felt, the conditions for calling them are not yet sufficiently ripe:

-- on the one hand, because many of the “old groups” still maintain an attitude of sectarian isolation (the enthusiasm for contacts with a group on the other side of the world should not hide the fact that this is often accompanied by a – sometimes theorised – refusal to so much as attend public meetings held in the same country by other revolutionary organisations);

-- on the other, because the “new” groups, precisely because of their youth, are not yet capable of successfully taking to its conclusion the political responsibility of this kind of work.

5) In the short term, the ICC’s intervention in the proletarian political milieu must follow two fundamental lines:

a) towards the new groups, the organisation must continue its work of discussion, pushing for decantation and political clarification; putting forward the need for the new groups to integrate themselves into the international milieu, and to attach themselves to the political continuity of the Communist Left, without however neglecting the tasks of defining themselves more clearly and intervening in the class;

b) as far as the “old” groups are concerned, apart from denouncing the degeneration of some and the parasitic [1] [56] nature of others, priority must be given to tightening our links with the movement’s other historic pole of reference: the current of the IBRP (continuing and improving our public and international debate, presence at their public meetings, proposals for common public meetings, direct contacts as often as possible).

The current world situation is at one and the same time presenting us with the war-like events in the Middle East, and with the workers' struggles in South Africa and South Korea. These two antagonistic aspects of the world situation - both based on the deepening crisis of capitalism - illustrate what we mean by the ‘acceleration of history'. They show that the ‘historic course', the balance of forces between the two perspectives of war and revolution, is the axis around which present and future historical events are unfolding. And though up till now the class struggle has managed to prevent humanity from embarking on an irreversible slide towards war, the acceleration of history underlines the vital necessity if it is to take its struggles forward, for the working class to develop its awareness of what's at stake in the world situa­tion, and of its historic mission to transform society.

'The war of the embassies' in Europe, the bloody events in Mecca, the 'Irangate' scandal in the USA, UN resolutions. Behind all this, the western imperialist bloc, under the supreme command of the USA, has prepared and concealed the greatest military buildup since the Second World War. These events are on such a grand scale that they have had to be prepared very carefully, above all at the level of what is known as ‘public opinion'. This has been done. At the centre of all these detailed preparations, the recent events reveal the true significance of the Irangate scandal and of all the campaigns around it: to justify a major shift in US policy towards Iran.

Just as the ‘Watergate' scandal in 1973-74, which led to the resignation of President Nixon, corresponded to a change in international policy ( US withdrawal from Vietnam, rapprochement with China ), Irangate also corresponds to a change in the orientation of international politics. What has come out of this scandal except the ‘proof' that negotiation with the Iranian ‘terrorists' is impossible, that only force, the language of arms, can make them listen to reason?

For those who still think that this military intervention in the Persian Gulf, which has involved 40 of America's most sophisticated war­ships including two aircraft carriers, not to mention the air-naval forces, one half of the French fleet including one aircraft carrier, the most up-to-date war-ships of the British navy and tens of thousands of men - for those who think that all this isn't so important and who, lulled by the bourgeoisie's refrain about the ‘desire for peace' are content to doze off after expressing the view that this is really only an adventure in far-off lands without any major consequences or implications for Europe, we should simply like to recall that the First World War, which covered all Europe in blood, also began out of such ‘far-away' wars - the two Balkan wars, in a region close to the Middle East and playing an analogous strategic role: yesterday the confrontation between the great powers over access to the ‘warm seas'; today the main focus for east-west confrontation since this was symbolically declared at Yalta in 1945.

From all points of view the working class is concerned by such military engagements. How could it be otherwise when, just from the economic and social point of view, two thirds of humanity are suffering from hunger and unemployment is spreading a shadow of misery over a major part of the working class in the industrialized countries, and when at the same time as all this the present military intervention in the Gulf is officially costing the USA the astronomical sum of a million dollars a day, just for transportation costs? As for France, which is present on two fronts, Africa and the Middle East, no figures have been supplied, and no wonder.

"Fanaticism and terrorism" against "peace and civilization"

The policies of the USA are neither ‘chaotic' nor ‘incoherent', nor improvised on the spur of the moment as many commentators claim. Despite detours and contours that aren't always immed­iately comprehensible, the American strategy in the Middle East - a strategy of offensive aimed at strangling the Russian bloc - is based on an iron logic.

For seven years the states of the world have been happy enough simply to see the continuat­ion of the Iran-Iraq war. Today the situation has qualitatively changed. After having ‘reg­ulated' the situation in Lebanon, and completed Iran's isolation in the Middle East, the USA has decided to finish with the Iranian quest­ion once and for all. The USA is determined to re-establish Iran as the military fortress it was around 10 years ago. Because of its geo­graphical position, the extent of its territ­ory and its demographic density, no other country can take Iran's place in the region.

Faced with these undeniable realities, what is being said to justify intervention in the Persian Gulf? That the fanaticism of the Iranian population, which is subjugated by religious maniacs, is the cause of instability in the Gulf and of many other evils. The whole effort of western countries and of their band­leader the USA is by this token aimed at containing, ‘by force if necessary', this surge of religious fundamentalism, at achieving peace between Iran and Iraq and, of course, at ensuring the interests of the western countries through the free circulation of oil shipments in the Persian Gulf.

Thus the chancelleries both of the western world and of the Arab countries point to relig­ious fanaticism in Iran as a dangerous source of trouble, a grave threat to peace in the Gulf.

First of all we don't accept that the populat­ion of Iran which, like that of Iraq, has been through seven years of a particularly murderous war, costing something like a million deaths, is greatly enthusiastic about waging a ‘holy war' against all the powers of the Arab world and, on top of that, against all the powers of the west.

All wars are atrocious, but this one is particularly so. As well as the power of modern weaponry, it has also involved chemical warfare. Neither side has rejected using any barbarity, either on the battle front or against urban concentrations.

How can we forget that over the past seven years, because of the shortage of combatants whom the war is cutting down in their thousands, 10 year old boys have been sent out by force to the front? And how can you measure the sacrifices demanded to pay for these years of war - even when you don't lose your life, or that of your children, or end up crippled? In these conditions, we are not mistaken in affirming that a very wide anti-war sentiment exists among the Iranian and Iraqi populations. You can't go through seven years of war without being cured of fanaticism. Despite the fact that the bourgeoisie understandably allows very little information about   these things to get through, we know that there is real opposition to the war both in Iraq, and Iran:                      

"The population's hostility to the conflict is in close relation with the privations suffered in particular by the poor...In 1985, agitation which was habitually provoked by the economic situation was for the first time superseded by veritable demonstrations against the war." (International Institute for Strategic Studies, ‘Iraq-Iran: the Paralyzed War').

It's already quite staggering to hear the whole chorus of pacifist declarations which accompanies the deployment of this vast armada in the Gulf. But the duplicity of it all is even more striking when you bear in mind that this war, which they're now talking about bringing to an end, was begun, kept up, and nourished for seven years by those who are now shouting loudest about ‘peace'. It's no secret that the essential aim of the Iran-Iraq war was to destroy the religious regime in Tehran, the cost in human lives counting for little or nothing.                   

All the countries which, goaded by the USA, were in at the beginning of the conflict, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, thought that the shock of the war in a country which had already been plunged into indescribable chaos after the fall of the Shah would rapidly result in the collapse of the Islamic regime. This perspective has not been verified, on the contrary. This war was supposed to be a short one but it's still very much with us. The Khomeini faction, far from collapsing, has fed on the war and has strengthened its grip on Iranian society through pitiless repression. The fact that a more ‘adaptable', less anachronistic faction than the Mullahs hasn't been installed in Iran shows the depth of social decomposition that has taken place since the Shah's time.

In any case, since the objective of getting rid of the Mullahs had momentarily failed, Iran and Iraq could only get sucked further into the war. A war kept going by all the international powers who, for seven years, have been supplying arms and all kinds of modern military material to the belligerents. Without all these arms, it would have been impossible to continue the conflict.                                                                                  

Realizing they could no longer hope for a rapid solution to the Iranian problem, particularly as long as the question of Syria and Lebanon was not ‘stabilized', and as long as Iran's isolation wasn't complete, the western world, the Arab countries and Israel adapted very nicely to the war.                                                                            

So for years the whole fine imperialist world has drawn profit from the situation, above all through arms sales. At the head of the queue you will find France, which has sold Iraq modern weapons amounting to $7 billion worth (see ‘Iraq- Iran: the Paralyzed War'). The state of Israel, whose links to the USA can't be denied by anyone, has been the main supplier of arms to Iran during the war:

"Although Tehran denies any link of this kind, Iran has received deliveries of arms from Israel since the beginning of the war...at the time, the sum of these transactions could be estimated at nearly $100 million...In 1983 alone, arms deliveries to Iran reached $100 million." (ibid).

On other levels, apart from the arms sales which fed the carnage for the profit of a large number of nations, China and the USSR included, there has been a very broad consensus about this war. The Arab nations couldn't help viewing with satisfaction that this war kept their turbulent Iranian neighbor well occupied, and that two of the main oil producing countries in the Gulf were drastically cutting production at a time of over- production and falling oil prices. As for Israel, as long as Iran has been the soft underbelly in the defense of western interests in the Middle East, it could claim to be the sole occupant of the post of gendarme for the west, and draw all the advantages from this.

And then comes Russia which, although having no hope or possibility of gaining any real influence in Iran, would much rather see Iran at war than as a reliable US stronghold on the borders with Afghanistan which is under the occupation of Russian troops.

As long as the US was unable to get rid of the religious clique in Tehran, it permitted and encouraged the continuation of the war, sagely controlling the dosage of arms delivered to Baghdad and Tehran. The trick was to permit neither a decisive victory for Iran, which would have further strengthened the existing regime, or a crushing defeat that would have led to its complete collapse and prevented any possibility of reconstructing this military fortress of the western bloc.

From this standpoint, the continuation of the war and of tensions in the Gulf offered the USA the not inconsiderable advantage of the Arab countries being more dependent on America:

"The Gulf states were thus condemned to give financial support to Baghdad and to stren­gthen their own systems of civil and military defense against Tehran. Their implicit dependence on American guarantees, as well as the political weight of this de facto alliance, was brutally increased." (ibid).

These are the realities of imperialism's danse macabre in the Persian Gulf. And we have only traced its broad outlines.

At a general level this escalation is not a disordered sequence of actions and efforts, without any coherent goal and whose consequences are limited geographically to the Middle East. The present situation in the Persian Gulf is the continuation of an overall strategy which, even if it doesn't directly set US and Russian imperialism against each other, is fully part of the global logic of this confrontation.

When the USA has succeeded in ‘settling' the Iranian question, ie when it once again has made Iran a bastion of its military positions in the Middle East, this settlement will in the final analysis mark up another notch in militarism's planetary advance. After establishing the peace of the grave, the western bloc won't be able to rely simply on its economic power - which is already in a bad enough state in the metropoles ‑ to maintain ‘order' in such an unstable region, where economic decomposition has already reached a very advanced point. It will become obligatory to install a permanent military order at the very frontiers of Russia, thus marking a heightened degree in world imperialist tensions.

The development of military tension and the historic stakes

Let's move our attention for a moment away from the Middle East. The flames of the class strugg­le are burning in South Africa. In South Korea, a massive movement of the working class has, by its pugnacity, its intransigence and its courage, shattered into a thousand pieces the shop-window display of an Asian proletariat made up of docile slaves. And these are only the most recent expressions of a powerful, world-wide flood of insubordination to the laws of capital in crisis.

The whole world situation is contained in this contradiction, in the opposition between the two perspectives which derive from the decadence of capitalism: war or revolution.

Up till now the struggles of the inter­national working class has pushed back the bourgeois perspective of war. By refusing to sacrifice itself for the survival of the bourg­eois economy, it has pushed back the perspective of a supreme sacrifice on the altar of imperial­ism. All honor is due to the class for having, through its struggles, through its resistance to exploitation, forged a spirit alien to the servile conceptions of fatalism.

But as the world situation as a whole shows us, history is accelerating and in doing so becomes more demanding. It is demanding the proletariat becomes conscious of what it has already done, and, by developing this conscious­ness, that it pushes it to its logical conclusion. From being a de facto international movement, the workers' struggle can and must become an inter­nationalist movement.

History can often be thankless but it never demands the impossible. Along with historical necessity, the conditions for its realization are also developed. Through the development of the economic crisis, that veritable scourge of society and of the barbarism it brings about; through the international development of the proletarian struggle itself, the working class is now compelled to take its combat onto a higher level. The experience accumulated through its repeated assaults on the fortress of capitalism will give it the strength and the means to do so.

If it is to become conscious of its historic mission, the proletariat can't wait to be submerged in barbarism, otherwise it will be too late. On the terrain of the economy itself, the struggle between labor and capital is already a barricade in the way of the march towards the third world war, and today the workers' struggles can and must point to the proletariat's own perspective. Destroying frontiers, exploitation, and the profit economy is the only way to sweep away, once and for all, the threat of disaster which capitalism suspends over humanity.

Prenat, 5.9. 87.

International class struggle: Workers' struggles in South Korea and South Africa

The world proletariat's increasing mobilization

Contrary to the propaganda of the ruling class, the recent workers' struggles in South Korea and South Africa are not essentially different from those waged by workers in other countries and particularly in the most industrialized countries. Despite their specificities - military dictatorship in South Korea, ‘apartheid' regime in South Africa - these are moments in one and the same combat in the struggle of the world working class against capitalist exploitation.

South Korea, a country whose ‘exceptional' economic performance has been made so much of by the ‘experts', a country which has been pointed to as a model for the less developed world, has during the summer been through its greatest social explosions since the war. Its ten million proletarians, on whose back the national capital, but also Japanese and American capital, have built the ‘Korean miracle' by imposing on them some of the worst working conditions in the world, have given a masterful slap in the face to the myth of the ‘passive', ‘resigned' Asian workers, who are exploited to death and ‘happy' to be so. Through an unpre­cedented movement of strikes which, beginning from the main working class concentrations - coal mines, shipyards, car plants - spread like wildfire to all sectors of the class, the Korean workers have shown that in Japanese capital's sphere of influence, as in the rest of the world, the working class is learning to constitute itself into a social force, the only one capable of confronting decadent capitalism in crisis and opening up a real perspective. In the long run, these battles prefigure the mobilization of the Japanese proletariat.

South Africa has also been through the biggest class mobilization in its history. More than a quarter of a million miners were on strike for three weeks. At the same time 10,000 postal workers were out; 60,000 workers in the metallurgical sector have been involved in strike movements since July; 15,000 petro­chemical workers are threatening to come out.

We can't here go into all the aspects of these struggles. We refer readers to the various organs of our territorial press for further coverage.

The most important thing to do here is to denounce the ideology which seeks to enclose these struggles in a framework which emasculates their class content, which hides what unites them to the combat of the entire world working class.

The bourgeoisie always resorts to the same strategy: it emphasizes what is specific about the conditions of the workers' struggle in a particular enterprise, sector, or country in order to isolate it, to derail it onto a false terrain and smother it. One of the most spectac­ular examples of this was Poland 1980, where the workers' struggle against exploitation was presented to the whole world as a struggle for the right to go to mass, while more locally it was imprisoned in the struggle for the Solidarnosc trade union's right to exist.

In South Korea capitalist barbarism has taken the form of a particularly violent military dictatorship; in South Africa, the form of racism and apartheid. The American bourgeoisie is currently engaged in getting rid of the most anachronistic elements of these regimes, not in order to lighten the living conditions of the working class, but on the contrary in order to create institutions capable of containing and controlling the class struggle developing in these countries, as in the rest of the world, under the effects of the world economic crisis.

The workers' strikes in South Korea didn't break out with the aim of installing a western-style ‘democratic' bourgeois regime, any more than the South African workers have been strugg­ling for a form of capitalism less cruel towards the black proletarians. These struggles emerged from the start as direct reactions against capitalist exploitation, for wages increases, for the general improvement of living and working conditions. If it had been otherwise, they wouldn't have taken the form of strikes for class demands, but would have remained in the suicidal, inter-classist framework of petitions and demonstrations organized by the so-called ‘democratic' parties of the bourgeois ‘opposition'.

This doesn't mean these struggles haven't attacked the dictatorial and racist forms of capitalist exploitation. On the contrary, they are the only struggles which can impose limits on the barbarism of the local ruling class.

All factions of the bourgeoisie, with the liberals and democrats at the forefront, have said how shocked they are by these strikes, and have called on the proletarians of these countries to be careful not to put their ‘egoistic' class interests above the interests of the ‘nation'.

Kim Young Sam, one of the main Korean democratic opposition leaders again and again called on workers to "show moderation in their demands so as not to threaten the success of the South Korean economy." In South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the NUM, the new ‘democratic' union which has just sabotaged the miners' strike, explained his call for a return to work by referring to the need to respect the legality of the nation.

These appeals, these maneuvers are in reality nothing but a means to disarm the exploited class, to destroy its struggles by derailing them onto the terrain of its exploit­ers.

No, the struggles of the proletarians in South Korea and South Africa are not examples of cooperation between the exploited and the exploiters for a utopian ‘humanization' of capitalist barbarism. They are moments in the world-wide combat of the working class against capital and its world-wide barbarism. And this is because:

* The causes which have provoked these struggles are the same: the economic crisis of world capitalism leads to an intensificat­ion in the peripheries as anywhere else; if there is a difference it's only because in these countries the aggravation of the crisis generally takes on an even more violent character;

* the very forms these struggles take - their tendency to extend to different sectors of the working class, across the barriers of profess­ion, sector or race - are the same which have manifested themselves in all the important workers' struggles in western Europe over the last few years;

* finally because like the struggles of other workers all over the world, they have to be fought on two fronts: against their declared enemies - the governments and their armed military and police apparati, but also against those enemies disguised as ‘friends', the unions and the so-called ‘opposition' parties who work to sabotage the struggle from the inside.

The main danger for the workers of these countries is to become prisoners of the confusion created by all the ‘democratic' propaganda, which is all the more dangerous in that it is aimed at a proletariat which is only beginning to gain experience of the policing role of these ‘democratic' institut­ions.

All this underlines the responsibility of workers in countries with a long ‘democratic' tradition, workers who are seeing through these institutions more and more clearly, are deserting them - the parties and above all the trade unions - in their millions, and who are more and more learning to fight not only outside them, but against them, as has been shown in the last few years by the workers of Belgium, France, and, most recently, Italy.

RV 5.9.87.

International debate

Bourgeois trade unions, Working class organizations and the intervention of revolutionaries (Reply to "Battaglia Comunista")

 

After years of silence, Battaglia Comunista[1] has at last resumed its written polemic with the positions of the ICC. Not without difficulty: first BC started discussing with and answering groups in the capitalist periphery (Mexico, India) that knew of, or shared, the ICC's positions; then BC undertook to publish these replies in its press; and now, finally, BC has taken the opportunity, via a reply to a group of our sympathizers in Spain, to engage a direct polemic with the ICC.

Since we have already answered BC elsewhere[2] on the question of the historic course and the evaluation of the present stage of the class struggle, in this article we will deal with "the ICC's abstract positions on the unions and parliament", (Battaglia Comunista no 2, February 1987), concentrating on the question of the unions and revolutionary intervention in workers' struggles. We intend to stick to our method of getting to the roots of the disagreement by taking account of all BC's texts on the question, rather than picking out one or two sentences in a particular article.

Battaglia's article starts from the assumption that, as long as it is merely a matter of "the general theoretical problem (the trade unions' nature and function)", then no great effort is needed to give a clear reply. "The political problem is quite different, and can be posed as follows: given this nature and function of trades unions, how is it possible to "go beyond" them in a revolutionary manner?". And according to BC, the ICC is incapable of answering this question "because of its organic inability...to act politically."

In this reply, we intend first and foremost to demonstrate that even at the "genera1 theoretical" level, there are certain points BC would do well to clarify. Then, we will look at Battaglia's specific proposals for the organization of revolutionaries in the struggle: the "internationalist factory groups." Finally, we will analyze the links between the shortcomings in BC's intervention, and their difficulty in recognizing the reality of the class struggle, in particular the as yet confused and embryonic attempts through which the class itself is beginning to pose the problem of tomorrow's unitary organizations.

Precisely these questions were at the heart of the debates during the first series of International Conferences of the Communist Left, broken off in 1980 by Battaglia and the Communist Workers Organization. It is through the renewal of this debate, on a wider and clearer basis, that the whole international proletarian political milieu will best be able to contribute to resolving the problems posed by the class's preparation for its decisive confrontations with capitalism.

The trade unions: Organs of the bourgeois state

On what solid reference points does BC anchor its present-day understanding of the unions? Essentially, there are three of them:

1) "The union is not and never has been an organ of the revolutionary struggle for the proletariat's emancipation";

2) the union "has been led, as an organ of economic  negotiation, to oppose the revolutionary thrust to the abolition of capitalism";

3) "the revolution will be made over the trade union's dead body".

These solid reference points seem rather shaky to us: above all because they do not go to the roots of the problem posed by the Spanish comrades. These comrades want to know why Battaglia still considers it possible today to work within counter-revolutionary organizations like the unions. They will certainly be pleased to hear that the unions are not revolutionary, but this does not take the question forward one jot.

There is no doubt, that even in the 19th century, the unions were not revolutionary organizations, and that their negotiating function always pushed their leaders in a conformist and non-revolutionary direction. However, it is equally true that in the 19th century, marxists fought to the utmost to strengthen the unions. How is it possible, on this identical basis, for the comrades of Battaglia to come to the opposite conclusion that the revolution will have to be made "over the trades unions' dead body"?

Obviously, we will get nowhere like this. It is necessary to put our ideas in order before continuing.

In our opinion, the essential guide lines of the communist position on the unions are the following:

1) the unions were the typical proletarian unitary organization during capitalism's ascendant phase when, since the worldwide proletarian revolution was not yet a possibility, the working-class struggle was essentially in defense of its living conditions and unity within capitalism;

2) with capital's entry into its decadent phase marked by the outbreak of World War I, the proletariat can no longer benefit from the conquest of real reforms; consequently, all the arms created for this struggle (unions, parliamentary parties, etc...) became redundant as far as the proletariat is concerned;

3) the dominant tendency within decadent capitalism is towards state capitalism, one of whose major characteristics is the integration into the state, with an anti-working class function, of organizations that are no longer of any use to the proletariat: the unions have thus become organs of the bourgeois state, to control the workers, and the revolution will destroy them as such.

As we can see, the essential point is that yesterday the unions were working class organizations, while today they belong to the enemy: what is important is what has changed, not what has remained the same.

Since Battaglia says nothing about this in their reply to the Spanish comrades, let us look back at their October 1986 document devoted to the union question ("Il sindacato nel 3 ciclo di accumulazione del capitale"). Here, indeed, we learn that something has changed. But what? and when?

According to BC, what has changed is that, in Marx's day wage increases did indeed decrease the bosses' profits, and the trade union struggle, although limited, was therefore antagonistic to capital. In its monopolistic form, capital has supposedly gained the ability to control the market through monopolies, and therefore to compensate for the effects of wage increases through increased prices; as a result, "with the lessening, or rather the dulling, of the conflict in immediate interests, a whole inter-classist ideology has been able to develop, and strike a chord within the working class itself, especially in the trades unions (...) the institutionalized union is the inevitable conclusion to this process"[3].

In one sentence, BC has turned the world upside down: its decadence no longer means that capitalism has become historically incapable of granting reforms to the working class, but that "the unions are confronted with employers who sometimes even take the lead in conceding wage rises rendered possible, precisely, by the super-profits that a large company can make thanks to its ability to influence the price-fixing process".

Here, Battaglia mistakes effects for the cause: the fact that the bourgeoisie is forced to regulate every stage of the economic cycle (production and market quotas, monetary balance etc...) demonstrates, not that monopoly capital can do what it likes, but on the contrary that ,it is forced to walk on tiptoe through a minefield, because it would collapse into chaos in a matter of months if left to the "free play" of its own laws. And the trades unions, organizations originally formed to negotiate improvements within capitalism, have been integrated into the state because winning lasting reforms has become impossible, not because it has become too easy.

Moreover, if the ease of distributing the crumbs of capital's "super-profits" were really the reason for the unions' integration into the state, then the crisis which, as BC says, has "drastically reduced the possibility (...) of distributing crumbs from these super-profits", should by the same token have eliminated the cause of this integration, and opened the way to the reconstitution of the "glorious red trades unions" in the classic conception of the various Bordigist groups.

The reverse is true, and Battaglia is the first to recognize that with the crisis, the union "has progressively increased its integration into the state apparatus".

There is only one way out of this mesh of contradictions: the recognition that the unions' integration into the bourgeois state has nothing to do with "super-profits", but is based on two complementary historical necessities:

1) capitalism's decadence has made the struggle for lasting reforms impossible,

2) it has also made it vital for capitalism to strengthen its instrument of social cohesion -- the state -- especially by integrating originally working class structures like the trades unions, and transforming them into organs aimed at controlling the working class.

When were the unions integrated into the bourgeois state?

Without this coherence, Battaglia can only flounder in ever more inextricable contradictions, especially when it tries to answer the question: when did the unions pass over to the ruling class?

There should be no room for doubt here: in "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", Lenin, writing in 1916, describes the transition to capital's monopoly form as something that has already taken place. The unions' integration into the bourgeois state, which according to BC depends on this transition, is thus situated at about the period of the First World War. And this is confirmed by the authoritative voice of the Imperial German Government:

"nothing can be done without the union leaders, much less against them; their influence is based on the actions that they have conducted successfully for years to improve the workers' conditions... we could not possibly keep afloat were this not the case"[4].

This definitive integration is only the conclusion of a process begun years before; and it is no accident that the appearance in 1905 of new mass organizations -- the workers' councils of the Russo-Polish revolution, which were later to become the protagonists of the revolutionary wave unleashed by Red October -­coincides with the growing inadequacy of the union form for the needs of the workers' struggle.

Given these basic facts, it comes as a great surprise to read in the pamphlet that today's trades unions are the same "as those of 30 - 40 years ago" (ie, 1947-57), and that "the definitive transition, in Italy at least, occurred during World War II". In other words, the transition occurred about the end of the 1940's -- a leap of more than 30 years. To what do we owe this veritable historical earthquake? Probably, to the fact that, in the discussion that developed during the 1920's, the Italian Left took the same line as the Bolsheviks, in favor of reconquering the trades unions (Rome Theses, 1922), against the German and Butch Lefts, who considered the unions' integration into the state as irreversible. That the Italian Left should make this mistake in the 1920's is perfectly comprehensible; what is incomprehensible, is that today BC should try to rewrite history in order to deny the obvious: that on this question the Dutch and Germans' intuition was swifter and deeper than the Russians' and Italians'[5].

This has nothing to do with the method that the Italian Left has bequeathed us: already during the 1930's, the Italian Left's Fractions abroad, far from taking refuge in the out-and-out defense of the Rome Theses' formulations, were doggedly working to "emphasize the stages of the unions' progressive incorporation into the state"[6]. While some argued that only a new revolutionary situation could make it possible to clarify the question definitively, others considered it already resolved, and fought for an end to all activity within the unions:

"Today, the question is not whether or not it is possible for marxists to develop a healthy activity inside the trades unions; it is one of understanding that these organizations have passed definitively into the enemy camp, and that it is impossible to transform them". (Luciano Stefanini: "Contribute alla discussione sul rapport Verresi", in "I1 Seme Comunista" n° 5 of February 1938, quoted in the ICC's pamphlet "La Gauche Communiste d'Italie)

In fact, the only reason for placing the definitive turning-point at the end of the 1940's is that... it is only after the split with the Bordigists of "Programma Comunista" at the beginning of the 1950's that Battaglia decided to give up definitively any plans to reconquer the unions.

BC's pamphlet tries to mask this fact by reminding us that "all the premises of our later and current position" were already to be found in the Theses on the union question presented at the PCInt's December 1945 Turin Congress. This is true. These Theses, presented by Luciano Stefanini, were clearly anti-union, and from this standpoint fairly close to the positions of the Gauche Communiste de France which we consider as our predecessor; and this is precisely why they were rejected by a large majority of the Congress, which went on to adopt the objective of "conquering the unions' leading organs"!

If the comrades of Battaglia consider it useful to cite episodes of their party's history, they should at least try to be complete....

How did Battaglia change its conception of its "Internationalist Factory Groups"?

Now that we have at last determined the "unions' nature and function", we can consider how revolutionaries should develop their organized intervention.

Although the letter to the Mexican  and Spanish comrades does not talk about it (why not?), we knew that, for Battaglia, revolutionaries organize their intervention through "factory groups". Let's see then, what is the "nature and function" of these factory groups, and how this notion has evolved in time.

1922: the Partito Comunista d'Italia''s Rome Theses assign to the communist factory groups, made up of party militants, the task of reconquering and taking over the political leadership of the unions, seen as transmission belts from party to class.

1952: the perspective of reconquering the unions being abandoned, the groups are kept alive by giving them "two hats, one of the intermediary between party and class, the other of a political organization". In other words, since the trade's union transmission belt no longer exists, the factory groups themselves are to take their place, replacing, one might say, the class' own unitary organizations. It is no accident that these groups are no longer called communist as in 1922, but union factory groups, coordinated in a Union Fraction on the basis of a specific Trade Union Platform.

1977-80: BC limits its reaction to the discussions on this question during the International Conference of the Communist Left, to changing the name to "Internationalist Factory Groups", without touching anything else.

1982: Battaglia's 2nd Congress throws overboard the whole framework of the Union Fraction, Platform and so on... but continues to ascribe to these groups the role of "sole real transmission belt between party and class"[7].

1986: Battaglia's new pamphlet on the unions declares clearly that, while the factory group retains its role as a party organism, "we ran no longer consider it as an intermediary organ" "situated half-way between party and class". Terms like "intermediary organisms" and "transmission belts" are eliminated, as being "worn-out and out-of-date".

The most incredible thing today is that the comrades of Battaglia seem to be unaware how important these last changes are. To grasp this, and above all to make it clear to all the new comrades present on the international scene today, we must go back to the International Conferences held between 1977 and 1980.

At the time, the central discussion was undoubtedly: how should revolutionaries intervene? The debate ended up polarizing around on the one hand, BC and the CWO, defending the factory groups and maintaining that "their role is to act as "transmission belts" or "intermediaries" between party and class"[8], and on the other the ICC, declaring on the contrary that instead of deceiving themselves as to their ability to organize the class' most combative sectors in "their own" groups, communists should be intervening in those organisms that the class movement itself tends to create (today: mass              assemblies, committees, coordinations; tomorrow: the workers' councils). Battaglia Comunista summed up the debate at the 3rd Conference as follows:

"the development of the discussion has made it possible to highlight two opposing positions: 1) the party plays a secondary role in the class struggle, rejecting its "raison d'être" in the organization of the struggle itself; 2) without the party as its leading and organizing organism, the       proletariat cannot carry out its historical task"[9] (our emphasis).

As we can see, for BC the party's organisms must not only provide a political leadership, but also organize the class; whoever rejects this role denies "the party's reason for existing". It was on this basis that BC and the CWO sabotaged the Conferences, declaring that it was impossible to go on talking to the "spontaneists" of the ICC, who maintained that the only correct term was that of "political orientation" or "political leadership", and who proposed a formulation according to which the party is the "indispensable organ for the political orientation of the revolutionary class and its political power, a power taken and held by the whole class organized in Councils". Battaglia, who declared at the Conference that this formulation was "unacceptable, because the Conference must eliminate spontaneism" (ie, the ICC), now calmly declare that "the dialectical unity of class and party is achieved through the Party's political leadership (strategy and tactics of the Revolution) in the proletariat's mass organs (the living force and subject of the Revolution)". The subject of the revolution is thus the class as a whole, regrouped in its mass organizations (the councils), and it is within these organizations that the Party must play its role as a political leadership. Perhaps the comrades of BC would be kind enough to explain to us why these formulations are "completely opposed" to the ICC's "unacceptable" ones? For a decade, whenever we asked how it was possible for the factory groups to be at one and the same time organs of the party, and intermediaries between the party and the class, we were told that we "didn't understand anything about dialectics". And today, Battaglia blithely announces that to have placed these groups "half-way between class and party" was clearly "equivocal" and "ambiguous".

Two things should be clear right from the start. Firstly, that we are perfectly aware that despite this change, BC's positions remain very different from ours; secondly, that despite this we welcome enthusiastically this step forward by Battaglia. But a third thing should also be clear: however big or small this step may be, it will be useless unless it is made coherently. In our opinion, abandoning a position which has been the basis for a decision as important as breaking off the International Conferences, without in the least wondering about the validity of this decision, is neither serious nor coherent.

Can communists work in state organisms like the unions?

BC's reply to the Spanish comrades can be summed up as follows:

1) the ICC comrades, because they go no further than abstract schematism and verbal extremism, limit themselves to being "revolutionaries of declamations and fine gestures, setting their consciences at ease, speaking learnedly to themselves for lack of any possibility of making themselves heard, much less of seeing their "indications" concretized in an organizational class struggle praxis";

2) in reality, what is decisive is not so much where as how one intervenes. In this sense, "the problem of being outside or inside the union is a false one, or rather one that is tied to the concrete possibilities and opportunities offered by the contingent situation";

3) the correctness of BC's position is confirmed by the fact that "the ICC has for some time been developing an intense activity of intervention, and has corrected some of its idealist rigidities by blurring them".

Let's try to set things straight. The ICC is so "abstract" in its principal of anti-unionism that not only does it intervene in any demonstration or mass meeting called by the unions, where there is a real working class presence, it also explicitly allows its militants working in closed shops to join a union. But this legal or quasi-legal obligation, similar to paying taxes, has nothing to do with choosing to join a union in order to carry out anti-union activity. And let us note in passing that already in the 1930's, unlike the Trotskyists, the comrades of the Italian Left ruled out any work inside the fascist unions either in Italy or Germany. The discussion was automatically settled on this point, since it was taken for granted that no communist action was possible inside an organ of the state, and there could be no doubt that the fascist unions were state organs. The comrades of Battaglia affirm, by contrast, that the unions are integrated into the state and that it is nonetheless possible to work within them: they are free to do so, but not to call on the Communist Left to support this affirmation.

Two ways of intervening in the class struggle

Faced with this amusing idea that the ICC has changed position by throwing itself into "an intense activity of intervention" in the struggle, it is necessary to return once again to the discussions in the International Conferences.

The debate was not between those in favor of intervention and those against it. It was a confrontation between on the one hand, the ICC maintaining that revolutionaries should intervene in the struggle, and in the attempts at self-organization that were developing at the time (hospital workers in Italy in 1978, steelworkers in Britain and the Lorraine in 1979, the Rotterdam dockers, etc...), and on the other, Battaglia and the CWO, according to whom revolutionaries should be dedicating themselves to building factory groups, which were to organize the combative sectors of the proletariat, and make real mass movements of the class possible. The ICC proposed a resolution, whose starting point was the recognition of the fact that "the historic recovery of the workers' struggles accompanied by the development within the class of groups, circles, nuclei of proletarians, which although not fully formed and menaced by all kinds of dangers, by activism, workerism„ or new-style trades unionism, are a real sign of life in the class". This resolution therefore emphasized the need to intervene within these organisms, to combat such dangers and so to contribute to the process of the class' coming to consciousness.

Battaglia and the CWO rejected the resolution and were so blinded by the weaknesses of these first attempts that they went so far as to call their class nature into question, seeing them essentially as "maneuvers of one or another political group". Even the 5th Congress' 1982 Theses still insist on this characterization, and when they admit the possible appearance, in the very distant future, of "workers' circles", the only perspective that these are given is to turn into to factory groups, transmission belts between Battaglia and the class.

Today, BC's pamphlet on the unions insists that the organisms formed by the workers' spontaneity (assemblies, coordinations, councils), must be able to find "in the workplace, clearly defined reference points capable of taking on the political leadership of these mass organs". When we insisted, between 1977 and 1980, that the role of communists was to fight to give a class orientation within the organisms that the workers' spontaneity will increasingly generate, we were accused of being "spontaneists" with whom it was impossible to discuss seriously. What should we accuse Battaglia of today?

Two interventions and the test of reality

But abandoning the idea that it is up to communists to create the framework destined to organize the proletariat's most militant sectors does not solve all the problems, nor does it settle all the disagreements between us and BC. Firstly, although BC today recognizes the reality of the process by which autonomous mass organizations are appearing, here and there (mass meetings, strike committees...), it has no position on the tendency towards minority organizations, bringing together small groups of militant workers, and whose purpose is to push the struggle forward, and to analyze its lessons. In the 1992 Theses, these minority organisms are still considered, to all intents and purposes, as "emanations of the class' political organizations". Does BC recognize today, that the tendency towards the formation of such groups is "a real sign of life in the class"? And secondly, understanding the necessity to ensure a political leadership in these mass organizations is one thing, having the ability to do so is another.

And from this point of view, Battaglia's record is hardly positive. In the two recent episodes where mass proletarian organizations have appeared outside the trades unions -- the rail workers' struggle in France and the school workers struggle in Italy - neither the French section of the IBRP linked to Battaglia, nor Battaglia itself intervened in the movement. All that they managed to do was to wait till the end of the struggle to write a text in which they...denounced its limitations! This is especially disconcerting in the case of Battaglia, which has an organized group of militants amongst the teachers, with a long tradition of intervention and which could and should have played the role of a spur and political leadership in the movement. But to lead a movement, one must at least intervene in it, and not limit oneself to "learnedly" expressing one's opinion. Battaglia however, prefers to explain to us that the 1987 rail workers' movement was more corporatist than the steelworkers' in 1979, and that this proves, contrary to what the ICC says, that the class does not learn from its own experience. This kind of affirmation only proves that BC had nothing to do either with the steelworkers in 1979 or with the railwaymen in 1987. In 1979, the French steelworkers' struggle, for all its radicalism and combativity, remained under the control of the Longwy "Intersyndicale", ie a rank-and-file trade union organism. In 1987, the rail workers started and spread their movement outside and against the unions; they formed strike committees based on their own mass assemblies, and began to create regional and national coordinations, which is a considerable step forward. As for the Italian school workers, they were organized nationally outside and against the unions.

Of course, there was corporatism everywhere, rank-and-file unionism even more so; but there was also a maturation within the working class, a greater openness to the intervention of revolutionaries which appeared in the fact, not only that the ICC was able to intervene in the movement, as it had done in 1979, but that its militants encountered a far greater echo, and in the case of the Italian school workers' assemblies, were even elected as delegates to the national coordinations[10].

Certainly, we have made mistakes during these years; we have even paid dearly for some of them. But at least we have learnt by acting in the heart of the workers' struggles. Can Battaglia draw the same conclusion from its famous factory groups, with all their twists and turns?

The renewal of the class struggle has put unfinished discussions back on the agenda

After sabotaging the International Conferences, Battaglia Comunista for years neglected to answer our polemical articles. When we asked the comrades why, they replied that their paper was read in the factories and that the workers were not interested in reading pages of polemics with the ICC, which comes down to saying that the discussions among revolutionaries are just so much hot air, and that the "concrete" workers have got no time for them.

Today, however, BC regularly devotes pages and pages to polemics with the ICC, the OCI, and even with an extra-parliamentary bourgeois group like Lotta Comunista. What has happened? Have BC's working class readers decided to "cultivate" themselves. Or is this not rather the confirmation of what we said when BC decided to interrupt the Conferences: "one thing must be clear: the questions that you are refusing to discuss today will be on the agenda in the struggle tomorrow". And it is indeed the renewal of the international class struggle which is today renewing the debate which up to now had been limited to Europe, and widening it as far as Mexico, Argentina, and India.

To repeat what we said in our 1980 open letter to Battaglia: "if the Conference, are dead, through your action, the idea of the Conferences is not. On the contrary, the renewal of the proletarian struggle will push revolutionaries to emerge from their isolation, and to organize a public discussion on the questions that the class is confronting"[11].

This is the objective that all revolutionaries should aim at, Battaglia included.

Beyle

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[1] Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista): CP1753, 20101 Milano, Italy. The PCInt, along with the Communist Workers' Organization (Britain), and comrades in France and India, is part of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), which can be contacted at the same address.

[2] See "On the Course of History" in the International Review no. 50, 3rd quarter 1987.

[3] "The trade unions in the 3rd cycle of the accumulation of capital" - available from BC - the different quotes can be found on pages: 9, 8, 11, 13, 3, 10, 15, and 16.

[4] Quoted in "La Sinistra Tedesca" by Barrot, published by La Salamandia.

[5] The fact that this intuition, by its very precocity, was expressed in formulation that were still incomplete and immature, and which still did not bar the way to back-sliding in the form of a radical "revolutionary" unionism, in no way diminishes the merit of the German and Dutch Lefts in being the first to pose the problem of the unions' destruction.

[6] This work has been described in detail in the ICC's pamphlet "La Gauche Communiste Italianne, 1927-1952", especially in Chapter 7.

[7] The Theses of the Trade Unions from BC's 5th Congress are reprinted as an appendix to the 1986 pamphlet.

[8] Preparatory Bulletin no. 2 of Texts for the 3rd Conference of Groups of the Communist Left.

[9] Proceedings of the 3rd Conference of Groups of the Communist Left (May 1980), available from the ICC. The various quotations can be found in Part 7.

[10] A detailed article criticizing BC's absence from the school workers' movement will be published in no. 31 of the ICC's press in Italy: "Rivoluzione Internazionale".

[11] Letter from the ICC to the PCInt (BC) after the 3rd Conference, published as an appendix to the Proceedings.

The "Ten days that shook the world" were seventy years ago. The world media is celebrating the anniversary. Once more they are going to talk about the Russian Revolution. In their fashion that is, of the ruling class, with its lies, its deformations and with its stale old refrains: "the communist revolution can only lead to the Gulag or to suicide".

In defence of the true nature of what still remains the greatest revolutionary experience of the world proletariat, the ICC has just brought out a pamphlet dedicated to the Russian Revolution.

Here is the introduction.

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"The most indubitable feature of revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times the state, be it mon­archical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business - kings, ministers, bur­eaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the poli­tical arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interfer­ence the initial groundwork for a new regime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revo­lution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol.1, Preface.)

The very term REVOLUTION often inspires fear. "The ruling ideology" said Marx "is always the ideology of the ruling class". And what the rul­ing classes, the exploiting classes, fear the most, in the very depth of their being, is that the masses they exploit will get it into their heads to put into question the existing order of things by making a "forcible entrance ... into the realm of rulership over their own destiny."

The Russian Revolution was first and foremost that: a grandiose action by the exploited masses to try to destroy the order which reduces them to the state of beasts of burden in an economic mach­ine and cannon fodder for the wars between the capitalist powers. An action where millions of proletarians, bringing behind them all the other exploited layers of society, manage to tear down their atomisation by consciously unifying, by giving themselves the means to act collectively as a single force. An action to make them mas­ters of their own destinies, to begin the con­struction of another society, a society without exploitation, without wars, without classes, without nations, without poverty: a communist society.

The Russian Revolution died, swamped, isolated, because of the defeat of the revolutionary att­empts in the rest of Europe, in particular in Germany. The Stalinist bureaucracy was its hypocritical and pitiless executioners. But that doesn't in any way change the grand­eur of this intrepid "assault on the heavens" which the Russian Revolution was. October 1917 wasn't just one revolutionary attempt amongst others. The Russian Revolution constitutes and remains - from the past to the present day - the most important revolutionary experience of the world working class.

By its length, by the number of workers who participated in it, by the degree of conscious­ness reached by these workers, by the fact that they represented the most advanced point of an international movement of workers' struggles, by the extent and the depth of the changes that they tried to put in place, the Russian Revolution constitutes the most transcendent revolutionary exp­erience of the world working class. And as such it is the richest source of lessons for the coming revolutionary struggles of the class.

 

But in order to be able to draw the lessons of a historic experience, you have to recognise from the start what kind of experience you are talking about. Was the Russian Revolution a workers' revolution? Or was it a coup d'Etat, fermented by a bourgeois party particularly adept at mani­pulating the masses? Was Stalinism the normal, ‘natural' product of this revolution or was it its executioner? Obviously the lessons you draw will be radically opposed according to the answers given to these questions.

Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is not content to militarily crush or stamp out the proletarian revolutions of the past. It has also systematically deformed their memory by giving them deformed and distorted versions: just as it completely adulterated the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 -that first great proletarian attempt to destroy the bourgeois state - by presenting it in its history books as a nationalist, patriotic, anti-Prussian movement; so it has totally disfigured the memory of the Russian Revolution.

The Stalinist ideologies ‘recognise' a prole­tarian character (although they prefer in general to call it ‘popular') to the October Revolution. But the totally disfigured version that they give the revolution has no other aim than to make people forget the dreadful repression which Stalinism unleashed against the workers and Bolsheviks who had been the revolution's protagonists; in order to try to justify what has become one of the biggest lies in history: the assimilation of state capitalism, this decadent and militarised form of capitalist exploitation, as a synonym for ‘communism'.

The Trotskyists also speak of a ‘Workers' October', but for them the Stalinist regimes still have something proletarian in them which must be defended in the name of the march towards ‘communism'.

The other forms of bourgeois ideology distort the Russian Revolution in a no less repugnant manner. Some are happy to describe it as having been a nationalist movement whose aim was to modernise Russian capitalism which hadn't, at the beginning of this century, shaken off its feudal trappings: in sum, it was a bourgeois revolution like in France in 1789, but more than a century late and ending up in a fascist-type dictatorship Others speak of October ‘17 as a workers' revolu­tion and agree with the Stalinists in describing Russia as a ‘communist' country, but do so simply to better describe the horrors of Stalinism and then to deduce that revolutionary movements in our epoch can only lead to this. Thus they intone the beliefs of all ruling classes: the revolts of the exploited can only lead either to suicide or to regimes worse than those they are claiming to fight against.

In brief, bourgeois ideologies have completed the work of the murderers of the Russian Revolu­tion by setting out to destroy the very memory of what was the greatest revolutionary proletarian attempt up till now.

Unhappily, in the revolutionary camp, amongst the proletarian political currents whose task should be to draw the lessons of past experiences in order to transform them into weapons for future battles, you also find aberrant theories on the nature of the Russian Revolution.- even if clearly their political aims are different. Thus the ‘councilists', coming from the German Left curr­ents, came to consider October and the Bolsheviks as bourgeois. Also, from within the Italian Left, the Bordigists developed the theory of the ‘dual nature' (bourgeois and proletarian) of the Russian Revolution.

These theories were the products of the defeat of the revolutionary wave in the twenties, of the confusion created in peoples' minds by the fact that the Russian Revolution didn't die like the Paris Commune, quickly and openly crushed by bourgeois reaction, but degenerated through a long, painful and complex process, ending up in the power of the bureaucracy which claimed to be the continuator of October 1917.

But even if the origin of these aberrations can be understood, they remain nonetheless a major obstacle to the reappropriation by the revolutionary class of the lessons of its key historic experience. And as such they must be combatted. This is the objective of this pamph­let which consists of two articles that appeared in the International Review of the ICC (nos 12 & 13, the former brought out at the end of 1977, the latter at the beginning of 1978 [68]). One arti­cle is a critique of ‘councilist' theories, and the other is a critique of ‘Bordigist' theories.

 

For a long time is has been necessary for the world proletariat to shake off the ideological muck with which the bourgeoisie has covered up the greatest revolutionary experience. Pro­bably it will only get to the point of reappropriating all the richness of %he lessons of this experience in the midst of the revolutionary struggle itself, when it will be confronted with the same practical questions.

It will be when the proletariat is confronted by the immediate necessity to organise itself as a united force, capable of fighting against the bourgeois state and putting forward a new form of social organisation, that it will relearn the true meaning of the Russian word ‘soviet'. It will be when workers are confronted with the task of collectively organising an armed insurrection that they will massively feel the need to possess the lessons of October 1917. And it will only be when they are confronted by such questions as knowing who exercises power, or what must be the relationship between the proletariat in arms and the state institutions which will emerge the day after the first victorious insurrections, or still more, how to react in the face of divergences between important sectors of the proleta­riat, that they will understand the real mistakes committed by the Bolsheviks (particularly in the tragedy of Kronstadt).

The failure of the Russian Revolution was in reality that of the international revolutionary wave - it was merely its most advanced point - and it confirmed that the proletarian revolution has no country except the proletarians themselves. But despite its failure, the Russian Revolution posed in practice the crucial problems which future revolutionary movements will inevitably be confronted with. In this sense, whether today they are conscious of it or not, the proletarians of tomorrow's battles will have to reappropriate its lessons.

But in order to do that they have to start by recognising this experience as THEIR experience. In order to affirm the continuity of the proleta­rian revolutionary movement, they will also have to carry out ‘the negation of the negation' - to reject all those theories which deny the prole­tarian nature of their greatest past experience.

As for the revolutionary political organisations of the class, the recognition of October is already crucial: their capacity to enrich the immediate struggles of the proletariat depends in effect on first of all understanding the historic dynamic which has for more than two centuries led to the present struggles. And this understanding will be impossible without a clear recognition of the true nature of the October Revolution.

We want to contribute to this search for an indispensable clarity by publishing this pamphlet.

ICC, October 1987.