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] [6]. 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] [7], 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] [8].  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] [9].

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)