The more and more obvious bankruptcy of world capitalism, which is now sinking into a new recession, is beginning to alarm seriously even the most optimistic analysts of the ‘perspectives' for the economy in all countries. At the same time, discontent, anger, combativity continue to mount within the working class against the increasingly generalized attacks on its living conditions:
-- unemployment with less and less benefits, lasting longer, with decreasing prospects of finding a job; on the contrary, we are seeing more and more lay-offs in the name of ‘restructuration', ‘reconversion', ‘privatization';
-- the dismantling of the whole apparatus of social benefits, in the spheres of health, pensions, housing and education;
-- the fall in incomes through the suppression of bonuses, the increase in the working day, wage limits and freezes;
-- the deregulation of working conditions: reintroduction of weekend working, night work, ‘flexible' hours;
-- the increase in sanctions at the workplace, the reinforcement of police controls, especially over immigrant workers, in the name of defending ‘security', of fighting ‘terrorism' or ‘alcoholism', etc.
On the level of the economy and the consequences for the lives of the social classes which are exploited and disinherited by this society, it is the less developed capitalist countries which show the future for the industrialized ones. Today the characteristics of the historical bankruptcy of capitalism manifest themselves very violently in these countries (see the article on Mexico in this issue). However, these characteristics aren't limited to the ‘under-developed' areas and in the most important industrialized centers capitalism is showing the same symptoms of flagrant bankruptcy: the aggravation of unemployment in Japan, the US debt now bigger than that of Brazil, plans for massive lay-offs in West Germany, to give only some of the most significant indications.
Faced with this tendency for the crisis of capitalism to unify the conditions of exploitation and poverty for the workers in all countries, the working class has responded internationally. A whole series of workers' struggles have developed since 1983 and have been intensified since 1986, ranging across all countries and all sectors. The present wave of struggles constitutes a level of simultaneity in the workers' response to capitalist attacks which is unprecedented in history. In the most industrialized countries of western Europe -Belgium, France, Britain, Spain, Sweden, Italy, the USA, but also in the less developed countries, especially in Latin America, in eastern Europe where there have been signs recently of a revival of class combativity, in Yugoslavia where a wave of strikes has been unfolding for several months - everywhere in the world, in all sectors of the economy, the working class has entered into the fight against the attack on its living conditions. The tendency towards movements involving more and more workers, in all industries, employed and unemployed, the tendencies towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, towards the development of the proletariat's confidence in itself, towards the search for active solidarity, are all present, to various degrees, according to the moment and the country, in the current struggles of the workers. They express the search for unification in the working class, a unification which is the central need in today's struggles.
It is in order to parry this tendency towards unification that the bourgeoisie is using all the tactics it can find to divide and divert the means and aims of the struggle - above all on the terrain of the struggle itself through the intervention of the unions and base unionists:
-- against the extension of struggles: corporatist and regional isolation;
-- against self-organization: false extension by the unions;
-- against unified demonstrations, the use of union and corporatist division, of all kinds of tricks with the date and timing of demos.
All this is wrapped in a verbiage which becomes all the more radical as workers' distrust towards the unions is more and more transformed into open hostility, and workers' militancy results in the mobilization of large numbers of workers in assemblies and demonstrations:
"The struggles in Belgium (spring ‘86) underlined the necessity and possibility of massive and generalized movements in the advanced countries. The struggles in France (winter ‘86-‘87) have confirmed the necessity and possibility of the workers taking control of their struggles, of the self-organization of the struggle outside the unions, against them and their sabotaging maneuvers.
"These are the two inseparable aspects of the workers' combat which will be more and more present in the movement of struggles which has already begun." (IR 49, 2nd quarter, 1987).
After the railway strike in France and the telecommunications strike in Britain at the beginning of the year, the workers' struggles in Spain and Yugoslavia lasting several months, and also the recent struggles in Italy, confirm in their turn the general characteristics of the present wave of struggle. The simultaneity of struggles, and the tendency to take them in hand confronted with the strategy of the left, the extreme left and the unions, confirms the development of a potential for unification.
Spain: Union divisions against workers' unity
In Spain, above all since February, not a day has passed without strikes, assemblies, demonstrations, from the mines to the airlines, from health to steel, from shipyards to transport, from teaching to building. The ever-so serious paper Le Monde put it like this: "Many workers now seem to be persuaded, rightly or wrongly, that going into the street is the only way to make themselves heard." (8.5.87).
The working class is obviously ‘right' to feel the need to go into the street to look for solidarity and unity in the face of the bourgeoisie. This is true for the working class in all countries. In Spain it is a tradition, inherited in particular from the Francoist period when the police forbade striking workers to stay in the factories, to demonstrate from factory to factory and to search immediately for solidarity. This is something which already characterized the massive struggles of 1975-76 in this country.
From the beginning of the movement this year, the first attempts at unification could be seen in certain sectors of the working class: agricultural workers from the Castellon region held a number of demonstrations which brought in other workers and the unemployed; in Bilbao, workers from two factories imposed a joint demonstration against the advice of the unions, and the same thing was done in the Canaries by the port workers of Tenerife and the tobacco workers and truck drivers. However, despite these signs of a push towards active solidarity, in February-March the unions managed to contain the thrust towards extension and in particular the thrust towards extension, and in particular to isolate the movement of 20,000 Asturian miners to the north of the country: in this movement there were hardly any general assemblies or organized demonstrations. From the beginning of April it seemed that the unions would be able to stop the movement thanks to an unprecedented array of divisive tactics. Workers Commissions (the PCE union), the UGT (PSOE union), the CNT (anarchist union) and a whole plethora of professional or branch unions including base unions like the ‘Coordinadora' in the ports, went to work to divide things up into different demands, different sectors, different regions, to disperse the movement through rolling strikes, notably in the transport sector.
But while the union maneuvers managed to contain the important potential which was there, they only succeeded in stifling combativity in one place to see it reappear immediately afterwards somewhere else. Many work stoppages, short strikes and demonstrations took place outside any union directive and in many sectors there is an atmosphere of thinly buried conflict. The bourgeoisie, which can't stop the workers from going into the streets, has done all it can to ensure that they don't join up in common demonstrations and develop an active solidarity between different sectors. It has done this through the game of union divisions completed by the systematic intervention of the police forces when these divisions no longer suffice. Thus, in certain places all the workers' energies are mobilized towards almost daily confrontations: in the port of Puerto Real in Cadiz, the workers and many elements of the population have been battling with the police for weeks; in the mines of El Bierzo, near Leon in the north, while discontent has been evident since the beginning of the year since the beginning of May there have been daily clashes with the police in which the whole population has been involved. The death of a worker in Reinosa, a steel town near Santander, in some particularly violent confrontations, has once again tragically confirmed the fact that the ‘left' parties - in this instance the governing PSOE - are just as much the guard dogs of capital as those of the right.
These confrontations with the police in small, relatively isolated industrial towns like Reinosa and Ponferrada in the north of the country, Puerto Real in the south, show the depth of the workers' discontent, of their combativity and of the tendencies to unite all categories together against the attack on living conditions, and against the intervention of the forces of order. However, these systematic confrontations often constitute a trap for the workers. All their energies are mobilized into these street battles, ritually orchestrated by the police and by those who, within the workers' ranks, reduce the question of the means and aims of the struggle to these clashes alone. In this work the unions and ‘radical' base-unionist organs have a division of labor; thus, for several weeks, the battles in Puerto Real are ‘programmed' for Tuesday at the port and Thursday in the town: It's no accident that the media in Europe are only now beginning to talk about events in Spain, and then only about the clashes with the police, whereas the workers' struggle has been developing over several months. The workers can't win in these isolated battles with the forces of order. They can only exhaust their strength to the detriment of a search for extension and solidarity outside the region, because only massive and unified struggles can face up to the state apparatus, to its police and its agents inside the working class.
The tendencies towards the unification of simultaneous struggles through the workers taking control of their own movements have not yet reached their full flowering. However, the conditions which give rise to these tendencies - frontal and massive attacks on the working class, the maturation of consciousness about the need to fight together - are far from exhausted, whether in Spain or in other countries.
Italy: base unionism versus the self-organization of the struggle
The tendencies towards the workers taking charge of their own struggles have manifested themselves on several occasions. In France in particular, in the railway workers' strike, at the beginning of the year, the necessity and possibility of self-organization could be seen in broad daylight. This experience has had a profound echo in the whole international working class.
In Italy today this need to organize the struggle outside the traditional union framework has been in the forefront of the movement which has been developing in several sectors: railways, airlines, hospitals, and particularly in the schools. In this last sector, the rejection of the contract accepted by the unions resulted in self-organization through base committees, first in 120 schools in Rome, then on a national scale. In the space of a few months, the movement gained a majority over the unions and organized three national assemblies - in Rome, Florence and Naples - of delegates elected by provincial coordinations. Within the movement there was a confrontation between the tendency which sought to stabilize the committees into a new union (unione Comitati di Base, Cobas, which had a majority in Rome), and the ‘assemblyist' tendency, which had a majority in the national assemblies and which clearly reflected the profound rejection of trade unionism developing throughout the working class. For the moment, this is being expressed more through a general rejection of any notion of delegation - which still leaves the door open to base unionism ‑ than through a clear consciousness of the impossibility of building new unions. But the fact that trade unionism, in order to maintain control over the movement, has been obliged to put up with the ‘base committees' is a significant expression of the workers' slow disengagement from trade unionist ideology, and of the need for the self-organization and unity of struggles that they represent.
On the railways, the movement began with a ‘self-convened' assembly in Naples which gave rise to a regional coordination, then to similar organs in other regions and a national coordination which assembled in Florence. The need for unity was expressed in the fact that, at a national railway workers' demo in Rome, a leaflet calling for a joint struggle was distributed by the non-unionist minority of the schools' base committees. In the railway workers' coordinations the weight of the leftists was very strong right from the beginning Democrazia Proletaria (a radical left group like the PSU in France, only more important) straight away tried to fixate the attention of the movement onto the idea of fighting both inside and outside the unions, thus making the unions the main preoccupation of the movement and pushing the question of unity into the background.
The depth of this process of accumulating experience, of reflection, which has gone on over a number of years, is being expressed more and more openly: through short wildcat strikes like that of 4,000 municipal workers in Palermo, Sicily; through regroupments to discuss what has to be done, like the assembly of 120 workers from different categories in the public services, in Milan in March, which debated how to organize faced with the treason of the unions. In response to this ferment there has been a whole ‘sapping' work carried out by various leftist and base unionist groups For the first time in Italy, the Trotskyists played a role, in the teachers' movement. The libertarians have shaken off their torpor to warm up the cadaver of anarcho-syndicalism. Democrazia Proletaria has been working hard to transform the base committees, which began as proletarian organs, into base unions, and to keep control of the demonstration of 40,000 school workers in Rome at the end of May, by polarizing attention around the question of the recognition of the Cobas to ‘negotiate' with the government to the detriment of joining up with other sectors who are beginning to mobilize.
However, while the bourgeoisie, by calling up all the political forces able to contain the working class ‘at the base' has kept overall control of the situation, the present situation in Italy is an illustration of the historic weakening of the left wing of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus in the face of the working class. La Corriere della Serra, a newspaper no less ‘serious' than Le Monde, notes in an article entitled ‘Uncontrolled Malaise' that: "The crisis of the unions is not episodic, but structural ..." From its bourgeois standpoint which can only see the working class in the trade unions, it therefore considers that: "Class interests are obsolete." But it then immediately asserts that "this doesn't mean that the unions are managing to control the spontaneous and centrifugal manifestations of those (egotistical? wildcat? rebellious?) fringes who don't intend to renounce the defense of their own interests." And this is indeed why the bourgeoisie is trying to control the movements:
-- through the trick of radicalizing the left, since traditional trade unionism is completely discredited among the most combative workers -who are becoming increasingly numerous;
-- through the attempts to discredit the most militant elements of the class by presenting them as ‘egotistical'. But stupid stories such as "the teachers are ruining the holidays of the hospital workers who aren't looking after railway workers who don't transport the bank employees" are less and less able to hide the reality of the growing mobilization.
Although Italy has seen relatively fewer open expressions of the present international wave of struggle, the movement of spring ‘87 shows that the period of fragmentation and dispersion of struggles has come to an end in this country as well. The intensification of attacks against the working class, the accumulation of distrust towards the unions, a greater confidence on the part of the workers about the possibility of action for themselves - all this will lead the class toward more massive and determined actions.
The development of the perspective of unification
The general characteristics of the present workers' struggles aren't just being manifested in the industrialized countries of Western Europe. In the less developed countries, like Mexico (see the communiqué in this issue) but also in the eastern bloc (see also in this issue), the working class is showing a growing combativity which confirms the international dimension of the struggle.
In Yugoslavia as well: since February ‘87 a wave of strikes against new government measures on wages (which had already fallen by 40% in six years) swept through the country. The measure which consisted of making the workers pay back several months wage increases was the last straw. Beginning with strikes by 20,000 workers in Zagreb -industry, hospitals, schools - the strikes then spread to the province, then to the whole country, and to other sectors like the ports, the shipyards, steel and agriculture. This movement, which for three months the bourgeoisie was unable to get under control, showed all the characteristics of extension, combativity, and initiatives taken directly by the workers. And this all the more strongly because the unions there are evidently part of the state apparatus, as in all the countries of the east. Thus we saw strikes taking place outside of any union directives, collective decisions by workers to leave the official unions - which denounced the strikers as "anti-socialist", numerous assemblies where workers discussed and decided on their actions. Faced with this situation the unions have asked for greater autonomy from the government in order to regain their grip over the working class.
In all these events, the central question posed has been the unification of struggles - unity in action through the workers taking charge of their own struggles. This has been the case in Spain as it has been in Italy and Yugoslavia. And the working class has been far from passive in the other countries of Western Europe. In Belgium, the miners of Limburg, who sparked off the spring ‘86 movement which marked the beginning of a new acceleration in the current wave of struggles, entered into the fight once again. This was in a context of reviving combativity marked by short strikes in several sectors, after the relative calm which followed last year's movement. In Holland, after the Rotterdam dockers had been tied down by the union tactic of ‘surprise strikes' at the beginning of March, the municipal workers in Amsterdam launched a strike which in two days spread throughout the city. The unions had prepared the same scenario as in the port of Rotterdam, but the workers came out rapidly and spontaneously, threatening to extend the struggle to the coast and the railways and rejecting the union tactic of ‘surprise' actions. However, lacking an alternative to the unions and with the bourgeoisie quickly retreating from its plans, the workers returned to work Nevertheless, this brief movement marked a change in the social climate in the country and deepened the perspective of a development of struggles against the increasingly draconian measures being taken by the bourgeoisie. In Germany as well, in response to the plans to lay-off tens of thousands of workers, particularly in the Ruhr, there have been several demonstrations including one which united industrial and municipal workers. This shows that even in this country where the mobilization of the workers lags behind what's going on in other countries, there will be no lack of struggles as the effect of the world recession begins to be felt more keenly in Germany.
Struggle Committees: A general tendency towards the regroupment of combative workers
A particularly significant expression of the maturation going on in the working class is the embryonic appearance of struggle committees, regrouping combative workers around the problems posed by the necessity to struggle and to prepare the struggle, outside of the traditional union structures.
In spring ‘86 in Belgium, a committee was formed in the Limburg mines and took the initiative of sending delegations to push for extension (to the Ford factory in Ghent, to rallies in Bruxelles); in Charleroi, some railway workers came together to send delegations to other stations and other sectors in the region, such as urban transport; in Bruxelles a coordination of teachers (Malibran) was also formed, regrouping unionized and non-unionized teachers with the aim of "fighting divisions in the struggles". These committees, arising out of the spring ‘86 movement, finally disappeared as the movement retreated, after being gradually being emptied of their class life and taken over by the base unionists.
Such regroupments don't only appear as the fruit of an open struggle. In an open struggle they tend to regroup a larger number of participants, at other moments they regroup smaller minorities of workers. In Italy, for example, in Naples, committees of sanitation and hospital workers have existed for several months. The hospital workers group, made up of a small minority of workers, meets regularly and has intervened through leaflets and posters and by speaking up at assemblies called by the unions in favor of extension and against the proposals of the unions. It has had an important echo in this sector (the unions no longer call assemblies in the hospital!) and even outside it among railway workers. Committees of this kind have also appeared in France. At the beginning of the year, the unions did all they could to involve the whole working class in the defeat of the railway workers, by organizing a dead-end extension under the auspices of the CGT - which hadn't hesitated to condemn the rail strike when it began. In the face of such sabotage, workers in gas and electricity, then in the post office, set up committees to draw the lessons of the railway workers' struggle, to make contacts between different workplaces, to prepare the next round of struggles.
Even if these experiences of struggle committees are at their beginnings, even if the committees haven't managed to keep going for long and fluctuate a lot in the wake of events, this doesn't mean that they are simply ephemeral phenomena linked to particular situations. On the contrary. They are going to appear more and more because they correspond to a profound need in the working class. In the process towards unification of struggles, it is vital that the most militant workers, those who are convinced of the need for unity in the struggle, should regroup in order:
-- to defend, within the struggle, the necessity for extension and unification;
-- to show the necessity for sovereign general assemblies and for strike committees and coordinations elected and revocable by the assemblies;
-- to push forward, both within and outside moments of open struggle, the process of discussion and reflection, in order to draw the lessons of previous struggles and to prepare the struggles to come;
-- to create a focus for regroupment, open to all workers who want to take part, whatever their sector and whether or not they are unionized.
Such regroupments don't have the task of constituting themselves into political groups, defined by a platform of principles; neither are they unitary organs englobing all the workers (general assemblies of the employed and unemployed, committees elected and revocable by the assemblies). They regroup minorities of workers and are not delegations from unitary organs.
In 1985, with the relative dispersal of struggle, the growing distrust towards the unions led many workers to take a wait-and-see attitude; their disgust with the unions made them retreat into passivity. The acceleration of the class struggle in 1986 has been marked not only by more massive struggles and by a tendency for workers to take charge of their own actions, but also by more numerous attempts by the more combative workers to regroup in order to act upon the situation, The first experiences of struggle committees correspond to this dynamic: a greater determination and self-confidence which is going to develop more and more in the working class and which will lead to the regroupment of workers on the terrain of the struggle, outside the union framework. And this isn't just a possibility, but an imperious necessity if the working class is going to develop the capacity to unite, against the bourgeoisie's maneuvers aimed at keeping it divided.
This is something the bourgeoisie has already understood. The main danger facing the struggle committees is trade unionism. The trade union representatives and the leftists are now themselves promoting ‘struggle committees'. By introducing to them criteria for participation, platforms, even membership cards, they are aiming to recreate a variety of trade unionism. And by maintaining them in a corporatist framework and proclaiming them as ‘representatives' of the workers, whereas they are only the emanation of those who participate in them and not of general assemblies of workers, they again drag them back onto the terrain of trade unionism. For example, in Limburg in Belgium the Maoists managed to deform the reality of the miners' struggle committee by proclaiming it as a ‘strike committee' and thus turning it into an obstacle to the holding of general assemblies of all workers. In France militants of the CNT (anarcho-syndicalist) and elements coming from the PCI (Program Communiste - which has now disappeared in France) tried to recuperate the committees of postal workers and gas and electricity workers. They proposed a platform of membership "for a renewal of class unionism". Thus introducing in a ‘radical' manner the same objectives as any union. And against the principle defended by the ICC of the need to open up to any workers who wanted to participate, an element from the CNT even talked about "the danger of seeing in these committees too many ‘uncontrolled' workers"!
Despite the difficulties there are in constituting such workers' groups and keeping them alive, despite the danger of being strangled at birth by base unionism, the struggle committees are an integral part of the constitution of the proletariat into a united, autonomous class, independent from all the other classes in society. Like calling for the extension and self-organization of struggles, supporting and impulsing such committees is something which revolutionary groups must take up in an active manner. The development of struggle committees is one of the conditions for the unification of workers' struggles.
MG, 31.5.'87.
Capitalism is one system. The chronic crisis of capitalism is hitting every country in the world. Everywhere governments with their backs to the wall are resorting to the same policies, the same measures. Everywhere the working class is replying by engaging in the struggle for the defense of its vital interests, and everywhere the struggle is taking on an increasingly massive character. And everywhere the workers find themselves up against an enemy which is refining its strategy: the governments attack head-on, while the 'left', the unions and the leftists have the job of sabotaging struggles from the inside, using a 'radical' language to break the workers' unity, to derail their struggles towards dead-ends and defeats.
Against the ramblings of all those pessimistic and disappointed souls who have such doubts in the combativity of the working class, from those who are scrabbling about on the ‘glacier' - like the modernists of La Banquise - to those like the GCI who spend their time complaining about the ‘passivity' and ‘amorphousness' of the working class, the news arriving from Mexico is a sharp rejoinder and a confirmation of our analysis of the third wave of struggles which is hitting Latin America as well as Europe.
We're publishing here extracts from a communiqué addressed to all the workers and revolutionary groups in the world by the Alptraum Communist Collective on the recent struggles in Mexico. This group is not well known in Europe, so we think it's necessary to give our readers some information on the subject. The ACC was formed at the beginning of the ‘80s as a marxist study and discussion group. It has evolved in a slow and hesitant manner towards becoming a group of political intervention. This slow evolution is not only due to ‘hesitations' faced with the putrid political atmosphere which reigns in Mexico but is also in some way an expression of the seriousness and sense of responsibility of these comrades, who have been trying to ensure a solid theoretical/political foundation before launching into public activity. In this sense, they provide a salutary lesson to many small groups who get carried away by a taste for ‘practical action' alone, and who thus run the risk of having a purely ephemeral life and losing themselves in superficiality and confusion.
In 1986, the ACC - with whom we have been in close contact (see IR 40 and 44) - became a political group in the full sense, regularly publishing its review Comunismo, whose content is as interesting as it is serious. We are sure that our readers will be extremely interested in this communiqué on the situation in Mexico and the workers' struggle developing there. Integrating the situation in Mexico into the international context, the ACC's analysis has the same approach and draws the same conclusions as ours. We salute the ACC, not only for the contents of this communiqué but also because of the concern which guided them to address this for the information of revolutionaries and workers in all countries.
Simultaneously with this communiqué, we received from Mexico the first issue of the review Revolucion Mundial published by the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista (GPI). The GPI was definitively formed in December 1986 by a certain number of elements who have been through a "long and painful process of political decantation." It is a group of militants with a solid political formation. We do not have enough space in this issue to give more detailed information about this new group and its positions; in our next issue we will publish extracts from their theoretical works and statements of political position. For the moment we will restrict ourselves to giving the following extract from the presentation to their review:
"It is in this situation of a historical ‘crossroads' and under the political influence of communist propaganda that the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista has appeared. It's also in this framework that Revolucion Mundial has appeared. This publication is the product of a long and painful process of political decantation, of a period devoted fundamentally to discussion, to clarification, to the attempt to break with all kinds of bourgeois influences and practices."
We can only express our satisfaction at seeing the ranks of the revolutionaries strengthened by the arrival of a new communist group. With the appearance of this group we can see the opening up of a perspective, after the necessary discussions and confrontation of positions, of a process of regroupment of revolutionary forces in Mexico, whose importance and impact will largely transcend the frontiers of this country. Weare convinced of this and will do all we can to help this process reach a positive conclusion. Our warmest communist greetings to the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista.
ICC
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1. The growing misery of the proletariat has become palpable with the reduction and liquidation of the ‘social programs' of the state, particularly in the central areas of capitalism; with the accelerated growth of the industrial reserve army, especially in Europe; with the increased rates of exploitation in all areas of capitalism, which in the peripheral countries is combined with very high rates in inflation, making the existence of the proletariat even more difficult.
...The Mexican proletariat is no exception to this. The Mexican fraction of the world bourgeoisie has applied the measures needed to maintain the interests of world capital as a whole.
...During the course of the last three years, the state has closed enterprises in steel, transport and communications, docks, automobiles, manure, sugar, as well as in the central sector of administration. State subsidies for basic foodstuffs have been suspended and expenditure on education and health greatly reduced.
The general policy of the state has been to maintain wage increases for all workers below the level of inflation and to ensure that the wage rates fixed by the collective labor contracts are each time closer to the legal minimum wage.
To give a general idea of the situation of the proletariat in Mexico, we will provide a few figures from the bourgeoisie's statistics:
-- 6 million unemployed, or 19% of the active population;
-- 4 million ‘under-employed';
-- the legal minimum for wages has been reduced from $120 a month in ‘85 to $87 in ‘86;
-- in 1986 more than 50% of wage earners received the legal minimum wage.
...In 1987, given the acceleration of devaluation and of the growth in the rate of inflation (now 115% annually), the deterioration of wage levels has also gathered pace, as have the numbers of unemployed.
2. The reduction in the living standards of the proletariat in Mexico over the past three years thus reached an extreme point in 1987. The wage situation of the electricity workers illustrates what is happening in the public sector. Whereas in 1982 they were getting wages up to 11.5 times the legal minimum, in 1987 they have been getting only 4 times the legal minimum.
Since last year there has been increasing disquiet amongst public sector workers. Between January and April, the great majority of unions obtained revisions of the collective contracts. The growing pressure on them from the workers to negotiate higher wages proved to the public sector unions that there was a possibility of workers mobilizing outside of their control. In February the state informed the workers that it "didn't have the funds" to cover the demands for emergency wage increases, which the unions had fixed at 23% (in Mexico the annual rate of inflation is, as we have seen, more than 110%).
It was in this context that the electricity workers came out on strike, despite the hard blows received by the workers at Dina, Renault and Fundidora in Monterrey (Fimosa) in 1986, and immediately after the end of the students' strike in Mexico City - a typical conflict of the middle classes through which the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie had tried to give the proletariat a ‘lesson' about the bounties of bourgeois democracy. The strike also took place in the midst of the most acute economic crisis for the federal district and the four surrounding departments. Focused on the most important industrial zone and working class concentration in the country, it was a blow to the nerve centre of the productive apparatus.
...The strike only lasted five days and the workers went back without winning anything. But in this brief lapse of time we saw in clear outline the development of the tendencies which are appearing in many proletarian movements today, especially in Europe, and which were already there in embryo in the strike at Fimosa. In the electricians' strike we saw the tendency towards massive workers' struggles with strong possibilities of extension to other sectors of the class, as manifested recently in Belgium, France and Spain. Also this strike had the characteristic of being of shorter duration, in contrast to the one at Fimosa which lasted nearly two months. The particulars of the strike were as follows.
Unlike what happened at Dina, Renault and Fomosa last year, where the conflicts lasted longer, the electricians' strike immediately took on a political character. Two hours before the outbreak of the strike, the state, through a presidential order, requisitioned the installations of the electricity company "to safeguard the national interest." Certain installations for producing electrical energy were occupied and guarded by the public forces. The army was prepared for an immediate intervention.
Faced with the evidently political character acquired by the strike, the union, aided by the left wing of capital, pounded the workers' heads with the idea that the movement was a "national affair in defense of rights, of legality, of the constitution, of national sovereignty," etc ...By continuously insisting that "the only way to prevent the strike being declared illegal is to condemn any act of violence on the part of the workers", the union in most instances managed to prevent the workers from forming pickets and calling on the non-unionized workers or those from other categories (transformed by decree into ‘scabs') to join the strike.
...The union showed a great deal of flexibility in adapting to the conditions imposed on it by the movement of workers, in order to recapture and dominate this movement.
When the unions are more openly tied to the state apparatus, they run a greater risk of losing credibility in front of the workers, especially when they act as brutally as they did at Fimosa (14,000 direct lay-offs and40,000 indirect). In these conditions it becomes necessary for the left of capital and the leftists to enter the arena in order to maintain order and lead the mobilization back along the road to social peace.
In this case, and in contrast to what happened at Fimosa where the workers were beaten down by a union which they clearly identified as being part of the state structure, the Mexican Electricians' Union (SME) is a ‘democratic' union which acts as a bridge between official trade unionism and the base or "class" unionism animated by the left and the leftists. Because of this, from the very first minute of the strike the union was able to pummel the workers with the idea that "union organization is in danger" and that for this reason it was necessary to apply the decisions of the union's central committee. This allowed the SME to maneuver from right to left and back again, radicalizing its language while framing its directives in the purest nationalist ideology. The workers literally allowed themselves to be conducted by the SME's decisions. The great majority of them left their workplaces and concentrated near the union building ... immobilized the whole time in order to "avoid violence"... and allowed the union to look for ‘solidarity' ‑ from other unions.
The SME did exactly the same thing as the car workers' and miners' unions at Dina, Renault and Fimosa, shutting the workers up in corporatism, isolating them from other workers and maintaining the conflict within strict local limits.
In addition the SME, as one of the main animators of the ‘concerted union table' - a veritable ‘council' gathering together the whole gamut of ‘democratic' unions and base unionists with a view to fabricating caricatures of ‘days of solidarity' - took charge of filling the pages of the bourgeois press with paper declarations of solidarity, while the other unions kept ‘their' workers quiet.
For its part, the left of capital, through its political groups and parties and its trade union representatives, took on the task of bombarding the electricians with the idea that they had to defend the SME as a ‘bastion of democracy' and that the fight had to be in favor of ‘national sovereignty' and ‘against the payment of foreign debt', etc, etc...
...The only march the electricians managed to hold was attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico City and concentrated large contingents of electricians from the four departments of the central zone. The march was joined by many workers from the public sector (metro, foreign exchange bank, telephones, trams, workers from the exchange offices, the universities, etc...) and from industry (clothing) as well as small nuclei of workers from medium sized enterprises (the Monteczuma brewery, Ecatepec steel). The march was also joined by groups of residents from the marginal neighborhoods and high school students. Faced with this very visible possibility of a massive extension of strikes to other sectors, the Labor Tribunal declared, two days after the march that the strike was ‘non-existent', calling on the workers to return to work immediately or face massive sackings. The union obliged the workers to go back, saying that "we respect the law". When the union informed the workers' assemblies of this, many strikers showed their discontent.
There were cries of ‘traitors' against the union leaders. But all this anger was diluted with frustration and resignation. Only a minority of workers were able to react against the union...
...While the state was hitting out at the electricians the other unions were sabotaging any attempt at mobilization in the other sectors. On three occasions they prevented strikes from breaking out in key sectors like the telephones, airlines and city trams. They also demoralized the workers from the universities, the cinemas and the primary schools. In sector after sector the unions manipulated the workers into accepting the state's decision not to grant any general emergency wage rises.
After the electricians' strike was ended it was clear that the telephone workers would go on strike. The unions tried to put it off for as long as possible, ‘postponing' it again and again. But in the union assemblies the workers showed a firm determination to come out on strike. The state then applied the same tactic it had used with the electricians: two hours before the outbreak of the strike it requisitioned the enterprise, and the union straight away sent the workers back to work...Finally, it became more evident that the unions in all their varieties are an obstacle to the proletariat's struggle for immediate demands. Far from expressing the interests of this struggle they are the incarnation of national bourgeois interests, of the state.
The bourgeois state imposed its wage policy with the help of the unions, who acted to break the workers' resistance and held back the tendencies towards massivity, simultaneity and extension.
Despite all its limitations like corporatism, the workers' surviving confidence in the unions and a lack of confidence in their own strength, despite isolation and the weight of bourgeois nationalist ideology, the electricians' movement of resistance against capital's wage policies was very important, because it showed the workers that the struggle for economic demands is inevitably transformed into a political movement, since there is no way of avoiding a confrontation with the bourgeois state. It also showed that there is a tendency towards the mass strike where the potential for extending the movement to other sectors becomes increasingly obvious.
...It's in these movements that we see the necessity to forge the political instrument of the proletariat to give it the elements of its identity as a class, in other words the international communist party, which in each moment of the struggle embodies the perspective of the communist program.
Comunismo, Mexico, April 1987.
Those, like the Internationalist Communist Group (ICG), who ignore the decadence of capitalism, “logically” situate the 2nd International (1889-1914) and its constituent parties in the bourgeois camp. In doing so, they ignore this real continuity that is a fundamental element of class consciousness.
For us, defending this continuity does not mean glorifying today the parties that made up the 2nd International. Still less does it mean considering their practice valid for our own epoch. Above all, it does not mean claiming the heritage of the reformist fraction that slid towards “social-chauvinism” and which, when war broke out, passed over definitively into the bourgeois camp. It means understanding that the 2nd International and its constituent parties were real expressions of the proletariat at a given moment in the class’ history.
Not the least of its merits was to complete the decantation begun during the early years of the 1st International by eliminating the anarchist current, the ideological expression of the process of decomposition and proletarianisation of the petty bourgeoisie bitterly resented by certain artisan strata.
From the start, the 2nd International took its stand on the basis of marxism, which it incorporated in its program.
There are two ways of judging the 2nd International and the social-democratic parties: with the marxist method, i.e. critically, placing them in their historic context; or with the anarchist method, which ahistorically, and with no coherent method, is content simply to obliterate them from the workers’ movement. The first method has always been that of the communist lefts; it is the ICC’s method today. The second is that of those irresponsible “revolutionary” phrasemongers, as hollow as they are incoherent, who barely hide their semi-anarchist nature and approach. The ICG belongs to this category.
“Before me, chaos”. For those who think there is “no future”, past history seems useless, absurd, and contradictory. So much effort, so many civilisations, so much knowledge, only to arrive at the perspective of a starving, sick humanity constantly threatened by nuclear destruction. “After me, the deluge”... “Before me, chaos”.
In its present advanced state of decomposition this kind of “punk” ideology oozes from capitalism’s every pore, and to varying degrees penetrates the whole of society. Even revolutionary elements, supposedly convinced – by definition – of the existence, if not the imminence, of society’s revolutionary future may sometimes be subjected to the pressure of this kind of “apocalyptic nihilism” where the past no longer has any meaning, especially if they are poorly armed politically. The very idea of a historical “evolution” seems absurd to them. And the whole history of the workers’ movement, 150 years of effort by revolutionaries organised to accelerate, stimulate, and fertilise the struggles of their class are considered of little value, or even as part of the existing social order’s “self-regulation”. Such ideas come into fashion from time to time, conveyed especially by elements coming from anarchism, or moving towards it.
For several years, the ICG has more and more been playing this role. The ICG split from the ICC in 1979, but a number of its constituent members came originally from anarchism. After a passing flirt with Bordigism, just after the split, the ICG has evolved towards the anarchist childhood loves of some of its members, with its desperate ahistorical ranting about eternal revolt; but this is no openly proclaimed anarchism, capable for example of stating clearly that Bakunin and Proudhon were basically right, against the marxists of their time; it is an embarrassed anarchism, which doesn’t dare come into the open, and which defends its ideas with quotes borrowed from Marx and Bordiga. The ICG has invented “punk anarcho-Bordigism”.
Like an adolescent having trouble affirming his own identity and breaking with his parents, the ICG considers that before itself and its theory was the void, or almost. Lenin? “(His) theory of imperialism – says the ICG – is nothing but an attempt to justify under another (anti-imperialist!) form, nationalism, war, reformism... the disappearance of the working class as the subject of history” [1]. Rosa Luxemburg? The German Spartakists? “Left-wing social-democrats”. And social-democracy itself, in the 19th and early 20th century, founded in part by Marx and Engels, and where not only the Bolsheviks and the Spartakists, but also those who were to form the communist left of the 3rd International (the Dutch, German, and Italian lefts), got their training? For the ICG, the social-democracy, and the 2nd International that it created, were “essentially bourgeois in nature”. All those within the 2nd and then the 3rd International, against the reformists who denied it, defended first the inevitability and then the reality of capitalism’s decadence? “Anti-imperialist or Luxemburgist, the theory of decadence is nothing but a bourgeois science aimed at justifying ideologically the weakness of the proletariat in its struggle for a world free from value”.
Judging by the quotations it uses, it would appear that the only revolutionaries before the ICG were Marx and perhaps Bordiga... although we might wonder how – according to the ICG – someone like Marx given to founding “essentially bourgeois organisations”, or like Bordiga who only broke with the Italian social-democracy in 1921, could be revolutionary!
In fact, for the ICG, the whole question of identifying the proletarian organisations of the past and their successive contributions to the communist movement is meaningless. For the ICG, claiming a political and historical continuity with proletarian organisations, as communist organisations have always done, and as we do, means giving in to a “family” spirit. This is just one facet of its chaotic vision of history, just one titbit from the theoretical soup that supposedly serves as a framework for the ICG’s intervention.
In the two previous articles [2], devoted to the analysis of capitalist decadence and the ICG’s critique of this analysis, we demonstrated on the one hand the anarchist vacuity hidden behind the ICG’s “marxist” verbiage with its rejection of the analysis of capitalist decadence and of the very idea of historical evolution, and on the other the political aberrations, the frankly bourgeois positions – e.g. support for the Stalinist “Shining Path” guerrillas in Peru - to which this method, or rather this total lack of method, leads. In this article we intend to combat another aspect of this ahistorical conception: the rejection of the need for every revolutionary organisation to understand and to place itself within the historical framework of a historical continuity with past communist organisations.
On the back of all our publications, we write: “The ICC traces its origins in the successive contributions of the Communist League, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Internationals, and the left fractions which detached themselves from the latter, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts”. This makes the ICG sick.
“Communists – writes the ICG – don’t have any “parental” problems, attachment to the revolutionary “family” is a way of rejecting the impersonality of the program. The historic wire in which the communist current flows is no more a question of “persons” than of formal organisations, it is a practical question, a practice which is born at one time by such or such an individual, at another by such or such an organisation. Let us then leave the senile decadentists to gabble on their family tree, looking for their papas. Let’s look after the revolution!”
Obsessed with problems of “revolt against the father”, the ICG speaks of the “historic thread” only to make it an ethereal abstraction, devoid of reality, floating above “persons” and “formal organisation”. The ICG calls reappropriating the proletariat’s historical experience, and so the lessons drawn by its political organisations, “looking for papa”. It proposes instead to “look after the revolution”, but this is nothing but empty and inconsequential phrase mongering, if one knows nothing of the efforts, and the continuity of the efforts of those organisations which for more than a century and a half have been... “Looking after the revolution”.
We do not examine the present from the standpoint of the past; we examine the past from the standpoint of the revolution’s present and future needs. But to lack this understanding of history inevitably means being disarmed in the face of the future.
The struggle for the communist revolution did not begin with the ICG. It already has a long history. And although this history is mostly marked by the proletariat’s defeats, it has furnished those who really want to contribute to today’s revolutionary combat with lessons, acquisitions that are vital weapons for the struggle. And it is precisely the proletariat’s political organisations that throughout its history have fought to draw out and formulate these lessons. It is mere Sunday-revolutionary charlatanism to talk about “looking after the revolution” without looking at the proletarian political organisations of the past, and the continuity of their efforts.
The proletariat is a historical class: that is to say, a class that bears a future on a historic scale. Unlike other exploited classes, which decompose as capitalism develops, it develops, it gains in strength and concentration while at the same time acquiring, through the generations, in thousands of daily struggles and a few great revolutionary attempts, an awareness of what it is, what it can achieve, and what is its aim. The activity of revolutionary organisations, their debates, their regroupments and their splits, are an integral part of this historic combat, uninterrupted from Babeuf until its definitive triumph.
Not understanding the continuity that ties these organisations together politically through history means seeing in the proletariat nothing but a class without either a history or a consciousness... at best, a class in revolt. This is the bourgeoisie’s vision of the working class. Not communists’!
The ICG sees a psychological problem of “paternity” and “attachment to the family” in what is in fact the minimum of consciousness to be demanded of any organisation that claims to live up to the role of proletarian vanguard.
According to the ICG, claiming continuity with past communist organisations means, “denying the impersonality of the program”. It is obvious that the communist program is neither the work nor the property of any one person, or any genius. Marxism bears Marx’s name in recognition of the fact that it was he who laid the foundations of a truly coherent proletarian conception of the world. But ever since its first formulation, this conception has been constantly elaborated through the class’ struggle and through its organisations. Marx himself claimed a descendance from the work of Babeuf’s Society of Equals, the utopian socialists, the British Chartists, etc, and considered his ideas as a product of the development of the proletariat’s real struggle.
But however “impersonal” it may be, the communist program is nonetheless the work of human beings in flesh and blood, of militants grouped in political organisations, and there is nonetheless a continuity in these organisations’ work. The real question is not whether such a continuity exists, but what it is.
The ICG intimates that claiming a continuity with proletarian political organisations comes down to agreeing with what anyone has ever said at any time in the workers’ movement, thereby demonstrating that they have not the slightest understanding of what they claim to criticise.
One of the ICG’s main accusations against those who defend the idea of capitalist decadence is that they “thus uncritically ratify past history, and in particular social-democratic reformism, which is justified by a sleight of hand because it was “in the ascendant phase of capitalism””.
In the ICG’s narrow-minded mentality, assuming a historical continuity can only mean “uncritically ratifying”. In reality, as far as the organisations of the past are concerned, they have already been mercilessly and definitively criticised by history.
The continuity between the old organisations and the new has not been ensured by just any tendency. It has always been the left that has ensured the continuity between the proletariat’s three main international political organisations. It was the left, through the marxist current, which ensured the continuity between the 1st and 2nd International, against the Proudhonist, Bakuninist, Blanquist, and corporatist currents. It was the left, which fought first of all the reformist tendencies, and then the “social-patriots”, which ensured the continuity between the 2nd and 3rd International during the war, then by forming the Communist International. And it was the left, once again, and in particular the Italian and German lefts, which took up and developed the revolutionary gains of the 3rd International, trodden under foot by the social-democratic and Stalinist counter-revolution.
This is to be explained by the difficult existence of proletarian political organisations. The very existence of a truly proletarian political organisation is a permanent combat against the pressure of the ruling class, which is both material – lack of financial resources, police repression – but also and above all ideological. The dominant ideology always tends to be that of the economically ruling class. Communists are men and women, and their organisations are not miraculously proof against the penetration of the ideology that impregnates the whole of social life. The proletariat’s political organisations often die defeated, by betraying, and passing over to the enemy. Only those fractions of the organisation – the lefts – that have had the strength not to let fall their arms in the face of the ruling class pressure, have been able to assume the continuity of the proletarian content these organisations once had.
In this sense, affirming a continuity with previous proletarian political organisations means claiming the heritage of the various left fractions which alone were capable of ensuring this continuity. Tracing our origins to the “successive contributions of the Communist League, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Internationals” does not mean “uncritically ratifying” Willich and Schapper in the Communist League, nor the anarchists in the 1st International, nor the reformists in the 2nd, nor the degenerating Bolsheviks in the 3rd. On the contrary, it means claiming the heritage of the political combat conducted against these tendencies by the lefts, usually in the minority.
But this combat was not fought out just anywhere. It took place within the organisations that regrouped the most advanced elements of the working class; within proletarian organisations, which for all their weaknesses have always been a living challenge to the established order.
These were not the incarnation of an eternal unvarying truth laid down once and for all – as is claimed by the theory of the Invariance of the Communist program, which the ICG has borrowed from the Bordigists. They were the concrete “vanguard” of the proletariat as a revolutionary class at a given moment in its history, and at a given degree of development of its class consciousness.
Through the debates between the Willich and Marx tendencies in the Communist League, through the confrontation between anarchists and marxists within the 1st International, between reformists and the internationalist left in the 2nd, between the degenerating Bolsheviks and the left communists in the 3rd, the working class’ permanent effort to forge political weapons for its combat takes on a concrete form.
Claiming a political continuity with the proletariat’s political organisations means taking position in the line of the tendencies that assumed this continuity, but also of the effort in itself that these organisations represented.
For the ICG, the main indictment of the idea of any continuity with proletarian political organisations is that it leads to considering the 19th century social-democratic parties, and the 2nd International, as working class. For the ICG, the social-democracy is “essentially bourgeois”.
As we have seen in previous articles, the ICG takes up the anarchist vision of the communist revolution, permanently on the agenda ever since the beginnings of capitalism: there are no different periods of capitalism. The proletarian program can be reduced to one eternal slogan: the world revolution right now. Trade unionism, parliamentarism, the struggle for reforms, were never part of the working class. Consequently, the social-democratic parties and the 2nd International, which made these forms of struggle the essential axis of their activity, could never have been anything but instruments of the bourgeoisie. The 2nd International of Engels’ time was the same as today’s understandings between Mitterand and Felipe Gonzales.
Since we have already dealt with them at length in our two previous articles, we will not here go back over such questions as the existence of two fundamental historic phases in the life of capitalism, nor the central place of the analysis of capitalist decadence in the coherence of marxism (International Review no. 48 [7]); nor will we return to the question of the different practice and forms of struggle in the workers’ movement that result from this change in period (International Review no. 49 [8]).
From the standpoint of revolutionary organisations’ historic continuity, we want here to highlight what was proletarian in the social-democracy, and what it contributed that revolutionary marxists were afterwards to claim, over and above its weaknesses, due to the forms of struggle of the period, and its degeneration.
* * *
What are the criteria for determining an organisation’s class nature? We can define three major ones:
- its program, i.e. the definition of its aims and means of action as a whole,
- the organisation’s practice within the class struggle,
- finally, its origins, and its historic dynamic.
However, these criteria obviously have meaning only if we first place the organisation within the historical conditions in which it existed; not only because it is vital to take account of objective historical conditions to determine what are and can be the proletarian struggle’s forms and immediate objectives, but also because it is vital to bear in mind the degree of consciousness reached historically by the proletarian class at a given moment, to judge the degree of consciousness of a particular organisation.
Consciousness develops historically. It is not enough to understand that the proletariat has existed as a politically autonomous class since at least the mid-19th century. It is also necessary to understand that it has not remained a mummy, a stuffed dinosaur, ever since. Its class consciousness, its historic program, have evolved, becoming richer with experience, and developing as historical conditions have ripened.
It would be absurd to judge a proletarian organisation of the 19th century by the yardstick of an understanding that was only made possible by decades of further experience.
Let us then recall briefly a few elements of the historical conditions within which the social-democratic parties were formed and lived during the last 25 years of the 19th century, until the period of World War I, when the 2nd International died, and the parties died, one after the other, under the weight of the betrayals of their opportunist leaderships.
According to the ICG’s static conception of a capitalism unchanged since its beginnings, the end of the 19th century appears identical to the present day. Its judgment of the erstwhile social-democracy thus comes down to identifying it with today’s social-democratic and Stalinist parties. In reality, this kind of childish projection that considers that what one knows is all that has ever existed is nothing but an insipid negation of historical analysis.
Today’s generations live in a world which has been overrun for more than 3/4 of a century by the worst barbarism in mankind’s history: the world wars. Outside open periods of world war, society is hit by economic crisis, with the sole exception of two periods of “prosperity” founded on the “reconstruction” that followed the First and Second World Wars. To this should be added, since the end of World War II, the constant local wars in the less developed zones, and the orientation of the entire world economy towards essentially military and destructive objectives.
The apparatus responsible for preserving this decadent order has unceasingly increased its grip on society, and the tendency towards state capitalism in all its forms and in every country has become ever more powerful and omnipresent in every aspect of social life, and first and foremost in the relations between classes. In every country, the state apparatus has adopted a whole panoply of instruments for controlling and atomising the working class. The trade unions and the mass parties have become cogs in the machinery of the state. The proletariat can only affirm its existence as a class sporadically. Outside moments of social movement, as a collective body the class is atomised, as if it had been expelled from civil society.
The capitalism of the late 19th century is altogether different. On the economic level, the bourgeoisie went through the longest and most vigorous period of prosperity in its history. After the cyclical crises of growth, which had hit the system about every ten years between 1825 and 1873, for almost 30 years until 1900 capitalism experienced an almost uninterrupted prosperity. On the military level, the period was just as exceptional: there were no major wars.
During these years of relatively peaceful prosperity, barely imaginable for people of our epoch, the proletarian struggle took place in a political framework which, although it remained – obviously – that of capitalist exploitation and oppression, nonetheless had very different characteristics from those of the 20th century.
The relationships between proletarians and capitalists were direct, and all the more dispersed in that most factories were still relatively small. The state only intervened in these relationships at the level of open conflicts likely to “endanger public order”. For the vast majority, negotiations over wages and working conditions depended on the local balance of forces between bosses (often of family firms) and workers, who for the most part came directly from the peasantry or the craft trades. The state was not involved in these negotiations.
Capitalism conquered the world market, and spread its form of social organisation to the four corners of the earth. The development of the productive forces was explosive. Every day the bourgeoisie became richer, and even made a profit from the workers’ improving living conditions.
Workers’ struggles were often crowned with success. Long, bitter strikes, even isolated, managed to beat bosses who – apart from the fact that they were able to pay – were often disunited in their resistance. The workers learnt to unite and organise on a permanent basis (so did the bosses). Their struggles forced the bourgeoisie to accept the right of working class organisations to exist: trades unions, political parties, and cooperatives. The proletariat affirmed itself as a social force within society, even outside moments of open struggle. The working class had a life of its own within society: there were the trade unions, (which were “schools of communism”), but also clubs where workers talked politics, and “workers’ universities”, where one might learn marxism as well as how to read and write (Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek were both teachers in the German social-democracy); there were working class songs, and working class fetes where one sang, danced, and talked of communism.
The proletariat imposed universal suffrage, and won representation by its own political organisations in the bourgeois parliament – the parliament had not yet been completely devoured by the circus of mystification; real power was not yet wholly in the hands of the state executive; there were real confrontations between different fractions of the ruling classes, and the proletariat sometimes managed to use the divergences between bourgeois parties to impose its own interests.
The European working class’ living conditions underwent real improvements: the working day reduced from 12-14 hours to 10; the outlawing of child labour and dangerous work for women; an overall rise in living conditions and general culture. Inflation was unknown. The prices of consumer goods fell as new production techniques were introduced. Unemployment was reduced to the minimum reserve army of labour that an expanding capitalism could draw on to satisfy its constantly growing needs for labour power.
A young unemployed worker today might have difficulty in imagining what this could be like, but it should be obvious for any organisation that claims to be marxist.
The workers’ social-democratic parties and “their” trade unions were the products and the instruments of the combats of this period. Contrary to what the ICG implies, the union and parliamentary political struggle of the early 1870’s were not “invented” by the social-democracy. The struggle for the existence of trade unions and universal suffrage (with the Chartists in Britain especially) developed in the proletariat from the first moments of its affirmation as a class.
The social-democracy only developed and organised a real movement that had existed well before it, and developed independently of it. Then, as today, the question has always been the same: how to fight the situation of exploitation in which it finds itself. And at the time, the trade union and parliamentary political struggle really were effective means of defence. To reject them in the name of “the Revolution” would be to reject the real movement and the only path towards the revolution that was possible at the time. The working class had to use it to limit its exploitation, but also to become aware of itself, and of its existence as a united and independent force.
“The great importance of the trade union and the political struggle is that they socialise the proletariat’s knowledge and consciousness, and organise it as a class” wrote Luxemburg in “Reform or Revolution”.
This was the “minimum program”. But it was accompanied by a “maximum program”, to be carried out by the class once it had become capable of taking its fight against exploitation right to the limit: the revolution.
Rosa Luxemburg expressed the link between these two programs: “According to the Party’s current conception, the proletariat, through its experience of the trade union and political struggle, arrives at the conviction that its situation cannot be transformed from top to bottom by means of this struggle, and that the seizure of power is unavoidable”.
This was the program of the social-democracy.
By contrast, reformism was defined by its rejection of the idea of the revolution’s necessity. It considered that only the struggle for reforms within the system could have any meaning. Now, the social-democracy was formed in direct opposition not only to the anarchists – who thought the revolution was possible at any time – but also to the possibilists and their reformism that considered capitalism as eternal.
Here, for example, is how the French workers’ party presented its electoral program in 1880:
“.....Considering,
That this collective appropriation can only derive from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organised as a distinct political party;
That such an organisation must be pursued by all the means at the proletariat’s disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery that it has been up to now, into an instrument of emancipation;
The French socialist workers, in giving their efforts in the economic domain the aim of returning to the collectivity all the means of production, have decided, as means of organisation and struggle, to enter the elections with the following minimum program...” This program was drawn up by Karl Marx.
Whatever the weight of opportunism towards reformism within the social-democratic parties, their program explicitly rejected it. The maximum program of the social-democratic parties was the revolution; the trade union and electoral struggle was essentially the practical means, adapted to the possibilities and the demands of the period, for preparing to realise this aim.
1. The adoption of marxism
Obviously, the ICG recognises no contribution to the workers’ movement on the part of all these “essentially bourgeois” organisations. “Between the social-democracy and communism – they say – there is the same class frontier as between bourgeoisie and proletariat”.
There is nothing new in rejecting 19th century social-democracy and the 2nd International. The anarchists have always done so. What is relatively new [3] is to do so while claiming the heritage of Marx and Engels... (out of a concern for parental authority perhaps).
The problem is, that the adoption of marxist conceptions and the explicit rejection of anarchism is undoubtedly the 2nd International’s major advance over the 1st.
The 1st International, founded in 1864, regrouped, especially at its beginnings, all kinds of political tendencies: Mazzinists, Proudhonists, Bakuninists, Blanquists, British trade-unionists, etc. The marxists were only a tiny minority (the weight of Marx’s personality within the General Council should not deceive us). There was only one marxist, Frankel, in the Paris Commune, and he was Hungarian.
By contrast, with Engels the 2nd International was based on marxist conceptions right from the start. This was explicitly recognised by the Erfurt Congress in 1891.
In Germany, as early as 1869, the Workers’ Social-Democratic Party founded at Eisenach by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel after they split from Lassalle’s organisation (the General Association of German Workers) was based on marxism. After the reunification of the two parties in 1875, the marxists were in the majority, but the program as it was adopted was so full of concessions to Lassalle’s ideas that Marx wrote in the accompanying letter to his famous “Critique of the Gotha Program”:
“After the Unity Congress has been held, Engels and I will publish a short statement to the effect that our position is altogether remote from the said declaration of principles and that we have nothing to do with it”. But he added: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”.
Fifteen years later, his confidence in the real movement was vindicated by the adoption of marxist conceptions by the 2nd International right from its creation.
The ICG reminds us of Marx and Engels’ rejection of the term “social-democrat” which in reality reflected the Lassallean weaknesses of the German party: in “all these texts I never describe myself as a social-democrat, but as a communist. For Marx, as for myself, it is thus absolutely impossible to use such as elastic expression to describe our own conception”. (Engels in the pamphlet “Internationales aus dem Volkstaat”, 1871-1875).
But the ICG “forgets” to mention that the Marxists did not therefore deduce that they should break with the party, but on the contrary that they should make the best of it by engaging the combat on the fundamental question. As Engels went on to say: “Things are different today, and this word can pass if it comes down to it, even though it does not today correspond any better to a party whose economic program is not only socialist in general, but directly communist, i.e. to a party whose final aim is the suppression of all states, and therefore of democracy”.
The International’s adoption of marxism’s fundamental ideas was not a gift from heaven, but a victory won thanks to the combat of the most advanced elements.
2. The distinction between the proletariat’s unitary and political organisations
Another contribution of the 2nd International in relation to the 1st, was the distinction between two separate forms of organisation. On the one hand, unitary organisations regrouping proletarians on the basis of their membership of the class (in the trade unions, and later in soviets or workers’ councils); on the other, political organisations regrouping militants on the basis of a precise political platform.
Especially at the outset, the 1st International regrouped individuals, cooperatives, solidarity associations, unions and political clubs. Which meant that it never, as an organ, really succeeded in carrying out the tasks, either of clear political orientation, or of unifying the workers.
It was therefore quite natural that the anarchists, who reject both marxism and the need for political organisation, should combat the 2nd International right from its foundation. And moreover, many anarchist currents today continue to trace their origins to the IWA (International Workingmen’s Association). Here again, the ICG has not innovated and remains invariantly... anarchist.
Does this mean that the social-democracy and the 2nd International were perfect incarnations of what a proletarian vanguard political organisation should be? Obviously not.
The Gotha Congress was held four years after the crushing of the Commune; the 2nd International was founded after almost twenty years of uninterrupted capitalist prosperity, under the impulse of an outburst of strikes provoked not by worsening exploitation due to the economic crisis, but by this very prosperity, which placed the proletariat in a position of relative strength. The distance from capitalism’s cyclical crises, and the progress of working class living conditions through the trade union and parliamentary struggle, inevitably created illusions amongst the workers, even in their vanguard.
In the marxist vision, the outbreak of revolution can only be provoked by a violent capitalist economic crisis. The longer the period of prosperity lasted, the more the eventuality of such a crisis seemed to recede. The very success of the struggle for reforms lent credit to the reformists’ idea that the revolution was both pointless and impossible. The fact that the results of the struggle for reforms depended essentially on the balance of forces at the level of each nation state, and not on the international balance of forces – as is the case for the revolutionary struggle – increasingly limited the fighting organisation to a national framework, while internationalist conceptions and tasks were often relegated to a secondary importance, or put off indefinitely. In 1898, seven years after the Erfurt Congress, Bernstein openly called into question, within the International, the Marxist theory of crises and the inevitability of capitalism’s economic collapse (which the ICG also rejects): only the struggle for reforms was viable, “The goal is nothing, the movement is all”.
The party’s parliamentary groups were often all too easily caught in the nets of the bourgeois democratic game, while the union leaders tended to become too “understanding” towards the imperatives of the capitalist national economy. The extent of the combat conducted by Marx and Engels within the emerging social-democracy against the tendencies to compromise with reformism, the combat of Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, or Trotsky within the degenerating social-democracy are proof of the weight this form of bourgeois ideology had within the proletarian organisations... But the weight of reformism within the 2nd International does not make it a bourgeois organ, any more than that of Proudhonist reformism makes the IWA an instrument of capital.
The proletariat’s political organisations have never formed a monolithic bloc of identical conceptions. Furthermore, the most advanced elements have often been in the minority – as we have pointed out previously. But the minorities that go from Marx and Engels to the left communists of the 1930’s knew that the life of the proletariat’s political organisations depended on a struggle not only against the enemy in the street and the workplace, but also against the ever-present influence of the bourgeoisie within these organisations.
___________________________________________________
“Sweeping aside the half-heartedness, lies and corruption of the outlived official Socialist parties, we Communists, united in the Third International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations, from Babeuf, to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
“If the First International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the Second International gathered and organised millions of workers; then the Third International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realisation, the International of the deed”.
(Manifesto of the Founding Congress of the Communist International to the Proletarians of the Whole World! [9] March, 1919)
___________________________________________________
For the ICG, this kind of combat was meaningless, and only helped the counter-revolution.
“The presence of marxist revolutionaries (Pannekoek, Gorter, Lenin...), within the 2nd International did not mean that the latter defended the interests of the proletariat (whether “immediate” or historic), but cautioned for lack of a split, the social-democracy’s counter-revolutionary activity”.
Let us note in passing that all of a sudden, the ICG here raises Pannekoek, Gorter, and Lenin – the left wing of an organisation separated from communism by a “class frontier” – to the rank of “marxist revolutionaries”. How nice to them. But in doing so, the ICG gives us to understand that organisations “essentially bourgeois in nature” can have a left wing made up of authentic “revolutionary marxists”... for decades! It is presumably the same kind of “dialectic” that leads the ICG to consider that the left wing of Latin American Stalinism (the “Shining Path” maoists in Peru) can in these countries be “the sole structure capable of giving a coherence to the ever growing number of proletarian direct actions”.
Whether our punk dialecticians like it or not, Peruvian maoist Stalinism is no more a “structure capable of giving a coherence” to the actions of the proletariat than the “marxist revolutionaries” in the 2nd International “cautioned a counter-revolutionary practice”.
Marx and Engels, Rosa and Lenin, Pannekoek and Gorter, were not incoherent imbeciles who thought they could struggle for the revolution as militants giving life to bourgeois organisations. They were revolutionaries who, unlike the anarchists - ...and the ICG – understood the concrete conditions of the workers’ struggle according to the system’s historic periods.
We may criticise Lenin’s lateness in realising the gravity of the opportunist disease within the 2nd International; we may criticise Rosa Luxemburg’s inability really to conduct the organisational work of the fraction within the social-democracy at the turn of the century, but we cannot reject the nature of their combat. By contrast, we should salute Rosa Luxemburg’s lucidity, at the end of the 19th century, in criticising mercilessly the revisionist current emerging within the 2nd International, and the Bolsheviks’ ability to organise as an independent fraction with its own means of intervention within the Russia Social Democratic Workers’ Party. This is why they were in the proletariat’s vanguard in the revolutionary struggles at the end of World War I.
Does the ICG really think that those it sometimes calls “marxist revolutionaries” came from the social-democracy by accident, rather than from anarchism or some other current? It is impossible to answer this elementary question without understanding the importance of the continuity of the proletariat’s political organisations. And this cannot be understood without understanding the analysis of capitalist decadence.
The whole history of the 2nd International can only appear as meaningless chaos if we do not bear in mind that it existed at the watershed between the period of capitalism’s ascendancy, and that of its decadence.
Today, the proletariat is preparing to wage a decisive battle against a capitalist system no longer capable of escaping an open crisis that has lasted for almost 20 years, ever since the end of the reconstruction period in the late 1960’s.
It is heading for the combat relatively free of the mystifications heaped on it for 40 years by the Stalinist counter-revolution; in those countries with a long-standing tradition of bourgeois democracy, it has lost many of its illusions in the trade union and parliamentary struggle, while in the less developed countries it has lost those in anti-imperialist nationalism.
However, in breaking free of these mystifications, the workers have not yet managed to reappropriate all the lessons of their past struggles.
The task of communists is not to organise the working class – as the social-democracy did in the 19th century. The communists’ contribution to the workers’ struggle is essentially at the level of conscious practice, the praxis of the struggle. At this level, they contribute not so much by the answers they give, but by showing how problems should be posed. Their conception of the world and their practical attitude always put forward the worldwide and historic dimension of each question confronted in the struggle.
Those like the ICG who ignore the historic dimension of the workers’ struggle by denying the different phases of capitalist reality, by denying the real continuity of the proletariat’s political organisations, disarm the working class at the moment when it most needs to reappropriate its own conception of the world.
It is not enough to be “for violence”, “against bourgeois democracy” to know where you are and to establish at every moment perspectives for the class struggle. Far from it. Maintaining illusions like this is criminally dangerous.
RV
[1] Unless otherwise stated, all the quotes of the ICG are taken from the articles “Theories de la Decadence, Decadence de la Theorie” published in numbers 23 and 25 of “Le Communiste” (Nov 1985 and Nov 1986), and translated by us.
[2] See “Understanding Capitalist Decadence”, International Review no. 48 (1st Quarter 1987), and “Understanding the Political Implications of Capitalist Decadence”, International Review no. 49 (2nd Quarter 1987).
[3] In reality, this is the old refrain of the modernists and “embarassed” anarchists, especially since 1968.
Since 1968, the revolutionary groups which have come to form the ICC have been arguing that the international wave of workers’ struggles which began in France that year marked a new period in the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat: the ending of the long period of counter-revolution which followed the reflux of the 1917-23 revolution wave; the opening up of a course towards generalised was class confrontations. While the accelerating collapse of the capitalist economy could not fail to push the bourgeoisie towards another world war, this same economic disintegration was provoking a vigorous resistance by a new and undefeated generation of workers. Consequently, capitalism cannot go to war without first crushing the proletariat; on the other hand, the growing combativity and consciousness of the proletariat is inevitably leading to huge class battles whose outcome will determine whether the crisis of capitalism is to end in world war or world revolution.
This vision of the historic course is not shared by many groups in the proletarian political milieu, in particular by the main international current outside the ICC, the International Bureau for a Revolutionary Party. After a long period in which the IBRP’s seemed to have little or no interest in debating with the ICC, we can only welcome the recent contribution on this question in Battaglia Comunista, the publication of the IBRP’s affiliate in Italy, the Internationalist Communist Party (‘The ICC and the Historic Course: A Mistaken Method’ in BC No 3, March ’ 87, published in English in Communist Review No 5). Not simply because the text contains passages indicating that BC is waking up to certain realities of the present world situation – in particular the end of the counter-revolution and the “signs” , at least, of a resurgence of class struggle. But also because, even where the text is fundamentally wrong, it does take us straight to the essential issues: the problem of the marxist method in grasping the unfolding of reality; the conditions for unleashing a new world war; the real level of class struggle today, and the approach to these problems taken by our common political ancestor, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s and 1940s.
In IR 36 we published another polemic with BC on the question of the historic course (‘The Course of History: the ‘80s are not the ‘30s’). A text emanating from BC’s 5th congress had affirmed that it was not possible to say whether the social storms stirred up by the crisis would break out before, during or after a world imperialist war. In our reply, as well as in a basic text on the historic course emanating from our third congress in 1979 (see IR 18) , we argued that it is a fundamental and crucial task of revolutionaries to indicate the general lines in which social events are moving. It is a pity that BC’s text doesn’t really address itself to these arguments. Indeed, it does little more than quote again the passage which we criticised at such length in IR 36! But in another part of the article, BC does at least try to explain why it feels it necessary to maintain an agnostic attitude about the historic course, and, rather than simply repeating all the arguments contained in our other two articles, we will address ourselves to this new ‘explanation’ . This is how BC poses the problem: “In relation to the problem the ICC has set us of being precise prophets of the future the difficulty lies in the fact that subjectivity does not mechanically follow objective movements. Although we can precisely follow tendencies, possible counter-tendencies and their reciprocal relations in the structures of the economic world, this is not the case for the subjective world, neither for the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat. No-one can believe that the maturation of consciousness, even the most elementary class consciousness, can be rigidly determined from observable, rationally correlated data.”
It’s perfectly true that subjective factors are not mechanically determined by objective ones, and that, consequently, it is not possible to make exact predictions of the time and place of proletarian outbursts. But this does not mean that marxism historically has confined itself to predicting only the trends in the capitalist economy.
On the contrary: in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels defined the communists as those who were able to see the “line of march” of the “movement going on in front of our eyes” the movement of the proletariat. And throughout their careers they attempted to put this theoretical proposition into practice, closely aligning their organisational activity to the perspectives they traced for the class struggle (stressing the necessity for theoretical reflection after the defeats of the 1848 revolutions, for the formation of the 1st and 2nd Internationals in periods of class revival, and so on). Sometimes they were proved wrong, and they were obliged to revise their predictions, but they never abandoned the effort to be the most far-sighted elements of the proletariat. Similarly, the intransigently revolutionary positions adopted by Lenin in 1914 and in 1917 were based on an unshakable confidence that the ‘objective’ horrors of the imperialist war were giving rise to a profound maturation in the class consciousness of the proletariat. And when the Italian Fraction in the 1930s insisted so strongly on basing its whole activity on a proper analysis of the historic course, it was merely following on in the same tradition.
And what applies to the broader historical dimension also applies to the immediate struggle; in order to be able to intervene concretely in a strike movement, communists must develop the capacity to assess and reassess the momentum and direction of the struggle.
Having to deal with ‘subjective’ factors has never prevented marxists from carrying out this essential work.
The ICC has always maintained that, in order to march the proletariat off to a new world war, capitalism requires a situation expressed in “the workers’ growing adherence to capitalist values (and to their political and trade union representatives) and a combativity which either tends to disappear, or appears within a political perspective totally controlled by the bourgeoisie,” (‘The Course of History: the ‘80s are not the ‘30s, IR 36).
Unwilling, perhaps, to go on insisting (as they have done in the past) that the proletariat today is still groaning under the ideological heel of the counter-revolution, BC comes up with a novel response to this: “...the form of war, its technical means, its tempo, its characteristics in relation to the population as a whole, has greatly changed since 1939. More precisely, war today has less need for consensus or working class passivity than the wars of yesteryear. Here we must make it clear that we are not theorising the complete separation of the ‘military’ and the ‘civil’ which are, especially on the level of production, intersecting more and more. Rather, we wish to put the speed and high technical content of warfare in relation to its economic, political and social background. The relation is such that involvement in the actions of war is possible without the agreement of the proletariat. Every bourgeoisie is able to rely on its victory for the re-establishing of consensus as well as for the other things that victory brings: occupation of territory, etc. And it is obvious that every bourgeoisie enters a war thinking of victory.”
Reading this passage, it is difficult to understand what BC is talking about. The above conditions could be applied to very limited imperialist adventure, such as the various raids and expeditions the west has carried out in the Middle east, though even these actions have to be accompanied by intense ideological campaigns to dull the proletariat’s awareness of what is being done. But we are talking not about limited or local actions, but a world war, a third world war in a century whose wars have been ever-more global – embracing the entire planet – and total – demanding the active cooperation and mobilisation of the entire population. Is BC seriously suggesting that World War 3 could be fought with professional armies on some ‘distant’ battlefield, and that the accompanying ‘intersection’ of the civil and military sectors would not involve imposing the most monstrous sacrifices on the entire working population? With such a gentlemanly vision of world war, it’s not surprising that BC can still talk hopefully about the proletarian revolution achieving its victory during and even after the next global conflict! Or else, by the increased “technical means” and “tempo” of modern warfare, BC means that World War 3 will begin straight away as a push-button affair. But if this is the case, then it makes no sense to talk about the victory either of one bourgeois camp or the proletariat, since the entire world would have been reduced to rubble.
In fact, it is practically certain that a third world war would rapidly escalate into a nuclear holocaust – which is a good reason for not talking glibly about the proletarian revolution arising during or after the next war. But we agree that “every bourgeoisie enters a war thinking of victory.” This is why the bourgeoisie doesn’t want to plunge straight into a nuclear war, why it is spending billions searching for ways of winning the war without annihilating everything in the process. The ruling class also knows what the main stakes of the next war would be: the industrial heartlands of Europe. And it is certainly intelligent enough to recognise that for the west to occupy eastern Europe, or for Russia to seize the fleshpots of western Europe, there would have to be a total involvement and mobilisation of the proletarian masses, whether at the military fronts or at the point of production, and particularly in Europe itself. But for this to be a possibility, the bourgeoisie would first have to have ensured not only the “passivity” of the working class, but its active adherence to the war-ideologies of its exploiters. And this is precisely what the bourgeoisie cannot ensure today.
In 1982, the text from BC’s Congress argued that : “if the proletariat today, faced with the gravity of the crisis and undergoing the blows of repeated bourgeois attacks, has not yet shown itself able to respond, this simply means that the long work of the world counter-revolution is still active in the workers' ’consciousness”; that the proletariat today “is tired and disappointed, though not definitively beaten.”
BC's most recent text on the subject clearly
marks an advance from this point. For the first time, it states unequivocably
that: “the counter-revolutionary period
following the defeat from within of the October revolution has ended,” and
that “there are no lack of signs of a
revival of class struggle and we do not fail to point them out.” And in fact we have already noted that
the pages of Battaglia have contained a serious coverage of recent
massive class movements in Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Spain, etc.
Nevertheless, the IBRP’s underlying attitude remains one of profound
underestimation of the real depth of the class struggle today, and it is this
above all which renders them incapable of seeing how the proletariat stands as
an obstacle to the war-plans of the bourgeoisie. [1] [14]
Battaglia may have noticed some “signs” of a class response in the years
1986-87. But these “signs” are in reality the advanced point of a succession of
international waves going back to the events of May ’68 in France. But when the first of these waves manifested
itself, whether in France ’68 or the ‘hot autumn’ in Italy in ’69, Battaglia
dismissed them as noisy eruptions of the petty bourgeois student strata;
derided the arguments of the ICC’s predecessors about the beginning of a new
period; and then went back to sleep. At its 5th Congress in 1982, it was still
projecting its own tiredness onto the proletariat, despite the fact that there
had already been a second wave of struggles between ’78 and ’81, culminating in
the mass strike in Poland. And, after a brief reflux after 1981, a new
wave began in Belgium in September ’83; but it wasn't until 1986 – i.e. three years into this
third wave – that BC began seeing the “signs” of a class revival. It is
thus hardly surprising that BC finds it so hard to see where the class
movement is going – it has so little idea of where it has come from. Typical of
this blindness even in relation to the past is the statement in the most recent
article that : “after both ’74 and ’79,
the crisis pushed the bourgeoisie into much more serious attacks on the working
class but the much-exalted workers’ combativity did not in fact grow.” The
wave of struggles from ‘78-81 is thus written out of history...
Because it sees today’s struggles as no more than the first timid beginnings of the class revival, rather than situating them in an evolving historical dynamic going back nearly 20 years, BC is naturally unable to measure the real maturation of class consciousness which has been both a product of and an active factor in these struggles.
Thus when the ICC points out that the ideologies which capitalism used to mobilise the class for war in the ‘30s – fascism/anti-fascism, defence of ‘socialist’ Russia, etc. – are now used up, discredited in the eyes of the workers’ Battaglia asserts that the bourgeoisie can always find alternatives to Stalinism or the fascism/anti-fascism campaigns of the ‘30s. But curiously enough, it avoids telling us which alternatives. If, for example, when it talks about finding “further obstacles” to Stalinism it means obstacles to the left of Stalinism, this only proves our case: because when the bourgeoisie is forced to put its extreme left in the front line of opposition to the proletarian threat, this can only be a reflection of a real process of radicalisation within the class.
The truth is that the
proletariat’s growing disengagement from the main ideologies and institutions
of bourgeois society is a real problem for the ruling class, particularly when
it affects the main organs charged with disciplining the workers : the trade
unions. And at this level, BC
seems particularly blind to what has been going on throughout the
working class: “At this point the ICC should point out the terms in which
the course they have adopted presents itself: the revival of combativity, the
fall of old myths, the tendency to shake off union shackles... As there are no
real pieces of evidence (for this).... it is necessary to tamper with reality,
exaggerate it, distort it... invent it.”
By this token, the increasing tendency to ‘de-unionisation’ (which the
bourgeois press has lamented in numerous countries); the growing number of
strikes which break out spontaneously, ignoring or going beyond union
directives (eg Belgium ’83 and ’86, Denmark ’85, British Telecom, French Rail
strikes, Spanish miners and steel workers, and countless other movements); the
mounting list of examples of workers booing unions speeches, ignoring union
pseudo-actions or alternatively turning them into real class actions; the
appearance of independent and unitary forms of workers’ self-organisation (as
in Rotterdam in ’78, Poland ’80, the French rail strike, the teachers’
struggles in France and Italy...); the emergence of combative nuclei of workers
outside the union structures (Italy, Belgium, France, Britain...) – all these
“pieces of evidence” about “the tendency to shake off union shackles” which the
ICC press has been documenting and publishing for years, all this is a mere
‘invention’ on our part, or at least a ‘distortion’ of reality.
If the idea of a
swelling tide of proletarian resistance is a mere invention of the ICC, then it
would follow that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have to take the working class into
consideration when formulating its economic or political strategies. And BC
doesn’t hesitate to draw this conclusion: “There
is not a single policy in political economy in any of the metropolitan
countries (with the possible exception of Poland and Rumania)
which has been modified by the bourgeoisie in the wake of the struggle of the
proletariat or any of its sections.”
If Battaglia is suggesting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t shape its
economic attacks (or its propaganda campaigns, election strategies, etc) in
anticipation of the reactions they will provoke from the workers, then it is
denying an intelligence to the bourgeoisie, a mistake which marxists can
ill-afford to make. Alternatively, it is suggesting that the Polish and
Rumanian bourgeoisies are the most sophisticated in the world! Actually, the
citing of these two cases isn’t accidental, because the Stalinist form of state
capitalism often makes explicit tendencies which are less apparent in the ‘western’
varieties of state capitalism. One might well ask, however, what changes in the
policy of the bourgeoisie BC discerns in Rumania today? As for the modifications in the policy
of the Polish bourgeoisie in order to attack the working class more effectively,
we saw these at work against the class struggle in 1980: false liberalisation,
the use of ‘renovated’ trade unionism a la Solidarnosc, staggering of the
attacks, etc. In other words, the techniques used for decades in the west. The
same ones which Gorbachev wants to generalise throughout his bloc in order to
confront the revival of class struggle. Even the most rigid and brutal
fractions of the bourgeoisie are now being led to modify and adapt their
policies in order to cope with the development of the class struggle.
Furthermore, to argue
that the proletariat, despite all the massive struggles of the last few years,
has not succeeded in pushing back the bourgeoisie’s austerity attacks in any
way is to deny all significance to the defensive struggles of the class.
Logically it would imply arguing that only the immediate struggle for
revolution can defend the workers’ interests. But while in global terms it’s
true that the revolution is the proletariat’s only ultimate defence, it’s also
true that the present struggles of the class on the terrain of economic demands
have both held the bourgeoisie back from making more savage attacks, and have,
in a number of circumstances forced the bourgeoisie to postpone attacks it was
actually trying to impose. The example of Belgium ’86 is particularly significant here, because
it was the real threat of a unification of struggles which obliged the
bourgeoisie to make a temporary retreat.
But the most profound significance of the proletariat’s capacity to push back
the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie is that it also represents the
proletariat’s resistance to capitalism’s war-drive. Because if the ruling class
is unable to compel the workers to acquiesce to ever-increasing sacrifices on
behalf of the national economy, it will be unable to accomplish the
militarisation of labour required for an imperialist war.
For Battaglia, however, the proletariat’s performance is still not up to
scratch. The evidence we give of a growing disengagement from bourgeois
ideology, of a developing combativity and consciousness, everything in fact
“presented by the ICC as ‘proof’ is extremely weak and is insufficient to
characterise an historic course.”
The fact is that for Battaglia, the only thing that could have any effect on the war drive is the revolution itself. Our text of 1979 already responded to this argument: “Some groups, like Battaglia Comunista, consider that the proletariat’s response to the crisis is insufficient to constitute an obstacle to the course towards imperialist war. They consider that the struggle must be of a ‘revolutionary nature’ if it’s really going to counteract this course, basing their argument on the fact that in 1917-18 only the revolution put an end to the imperialist war. Their error is to try and transpose a schema which was correct at the time to a different situation. A proletarian upsurge during and against a war straight away takes the form of a revolution:
- because society is plunged into the most extreme form of its crisis, imposing the most terrible sacrifices on the workers;
- because the workers in uniform are already armed;
- because the exceptional measure (martial law, etc), which are in force make any class confrontation frontal and violent;
- because the struggle against war immediately takes on the political form of a confrontation with the state which is waging the war, without going through the stage of less head-on economic struggles.
“But the situation is quite different when war hasn’t yet been declared. In these circumstances, even a limited tendency towards struggle on a class terrain is enough to jam up the war machine, since:
- it shows that the workers aren’t actively drawn into capitalist mystifications;
- imposing even greater sacrifices on the workers than the ones which provoked their initial response runs the risk of provoking a proportionally stronger reaction,” (IR 18, The Historic Course’).
To which we can only add that today, for the first time in history, we are moving towards a generalised class confrontation provoked not by a war but by a very long drawn-out crisis. The movement of struggles which is laying the foundation for this confrontation is consequently itself a long drawn-out one and often seems very unspectacular compared to the events of 1917-18. Nevertheless, to remain fixated on the images of the first revolutionary wave and to dismiss today’s struggles as amounting to very little is the very last way to prepare oneself for the massive social explosions that lie ahead.
The ICC’s approach to the question of the historic course is based to a large extent on the method of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, whose political activity in the 1930s was founded on a recognition that the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave and the onset of the crisis of 1929 had opened up a course towards imperialist war.
Although the Internationalist Communist Party also claims a historical continuity with the Fraction, it has not really assimilated many of its most vital contributions, and this is particularly true with regard to the question of the historic course. Thus whereas for us the clarity of the Fraction’s approach to this position enabled it to make an internationalist response to the events in Spain in 1936-37, in contrast to nearly all the other proletarian currents from Trotskyism to the Union Communiste and the Fraction’s own minority, who succumbed to a greater or lesser extent to the ideology of anti-fascism, Battaglia is only too keen to seek out the “methodological error” of the Fraction: “The Fraction (especially its EC and in particular Vercesi) in the ‘30s judged the perspective as being towards war in an absolute fashion. Did they have reasons to do so? Certainly, the facts in their entirety gave them reason. But even then the absolutisation of a ‘course’ led the Fraction to make political errors... The political error was the liquidation of any possibility of a revolutionary political intervention in Spain before the real defeat of the proletariat, with the consequent hardening of the differences between the minority and majority on a basis which held little advantage for either of them. The ‘interventionists’ allowed themselves to be absorbed by the POUM militia only to then be rapidly disillusioned and return to the Fraction. The majority remained watching and pontificating that : 'There is nothing to be done’....”
Turning to the ICC
today, Battaglia goes on: “Today,
the ICC’s error is substantially the same, even if its object has been stood on
its head. Absolutisation of the course towards conflict before war; all
attention is turned on this in the ingenuous and irresponsible undervaluation
of what is in front of everyone’s eyes as regards the bourgeois course towards
war.”
This passage is replete with errors. To begin with, BC seems to be
mixing up the notions of the course with that of the tendencies
produced by the crisis. When they accuse us of “absolutising” the course
towards class confrontations they seem to think we are simply denying the
tendency towards war. But what we mean by a course towards class confrontations
is that the tendency towards war– permanent in decadence and aggravated
by the crisis – is obstructed by the counter-tendency towards proletarian
upsurges. Furthermore, this course is neither absolute nor eternal: it can be
reversed by a series of defeats for the class. In fact, simply because the
bourgeoisie is the dominant class in society, a course towards class
confrontations is far more fragile and reversible than a course towards war.
In the second place, BC completely distorts the history of the
Fractions. We can’t here go into details about the complete history of the groups
of the Communist Left [2] [15].
However, a few brief points must be made:
- it is not true that the majority position was that “there is nothing to be done.” while opposing any idea of enrolment in the anti-fascist militias, the majority sent a delegation of comrades to Spain to seek out the possibility of creating a communist nucleus there, despite the evident danger posed by the Stalinist hit squads: these comrades narrowly missed being assassinated in Barcelona. At the same time, outside Spain, the Italian and Belgian Fractions (and also the Mexican ‘Marxist Workers Group’) issued a number of appeals denouncing the massacre in Spain and insisting that the best solidarity with the Spanish workers was for the proletarians in other countries to fight for their own class demands;
- it is true that, in the face of the second world war, a tendency crystallised around Vercesi, denying the “social existence of the proletariat” and rejecting any possibility of revolutionary activity. It was also true that the Left Fractions in general were thrown into disarray and inactivity shortly before the outbreak of the war. But the source of these errors lay precisely in the abandonment of their previous clarity about the historic course. The theory, articulated in particular by Vercesi, of a ‘war economy’ that has overcome the crisis of overproduction, and consequently of all further wars as evidence of an inter-imperialist solidarity to crush the proletarian danger, resulted in the disappearance of the review Bilan and the publication of Octobre on anticipation of a new revolutionary upsurge. This left the Fractions completely disarmed on the eve of the war: far from ‘fixating all attention on the war’ at this point, as BC claims, Octobre saw the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Munich agreement as desperate attempts to forestall the revolution!
- it should be said that this radical revision of the Fraction’s previous analyses was opposed by a significant minority within the organisation. Some of the most articulate spokesmen of this minority were silenced by the Nazi death-camps. But in France this position was maintained throughout the war; and it is not accidental that the same comrades who insisted on the necessity to carry on with the communist activity during the war were also able to resist the activist turn provoked by the proletarian movements in Italy in 1943, when the majority of the comrades of the Italian Left – including Vercesi – mistakenly saw a new 1917 and decided that the time had come to form the Party. The Internationalist Communist Party is the direct heir of this error of method;
- in this context it is also worth pointing out that the ‘interventionist’ minority did not return to the Fraction as BC claims. They returned to the Union Communiste, which stood half way between the communist left and Trotskyism. And after 1943 they returned... to the Internationalist Communist Party. No doubt they felt at home within an organisation whose ambiguities concerning the partisan formations in Italy were virtually identical to their own ambiguities towards the anti-fascist militias in Spain... [3] [16]
As we have seen, the
origins of Battaglia themselves lie in a mistaken analysis of the
historic course. The precipitous formation of the ICP during WW2 resulted in an
abandonment of the clarity attained by Bilan on many issues,
particularly the problem of fraction, party and historic course. These errors
have reached their most caricatured form in the ‘Bordigist’ current which split
from the Battaglia current in 1952, but it is extremely difficult for the
latter to overcome all the remaining ambiguities without calling its own
origins into question.
In its recent article BC claims that the ICC’s errors in method, its
deformations of reality, have led to splits and will result in more. But the
truth is that the ICC’s prognoses have been proved consistently correct ever since
1968. We were the first to reaffirm the reappearance of the historic crisis in
the late ‘60s. We have seen our predictions about the development of the class
struggle confirmed by the various waves which have taken place since then. And,
despite all the scoffings and incomprehensions in the political milieu, it is
becoming more and more obvious that the ‘left in opposition’ is indeed
the essential political strategy of the bourgeoisie in this period. This is not
to deny that we have made mistakes or suffered splits. But with a framework of
analysis that is basically sound, in a period full of possibilities for
revolutionary work, mistakes can be corrected and splits can result in overall
political strengthening of the organisation.
The danger facing Battaglia is of a different order. Since it is so
historically bound up with a false analysis if the historic course, since it is
tied to a number of obsolete political conceptions, it runs the risk that the
apparent ‘homogeneity’ it displays today will give way to a series of
explosions brought about by the insistent pressure of the class struggle, by
the growing contradiction between its analyses and the reality of the class
struggle.
Whether Battaglia like it or not, we are heading towards immense class conflagrations. Those currents who are not prepared for them are in danger of being swept aside by the heat of the blast.
MU[1] [17] We are talking on a general level here. At certain moments – and in total contradiction to the article we’ re responding to here - Battaglia even go so far as to lend support to the thesis that capitalism must first silence the proletariat before being able to go to war. Thus in the same issue of Battaglia as this article, we can read an article ‘Let’s Reaffirm some Truths about the Class Struggle’ which says: “let us reaffirm to the point of boredom to the workers that not to fight against the sacrifices imposed by the bourgeoisie amounts to allowing the bourgeoisie to enlarge the social peace required as a prelude to the third imperialist war.” (our emphasis).
[2] [18] See our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste D’Italie .
[3] [19] On the ICP’s ambiguities on the question of the partisans, see IR 8.
The year 1915 was a decisive year for the Dutch revolutionary movement. The SDP minority, made up of different fractions, became a structural opposition against the Wijnkoop-Van Ravesteyn leadership. This opposition developed numerically in proportion to the growth of the SDP, which proclaimed itself as the Communist Party in November, when the revolution was knocking at Holland's door.
a. The offensive of the minority in the SDP: between fraction and opposition
In the Spring of 1918, the SDP went through an unprecedented crisis. The minority directly threatened with being squashed by the authoritarian leadership around Wijnkoop. The latter - and this was a hitherto unknown in the SDP's history - suspended the Hague section, one of the most militant in its opposition to Wijnkoop. This suspension came after several individual expulsions of opposition militants. These measures, in contradiction to workers' democracy, showed that the leadership were worthy successors to Troelstra.
The opposition ssoon regrouped at a joint meeting held on 26 May 1918. It was composed of groups which up till now had reacted in a dispersed manner to opportunism in the SDP:
-- the Propaganda Union of the Zimmerwald Left in Amsterdam, led by Van Reesema, which wanted the party to be aligned with the Bolshevik Left;
-- Luteraan's group in Amsterdam, working closely with Gorter;
-- the Rotterdam group;
-- the Hague section.
The opposition represented one third of the militants of the party. After June it had a bi-monthly journal, De Internationale. An editorial commission was set up. The press commission, was which met every three months and was made up of representatives of four groups[1] formed a de facto executive organ. This opposition, with its journal and its commission, was very close to forming a fraction within the SDP. However, it lacked a clearly established platform because it was not sufficiently homogenous. It also suffered cruelly from the absence of Gorter, who was in Switzerland and only contributed to the debate through articles, the appearance of which
was subjected to the bad faith of the editorial board of De Tribune, which was entirely controlled by Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn[2].
The cause of this regroupement of the opposition was the growing hostility to the policies of the party, which was more and more turned towards elections. The elections which had been held on 1 July had been a real success for the SDP: Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn became deputies. This had been made possible through an alliance with the small Socialist Party, which had come out of the SDAP in 1917. The latter, led by Kolthek, top man in the NAS[3], was openly pro-Entente. Along with the Social Christians (BvSC) another component of this electoral ‘united front', it won a seat in the Assembly.
The opposition, which denounced this alliance, as a ‘monstrous union' with pro-Entente syndicalists, underlined that this electoral success was a demagogic one. The votes gleaned from among the syndicalist militants of the NAS had been done so through a campaign which appeared to support the USA. At a time when the USA was holding the Dutch commercial fleet in its ports in order to use them in the war against Germany, in exchange for food shipments to Holland, Wijnkoop stated that any means was justified to get these shipments from the US. Such policies were vigorously denounced by Gorter and the Bussum section, but much later, in November. Like Gorter, the opposition more and more saw Wijnkoop as a new Troelstra, as a man whose love for the Russian revolution was purely platonic[4] and whose politics were essentially parliamentarian.
The approach of the war's end, with the revolutionary events that accompanied it, put the opposition's fight against Wijnkoop's pro-Entente policies into second place. More and it began to emphasize the danger of parliamentary politics[5]. It also forcefully combated the revolutionary syndicalism of the NAS, which had begun to work with the reformist union, the NVV, which was dominated by Troelstra's party. Here in embryo were the anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union policies of the future Dutch communist left. These policies meant a break with the old ‘Tribunism'.
b. The abortive revolution of November 1918.
It was a party that was growing numerically, but threatened with falling apart, that went into the ordeal of the revolutionary events in November.
The events in Germany, where the government fell at the end of October, created a real revolutionary atmosphere in Holland. Authentic mutinies broke out in the military camps on 25 and 26 October 1918. They had come in the wake of a permanent workers' agitation against hunger, in September and October in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
It was symptomatic to see Troelstra's official social democracy radicalizing itself. To the great astonishment of the other leaders of the SDAP, the party boss started making inflammatory speeches about revolution, about the seizure of power by the working class. To the stupefaction of the Dutch bourgeoisie, he proclaimed himself their implacable adversary:
"Don't you feel little by little as events unfold that you are sitting on a volcano ... The epoch of the bourgeois governmental system is over. Now the working class, the new rising force, must ask you to give up your place and allow it to take it for itself. We are not your friends, we are your adversaries, we are, as it were (sic) your most determined enemies."
Troelstra, a last minute revolutionary? In fact he was speaking a double language. In the secrecy of a meeting with organs of the SDAP, held on 2 November - that is, three days before this fiery declaration at the chamber of deputies - Troelstra said quite crudely that his tactic was to head off the action of the revolutionaries, who had been encouraged by the revolution in Germany.
"In these circumstances contrasts within the working class are accentuating, and a growing part of it will place itself under the leadership of irresponsible elements."
Judging the revolution to be inevitable and in order to neutralize a possible Dutch ‘Spartakism', Troelstra proposed adopting the same tactic as German social democracy in the workers' councils: taking over the leadership of them in order to destroy them:
"We aren't calling for the revolution now, but the revolution is calling for us ... What has happened in countries which have been through a revolution makes one say: we must take over its leadership as soon as it arrives."
The tactic adopted was to call on 10 November for the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils, if the German example was to be repeated in Holland. "Wijnkoop must not be the first", said Ondegeest, one of the leaders of the SDAP.
But in fact the SDP was to call for the formation of soldiers' councils and a strike, on 10 November. It declared in favor of the arming of the workers and the formation of a peoples' government on the basis of the councils. It also demanded the ‘immediate demobilization' of the conscripts, an ambiguous slogan because its consequence was the disarming of the soldiers.
It's this slogan that the SDAP took up, with this very intention. To this it added the program of German social democracy, in order to defuse more revolutionary demands: ‘socialization' of industry, full unemployment insurance and an 8-hour day.
But events showed that the situation in Holland was still far from revolutionary. On 13 November there was indeed the beginning of fraternization between workers and soldiers in Amsterdam; but the next day, the demonstration came up against the hussars, who fired on the crowd, leaving several dead. The SDP's call for a strike the next day in protest against the repression had little echo among the workers of Amsterdam. The revolution had been crushed before it could really get going. The call for the formation of councils had only a limited success; only a few groups of soldiers, in places isolated from the capital - at Alkmaar and in Frisia - formed themselves into councils. This was of short duration.
While the movement was not ripe for revolution, it must be said that the activities of the SDAP were decisive in stopping any strike movement in November. More than twenty years later, Vliegen, speaking as leader of the SDAP, stated without equivocation:
"The revolutionaries weren't wrong in accusing the SDAP of strangling the strike movement in 1918, because social democracy did consciously hold it in check."
But apart from the SDAP's strategy for preventing the revolution, the policies carried out by the syndicalists of the NAS and the RSC - to which the SDP adhered - also tended to provoke disarray in the workers' ranks. During the November events, the NAS approached the SDAP and the NVV with the aim of establishing a joint action program. This tactic of the ‘united front' before the term was coined, strongly criticized in the assemblies of the RSC, gave the impression that the RSC, to which the NAS also belonged, and the SDAP were situated on the same terrain. The latter's policy of sabotaging the strike movement wasn't exposed. At the same time, the SDP leadership made no real critique of revolutionary syndicalism; at its Leiden Congress, on 16 and 17 September, it considered that the NAS had "acted correctly" during the revolutionary week of 11-16 September.
c. The foundation of the Communist Party of Holland (CPN).
The transformation of the SDP into a Communist Party made it the second party in the world, after the Russian party, to have abandoned the ‘social democrat' label. It was even formed before the German Communist Party.
A small party, the CPN was in full growth: at its founding congress it had 1,000 members, and this figure doubled in the space of a year. This transformation didn't put an end to the authoritarian, maneuvering politics of Wijnkoop. Three weeks before the Congress, he and Gorter announced in De Tribune that they had proclaimed themselves respectively president and secretary of the party. By anticipating the results of the congress, these two gave a curious example of democracy[6].
However, the new party remained the only revolutionary pole in Holland. This fact explained that the results of the founding congress were the disintegration of the opposition. De Internationale, the organ of the opposition, ceased to appear in January 1919. The resignation of 26 members of the Hague section in December 1918, refusing to become members of the CPN, appeared as an irresponsible action. Their formation of a group of ‘International Communists', with the aim of linking up with the Spartacists and Bolsheviks on the basis of antiparliamentarism and solidarity with the Russian revolution, came to nothing[7]. Most of its members soon rejoined the party. The Zimmerwald left group, within the party, soon dissolved itself. All that was left was the ‘Gorterian' opposition in Amsterdam around Barend Luteraan. It was this group which maintained continuity with the old opposition by bringing out its own organ in the summer of 1919: De Roode Vaan (Red Flag).
Contrary to the legend which made him a founder of the Communist Party, Gorter was absent from the congress. He had increasingly detached himself from the Dutch movement in order to devote himself entirely to the international communist movement. At the end of December he was in Berlin, where he held a discussion with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. From there he returned to Holland. Despite Luteraan's pressing request, he refused to put himself at the head of the opposition in the CPN. Leading an opposition was to him "an idea as good as it was impossible" owing to his poor state of health.
This didn't mean he was rejecting any political activity. A few months later he retired from all activity within the CPN in order to devote himself entirely to the communist movement in Germany. He became in fact a militant and the theoretician of the opposition that was to form the KAPD in April 1920. His activity was devoted totally to the Communist International, as part of the opposition.
Pannekoek, unlike Gorter, didn't become a member of the KAPD; he remained in the opposition within the CPN until resigning in 1921. His contributions were more theoretical than organizational. His main aim was to carry out his theoretical activities within the world communist movement, but principally in Germany.
Thus, the theoretical leaders of ‘Tribunism' were to detach themselves from the CPN. They constituted the Dutch school of marxism, whose future was henceforth tied theoretically and organically to the KAPD in Germany. From then on, the Communist left in Holland was linked, until the beginning of the thirties, to the German communist left. The latter, strongly dependent on the Dutch school of marxism, constituted the centre of international left communism, both on the organizational level and on the practical terrain of the revolution. As for the CPN, outside of the opposition which ended up leaving it, its history became that of a more and more ‘orthodox' section of the Communist International.
********************
The Third International (1919 - 1920), I
In January 1919 an invitation to the congress of the ‘new revolutionary International' was sent to the different communist parties, which had only just been formed, and to the revolutionary fractions or oppositions within the old parties. Initially it wasn't going to be a congress but simply an ‘international socialist conference' to prepare the foundation of the IIIrd International; it was to be held before the first of February, in clandestinity, either in Berlin or Holland. The crushing of the January uprising in Berlin changed the original plan: the conference was to be held in Moscow, from 2-6 March 1919.
The Dutch Communist Party received the invitation. It had already decided at the congress of November 1918 to send a delegate when the congress of the IIIrd International was convened. However, the attitude of the exactly the same as it had shown towards the three Zimmerwald conferences. Although he had received all the necessary means to make the trip to Moscow, Wijnkoop didn't ‘manage' to get there. In fact he had refused to go. To explain this refusal, still camouflaged behind a sectarian phrase, he published the articles of the bourgeois journalist Ransom who claimed that the Congress of the IIIrd International had been "nothing but a Slavic operation".
In the end, the CPN was represented indirectly, and only with a consultative voice, at the first congress of the new International. Its representative, Rutgers, had not come directly from Holland: he'd left the country for the USA in 1914, where he became a member of the American League for Socialist Propaganda[8]. Arriving in Moscow via Japan, he really only represented this American group, without a mandate. It was through him that the Dutch Left was known in the USA. One of the leaders of American left communism, Fraina, was his friend and was very influenced by Gorter and Pannekoek[9].
In April 1919 the CPN did join the IIIrd International. Rutgers was associated to the work of the Executive Committee.
The Left currents in the International in 1919
The left in the IIIrd International developed during the course of 1919 under the influence of the German revolution. The latter, represented, for all the left currents, the future of the proletarian movement in industrialized Western Europe. Despite the defeat of January 1919 in Berlin, where the proletariat had been crushed by Noske and Scheideman's social democracy, the world revolution had never seemed so close. The republic of councils had been installed in Hungary and Bavaria. The situation remained revolutionary in Austria. Huge mass strikes were shaking Britain and were beginning in Italy. The American continent[10] itself had been hit by the revolutionary wave, from Seattle to Buenos Aires. The proletariat in the most industrialized countries was on the march. The question of the tactic to adopt in the central countries of capitalism, where the revolution would be more purely proletarian than in Russia, had to be examined in the light of the seizure of power - which revolutionaries thought would happen in the very near future.
The revolutionary wave that is the actual experience of the workers confronting the state, brought about a change of tactic as capitalism's era of peaceful growth came to an end. All the revolutionary currents accepted the validity of the theses of the first congress of the IIIrd International:
"1. The present period is one of the decomposition and collapse of the whole world capitalist system, and will be that of the collapse of European civilization in general if capitalism, with its insurmountable contradictions, is not overthrown.
2. The task of the proletariat now consists of seizing state power. The seizure of state power means the destruction of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organization of a new apparatus of proletarian power."[11]
In the new period, it was the praxis of the workers themselves which was putting into question the old parliamentary and union tactics. The Russian proletariat had dissolved parliament after taking power, and in Germany a significant number of workers had pronounced in December 1918 in favor of boycotting the elections. In Russia as in Germany, the council form had appeared as the only form of revolutionary struggle, in place of the union structure. But the class struggle in Germany had revealed the antagonism between the proletariat and the trade unions. When the unions participated in the bloody repression of January 1919 and when there appeared organs of political struggle - the Unions (AAU) - the slogan was not the reconquest of the old unions but their destruction [12].
By accepting the program of the German Communist Party as well as that of the Bolshevik as a fundamental basis of the CI, the International was de facto accepting the anti-parliamentary and anti-union left currents. Had the Spartakusbond congress not rejected participation in elections? Even if Rosa didn't agree with the majority on this point, she defended an anti-union line:
" ... the unions are no longer workers' organizations, but the most solid protectors of the bourgeois state and bourgeois society. Consequently it goes without saying that the struggle for socialization can't be taken forward without the struggle for the liquidation of the unions. We are all agreed on this."[13]
At the beginning, the Communist International accepted into its ranks revolutionary syndicalist elements like the IWW, who rejected both parliamentarism and activity in the old unions. But these elements rejected political activity in principle, and thus the necessity for a political party of the proletariat. This wasn't the case with the elements of the communist left, who were actually very often hostile to the revolutionary syndicalist current, which they didn't want to see accepted into the International because the latter was a political not a trade union organ[14].
It was during the course of 1919 that a left communist current really appeared, on a political and not a trade union basis, in the developed countries. The electoral question was in certain countries the key issue for the left. In March1918, the Polish Communist Party - which had come out of the SDKiL of Luxemburg and Jogisches - boycotted the elections. In Italy, on 22 December 1918 Il Soviet was published in Naples, under the direction of Amadeo Bordiga. Unlike Gramsci and his syndicalist current, which defended participation in elections, Bordiga's current was for communist abstentionism with a view to eliminating the reformists from the Italian Socialist Party and to constituting a "purely communist party". The Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the PSI was formally constituted in October 1919. In Britain, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation took a stand against ‘revolutionary' parliamentarism in order to avoid any "waste of energy"[15]. In Belgium the De Internationale group in Flanders and War van Overstraeten's group were against electoralism[16]. It was the same in the more ‘peripheral' countries. At the congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party, in May 1919, a strong minority was in favor of condemning parliamentary action on principle.[17]
The Dutch communists, on the other hand, despite a tenacious legend, were far from being so radical on the parliamentary question. While the majority around Wijnkoop was electoralist, the minority was hesitant. Gorter himself was for revolutionary activity in parliament[18]. Pannekoek on the other hand defended an anti- parliamentary position. Like all the left communists he underlined the change in historical period and the necessity to break with the democratic principle so firmly anchored in the working masses of Western Europe. For the development of class consciousness, it was necessary to break with ‘parliamentary democracy'.
In 1919 the CI didn't consider that the refusal to participate in bourgeois parliaments was a reason to exclude the left. Lenin, in a reply to Sylvia Pankhurst[19] was of the opinion that:
"The question of parliamentarism is today a particular, secondary point ... being indissolubly linked to the working masses, knowing how to make constant propaganda within them, participating in each strike, echoing each demand by the masses, this is essential for a communist party ... The revolutionary workers whose attacks are aimed at parliament are quite right to the extent that they express the negation of the principle of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy."[20]
On this question, however, the circular from the Executive Committee of the CI, 1 September 1919, marked a turning point. While parliamentary activities and electoral campaigns were still defined as 'auxiliary means', the conquest of parliament appeared to be a way of conquering the state. The CI returned to the social democratic conception of parliament as the centre of the revolutionary struggle: "(militants) ... go to parliament to seize hold of this machine (our emphasis) and to help the masses, behind the walls of parliament, to overturn it".
An even more serious difference between the CI and the left was the union question. In a period when workers' councils had not yet appeared, was it necessary to militate in the unions, now counter-revolutionary organs, or on contrary to destroy them by creating real organs of revolutionary struggle? Here the left was divided. Bordiga's Fraction leaned towards creating ‘real' red trade unions. Fraina's Communist Party of America was in favor of working with the revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW, rejecting any ‘entryism' into the reformist unions. The minority of the CPN, with Gorter and Pannekoek, were increasingly hostile to any activity in the NAS, considering that a break with the anarcho-syndicalist current was inevitable.
The exclusion of the German Left from the KPD on the grounds of anti-parliamentarism and anti-unionism was to crystallize the international left opposition. The Dutch minority in fact found itself at the theoretical forefront of German and international ‘Linkskommunismus'.
[1] De Internationale no. 1, 15 June 1918 ‘One Organ' p. 1. The lines for this regroupment were: political adherence to the Zimmerwald Left; the fight against the Dutch imperialist state; the sharpest struggle against all the reformist and imperialist tendencies among trade union members organized in the NAS and the NVV (the SDAP union).
[2] Since August 1917, Wijnkoop and van Ravesteyn had been the sole editors of the daily.
[3] Kolthek, who was elected as a deputy, collaborated in a bourgeois paper De Telegraf, which had a vigorously pro-Entente orientation. With his party, the SP, and the BvSC, the SDP won more than 50,000 votes, including 14,000 for Wijnkoop in Amsterdam - half the vote obtained by the SDAP. The three elected deputies formed a ‘revolutionary parliamentary faction' in the chamber.
[4] Gorter wrote an article assimilating Wijnkoop with Troelstra, ‘Troelstra-Wijnkoop', published in De Tribune 18 Sept, 1918. Another article, published in De Tribune on 26 October 1918, affirmed that:
"The directing committee's love for the Russian revolution is purely platonic. In reality all the force of its love is directed towards the extension of the party's growth and popularity with the aid of the Parliament."
[5] The opposition didn't yet reject parliamentarism; it hope for a serious discussion in the worker's movement to determine the future tactic: "... important problems in this phase of the movement have yet to be clarified ... On the question of parliamentarism, the editors support the view that everyone should give their opinion in De Internationale. This question however is not yet exhausted ... The same goes for participation or non-participation in elections." (De Internationale no. 9, 12 Oct 1918 ‘Landelijke conferentie van De Internationale')
[6] De Tribune 26 Oct 1918. The anticipated nomination was announced as follows:
"Attention! Seeing that Wijnkoop is the only candidate for the post of party president, he is therefore declared elected to this post. Seeing that the only candidate for party secretary is Ceton, he is consequently declared elected. The candidates for the post of vice-president are A. Lisser and B. Luteraan."
[7] De Internationale no. 14, January 1919 ‘Colltif uittreden'. This was the last issue. The ‘International Communists' disappeared as rapidly as they had appeared.
[8] The American League for Socialist Propaganda was born inside the Socialist Party in Massachusetts, against the electoralist orientation of the party leadership. It published the Internationalist which fought the orientation towards pacifism in the majority of the party in 1917. In 1919 it assumed the title of ‘Left Wing of the Socialist Party' and published in Boston, under Fraina's direction, the weekly Revolutionary Age. In its 1919 theses it was for leaving the IInd International and joining the IIIrd, and for eliminating the reformist demands in the SP platform.
[9] Louis Fraina (1894-1953): born in Southern Italy, at the age of two he immigrated to the USA with his parents. At 15 he became a member of the De Leonist SLP, which he left in 1914. He became a member of the Socialist Party and, with John Reed, active in its left wing, which decided on a split at a conference of June 1919. From this split came Reed's Communist Labor Party and Fraina's Communist Party of America - the most advanced theoretically - in September 1919. After the Amsterdam conference of February 1920, Fraina took part in the Second Congress of the CI, after being cleared of suspicions about being an ‘agent provocateur'. After that he took charge, along with Katayana and certain Jesus Ramirez, of the Panamerican Bureau of the Comintern in Mexico, in 1920-21, under the pseudonym Luis Corey. In 1922, he became known as a journalist under this pseudonym. After that he became a university professor of economics, and was known essentially for his work in this field.
[10] The IWW headed the Seattle strike which generalized to Vancouver and Winnipeg in Canada. In the same year, 1919, very hard strikes broke out among the metal workers of Pennsylvania. These strikes were opposed by the unions and brutally repressed by the bosses' police and the federal government. In Argentina, the ‘Bloody Week' in Buenos Aires ended in dozens of dead among the workers. At the extreme south of the continent, the striking agricultural workers of Patagonia were savagely repressed.
[11] ‘Letter of Invitation to the Congress'.
[12] The first Union (AAU) which was not anarcho-sysndicalist as in the Ruhr emerged in the autumn of 1919 in Bremen. It's organ Kampfruf (‘Flugzeitung fur die revolutionare Betrieborganisation') clearly affirmed that it didn't want to "become a new trade union". Declaring itself in favor of "conquering political power", the Bremen AAU denounced the syndicalists as "adversaries of the political dictatorship of the proletariat". (Kampfruf, no. 1, 15 October 1919, ‘Was ist die AAU?')
[13] Cited by Prudhommeaux, Spartacus et la Commune de Berlin 1918-1919.
[14] Bordiga was the firmest partisan of this separation between the political International and the International of economic organizations. Up till 1920, the Communist International accepted both communist organizations and national and regional trade or industrial unions. This lasted until the formation of the Red Trade Union International (Profintern). The KAPD wanted to set up, alongside the Communist International, an International workplace organizations on a political basis: anti-parliamentarism, destruction of the counter-revolutionary unions, workers' councils, destruction of the capitalist state.
[15] S. Pankhurst Communist Thought and Action in the IIIrd International, published in Bordiga's Il Soviet, 20 Sept 1919.
[16] War van Overstraeten (1891-1981), painter, at first anarchist, he became during the war editor-in-chief of the Zimmerwald paper of the Jeunes Gardes Socialistes: Le Socialisme. He was at the origin of the Communist Group in Brussels, founded in 1919, and which on 1 March 1920 began publishing L'Ouverier Communiste (De Kommunistische Arbeider in Flemish). At the Second Congress of the CI he defended Bordiga's anti-parliamentary theses. He was one of the main artisans in the foundation of the Belgian CP in November 1920, which was joined by the Flemish Federation in December (De Internationale). At the Third Congress of the CI, he was very close to KAPD. Under the CI's pressure, he had to admit into the Party, the centrist group, Jacquemotte and Massart's ‘Les Amis de l'Exploite', at the unification congress of September 1021. Unlike Bodiga, he continued to defend anti-parliamentary positions. Hostile to the idea of the mass party and ‘Bolshevization', in 1927 he was part of the unified opposition group. In 1929 he was excluded with the opposition and became close to Hennaut's Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes, formed in 1931 after separating from the Trotskyist wing. In Spain from 1931-35, he was in contact with the groups of the communist left. After that withdrawal from all political activity.
[17] A strong opposition was formed in Bulgarian CP around Ivan Gantochev, a journalist and a translator of Goethe. It was he who translated a certain number of Gorter's works into Bulgarian. In Hungary, anti-parliamentary positions were known about thanks to a group of Hungarian Communists exiled in Vienna, after the end of the ‘Hungarian Commune'. Within this group Lukacs was an anti-parliamentarian, while Bela Kun put forward a curious tactic: participation in elections in order to denounce them; no deputies to be sent to parliament. In Sweden, C J Bjorklund's Federation of Social-Democratic Youth (Social-demokratiska Ungdomsforbundet), which had adhered to the CI in May 1919, was resolutely anti-parliamentarian; in contact with KAPD in 1920, it denounced the opportunism of Hoglund in parliament - after Lenin had presented the latter as the Swedish Liebknecht. Anti-parliamentariam reached as far as Latin America: within the Partido Socialista Internacional in Argentina - which was to become the Communist Party of Argentina in December 1920 - a strong minority had emerged in 1919, referring to Bordiga and calling for a boycott of elections.
[18] On 1 May 1920, a few weeks before writing his Reply to Lenin, Gorter wrote to Lenin saying:
"I am not adversary of parliamentarism. I am writing this only to show you - you and the central committee - how dangerous it is to talk too much in favor of the opportunist communist."
[19] Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) had militated in the suffragette movement founded by her mother Emma. In 1914, she had founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes which published The Women's Dreadnought. Under the effect of the war, her movement broke with feminism. In 1917 it was transformed into the Worker's Socialist Federation, whose organ The Workers' Dreadnought. Pankhurst declared for the Bolsheviks. In 1919, she was present at the Bologna congress of the PSI. she became a paid correspondent of The Communist International, organ of the CI. On returning from Italy, she participated at the Frankfurt Conference, then at the Amsterdam Conference. Rejecting any parliamentary tactic and any entryism into the Labor Party, she contributed in June 1920 to the foundation of the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). The same year, along with the shop steward Gallacher, she defended anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union positions at the Second Congress of the CI. Her party was obliged, in Leeds in Jan 1921, to fuse with the Communist Party of Great Britain which defended the orthodoxy of the CI. Workers' Dreadnought remained the independent organ of her tendency in the ‘unified' CP. Thrown in prison by the British government, she was freed in Sept 1921 only to be expelled from the CP along with her followers. In February 1922 she and the excluded comrades founded the Communist Workers' Party, the section of Gorter's KAI, which lasted until June 1924. After this Sylvia Pankhurst ceased to be a left communist and a proletarian militant. She returned to her feminist first love and developed a passion for Esperanto. In 1928, she even became the apostle of an ‘anti-fascist' crusade. In 1932 she formed a Women's International Matteoti Committee, an anti-fascist feminist movement. She supported the Negus during the 1935 war between Italy and Ethiopia. She went off to Ethiopia and ended up a Catholic. A friend of the Negus, she died in Addis-Ababa in 1960, where she is buried.
[20] Pankhurst's letter and the reply by Lenin (August 1919) can be found in Die Kommunistische Internationale no. 4-5, pps 91-98 ‘Der Sozialismus in England'.
Recession, inflation, debt, growing poverty for the working class: in the Eastern bloc, as in the West, the crisis is getting worse. The old Stalinist and Trotskyist refrain about the "socialism" of some or all of the Eastern bloc countries is collapsing in the face of reality. Given the relative under-development of its economy, not only is the crisis particularly harsh in the Eastern bloc, the development of the class struggle clearly reveals the bourgeois and anti-working class nature of its regimes. Their social and economic crisis demonstrates that they are an integral part of world capitalism.
In the previous issue of the ICC's International Review (no.49), our regular column on the economic crisis dealt with Russia; in this issue, we continue our survey of the Eastern bloc, to deal with the other members of COMECON[1].
The economic weakness of the Eastern Bloc
After Russia, the six East European countries (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania) are economically the most powerful countries in the bloc. This gives an idea of its profound weakness in relation to its Western rival: the six East European countries' combined GNP ($507 billion. in 1984) is hardly greater than that of France ($496 billion), and considerably less than West Germany's $616 billion.
|
GNP ($ billions) |
GNP/inhabitant ($) |
East Germany |
145 |
8680 |
Poland |
160 |
4370 |
Czechoslovakia |
100 |
6485 |
Hungary |
20 |
1902 |
Bulgaria |
43 |
4790 |
Romania |
39 |
1750 |
USSR |
500 |
5500 |
COMECON's total GNP (including Vietnam and Cuba) amounts to $2020 billion, which is slim indeed compared with the rival economic alliance regrouped in the OECD, which totals $8193.4 billion -- 4 times greater. In 1984, the GNP of the EEC alone amounted to $2364 billion, well above that of all COMECON put together.
Moreover, these figures should not be taken literally, since, as certain studies have shown[2], they are, for propaganda purposes and due to different accounting methods, over-estimated by 25% - 30%, with the exception of Hungary, which belongs to the IMF and voluntarily understates its estimations by 50%, in order to gain access to the credits reserved for poor countries!
The Eastern bloc is thus certainly not ready to confront its Western rival on the economic level. For the USSR, the only way to maintain the independence and unity of its own imperialist bloc is by a draconian subjection of its entire economic potential to the demands of its war economy. Arms production, necessary to the strengthening of its military potential, is the only level at which it can compete with, and confront, the power of the opposing bloc. Ever since the end of World War II, the advance of the Russian army and the Yalta agreements have sealed the submission of the East European nations to the demands of Russian imperialism, and this is the reality that fundamentally determines their economic situation.
The East European countries have paid dearly their integration into the Russian bloc, in terms of their own development. Their real situation is very different from what the overblown statistics churned out for decades by Stalinist economists would have us believe.
The dismantling, immediately after the war, of the most competitive factories in order to export their machinery to Russia, the 180 degree reorientation eastwards of all the traditional lines of communication and commercial circuits, forced "collectivization", systematic pillage, and the imposition of an international division of production within the bloc following the demands of Russia's war economy, all weigh heavily on East European countries' real growth rates. Czechoslovakia is a good case in point: in 1963, while agricultural production was still below that of 1938, its industrial decline was even clearer, in a country renowned before World War II for the quality of its products. In 1980, a Czech institute carried out a survey of 196 supposedly "top-quality" products destined for export; 113 were unsaleable in the West, being below required quality standards. The Russian leaders themselves have protested officially at the poor quality of imported Czech goods.
Eastern Europe's industry is growing on the basis of the declining quality of its products, and increasing technological backwardness, which means that most of its commodities are considered outdated by international commercial standards, and thus cannot be sold on the world market outside COMECON. Eastern Europe's technological backwardness appears, not only in the obsolescence of the productive apparatus (outdated machine tools, high manning levels to compensate for inadequate automation), and what it produces, but also in the waste of the energy required by this production:
|
Energy consumption (*) |
Energy consumption per unit of GNP |
East Germany |
86 |
0.61 |
Poland |
114 |
0.71 |
Czechoslovakia |
69 |
0.69 |
Hungary |
28 |
1.35 |
Bulgaria |
37 |
0.90 |
Romania |
70 |
1.57 |
(*) in millions of tons of oil-equivalent |
If we examine the energy necessary to produce one unit of GNP, the most efficient country of Eastern Europe is hardly at the level of Portugal (0.60), behind Greece (0.54), and far behind West Germany (0.38) or France (0.36). And here again, we should examine these figures in the light of what we have said above concerning the estimation of GNP, in other words increase them by 25% - 30%. This expresses perfectly the intolerable industrial backwardness accumulated by the Eastern countries in relation to their West European rivals during decades of post-war "growth". Since World War II, the Eastern bloc countries have developed in a situation of permanent crisis.
The convulsions of capital in crisis, and the reactions of the working class
Since the end of the 1960's, the crisis in the Eastern bloc has taken on less "dynamic" and spectacular forms than in the West, which is the epicenter of the crisis of generalized overproduction. During the 70's, the crisis on Eastern Europe has been marked by an overall slowdown in growth, and for the weaker countries (Poland, Romania), by a growth in debt aimed at modernizing an economy still characterized by a large and backward agricultural sector. The crisis' acceleration in the 1980's had serious consequences for all the Eastern bloc countries: declining East-West trade, sources of credit drying up, falling prices for raw materials, the collapse of the "Third World" market, aggravated competition on the world market and the intensification of the arms race, all threaten to strangle COMECON's economy.
The bourgeoisie's attacks on the working class already precarious living conditions are increasing daily. Discontent is growing, and the echo of the workers' struggles is beginning to pierce the wall of silence imposed by the Stalinist bourgeoisie.
Romania
After being forced to interrupt its payments in 1981, Romania has accelerated the repayment of its foreign debt, which has fallen from $9.9 billion in 1981, to $6.5 billion in 1985. This result has been achieved at the cost of brutal rationing and a violent increase in exploitation imposed on the whole population.
In two years (1984-85), household electricity consumption has been halved, heating in homes and offices is limited to 12 degrees centigrade; light bulbs of more than 15 watts are banned, TV programs have been reduced to 2 hours per day. The list of bureaucratic measures imposed by police terror is endless: private cars forbidden in Bucharest to save petrol, drastic rationing of food to save imports and increase exports; faced with a housing crisis in late 1986, Ceausescu "requested" the old-age pensioners of Bucharest to move to the country; confronted with popular resistance, he announced during the summer that "certain categories" of pensioners would be refused medical treatment if they did not.
Although carefully hidden by the bourgeoisie, the death-rate is increasing and famine spreading. In December 1985, starving peasants in Banat tried to seize the grain silos, revealing the deep-seated discontent of the population. The workers are subjected to a violent exploitation: abolition of the guaranteed wage in September 1983, obligation decreed in June 1985 for those who do not "give" a day's labor to the state, to pay the equivalent in cash. Industrial "accidents" have increased in the mines, while the huge Volga canal project has cost hundreds of workers' lives.
Working class discontent has broken out in the months-long strikes in the coal mines and the petrochemical industry during 1983-84. After a bloody repression, the militarization of labor was decreed for these sectors; a measure which has since been extended, in October 1985, to power station workers. Scattered strikes broke out in November 1986 in several Transylvanian towns against the new wage system. In early 1987, leaflets were circulating in Bucharest calling for a general strike to overthrow Ceausescu.
Poland
The Polish economy is plunging into the abyss. The national income fell by 30% between 1978 and 1982; it is still officially 10% below the 1979 level. The positive growth rates announced since 1983 should be treated with caution: in 1983, for example, the growth rate was officially announced at 5.9%, but estimated by the OECD at only 0.7%. The Polish economy is in the midst of recession.
The 25% fall in the price of coal in 1986 (Poland is the world's third largest exporter) and the irradiation of the harvest by the Chernobyl disaster have seriously affected exports to the West, which had already fallen by 3.8% in 1985. Despite successive devaluations of the zloty (the national currency was devalued by more than 30% during 1984-85) to increase export competitivity, and a drastic decline in imports, the resulting trade surplus was not even enough to pay off the interest on the national debt, which itself is growing in leaps and bounds: from $29.5 billion in 1985 to $33.4 billion in 1986, and well on the way to $35 billion in 1987.
Inflation is raging, and price increases come in quick succession: in March 1986, staple food prices rose by 8%, public transport by 66%; on 7th April 1986 gas and electricity rose by 30%; in August, meat prices increased 8%. Between 1982 and 1986, the price of bread has risen from 3 to 28 zlotys.
In the same way, wages have come under attack with the "new company autonomy" reform. Weekend work, abolished by the 1980 Gdansk agreements, has been reintroduced for "vital" sectors like the mining industry.
Faced with growing discontent, the Jaruzelski government has adopted Gorbachev's orientations: successive amnesties have followed repression, the bourgeoisie is trying to present a more "liberal" image, Solidarnosc is tolerated; but all this is only to make the attacks on the working class "acceptable".
Bulgaria
Bulgaria is also hit by recession. Whereas the official estimates of growth in GNP were 4% in 1982 and 3% in 1983, the OECD places them at -0.7% and +0.2% respectively. In 1985, farm output fell 10% and electricity 7%, instead the forecast 4.1% rise. The growth rate has been officially revised downwards: 1.8%, the lowest level since the war. Prices are rising faster: in September 1985, household electricity costs rose by 41%, petrol by 35%....
To save electricity, power cuts are common, and rationing has been imposed: for collectively heated households, electricity consumption has been limited to 350 kw hours per month, to 1100 kw hours for the others; shops shut two hours earlier, lighting is limited to 60 watts in the sitting room and 45 watts in other rooms. In cases of disobedience, electricity is cut off.
To divert the rising discontent onto the question of national minorities, the bourgeoisie has savagely repressed the Turkish minority to make it a scapegoat, and strengthen nationalism. The black-out has been broken by the yet to be confirmed echo of strikes during the winter of 1986-87.
Hungary
Hungary, Eastern Europe's "liberal" showpiece, is also sinking faster and faster into the crisis. The official growth rate of 0.3% in 1983 rose to 2.8% in 1984, only to fall back to -0,6% in 1985; it will probably remain below 1% in 1986.
In 1986, exports to the West stagnated, and the outlook for 1987 is poor. Hungary is essentially an exporter of farm produce; this year's harvest has been rendered unsaleable in the West by the fallout from Chernobyl, while Spain's entry into the Common Market has diminished its main western market.
The official rate of inflation is 7%, Price rises come pell-mell; in 1985, public transport rose by 100%, postal tariffs by 85%, and the tendency accelerated in 1986, constantly eating away at workers' and pensioners' living standards.
The attack on working class living conditions is getting worse: in December the council of ministers decreed a freeze on basic wages, new criteria of quality and productivity control were imposed which had the effect of reducing workers' wages. Workers can maintain their living conditions only by taking two jobs and doubling their working hours.
The relatively well-to-do model is an exception in Eastern Europe that has now reached its limits, a chimera base on a level of debt per inhabitant higher even than Poland. The attack on the working class can only continue to intensify, which will aggravate the population's growing discontent. The miners' strikes in the Tababanya region reveal the tendency of the working class in Hungary to take up once again the road of class struggle.
Czechoslovakia and East Germany
Czechoslovakia and East Germany, the two most developed East European countries, and those which have stood up best to the crisis' devastating effects. However, the signs of the crisis shaking them are increasingly clear: growth is stagnating and a recession is on the way. For the Deutsche Democratische Republik, official figures put growth, at 2.5% in 1982 and 4.4% in 1983: according to the OECD, these should be 0.02% and 0.8% respectively. The official rate of 4.8% for 1985 is equally largely over-estimated. Similarly, the official figures for Czechoslovakia of 0% in 1982 and 1.5% in 1983 (the latter revised downwards to 0.1% by the OECD) show that this country, weaker than the DDR, has already entered the recession.
Although up to now, both countries have relatively successfully defended their exports on the world market, their future is hardly a bright one, given the perspective of a decline in the West European market, itself hit by the crisis, and which remains the main destination for their exports to the West. Czechoslovakia, whose manufactured products are increasingly outdated and difficult to export, has only managed to maintain its balance of trade by selling more and more semi-finished products, of lesser added value.
The DDR's increasing debt ($13 billion in 1985) towards the West, and Czechoslovakia's towards Russia (15 billion crowns) weighs heavily on both countries, and to balance their accounts they can only increase their attacks on working class living conditions.
Living standards in the DDR and Czechoslovakia are the highest in Eastern Europe; in 1984, their GNP's per inhabitant were respectively $8680 and $6485, comparable to those of Austria ($8685) or Italy ($6190). This "privileged" situation, in terms of material well-being, within Eastern Europe, coupled with a tight police and military control, has up to now made it possible to maintain a certain social calm.
However, this situation is only relative:
-- a true comparison with Western living standards would reduce the figures for GNP by 25% -30%. Moreover, GNP measures production, but not consumption, nor does it take account of the high cost and poor quality of consumer goods, nor of the wretchedness of existence in a police state, that does not appear in any index. Every day 150 East Germans cross clandestinely to the West, which means that every year 50,000 East Germans flee the "highest" living standards in Eastern Europe;
-- the perspective is one of economic decline, not only for Czechoslovakia, but also for East Germany which has proved more resistant up to now. The attacks on the working class will increase. The last party congress in the DDR announced 1 million redundancies. Given the chronic shortage of manpower, and obligatory re-employment, this will not create unemployment but it will make it possible to force workers to accept lower-paid jobs. Here again, double-working, the accumulation of jobs, is the only way for workers to maintain their living standards. Discontent is growing, and even if for the moment it remains mystified in the forms of democratic and religious "opposition" campaigns, it is a sign of class struggles to come.
Like the rest of world capitalism, Eastern Europe is plunging inexorably into the crisis. As in Western Europe, attacks on working class living conditions are increasing; living standards are falling to the level of the dark years of the war and immediate post-war period.
Everywhere, discontent is growing. In the East, the echo of the class struggle is getting louder. Although with difficulty, the East European proletariat is beginning to join the international recovery in the class struggle.
This is why the Russian bourgeoisie, with Gorbachev at its head, is trying to impose a fake liberalization - to break, the emerging thrust of the class struggle with democratic, religious, and nationalist mystifications. However, the still recent experience of the repression in Poland is there to remind workers that Gorbachev's version of Stalinist propaganda's "new course" is no less a lie than his predecessors. In Poland, the difficult process of learning from experience is under way, often this takes the form of defensive struggles on the class terrain against Solidarnosc's "political adventures" and its collaboration with Jaruzelski. Today, Walesa is openly contested and criticized. While the working class has suffered a defeat in Poland, its fighting potential remains strong and the repeated experiences of 1970-76-80 are a guarantee of the Polish proletariat's ability to develop its struggles in the future.
The perspective of the development of workers' struggles in Eastern Europe echoing those in the West, will more and more pose the question of proletarian internationalism and workers' solidarity against the world's division into two antagonistic military blocs, especially with the development of struggles in the most developed countries -- Czechoslovakia and above all the DDR -- in direct contact with the great industrial concentrations of Western Europe.
JJ. 9/05/81
[1] These articles do not deal with the historic roots of Russian capitalism and its history, which determine the Russian bloc's present characteristics and specificities; we refer our readers to previous texts published by the ICC, in particular the pamphlet on the "Decadence of Capitalism", and the articles on "The Crisis in the Eastern Bloc" (International Review no. 23)
[2] "The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the World Economy", P. Marer.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/alptraum-communist-collective
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/048_decadence_part01.html
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/049_decadence_part02.html
[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/ch01.htm
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/304/understanding-capitalisms-decadence
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internationalist-communist-group-icggci
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/second-international
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/050_reply_to_BC_historic_course.html#_ftn1
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/050_reply_to_BC_historic_course.html#_ftn2
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/050_reply_to_BC_historic_course.html#_ftn3
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/050_reply_to_BC_historic_course.html#_ftnref1
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/050_reply_to_BC_historic_course.html#_ftnref2
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/050_reply_to_BC_historic_course.html#_ftnref3
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/329/historic-course
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/128/historic-course
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/17/stalinism-eastern-bloc