We are publishing an appreciation of the recent telephone technicians' struggle at Movistar. This arose out of a widespread discussion amongst comrades close to the ICC. This debate was started with the contribution of one comrade; this provided the bones for this article, and others added contributions and they were incorporated into the final draft.

The role of the immediate struggles of the proletariat

The immediate struggles to defend the living conditions of the workers are one of the factors in the process of the coming to consciousness, of developing solidarity, unity and determination within the proletariat. Revolutionaries follow very closely these struggles and participate in them as far as they are able. They put lots of work into supporting them and are never dismissive of economic gains they achieve, because these are necessary for the daily survival of workers; because they result from the courage and the spirit of initiative of proletarians in asserting themselves against capital; and because they are a declaration of war against the logic of the market and the national capital.

This logic tells us we should sacrifice ourselves on the altar of the imperatives of capitalist accumulation and, therefore, that we should work harder, with less pay, agree to lay-offs, worsening conditions, the loss of social benefits and so on, so that capitalist profits can prosper and especially so that the nation – whether it be Spanish, Greek, German or Catalan - is respected in the international arena and is "recognised" for its "seal of quality".

Against such logic, in struggling to defend their living conditions, the workers highlight implicitly that human life is not for production - this is the logic of capital - but that production of use values is part of human life – that is the logic of the new communist society that the proletariat carries within itself. [1]
But to restrict ourselves to such an implicit response is not sufficient, since most of these struggles will not get results. Their main contribution comes from the lessons - often negative - linked to the historical struggle for a new society. Also, we have to consider these struggles critically to be able to develop and deepen the theoretical, organisational and moral acquisitions of the proletariat.

The role of strikes

The strike is the traditional starting point for the coming to consciousness of the workers about the reality of their situation, because it throws light on all the elements of the class struggle and the diametrically opposed interests that underpin it: the struggle against the economic attacks of capital, the perception, or at least the immediate intuition, that all employees must defend themselves and, sooner or later, begin to fight against the social relations imposed by capitalist production.

But what is the essential meaning of a strike? Formerly, during the ascendant phase of capitalism, with the whole world to conquer, there could be real and more or less lasting economic improvements for the proletariat. But even at that time, the revolutionaries insisted on the need to understand what strikes really meant, that workers learn from them, examine all the questions they raise, gain from the experience they provide in fighting together and in the strengthening of political consciousness.

Today, for a mode of production in decomposition, there is little margin for a real and lasting improvement in the situation of the workers, if any. If revolutionaries defend the self-organised strike, it is because it brings into play the best conditions for building solidarity and confidence between workers and because no other action pushes this forward as much as the widest debate, as organised mass assemblies in which every aspect of this society is subject to scrutiny through criticism and discussion.
So it is not a matter of defending the strike because it is "harmful" to this or that capitalist, because it impedes production and prevent the capitalists from filling their own pockets. For us, what is important is the debate, the assemblies, being politically independent of the state and capital, the fact that the strike pushes the workers forward, into taking control of their struggle, breaking with their individual atomisation and reconnecting with the historical methods of struggle outside of the influence of the bourgeois politics of the State.

The strike is a part of the whole of the means available to the proletarian class struggle. It combines economic struggle, political struggle and ideological struggle, all three forming a unity that nourishes proletarian consciousness.

An attempt at self-organisation

The Movistar technicians' strike, of indefinite duration, had two sides almost from the beginning: the most negative was, from what we know about it, that the strike was called by the unions, the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) and the UGT, which have been able to reinforce a strong tendency to corporatism that was very present in this strike.

However, its most encouraging and promising side was the notable effort by the workers to hold assemblies outside and separate from these major unions and to organise themselves to try to move forward. That's why we can say that the struggle had, for some time, a real prospect of self-organised proletarian struggle and a certain potential.

These assemblies express, firstly, a tendency towards unification within the working class; secondly, a battle to take control of the struggle and to wrench it free from the hands of the capitalist state organisations which, in controlling it, can only bring defeat. Thirdly, it heralds a new mode of social organisation – communism - based on the associated decisions of humanity freed from all forms of exploitation. We have been able to see that such general assemblies constituted one of the most prominent vital and dynamic elements at the time of the Indignados movement and also in the struggle at Gamonal.[2]

Every struggle should be seen in its historical and international context, because otherwise, we would be looking at them with opera glasses distorted by empiricism and immediatism, which would prevent us from seeing the broader picture. Thus, we should take into account that the struggle at Movistar comes at a historic time of great weakness of the proletariat with a loss of its class identity, characterised by a significant lack of confidence in itself as an independent social force.

This struggle is part of a series of struggles which, despite what they bring, are well below what the gravity of the situation imposed by capitalism demands. In recent years, there have only been, on the one hand, some relatively important strike movements in some companies in the Asturias (2012), in Bangladesh, China, South Africa, Vietnam, and more recently in Turkey. On the other hand, there have been occupations in the centres of some towns and cities or mass assemblies, notably with the anti-CPE movement in France (2006) and with the Indignados movement in Spain (2011), also in the course of more recent examples, but these have had weaker international echoes, in Brazil and Turkey (2013) and Peru (2015).[3]

The political and trade union forces of the bourgeoisie, in their desire to divide and counter the proletarians in struggle, oppose these two types of movement, whereas, even with their differences, they are driven by a profound unity. It is this unity, especially the effort of self-organisation, that is expressed in the struggle at Movistar.

Attempts at solidarity

We have seen attempts at solidarity. There is a strong sense of solidarity among the workers... but it does not extend to being a class expression, that is, solidarity "going outside" to workers in other sectors, and is not expressed as a practical recognition of being part of the same struggle, but as sympathy and support (which is still sincerely welcomed); so there is a significant lack of consciousness of belonging to the same world-wide class struggling for the same interests. Leftists, who in their verbiage gladly borrow the language of the workers, promote this distorted view highlighting "immediate action" by making an appeal to good old "common sense" that claims it should deal only with what is "urgent" in the narrowest and most trifling sense of the term.

The struggle itself has nonetheless revealed a remarkable effort of unification, even more commendable in the case of Movistar, a company where the nature of the work of the technicians is atomised, with no concentration in work centres, with a fragmented workforce and where many of them do not appear, on legal grounds, as workers, "working on behalf of someone", but are falsely considered to be "self-employed".[4]

The danger of the entrapment of the struggles

But the struggle has shown that the main trap was corporatism, resistance expressed in an isolated and desperate manner: this is what happened to Coca-Cola workers but also those at Panrico. There is a reaction against the major unions on close examination, but this reaction does not necessarily challenge the union logic. There has been and there is still a strong tendency in the struggles, not towards explicitly seeking unification, extension and debate inside the assemblies, but retreating and taking a stand inside the company or the industry until a judicial verdict or a hypothetical favourable agreement has been reached.

These reactions, that lead everyone to be a prisoner in his hole, his sector, his company or his corporation, have several causes. The first is clear, we just raised it: the loss of class identity that fuels a sense of emptiness, not knowing who to contact to seek solidarity, a desire to desperately cling to the imagined protective refuge of the small space and alleged "intimacy" of the company, corporation and "work mates" ...

It bears the stamp of a historical situation that we characterise as that of the decomposition of capitalism, which marks all components of society with a dangerous tendency to dislocation,  to "every man for himself ", to dispersion. As we have said in our Theses on Decomposition: “"every man for himself ", marginalisation, the atomisation of individuals, the destruction of family relationships, the exclusion of older people, the destruction of emotions and their replacement with pornography, commercialised sport and media coverage, mass gatherings of young people in the collective hysteria of song and dance, a sinister substitute for solidarity, with the social ties completely absent. All these manifestations of social putrefaction today, on a scale unknown in history, invade every pore of human society, expressing only one thing: not just the dislocation of bourgeois society, but the annihilation of every principle of collective life within a society that is deprived of any project, from any perspective, even in the short term, even the most illusory".[5]

This is fertile ground for the penetration of trade union and leftist organisations, always ready to bring workers' struggles to the "safe area" of bourgeois legality "for their own good" or "for the struggle" as a pure abstraction. In an atmosphere of isolation, of lack of reflection and debate, of lack of contact between strikers and the workers of other sectors, union and reformist logic finds its breeding ground that opens the way for organisations who seek only to control the workers and to attract their votes.
These organisations say they defend the workers, but we could see, with Syriza for example, what they do when they take on government responsibilities. But we must also understand their nature when they are not in government, when they do not stop pressing for solutions from the legal institutions of the exploiters, from the State, and above all try to prevent workers from learning, from reflecting, from debating in the heat of the struggle, and instead try to get us to entrust the solution to conflicts to the very forces that represent the mode of production that every day and everywhere lies behind these same conflicts. A significant example is that of the Trotskyist tendency 'El Militante' that wildly applauded the fact that the workers of Coca-Cola had ended the struggle by appealing to the Supreme Court to demand suspension of the closure of the plant in Fuenlabrada, chanting slogans such as ''Make the courts see justice.''

In the case of Movistar, the suspension of the strike for "other forms of struggle" was a clear statement that the struggle was over. For several weeks now, we have seen that the loss of a desire to unify and to extend the struggle has created disarray, with the entry onto the scene of 'new players' such as Cayo Lara, leader of Izquierda Unida, or Pablo Iglesias, of Podemos, although we did see a small group of workers expressing dissent through ironic interjections of the word “Presidente” during one of his speeches to a demonstration of strikers.

Perspectives

It is clear that the current struggles are still far away from achieving some key elements: what appears almost intuitively (solidarity and self-organisation) demands further elaboration to deepen what is essential: class identity, class consciousness (historical and international), the extension of the struggle, which help us to move towards the re-appropriation of revolutionary theory by the masses themselves.
The intervention against every effort to give credibility to the bourgeois state is a first requirement, against its democracy and its representative bodies that act to overcome the conflicts between the workers and their exploiters, and against trade unionist notions, which are openly reformist and belong to a bygone period, and which the leftist organisations instil into workers continually. This work is particularly pernicious in countries where the bourgeoisie has been able to equip itself with a well-oiled democratic system, with a long and deep political experience facing situations like this kind of struggle. The intervention of revolutionaries in these strikes and participation as an active factor in the coming to consciousness means a struggle against reformist conceptions and their representatives, democratic or not, which always will have an influence and a presence in the struggles of the proletariat, and which are themselves an active factor in the opposite sense – towards disintegration, dislocation and demoralisation, physical or ideological.

It is important to develop criticisms and balance sheets and to publicise them inside the struggles in expressing our solidarity, not as outside groups, but as part of the same class struggle. It is important to be present in these movements because they express the living reality of the class struggle in its immediate level; they bring us elements for deepening our theoretical work; they help us to put the immediate struggles in the context of the revolutionary struggle and to highlight the historical perspective of our class.

Refugees and other migrants wanting to come to Britain congregate in the ‘Jungle’, a shanty town near Calais. For over a decade several thousand people have been living there, or prior to that in the official Sangatte camp that was destroyed in 2002 at the request of the UK. They are there in the hope of being able to get into the UK through the Channel Tunnel. This is where Britain, like so many other countries, has built a barbed wire fence to protect its borders and keep out refugees, except that it only needs to defend the entrance to the Eurotunnel and not a land border. The refugees around Calais returned to the news over the summer when striking French ferry workers blocked the entrance to the Eurotunnel, causing queues of cars and lorries that people desperate to get to the Britain tried to climb onto. Others risked their lives trying to walk through the tunnel. Some nights up to 2,000 people were trying to get through the police lines and fencing. Although the strike and blockade has long finished the media continue to report delays on Eurotunnel and Eurostar due to migrants breaking into their terminal. The UK media in general give greater prominence to the delays than to the deaths of migrants – 13 since late June – taking such a dangerous route, and there is very much less coverage of the utter misery suffered by thousands in the camp.

The British state keeps out the “swarms”

PM David Cameron responded to the situation created by the ferry strike by talking of “swarms” of people trying to “break into Britain”, the answer being to “show that Britain is not a soft touch on asylum”. Landlords will have to check tenants’ documents proving their right to stay, and evict those living illegally - a policy already piloted in the Black Country. The withdrawal of all financial support from failed asylum seekers will be extended from adults to families with children, except for an appeal to the Home Office with evidence they are unable to leave the country. Now families with children will be forced into the kind of destitution already suffered by single adults denied asylum. Plus the government is tendering an estimated £500 million contract to return failed asylum seekers, which could include some from Calais. 12,460 were forcibly removed last year.

On 20 August home secretary Teresa May visited Calais to organise the increased security with French minister of the interior, Bernard Cazeneuve: Britain is investing in fencing, CCTV, floodlighting, and infrared detection; France is putting in extra police search teams with dogs; Eurotunnel is increasing its guards; and a new integrated control room will coordinate all this security.

According to one view common in the media, it is those who really don’t get democracy yet, having grown up under Eastern European Stalinist regimes, who do not understand their responsibilities to the refugees: “The very worst of Europe has been seen in Viktor Orban, the pocket-Putin who serves as Hungary’s prime minister. Ignorant of history, Mr Orban sees the refugees as a threat to European civilisation. His answer is to build a 175km razor wire fence. Sadly, he is not alone in such bigotry. The Slovakian government says it will accept only non-Muslim refugees. There is something truly dispiriting about former communist states recently welcomed into the EU slamming the door against refugees from other forms of tyranny.”[1] Britain’s own razor-wire response, coming from the country that boasts the “Mother of Parliaments”, and from the mouths of politicians who would never fall into any such “politically incorrect” bigotry about non-Christians or non-Europeans, makes it harder to maintain this argument, except by saying Cameron is letting down the British tradition of generosity.

Cameron has a change of rhetoric

On 3 September, when the photograph of a dead toddler appeared on the front pages, one of 12 Syrians drowned trying to reach Kos, Cameron was still saying that Britain cannot take more people fleeing from war: “we think the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that part of the world. I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees” (Guardian 3.9.15).

Shortly afterwards he announced that Britain would take a paltry 20,000 vulnerable Syrian refugees directly from the Middle Eastern countries over the next 5 years, and make use of the UK opt out of the EU system of quotas for those arriving in Greece and Italy. Last year Britain had only 31,260 asylum applications, only half the number received by France or Italy, a sixth as many as Germany, and less than Hungary!

The patriotic opposition

In fact the first Westminster politician to suggest that the UK could take some more Syrian refugees was Yvette Cooper, at the time one of the Labour leadership candidates. Pointing to the scale of the humanitarian crisis she said “we seem paralysed to respond. We cannot carry on like this. It is immoral, it is cowardly and it is not the British way. It is a test of British values, too — of whether we will again be able to reach out to the rest of the world and help as we have done in previous generations, or whether we will turn inwards and turn our backs instead.”[2] Her proposal for help was similar to the prime minister’s – 10,000 distributed throughout the country.

The winner of the leadership contest, Jeremy Corbyn, sounds even more positive: “There’s a very large number of people going over to Calais to take aid and support to them … Our health service, our education service, much of our industrial development in Britain, has been greatly enhanced by the work done by people who have made their homes here, paid their taxes here, worked very hard here…”[3]

In fact, Britain has been welcoming or resistant to immigration according to the needs not of the migrants or refugees, but of the national capital. After World War 2 immigration was greatly encouraged to make up for a shortage of labour. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, on the other hand, when a huge mass of Asians were expelled from East Africa, it was Labour home secretary Callaghan who rushed through the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1968 so that people with British passports no longer had the right to settle in the UK unless they could show a personal connection with the country. Nor should we forget how the last Labour government campaigned about “bogus” asylum seekers. Right now Britain’s population is expected to rise by more than 10% in the next 20 years, and less than 15% of firms have difficulty filling vacancies, so it has less need of immigration. Germany, by contrast, which has been much more welcoming to refugees, has a falling population and more than 45% of firms report having difficulty filling their vacancies (The Economist 19.9.15).

Capitalism is the problem

When we look at the number of refugees fleeing war, or even the economic migrants who are seeking somewhere to earn a living, we are presented with a barrage of propaganda and opinions that can be roughly divided between those that say we have to defend what we have, and those who say since we are better off we should be generous with our resources when others are in such a desperate situation. The former is represented by the present conservative government as well as UKIP and similar right wing populist organisations in Europe eg Pegida in Germany, although as the Labour government showed in 1968 they can carry out the same policies. The latter more welcoming attitude is today, more or less weakly, expressed by the Labour Party. However the 1951 Conservative government carried on the same policy of encouraging immigration as the previous Atlee government, because it was required. Both these views take it for granted that we are fortunate to live in stable, free, democratic European countries, surrounded by these dangerous unstable regions that threaten us, and then put forward a policy to cope within the system as it is.

As we show in the series of articles on the problem of refugees starting in this issue (page 4 and 5) capitalism is continually causing both economic migration and waves of refugees from imperialist war. It is the same capitalist system that has created both the better conditions in Europe and the wars elsewhere, just as it was responsible for WW2 and the waves of refugees that followed, and profoundly affected Europe. There is no way out within capitalism so we cannot afford to get drawn into either side in this campaign. It is perfectly true that some of the more xenophobic comments are completely revolting, such as Sun journalist Katie Hopkins likening refugees to cockroaches. Much more dangerous is the hypocrisy of the politicians who pretend compassion for refugees when it suits them while equally prepared to put up fences or change the law to keep them out when they are not needed. No less dangerous is the attempt to turn individual acts of kindness and solidarity shown to refugees, whether in Calais or arriving at German railway stations, into a symbol of patriotism: “we British” are kind hearted, “we Germans” understand the problems faced by refugees. General feelings of solidarity with migrants and refugees can only have a future if they become part of a growing class solidarity among all those that capitalism exploits and oppresses.

Alex  3/9/15

On the 10th October, 2015, the ICC is organising a day-long public meeting [11]in London. In order to facilitate discussion, we are publishing the article that will form the basis of the afternoon presentation. We hope this will give a flavour of the topic of the meeting and also give participants the opportunity to prepare comments and counter-arguments in advance.

1915, 1945: the development of internationalist opposition to imperialist war

1915, 1945: two rather contrasting anniversaries. On 1915, the ruling class and its mouthpieces don’t have anything like as much to say as they did on 1914. The unutterable slaughter of the Somme might come in for a mention: regrettable for the right, but part of the necessary sacrifice for king, country, or resistance to German aggression; for the left, proof of the futility of this particular imperialist war.

1945 is also an anniversary of horrors: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the opening of the Nazi death camps. But on this particular imperialist war, both left and right are in agreement. After the scandal of not singing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial, Jeremy Corbyn hastened to say, in a statement issued by Labour HQ, that his parents, “like that whole generation….showed tremendous courage and determination to defeat fascism”. This was a Good War, not only toppling Hitler, but also bringing us post-war “socialism” in the shape of a Labour Government and the NHS.

For revolutionaries, these dates have a rather different significance. 1915 was the beginning of proletarian resistance to the imperialist massacre, opening the road to the revolutions of 1917 and 1918 and ultimately forcing the bourgeoisie to bring the war to an end. This resistance was expressed both through mass actions such as demonstrations against the war in Berlin and strikes on the Clyde, and through the revival of the political organisations of the working class, which had been hit hard by the shameful betrayal of mainstream social democracy at the outbreak of the war[1].

1945, by contrast, was a year that indeed brought horror and not hope, because it was a low point in the defeat of the international working class after its revolutionary attempts at the end of the first war. The “victory over fascism” in 1945 also meant the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution in the east and the democratic counter-revolution in the west.  

In this discussion, we want to recall what has made it possible for revolutionaries today to defend a proletarian position on both theses wars and on all the innumerable wars that have ravaged the world since 1945. In other words, we want to focus on the combat waged by internationalist political organisations in the two world wars, which was certainly connected to the mass struggles of the class, but which also has its own dynamic and importance.

In 1915 there were two highly significant moments in the revival of marxist political organisation: the Zimmerwald conference, and the publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet.

The Zimmerwald conference

Zimmerwald is a small town in Switzerland, and it was host to a small conference: 38 delegates from 12 countries - all the internationalists transported there in a couple of coaches, as Trotsky joked.  And even among these few, only a small minority defended a really revolutionary position against the war. The “classic” centrist tendency, incarnated in the likes of Kautsky and the future leaders of the USPD, was on the right at Zimmerwald[2]. Kautsky had argued that the International, which had indeed collapsed in 1914, was not an instrument that could be used in war, but only in peacetime, so for him and his ilk the priority was to call for peace, appealing to the good sense of the world’s rulers rather than the class struggle. The centre here was represented rather by Trotsky and by Luxemburg’s comrades in the Spartacus group, who were for the methods of class struggle to end the war, but who also called for peace without annexations as the goal of the struggle. Only the Bolsheviks around Lenin and some of the other German groups stood for revolutionary methods and revolutionary goals: transformation of the imperialist war into civil war, the destruction of capitalism as the source of all wars.

Analysing imperialism

The result of the fierce debates at Zimmerwald was a manifesto to the proletarians of the world which was in many ways a compromise between the left and the centre, since it did not take up the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary slogans. Nevertheless its ringing denunciation of the war and its call for class action against it still enabled it to articulate and politicise the anti-war sentiments that were growing among the mass of the working class. And within two years the theoretical standpoint of the left was to be put into practice by the workers of Russia, whose revolt against the war led them to seize political power through the soviets.

But if Luxemburg lagged behind Lenin on the question of the goals of anti-war action, she had leapt ahead of him when it came to providing a more general theoretical understanding of the origins of the war, and its consequences for certain key elements of the revolutionary programme. In a series of works published around 1915 or the year after, all the revolutionaries were agreed – unlike the former “pope of marxism”, Kautsky – that imperialism was not a policy, whether good or bad, freely decided on by capitalism, but a historical necessity, a whole new epoch in the life of the bourgeois economy, which had unified the planet under the reign of capital, but in doing so had brought not peace and harmony but war and catastrophe. Lenin’s Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy were both important landmarks in the elaboration of this outlook. But just before the war Luxemburg had already published The Accumulation of Capital, which went deeper than either of them in locating capitalism’s imperialist drive in the historical conditions of accumulation, and it was on this theoretical foundation that Luxemburg, writing from prison, was able to put forward the most thorough-going analysis of the motives behind the different imperialist antagonists in the push towards war. And at the same time she was able to draw the most radical conclusions from an understanding that imperialism “is not the creation of any one or any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will." (The Junius Pamphlet). In sum: all nations are imperialist: every small nation acts under the aegis of a larger power but has its own imperialist appetites. Hence the epoch in which revolutionaries could support struggles for national independence was over once and for all. Even then this profound breakthrough was not entirely without limitations: Lenin, who continued to hold on to the old slogan of the “rights of nations to self-determination” criticised the Junius Pamphlet for its curious concessions to the idea of national defence, which he understood was impossible in the context of this war. But for the whole of the coming century, which was to witness an endless proliferation of proxy imperialist conflicts fought under the slogans of national liberation, it was above all Luxemburg’s approach that has made it possible for revolutionary minorities to maintain an internationalist stance against these wars.

The struggle for internationalism needs political organisation

The example of Zimmerwald demonstrates that, for revolutionaries, the struggle against war takes place at three distinct but interconnected levels:

• Organisational: the betrayal of the majority of the old parties demanded that the minority of internationalists had to work as an organised fraction, to work either for the expulsion of the traitors or, when this proved impossible, as it did in the majority of cases, to fight to win over the maximum number of healthy elements and to prepare the ground for a new party, a new International. This demanded a relentless battle against centrism and opportunism, against the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. Thus the Zimmerwald left in particular was the driving force behind the formation of the Third International in 1919. In a situation of war or impending revolution, the heroism of individual militants like Luxemburg, Liebknecht, John Mclean or Sylvia Pankhurst was certainly vital, but could never be enough on its own. It could only have a real meaning in the context of collective organisation around a clear political programme;

• Theoretical: the necessity to understand the characteristics of the new epoch demands a patient work of theoretical elaboration, an ability to step back and reassess the whole situation in the light of the past and of the perspectives for the future. Hence Lenin, at the outbreak of war, “retreating” to the Zurich library to read Hegel in order to grasp the dialectic of social change, which can make what was valid in one period entirely reactionary in another. This reinforced Lenin’s ability to reply to the traitors and opportunists who used Marx’s words from a different period to justify, for example, their advocacy of a war to defeat Russian Czarism. The work of Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek and others enabled the re-emerging political movement of the class to understand that a new epoch had dawned, one in which the class struggle would take on new forms and new methods to achieve directly revolutionary objectives;

• Propaganda and agitation: armed with a lucid theoretical framework, the intervention of revolutionaries in the new situation could avoid unthinking activism and make thought-out, concrete proposals to fortify the resistance against war and the struggle for revolution. Hence Lenin’s study of the marxist theory of the state in State and Revolution underpinned the Bolshevik slogan “all power to the soviets”.  The regroupment of revolutionaries into political organisations enabled them to develop their propaganda and agitation through the medium of a regular press and mass-produced leaflets, and to speak in the workers’ assemblies and councils not as individuals representing only themselves but on behalf of a definite political tendency within the class movement.  

The dark road to 1945

In 1915 the working class was beginning to throw off the heavy weight of its ideological defeat in 1914, which had been prepared by decades of growing opportunism in the movement. By 1917 the period was directly revolutionary. This rapid shift in the historic course was, however, also reversed very rapidly: by 1923, the post-war revolutionary wave was over and the Russian revolution was sinking into isolation and internal degeneration. By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 30s the counter-revolution was triumphant all along the line: Stalinism in Russia, fascism in Germany and Italy were its most evident forms, but as the world lurched towards another war, the ideology of democracy and anti-fascism was to prove indispensable to the bourgeoisie in mobilising the working class for a second world war within 20 years.

Class struggle did not cease during this dark period, and there was still a proletarian political opposition to the advancing counter-revolution. But it was extremely weak, facing police repression and endless defections and betrayals. It was weak above all at the theoretical/political level, with the majority of forces within Trotskyism and anarchism more and more succumbing to the siren calls of anti-fascism and thus incapable of standing against the march towards war. Rather than seriously examining the balance of forces between the classes and the programmatic changes demanded by the new epoch, Trotskyism in particular threw itself into an unprincipled quest for growth at any cost, culminating in the formation of an abortive Fourth International in 1938.

This process of degeneration left the clearest elements of the political movement – the heirs of the left communists who had first begun to recognise the decline of the Russian revolution and the opportunist course of the Third International – extremely isolated. The capacity of the groups of the German/Dutch left to maintain political activity was further undermined by the drift towards “councilism”, the denial of the necessity for political organisation – in effect a concession to anarchist ideology. This mean that the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left was almost alone in advocating a course of activity appropriate to a highly unfavourable historical juncture, where the priority was to draw the lessons of past defeats and prepare the programmatic basis of the party of the future.

The most decisive test for the political milieu of the day came with the war in Spain in 1936. The initial military coup led by Franco in July was halted by a real working class uprising, but this was almost immediately led onto the terrain of anti-fascism and the defence of the bourgeois republic; with the intervention of the fascist powers and Stalin’s USSR, the conflict was also transformed into a rehearsal for the next imperialist world war. The Trotskyists and anarchists, with a few exceptions, threw themselves into the anti-fascist camp, leaving a minority of left communists denouncing the war for what it truly was: not a civil war, but an imperialist war, not a revolution, but a new step in the world-wide counter-revolution. The Italian Fraction distinguished itself by its ability to situate the war in its real historical and global context, and to remain loyal to the needs of the class struggle against both capitalist camps. And even then the pressures of the period did not spare the Fraction, which suffered a serious split soon after the war began, with a minority enrolling in the militias of the POUM in Spain.

The outbreak of the world war in 1939 increased these pressures, not only because of the brutal repression that revolutionaries faced under conditions of military occupation, but also because the enormous force of imperialist ideology strengthened confusions within their own ranks: the Italian Fraction, for example, was thrown into disarray when the war began because some its leading figures had developed the revisionist “theory of the war economy” which in the late 30s suddenly began to argue that world war was not on the agenda, and, when the war in fact began, insisted that it proved the social disappearance of the proletariat and thus the impossibility of any organised political activity. This theory was vigorously opposed within the Fraction and in particular by comrades in France who managed to regroup and carry out organised, clandestine work in both the “Vichy” zone and the area directly occupied by the German army. This work involved both internal debates about the theoretical problems posed by the war, and political propaganda calling for class struggle against both warring blocs, with no concessions to the patriotic ideology of the Resistance.

The definitive betrayal of internationalism by the Trotskyist organisations and many of the anarchists had already been prepared by the events in Spain, although there were some important minorities in both who rejected the ideology of the anti-fascist war: for the Trotskyists, the Stinas group in Greece, Munis in Spain and Mexico, the RKD in Austria and so on. In Britain, while the Trotskyists almost unanimously declared for participation in the war to defend democracy and the “workers’ state” in Russia, small groups of revolutionaries from the councilist and anarchist traditions stuck to their internationalist principles.

Before and during the war, many revolutionaries had clung to the hope that the end of the war would bring about another revolutionary situation, as in 1917. And indeed there were some important class movements towards the end of the war, most notably in the factories of northern Italy in 1943, which led the ruling class to drop the Mussolini regime like a hot potato. This created a wave of short-sighted optimism among revolutionaries, especially comrades of the Italian left, many of whom returned from exile to join the Partito Comunista Internazionalista which was formed in considerable haste from different oppositional groupings.

In a situation of considerable confusion it was again the French Fraction of the Communist Left (constituted in 1942) which was best able to carry on the political tradition of the Italian Fraction, now dissolved into the PCInt. Having initially thought that the strikes in Italy announced a change in the historic course, they soon understood that the bourgeoisie had learned the lessons of 1917 and was well-prepared to prevent any re-run of the revolution at the end of the Second World War. The terror bombing of German cities, Churchill’s policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice” in 1943 – halting the advance of the allied armies from the south of Italy to allow the Nazis to crush the class movement in the north – expressed the ruthless determination of the bourgeoisie to wipe out the least sign of resistance to its rule in the potentially dangerous closing phase of the war. 

The French Fraction was able to understand that the formation of a party – in one single country, and in conditions where the defeat of the working class was being further exacerbated both by repression and the ideological poison of “Liberation” and the “victory of democracy” – was an opportunist error that could only result in a programmatic regression in relation to the gains made by the Fraction in the previous period. This was demonstrated by the concessions made by the new party – especially after the fusion with the groups in the south led by Bordiga in 1945 – on such vital issues as the nature of Russia, the trade union and national questions, and even electoralism.

Against the activist attitudes of the new party, the French group (which took the name Gauche Communiste de France following the split with a tendency that aligned itself with the Italian party) understood that the need for theoretical elaboration was still paramount, and in the post war period produced a considerable body of work analysing such issues as the function of war in the epoch of capitalist decadence, the development of state capitalism as a worldwide phenomenon, the role of the party, and the problem of the state in the period of transition to communism. 

Obviously the scale of the activity of revolutionaries during and immediately after the Second World War, and the perspectives for the growth of its influence within the class, was considerably reduced in comparison with the groups that met at Zimmerwald in 1915 and were to meet again at the formation of the Third International in 1919. But the essential dimensions of this activity – organisation, theory, intervention – were as relevant in 1945 as they had been 30 years earlier.

Internationalism today

One of the clearest signs that capitalism has outlived its usefulness for humanity is the near permanence of war over the last century. Even before the end of the Second World War, the battle lines for the Third were already forming: the primary motive for the atom bomb being dropped on an already defeated Japan was to issue a warning against the imperialist ambitions of the USSR in the east. The ‘Cold War’ was mainly made up of a series of proxy wars between the new superpowers, but as we said earlier they were often fought under the banner of national independence. A number of the groups of the communist left today were born in the period of the Vietnam war, and they found themselves having to fight against the dominant trend, among those who considered themselves to be revolutionaries, which advocated support for North Vietnam as the “little guy” against the US bully, when in fact Vietnam was backed by the “big guys” of Russian and Chinese imperialism, and this “national liberation” struggle was in reality yet another inter-imperialist confrontation. In the period after the break-up of the two imperialist blocs, marked by a more chaotic series of conflicts, the need for a principled and coherent position on war is as vital as ever: the recent rush of elements within the anarchist milieu to line up with Kurdish nationalism (and the USA) against ISIS in Rojava is proof of that. But a principled and coherent position can only be maintained and developed on the basis of the acquisitions we have inherited from the revolutionaries of the past, those who faced the ultimate test of loyalty to the proletarian cause.

Amos

An ex-member of the ICC, Devrim, who left some three years ago, has subsequently made a number of criticisms of our organisation.

Devrim’s ‘My experience in the ICC’ first appeared on the anarchist web forum Libcom in 20121. It was, by definition, a personal account , based on impressions and anecdotes of life in the ICC rather than a general critique of the ICC’s political principles as a whole. Since there can be no argument about personal taste we tended to let the criticisms lie, particularly as Devrim declared he did not want to engage in a debate about this account. He had in any case left the organisation without politically justifying his departure.

We now believe that these personal criticisms need a reply because the issues they raise have taken on a general interest today, when the fundamental conditions of revolutionary militancy are being put in question, including amongst those who consider themselves part of the ‘Communist Left.’

We have come to realise that his personal account of the ICC is supposed to be a self-standing political analysis itself: a personal interpretation is seen as sufficient to judge the ICC to be an organisation that has outlived itself.

The life and death of revolutionary organisations

Devrim’s critique has thus led him to repeat on several occasions the belief that the ICC will die. In an email to a member of the ICC in 2013 he wrote, in reply to the criticism that he should be taking up the political principles of the ICC:

‘I think that the point that you have to address the political positions of an organisation belongs to the thinking of a bygone age. The ICC will die, and it will, not because people engage with and refute its political positions, but precisely for the opposite reason; because people can’t be bothered to do even this. Of course this points to a more general problem of depoliticisation within society, but to an outside observer, it would seem that the ICC is actively trying to complete the circle of its isolation.’

The ICC will die, the argument goes, not because its political positions or principles are wrong or have become outmoded and need to be replaced by those that correspond to the evolution of the needs and objectives of the working class struggle. It will pass away instead from a general disinterest in political positions themselves. The failure of the ICC to adapt to this disinterest and the current boredom with politics in the population and even amongst would-be revolutionaries, and to insist by contrast on defending and elaborating its political principles, will lead to its complete isolation and demise. This is the essential thinking of Devrim.

In his account ‘My Experience…..’ Devrim, true to his vision, does not ‘address the political positions’ of the ICC, but gives a series of mostly negative impressions and opinions about life in the organisation, on its process of integration of new members, on its mode of centralisation and on its debates. We will come on to some of these questions in a later part of the article. But first we want to look at how important political positions and principles are in the marxist concept of revolutionary organisation.

In the past marxist revolutionary parties and organisations have often died, even at a relatively young age. The most obvious example is the sudden collapse of the 2nd International in 1914, after its main constituent parties betrayed their internationalist political principles, joined their imperialist bourgeoisies, and helped send millions of workers to the mutual slaughter of the trenches. The 3rd International also perished after the adoption of the slogan of ‘Socialism in one country’, as it became an instrument of the Russian state and prepared the working class for the imperialist carnage of the 2nd World War. 2

In these two major instances of the marxist revolutionary movement, organisations disappeared because of a progressive abandonment of political principle, in particular the most important one for the working class - international unity and action in the face of imperialist war or in face of their preparation. These marxist organisations therefore died (at least as far as working class interests were concerned) not as a result of a failure to adapt to the general mood of society, but because they did adapt to it and gave into the pressure of the imperialist bourgeoisie and abandoned proletarian political positions. So we think the reality runs diametrically counter to Devrim’s logic. In fact, if we use revolutionary history as a guide, the ICC would be more likely to disappear if it abandoned or lessened the importance of its political positions as a way of accommodating itself to the prevailing disinterest in politics and failed to stand firm and theoretically develop these and other fundamental principles out of a fear of isolation. So we draw the opposite conclusion to Devrim.

If the marxist revolutionary movement has known periods of betrayal and organisational death like those just mentioned, it can also offer magnificent examples from these periods where marxist minorities suffered the most brutal isolation in order to uphold political positions and create a life-line to new revolutionary organisations. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who went to prison (hard labour in the case of Liebknecht) and were later murdered because of their internationalist fight against the First World War, helped to inspire the October Revolution and the formation of the Communist International . Or the hardly known militants of the Communist Left, who risked (and often fell victim to) the terror of the Gestapo or the Partisans, in order to defend internationalist principles in the Second World War, keeping alive a tradition that we uphold today.

Today’s revolutionary organisations would hardly merit the appellation ‘Communist Left’ if they weren’t able to withstand the relatively soft conditions of isolation that they can experience today in the face of the general distaste for politics. Surely they can bear the ridicule and ostracism that can be directed to revolutionary militants today, when one measures the terrible conditions their antecedents have faced in the past?

The ability to preserve and develop revolutionary political thought in the face of often extreme isolation is an important measure of whether a revolutionary organisation deserves to exist.

The ICC therefore would deserve to die as an authentic current of the Communist Left … if it followed the criticism of Devrim and underestimated the importance of political positions as ‘the thinking of a bygone age’. The ICC thrives on the ability to hold onto and develop the political positions that are relevant to the working class in the current and coming period. We will come on to the present conditions of working class struggle below. First some general observations about the importance of political positions.3

The proletarian revolution is political

Marx, following Aristotle, the Ancient Greek philosopher, defined man as a political animal:

“Man is a political animal in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualised only within society”.

(Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1857)

By extension the term ‘political’ has a general meaning (and therefore goes beyond the description of the corrupt machinations of the parties of the bourgeois state): man’s attempt to determine the direction of society as a whole and thus his own future.

In the long history of class-divided society the exploited masses have been completely excluded from its political direction. However in capitalism, the last form of class society, the working class has been able to force itself onto the political stage and form political parties. This capacity to express its interests in a political form is ultimately a result of the fact that unlike previous exploited classes the working class is a revolutionary class that bears within itself an entirely new mode of production to replace capitalism.

The working class struggle in capitalism, when fought to a successful conclusion, leads to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This supreme political act, the coming to political power of the working class, is the condition for the ultimate establishment of a classless society - communism. The development of the self-consciousness of the proletariat is the recognition of its historical/political interests as a class, expressed by, though not exclusively, the formation of political parties. The working class, having an innate need to take society into socialism has to unify around these political definitions of what it is, and what it must do, as a class. Political positions are the constituent elements of the platform of the revolutionary political organisation - what distinguishes the perspective of the working class from the objectives of the bourgeoisie, and other classes in society. The precise nature of this political party, when it can be formed, the role it plays in the proletarian seizure of power, etc., has evolved dramatically in the course of the last two centuries. But the marxist conception of the revolutionary organisation as a fundamentally political entity remains.

This is all the more crucial considering that the working class, unlike previous revolutionary classes, cannot build up an economic power base in existing society, so the theoretical elaboration and adoption of proletarian political positions becomes all the more vital.4 The formulation of political positions must for this same reason precede the actual seizure of political power.

The working class therefore is not simply an economic or sociological category within bourgeois society, an exploited class like the slaves or the serfs, but above all a historical class with a revolutionary purpose and therefore a political class in the deepest sense of the word.

The disdain for the central importance of politics in the working class struggle, and in the organisations which claim to defend its interests, cannot however avoid or escape political pressures, since the struggle between the classes over the direction of society is invariably a political fight that is imposed on the combatants whether they like it or not. Apoliticism, despite its illusions, inevitably becomes political… but not necessarily in a good way. Rather, because of its lack of clear and developed proletarian political positions and principles, the apolitical approach comes under the sway of the dominant political forces of the ruling class.

This is nowhere better exemplified than in the history of anarchism and its attempted revolutionary apoliticism. In the great political tests of history anarchists have in the main been unable to resist the pressures of the politics of the ruling class and capitulated to them, most famously by Peter Kropotkin in the First World War:

Kropotkin, Tcherkesoff and Jean Grave were the most eager defenders of France: "Don't let these heinous conquerors wipe out the Latin civilisation and the French people again... Don't let them impose on Europe a century of militarism" (Letter of Kropotkin to J.Grave, 2 September1914). It was in the name of the defence of democracy against Prussian militarism that they supported the Sacred Union: "German aggression was a threat - executed - not only against our hopes for emancipation but against all human evolution. That's why we, anarchists, we, anti-militarists, we enemies of war, we passionate partisans for peace and fraternity between peoples, we line up on the side of the resistance and we have not thought of separating our fate from that of the rest of the population" (Manifesto of Sixteen (the number of signatories) 28 February 1916).”5

The main representatives of anarchism lined up behind the politics of the ruling class, as did the opportunist leadership of the main Social Democratic parties. The latter abandoned the internationalist political positions of the working class; the former, largely dismissive of these positions, found that their own nice-sounding but empty phrases about democracy and emancipation, human evolution, against war, for peace and fraternity, could be recuperated by the imperialist politics of the bourgeoisie.6

The scorn for political positions amongst revolutionaries can also be harmful in other, less decisive periods, like today’s, tending to reflect, rather than counter, the present disorientation of working class.

Marxist political positions and the current period

Devrim says that there is a problem of depoliticisation in society. True, as far as it goes. But what are the particular characteristics of de-politicisation today which affect the working class and its tiny revolutionary minorities?

Since the resurgence of class struggle on a historical scale in 1968, ending the long counter revolutionary epoch, the working class has found it very difficult to develop its struggle onto its own political terrain. It has remained largely on the defensive, and under the sway of social democracy, Stalinism and trade unionism. The ruling class, for its part has been able to phase in its growing economic crisis, and manoeuvre politically and intelligently against the threat from below. The resulting stalemate between the two main class adversaries in capitalist society has opened up a period of the social decomposition of capitalism, which has led to a profound disorientation within the working class.7

The definite opening of the period of decomposition was marked by the collapse of the USSR, and this has been deliberately used by the ruling class to reinforce this disorientation. The enormous ideological campaigns by the international bourgeoisie since 1989 about the “death of communism”, of “marxism”, and “the end of the working class” as a political force in society are not accidental. Marxist minorities like the ICC, even if they were not tainted in any way by Stalinism, nevertheless have suffered the full force of this attempt by the ruling class to de-politicise the working class, and thus use the social decomposition of its system to inflict a profound blow on its class adversary.

Devrim in his personal testimony ‘My experience…’ expresses agreement with the ICC’s analysis of the social decomposition of capitalism which we have briefly outlined above:

"Personally I think that a lot of what it has to say is a good description of the new period that began with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it has to be understood also as a way to justify the mistakes present in the stuff about the years of truth" (a reference to the analysis the ICC had made to describe the stakes of the 1980s).

Devrim doesn’t elaborate on what parts of the Theses on Decomposition he agrees with or what parts that he doesn’t disagree with, or the nature of the mistakes we are supposed to have made in the analysis of the 80s, nor does he explain what is faulty in the analysis of the Theses on Decomposition which apparently proves they are a way of justifying this earlier analysis.8

Nevertheless we can infer that Devrim doesn’t follow the most important conclusions of the Theses that this new period would create new difficulties for the proletariat and therefore its revolutionary organisations:

“13) In fact, we must be especially clear on the danger of decomposition for the proletariat’s ability to raise itself to the level of its historic task. Just as the unleashing of the imperialist war at the heart of the ‘civilised’ world was ‘a bloodletting which [may have] mortally weakened the European workers’ movement’, which ‘threatened to bury the perspectives for socialism under the ruins piled up by imperialist barbarism’ by ‘cutting down on the battlefield (...) the best forces (...) of international socialism, the vanguard troops of the whole world proletariat’ (Rosa Luxemburg, The crisis in Social-Democracy), so the decomposition of society, which can only get worse, may in the years to come cut down the best forces of the proletariat and definitively compromise the perspective of communism. This is because, as capitalism rots, the resulting poison infects all the elements of society, including the proletariat" (Theses on Decomposition).

Devrim hasn’t drawn from this analysis the conclusion that the revolutionary organisation, as an emanation of the working class, must resist this process of de-politicisation and explore in the deepest theoretical way all the implications of the new period for the proletariat as a political class to prepare for its future reawakening, which is still possible in spite of the negative weight of decomposition.

He rather draws the opposite conclusion: if society and the working class have in this period been de-politicised, revolutionaries should adapt to this trend to reduce or obliterate the significance of the historic interests of the proletariat, and thus reduce their preoccupation with its related political positions and theory and adjust their language to suit. But wouldn’t this be a return to the worn-out fashions and muddled theory of anarchistic apoliticism?

We should remember that this trend to de-politicisation in the working class today is not permanent nor complete, nor has the putrefaction of capitalism reached its ultimate conclusion. The contradictions of world capitalism will continue to oblige the working class to think again in political terms no matter how difficult and lengthy such a process of reawakening may prove.

Which is why there continue to be a small minority of individuals who are attracted to marxist politics. So we don’t think Devrim speaks for all people or all ‘outside observers’ of the ICC who he suggests are all repelled or bored by political positions.

It would be tragic if the revolutionary organisation failed today to meet the challenge of this trend, albeit still minuscule, towards working class political positions, and failed to give the latter a historic context, a global consistency and coherence, and their deepest theoretical basis.

In this sense Devrim’s prediction of the demise of the ICC because of its preoccupation with proletarian political principles, expresses instead, in his own way, the present trend of decomposing capitalism, toward the destruction of class consciousness and consequently of the revolutionary minorities who are trying to preserve and enrich it.

Politics and the internal life of the marxist revolutionary organisation

Devrim’s personal account ‘My Experience in the ICC’ doesn’t address the political principles of the organisation, its platform, and touches only very briefly on certain key ICC analytical texts like the Theses on Parasitism and the Theses on Decomposition.

This belittling of the framework of the existence of the ICC is a logical consequence of his idea, expressed in the email to an ICC member which we quoted at the beginning of this article, that the addressing of political positions of the platform expresses the thinking of a bygone age. Instead Devrim’s memoir focuses on his experience of the internal life of the ICC. Here again he doesn’t address the political principles behind the internal functioning of the ICC, but bases his critiques on impressions and personal anecdotes and hearsay evidence (such as ‘a member of the central organs told me….’ or ‘I’ve heard of cases where integration took years’ etc)9.

Nevertheless a number of basic themes emerge from his critical account which would be of general interest to discuss. We will look at three of them and then reply:

1) The ICC’s conditions of membership are too tight, and the process of integrating new members is too long and exhaustive.

“The process of joining the ICC is a drawn out and tedious one. ….. Basically to join the ICC you have to agree with the platform and statutes. I have heard of incidences within the ICC when this process has taken years. With us it was quicker, but still a very long extended process….

…..it seems that the ICC actively tries to avoid recruiting10 new people by making it as difficult to join as possible. The feeling that I got was that the centre felt that we had been integrated too quickly, and that part of the problem was that we hadn't agreed with them on certain issues before joining, particularly the 'Theses on Parasitism', but also many others. This presents a dichotomy for the ICC because although officially membership relies upon adherence to the platform and statutes, the desired level of political agreement is actually much higher. When we were originally discussing the platform, there were numerous 'supplementary' texts that it was also suggested that we discuss. My feeling is that in the future the ICC will insist on even more of these texts, which will have the dual effect of not only making it more difficult to recruit people but also mean that there are less fresh ideas within the ICC itself.

2) The ICC is ‘too highly centralised’

“The ICC sees itself as a single internationally centralised organisation, and not as a collection of different national sections. This said the amount of intervention of the central organs into the everyday running of the various sections seemed to me to be not just excessive, but absolutely overbearing.

On the subject of the relationship between the members and the organisation, I feel that the one that exists within the ICC serves to diminish the initiative of the individual members, and also of the sections by encouraging an organisational culture, which, in my opinion, is too highly centralised.

Despite what I would consider an extremely high level of political agreement as a criteria for membership, it still seems to me that in the ICC the orders come from the top, and are transmitted downwards. This process, I feel, acts to discourage initiative coming from the membership of the organisation as a whole and despite the ICC's protests to the contrary tends to mirror the hierarchical relations prevalent in society as a whole”.

3) There is too much internal discussion in the ICC, demanding too much political commitment….

“There is so much 'debate' within the ICC that it tends to make any real discussion impossible.

This leads to a problem where just to keep up with the internal business of the ICC requires an amount of time which I would imagine that most people in political organisations put into their entire political activity.

…..

Everything must be discussed endlessly internally before it can be presented to the outside

…..

I think that it presents the impression that the ICC is composed of a bunch of robots who all parrot the same line. However, true or untrue this may be, it is certainly an impression held by many outside the ICC, which the ICC does very little to dispel. The second is that the ICC generates an immense volume of texts, many of which, as has already been discussed, don't even get read by all of their own members. Surely there must be some people out there who might be interested in some of them”.

…..while the theory of the ICC is ‘too coherent’.

“The theory of the ICC is an impressive body of work, more so because of its deep coherence. It all fits together perfectly with every block having its place in the entire structure. Certainly for those looking for theoretical coherence it can seem very attractive, especially for new groups, as we were at the time, the adopting of a theoretical whole in one go can seem deeply attractive rather than going through the painstaking theoretical work that is the alternative. The problem is though that it is a house of cards where each part is dependent on the others to stop the entire edifice from collapsing.

Taken as a whole, if you strip out the disparaging personal impressions and derogatory metaphors and quite a few fibs in his personal account, Devrim is criticising the ICC for being too much of a revolutionary political organisation: the required political agreement for being a member is too high, it is too centralised on an international scale, it has too much internal theoretical debate, it demarcates itself too much from other political tendencies; it demands too much political passion from its members; and finally it is too theoretically coherent.

Altogether this is too complimentary to a political organisation! The history of the ICC shows it has had many difficulties. Nevertheless, despite all the mistakes and insufficiencies of the ICC, for a revolutionary organisation to be able to hold onto, for 40 years, a lineage from the marxist left (in the Communist League, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Internationals and the Communist Left itself); to provide an extensive analysis of the historic period (the decadence of capitalism) as well as capture the main features of its last phase of decomposition; to provide a platform which outlines the communist perspective in these conditions; to maintain independence from the bourgeoisie including from its extreme left wing; to furnish regular analyses of the evolving international situation in its dimensions of the economic crisis, the imperialist conflicts and the class struggle; to intervene with one voice across continents (despite its small numerical size); to generate the level of internal discussion needed to present its debates in a clear way to the outside; to survive and prosper from internal political crises…. all this at least shows that the preoccupation with political principles tends to sustain a revolutionary organisation rather than lead to its demise.

But this political tenacity is not our exclusive achievement. In the end the capacity the ICC has shown is a reflection of the latent potential in the working class as a revolutionary political class, its capacity to become highly conscious of its historic goals and to unify around these interests in the face of all the obstacles that have been and will be put in its way.

Nevertheless it’s these very political capacities which Devrim thinks are antiquated and will lead to the demise of the ICC, a fate which he implies should be accelerated. Principled politics supposedly destroy individual and local initiatives, discourage the development of fresh ideas from such initiatives, and isolates the organisation from outside sources of inspiration and thus prevents growth. In short the ICC restricts personal liberty, the individual freedom necessary for a vibrant and growing organisation as Devrim puts it. The integration process of new members, the role of the central organs, the framework of internal debate, and its theoretically coherent goals and its attitude to other parts of the political milieu, are, in a word, authoritarian.

Individual political freedom, bourgeois and proletarian

In order to answer this false idea that marxist revolutionary political organisation restricts the freedom of the individual, we need to try and clarify a few questions in order to give a certain coherence to the problem.

The desire for freedom, for the ability to shape one’s own destiny and be true to oneself is one of the oldest human needs, an intrinsic one for a species which has the capacity for self-consciousness and which must live communally. The interplay between the innermost desires of the individual and the needs of others has always been a fundamental aspect of human existence.

For a large part of pre-capitalist human history, dominated by classes and the exploitation of man by man, the individual’s spiritual need for personal freedom and control of his destiny was largely turned against him by the spectre of ‘God’ and by the latter’s self-appointed representatives on earth, who, not coincidentally, happened to belong to the class of slaveowners. The producing mass of the population was shackled on earth by the ruling class and in the imaginary heavens by a celestial tyrant.

The secularisation and therefore politicisation of personal freedom and destiny, in the bourgeois revolutions - particularly in the French Revolution 1789-1793 - was a fundamental step in the progress toward the real-world solution of human freedom. Not least because it opened the way for the working class to force itself into the political arena and define itself politically. However, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, the bourgeoisie presented its own newly won freedom as a universal achievement that benefited everyone. This deception resulted partly from its own illusions and partly from the bourgeoisie’s need to enroll the whole population behind its banner. The concept of freedom remained within a mystified abstract form, hiding the fact that in capitalist society the producers, while legally free and equal to their masters, would now be enchained by a new form of exploitation, a new dictatorship. The victorious bourgeoisie had brought with it the generalisation of commodity production which had accentuated the division of labour, tearing the individual away from the community. The various forms of the social texture confronted the individual as external necessity, and turned his fellow man into a competitor. From this atomisation and isolation came, paradoxically, the mystique of individual freedom in capitalist society. In reality only capital was free:

“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois abolition of individuality and freedom. And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at”.

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

The living, historically concrete development of individual freedom therefore depends on the solidarity of the proletarian struggle for the abolition of classes and exploitation. Real freedom is only possible in a society of free labour, that is a communist mode of production, where the abolition of the division of labour permits the all-round development of the individual.

The promotion of proletarian political freedoms on which this revolutionary transformation of society depends, and which the communist political organisations must defend, necessarily involves the struggle against the ferocious demands for bourgeois political freedom that capitalist society continually generates.

1) ’Too tight conditions of membership’

To paraphrase the Communist Manifesto: The stringent conditions of marxist militancy are reproached by the bourgeoisie for restricting the freedom of the individual and his initiatives. And rightly so. The prohibition of bourgeois individual freedoms and bourgeois initiatives is undoubtedly aimed at.

The political principle of opposition to parliamentary participation, which the ICC holds in common with the rest of the tradition of the Communist Left, in large measure prevents the sort of careerism and hierarchical decision-making which infected the parties of the Second International and which is typical of bourgeois political life. The principled independence from the bourgeois state apparatus precludes the sort of personal ambition and adventurism fuelled by the expectation of easy money which animates the participants of bourgeois politics.

The struggle for proletarian political freedom against bourgeois freedoms doesn’t end here. There are those who are disgusted by the rotten world of bourgeois politics, left and right, and who want to fight it inside a marxist revolutionary organisation. But they haven’t given up, at root, the abstract and empty slogan of ‘individual freedom’ which serves as the ultimate ideological cover and justification for the capitalist world.

Unchecked, these residues of bourgeois thought lead, inside the organisation, to an attitude of surreptitious combat against

the alleged rigidity of proletarian political principles, the supposed hierarchy of centralisation, the ‘dogmatism’ of proletarian debate, which are felt to be so many restrictions on personal rights, even if superficially these very principles -centralisation and the culture of debate - are agreed with. This attitude has no precise alternative, no distinct positive outlines, but is mainly characterised by being against, of rejecting what is. It demands the right to not abide by collective, centralised decisions, the right to take local initiatives counter to those of the rest of the organisation without explanation, the right not to be coherent and above all not to be held responsible for any inconsistency.11

This anarchistic attitude retains the bourgeois belief in ‘individual freedom’. It rejects the authority of capitalist politics and exploitation but also ends up rejecting the authority of the Marxist alternative to it as well.

The marxist revolutionary organisation therefore must struggle against and protect itself from this more diffuse and empty defence of bourgeois political freedom as well as its open obvious expressions that are found in parliamentary and leftist parties. .

It’s not accidental that in the history of the marxist movement the question of who is, and who is not, a member of the organisation has assumed vital importance. At the Hague Congress of the 1st International the first days were spent verifying the eligibility of the delegates, particularly because there was a secret cabal within the organisation: Bakunin’s Brotherhood.

At the fateful 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 one of the principle divisions between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over the definition of a member in the proposed statutes of the party.

The tight conditions of membership are a vital means of excluding both the classic expressions of bourgeois political freedom like adventurism and careerism, and the more diffuse concessions to them that take the form of opportunism on matters of general political principle and the formation of personal cliques that resist the consistent application of principles on questions of organisation.

A lack of rigour in the process of integration of militants is a good means of establishing a hierarchy within the organisation between ‘those who know and those who don’t know’ the positions and analyses of the latter. Obviously it is never possible to completely eliminate the inequalities and differences of capacities between militants, but the ‘recruitment’ on insufficient bases are the best means to reinforce rather than attenuating them.

2) Centralisation and the non-hierarchical conception of delegation.

All organisms need a given amount of unity in order to maintain their existence. This is true in the political sphere as it is in the natural world. Centralisation is the essential means of ensuring any complex unity. This expresses a fundamental, universal premise: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Unity is not the simple result of the collection or aggregation of the different constituent elements of the whole. Unity requires another quality: the capacity to centralise and coordinate these otherwise disparate elements. An orchestra requires a conductor to bring all the musicians together, who in return recognise and respect his indispensable role in creating a unified work of art that is qualitatively more than the sound of each instrument taken separately.

A revolutionary political organisation is likewise more than a collection of individuals who happen to agree - it also requires, in order to sustain itself, a will to unity and therefore a will to centralisation by every militant.

The high degree of centralisation needed for proletarian political organisations reflects the fact that the proletariat has no separate economic or political interests within itself, unlike other classes. It also expresses an important need of an exploited class: to combat the process of division and atomisation which wage labour and generalised commodity production imposes on the proletariat and to compensate for the absence of any economic power to solidify its combat.

Centralisation is necessarily restrictive on certain individual initiatives - those that resist the process of centralisation and instead pursue their own independent direction that leads to a loss of cohesion and ultimately the dissolution of the whole. But by contrast, it is entirely dependent on the individual initiatives and diversity of the whole political organism. The protracted nature of centralisation is precisely a result of the need to collectively resolve these differences, synthesise the disagreements - the only way to bring the whole together and enrich it into a higher unity.

The marxist concept of centralisation is therefore not monolithic. It allows for, in fact demands, the expression of minority positions - with the objective of winning over the majority so the whole organisation can take the right path. The de-centralised or federalist conception that the minority should not be open to criticism, and not subject to the unity of the organisation while the debate continues, is in fact authoritarian since it means the arbitrary imposition of a part over the whole.12

Centralisation always appears to be hierarchical to the adepts of ‘personal freedom’ because it involves the principle of delegation. The Congresses for example which formulate the general goals of the organisation cannot possibly sit permanently and deal with the huge amount of daily functions of the organisation and in particular its intervention within the working class. It has to delegate responsibility to central organs to translate its orientations into the daily life of the organisation. The mandating of central organs and their return of mandate to the next congress to be verified is a hallmark of revolutionary marxist political organisation.

The principle of delegation and of the maintenance of unity during the debates over differences is not too much centralisation, it is centralisation: the lifeblood of the revolutionary organisation. The hostility to these principles means in the end the assertion of the will of the individual or a minority over the interests of the whole. It is this, not centralisation, that is authoritarian.

3) Debate, diversity and the search for coherence.

An interesting aspect of Devrim’s personal account is that he criticises the ICC for having too much internal debate, therefore too much diversity and individual initiative on the one hand, while on the other he criticises the organisation for being too theoretically coherent, where nothing is out of place so that no room for individual initiative remains.

Devrim is not concerned with reconciling this apparent contradiction in his account: that an organisation can be both intensely self critical and intensely cohesive at the same time. 13 In fact there is no contradiction between these two opposites - we think they are complementary and interdependent.

The tradition of the marxist left, which the ICC belongs to, has always been characterised by a critical spirit that is not just directed to the bourgeoisie and capitalist society but also to itself, to its own parties, and their concessions to the bourgeoisie, to theoretical errors, and theoretical insufficiency in front of the changes of events and historical periods. The political principles that the ICC defends are the fruit of long efforts to question principles, or conceptions of these principles, that have been found wanting in the light of the constant unfolding of social reality and the creation of new situations, which require new answers and analyses. The ICC’s vision of the role of the party or the state in the period of transition for example is the product of a long and tortuous theoretical development within the Communist Left, requiring decades of debate and confrontation after the defeat of the October Revolution.

And in the history of the ICC itself internal debate has led to the rejection of once axiomatic analyses of the marxist tradition such as Lenin’s theory of the weak link - the concept that the revolutionary socialist transformation would emanate from the peripheral countries of capitalism. The ICC countered that it was in Western Europe with the most experienced sectors of the working class and with the most intelligent bourgeoisies, where the central impetus for proletarian revolution lay. 14

A constant critical stance towards the acquisitions of the marxist tradition in the light of the new problems thrown up in the evolution of events is therefore a necessary aspect of marxist theory.

It implies that every militant takes this critical approach to heart, recognizes the need to think for him or herself and refuse to accept things at face value.

At the same time marxist criticism can only be severe enough if it involves the search for new coherence. Only the quest for new syntheses that either enrich or even overturn the old can go to the roots.

The marxist objective is always to create or recreate a theoretically and politically unified vision that traces the ‘general line of march’ of the working class struggle as the latter evolves over time and through changing conditions. The need for the unified theoretical conception of the interests of the proletariat is a vital counterpart to organisational unity. Theoretical unity or coherence, like centralised organization, is not the same as conformity or uniformity. Every coherence contains potential contradictions. And these latent oppositions point toward new debates and, necessarily, new conclusions.

Diversity is not therefore a goal in itself, the celebration of difference for its own sake, as the anarchists believe, but the means to the greater self-consciousness of the proletariat as a unified revolutionary class.

Likewise the goal of the debates within the organisation is not to reinforce the authority of any ‘leaders’ but to allow the greatest clarity, the most homogeneity within the organisation, that is, to fight against the conditions which engender the need for ‘leaders’.

The power of the ideas of the revolutionary organisation in the working class, which must be measured in the long term, is not through the dilution of its principles and analyses or the abandonment of coherence, as Devrim thinks, but through the greater concentration and depth of its theory.

All this places particular theoretical demands on the revolutionary militant. One of the most important is that they have to see beyond their own personal impressions and feelings.

But Devrim’s whole account of his negative experience in the ICC stays at the first stage of personal impressions which are never raised to the level of a debate over the political and organisational principles which are the essence of marxist revolutionary organisation.

Consequences

There is no detailed alternative conception of revolutionary organisation in Devrim’s critique. But by implication his criticism of the ICC means the alternative should be less stringent in its integration of new members, less centralized, leaving the different parts of the organisation more autonomy. It should spend less time on internal theoretical debate, less time demarcating itself from other political tendencies. There should be less importance given to the collective development of coherent political positions and more weight to personal impressions and feelings. In brief, the revolutionary organisation should be less a political expression of the working class and more a reflection of the personal inclinations of its individual members.

Since Devrim gives no historical models or reference points for what such an organisation should look like, or how it would avoid previous failures based on the same lack of parameters, his alternative seems extremely hazy, its contours indeterminate.

In the end Devrim’s critique expresses a completely different vision of revolutionary militancy to the marxist one. Whereas the latter sees the free development of the militant as a process of interaction with his comrades, that is, as a question of organisational solidarity, Devrim sees the revolutionary as someone who must retain his personal autonomy at all costs even if it means the desertion of the organisation and thus his comrades.

In a period when the working class needs to regain its identity as a political class, the suggestion that an existing revolutionary political organisation, one that can provide a valid communist political perspective, is obsolete, and should be replaced by a vaguely conceived alternative which is indifferent to political positions - well, this is derisory. Not only derisory but harmful.

Today there are groups and individuals who deliberately set out to destroy revolutionary organisations and the ICC in particular. While Devrim does not agree with our definition of these elements as ‘parasitic’, he nevertheless once rejected their behaviour and objectives as anti-working class - one of the reasons that originally drew him to the ICC. But his present attitude, expressed in his personal critique, which now implies the ICC is not worth defending in the face of such attacks, can, irrespective of his own intentions, only whet the destructive appetites of the parasites.

The preoccupation with ‘personal liberty against authority’ finds itself caught in a no-man’s-land between two alternatives: the political determination of marxism on the one hand and the hostile political power of the bourgeoisie, and those who have put themselves at the latter’s service, on the other. In reality there is no neutral middle ground between these two political poles.

It’s clear which of these two camps genuine revolutionaries must choose.

Como

Introduction: Economic migration and refugees from war throughout the history of capitalism

From its ascendence

For thousands of years people have been forced to flee from war, persecution, famine and forces of nature such as floods, droughts, volcanoes etc.  But these movements were not a permanent phenomenon and they mostly involved only a small part of the population. After the beginning of agriculture, with the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals, humanity lived for thousands of years on the same spot. Under feudalism the peasantry were attached to the land and serfs stayed, from the moment they were born until their death, on the same land, which belonged to their feudal lord. But, with the onset of capitalism around the fourteenth to fifteenth century this changed drastically.

Capitalism spread by conquest, by intense and massive violence across the globe. First in Europe, where enclosures drove self-sufficient peasants from communal land into the cities to work in factories.  Marx described primitive accumulation as the process of “divorcing the producer from the means of production. … great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process” (Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation). This separation of the peasant from the soil, from their means of production, meant uprooting millions of people. Because capitalism needs “the abolition of all laws preventing labourers from transferring from one sphere of production another to and from one local production centre to another” (Marx, Capital Volume 3, Chapter 10.)

At the same time as capitalism in Europe was compelling the peasants to sell their labour power, it began to spread its colonial rule by invasion and conquest around the globe. And for centuries slave-hunters kidnapped millions of people, mostly from Africa to supply cheap labour for the plantations and mines mainly in America. When slavery ended many slaves working on plantations were replaced with indentured labour (1).  All along its expansion capitalism uprooted and displaced people, either from the countryside forcing them to sell their labour power to a capitalist, or by robbing labour power and turning them into slaves to be sold on another continent. In the same way as capitalism needs the biggest, if not unlimited mobility for its commodities and free access to markets, it also imposes the biggest mobility and access to the work-force. Capitalism “must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe – up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. This labour power, however, is in most cases rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organisation of production. It must first be ‘set free’ in order to be enrolled in the active army of capital. The emancipation of labour power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism.” (The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter 26; Rosa Luxemburg). Mobility has a particular significance within capitalism. “Capitalism necessarily creates mobility of the population, something not required by previous systems of social economy and impossible under them on anything like a large scale” (Lenin The Development of Capitalism in Russia “The ‘Mission’ of Capitalism”).

The proletarian is thus forced to move incessantly, always in search for an opportunity, for a place to sell his labour power. Being a wage earner means being forced to move large and small distances, or even to move to another country or continent, wherever a worker can sell his labour power. Whether in violent forms or through ‘mere’ economic coercion capitalism from its beginning has drawn its work-force from the entire planet, it has been global, international from the start. In other words: the working class – by the nature of the conditions of capitalism, is a class of migrants – and this is why workers have no fatherland. However the distances a worker has to migrate depends on the economic situation and on other factors such as famine, repression or wars. 

During the nineteenth century, the ascendant phase of capitalism, this meant migration occurred mostly towards the areas with expanding industries. Migration and urbanisation went together. In many cities in the 1840-80s in Europe the population doubled within a period of 30-40 years.  Within a few decades or, often, within an even shorter period, small towns centred on coal mines, iron mines or new factories, swelled into huge cities.

To the twentieth century 

At the same time, since capitalism always runs into economic crises, a ‘surplus’ of labour power regularly crops up with masses of unemployed workers looking for jobs. In the ascendant phase of capitalism economic crises were mainly cyclical. When the economy entered into a crisis, many workers could emigrate, and, when a new boom phase began, additional workers were needed. Millions of workers could emigrate without any major restrictions - mainly because capitalism was still expanding - in particular to the USA. Between 1820 and 1914 some 25.5 million people from Europe emigrated to the USA; altogether some 50 million left the European continent. In every year between 1820 and 1915, more than half the increase in the British population simply emigrated (2). But these waves of mainly economic migration slowed down considerably with the First World War, when the global historical conditions changed and in particular when  the economic crisis was no longer just cyclical but became long-lasting, if not permanent. From massive and almost unhampered, migration became filtered, selected and more and more difficult, if not illegal. From World War I a period of stricter border controls began to be imposed on economic migrants.

The decadent system produces an endless number of war refugees

And yet we need to distinguish economic migration from wars: every refugee is a migrant, but not every migrant is a refugee. A migrant is someone who leaves his residence in search of a place where he can sell his labour power. A refugee is someone whose life is at stake in an immediate way and moves elsewhere to find a safe place.

Wars and pogroms are not new phenomena. Any war means violence, forcing people to run away from the confrontations to save their life. Thus war refugees are as old as wars themselves, and war refugees appeared a long time before capitalism forced workers into economic migration. However, the number of wars also took on a different size and quality with the First World War. Up until then the number of war refugees was relatively small. And also the number of victims of pogroms as the ones against the Jews in Russia (or elsewhere) began to change with World War I. In earlier centuries the refugee problem was mainly a temporary and limited phenomenon. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, with the onset of the decadence of capitalism, with each world war and, after 1989, with the period of ‘local’, ‘regional’ but often endless wars, the question of refugees has taken on a new dimension. Both the number of war refugees and economic migrants depend on the respective historical conditions – whether there is an economic crisis and how much war has become dominant.

We plan to publish a number of articles on the question of refugees and migration, which look at the questions from different angles. We have already published an article on migration [16]  and plan to take up this question in more detail soon. We begin this series with the development of the spiral of violence in the twentieth century and the consequences for the scope of flight from wars, taking up in more detail the different phases from the First World War to the Second World War, and its aftermath, before taking up the period from the Cold War up to the present day. In another article we will also look more closely at the policy of the ruling class and what consequences flow from this for the struggle of the working class.

Heinrich 3/10/15

1914: a new era of violence against populations

“One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point…The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat – these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers’ movement seem a pleasant idyll”. Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, 1916

The brutal and violent impetus inherent in decadent capitalism, evoked here by Rosa Luxemburg, has been strikingly confirmed by the tragic fate of the civilian populations in the 20th century who have been subjected to imprisonment in camps, to displacement, deportation and liquidation en masse. The combined effect of wars, economic crisis and oppression in declining capitalism gave rise to an irrational dynamic of blind violence, of pogroms, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and unbridled militarism. The 20th century was one of the most barbaric in history.

The year 1914 and its chauvinist hysteria opened a whole spiral of violence. In the past of course wars led to massacres and oppression, but this was usually on a local scale; they didn’t result in massive exoduses, the displacement of whole populations and the near- paranoid obsession to control them on the part of the state. Modern warfare has become total war. It mobilises, over a period of years, the entire population and the economic machines of the warring countries, reduces to ashes decades of human labour, sacrifices the lives of tens of millions of human beings, hurls hundreds of millions into famine. Its effects are no longer limited to mere conquests, with their train of rape and pillage, but gigantic destructions across the whole globe. On top of the uprooting, the rural exodus brought about by the introduction of capitalist social relations, total war adds the militarisation of the whole of civil society in the service of the battle fronts.  This was a real qualitative step. Populations of entire countries, and above all the youth, are forcibly displaced to become soldiers, compelled to engage in a mutual bloodbath with those from rival countries. The civilians at the rear are bled dry by the war effort and the first camps are made up of the prisoners from enemy nations. Although during the First World War there were no extermination camps, we can still talk about mass imprisonments and deportations. Any foreigner immediately became a suspect. In Britain for example foreigners were stuck in the Newbury race course or on the Isle of Man. In Germany, the camps at Erfurt, Munster or Darmstadt were used to imprison masses of civilians. In France, 70 internment camps were in service between 1914 and 1920 on the west coast (in the vicinity of Brest for example) and in the southern departments. At first they were existing buildings or perimeters surrounded by barbed wire and closely guarded. Transfer from one camp to another was done with cattle wagons and any revolt was met with violence. Useless to point out that any communist militant was subject to imprisonment as were women who had “compromised with the enemy”. A camp like the one in Pontmain was made up of Turks, Austro-Hungarians and especially Germans. This was indeed a prefiguration of the concentration camp universe that was set up in the 1930s and reached its summit during the Second World War. At the same time as xenophobic prejudices were being whipped up, the indigenous inhabitants of distant countries were dragged towards Europe by the recruiters, enrolled as sacrificial lambs in the war. From 1917-18, under orders from Clemenceau in France, 190,000 North Africans were sent to the front. 170,000 West Africans, the famous “Senegalese sharpshooters” were for the most part mobilised by force. Chinese people were also mobilised by France and Britain. Britain also sent Africans and Indians to the slaughter (1.5 million from the Indian sub-continent alone). The belligerent powers – and this also included the Russians with their “savage divisions” from the Caucasus – used all these “natives” as specialised cannon-fodder for the most dangerous military operations. As well as the soldiers displaced, more than 12 million Europeans were compelled to flee from the war, to become refugees.

The Armenian genocide and the persecution of minorities

This was the case for the Armenian populations, one of the most striking tragedies of the war, and seen as the first real genocide of the 20th century. Even during the 19th century, Armenian aspirations for independence, like that of the Greeks, resulted in persecution by the Ottomans. A political movement known as the “Young Turks”, which adopted an extremely nationalist Pan-Turkish ideology, prepared the massacre. Having become scapegoats during the war, especially after the defeat by the Russians, the Armenians were subjected to a well-planned massacre between April 1915 and the autumn of 1916. Having initially arrested a number of intellectuals, the rest of the Armenian population was systematically deported and decimated en masse by the Turkish state. Women and children were transported in boats and many drowned around the coasts or were sold like slaves. The Baghdad railway was used to carry out massive deportations to the desert or to camps, some of which were already being used to exterminate people, A large number of Armenians died of thirst in the Mesopotamian desert. Those who managed to escape the slaughter became impoverished refugees, including thousands of orphans. They were to make up a real diaspora (many for example went to the US where a sizeable community still exists). All this of course was very quickly forgotten by the ‘great democracies’ not long after this tragic event. And yet over a million Armenians had been killed!

The collapse of the last great empires during this terrible war gave rise to a multitude of nationalist tensions which had equally disastrous consequences for other minorities. The formation of nation states after the First World War was the result of the fragmentation of the old moribund empires. This was particularly the case with the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires that had been composed of a mosaic of populations that were preyed upon by the hungry vultures that were the European imperialist powers. By struggling for their own survival, these ruined empires had tried to fortify their frontiers, conclude desperate military alliances and carry out population exchanges which gave rise to sharpened divisions and forms of “ethnic cleansing”. The Greek-Turkish conflict, which is often presented as the consequence of the spontaneous reaction of crowds of Turks, was highly orchestrated by the new state run by its modern leader Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. The new state he founded was to wage a long and murderous war against the Greeks. During this conflict, the Greeks also engaged in pillaging, with armed civilian bands burning Turkish villages and committing all kinds of atrocities against their inhabitants. Between 1920 and 1923 the Turkish forces also carried out a whole number of cruel massacres against Greeks and Armenians. From the beginning there were wholesale transfers of populations, of Greeks who had been living in Turkey and vice-versa (1,300,000 Greeks left Turkey and 385,000 Turks left Greece). In 1923, the Lausanne Treaty put the seal on these violent measures with a number of administrative procedures. Thousands of Greeks and Turks were expelled through this official exchange and good number of them died during the course of this exodus. More generally, in such conditions, with the displacement and concentration of hungry populations across the continent, it was not surprising that pathogenic infections proliferated. Central and eastern Europe was soon hit by typhus. But more spectacularly, the world was swept by the “Spanish flu” which claimed 40 to 50 million victims in populations weakened by the years of war. Before that the worst epidemic had been cholera in the 19th century. You would have to go back to the Middle Ages and the Black Death to find an epidemic on such a scale (30% of the European population was wiped out by the plague).

This whole barbaric reality was only possible because the working class had been dragooned by nationalism and soiled by patriotism. But faced with these atrocious conditions, the proletariat did raise its head, demonstrated that it alone was capable of blocking the war machine and putting an end to the carnage. It was after the mutinies of 1917 and the revolutionary wave which began in Russia and with workers’ uprisings in Germany (the sailors’ mutiny at Kiel and the revolts in big cities like Berlin) that the main belligerents were forced to sign the armistice. Faced with the threat of world revolution, the war had to be brought to a rapid end.

The counter-revolution: manhunts and pogroms

The ruling class had one obsession faced with the problem of desertions, demobilisation, and above all the risk of social conflict: it was vital to crush the focal points of the communist revolution. The Entente Powers, driven by powerful class hatred, encircled Bolshevik Russia. The terrible civil war was launched by the “White” armies, backed up by the armies of the capitalist states of Europe and the USA. All this resulted in countless victims. An economic blockade provoked a major famine in Russia. But to crush the proletariat, a new wave of violence had to be unleashed. The proletariat had become the common enemy of all the capitalist powers. Faced with the proletarian danger, they had to cooperate. But in contrast to the victorious countries, the bourgeoisie and especially the petty bourgeoisie in the defeated countries like Germany was to develop a deep feeling of having been “stabbed in the back”, of having been humiliated by the “enemy within”. The drastic conditions of the Versailles Treaty precipitated the hunt for scapegoats, leading to the development of anti-Semitism and a real man-hunt against communists, who were also made responsible for everything that had gone wrong. The culminating point was the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 and the series of savage massacres that followed: “The butchers set to work. Whole buildings collapsed under artillery fire, burying entire families in the ruins. Other proletarians fell in front of their homes, in schools, in stables, shot dead, beaten to death with clubs, pierced by bayonets, most often denounced by anonymous informers. They were put up against the wall singly, in twos, in groups of three or more, or finished off with a bullet in the back of the neck, in the middle of the night, on the banks of the Spree. For weeks, the river was throwing up corpses.” (3)

A succession of defeats for the working class was punctuated by the murder of great figures of the movement, the most celebrated being Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In the 1920s, ferocious repression against any form of opposition was made all the easier because the Stalinist counter-revolution was carrying out expulsions and murders, creating labour camps and prison camps, the Gulags, hunting down revolutionaries and systematically locking up workers suspected of “sedition”.

In the framework of decadent capitalism and of the counter-revolution, hatred of communism and its assimilation with the rootless Jew led to a qualitative change in anti-Semitic pogroms. In the 19th century, there had already been a series of pogroms against the Jews, especially in Russia after the annexation of Poland. Outbursts of violence against the Jews had already been recurrent in Odessa in the early part of the 19th century. But between 1881 and 1884 pogroms led to real massacres. Local populations were incited and encouraged to pillage, rape and murder. In 1903 a terrible series of pogroms struck the city of Kishinev. In a totally irrational and obscurantist manner, the Jews were accused of practising ritual murders. Between 1879 and 1914 nearly 2 million Jews became refugees. At the beginning of the 1920s, there was a new upsurge of pogroms. During the civil war in Russia, thousands of Jews were massacred by the White Armies, especially those led by Denikin. Following these pogroms, our comrade MC, for example, had to take refuge in Palestine with part of his family (see International Review 65 and 66). During this period, pogroms in Russia resulted in 60,000 deaths.

The defeat of the proletariat in Germany generated growing tensions against the Jews, as in other parts of Europe, producing a fresh wave of refugees. The programme of the Nazi party, dated 24 February 1920 had already stated that “To be a citizen, you must have German blood, religious denomination is not important. Thus no Jew can be a citizen”.

The central role of the state: towards the totalitarian control of populations

With the preparation and entry into the war, a new epoch had opened up: that of capitalism in decline and its universal tendency towards state capitalism. From now on, each state, led by its executive and its armed wing, would exert a bureaucratic control over the whole of social life. As a result of the war and in the name of the military needs or security of the state, there was a tightening of border controls and increasing control over and exactions against exiled populations and refugees.  Unlike the period before the First World War, migrations were now subject to restrictions. It was at this moment that the main tools of administration were put in place. The displacement of populations during the war led states to establish a real police control over identities, to systematically place all foreigners under suspicion and to search hem. In France for example, “the creation of identity cards in 1917 was a real reversal of previous police and administrative habits. Our mentalities have today taken on board this individual stamp whose police origins are no longer seen as such. It is not however neutral that the introduction of identity cards first concerned foreigners, with the aim of surveillance in a full-on state of war” (PJ Deschodt and F Huguenin, La République xenophobe, ed JC Lattès). From the start, armies recognised that the displacement of civilians – whether spontaneous or provoked – was a real threat, an “encumbrance” for troop activity and military logistics. States thus tried to give evacuation orders, instrumentalising civilians and refugees to use them as weapons of war, as was the case during the Greek-Turkish conflict concluded by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923.  The “solution” that was resorted to more and more was the multiplication of internment camps, as we saw above. When refugees had to flee from combat zones (as was the case with the Belgians in 1914 when the country was invaded by Germany), even though they sometimes benefited from the help of voluntary associations, a large number of civilians were directly placed under the control of the authorities and ended up in camps. Prisoners were divided up according to nationality and “dangerousness”. These were decisions of states out to defend their sordid capitalist interests, with the most “democratic” ones to the fore, and ready to take entire civil populations hostage.

In the aftermath of the war, following the physical and ideological defeat of the proletariat, the spirit of revenge took a new step and an even more murderous and barbaric conflict was being prepared.  Facing a pile of ruins, the states of Europe were in a difficult situation with so much labour power having been destroyed. Accords were signed to allow economic emigration. In the 1920s, France for example recruited Italian, Polish and Czech immigrants, the prelude to new xenophobic campaigns brought about the economic crisis and the terrible depression which followed, opening the course towards a new world war. 

WH 28/6/15

The outbreak of a second world holocaust would take barbarism to unheard of levels for civilian populations and refugees. We will look at this tragic development in the second part of this article [17].

(1) Frölich, Lindau, Schreiner, Walcher, Révolution et contre-révolution en Allemagne, 1918-1920, Ed Science marxiste

(2) Indentured labour means an emigrating worker signs a contract in his county of migration, according to which for a period of 5 or 8 or 10 years he has to work in that country. The wages are fixed, he cannot ask for an increase and he cannot cancel the contract. Between 1830 and 1930 this involved around 5 million Indians and 5-6 million people from other Asian countries – so as many as 12 million people were indentured labourers.

This article is contributed by a close sympathiser who has participated in a number of recent online debates about the question of capitalist decadence.

Introduction

The ICC has commented more than once on the persistent tendency in the proletarian milieu – especially that part influenced by anarchism – to reject the Marxist theory of capitalist decadence.[1]

Since the main conclusion we draw from this theory is that capitalism today is a socially regressive system, and that its overthrow is therefore both possible and necessary for humanity, you might be forgiven for thinking there would be some common ground on this; especially today, with the daily images of millions of people desperately trying to flee the barbaric wars of capitalism in the Middle East; wars which increasingly reveal the lack of any rational economic motive even from the point of view of imperialism...

Instead, if a recent online discussion on libcom’s forum is anything to go by,[2] at least some in this milieu display outright hostility to the whole Marxist theory of decadence, arguing that it is at best unnecessary to explain capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production, and at worst a purely ideological construct or pseudo-religious belief.

This goes to prove that ‘decadence-denial’ is a real phenomenon in the proletarian milieu today.

Online discussions certainly have their weaknesses and this one generated as much heat as light at times, so rather than go back over ‘who said what’ instead we want to focus on what seem to us to be the key questions to address: to re-state, as clearly and simply as we can, the Marxist position on these questions; to briefly look at the arguments of the ‘deniers’, and pose some key questions for them to answer, so at the very least we can identify common ground where it exists and try to avoid false arguments in the future.

1. What method do we use to understand changes in capitalism?

From the beginning of the discussion, the onus was firmly placed on the supporters of “decadence theory” to prove that capitalism has been decadent since 1914.

But before we can answer that we have to decide what theory we’re going to use to determine it; after all, as Einstein said: it is the theory which decides what we can observe.

Our starting point is the Marxist method of understanding history, and like all scientific methods it must be firmly based on the verified discoveries of those who have gone before.

Capitalism is a historically transitory system

Contrary to popular belief, the main discoveries of the Marxist movement are not the existence of classes or of the struggle between them, or even of the labour theory of value; all of these concepts had already been advanced by bourgeois historians and economists at a time when the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class struggling against decaying feudalism.

The first key development in the work of Marx and Engels is that the existence of classes and of the struggle between them is merely a historical phase in the development of the productive forces; capitalism is only the last in a whole succession of modes of production which creates the conditions for its own abolition and – after a successful proletarian revolution – for the abolition of all classes and the creation of a communist society.[3]

This is in a nutshell is the materialist conception of history and the core of historical materialism, which is simply the method we use as Marxists to understand the laws involved in this coming into being and passing away of successive modes of production and to analyse the change from one to another.

The fatal contradictions of capitalism

The second key development in the work of Marx and Engels is the discovery of the specific way these laws express themselves within capitalism. Based on their theoretical framework, Marx and Engels were able to identify, even in the crises of youthful capitalism when it was still expanding rapidly across the planet, the seeds of the fatal contradictions that would eventually create the conditions for its abolition:

“The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means by which crises are prevented.” (Communist Manifesto)

As a dynamic mode of production driven solely by the extraction of profit, capitalism has a built-in tendency to produce too many commodities relative not to social need but the purchasing power of society. It must therefore seek ever-larger outlets for its products, extending its market across the whole world. But as it extends its mode of production throughout the world it progressively reduces the outlets it needs to grow. The trajectory of capitalism is therefore inexorably towards “more extensive and more destructive crises” which it is increasingly unable to prevent[4]. 

At several times during the 19th century Marx and Engels overestimated the speed of capitalism’s trajectory and even thought capitalism was entering into its final crisis. But they were able to revise their perspective and clarify their framework for understanding how and why capitalism would prove to be historically transitory. As long as it had not definitively reached the limits of its progressive expansion a world revolution of the proletariat was not yet possible. Only when the further development of the productive forces came into conflict with bourgeois relations of production (ie. with wage labour, capital and the nation state), would the conditions for capitalism’s abolition exist. When this point was finally reached a whole era of social revolution would be opened, characterised by acute contradictions, crises and convulsions.[5]

Decadence at the heart of historical materialism

It still took several more decades of capitalist development, and in particular the rise of imperialism, to clarify exactly how capitalism’s era of crises, convulsions and class struggles would finally be ushered in. But we can see from the theoretical framework developed by the Marxist movement in the 19th century that “decadence theory” is simply the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production. It is therefore indispensable for understanding the historical period we are living in, and how to act as revolutionaries.

For the deniers on the other hand, the theory of decadence is at best unnecessary to explain capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production, and at worst ‘teleological’, a  purely ideological construct imposed by Marxists, or even a mystical, pseudo-religious belief…

The main argument of the deniers seems to be that capitalism is essentially a cyclical system and that the manifestations of decadence today can therefore be understood as the symptoms of its ‘normal’ functioning. In other words, rather than having any built-in tendency towards increasingly devastating and irresolvable crises, capitalism is in a sort of stasis where each crisis simply irons out temporary problems and results in a new phase of growth. 

But it became very clear in the discussion that this disagreement is not about “decadence theory”, or even the history of capitalism: it’s about the whole materialist conception of history as a succession of modes of production which go through a phase of ascent and decline.

2. How do we explain capitalist growth since 1914?

A total halt to the productive forces?

The online discussion was prompted by a question about growth in the so-called ‘developing countries’ in Asia. How can we say that capitalism is ‘decadent’ when there are so many signs that capitalism has continued to grow since 1914?

There are certainly phenomena to be explained – for example the spectacular growth of China since the 1980s – but in general we can say that because capitalism is a global system, it enters into its epoch of decay as a global system and not on a country by country basis; no national economy or region can escape from capitalism’s trajectory.

There is a strong tendency among our critics to see any sign of growth since 1914 as a refutation of decadence and to offer a whole list of new developments to show that capitalism has in fact continued to grow vigorously in its epoch of decay: telecommunications, consumer goods, aviation, computers, data/web services...

But decadence has never meant a total halt to the growth of the productive forces, even in previous modes of production, and capitalism is the first mode of production to be based solely on the extraction of  profit; if the growing accumulation of capital cannot be ensured then the whole system would simply grind to a halt.

Is capitalism a socially regressive system?

Flowing from the Marxist theory of capitalism as a historically transitory system, the real question we need to answer is: are the productive forces definitively and irreversibly in conflict with bourgeois relations of production? In other words, does capitalist growth since 1914 demonstrate that it is now a socially regressive system?

At the quantitative level, it is possible to show the braking effect of bourgeois relations of production since 1914 by comparing the growth of industrial production in the period of capitalist decadence with what it would have been without this braking effect. Taking the rate of growth in the last phase of capitalist ascendancy and applying it to the whole of the period of decadence, industrial production in decadence reaches only 60% of what it could have been, although even this is likely to be an overestimation.[6]

But this still doesn’t show the crucial qualitative changes to growth in decadence. Since the conditions for capitalism’s abolition already exist, this growth is increasingly characterised, in Marx’s poetic phrase, as “development as decay”.

Having reached the geographic limits of its expansion, with remaining extra-capitalist markets insufficient for its further progressive growth, capitalism’s hereditary disease of overproduction becomes chronic and irreversible. As Marx forecast in the 1848 Manifesto, it is forced to destroy parts of its own body and adopt a series of increasingly drastic palliatives to prolong its life and ensure growing accumulation.

We can see this process at work since 1914:

• the periodic destruction of the productive forces on an increasing scale through global wars (20 million dead in WW1, 60+ million in WW2);
• the massive increase in the role of the state to shore up the economy against collapse and to control a proletariat which has become a permanent threat;
• the growing burden of unproductive costs (state bureaucracy, arms production, welfare, marketing, etc.);
• the huge growth of debts that realistically can never be repaid.
• systematic attempts to ‘cheat’ the law of value, for example protectionist policies and the massive use of credit to create artificial markets.

So if capitalism in decadence at certain times or in certain areas has still been able to display impressive growth rates, this still disguises the increasingly ‘drugged’ nature of this growth, which is at a mounting cost for the future of humanity and the planet itself, and the gigantic waste of the productive forces entailed in these palliative measures.

In other words, it is the growth of a socially regressive system.

The context for understanding the growth in East Asia

All the palliatives adopted since the entry of capitalism into decadence are now themselves exacerbating its mortal sickness. Capitalism has no choice but to launch a frontal assault on the wages and living conditions of the working class to try to make it pay for its crisis. But even this provides no ‘solution’; on the contrary, it can only reduce demand and intensify its chronic crisis of overproduction.

This is the context in which we must analyse the spectacular development of the East Asian economies since the 1980s, especially China which has managed to achieve the most dramatic growth rates in the entire history of capitalism – even during a period of worsening crisis internationally.

A full examination of China’s development is clearly beyond the scope of this article,[7] but based on our theoretical framework for understanding the nature of growth in decadence we are led to conclude that the growth of the East Asian economies is not the indication of a new period of capitalist expansion as in the 19th century, but rather a temporary upturn within a global decline; and in fact we have recently seen China’s growth rates fall to their lowest level for 25 years, leading bourgeois pundits to warn of the shock waves hitting an already weak global economy.[8]

But we should be cautious about making any forecasts. The return of capitalism’s open crisis in the late 1960s dramatically re-affirmed the Communist Left’s analysis of the decadence of capitalism and the inability of the system to overcome its fatal contradictions. But the evolution of the crisis over the last five decades is testament to capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to adapt and survive – even if this can only mean storing up more problems for itself in the longer term. Just as Marx and Engels at times mistakenly believed capitalism was entering into its final crisis, revolutionaries have on occasions underestimated this capacity of capitalism or to foresee the possibility of an under-developed country like China industrialising quite so spectacularly.[9]

We have now passed the milestone of 100 years of capitalist decadence. Despite massive waves of struggles especially in the late 60s and early 1970s, the proletariat has not yet been able to destroy decadent capitalism. But this failure of the working class to meet its ‘appointment with history’, especially in the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, does not in any way invalidate the Marxist theory of capitalist decadence.

Some questions for the ‘deniers’ 

There seems to be common ground that capitalism today is a socially regressive system – although we probably disagree on whether it was ever progressive in the first place – and that a proletarian revolution is both possible and necessary.

There also appears to be broad agreement that capitalism is a historically transitory system. But it is entirely unclear what theory the deniers use to determine this, given that they appear to reject the whole materialist conception of history as a succession of modes of production which go through a phase of ascent and decline.

• Why is capitalism a historically transitory system?
• And if it is historically transitory, what are the seeds of its destruction, the fatal contradictions that will – at least at some point in its development – lead to its historic crisis?
• And if it has no fatal contradictions – no built-in tendency towards overproduction, for example – why can it not prolong its life indefinitely?
• Are there any limits – geographic or other – to its ability to continue to create new markets for its commodities?
• Are there any final limits to capitalism’s ability to adapt and survive – for example the degradation of the planet to the point where it threatens the survival of humanity?

If there are no limits, then it’s hard to see why capitalism is not, as the bourgeoisie itself proclaims, essentially an eternal system.

So in conclusion we think the onus is on the deniers of decadence to demonstrate how they prove that capitalism is not, as the bourgeoisie argues, the final finished product of the class struggle that contains no fatal contradictions.

For ourselves, having tested all the links of our theoretical framework, we’re confident that the Marxist theory of capitalist decadence remains absolutely valid. 

MH  26.9.15

In the struggle to form a Communist Party in Britain during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 it was the Left, led by the small group around Sylvia Pankhurst and the Workers’ Dreadnought, that was clearest about the danger posed by the Labour Party to a workers’ revolution.

After some initial hesitations in 1914 the Labour Party had joined the ranks of the ‘social patriots’ and became a supporter of British imperialism in the slaughter. This excerpt from an article written by Pankhurst in 1920 still refers to Labour as ‘reformist’ rather than a capitalist party but it is very clear in denouncing its counter-revolutionary role for the capitalist state.

In opposition to the programme of the social patriotic Labour Party the Dreadnought group defended the need for the overthrow of capitalism and the dictatorship of the working class exercised through the soviets as a step towards the abolition of the wages system and communism.

“The social patriotic parties of reform, like the British Labour Party, are everywhere aiding the capitalists to maintain the capitalist system; to prevent it from breaking down under the shock which the Great War has caused it, and the growing influence of the Russian Revolution. The bourgeois social patriotic parties, whether they call themselves Labour or Socialist, are everywhere working against the Communist revolution, and they are more dangerous to it than the aggressive capitalists because the reforms they seek to introduce may keep the capitalist regime going for some time to come. When the social patriotic reformists come into power, they fight to stave off the workers’ revolution with as strong a determination as that displayed by the capitalists, and more effectively, because they understand the methods and tactics and something of the idealism of the working class.

The British Labour Party, like the social patriotic organisations of other countries, will, in the natural development of society, inevitably come to power. It is for the Communists to build up the forces that will overthrow the social patriots, and in this country we must not delay or falter in that work.

We must not dissipate our energy in adding to the strength of the Labour Party; its rise to power is inevitable. We must concentrate on making a Communist movement that will vanquish it.

The Labour Party will soon be forming a Government; the revolutionary opposition must make ready to attack it.”

Excerpt from ‘Towards a Communist Party’, Workers’ Dreadnought, 21 February 1920.

Why are millions fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and other countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa? Because the population there is desperate to escape a permanent state of war, an infernal spiral of two, three, even five way conflicts between equally murderous antagonists, whether official government armies or terrorist gangs. Syria is the most ‘advanced’ expression of this descent into chaos. The Assad government, which has shown itself ready to bomb Syria to ruins rather than relinquish power, now only controls about 17% of the country. Whole areas of the north and east of the country are under the control of the fanatical jihadis of Islamic State. Other areas are in the hands of what the western media sometimes calls “moderate” oppositionists, but which are themselves increasingly dominated by jihadi forces like al-Nusra, which is an affiliate of al-Qaida: the “secular and democratic” rebels of the Free Syrian Army, which has been noisily supported by the US and Britain, seem to have become increasingly marginal. Between the anti-Assad forces themselves there is a never-ending game of alliances, betrayals and armed battles.  

But Syria, like the other wars in the region, is also a confrontation between international powers, a fact brought home by the direct intervention of Russian war planes. From the start, Russia has backed the Assad regime with arms and “advisers”. Today its fighters are bombing “terrorist” targets because the Assad regime has its back to the wall and there is a threat that IS will overrun Russia’s base at Tartus, its only naval outlet to the Mediterranean. But for Russia, all the opposition forces, including those backed by the US, are terrorists, and its recent strikes have hit more of the non-IS rebels than IS itself. The US, which might have welcomed Russian aid in its bombing campaigns against IS in Syria and Iraq, can see very clearly that Russia’s number one aim is not to beat back IS but to prop up Assad. So the two powers are acting in the same country with opposing ends, even if they are not yet confronting each other head on.

Russia’s actions in Syria clearly mark an escalation, but they are an escalation in chaos. They go against any possibility of the big powers coming to some kind of settlement to the 4-year war in Syria, and thus any hope of stemming the tide of refugees fleeing the country. Like the US invasion of Iraq, the great powers are not bringing stability to the region, but a mounting instability, and their lack of options opens the door further to the ambitions of the regional powers. In Yemen, for example, where the Saudi- backed government has been fighting the rebels supported by Iran, which in turn has sent forces to Syria to support Assad. On the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi frontier, where Turkey has used the pretext of opposing IS to step up its attacks on the Kurdish PKK; Turkey also supports the Ahar al-Sham group in Syria, while Qatar and Saudi have their own Islamist protégés, some of which have also received CIA support.   

For decades after World War Two, the world lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the two imperialist blocs controlled by the US and the USSR. But this “Cold War” also brought with it a certain discipline, a certain order, as the majority of lesser countries or nationalist forces had to obey the diktats of one bloc or the other. The break-up of the Russian bloc at the beginning of the 90s led to the rapid unravelling of the US bloc, and subsequent attempts by the US to impose order on the resulting centrifugal tendencies only accelerated them further. Its failures in Afghanistan and Iraq are clear evidence of that, above all today as the Taliban, ousted from power by the 2001 US invasion, grow in strength in Afghanistan, and whole swathes of Iraq fall to IS or are under the influence of Iran, which is no friend to the US despite recent attempts to find a rapprochement. After these very negative experiences the US is reluctant to intervene with “troops on the ground” but the rise of IS has obliged it to resort to air power and to step up proxy support for forces like the PKK – previously considered a terrorist group -  which has proved most effective in fighting IS.   But this in turn has goaded Turkey to raise the stakes in its war on the Kurds. Attacking IS in Syria also runs the risk of indirectly boosting the Assad regime and thus Russian ambitions in the region. The contradictions mount up with no solution in sight. 

In sum, there are no forces of order on the planet. The irrationality of capitalist war is becoming increasingly apparent: the wars ravaging the planet bring short term profits to a minority of capitalists and gangsters, but overall they are a total drain on capital, and carry with them no prospect of any post-war reorganisation and reconstruction, as was the case after World War Two. And yet, none of the capitalist powers, from the mighty US to the smallest local war-lord, can afford to stay out of this headlong plunge into militarism and war. The underlying drive of capitalist and imperialist competition is too strong. The financial cost of intervening militarily may be formidable, but the worst thing of all is to lose ground to your rivals. And there will always be rivals.

For the population of these regions, the cost is counted in flesh and blood – in the civilians bombed, raped, beheaded by government armies or opposition militias, in the ruin of their homes along with the historic and cultural products of centuries, in the choice between starvation in refugee camps on the edges of the war zones or the perilous journey to the “safety” of Europe. For humanity as a whole, the prospect is the spread of military chaos across the world, dragging us towards a fateful point of no return.

But that point has not yet been reached. If Europe still looks like a haven of prosperity to the refugees of the world, this is not because of the kindness of the European bourgeoisie. It’s because the working class in these countries is still a force to be reckoned with, and the ruling class is not able to grind it down to utter poverty or mobilise it for war as it was in the 1930s when it faced a defeated working class. Syria gives us a picture of the barbarity of the ruling class when the working class is weak and unable to resist the brutality of the state. The problem for the working class in the more central countries is that it doesn’t know its own strength, doesn’t understand its capacity to fight back, doesn’t have an independent perspective that can offer a future to all the world’s exploited and oppressed. But this perspective – of class struggle across all frontiers with the goal of creating a new society – remains the only real hope for humanity.

Amos, 4.10.15

We are publishing here a letter written by the ICC in response to an article published on the website of the Communist League of Tampa, a group which has appeared recently in the USA ("Why we need a world party"). In the interests of public debate among revolutionaries, the comrades asked us to publish our letter on our website and informed us that they are working on a reply which will in turn be published on their site.

To the Communist League of Tampa

From the International Communist Current

22.8.15

Dear comrades,

We have been following your site with interest. We are encouraged by the appearance of a group which in some way identifies itself with the positions of left communism and which states plainly the need for revolutionaries to organise politically.

We think it would be fruitful to begin a political dialogue with your group and – given the importance of the organisation question for revolutionaries - that a useful starting point for this dialogue would be the text ‘Why we need a world party’ . We understand that this does not represent a ‘programmatic’ statement of the group and that it may well be the subject of disagreements among you: all the more reason, we think, to offer our own thoughts on this text and contribute to the discussion.

As already mentioned, a text which calls for a world party seems to go against the stream in a milieu dominated by anarcho-syndicalism, councilism, communisation theory, and all the varieties of individualism which flourish in a world increasingly ruled by the bourgeois principle of ‘every man for himself’. The open affirmation of the need not only for revolutionaries to come together and organise in a distinct political organisations, but also to prepare the ground for a worldwide revolutionary party in the future – this appears as a bold stance given the enormous weight of suspicion about the marxist conception of revolutionary organisation. From the mainstream media to the anarchists, we are ceaselessly informed that revolutionary political organisations can only be outmoded sects and that they are irrevocably tainted by the poisonous experience of Stalinism. We should not be surprised by this: just as the working class is a “class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”, so the revolutionary organisation which is a product of this class is essentially an alien body in capitalist society, and its militants cannot be deterred by the inevitable hostility they encounter from the representatives of the ruling ideology in all its forms. So we see a key area of agreement in the very title and theme of this text, as well as in the criticisms it makes of the anarcho-syndicalist and councilist arguments against political organisations and the political party. We have some disagreements with its formulations about the possibility of forming “revolutionary unions”, but that is an issue we can return to elsewhere, perhaps in a discussion about the Tampa group’s ‘Points of Unity’

Equally important – because the working class is an international class and its revolution can only win on an international scale - is the fact that the text sees the party as a world party, and that it must be prepared today through a process of common discussion and activities among revolutionary groups in different parts of the globe. Thus while, as you say, it is perfectly true that “forming a world party is not an immediate task at hand”, neither is it a purely abstract goal that will come about of itself sometime in the future: what revolutionaries do and say today plays an active role in the process that will lead to the formation of the party (or, negatively, in the failure to form it, which is certainly a possibility and a danger). That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily in agreement about the kind of organisation we need to develop now – we will return to this later.

Before that, we want to take up some questions about the text’s view of the party which seem inconsistent to us. First of all, the text uses the term “mass party” as opposed to the idea of a “vanguard party” based around a “tight ideological/theoretical line imposed on members”. In our view, the idea of a mass party which developed in the workers’ movement in the late 19th century was tied up with the notion of the party as a kind of government in waiting which would take over the running of society - probably through the medium of parliamentary elections, but similar ideas persisted in the revolutionary movement which broke from official social democracy during the First World War. The most obvious example is the Bolshevik party in the Russian revolution, which saw its role as forming a government after winning a majority in the soviets.

Would you not agree that the mass party idea that developed in the 19th century was also connected to the rise of opportunism in the workers’ movement? That the attempt to build a mass base as rapidly as possible led to the dilution of principles and to compromises with the ruling class, both in the parties of the Second International and in the Communist Parties after 1920-21? And we would argue that it was not accidental that the principal opponents of opportunism in both Internationals were currents who had begun to elaborate a critique of the idea of the mass party: first the Bolsheviks , following the famous debate about ‘who is a member’ at the 1903 RSDLP congress, and then the Italian and German left communists in the Third International, who took up the best in Bolshevism by arguing that, in the new epoch of proletarian revolution, the party had to be made up of committed revolutionaries on the basis of a voluntary – not “imposed” – adherence to a high level of programmatic unity. In the period up to and even during the revolution, such an organisation would necessarily be formed around a minority (a “vanguard” if you like) of the proletariat.

It also seems to us that the text’s commitment to the idea of a mass party results in a regression to social democratic ideas about the relationship between the party and the councils, or at least to a very ambiguous position about the taking of power by the party. The text makes several references to the party taking power, to the idea that “council rule is still essentially party rule”. Although the danger of substitutionism is recognised, the text appears to see the main remedy to this in the fact that the party “shares power with the entire revolutionary movement as well as other revolutionary tendencies it may be in alliance with”.

For us, this vision does not escape the parliamentary vision of council rule which hamstrung the movement in 1917. We certainly agree with the text that the aim of the party is to fight for its programme1 within the councils, which will be a battle-ground between political standpoints that, in the final analysis, represent different class interests, or encapsulate the confusions which will still weigh heavily on the proletariat during the revolution. But the party’s role is not to take power or to confuse its own functioning with the actual organs of power, the councils. Would you not agree that a central lesson of the Russian revolution was that the identification of the Bolshevik party with the state, and its tendency to substitute its decisions for those of the councils, led to the degeneration not only of the Soviet power but of the party itself? We think that clarity on this question is now a key point in the platform of the revolutionary organisation, and thus eventually of the party itself. We refer you to a polemic we had with the Communist Workers’ Organisation [31] on this question in the 1970s and would be interested in your response.

Turning to the text’s conception of the kind of organisation that needs to be built today to prepare the ground for the party: since we don’t see the party as a mass party, but as a minority organised around a clear programme, we think that the organisations which can serve as a bridge to the future party also need to have a high level of political and theoretical coherence, based around an agreed platform that is more than just a series of minimum points. This does not mean that such organisations, any more than the future party, can be monolithic; on the contrary, a living marxist organisation is one that engages in permanent debate both internally and with other tendencies in the proletarian movement. But we do think that such organisations are more than just discussion circles and need to be imbued with what Lenin called the ‘party spirit’ even if they are not the party. Furthermore, they need to be built from the start on an international scale because the future party is not (as was conceived in the past, even in the Third International to some extent) a federation of national sections but a single worldwide organisation. The experience of organising in this manner will be essential to the functioning of the future party.

This view of the present organisations as a bridge to the future party is strongly influenced by the concept of the Fraction as developed by the Italian left in the 1930s. The notion of the Fraction is, first of all, founded on the conviction that revolutionary organisations don’t come from nowhere but are part of a tradition in the workers’ movement, a tradition without which they would not exist and which needs to be assimilated in depth; at the same time, this must always be a critical assimilation based on new lessons drawn from the experience of the proletarian struggle and the practice of the revolutionary organisations of the past. The aim of this work is to prepare the programmatic and organisational principles which will be the basis for the new party. We think that a weakness of the text on the party is precisely that, except for a few lines at the end, it does not situate itself sufficiently in relation to the experience of the past and, most crucially, to attempts by previous generations and organisations of revolutionaries to address the same question as those posed in the text: how do revolutionaries today organise in order to prepare the terrain for the party of the future?

We have recently republished what we think is an important text on the party produced in 1948 [32] by a group that was heir to the tradition of the Italian left: the Gauche Communiste de France. Again, we would be very interested in your views on this text, and of course to the comments and criticisms contained in this letter. We sincerely hope that this letter can be the basis for a fruitful discussion between us – one that will clarify issues not only between our organisations, but also for the proletarian political movement in general.

Communist greetings

Alf

For the ICC

1 Regarding the question of the programme of the party, the comments by various posters at the end of the article indicate that some confusion has been caused by the idea in the text that measures like the destruction of the bourgeois state and the creation of a new proletarian power are part of a “minimum programme”. Surely the latter term evokes memories of the old social democratic parties with their programme of demands to be implemented within capitalist society? However we don’t think the issue of terminology is the most crucial one here: the real question is the content of the measures (which seem to us to be correct) and the fact that they would indeed be part of a programme that the party defends inside the assemblies and councils.

Despite it being anticipated in all the preceding polls, there were still many expressions of ‘surprise’ at the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party. Previous leaders Kinnock, Blair and Brown had all warned that the election of Corbyn would mean that Labour would lose the 2020 general election and could be out of power for a generation. After Corbyn’s speech to the Labour Party Conference he was accused of only speaking to the ‘activists’ and it was widely claimed that, under his leadership, Labour would only be a party of protest.

The elevation of Corbyn was not an accident, but it can only be understood in terms of the overall political needs of British capitalism.

The myth of anti-austerity

In the General Election in May the distinction between the varieties of austerity on offer from the major parties was even less clear than usual. Against the policies undertaken by the Conservative/LibDem Coalition, Labour offered little more than ‘Austerity Lite’. After the election Labour in parliament proceeded to support new cuts in welfare introduced by the new Tory government. It was against this background that Corbyn stood as an opponent of austerity who puts forward fairness and equality, along with growth and state intervention, as an alternative to the brutality of a government that favours the few, not the many.

Comparisons were justifiably made with the Greek populist government of Syriza. Syriza also advertises itself as being against austerity, although it should be recalled that, after winning a clear majority against the bailout conditions proposed by the ‘troika’, Syriza then accepted an even more stringent programme of austerity than had been agreed by previous governments of right and left. However, the idea that Corbyn’s emergence expresses a similar rejection of austerity as that trumpeted by Syriza, and by Podemos in Spain, remains popular. It is tied up with the notion that austerity is a political choice, and not something imposed on all capitalist governments by the reality of the capitalist economic crisis.

While state capitalism is at the heart of the governing regime of every country in the modern world, Corbyn and the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell have made explicit their commitment to the strengthening of the role of the capitalist state in all aspects of economic and social life in the UK. Plans for state investment, for ‘peoples’ quantitative easing’, for the nationalisation of banks, the re-nationalisation of the railways, and  similar policies, show that the domination of capital in Britain is safe in their hands. It’s true that the shadow energy minister has said that Labour “don’t want to nationalise energy. We want to do something far more radical. We want to democratise it.” But this apparently means that “There should be nothing to stop every community in this country owning its own clean energy power station” - which still seems to be a populist green variation on the same basic theme.

To prove that they are not ‘deficit deniers’, the new Corbyn leadership has signed up to Chancellor George Osborne’s fiscal charter and insists that Britain must ‘live within its means’. Corbyn and McDonnell have also appointed an economic advisory panel including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, fashionable author Thomas Piketty, and former Bank of England monetary policy committee member Danny Blanchflower, to provide ideas for the reforming of the role of the capitalist state. This can only mean minor modifications in an economic system that is based on the exploitation of the labour power of the working class.

At the level of British imperialism Corbyn has been much criticised for saying that, if he were to be Prime Minister, he would not use nuclear weapons. This should be put into context. In his speech to the Labour Conference he did say that “Britain does need strong, modern military and security forces” and that “British values … are the fundamental reason why I love this country and its people.” There can be no challenging his patriotism. His support for “the authority of international law and international institutions” demonstrates a support for the imperialist set-up that is the basis for international relations. As for nuclear weapons, his favourable words towards the policies of US President Obama reveal no antagonism towards the Commander in Chief in charge of the greatest nuclear force on the planet.

However, opposition to nuclear weapons is, at root, as important a part of Corbyn’s appeal as the ‘opposition to austerity’. All the attacks on the new Labour leader from mainstream media, saying how ‘dangerous’ his policies are, only go to boost his radical image. This is reinforced by the claims of the left. At the Labour Conference Matt Wrack, the leader of the Fire Brigades Union, said that  Corbyn and McDonnell “represent a serious challenge to the establishment, in reality to the British ruling class” and that “MI5, Special Branch and the CIA are all watching this conference, and watching what is going on in the shadow cabinet, with the aim of undermining it.” Socialist Worker (15/9/15) agreed that “Corbyn faces opposition from the vast majority of his fellow MPs as well as from the ruling class and the majority of the media. They will do anything to bring him down.” Left and right agree that Corbyn is a threat to the status quo. And many people have been attracted to the Labour party, or persuaded to return to it, because of illusions that somehow Corbyn is a refreshing change or represents a return to socialist basics, rather than being a typical conformist product of the Labour Party machine.

In reality a Corbyn-led Labour Party will perform a useful function as part of capitalism’s political apparatus. In the face of deepening cuts in services and other attacks on living standards, the ruling class is aware that there is the possibility of discontent from those who are most affected. This does not need to be on the scale of widespread unrest for it to be a concern for the bourgeoisie. Labour will be able to present itself as a radical alternative for those who are the victims of a continuing programme of austerity and impoverishment. At this stage the existence of a ‘party of protest’ (which doesn’t challenge the fundamentals of the capitalist system, only points to its impact on ‘the many’) will serve British capitalism well.

Labour’s long history as a pillar of capitalism

Over the last hundred years the Labour Party has shown itself to be an essential part of capitalism’s superstructure, both in government and opposition.

In 1914, alongside social democratic parties across Europe, Labour, along with the unions, came to the aid of British imperialism, acting as a recruiter for the bloodbath of the First World War and standing against workers’ actions that would undermine the war effort. In the face of mutinies and the unrest that followed the war Labour acted as a pole of responsibility; and in 1918 it adopted a constitution with the explicit commitment to nationalisation and other state capitalist measures that had already characterised the management of social life during wartime. Against the aspirations of those who had been inspired by the revolution in Russia it offered stability, state control and opposition to social upheaval.

Throughout the inter-war period Labour offered ‘socialist planning’ against the anarchy of capitalist competition. In the 1930s, alongside Conservative mavericks like Winston Churchill, it stood against the policy of appeasement and for preparation for a war against German imperialism. During the Second World War Labour was a key constituent of the war-time Coalition which meant it slipped naturally into government in 1945.

The government of Clement Attlee from 1945-51 is often presented as a golden age for the Labour Party. In practice it presided over a period of great austerity, where troops and states of emergency were used against striking workers, when the role of the state was reinforced in many areas of economic and social life, when British imperialism continued to deploy its military forces and tried to develop nuclear weapons, and when Britain was a loyal lieutenant in the American-dominated imperialist bloc.

The subsequent Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan were able to replace Conservative administrations at key points in history. The 1974 Labour government was brought in against a wave of struggles, promoting illusions that it would be different to its predecessors. In fact, in the 1970s, Labour and the unions held down wages with the imposition of their Social Contract. Under Callaghan began the monetarist policies, the programme of cuts in public spending, that were later taken up by Margaret Thatcher. The strikes and demonstrations of the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978-79 were against a Labour, not a Conservative government.

In the 1980s Labour in opposition made ‘radical’ critiques of Thatcherism, providing a so-called ‘alternative’ at a time when workers were embarking on waves of massive struggles. Subsequently, the governments of Blair and Brown played their part in the management of the capitalist economy; at the level of international relations the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were further evidence of Labour’s commitment to the militarist core of imperialist conflict.

This is the history of the Labour Party’s defence of British values over the last century, as a party of government and as a party in opposition. In the period to come, when attacks on the working class could lead to a questioning of the very basis of society, and not just the policies of particular governments, Corbyn’s Labour Party will prove a valuable weapon for the bourgeoisie in Britain.

Car 3/10/15