In the mid 1970s, the proletarian milieu was polarized between two currents who, in a caricatural manner, were the product of the theorization not of the strengths of the Italian[1] and German-Dutch[2] lefts, but for their weaknesses - particularly with regard to a question that was crucial toa milieu re-emerging after decades of obliteration from the historical scene: the question of organization. On the one hand, there was the councilist current which rends to deny the necessity for revolutionary organization, and on the other hand the Bordigist current, represented in particular by the Parti Communiste Internationale (Programme Communiste), which makes the party the mechanical remedy for all the difficulties facing the working class. The first current was to have its hour of glory in the turmoil of the events of ‘68 and the years that followed but it encountered all kinds of problems with the reflux in the class struggle in the mid-70s; the second, having been ever so discreet during the period of the development of the struggle, was to gain a new echo during the reflux, in particular with elements who had come out of leftism. In the second half of the seventies the councilist pole collapsed whereas the PCI (Programme) thrust itself arrogantly forward: it was the Party and nothing existed outside of it.

The proletarian political milieu was extremely dispersed and divided. The question posed to it increasing urgency - and one intimately linked to the question of organization - was that of the need to develop contacts between the existing groups on the basis of a revolutionary coherence, in order to accelerate the process of clarification indispensable for the regroupment of revolutionary forces. The ICC, in continuity with the work of Revolution Internationale, showed the way forward in 1974-75 and the Manifesto it published in 1976 was an appeal to the whole proletarian movement to work in this spirit:

"With its still modest means, The Interna­tional Communist Current has committed itself to the long and difficult task of regrouping revolutionaries internationally around a clear and coherent program. Turning its back on the monolithism of the sects, it calls upon the communists of all countries to become aware of the immense responsibilities which they have, to abandon the false quarrels which separate them, to surmount deceptive divisions which the old world has imposed on them. The ICC calls on them to join in this effort to constitute (before the class engages in its decisive struggles) the international and unified organization of its vanguard.

The communists, as the most conscious fraction of the class, must show it the way forward by taking as their slogan: ‘Revolutionaries of all countries, unite'." (Manifesto, published with the ICC Platform)

It was on this shifting context of a political milieu in a state of decantation, profoundly marked by dispersal and the weight of sectarianism that Battaglia Comunista was to call in 1977 for an international conference of groups of the communist left[3].

In 1972, Battaglia Comunista had refused to associate itself to the appeal by Internationalism (USA), proposing the development of international coreespondence with the perspective of an international conference, an appeal which had initiated the dynamic which had led to the formation of ICC. At the time, in the aftermath of 1968, BC had replied

" - that we can't consider that there was a real development of class consciousness

-- that even the flowering of groups expresses only the malaise and revolt of the petty bourgeoisie

-- that we have to admit the world is still under the heel of imperialism."

What led to the subsequent change of attitude? A fundamental question for BC: the ‘social democratization' of the Stalinist CPs. BC took the ‘Eurocommunist' tura of the CPs, a purely conjunctural tura of the mid-‘70s, as we can now see clearly with hindsight, as the reason for their new attitudes towards the political milieu. It was in order to discuss this fundamental question that Battaglia proposed the holding of a conference. Furthermore, there were no political criteria for defining the proletarian milieu in BC's letter of appeal, and Battaglia excluded from its invitation the other groups of proletarian milieu in Italy such as PCI (Program) or Il Partito Comunista.

Despite the orientation towards the holding of the conferences, Battaglia wanted to remain ‘master of its own house.'

However, despite the lack, of clarity in the appeal, the ICC, in conformity with the orienta­tions already embodied in its own history and reaffirmed in the Manifesto published in January 1976, responded positively to this call was to act jointly with BC in promoting this confer­ence by proposing  political criteria demarcating the organizations of the proletarian milieu from those of the bourgeoisie; by calling for the appeal to be opened out to the organizations ‘forgotten' by Battaglia; by trying to situate this conference within a dynamic towards political clarification within the communist milieu, the necessary step towards the regroupment of revolutionaries.

The dynamic of the international conferences of the groups of the communist left

The First Conference[4]

Several groups agreed in principle to BC's appeal: the FOR in France and Spain (Formento Obrero Revolucionario); Arbetarmakt in Sweden; the CWO (Communist Workers' Organization) in Britain[5] the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste) in France. But this agreement remain platonic and only the ICC participated actively alongside BC at the first conference, whereas under various more or less valid pretexts, but which all expressed an underestimation of the importance of the conference, the other groups shone by their absences.

As for the apostles of councilism and Bordigism - Spartakusbond (Holland) and the PC (Program)[6] - they were uninterested in such conferences, taking refuge in a splendid, sectarian isolation.

However, although only two of the organizations (BC and the ICC) actually took part in this first conference (which clearly expressed the reality of the prevailing sectarianism); al­though the criteria for participation were still vague and needed to be made much more precise; although there was a lack of preparation, despite all this, this was still a great step forward for the whole proletarian milieu. Far from being a closed debate between two organizations, this first conference demonstrated to the whole proletarian milieu that it was possible to create a framework for the confrontation and clarification of divergent positions. The importance of the questions raised proved this amply:

-- analysis of the development of the economic crisis and the evolution of the class struggle;

-- the counter-revolutionary function of the so-called ‘workers' parties' -- SPs, CPs, and their leftist acolytes

-- the role of the trade unions;

-- the problem of the party;

--  present tasks of revolutionaries;

-- conclusions on the significance of this meeting.

However, an important weakness of this conference and  of the one which followed, was its inability to take a conscious position on the debates which had animinated it; thus the draft joint declaration proposed by the ICC, synthesizing the agreement and disagreements which had emerged, notably on the union question, was rejected by BC witihout an alternative proposal.

The publication in two languages ( Italian and French) of the texts contributed to the conference and the proceedings, aroused considerable interest in the proletarian milieu and made it possible to broaden the dynamic opened up by the first conference.

This was to be concretized a year and a half later, at the end of ‘78, when the second conference was held.

The Second Conference[7]

This conference was better prepared and organized than the first, both from the political and organizational points of view. The invitation was made on the basis of more precise political criteria:

"- recognition of the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution;

- recognition of the break with social democracy made by the first and second congresses of the Communist International;

- rejection without reservation of state capitalism and of self-management;

- rejection of all the Communist and Socialist parties as bourgeois parties;

- orientation towards and organization of revolutionaries which refer to the marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat."

These criteria - which were of course insufficient for establishing a political platform for regroupment, and the last point of which certainly needed to be made more precise, were by contrast amply sufficient for demarcating the proletarian milieu and giving a framework for fruitful discussion. 

At the second conference held in November 1978, five proletarian organizations were to participate in the debates: the PcInt (Battaglia) from Italy, the CWO from Britain, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista from Italy, Fur Kommunismen from Sweden , and the ICC which at time had sections in nine countries. The group Il Leninista sent texts as a contribution to the debates without, being able to participate physically at the conference , while Arbetarmakt of Sweden and OCRIA in France gave a purely platonic support to the conference.

As for the FOR, this has something of a particular case, because having given its full support to the first conference, having sent texts for the preparation of the second , and having come to take part, it performed a piece of theatre at the beginning: under the pretext of not being in agreenent with the agenda because it contained a point on the economic crisis, whose existence the FOR denies in a surrealist manner , it made a spectacular exit.

As for the epigones of councilism and Bordigism, they preserved their rejection of the conferences: Spartakusbond of Holland, imitated by the PIC in France, because they rejected the necessity for the party, and the PCI's (Program and Il Partito Comunista in Italy) because they considered themselves to be the only parties in existence, and thus that outside them no proletariat organizations could exist.

The agenda of the conference bore witness to the militant spirit that animated it:

-- the evolution of the crisis and the perspectives it opens up for the struggles of the working class;

-- the position of communists on so-called 'national liberation' movements;

-- the tasks of revolutionaries in the present period.

The second international conference of the groups of the communist left was a success; not only a larger number of groups took part, but also because it made it possible to more clearly deliniate the political agreements and disagreements between the different participating groups. By enabling the various organizations present to get to know each other better, the conference offered a framework of discussion which made it possible to avoid false debates and to push for the clarification of real divergences. In this sense the conferences were a step forward within the perspective of the regroupment of revolutionaries, which while not an immediate short-term prospect is certainly on the historical agenda given the dispersed situation of the proletarian milieu after decades of counter-revolution.

However , the political weaknesses which the proletarian milieu suffers from also weighed heavily on the conferences themeselves. This expressed itself in particular in the inability of the conferences to avoid remaining dumb -- ie in the capacity of the participating groups to take a collective position on the questions under discussion, in order to make clear what point they had reached. The ICC put forward resolutions with this aim, but aside from the NCI met with the refusal of the other organizations present, and notably of Battaglia and the CWO. 'I'his attitude expressed the climate of distrust which infests the communist milieu, even those parts of it most open to confrontation, and holds back the much-needed process of political clarification.

In these conditions it wasn't surprising that the ICC's proposal to vote a resolution denouncing the sectarianism of the groups who refused to participate in the conferences was rejected by the other groups both at the first and second conferences. Obviously this touched a raw nerve.

Those weaknesses were unfortunately to be concretized after the second conference in the polemics launched by Battaglia and the CWO who labelled the ICC as 'opportunist' and denied the the existence of a problem of sectarianism. For them, the denunciation of sectarianism was just a way of denying the real political divergences. This positition of Battaglia and of the CWO fails to see that sectarianism is a political question in its own right since it expresses a tendency to lose sight of an essential issue: the role of the organization in one of its most decisive aspects, that is its work towards the regroupment of revolutionaries. In denying the danger of sectarianism in those organizations are poorly equipped to deal with it in their own ranks, and unfortunately this was to be manifested clearly at the third conference.

The Third Conference[8]

The third conference was held in spring 1980 at a time when the workers' struggles of the preceding year had shown that the reflux of the mid-70s was over; at a time, as well, when the intervention of Russian troops in Afghanistan had shown the reality of the threat of world war, which highlighted the responsibility of revolutionaries in a very sharp manner.

New groups had associated themselves to the dynamic of the conferences: the Nuclei Leninista Internazionalisti which was the product of the fusion of the NCI and Il Leninista in Italy, who had already associated themselves to the second conference; the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste was the product of a Bordigist-type split from the ICC in 1979, L'Eveil Internationaliste in France, which came from a break with Maoism, now in an advanced state of decomposition; the Marxist Workers Group from the USA which associated itself to the ccnference without being able to take part physically. However despite the grouing echo the conferences were having within the revolutionary miliue, the third international conference of groups of the communist left ended in failure.

The ICC's call for the conference to adopt a joint resolution on the danger of imperialist war in the light of events in Afghanistan wa s rejected by BC, the CWO, and by l'Eveil, because even if the different groups had a common position on this question, for them it would have been 'opportunist' to adopt such a resolution, 'because we have disagreements on the role of the revolutionary party of tomorrow.' The content of this brilliant 'non-opporcunist' reasoning was a follows: because revolutionary organizations haven't managed to agree on all the questions, they musn't speak about those they have been agreed on for a long time. The specificities of each group take precedence, as a matter of principle, over what is common to all. And this is precisely what we mean by sectarianism. The silence, the absence of any collective position taken by the groups during these three conferences, was the clearest demonstration of how sectarianism leads to impotence.

Two debates were on the agenda of the third conference:

-- the point reached by the crisis of capitalism and the perspectives flowing from this;

-- the perspectives for the development of the class struggle and the resulting tasks of revolutionaries,

The debate on the second point of the agenda permitted the opening up of a discussion on the role of the party, which had been one of the points discussed at the second conference. 'I'his question on the role of the party is one of the most serious and important facing today's revolutionary groups, particularly with regard to the appreciation one has of the conceptions of the Bolshevik party in the light of the historic experience accumulated since and through the Russian Revolution.

And yet Battaglia and the CWO, out of impatience, or fear, or (and this is unfortunately most probable ) out of miserable opportunist tactics -- and even though at the previous conference they had declared that this question would "need a long discussion" - were to refuse to carry on this debate on the problem of  the party. Using as a pretext, the so-called , 'spontaneist' conceptions of the ICC, they declared the question closed and made their own position a criterion for adhesion to the conferences, thus provoking the exclusion of the ICC and the dislocation of the conferences. In breaking the dynamic which has made it possible to restore the links between the different parts of the proletarian milieu and to push the whole milieu towards the clarification needed for the regroupment of revolutionary forces, the CWO and BC bear a heavy responsibility for reinforcing the difficulties faced by the milieu that inevitably resulted from all this.

The CWO and BC thus showed the same irresponsibility as the GCI who only came to thed third conference to denounce the very principle of it and to fish for recruits in the most shameful manner.

The outbreak of the mass strike in Poland three months afte the failure of the conference simply highlighted the irresponsibility of these groups who seem to believe that they exist only in relation on to their own egos and who forget that it is the working class which has produced them for its needs. These 'instrasigent' defenders of the party forget that the first task of the party is not to turn in on itself in sectarian manner, but is on the contrary to show a will for political confrontaton in order to accelerate the process of clarification within the proletarian milieu and thus to reinforce its capacity for intervention within the class.

The pseudo-fourth conference which took place later on had nothing to do with the dynamic that had informed the first three. The CWO and BC found a third person to act as a candlestick for the candle that illumenated their tryst: the UCM, a group that has to becone the 'Communist Party of Iran.' This nationalist group, hardly emerging from Stalinism, was certainly a more valid interlocutor for Battaglia and the CWO than the ICC -- perhaps because it defended a 'correct' position on the party, unlike the ICC? Sectarianis has its vicissitudes: it leads to the most downright opportunism and in the end to the abandonment of principles.

Balance Sheet of the Conferences

The first acquisition of the conferences is that they took place at all.

The international conferences of groups of the communist left were a particularly important  moment in the evolution of the international proletarian milieu which re-emerged after 1968. They made it possible to create a framework of discussion among various groups who directly participated in their dynamic, and so led to a positive clarification of the debates which animated the milieu as a whole, offering a political reference point f'or all the organizations and elements looking for a revolutionary political coherence. The bulletin published in three languages after each conference, containing the various written contributions and the proceedings of all the discussions have remained an indispensable reference for all the groups or elements who have since come to revolutionary posi­tions.

In this sense, despite the ultimate failure of the conferences, they represented an eminently fruitful moment in the evolution of the proletarian political milieu, allowing the groups to get to know each other better, creat­ing a framework which permitted a positive pro­cess of political decantation and clarification, which was concretized in the development of a dynamic towards regroupment. Thus within the conferences themselves this dynamic took shape through the fusion of the NCI and Il Leninista  into the NLI; through the decantation of elements from Arbetarmakt and the majority of the group Fur Kommunismen in Sweden who moved towards the ICC and later on formed its section in this country; through the rapprochement between Battaglia and the CWO who later regrouped to form the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party.

The positive role of the conferences and the growing echo they received weren't only manifested in the increasing numbers of groups who participated in them. They also showed all the groups in the milieu the value of such meetings and offered an example of how to proceed. Proof of this was the Oslo conference of September 1977 which regrouped a number of Scandinavian groups, and in which the ICC participated; even if it was held on a much looser basis, it ex­pressed a need felt within the international proletarian milieu.

But with the next reflux in workers' struggles, the positive role of the conferences has to be demonstrated, paradoxically, by the crisis in the milieu which followed the failure of the third conference.

The crisis of the proletarian political milieu

At the same time the conferences were taking place, the political milieu at the end of the 70s was marked by a dual phenonenon: on the one hand the collapse of the councilist movement, which had been the dominant pole at the begin­ning of the decade, and on the other by the de­velopment of the PCI (Programme) which became the most developed organization of the proletarian milieu.

The Political Degeneration of the Bordigist PCl

If the PCI (Programme) became the most devel­oped organisation of the political milieu, this wasn't just through its international existence in a number of countries: Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain, etc, publishing in Fr ench, Italian, Engish, Spanish, Arabic, German ... but also through its political positions which in a period of reflux in the class struggle met with a certain success, not only with elements produced by the decomposition of leftism but also within the existing proletarian mileu.

The incapacity of  ‘councilism' to resist the reflux in the struggle was a concrete demonstration of the bankruptcy into which one is led by rejecting the need for a political party of the working class, by the profound underestimation of the question of organization which this posi­tion implies. The PCI's insistence of the necessity for the party was perfectly correct. But it held a ‘substitutionist' conception of the party, one pushed to the limits of absurdity, .in which the party is everything and the class nothing. The conception was developed during the depths of the counter-revolution after World War Two when the working class was more mystified than ever before; it was in effect the theorization of the weakness of the proletariat. The party was presented as the panacea for all the difficulties of the class struggle. At a time when the struggle was in reflux, the increasing echo of the PCI's position on the party was the reflection of doubts about the working class.

This doubt about the revolutionary capacities of the working class was to be strikingly expressed in the PCI's accelerating slide oportunism during these years. Whereas the workers in the advance countries were supposed to be benefitting from the dividends of imperialism, bribed into passivity, the PCI saw the de­velopment of revolutionary potential of the pe­ripheries of capitalism, in so-called ‘national liberation' struggles. This nationalist inclination was to lead the PCI to support the KhmerRouge terror in Cambodia, the nationalist struggle in Angola, and the ‘Palestine revolution' (along with the PLO), while in France, for exam­ple, the priority the PCI gave to intervention in the struggles of ‘immigrant' workers tended to reinforce the weight of nationalist illu­sions. Bordigism's false conceptions on the question of the party, on the national question, but also on the union question were so many doors opened to penetration of  the dominant ideology. The development of Bordigism as the main political pole within the working class was an expression of the reflux in the class struggle and of its theorization. In these conditions, it wasn't surprising that the PCI (Programme), which preferred to open its doors to bourgeois leftism rather than discuss within the revolutionary communist milieu, paid for this attiude through an accelerating political degeneration, through an abandonment of the very principles that had presided over the PCI's birth.

The Debates Within the Proletarian Milieu at the Beginning of the ‘80s

If t.he PCI (Programme) pushed its positions to the point of caricature, the erroneous views which lay beneath them and which were descended from the points at issue in the Third Interna­tional were present in the general conceptions of other groups, even if they didn't reach the same level of aberration. This was particularly true of those who, like Bordiga's PCI, had their origin to various degrees in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista f'ormed mainly in Italy at the end of the Second Imperialist World War; for exanple, the PcInt (Battaglia), which is the continuator with the clearest revolutionary principles; the PCI (Il Partito) which split from Programme in 1973, or the NCI.

In these conditions , it's not surprising that the debates which took place within the conferences tended to be polarized around the same f'undauental questions: the party, the unions, the national question, because these were the questions of the hour, determined by the world situation and the proletarian milieu's own history. In the conferences, the NLI (NCI and Il Leninista) was the group closest to Bordigist positions; Battaglia made concessions to these conceptions on the national and union questions, while on the party question, we've seen that is was used as a pretext  for sabotaging the dynamic of the conferences, with the CWO during the course of the meetings undergoing which led it from a platform very similar to the ICC's towards the conceptions of Battaglia.

The Acceleration of History at the Beginning of the ‘80s and the Decantation within the Political Milieu

With the failure of the conf'erences, we thus see a profoundly divided proletarian milieu facing a very powerful acceleration of history at the beginning of the ‘80s. This was marked by:

-- the international development of the wave of workers' struggles which put an end to the reflux which had succeeded the wave begun in1968, and which culminated with the mass strikein Poland, its brutal repression, and so with another reflux in the international struggle;

-- the exacerbation of inter-imperialist ten­sions between the two big powers, with the Russian intervention in Afghanistan, the intense war propaganda unleashed in response, and the acceleration of the arms race;

-- the deepening crisis of the world economy; the American recession of 1982, the strongest since the ‘30s, led the whole world economy into the recession.

While the lessons of history may escape some people, there's no escape from history itself. Inevitable, a political decantation took place within the proletarian milieu; historical experience passed its judgment.

The wave of struggles which broke out at the end of the ‘70s was to pose very concretely the necessity for the intervention of revolutionaries.

The struggle of the steel workers of Lorraine and the north of France in ‘79, the steelworkers strike in Britain in 1980, and finally the mass strike of the workers in Poland in 1980 were to come up against the radicalization of the union apparatus,  against base unionism. The struggles were to be derailed and defeated and the victory of Solidarnosc signified the weakening of the working class, which made the repression possible. The abortion of the international wave and the brutal reflux which followed were to be a test of truth for the proletarian political milieu.

In these conditions, where the failure of the conference no longer allowed the proletarian milieu to have a place where the confrontation of political positions could be carried on, the inevitable process of decantation didn't express itself in a dynamic towards regroupment. On the contrary, as history speeded up, political selection took place in a vacuum, through a hemmorhage of militant energies caught up in the debacle of organization incapable of responding to the needs of the working class. The proletarian political milieu entered into a phase of crisis[9].

The question of Intervention: the Undersestimation of the Role of Revolutionaries and the Underestimation of the Class Struggle

Faced with the necessity to intervene, the proletarian milieu was to act in a dispersed manner, showing the profound underestimation of the role of revolutionaries which infects it. The intervention of t.he ICC within the workers' struggles, and notably with the events of Longwy and Denain in France, was to be the focus of the criticism of the whole proletarian milieu[10], but it had at least the merit of having taken place. Outside the ICC, the political milieu shone by its absence from the terrain of workers' struggles: the PCI (Programme), for example, the main organization which have been characterized by its activism in the previous period, didn't see the class struggle in front of its faces; hypnotized by its thordworldist dreams, it also continued with its slide into trade unionism.

The weakness of the intervention of the political milieu expressed its profound underestimation of the class struggles, its inexperience, it's lack of understanding of its tasks. This was crystallised in particular around the union question, not only throug the political concessions towards trade unionism expressed to varying degrees by the groups which came out of the Pcint of 1945, but also through a tendency to reject the importance and positive nature of the struggles going on simply because they hadn't broken away from the union prison, or the ‘economic' terrain. Thus, paradoxically, the councilist tendencies and those descended from the Pcint of 1945 came together in rejecting the importance of the workers' struggles because of the continuing hold of the unions. Programme Communiste, Battaglia, and many others such as the FOR, continued to deny the reality of the development of the class struggle since ‘68 and to affirm that the counter-revolution still ruled. In this context, the CWO was to stand out with its call for insurrection in Poland, but this serious one-off over-estimation simply ex­pressed the same incomprehensions which unfortu­nately dominated the political milieu outside the ICC.

The Explosion of the PCI (Programme)

The defeat in Poland, the international re­flux in the class struggle, which along with the downward plunge of the economy were so many sharp reminders of reality, were to ravage a milieu which hadn't seen how to take up its his­toric tasks. Those most affected by the crisis of the political milieu were first of all to be the ones who had from the beginning rejected the dynamic of the conferences. Spartacusbond in Holland and the PIC in France (as well as its successor, the inaptly name Groupe Volonte Communiste) were to be blown away like straws in the wind by this acceleration of history, but this made little impact. On the other hand, the explosion of PCI (Programme) was to be transformed the landscape of the political milieu. The monolithic Bordigist party, the most ‘important' organization in the milieu, paid the price for long years of political sclerosis and degenera­tion, and for the sectarian isolation which had accelerated this process. It broke apart under the impulsion of the leftist elements of El Oumani; there was a brutal hemorrhage of its militant forces, the majority of whom were lost in disorientation and denmoralization. From this crisis the PCI emerged almost drained of blood; the centre had collapsed, the international links had been lost; what remained of the sections in the periphery were left in isolation: the PCI was only a pale reflection of the pole-organization it had been within the proletarian milieu.

The Effects of the Crisis on the other Groups of the Proletarian Milieu

If the break-up of the PCI (Programme) was the clearest proof the crisis in the milieu, this was very much broader and also affected the groups who to varying degrees had participated in the dynamic of the conferences.

The weakest groups, those who were the prod­uct of immediate circumstance, without a a real political tradition or identity, were to disap­pear with the end of the conferences:

Arbetarmakt in Sweden, L'Eveil Internationaliste in Franc, the Marxist Workers' group in the USA, etc ... Other groups, more solid in that they were better rooted in a political tradition, but which had displayed their weaknesses during the conferences, not only through their political positions but, like the FOR and the GCI, through, their sectarian iiresponsibility, were to undergo a growing political degeneration in the face of acceleration of history:

-- the NLI in Italy were to follow a path identical to that of Programme Communiste through the repeated abandonment of principles on the national and union questions, and through an increasingly open flirtation with bourgeois leftism;

-- as for the GCI, its confused positions on the question of class violence, inspired by Bor­digism, were to lead it -- less paradoxically than at first sight -- towards anarchism;

-- the FOR with its crazy denial of the real­ity of the crisis was led to take up increasingly surrealistic positions where the radical phrase replaced any cohercnce.

The ICC itself was not immune from the ef­fects of this crisis of the prolerarian milieu. The ICC's involvement in intervention led to rich and important debates within it, but at the same time, the lack of organizational experience which still weights heavily on the present generation of revolutionaries was to allow a dubious adventurist element, Chenier, to crystallise tensions through secret maneuvers, finally fomenting the theft of the organization's materials. The few elements who followed Chenier in this adventure published ‘Ouvrier Internationaliste' which didn't survive much past its first issue. At the same time the Communist Bulletin Group, which was formed in the same dubious dy­namic by elements who had left the ICC's section in Britain, put itself outside the proletarian milieu through supporting the gangster behavior of an element like Chenier.

The Opportunist Formation of the IBRP

The formation in 1983 of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party[11], which regrouped the CWO and Battaglia in this context of a crisis in the proletarian milieu, seemed to be a positive reaction. However, while this re­groupment clarified the political landscape on the organisatioanl level, it didn't do the same thing on the political level.  This regroupment was situated in the dynamic of the failure of the conferences, and it took place between two groups most responsible for the failure. It was in direct continuity with the opportunism and the sectarian spirit these two organizations had exhibited at the third conference and after.

In order to make a real political contribution, it is indispensable that the dynamic to­wards regroupment takes place in politically clear way. But this certainly wasn't the case with the ‘regroupment' that resulted in the IBRP. The CWO had moved away from its original platform which had been very close to that of the ICC (which didn't prevent the CWO from refusing, in 1974, any regroupment with World Revolution, future section of the ICC­in Britain, on the grounds that after 1921, af­ter Krondstadt, there was no proletarian life left in the Bolshevik party and the CPs, a sectarian pretext soon forgotten afterwards) but the debates which led to this change remained a mystery to the whole political milieu. It wasn't until two years after the famous fourth confer­ence that the discussions were published, but this didn't bring much clarification about the political evolution of the two groups. The plat­form of the IBRP contained the same confusions and ambiguities that BC had exhibited at the conferences on the union question, the national question, and possibility of revolutionary parliamentarism, and, obviously, the question of the party and of the historic course.

But above all the formation of the IBRP ex­pressed a false conception of the regroupment of revolutionaries. The lBRP is a cartel of exist­ing organisations, rather than a new organisa­tion, produced by a regroupment in which the forces fuse around a clear common platform. In it, each adherent organisation keeps its own specificity. As well as the platform of the IBRP each group keeps its own platform without explaining the important differences that can exist. This enables one to measure the false homnogeneity of the IBRP, the opportunism that pro­vided over its formation.

The formation of the IBRP was not therefore the harbinger of the end of the crisis of the milieu, whose ravages continued to make them­selves felt, or of new dynamic towards clari­fication within revolutionary forces. It was the expression of a rearrangenent of the forces of the political milieu carried out in opportunist confusion and sectarian isolation.

*****

In 1983, with the crisis that was shaking it, the face of the proletarian milieu had been transforned. The Bordigist PCI had more or less disappeared and the ICC had become the most important organization in the communist milieu, its dominant political pole and, to the extent that history had made its judgnent, a pole of clarity in the debates, which animated the milieu. The ICC is a centralized organization on an international scale with sections in 10 countries and publishing in seven languages. However, if the ICC had become the main pole of regroupment, that doesn't mean it was alone in the world. Despite the confusions built into its origins, the IBRP, in comparison to the politi­cal delinquency of the other groups who formed the proletarian milieu, formed the other pole of reference and of relative political clarity within the communist movement and its debates.

As we can see the groups most able to resist the crisis of the proletarian milieu were those who participated most seriously in the international conferences; . this fact alone enables us to measure the positive contribution they made, and in retrospect to appreciate the scale of the political error in dislocating them - an error for which Battaglia and the CWO bear a heavy responsibility.

In mid-'83, after the short but deep phase of reflux in the struggle that followed the defeat in Poland, the first signs of a revival of struggles began to appear. We've seen how, at the end of the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s, the question of intervention was a real test for the proletarian milieu - the essential question that history is again posing to revolu­tionaries. In the third part of this article we will see whether the organizations of the prole­tarian milieu were able, after 1983, to live up to their responsibilities.

JJ

---

[1] See our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste d'Italie

[2] See the articles in IR 11, 16, 17, 21, 25, 28, 36, 37, 38, 45 and following.

[3] See the article ‘International Meeting Called by the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista) May '77 in IR 10, and the bulletin of the first conferences.

[4] On the CWO, see IRs 12, 17, 39.

[5] On Battaglia Comunista see IRs 13, 33, 34, 36.

[6] On the PCI (Program) see IRs 14, 23, 32, 33.

[7] See the articles on the second conference in IR 16 and 17; on the historic course see IR 18.

[8] See the articles on the second conference in IR 22 and the bulletin (3 volumes) of the third conference.

[9] On the crisis of the revolutionary milieu, see IRs 28-32.

[10] On the debates on intervention see IRs 20-24.

[11] On the formation of the IBRP see IR 40 and 47.

"Disarmament" and "peace" are lies

 

‘Reduction of armaments' and the march towards war

A daily propaganda has been made this year on the ‘reduction of armaments' and the ‘peace-talks' between USA and the USSR with the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings, the whole thing based on the ‘rights of man', and ‘perestroika'. ‘Disarmament' is once again in fashion, but in reality, as always ‘the reduction of armaments' is an enormous lie. It's a facade of propaganda which covers the forced march of capitalism to­wards a permanent search to perfect its military equipment. The part consecrated to armaments in the national budgets of all countries has never been so high, and it is not in any way going to diminish. As we have developed in preceding numbers of this Review[1], capitalism in its period of decline since the first world war sur­vives in a permanent war economy and "even in a period of ‘peace' the system is ravaged by the cancer of militarism". The increase in arma­ments is more and more inordinate, and its only possible denouement is in generalized war that could only mean, given the military technology of our epoch, the destruction of the planet and humanity.

The modernization of weapons

Today's propaganda should fool no-one. The withdrawal of certain missiles in Europe has the advantage for the USA that it makes its allies take more direct charge of military expenses; what's more, the withdrawal is completely negli­gible in relation to the overall firepower of the western bloc. For the USSR, it allows for the suppression of materiel outmatched by the sophistication of the present western armaments. The ‘START' accords for the ‘limitation' of ar­maments, like all these types of conferences be­tween the representatives of the great powers, are really about the renewal of materiel and don't constitute a real reduction of the latter. Like the SALT 2 accords of the summer of ‘79, which led to the installation of the famous medium range missiles, justified at the time by the ‘disarmaments' of inter-continental warheads which had become obsolete, the present accords, presented as a ‘reduction of armaments', are in reality about dumping outdated material, and taking steps towards the development of new military systems.

It is true that for each national state armament expenses only aggravate the crisis and don't in any way permit it to be resolved. But it's not economic reasons which explain the campaign on the ‘reduction of armaments'. Capitalism isn't able to reduce armaments. When the USA, which wants to lessen its gigantic budget deficit, en­visages the lessening of military expenses, it is not to reduce them globally in the western bloc, but to increase the part paid by its Euro­pean and Japanese allies to ‘defend the free world'. It's the same for the USSR, which is being more and more strangled by the economic crisis, when it's forced to ‘rationalize' its military expenses. The increase in armaments is inherent in imperialism in the period of deca­dence, in the imperialism of all nations, from the smallest to the lamest and "from which no state can hold aloof" as Rosa Luxemburg said some time ago.

If today the talks speak of ‘the end of the cold war' and similar formulae, that must be under­stood not in the sense ‘peace' will now be on the agenda, but rather as a warning that cap­italism is more and more being pushed towards a ‘hot war'. Furthermore, despite the attempts to justify war preparations the language of pacifism, the Reagan administration, which like the rest of the right wing of the political ap­paratus of the bourgeoisie is more at ease with open warmongering, hasn't muzzled the declara­tions of the actor/gangster of the White House about ‘being vigilant', ‘remaining strong'. In particular it has saluted Thatcher because with­out sacrificing her ‘anti-communist' credentials, she was also the first to suggest discussing ‘business' with Gorbachev; the ‘business' in question being nothing other than the diplomatic side of military pressure.

Intensification of East-West conflict

The pacifist talks today are part of the same reality as the war mongering at the beginning of the 1980s, when Reagan was denouncing the ‘Evil Empire' - the USSR. Today, when American diplo­macy meets Russian diplomacy in Moscow, the dis­cussion is on the ‘rules' of the growing con­frontation on a world scale under the leadership of Moscow and Washington. In no way was it about putting an end to this confrontation.

Only the speeches have changed. The reality is always that of world capitalism's march to war, today characterized by a western offensive against the strategic positions of the USSR, and by the search for the means to resist and re­spond to this offensive on the part of the Rus­sian imperialist bloc.

A great discretion reins today about the inces­sant battles in the Middle East and above all about the massive presence of the fleet of the great powers in the region. It seems clear that the media has orders to make the least noise possible about what takes place in the Persian Gulf - about the highly sophisticated armada, which has been on a war footing since the summer of ‘87. In the past 20 years, the direct mili­tary presence of countries like the United States, France, Britain, Belgium, and even the so-called ‘unarmed' West Germany, has never been as strong outside of their frontiers, on what the strategists call the ‘theatre of opera­tions'. Are we really to think that all this armada is there only to ‘ensure the peaceful circulation of shipping'? Obviously not. This presence is part of the western military strat­egy and the latter is not dictated by a few second-rate Iranian gunships and the tugboats which refuel them, but by the historic rivalry between East and West.

The western offensive is aimed at the USSR and it has just scored another point with the re­treat of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

The USSR has been obliged to yield under the di­rect military pressure of the Afghan ‘resistance' equipped with American Stinger mis­siles, which have allowed the latter to consid­erably reinforce its firepower; and under the ‘indirect' pressure of the western fleet in the Gulf. It is now being obliged to abandon in part the occupation of the sole countries out­side of its east European ‘sphere of influence'. And, unlike the USA which won the alliance with China at the time of their retreat from Vietnam in 1975, the USSR cannot count on any such deal. The USA has ceded nothing; this is also the real content of the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings. The western bloc is determined to maintain its pres­sure. This is also confirmed by the projected retreat of the Vietnamese army from Cambodia.

But the USSR's retreat doesn't mean the return to peace, on the contrary. Just as the Israeli-Arab accord at Camp David between Egypt and Is­rael more than 10 years ago, under the benedic­tion of Carter and Brezhnev, resulted in an en­largement of conflicts, in the massacres of pop­ulations and the social decomposition of the situation in the Middle East, the present re­treat of Russian troops doesn't open up a per­spective of ‘peace' and ‘stability' but rather of a reinforcement of tensions, and in particu­lar a probable ‘Lebanonisation' of Afghanistan, which is a tendency common to all countries in this region.

The ‘perestroika' of Gorbachev, just as it is a ‘democratic' veneer for home consumption, a cover for pushing through redoubled anti-working class measures, is also in foreign policy a pacifist veneer over a more and more unpopular military occupation - a policy which will in fact be continued and reinforced, even if it is under the more ‘discrete' form of political and military support to factions, clans and cliques of national bourgeoisies which don't find their place in the camp of the ‘Pax Americana', no­tably the local Communist Parties and their leftist appendages.

The conflict between the great powers will be pursued by permanently playing on the different governmental or opposition factions in all the extremely bloody ‘local' conflicts, with a grow­ing military participation by the principal an­tagonists, to the point where they are directly face to face - if the bourgeoisie has its hands free to keep social peace and guarantee loyalty to its imperialist designs. But this is far from being the case today.

Pacifism: a lie directed against the working class

It is fundamentally because the bourgeoisie is at grips with a proletariat which doesn't bend docilely to the attacks of austerity, a prole­tariat which doesn't show any profound adhesion to the diplomatic/military maneuvers which lead to an acceleration of inter-imperialist ten­sions, that today's propaganda on the one hand keeps silent about workers' strikes and demonstrations, and on the other hand has been con­verted from yesterday's warlike language into a ‘pacifist', ‘disarmament' campaign.

At the beginning of the 1980s the proletariat was suffering from the reflux of several impor­tant struggles which had developed internation­ally, from 1978 to the defeat of the workers in Poland in 1981. The propaganda of the bour­geoisie could at the beginning of the ‘80s be based on the feelings of disorientation that had been engendered by such a situation. It tried to instill feelings of fatality, impotence, demoralization and intimidation, in particular through a barrage of war propaganda and war-like actions: Falklands war, invasion of Grenada by the US, Reagan's diatribes against the Evil Em­pire, Star Wars, etc, the whole thing being ac­companied by military actions that more and more involved the great powers on the field of operations, up to the installation of western troops in the Lebanon in 1983.

Since 1983-84 workers' strikes and demonstra­tions have multiplied against the different aus­terity plans in the industrialized countries and equally in the less developed countries, marking the end of the short preceding period of reflux and passivity. And if many proletarian politi­cal groups are unfortunately incapable of see­ing, behind the daily images peddled by the pro­paganda of the bourgeoisie and of its media, the reality of the present development of the class struggle[2], the bourgeoisie itself senses the danger. Through the different political and union forces at its disposal it is evident that the bourgeoisie knows that the essential problem is the ‘social situation', everywhere, and par­ticularly in Western Europe where all the stakes of the world situation are concentrated. And there are more and more ‘enlightened' bourgeois sounding the alarm about the danger of de-unionization in the working class and the risk of ‘unforeseen' and ‘uncontrolled' movements. It's as a result of this danger that the bourgeoisie puts forward the false alternative of ‘war or peace', the idea that the future depends on the ‘wisdom' of the leaders of this world, when it really depends on the international working class taking control of and unifying its strug­gles for emancipation. Because of this danger everything is done to hide and minimize the mobilizations of the workers and the unemployed, to spread ideas about the weakness, impotence or ‘dislocation' of the working class.

If the bourgeoisie is a class divided into na­tions regrouped around imperialist blocs, ready to sharpen their rivalries, up to using all the means it has in a generalized imperialist war, it is by contrast a unified class when it's a question of attacking the working class, impris­oning its struggles, of maintaining it as an exploited class submitting to the dictates of each national capital. It's only faced with the working class that the bourgeoisie finds a unity, and the present unanimous choir about ‘peace' and ‘disarmament' is only a masquerade aimed essentially at anaesthetizing the growing proletarian menace.

Because, despite their limits and numerous set­backs, the struggles which have developed for several years in all countries, touching all sectors, from Spain to Britain, from France to Italy, including a country like West Germany which until now has been the least touched by the devastating effects of the crisis[3], are not only the sign that the working class is not ready to accept passively the attacks on the economic terrain, but also that preceding attempts at intimidation through the 'warlike' campaigns, or the noise about the 'economic recovery' have not had the desired effect. Equally symptomatic of the maturation of the consciousness in the working class is the fact that, as in Italy and Spain last year, we've seen during the electoral campaign in France - traditionally a time of social truce - the eruption of a number of particularly combative strikes. It's this development of the class struggle which lies behind the bourgeoisie's ‘peace' campaigns both in the eastern bloc and the countries of the west.

MG 7 June 1988

---

[1] See IR 52 and 53

[2] See the polemic in this issue on the underestimation of struggles by today's communist groups.

[3] See the editorial in IR 53.

Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism, Part 4

We are continuing here the series of articles begun in International Review Nos. 48 [7], 49 [8], 50 [9], which aimed to defend the analysis of the decadence of capitalism against the criticisms levelled at it by groups of the revolutionary milieu, and by the GCI [1] in particular.

In this article, we aim to develop different aspects of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production, and to answer the arguments that reject it.

In the late 60s-early 70s, the ICC had to fight to convince the political milieu that the “Golden Sixties” had come to an end, and that capitalism had entered a new period of crisis. The tremors that shook the international monetary system in October ‘87, and the effective stagnation of the real economy over the last 10 years (see graph below) leave no room for doubt, and have clearly demonstrated the inanity of a position like the FOR’s [2], which still denies the reality of the economic crisis. But there is worse: with the world on the threshold of the choice between War and Revolution, there are still to be found revolutionary groups which, while recognising the crisis, nonetheless proclaim capitalism’s vitality.

On the economic level, today’s crisis can only end in war, unless the proletariat stops the mailed fist of the bourgeoisie. However, since the end of the 60’s the working class has struggled more and more openly against the constant degradation in its living conditions, thus preventing capitalism from giving free rein to its inherent tendency towards generalised war. On the one hand, the proletariat has not been beaten physically as it was after the defeat of the international revolutionary wave during the 1920’s, or after the massacres of World War II, nor on the other does it adhere to bourgeois ideology as it did before the First and Second World Wars (anti-fascism and nationalism). With humanity’s future hanging in the balance (between either the development of the present course towards class confrontations, or the defeat of the working class and the opening of a course towards war), when revolutionaries have the task of demonstrating the capitalist mode of production’s historical bankruptcy and socialism’s necessity and immediacy, there are political groups picking over the “fantastic growth rates of the reconstruction period”, abandoning the marxist conception of succeeding modes of production by rejecting the notion of decadence, and straining themselves to prove that “...capitalism grows endlessly, beyond all limits”. It is hardly surprising that with this kind of foundation, and without any coherent analysis of the period, these groups defend a perspective that is unfavourable for the working class, and essentially academic as far as the activity of revolutionary minorities is concerned.

According to the EFICC [3], today’s priority is theoretical reflection and discussion (see Internationalist Perspective no. 9). Much preoccupied by the urgent problem of “the length and extent of the reconstruction that followed World War II”, they propose that the milieu should discuss the “serious problems” that it poses (IP nos. 5, 7). For CoC [4], we are still living in the period of counter-revolution that has lasted since the 1920’s (no. 22):  “with the end of World War II, the capitalist mode of production entered as almost unprecedented period of accumulation”,  and “...in the absence of a quantitative and qualitative break...”  in the class struggle, this group proposes to produce, in ...six-monthly... episodes a grand encyclopaedic fresco on the theory of crises and the history of the workers’ movement. For the GCI, since the 1968-74 wave of struggles, “the peace of the Versailles reigns” (editorial, no. 25/26). This group’s essential preoccupation is the liquidation of the gains of socialism; in its publication (Le Communiste no. 23), it identifies the marxist conception of the decadence of a mode of production with religious world-views like those of the Moon sect or the Jehovah’s Witnesses etc... The new split from the GCI, “A Contre Courant” [5] remains on the same terrain, both on the historical level – “We reject both the sclerotic schemes of the vulgar decadentist variety (plastered over a reality which is constantly disproving them)...” – and on the level of today’s balance of forces between the classes: “for us, the present stock-market crisis materialises essentially the proletariat’s absence as a revolutionary force...” (ACC no. 1).

THE DECADENCE OF CAPITALISM

To hide its movement towards anarchism and its abandon of all reference to a marxist framework of social analysis, the GCI takes cover behind the authority of an incorrect conception culled from the “thoroughly marxist” Bordiga [6]: “The marxist conception of the fall of capitalism does not at all consist in affirming that after a historic phase of accumulation it becomes anaemic and empties itself of life. These are pacifist revisionist theses. For Marx, capitalism grows endlessly, and without limits” (LC no. 23).

Whereas the decadence of previous modes of production was clearly identifiable (we will develop this point later), either because there was an absolute decline in the productive forces – Asiatic and antique modes of production – or because they stagnated with occasional fluctuations – feudal mode of production – the same is not true of capitalism. Capitalism is a wholly dynamic mode of production; the bases of its enlarged reproduction leave it no respite; its law is grow, or die. However, like previous modes of production, capitalism also has its period of decadence which began in this century’s second decade, and which is characterised by the brake imposed on the development of the productive forces by its now outdated fundamental social law of production – wage labour – which is eventually expressed in a lack of solvent markets relative to the needs of accumulation.

This is violently contradicted by our censors. However, peremptory affirmations aside, what are their arguments?

1) On a general theoretical level, we are told that Luxemburg’s analysis of the crisis, on which we base ourselves, is incapable of grounding a coherent explanation of the “so-called” decadence of capitalism: “If we follow Luxemburg’s logic, on which the ICC’s reasoning and the theory of decadence is based, then we are led to conclude that decadence must mean the immediate collapse of capitalist production, since none of the surplus value destined for accumulation can be realised, and so accumulated”  (CoC no. 22).

2) On a general quantitative level, the period of capitalist decadence is said to have undergone much more rapid growth than the period of ascendancy: “For the capitalist world as a whole, growth during the last 20 years [1952-72, ed.] has been at least twice as rapid as it was between  1870 and 1914, that is to say during the period that is generally considered to be that of ascendant capitalism. The affirmation that the capitalist system has been in decline since World War I has quite simply become ridiculous...”  (P. Souyri quoted in LC no. 23). “More than 70 years after the watershed date of 1914, the capitalist mode of production is still accumulating surplus value, while the rate and the mass of this surplus value have grown faster than during the 19th century, which was supposedly the capitalist mode of production’s ascendant phase...”

3) On a circumstantial level, in chorus with all the refuters of marxism, the growth rates that followed World War II (the highest in the whole history of capitalism) are brandished as the decisive proofs of the inanity of the idea that the capitalist mode of production could be decadent: “For, with the end of World War II, the capitalist mode of production entered a period of accumulation almost without precedent since the passage to the phase of labour’s real submission to capital” (CoC no. 22). “The frantic accumulation which followed World War II has swept away all Luxemburg-based sophisms...”

1 – ON THE THEORETICAL LEVEL

We will not here go back over a subject that has already been dealt with at length in our press (International Review no. 13, 16, 19, 21, 22, 29, 30). We will limit ourselves to pointing out the thoroughly dishonest practice of our contradictors, who deform our positions knowingly, in order to make an absurdity appear where none exists. The procedure consists of pretending that for the ICC, decadence = total inexistence of extra-capitalist markets: “If, as the ICC claims, the extra-capitalist markets have disappeared – at least qualitatively – then we cannot see what the better exploitation of old markets means. Either these are capitalist markets and their role is zero as far as accumulation is concerned, or they are extra-capitalist markets, in which case we cannot see how something which no longer exists can play any role at all”.

On this kind of basis it is not difficult for CoC to demonstrate the impossibility of any enlarged accumulation since 1914. But, for us as for Rosa Luxemburg, the decadence of capitalism is characterised not by the disappearance of extra-capitalist markets, but the inadequacy of extra-capitalist markets in relation to capital’s need for enlarged accumulation. That is to say, that the mass of surplus value realised in extra-capitalist markets is too small for it to be possible to realise the total mass of surplus value that capitalism produces. A fraction of total capital can no longer be sold on the world market, and this over production, from being an episodic obstacle in ascendant capitalism, becomes a permanent one in decadence. Enlarged accumulation has therefore been slowed down, but this does not mean that it has disappeared. Capitalism’s economic history since 1914 is the history of the palliatives aimed at cutting this Gordian knot, and their ineffectiveness – demonstrated, amongst other things, by the two World Wars (see below).

2 - ON THE GENERAL QUANTITATIVE LEVEL

To illustrate concretely how capitalist social relations of production hold back the productive forces (i.e., the decadence of capitalism), we have calculated what industrial production would have been without the braking effect, since 1913, of the social relations of production. We then compare this hypothetical index of industrial production (2401) to the real index (1440) over the same period (1913-83).

To do so, we have applied the rate of growth during the last phase of capitalist ascendancy (Kondratieff’s “phase A” (1895-1913) [7]) to the whole phase of decadence (1913-1983): we then compare real growth in 1983 (=1440) to potential growth (=2401 – application of a 4.65% growth rate to the same period), ie what it would have been without the obstacle of the inadequacy of the market. We can see that industrial production in decadence reaches 60% of what it could have been, in short that the braking power of capitalist social relations on the forces of production is in the order of 40%. Again, this is underestimated for three reasons:

a) We should extrapolate the rate of 4.65%, not linearly but exponentially, which is the tendency during the various prosperous phases of ascendant capitalism (Kondratieff’s “phase A”), given capital’s increasing technical perfection (1786-1820: 2.4%; 1840-70: 3.28%; 1894-1913: 4.65%).

b) Real growth in decadent capitalism, to the extent that it is doped by a whole series of tricks (a point which we will expand on in a forthcoming article), which must be discounted. For example, arms production – the non-productive sector – grows strongly in decadence as a proportion of the World Domestic Product, from 1.77% in 1908 to 2.5% in 1913, and to 8.3% in 1981 [8]. It therefore grows still more strongly as a part of the World Industrial Product index, since the latter’s share of the WDP decreases during decadence.

c) Since the present crisis has continued, the stagnation of growth rates since 1983 would only increase the difference.

If we add up all these elements, we easily reach a braking effect on the productive forces of about 50%.

Why do we choose the growth rates for the period 1895-1913, and not those for the whole of the ascendant period?

a) Because we have to compare what is comparable. In its early days, capitalism was held back by other braking effects: the survival of relations of production inherited from feudalism. Production was not yet wholly capitalist (widespread survival of cottage industry, etc.), whereas this was the case by 1895-1913.

b) Because the period 1895-1913 follows the main phase of imperialist expansion (colonial conquests), which took place during the previous phase (1873-95) [9]. This is therefore a period which the best reflects capitalism’s productive potential when it has an “unlimited” market at its disposal. This wholly suits our objective, which is to compare capitalism with and without a braking effect.

c) Because we therefore negate the exponential tendency of growth rates to increase over time.

These elements put definitively in their place all the myths of “a capitalism growing twice as fast in decadence as in ascendancy”.  Souyri’s “demonstration” which the GCI relies on is nothing more than a gross mystification, since it compares two incomparable periods:

a) For the GCI and for Souyri, the period 1952-72 is supposed to represent decadence, when in fact it excludes the two world wars (14-18 and 39-45) and the two crises (29-39 and 71-..)!

b) It compares a homogeneous period of 22 years of doped growth, with a heterogeneous phase of 44 years of normal capitalist life (this last includes a phase of relative slowdown in 1870-94 (3.27%) leading on to massive colonialism, which then opens up a phase of strong growth in 1894-1913 (4.65%).

c) It compares two periods where growth’s foundations are qualitatively different (see below).

Decadence is far from being a “vulgar sclerotic schema plastered over a reality that disproves it constantly”. On the contrary, it is an objective reality that has been confirmed with every passing day since the beginning of the century.

3 – ON THE QUALITATIVE LEVEL

The decadence of a mode of production cannot be measured simply in the light of statistics. The phenomenon can only be grasped through a whole series of quantitative, but also qualitative and superstructural aspects: our critics pretend not to know this, so as to avoid having to say anything about it, being happy enough to brandish the figures whose value we have just demonstrated.

a) The cycle of life in ascendancy and decadence

In ascendant capitalism’s overall dynamic, growth is a continuous progression, with slight fluctuations. It follows a rhythm of cycles of crisis – prosperity – lesser crisis – increased prosperity – etc. In decadence, apart from the overall braking effect that we have been above, growth undergoes intense and previously unheard-of fluctuations: two world wars, a marked slowdown during the last 15 years, and even stagnation during the last ten. World trade has never undergone such violent contractions (stagnation between 1913 and 1940, a marked slowdown in recent years), illustrating the permanent problem, in decadence, of inadequate markets.

 

---

 

TABLE 1

 

1ST SPIRAL
CRISIS	WAR	DRUGGED RECONSTRUCTION
1913: 1.5 Years of crisis	1914-18: 4 years and 20 million deaths	1918-29: 10 years
2ND SPIRAL
CRISIS	WAR	DRUGGED RECONSTRUCTION
1929-39: 10 Years of crisis	1939-45: 6 years, 50 million deaths and massive destruction	1945-67: 22 years
3RD SPIRAL
CRISIS	WAR	SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM
1967 - … already 20 years of crisis	A war that would be irreparable for humanity, or revolution

 

 

Table no. 1 illustrates the cyclical rhythm of capitalism in decadence: a rising spiral of crisis – war – reconstruction – ten-fold crisis – ten-fold war – doped reconstruction... But decadence has a history, and does not eternally repeat the same cycle. We are living at the beginning of the 3rd spiral, and what is at stake today is Engels’ old battle-cry: “Socialism or barbarism”.  “The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of civilisation, sporadically during a modern war and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun [1914, ed.] is allowed to take its damnable course to its ultimate conclusion. Thus we stand today, as Friedrich Engels prophesied more than a generation ago.... [before] the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice, whose scales are trembling in the  balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat. Upon it depends the future of civilisation and humanity.”  (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy ( [10]The Junius Pamphlet [10]) [10])

 

---

 

b) War in capitalist ascendancy and decadence

“IV – WHAT IS HISTORICALLY AT STAKE IN DECADENT CAPITALISM. Since the opening of capitalism’s imperialist phase at the beginning of this century, evolution has oscillated between imperialist war and proletarian revolution. In the epoch of capitalist growth, wars cleared the way for the expansion of the productive forces by the destruction of outmoded relations of production. In the phase of capitalist decadence, wars have no other function than the destruction of excess wealth...” (“Resolution on the Constitution of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left”, in OCTOBRE NO. 1, Feb. 1938).

During ascendancy, wars appeared essentially in phases of capitalist expansion (Kondratieff’s “A phase”), as products of the dynamic of an expanding system :

1790-1815	revolutionary and empire-building wars (Napoleonic).
1850-1873	Crimean and Mexican Wars, American Civil War, wars of national unification (Germany and Italy), Franco-Prussian War (1870).
1895-1913	Hispano-US, Russo-Japanese, Balkan wars.

 

Generally speaking, the function of war in the 19th century was to ensure the unity of each capitalist nation (wars of national unification) and/or the territorial extension (colonial wars) necessary for its development. In this sense, and despite its attending disasters, war was a moment of capital’s progressive nature: as long as it allowed capital to develop, then it was the necessary cost of enlarging the market, and therefore production. This is why Marx spoke of some wars being progressive. Wars were then, a) limited to 2 or 3 adjacent countries, b) of short duration, c) did little damage, d) were conducted by specialised armies and required little mobilisation of the population, and e) were declared with a rational goal of economic gain. They determined, for both victors and vanquished, a new expansion. The Franco-Prussian war is a typical example: it was a decisive step in the formation of the German nation, in other words in laying the foundations for a fantastic development of the productive forces and the constitution of the most important sector of Western Europe’s industrial proletariat; at the same time, the war lasted less than a year, casualties were relatively low, and it did not greatly handicap the defeated country.

In decadence, by contrast, wars appear as a result of crises (see Table 1), as a product of the dynamic of a shrinking system. In a period where there is no longer any question of forming new national units, or of any real independence, all wars take on an inter-imperialist character. Wars are a) generalised worldwide because their roots lie in the permanent contraction of the world market relative to the demands of accumulation, b) they are of long duration, c) they cause massive destruction, d) they mobilise the whole world economy and the entire population of the belligerent countries, e) they lose all economic function, and become completely irrational. They are no longer an aspect of the development of the productive forces, but of their destruction. They are no longer moments in the expansion of the capitalist mode of production, but moments of convulsion in a decadent system. Whereas in the past, a clear winner emerged, and the war’s outcome did not jeopardise the development of either protagonist, in the two World Wars both victors and vanquished emerged weakened, to the benefit of a third scoundrel: the United States. The victors were unable to extract the cost of the war from the vanquished (contrary to the heavy ransom in gold paid to Germany by France at the end of the Franco-Prussian war). This illustrates the fact that in decadence, the development of one is built on the ruin of others. Previously, military power upheld and guaranteed economic positions won or to be won; today, the economy is increasingly an auxiliary of military strategy.

ACC and CoC refuse to recognise this qualitative difference between wars pre- and post-1914: “At this level, we want to relativise even the affirmation of World War (...) All capitalist wars have therefore an essentially international content (...) What changes is therefore not the invariant worldwide content (whether the decadentists like it or not), but its extent and depth, each time more truly worldwide and catastrophic” (ACC no. 1). With a touch of irony, CoC tries to oppose us to Rosa Luxemburg, for whom “...militarism is not characteristic of a particular phase of the capitalist mode of production” (CoC no. 22). This groups forgets that, while it is indeed true that for Luxemburg “...war accompanies all the historic phases of accumulation”, it is also true that for her, the function of both war and militarism change with the capitalist system’s entry into decadence: “Capitalist desire for imperialist expansion, as the expression of its highest maturity in the last period of its life, has the economic tendency to change the whole world into capitalistically producing nations (...) World war is a turning point in the history of capitalism (...) Today war no longer functions as a dynamic method capable of winning for new-born capitalism the conditions of its national expansion (...) this war creates a phenomenon unknown in previous modern wars: the economic ruin of all the countries taking part in it”  (Rosa Luxemburg, Ibid).

If the image of decadence is of a body growing in clothes that have become too tight for it, then war marks this body’s need to cannibalise itself, to devour its own substance to stop the clothes splitting; this is the meaning of such massive destruction of the productive forces. Life as part of rival blocs, war, have become permanent aspects of capitalism, its very life even.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATE CAPITALISM

The state’s development in every domain, its increasing grip on the whole of social life, is an unequivocal characteristic of periods of decadence. All previous modes of production, whether Asiatic, antique, or feudal, underwent such a hypertrophy of the state apparatus (we will come back to this later).  The same is true of capitalism. A mode of production which:

-- on the economic level has become a hindrance to the development of the productive forces, expressed in increasingly serious crisis and malfunctions;

-- on the social level, is contested by the new revolutionary class bearing the new social relations of production and by the exploited class through an increasingly bitter class struggle;

-- on the political level is constantly torn by the internal antagonisms of the ruling class leading to increasingly murderous and destructive internecine wars:

-- on the ideological level undergoes the increasing decomposition of its own values; reacts by armour-plating its own structures by means of one appropriate instrument: the state.

In decadence, state capitalism:

-- replaces private initiative, which has more and more difficulty in surviving in a super-saturated market;

-- controls a developed proletariat which has become a permanent threat to the bourgeoisie, through the old working class organisations (“Socialist” and “Communist” Parties, trades unions) as well as a whole series of social mechanisms aimed at tying the working class to the state (social security, etc);

-- disciplines the particular fractions of capital in the general interests of the system as a whole. We can, in part, measure this process in the state’s share of GNP. We show below graphs that illustrate this indicator for three countries.

 

---

 

---

 

 

The change that takes place in 1914 is quite clear. The state’s share in the economy remains constant throughout capitalism’s long ascendant period; it then grows during decadence, to each an average of around 50% of GNP (47% in 1982 for the 22 most industrialised countries in the OECD).

 

The EFICC does not yet openly criticise the theory of capitalist decadence, but is abandoning it little by little, insidiously, in one “contribution to discussion” after another, that are so many milestones in its regression. Its “contribution” on state capitalism in Internationalist Perspective no. 7 is a flagrant illustration.

For the EFICC, decadence is no longer explained essentially by the worldwide lack of extra-capitalist markets, but by the mechanism of the passage from the formal to the real operation of capital: “It is this passage that pushes the capitalist mode of production towards permanent crisis, which makes the contradictions of the capitalist process of production insoluble (...) [there is an] inextricable link between this passage and the decadence of capitalism”. The same is true of the development of state capitalism: “In this respect, it is essential to recognise the no less decisive role played by the passage from forma domination to real domination in the development of state capitalism (...) The origin of state capitalism must likewise be sought in the fundamental economic transformation within the capitalist mode of production, brought about by the passage from the formal to the real domination of capital”. On this basis, the EFICC, with so many regressions already behind it, criticises our thesis of the restriction of the law of value’s field of operation, in the name of the post World War II development of free trade: “Thus, far from going with a restriction in the application of the law of value, state capitalism marks its greatest extension”. Along the same lines, the EFICC introduces the idea that the aim of war is the destruction of capital. Discovering the unpublished 6th chapter of Marx’s Capital 20 years after the modernists, the EFICC draws from it the inspiration necessary for the abandonment of coherent revolutionary positions.

a) This “group” is confusing two diametrical opposites: on the one hand, the transition from capital’s formal to its real domination, i.e. a more productive means of organising production, a more effective mode of extraction of surplus value, and on the other state capitalism, which is a response to capital’s difficulties of survival, in realising all the surplus value produced. One is an answer to “how better to develop capital”; the other is a response to the blockage of this development. One proposes a new mechanism for the extraction of surplus value; the other is a perversion of this mechanism in order to survive within the framework of a permanent crisis.

b) When it situates the passage from the formal to the real domination of capital at the watershed of the 20th century, the EFICC gets it wrong... by a century. State capitalism develops with capitalism’s decadence, whereas the passage to real domination takes place during the ascendant phase. Marx shows that capitalist relations of production first of all take over production as they inherent it from previous modes of production: this is the period of formal submission to capital, and is situated in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is only later that capitalism truly subjects the forces of production, thus determining the industrial revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries. As the OPI explains very well: “If the epoch of decadence did correspond to the transition to the real domination of the labour process, then we would have to place it at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Once again, we are confronted with the tendency to dilute the determined epoch of decadence within capitalism’s general development.” (International Review no. 52)

c) State capitalism is the expression of the contradiction between the worldwide socialisation of production, and the national basis of capitalist social relations of production. It demonstrates decadent capitalism’s inability to go beyond the framework of the state, which has become too restricted to contain the development of the productive forces. The whole of decadence is there to demonstrate this:

i) The limits of the international organisations invoked at such length by the EFICC’s argumentation. What is happening is an increasing development of national rivalries, which can only be taken in hand by the state, not a growing cooperation between states, even if this does exist at a minimum level within the framework of the policies forced on each bloc.

ii) Within this framework, each country, in decadence, must cheat with the law of value if it is not, either to be swallowed up by a more powerful neighbour, or to see its economy disintegrate under the weight of its own insurmountable contradictions. Decadence corresponds to the full development of cheating with the law of value, and a relative restriction of its field of application. A few examples: the so-called “socialist” countries (25% of world industrial production) which, to survive, must isolate themselves from the world market and create in their own market a prices policy in opposition to the law of value; the whole of European agriculture, which is artificially supported and sold at a price that does not correspond to the law of value; the same is true for the prices of a whole series of Third World products; all the forms of disguised protectionism which according to the GATT affect a third of world trade (import duties, quotas, export subsidies, restrictions of imports, etc.); “protected” markets (economic aid given on condition that it is used to buy from the donor country); the market of state contracts (monopolies for national companies), agreements among national companies, cartels and monopolies, etc... All these examples illustrate the process of the relative restriction of the law of value’s field of application. Dazzled by the reconstruction, the GATT, the World Bank... and above all by bourgeois propaganda, the EFICC don’t know what they’re talking about.

The CoC is right about one thing, it’s when they talk about the EFICC in these terms: “The EFICC has undertaken to think; for the moment it is floundering in the insurmountable contradictions of the theory of decadence, and it is only drawing tighter the noose that is strangling it. There are only two ways out of all this theoretical agitation: either the EFICC breaks with the theory of decadence, or it will, and this for the moment is more likely, stop thinking of its own accord” (no. 22).

d) A brake on the expansion of the capitalist mode of production, and on the integration of labour power

In all previous societies, decadence meant a halt to the geographic expansion of their social relations of production, and a brake on the integration of labour power. The decadence of Rome: with the end of Roman expansion came fall in population, the increasing ejection of workers from the productive process, the development of new relations production on the edges of the Roman empire. The decadence of feudalism: an end to land clearance, stagnation of the population, flight of peasants to the towns, development of capitalist relations of production.

An analogous process develops within the decadence of capitalism (apart from the development of new relations of production which can only be installed after the worldwide seizure of power). In the ascendant phase, the existence of virgin markets to conquer, both internally and externally, the low level of capital needed for industrial takeoff, the weak penetration by dominant countries’ capital, allowed various countries to hitch their economies to the locomotive of the industrial revolution, and gain a real political independence. Since then, the situation has been virtually frozen, the economic conditions of decadence remove any real possibilities for the emergence and development of new independent nations; worse still, the gap between the first industrialised countries and those of the “Third World” is getting wider.

 

---

 

TABLE 2: Evolution of the gap between the ratio GNP/population in the under-developed and developed countries from 1850 to 1980. (Source: P. Bairoch and World Bank)

Year	Average gap
1850	1/5
1900	1/6
1930	1/7.5
1950	1/10
1970	1/14
1980	1/16

 

---

 

Whereas in ascendancy, the gap remains quasi constant, in decadence it leaps from 1/6 to 1/16. In his book Le Tiersomonde dans L’impasse, Bairoch has published a table illustrating the halt in the geographic expansion of the industrial revolution, and the relative reduction in the population affected by it (!) in the decadence of capitalism.

 

---

 

TABLE 3

 

Dates	Number of Countries	% in relation to world population
1700	0	0
1760	1	1
1800	6	6
1860	11	14
1930	28	37
1960	28	32
1970	28	30

 

---

 

Whereas in ascendancy, the population integrated into the productive process grew faster than the population itself, today we are seeing the expulsion of growing masses from the system. Capitalism has completed its progressive role in particular through one of the main productive forces: labour power. CoC can swamp us with pages of prose full of figures that show the greater increase during decadence of the percentage of wage-earners in the working population in ....France, that does not alter the reality of the phenomenon on a world level (which is the only valid scale for understanding the phenomenon). At this level, CoC’s population figures show nothing at all... unless it is the demographic explosion in the Third World! The working population is meaningless as an indicator of the population’s integration into capitalist relations of production; it merely measures a demographic relationship of active age sets (15 or 20 years to 60 or 65 years, according to the definitions) within the total population. If CoC took the trouble to think, to learn to read statistics and to count, it would see clearly, what it only glimpses at the end of a sentence, the extent of the development of this ... “growing mass of the absolutely impoverished who have no solution other than to die of hunger”.

 

 

In a forthcoming article, we will examine the bases that made the post-war reconstruction possible, and so answer the third kind of arguments that have been thrown at us (“fantastic” growth rates following World War II). But above all, we will demonstrate that this convulsion of capitalism in decadence is one of doped growth created by a system at bay. The methods used to produce it (massive indebtedness, state intervention, growing military, production, unproductive costs etc.) are wearing out, opening the way to an unprecedented crisis. We will also show that behind the rejection of the idea of decadence hides the rejection of the marxist conception of historical evolution, which is the foundation of the necessity of communism.

C. McL

 

---

 

---

 

 

 

 

 

A new and striking demonstration of the sabo­taging role of trade unionism has just been given by the recent strikes in Poland. Solidarnosc, presented everywhere as the emana­tion of the formidable movement of the Polish workers in 1980, has, eight years later, openly confirmed the real reason for its existence: to drag the workers back into the grip of the na­tional capitalist institutions of Poland.

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

Faced with a movement that arose sponta­neously to demand wage rises against a whole ac­cumulation of measures by the government, Solidarnosc deployed a veritable panoply of maneuvers, worthy of the oldest tricks of the western unions. The pupil has learned well from his teachers: the numerous meetings between Walesa and his acolytes with various unions, es­pecially in France and Italy, have borne fruit.

In 1980, in a matter of days, the working class had by its own efforts managed to organize itself on the scale of the entire country, on the basis of general assemblies in the facto­ries, extending and unifying the movement, centralizing it in inter-factory committees of dele­gates from the assemblies (the MKS), forcing the government to come and discuss and negotiate publicly in front of all the workers. It took over a year of the joint efforts of the govern­ment and of Solidarnosc, newly constituted as a fireguard against the mass strike, to get the workers to toe the line. This year, the ‘free and independent' union, carefully ‘tolerated' since then by the government, and equipped with a by no means negligible apparatus of contact and propaganda throughout the country, was this time able to play its role as a social fireman in the service of the national capital.

At the beginning of the movement, at the end of April, when the transport workers of Bygdoszcz, then the steelworkers of the Nowa Huta works near Cracow, followed by those of the Etalowa Wola steelworks, all came out on strike, they raised the hopes of the whole working class, which was being subjected to a consider­able attack on wages and working conditions. In a situation ruled by draconian rationing of the most basic consumer goods, and where there had been announced price rises of 40% on a number of essential goods and of 100% on electricity and gas, all eyes were turned towards these strik­ers, who had put forward general demands for all the workers, for the steelworkers, the hospital workers, and other sectors. At this point, the leaders of Solidarnosc, Walesa and Kuron at their head, disapproved of the strikes "which are acts of despair that are understandable but that can only make things more difficult" (sic). They advised the workers to call for "political reforms" and "free trade unions", expressing open support for Gorbachev's ‘perestroika'.

The government had a division of labor with Solidarnosc. It rapidly gave in to the demands of Bygdoszcz and Stalowa Wola - because these enterprises were ‘competitive' - while putting some of the leading figures in the union in prison for a few hours, in order to give more credibility to their role as ‘opponents' of the regime, especially in front of the young workers among whom Solidarnosc's appeals for moderation did not go down at all well. Finally, faced with the growing solidarity of the workers, a solidarity which has been a characteristic of the struggles in Poland since the struggles of 1970, 1976, and above all 1980, the union did all it could to get to the head of the movement. It supported the strikes at the Gdansk ship­yards, which were the centre of the movement in 1980, and at the Ursus tractor factory near Warsaw, in order to focus the whole push for solidarity on these two workers' concentrations where it had a strong implantation, obviously to the detriment of a real broadening of the move­ment. The maneuver worked well. Even though there was a real solidarity among the workers of these factories, they were the places where Solidarnosc had sufficient strength to get away with its tricks. In Gdansk in particular, it proclaimed a ‘strike committee', nominated by itself and not by the workers' assembly, a typi­cal maneuver of western ‘democratic' unionism. It did the same thing at Nowa Huta where it set up its own ‘strike committee' even though one had already been created under the control of the workers. Finally, while the whole beginning of the movement had been marked by unifying de­mands (for the indexing of wages with inflation, improvements in health services, etc), the lat­ter disappeared as if by magic when Solidarnosc arrived at the head of the movement, and gave way to the ‘democratic' demand for the ‘reconstruction of the union'. Finally, having managed to regain control of the situation, Solidarnosc could then allow itself to threaten the government with a "general strike", in the event of "Jaruzelski sending the zomos (militia) into Nowa Huta"; but since Solidarnosc had al­ready reassured the government that it had things under control, the latter had no need to do this.

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

Despite the considerable experience of strug­gle which the Polish workers have forged in the last twenty years through three waves of strikes, they have only just come up against the union barrier in the ‘oppositional' form that it takes in the west. And this was all the more difficult for the workers in that, in the east­ern bloc regimes, illusions in ‘free and inde­pendent' trade unionism are very strong, and that in Poland Solidarnosc still has the appear­ance of a direct product of the struggles of 1980.

The answer to the obstacles which the Polish workers have just come up against lies first and foremost in the deepening of the present strug­gles in the western countries. It is in these countries that the bourgeoisie is strongest, is in these countries where the ‘key' to domination over the international proletariat can be found. And above all, for the develop­ment of experience and consciousness in  class, it is in these countries that the working class itself is the most developed and is fronted with the most sophisticated obstacles to the struggle, in particular the obstacle trade unionism and its ‘radical' and ‘rank and file' varieties.

Despite the retreat which they have be forced to make for the moment, the workers in Poland have once again given the world prole­tariat an example of determination, of combativ­ity, of active solidarity in taking up the struggle again seven years after the bitter feat of 1981. The response to this example, real solidarity with the workers of Poland, the strengthening of the struggle in the western countries, its advance towards unification.

MG

Underestimating the class struggle

In its struggle against capitalism, which has as the final goal of overthrowing this system and creating a communist society, the working class secretes political organizations which not only express its revolutionary future, but are indispensable to its realization. If the general goals expressed by these organizations, their program, are not subject to fluctuations in time (although they are being constantly en­riched), the forms they take, their impact, their means of action, and their mode of inter­vention also depend on the specific historic conditions in which the class is acting, and in particular the balance of forces between it and the enemy class. In other words, it is not enough for a communist organization to defend a revolutionary program to be an effective in­strument in the proletarian struggle. It can only achieve this if it understands the tasks that fall to it at each specific moment in the evolution of the struggle, if it is able to analyze correctly these different moments. And it is precisely around this question that most of today's proletarian organizations have the greatest difficulty in finding a clear orienta­tion. In particular, issues as crucial as the development of the economic crisis of capitalism and the perspectives for the whole of society that arise from it - imperialist world war or the generalization of the class struggle - are for most of these organizations the subject of enormous confusion, at a time when the greatest clarity about such questions is more than ever indispensable to any contribution to the present struggles of the working class.

In the last few months, the considerable con­fusions that weigh on the proletarian political milieu have tended to take the form of a sort of joint barrage by several organizations against the positions of the ICC. Certainly, the differ­ent organizations haven't developed their at­tacks in a concerted manner, but this simultane­ity partly originates in their shared inability to appreciate the real importance of the strug­gles currently being waged by the working class[1]. Among these attacks, some of them, like those by the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste in No 26 of Le Communiste[2] are so base that it wouldn't be fitting to reply to them in an article like this one. Similarly, while we can find in no 39 of Alarme (published by Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionaire and Nos 9 and 10 of Internationalist Perspectives (published by the ‘External Fraction of The ICC') a whole series of articles devoted to our organization, and while they flow partly from an underestimation of the present struggles, we won't respond to them directly in this article because with these organizations we are dealing with caricatures (the FOR is probably the only organization which is still incapable of recognizing the existence of the economic crisis of capitalism, which is really something for a group that claims to be ‘marxist'; and the EFICC does nothing else but present a caricature of the positions of the ICC).

Rather than attacking these caricatures, it seems to us more profitable, in order to clarify the questions we propose to deal with in this article, to look at other recently pub­lished polemical texts which have the merit, apart from the fact that they emanate from more serious organizations than the ones cited above, of presenting an elaborated orientation clearly different from that of the ICC and of openly ex­pressing the general underestimation of the im­portance of today's struggles.

These articles can be found in No 4 of Communismo, the review published by the comrades of the former Alptraum Communist Collective, and in No 11 (December ‘87) of Prometeo published by the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista). In the first case, the text is a letter sent by the Communist Workers' Organization (which is associated with the PCInt within the International Bureau For The Revolutionary Party) to the ACC on the communiqué by this organization ‘On The Recent Strikes in Mexico' (April ‘87), large extracts of which we published in IR 50. In the second case it's an article entitled ‘The Crisis of Capital Between Historical Objectivity And Class Subjectivity' which, without once naming the ICC, attacks our analysis of the present balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and in particular our conception of the historic course.

To the extent that the question of the his­toric course is the key to any understanding of the present evolution of the class struggle, and although we have already often dealt with it in these columns (in particular in IR 50 where we replied to an article from Battaglia Comunista 3, March ‘87, entitled ‘The ICC And The Historic Course: An Erroneous Method'), we must return to it here in order to show into what absurdities one is led when one is incapable of forging a clear view of this problem.

Battaglia Comunista and the historic course: A non-existent method

The ICC's analysis of the historic course has been put forward many times in all our publica­tions. We can summarize it as follows: in the period of the decadence of capitalism, which be­gan at the start of this century, the open crises of this mode of production, like the crisis of the 1930s and the present crisis, can, only offer (from capitalism's standpoint) the perspective of world imperialist war (1914-18, 1939-45). The only force that can prevent capi­talism unleashing such a ‘solution' is the work­ing class; and before being able to launch a world war, the bourgeoisie must first ensure the subjugation of the working class. In contrast to the situation of the ‘30s, the working class to­day is neither defeated nor mobilized behind bourgeois ideals like anti-fascism. The combat­ivity which it has shown over the last 20 years provides the only explanation for why the world war hasn't yet broken out.

The PCInt shares part of this analysis, as we can see from the following passage:

"The world is riddled with tensions which of­ten degenerate into open conflicts (the Iran-Iraq war), or which appear in the forms of coups d'état or' ‘national liberation struggles'; these tensions spring from capitalism's difficulties in resolving the internal problems of the world market. The crisis engenders increasingly piti­less competition. In ‘normal' periods the blows are less painful. In critical periods these blows increase in frequency and intensity and because of this, they very often provoke a ri­poste. If it is to survive, capitalism can only use force. A thrust today, a thrust tomorrow, and we have thus arrived at a thoroughly explo­sive situation where the conditions of degenera­tion (widening and generalization of local con­flicts) appear henceforth on the agenda. The phase which will lead to the unleashing of a new imperialist war is open.

"Why has the world war not broken out?

"All the conflicts between states and super powers show us that the tendency that will lead us to a third world war exists already. Objectively, all the reasons for a new generalized war exist. The same is true from the subjective point of view. The process of subjectiv­ity is asymmetrical in relation to that of the objective historical situation. If this were not the case, the war would already have broken out some time ago, with episodes like the Persian Gulf providing the motive.

"But in what way is the gap between the sub­jective aspects and the process involving the whole structure manifested?"

One might think that here, BC would introduce the proletariat as a "subjective element", espe­cially because elsewhere the text contains the following affirmation:

"It is clear that war is impossible unless the proletariat and all the working masses are ready for it (both for combat and for war pro­duction). It is obvious that a proletariat in the midst of a phase of recovery in the class struggle would be the demonstration of a precise counter-tendency which is the antithesis to war - the march towards socialist revolution."

However BC continues: "Unfortunately we are confronted with the opposite phenomenon. We are faced with a crisis which has reached the level of the utmost seriousness. The tendency towards war is advancing rapidly, whereas the class struggle is absolutely below the level that the objective situation ought to be imposing; it is below what would be necessary to repulse the at­tacks launched by capitalism against the inter­national proletariat."

To the extent that, in BC's eyes, the strug­gle of the proletariat does not explain why the war hasn't yet broken out, let's see what BC thinks are the subjective reasons for this ‘gap':

"Attention must be focused mainly on the fac­tors that go beyond particular factors and are situated in a much vaster process in which the international balances are not yet drawn up and defined in relation to what will be the actual war alliances, the alliances which will constitute the war fronts...

"But the framework of alliances is still fairly fluid, and full of unknowns. The develop­ment of the crisis will undoubtedly leave deep tracks, into which each one's interests will slide and meet up with others in an inverse and parallel process, the clash of opposing inter­ests will trace a dividing line between states which will come down in opposing camps in rela­tion to the barricade affected by the logic of imperialism.

"The nuclear question must also be taken into consideration. A war taking place in the condi­tions of maximum proliferation of nuclear weapons makes the constitution of a war front problematic. The apocalyptic theory of a ‘collective suicide' is totally unfounded. The delay in the declaration of war is partly due to the absence of nuclear disarmament, even par­tial, which the representatives of the great powers seem to be aiming at in the near future.

The meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev presented as being prompted by the desire for Peace, has only served in reality to bring down the last barriers in the way of the outbreak of the war. War is born from objective causes. Subjective factors are only detached efforts which can retard or accelerate, but never prevent."

It seems that we have in these passages the quintessence of Battaglia's thought, because these two ideas appear on many occasions in the press of this organization. We thus have to ex­amine them attentively. We will begin with the most serious idea (while trying to formulate it in a simpler way than Battaglia, whose flowery language often seems to operate as a cover for careless and imprecise analyses).

‘If world war hasn't yet broken out it's be­cause the military alliances are not yet suffi­ciently constructed and stabilized.'

As proof that this is an important point in PCInt's analyses, this idea is again put for­ward, in a more detailed manner, in a recent ar­ticle in Battaglia Comunista (‘The USA-USSR agreement: A New Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?' in BC No 5), where this agreement is supposed to have the aim of "delimiting, in this phase, the areas and interests most directly in dispute between the USSR and the USA and to permit the two to concentrate resources and strategies at differ­ent levels...and to prepare new and more stable balances and systems of alliances, with a view to a deeper and more generalized future con­frontation."

Similarly, we can read further on that "...the aggravation of the general crisis of the capitalist mode of production...could not fail to lead to a deepening of the motives for conflict even among the Atlantic partners, and in particular among what are called the Big Seven."

Finally, this whole ‘demonstration' leads to the conclusion that "all this (the arrival of new competitors on the world market) can only favor the trade war of each against all, based on dumping, protectionism, secret alliances be­hind the backs of other rivals, etc, but also the formation of new aggravation of interests tending to be concretized in politico-military alliances, the new axes of which will find their place either at different levels within the same system, which is being more and more destruc­tured despite declarations to the contrary and various proclamations of everlasting loyalty, or the perspective of possible changes of camp."

This analysis isn't new. In the past we've met it on a number of occasions, notably in the form developed by the (now defunct) group Pour Une Intervention Communiste which talked about a tendency towards the ‘crumbling' and recomposi­tion of the blocs in line with commercial rival­ries.

But in fact, the PIC was simply taking up the theses developed by the ‘Bordigist' current, which ended up considering that these commercial rivalries would result in the dislocation of the western bloc and the formation of an alliance between western Europe and the USSR. Announced some decades ago, this prediction still awaits its realization.

To complete this reminder, we should point out that for the PIC this tendency towards the ‘dislocation of the blocs' was due to the strength of the development of the class strug­gle which, obviously, isn't the case with Battaglia.

On a number of occasions in our press we have dealt with the thesis that the imperialist blocs are constructed directly on the basis of commer­cial rivalries[3]. We won't repeat here the ar­guments we developed to refute this analysis. We content ourselves with recalling that this isn't a new question in the workers' movement and that in particular it was the subject of a debate within the Communist International in which Trotsky was led to combat the majority thesis which held that the two bloc leaders in the Second World War would have to be the USA and Britain, who at the time were the main commer­cial rivals.[4]

History has, in the most sinister way, amply validated Trotsky's position, confirming that the - real - link between the exacerbation of commercial rivalries and the aggravation of mil­itary antagonisms is not of a mechanical nature. In this sense, the present system of alliances between the great powers will not be put into question by the aggravation of the trade war be­tween all countries. Although the USA, Japan and Western Europe constitute the main rivals on a world market in which the struggle for outlets gets more and more ruthless by the day, this will not call into question their adherence to the same military alliance.

We must therefore be clear about the fact that if the world war hasn't yet broken out, this has nothing to do with any so-called need to modify or strengthen the existing military alliances. It's true that the two world wars were preceded by a whole series of local con­flicts and agreements which were all part of their preparation, and which enabled the align­ments for the generalized conflict to be drawn up (for example the constitution of the ‘Triple Entente' between Britain, France and Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and the cre­ation of the ‘Axis' during the ‘30s). But in the present historical period these ‘preparations' have already been going on for decades (in fact since the end of the Second World War with the opening of the ‘cold war'), and we have to go back 20 years (the break between Russia and China at the beginning of the ‘60s and the inte­gration of the latter into the western bloc at the end of that decade) to find an important change of alliances. In fact, at the present, the imperialist alliances are much more strictly constituted than the ones on the eve of the two world wars, when we saw major countries entering the conflict well after it had broken out (Italy in May 1915, the USA in April 1917 during the first; the USSR in June 1941, the USA in December 1941 during the second). What's more, each of the two blocs have for many years had the greater part of their military potential un­der a single command (NATO since April 1949, Warsaw Pact since May 1955), whereas such a uni­fied command was not created until the second half of the two world wars (and then only by the western powers at the level of the European front).

Thus, to say that today the diplomatic or military preparations for a third world war have not yet been completed is to show an incredible ignorance of the history of this century, which is unforgivable in a revolutionary organization. But even more unforgivable is the thesis that: ‘It's the existence of atomic weapons, the deterrent that the represent which explains why the world war hasn't happened yet'.

Is it possible that serious revolutionaries can still believe such a fable? The bourgeoisie has told us this tale as a reason for building up its nuclear arsenals. In particular, the strategy of ‘massive reprisals', of the ‘balance of terror', was supposed to have a deterrent ef­fect: as soon as a country used an atomic bomb, or even if it threatened another's vital inter­ests, it would expose itself to having its main urban and industrial centers destroyed within an hour. The most murderous weapons that have ever existed are supposed to have the merit of ensur­ing that there will never again be a world war. It's understandable that such a lie could have a certain impact on populations that have illu­sions in the ‘reasonableness' of governments and more generally in the rationality of the capi­talist system. But it really is astounding that here are still revolutionaries who, considering themselves to be ‘marxist', believe and spread such stories, at a time when all the recent de­velopments in nuclear armaments (neutron bombs, nuclear shells, short-range missiles, ‘cruise' missiles capable of reaching within a few meters of their targets, the ‘star wars' program), as well as the elaboration of the so-called ‘graduated response' strategy (the official NATO doctrine) are there to prove that the govern­ments and military HQ seriously envisage waging atomic war in order to win it. And yet this is unfortunately the case with the Battaglia com­rades, who on this point defend absurdities wor­thy of those of the FOR when it denies the existence of the capitalist crisis today. Because the thesis contained in Prometeo 11 is not a slip of the pen, a gaff by a somewhat mixed-up comrade which has escaped the organization's vigilance. It had already been put forward in a more detailed manner in an article from Battaglia Comunista 4 (April ‘86) entitled ‘First Notes On The Next War'. Here we can read:

"Another factor which must not be underesti­mated, among others which can explain the pro­longing of the time needed to prepare the war[5] is the nuclear threat, to the extent that the direct confrontation between the blocs can't depend on the hazard of moments of major tension between the superpowers, because of the risk/certainty of the extinction of life on Earth. The day after the signing of the agree­ment about the non-utilization of nuclear weapons, war will be declared' is a classic quip among us and it has all the taste of reality."

The Battaglia comrades can find whatever taste they like in this quip; for our part, we'd say that their remarks have "all the taste" of chronic naivety. What is the scenario/fiction depicted in the articles from Battaglia April ‘86 and Prometeo December 87? Following up the process of 'nuclear disarmament' set in motion by the Washington agreement of December ‘87[6], the two superpowers will arrive at the total elimination of nuclear weapons or an agreement not to use these weapons. They will then have a free hand to launch a world war without the threat of "the extinction of life on earth," inasmuch as they will trust their enemies not to use the prohibited weapons or not to have kept them secretly. One might ask why, if the two blocs had decided to go in for such fair play, they didn't go a step further along the path of disarmament and eliminate or forbid the use of the most murderous conventional weapons. After all, both of them have an interest in limiting as much as possible the destruction which can be caused by such weapons, a destruction which the ruins and massacres of the Second World War can only hint at. And once they've started on this, why should the world leaders stop there? Of course, they won't have renounced war because we're still living in capitalism, there are still antagonisms between rival bourgeoisies and they will still sharpen with the aggravation of the economic crisis. But animated by the same concern that the war should cause the least amount of destruction, these leaders would grad­ually forbid any use of modern weapons, which are all so destructive: missiles, planes, heavy artillery and then light artillery, machine guns and - why not - firearms....We know the famous phrase ‘If the Third World War takes place, the fourth will be fought with sticks.' The perspec­tive that comes out of Battaglia's analysis is a bit different: it's the third world war that will be fought with sticks. Unless of course it takes place through a single combat between champions as sometimes happened in the Middle Ages or Antiquity. If the weapon chosen was chess, the USSR might have a chance of win­ning the war.

It goes without saying the Battaglia comrades don't tell or even think such tales: they're not stupid. But this fairytale does derive logically from the idea which lies at the centre of their ‘analysis': that the bourgeoisie is capable of drawing up rules of ‘temperance' in the utilization of its means of destruction, that it is likely to respect the treaties it signs, even when it has a knife to its throat, even when its vital interests are threatened. The two world wars, however, provide ample evidence that all means at capitalism's disposal are OK to use in an imperialist war, including - in fact, above all - the most murderous ones[7], including nu­clear weapons (have our comrades forgotten Hiroshima and Nagasaki?). We don't say that a third world war would begin straight away with the weapons of the Apocalypse. But we can be certain that if the bourgeoisie has its back to the wall after using conventional weapons, it will end up using them no matter what treaties it has signed beforehand. Similarly, there is no chance of the present (very minimal) reductions in nuclear weapons leading to their total elimi­nation. Neither of the two blocs, and particu­larly the one which is in an inferior technolog­ical state at the level of conventional arms, the eastern bloc, will ever consent to depriving itself completely of the weapons which are its last resort, even if it knows perfectly well that using these weapons would mean its own destruction. And this has nothing to do with any ‘suicidal behavior' on the part of the leaders of the capitalist world. It's the system as a whole, in the barbarism engendered by its deca­dence, which is leading humanity towards self-destruction[8]. In this sense, the article in Prometeo is quite right to emphasize that the process leading towards generalized war is "irrespective of what Reagan and Gorbachev may think subjectively" and that "war is born from objective causes." The PCInt knows the fundamen­tals of marxism. The problem is that it some­times ‘forgets' them and allows itself to fall for the most worn-out bourgeois mystifications.

We can thus see that in trying to defend its analysis of the present historic course, the PCInt is led not only to pile contradiction upon contradiction, but also to ‘forget' the history of the 20th century, and, what is even more se­rious, a certain number of the basic teachings of marxism, to the point where is takes up, in the most naïve fashion, some of the illusions put around by the bourgeoisie in order to paint its system in rosy hues.

The question that must be posed, therefore, is: how is it that a communist organization, which bases its positions on marxism and which knows the history of the workers' movement, can fall victim to such ‘lapses of memory' and dis­play such naivety towards the mystifications of capital? We can find part of the answer in the article published in BC No 3, March ‘87, and in English in Communist Review No 5, entitled ‘The ICC and The Historic Course: An Erroneous Method.' We have already responded to this arti­cle in IR 50. In particular, we rectified a cer­tain number of errors on the history of the workers' movement, notably on the history of the Italian Communist Left, from whom BC, in part, claims descent. We will limit ourselves to showing the PCInt's complete incomprehension of the very notion of the historic course.

Historic course or fluctuating course?

In the above-mentioned article, the PCInt writes:

"The way of thinking implicit in the ICC's thought is this: throughout the ‘30s the course was unequivocally towards imperialist war, as the Fraction in France claimed. That period is finished, overthrown: now the course is unequivocally towards revolution (or towards the con­flicts that make it possible). It is at this point, at its methodological juncture, that we have the deepest divergences....

"The Fraction (and especially its EC and in particular, Vercesi) in the ‘30s judged the per­spective as being towards war in an absolute fashion. Did they have reason 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....

"The methodological error the Fraction suf­fered from was precisely the absolutisation of the course, the exclusion of any possibility of significant proletarian insurrections and the perspective in linking the above intervention of communist with them, the denial of what is always possible in the imperialist phase, a revolutionary."

This indeed is the heart of the divergence between the PCInt and the ICC, even though, as often happens, the PCInt hasn't really under­stood our analysis[9]. In particular, we don't say there is a complete symmetry between a course towards war and a course towards class confrontations, just as we don't say that a course can't be reversed.

"...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," (IR 50, ‘Reply To Battaglia Comunisma On The Course Of History').

Or:

"The existence of a course towards war, like in the ‘30s, means that the proletariat has suf­fered a decisive defeat that prevents it from opposing the bourgeois outcome of the crisis. The existence of a course towards class con­frontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butch­ery; first it must confront and beat the working class. But this does not prejudge the outcome of this confrontation, in one way or another. This is why it is preferable to talk of a ‘course to­wards class confrontations' rather than a ‘course towards revolution.'" (‘Resolution On The International Situation' from the 5th ICC Congress, July ‘83, in IR 35).

Having pointed this out, we can easily see where the divergence lies. When we talk about a ‘historic course', it's indeed in order to de­fine a historic period, a global and dominant tendency which can only be put into question by major events (as was the case during the First World War with the upsurge of the revolutionary wave of 1917, or a series of decisive defeats, as in the 1920s). But for Battaglia, who it must be said more often use the term ‘course' than ‘historic course', it's a question of a perspec­tive that can shift in one direction or another at any moment, since "a revolutionary break­through" can't be ruled out, even during a course towards war. This is also why these com­rades are completely unable to understand what's at stake in the present historic period and why they attribute the fact that generalized war hasn't yet broken out, even when the objective conditions for it have been around for a long time, to the absence of complete nuclear disar­mament, of a treaty about the non-utilization of nuclear weapons, and other stupidities.

Here again, Battaglia's view resembles a Spanish inn: in the notion of the historic course, everyone puts in what he wants. You can find the revolution in a course towards war, or a world war in a course towards class confronta­tions. So you can say whatever you want: in 1981, the CWO who share the same vision of the historic course as BC, called on the workers in Poland to make the revolution whereas the world proletariat had supposedly not yet emerged from the counter-revolution. In the end, the notion of a course totally disappears. This is where BC ends up: eliminating any idea of a historical perspective.

In fact the vision of the PCInt (and of the IBRP) has a name: immediatism. It's the same im­mediatism which was at the origins of the proclamation of the party at the end of the Second World War when the working class was in the very depths of the counter-revolution. It's the same immediatism which explains why today the IBRP is downplaying the present struggles of the class by pointing to the obvious fact that they are not yet taking on a revolutionary form and continue to come up against the various bar­riers erected by the left and the unions.

The underestimation of the present struggles of the working class

Our appreciation of the present characteris­tics of the proletarian struggle has been put forward regularly in the IR and all our territo­rial publications. We won't go over this again here. On the other hand it would be of interest, in concluding this article, to examine how the IBRP - through a document by the CWO published in Comunismo No 4 - concretizes its analysis of the historic course in its critique of our ap­preciation of the class struggle:

"...the events in Europe show that the push towards the struggle is not directly linked to the gravity of the crisis nor to the severity of the attacks mounted on the proletariat...we don't think that the frequency and the extension of these forms of struggle indicate - at least up to now - a tendency towards a progressive de­velopment. For example, after the struggle of the British miners, of the French railway work­ers, we have the strange situation in which the most agitated strata are those....of the petty bourgeoisie. (doctors, airline pilots, magis­trates, middle and higher functionaries, and now, the teachers)."

It's already significant that, for the IBRP, the primary and secondary school teachers are "petty bourgeois" and that the remarkable strug­gle waged last year by this sector of the class represents nothing from a proletarian point of view. We may ask why certain comrades of Battaglia, who are teachers, still judged it useful to intervene in it (it's true that the militants of the ICC made a by no means negligi­ble contribution to waking them up by their sharp criticisms of the passivity they showed at the start).

Addressing itself to Comunismo, the IBRP goes on: "You are probably influenced by the ICC's em­phasis on the episodic struggles of the workers in Europe - an emphasis out of all proportion to reality...alongside episodes of heroic struggle (in terms of the length and sacrifices made by the workers) like that of the British miners, we for our part see the passivity of the other sec­tors of the class in Britain and elsewhere in Europe."

We don't think it would be useful here to re­call all the examples given in this Review and in our territorial press which contradict this statement. We refer readers to them, as well as the comrades of the IBRP, although we know there's none so blind as those who will not see. But let's continue with these quotations where they deal with the causes of this sad situation and the conditions for going beyond them:

"In order to explain the relative passivity of the class and its inability to respond to the attacks of capital, scapegoats (the unions, the parties) aren't enough. The power of persuasion of the parties and the unions isn't the cause but the manifestation of the essential phe­nomenon, which is capital's real domination over society...

The equilibrium upon which bourgeois society rests still exists. It has been consolidated in Europe for nearly two centuries, and a powerful, material class movement is needed to overcome it.

"The more capitalist domination becomes real, and the more it expresses itself in the super­structure, reinforcing real domination to the point where it becomes crystallized, the more difficult and violent will be the process that destroys it."

Voila. By juggling - for the sake of sounding ‘deep' - with the term "the real domination of capital" which Marx used in quite a different context (see the article on decadence in this issue of the IR), we get a nice collection of banalities (when they are not tautologies): ‘today the proletariat is still incapable of overthrowing capitalism because capitalism ex­erts a real domination over society.' Bravo the IBRP. Here is a thesis that will be lone-remem­bered in the history of the workers' movement and of marxist theory. History will also want to remember the following phrases:

"The revolutionary intervention of the Party is necessary to defeat all bourgeois influences, whatever form they take, in order to make it possible to go from protests and demands to a frontal attack on the bourgeois state...

"The condition for the victory of the revolu­tionary program in the proletariat is the routing of what we have defined as bourgeois in­fluences on and in the class."

Once again, the IBRP offers us the silly ba­nalities of argument which bites its own tail:

"There is no significant development of struggles because there is no party; and the party can't exist unless the class finds itself in a process of developing struggles."

How can this vicious circle be broken? The IBRP doesn't tell us. This, no doubt, is what these comrades, who are very fond of eye-catch­ing ‘marxist' formulae, call the dialectic.

In reality, by completely underestimating the place occupied by the proletariat the scene of history right now, by failing to see that it's the working class which is preventing the unleashing of a third world war, the IBRP's view also underestimates the present struggles of the class, both in their capacity to act as a barrier against the attacks of the bourgeoisie and in the experience they contribute to the deci­sive, revolutionary confrontations with the cap­italist state that lie ahead. That is why this organization is not only led as we've seen, to fall into the most obvious traps of bourgeois propaganda about the ‘nuclear deterrent', but also to neglect the responsibility of revolu­tionaries at the present time, from the point of view both of the work towards regroupment of communist forces (see the article on the politi­cal milieu in this IR) and of the task of inter­vention in the struggle. The IBRP's text is particularly significant in this respect:

"We, the revolutionary vanguards, can only have a very limited - almost non-existent - in­fluence on this process (of breaking the equi­librium upon which capitalism is based), pre­cisely because we are outside the material dynamic of society."

If by "material dynamic" the IBRP means the evolution of the crisis, it's obvious that revo­lutionaries have no impact on that. But it can't just mean that because elsewhere, the IBRP con­siders that the "class struggle is absolutely below the level that the objective situation ought to be imposing": we must therefore assume that according to the IBRP the crisis is suffi­ciently developed to allow the ‘breakthrough' this organization is waiting for. In the final analysis, behind the plays on words about ‘real domination' etc, behind the perpetual refrain about the ‘indispensable role of the party' (an idea which we also adhere to), the IBRP is sim­ply abdicating its responsibilities. It's not by permanently shouting ‘We Need The Party' that we will be able to take up our tasks in the class faced with the present needs of the development of the struggle. There is a Russian proverb which says: ‘When there is no vodka, talk about vodka.' In the end, many of the groups in the proletarian milieu today do the same thing. Only by going beyond the attitude of skepticism about the struggles of our class, in particular their impact on the historic course, will they be able to assume the real responsibilities of revolu­tionaries, and contribute effectively to the preparation of the conditions for the world party of the proletariat.

FM

---

[1] Another element explaining this conver­gence of attacks on the positions of the ICC is probably the fact that our organization, since the dislocation of the (Bordigist) International Communist party, has constituted the most impor­tant formation in the international revolution­ary milieu, and has thus become the reference point for all the groups and elements in this milieu. This does not give us any particular satisfaction: we are much too conscious of and preoccupied with the general weakness of the revolutionary milieu in taking up its responsibilities to rejoice in this situation.

[2] This issue of Le Communiste contains an article whose title alone tells us much about its tone: ‘Once Again...The ICC On The Side of the Cops Against the Revolutionaries.'

[3] We can refer in particular to the 'Resolution On The International Situation' adopted at our Third Congress (IR 18) and the article ‘War, Mitilitarization and Imperialist Blocs In the decadence of Capitalism' in IRs 53 and 54.

[4] See in particular ‘Europe and America'.

[5] We should point out that in a previous passage in the same article, this "prolonging of the time needed to prepare war" is explained in terms of the economic transformation capitalism has gone through since the Second World War, which is in flagrant contradiction with the the­ses put forward in Prometeo No 11, according to which "objectively all the reasons for a new generalized war exists." When you base yourself on a wrong theory, it's not surprising you get into all sorts of contradictions when you try to fit in with reality.

[6] On the subject of this agreement, the previously cited article from BC May 88 perti­nently emphasizes that it only affects 3.5 per­cent of the destructive potential wielded by its signatories, and that its aim is to allow them to "concentrate their efforts (economic, re­search, etc) on the reconstruction and modernization of their respective nuclear and conven­tional weapons"). Decidedly, the PCInt's analy­ses resemble the Spanish inn: there's no fixed menu, each article of the press brings its own conceptions, even if they are in contradiction with those in other articles. For the reader to know where he is, each article in BC or Prometeo would have to be accompanied by a note making it clear whether it expresses the positions of the organization or the particular position of a comrade. The same suggestion could apply to the cases where contradictory assertions are made in the same article.

[7] The Battaglia comrades consider that the non-utilization of combat gas during the Second World War illustrates the capacity of the bour­geoisie to establish a certain number of rules of conduct. What this affirmation really shows is that they are taking at face value the lies used by the bourgeoisie when it wants to demon­strate that it is capable of showing ‘reason' and ‘humanity' even in the most extreme manifes­tations of the barbarism of its system. The bourgeoisie didn't use these weapons in the Second World War because the first had shown they were a double edged sword which could turn against those who used them. Since then, ‘barbarous' Iraq in the Gulf war, and before that ‘civilized' America in Vietnam have proved that with modern technology they can again be used, but more ‘efficiently'.

[8] On this question see ‘War, Militarism and The Imperialist Blocs'.

[9] We must put an end to this lie about the Fraction's "liquidation of any possibility of a revolutionary political intervention in Spain". The Fraction intervened publicly, in its press, and in the proletarian milieu, to denounce the politics of class collaboration under the pre­text of ‘saving the Republic', to give total support to the revolt of the workers of Barcelona in July 1936 and May '37, to support the struggle of the Asturias workers in ‘34. But there's intervention and intervention: interven­ing to combat ‘the Republican anti-fascist al­liance' or intervening to integrate oneself into the militias in support of the bourgeoisie Republic. Battaglia condemns the position of the majority (the first), even if it also criticizes the minority (dragooned into anti-fascism). What then was the right position for the PCInt - and what was it that led the PCInt to launch in 1945 an ‘Appeal To The Agitation Committees, To The Parties Of A Proletarian Direction' (in fact, the CP, the SP and the anarchists), for a ‘united front of all the workers'? See IR 32 on this.

 

Six months after the October 87 stock-market crash, the "economic experts" are reviewing upwards their forecasts for growth rate in 1988. At the same time, fears of a new worldwide stock-market crash continue to mount.

The governments of the major economic power treated October's economic convulsions with highly dangerous medicines. Thanks to this treatment, the most recent indicators economic growth in the US have not been as bad as expected; this cannot hide the fact that decadent capitalism's fundamental problems, far from being resolved, have only got worse. Once again, governmental remedies for difficulties are turning out to be poisons whose effects, though slow, are nonetheless deadly.

"What is going on here? By all accounts, the 5 1/2 year old economic expansion should be fizzling out. Already ancient by historical standards, the upswing appeared to have suffered a devastating brow when the stock market crashed last October. But, defying expectations, the economy is till running and even blowing oft enough steam to inspire fears that it may actually be overheating. Forget about a recession, many economists counsel, start worrying about inflation". (Time, May 1988)

To listen to some economic commentators, or ministers of finance like Lawson in Britain, the danger of a new recession has been averted. Today the return of the inflationary monster is more to be feared.

In fact, today everything points to a comeback of inflation in the world economy - or rather of an acceleration of inflation, since despite a certain slowdown in recent years, inflation has never gone away. However, there are no signs that the danger of recession has been avoided. Quite the reverse.

To understand this, we need to look more closely at the reality, and the economic foundations, of these last 5 ½ years' such vaunted "economic expansion".

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

The real balance-sheet of 5 years' "non-collapse" and devastation

Since the recession of 1982 - the deepest and longest since the war - capitalist production has indeed grown. The growth in OECD (ie the Western bloc's 24 most industrialized countries[1] GDP between 1983 and 1987 has remained positive (+3% on average). In other words, the mass of value produced - as far as it can be measured in national accounting statistic[2] - has not diminished. However, this figure in itself does not mean very much.

We have to get at the reality behind this average.

Growth: weak and localized

Growth during this period has remained below the levels reached during the periods of "expansion" in the 70's: 5.5% in 1972-73; 4% in 1976-79 (annual averages). Since 1984, this growth has systematically declined, falling from 4.9% in 1984 to 2.8% in 1987. Growth has been mostly limited to the United States and Japan; in Europe, it has remained wretched, almost to the point of stagnation. In most of the under­developed world, with a few exceptions, it has meant a collapse.

The spreading industrial desert

The stagnation, or slow growth, of production has been achieved by keeping alive the most profitable centers of production, and destroying all those which, according to the laws of shrinking market, fail to produce cheaply enough to remain in the exclusive club of those still able to sell their commodities (Europe, example, still produces about the same number of cars as in 1978. But capital has closed down dozens of factories and got rid of hundreds of thousands of car industry jobs). In the USA, steel mills in perfect conditions are destroyed with dynamite; whole industrial plants are abandoned to rust. Like the Sahara, the industrial desert is spreading. The EEC has decided to "freeze" millions of hectares of farm land. The scourge is moving from the periphery to the centre, hitting the very heart of the major industrial powers.

Unemployment

During the five years of "growth", unemployment has grown constantly in the world as a whole. This is merely the continuation of a phenomenon hitherto unheard-of in world history: 20 years of constantly rising unemployment. Of the major powers, only in the US - and in 1987, in Britain - are the figures for unemployment falling. For Europe as a whole, by contrast, job scarcity has beaten all historical records, even if "officially" its growth has slowed down. In most other countries, unemployment has reached unprecedented proportions.

And this is according to official figures, which deliberately under-estimate the extent of the disaster. Thus government statistics consider that someone working one day a week or following a course for the unemployed, the young who are given some wretched pretense of a job in return for a pittance, or the adults laid off in "premature retirement", are not "unemployed". Precarious employment and jobs at the mercy of capital's immediate needs are being generalized: 12 hours work a day for a while, then 2 hours a day - with a corresponding reduction in wages and the constant threat of redundancy.

Arms production

To all these forms of destruction of capital (for capitalism, the development of unemployment beyond a certain minimum "reserve army of labor" is a destruction of capital, in the same way as the destruction of capital or the sterilization of farmland), which stamp their mark on these five years of "economic expansion", should be added the development the production of means of destruction - armament - specially in the United States. American capital, whose budget deficit has played the part of major market for world growth, has devoted gigantic sums to this.

"Since 1982, Federal spending has grown by 24% in real terms (4% per year)..This growth can be wholly attributed to defense spending, which has increased by 37%, while other spending has fallen by 7%. A considerable effort has been made in acquiring new equipment, almost doubling in five years: +78%". (Actualites: Banque Francaise de Commerce Exterieur, December 1987)

This is the result, in real terms, of five years of so-called "economic expansion". Despite weak, but positive, rates of growth in production, economic misery has increased without a pause, even in the most industrialized countries. The very basis of capitalist production has not grown, but shrunk. World capital is being restructured through the most massive movement of capital concentration ever seen in history, through stock-market raids on an unprecedented scale, in a war where shark devour the corpses of the bankrupt , where the blood of the wounded only sharpens the greed of the rest.

Far from expressing the system's renewed strength, capable of pushing back the perspective of a new world recession, the last five years' results in the real domain of production concretize the system chronic inability to reestablish a true movement of growth, able to soak up unemployment if nothing else.

The financial balance sheet

On the financial level, the results of the last five years only confirm the inevitability of a new recession, which like those of 1974-75 and 1980-82 will be accompanied by a worsening of that other disease of decadent capitalism: inflation.

"Highway robbery and murder look like acts of charity compared to some financial machinations" (Balzac).

Financing production means providing the money to carry it out. In capitalism, the capitalist gets this money from selling what he has produced, or from credit, which is nothing but an advance on future sales.

Who did the world s capitalists sell the little surplus they have managed to extract in recent years to? Essentially, to the United States.

As in 1972-73, as in 1976-77, in 1983 the USA played the part of economic locomotive to pull the world out of the 1980-82 recession: in 1983, the volume of American imports leaped by almost 10%; in 1984, by 24% (an all-time record!). US capital bought everything from everybody. In. 1982, US imports were 15% of world trade; in 1986, they were 24%! In other words, the US buys a quarter of everything exported in the world!

In five years, the US balance of payments jumped from $30 billion to $160 billion. This deficit has increased with respect to every part of the world: $40 billion more with Japan, $36 billion with other Asian countries, $32 billion with Europe, $9 billion with Latin America.

What has US capital paid with?

On the one hand, with over-valued dollars. From 1982 to 1985, the dollar constantly increased in value against all other currencies. This meant paying for imports at reduced prices.

On the other hand, and above all, with credit at every level, both internally and externally. Credit positively exploded. Between late 1983 and mid-1987, total indebtedness grew by $3000 billion -- three times the growth of GNP during the same period. The US has become the biggest foreign debtor in the world. In 1963, 5% of the US economy was financed from abroad. In 1987, the figure was almost 20%. The weight of interest payments alone has become enormous.

Can the US pay back these debts? It must begin by trying to reduce their fantastic rate of growth. To do so, they have no other choice than to reduce their balance of payments deficit, ie increase exports and reduce imports. And amongst other measures, this is what they are trying to do by letting the dollar fall, in order to make imports more difficult and exports "made in USA" more competitive. Already in 1987, this produced a drop in the volume growth of imports to 7%, and an increase in that of exports to nearly 13%. This change is far from providing US capital w.ith the ready cash to pay off its debts. However, it has already had a drastic effect on those whose markets have diminished to the same extent. The American locomotive market is contracting at the same time as American commodities are becoming increasingly aggressive and effective on the rest of the world market. The one-time stimulant of the world economy has disappeared without any other fraction of world capital being capable of playing a similar role.

The devaluation of the dollar is in itself another way to reduce debt. American capital is now repaying with devalued currency what it originally bought with over-valued dollar. This means there is less to repay, but it is also another step towards inflation, and a pure loss for creditors like Germany and Japan ... who are supposed to continue the recovery.

US capital has a third way to repay its debts: by taking out new loans, new debts to pay off the old ones.... just like the under-developed countries. This it has continued to do, and this is what forced it in 1987 to begin raising interest rates again, in order to attract the capital necessary to finance the deficit. The result of this rise, along with the devaluation of the dollar (which also devalues dollar shares) was none other than the October stock-market crash. The gap between the profits to be made on the stock exchange, and the cost of the loans necessary to take part in it had become to wide.

But in every case -- increase in US exports and a fall in its imports, devaluation of the dollar and generalized inflation, or headlong flight into debt -- the problem posed in financing the debt accumulated by the world economy in general and by the world's major economic power in particular opens no perspective other than a new inflationist recession.

The stock market crash

The real miracle hailed by certain economists today, such as those that Time speaks of in the article quoted above, is the fact that growth did not collapse following the stock-market crash in 1987, as it did in 1929.

Most economists predicted a severe cutback in growth just after the October 1987 stock-market crash. Governments revised their already less than brilliant forecasts downwards.

They forgot, first that the situation was not the same as in 1929. The 1929 stock-market crash came at the beginning of an open economic crisis. The October 87 crash came when capitalism had already been slowly sinking into the crisis for the past 20 years: it represented, not the crisis' beginning, but the confirmation of the economic dilapidation that had preceded it.

Secondly, they forgot that the capital present on the stock exchange is to a great extent purely speculative, paper money, or what Marx called fictitious capital: thus to a great extent, especially in a first collapse, its destruction does not mean the destruction of factories, but of paper. The hardest hit sector of the economy was the banking sector, which is more directly linked to speculation.

Thirdly, they forgot that, contrary to 1929, and contrary to the myths of so-called "liberalism" as to a supposed reduction of the state's role in the economy, state capitalism has reached a systematic and general level of development in decadent capitalism. All the world's governments, behind that of the United States, reacted immediately to ward off the danger of an immediate and uncontrolled collapse.

But the remedies they have applied have not resolved the system's fundamental problems: on the contrary, they have made them worse.

Essentially, these remedies have consisted in a forced drop in interest rates and easier credit, particularly in the US. In other words, capital has answered the problems posed by excessive debt through ...  increased indebtedness.

This has made possible the "surprising results of American growth" in late 87 and early 88. But it has resolved none of the fundamental problems. Already in May, there was powerful pressure for a new rise in interest rates in the United States, which has to finance a new state loan of $26 billion.

As The Economist noted:

"Even if the economy has shrugged off the crash, its domestic debt burden has left it in a poor state to withstand higher interest rates. And Texas, in particular, is ready to stage a multi­billion dollar banking crisis". (The Economist, 7th May 1988.)

The evolution of today's economy, based on massive debt, a credit explosion which has no hope of being repaid, can only end up, once again, in the conjunction of the two diseases of decadent capitalism -- inflation and recession -- just as it did in 1970-71, 1974-75, and 1980-82 (the term "stagflation" was already invented in the 70's). This time, they will be topped by financial collapse.

The bourgeoisie's economic experts do not have too many illusions about it themselves. They have only revised their upward forecasts for growth in 1988 by a small percentage, and the forecasts for 1989 remain gloomy.

RV

---

[1] All the countries of Western Europe, plus the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

[2] According to this accounting methods, a policeman or a member of the armed forces is considered as creating a value equivalent to his salary.