We are publishing here an article from the Grupo Proletario Internacianalista of Mexico. We have already presented this group in previous issues of the International Review (nos. 50, 52, and 53). This article on the situation in Mexico expresses the position of the GPI, and was published in Revolucion Mundial no.4 just before last July's presidential elections in Mexico.

In publishing this text, we intend to express our agreement with its political content, but above all to publicize the extent of the economic disaster that has overtaken Mexican capitalism, along with three quarters of the planet. Our aim is to denounce the appalling conditions that millions of human beings live in today. The text from the comrades of the GPI demonstrates that capitalist barbarism is not a fatality, and that the working class, -- even if its strength locally cannot be as great as in the industrial concentrations of North America and Europe -- is struggling against poverty, and coming forward as the only social force able to offer a perspective other than barbarism to all the unemployed and poverty-stricken masses in these countries. As in the rest of Latin America, the Mexican proletariat is fighting back, and is being lead to develop the same weapons as its class brothers on other continents, against the same obstacles: first and foremost, the left parties, the trade unions, and state repression.

The reality of workers' combativity in Mexico is confirmed by the results of the latest presidential elections, where for the first time in 60 years the candidate of the PRI (the party in power) only won 50% of the votes, in utter confusion, and clearly thanks to electoral fraud. His opponent, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas who also comes from the ... PRI, was supported by a coalition of left-wing parties -- the CP and the Trotskyists among them. The bourgeoisie has tried, and appears to have succeeded, to create a left-wing political force around Cardenas on the basis of such themes "democracy against corruption and electoral fraud", nationalism against repaying the Mexican debt, against the "dictatorship of the IMF" or of American imperialism, in order to derail an increasing anger and desperation onto the safe ground of democracy. And this new adaptation of the bourgeoisie's political forces in Mexico is accompanied by the development of "independent unionism" (ie of the sole trade union, the CTM), which is the Mexican version of rank-and-file unionism.

In short the Mexican bourgeoisie, following the enlightened advice of the USA, is setting up the political and trade union forces of the left in opposition, in order to mislead the workers' struggles which must inevitably come, towards the democratic mystification already being employed in most Latin American countries, like Chile, today.

In the abyss of a chronic crisis

In recent years, the crisis in Mexico has constantly deepened. This situation can only be wholly understood if we take account of the fact that Mexico is an integral part of the world capitalist system, and that it is therefore immersed in the world capitalist crisis which has been inexorably spreading and deepening since the end of the 1960's, in the form of ever deeper and more violent "recessions" (paralysis of industrial and commercial growth) and shorter and less convincing "recoveries".

So whereas the last "recession" in 1980-82 hit the entire world economy, the "recovery" which followed from 1983-86 only affected the great powers, while most countries continued to stagnate. Today, the whole world is on the way to a new "recession", whose effects will certainly be still more disastrous than those of its predecessor.

In Mexico, industry has collapsed since 1982. For five years, the GDP's growth rate has re­mained negative ... Every branch of industry is stagnant or in decline ... which worsens the sit­uation of the workers. In 1987, "industrial growth remained at a complete standstill"[1].

We will highlight here only three external and visible signs of the deepening crisis in 1987:

1) the weak growth in GDP (1.4%) is far from compensating the previous year's collapse. This demonstrates clearly that production continues to stagnate, due to lack of incentive to invest given worldwide over-production and the collapse of the prices of Mexico's raw material exports (oil, mineral ores, farm produce).

2) an annual inflation rate of about 159%.

Since the internal market is exhausted, the government is trying to reanimate it by increasing its expenditure. To do so, it is printing money to pay its employees ... which allows the latter to go on buying, getting credit, etc ...

However, the uncontrolled production of paper money has the same effect as the production of any other commodity at lower cost: its value falls. And the more paper money is in circulation, the more its value is depreciated in relation to other commodities; in other words, com­modities cost more.

Although it is true that all commodities cost more, their prices are not all increasing in the same proportion; the price of labor-power (ie wages) in particular is trailing far behind that of other comodities: a mechanism well known to workers, and which is used by the capitalist class to appropriate improved profits via falling wages,

For capital however, the trouble is that each rise in prices provokes a renewed acceleration in the issue of paper money ... and so on, pro­voking an "inflationary spiral", where the quan­tity of money grows at the same accelerating rhythm as its value falls, to the point where prices are rising so fast -- from day to day, or even from hour to hour (What is known as "super­inflation") -- that money becomes totally worth­less, since it no can longer be used to measure the value of goods, for trade, for savings, or for anything else.

In this way, the mechanism used initially to reanimate the circulation of commodities is transformed into its opposite: yet another ob­stacle to this circulation, which deepens stag­nation still further.

Inflation is a clear example of the way in which the measures of political economy applied by national states today are able to contain the crisis momentarily, but not to put an end to it. During the last few months, the Mexican economy has been heading straight for "hyper-inflation"[2].

3) the fantastic rise in Mexican stock-ex­change values over a period of a few months, and their subsequent collapse in October 1987, at the same time as stock exchanges all over the world.

The collapse of the Mexican stock-exchange and its simultaneity with that of others throughout the world is not mere coincidence: its fundamental causes were the same; it has highlighted the complete interpenetration of the world economy. The growth of the world's main stock exchanges (London, Tokyo, New York) during the last two years has been out of all propor­tion to industrial growth. Capital has been abandoning productive investment, in favor of speculative financial operations, a sign that the "recovery" begun in 1983 was drawing to a close. Since the world's main financial centers were on the way to becoming saturated, capital began to flow into the less important ones. And so, during 1987, a lot of capital "returned" to Mexico, not to be invested in industry, but es­sentially to be placed on the stock exchange, in the emission of shares, appropriating the money of other investors, who bought up shares, at­tracted by the promise of juicy profits (promises which went as high as 1000%). Thus, purely through the interplay of supply and de­mand, encouraged by the press and the government, the Mexico stock exchange grew by 600% in a few months ... only to collapse with the rest of the world's stock exchanges when it became apparent that neither world nor national produc­tion had grown sufficiently, and that the promised profits were unreal; the Mexico stock exchange lost 80% of its value. The only ones to make a profit were those who had access to and manipulated inside information, and so were able to sell their actions quickly and keep their cash, while the rest were ruined.[3]

And so, in today's conditions of over-produc­tion and saturated markets, industrial produc­tion is blocked, while capital turns to seeking profit in speculation.

Faced with this situation, the Mexican gov­ernment decided in December 1987 to adopt a new economic program, baptized the "Pact of Eco­nomic Solidarity". The state recognized the failure of previous plans for dealing with the crisis (which goes to show that previous opti­mistic official declarations were lies), and that the crisis is continuing and getting worse, making it necessary to retreat in as good an or­der as possible, by "distributing" (insofar as the state is able to do so) losses among the different sectors of capital, but essentially by increasing still further the exploitation of the working class.

To launch this program, the state mounted an enormous ideological campaign, broadcast by every possible means, to convince workers that they should accept it, that the "pact" would be a basis for solving the "nation's problems", that there should be "solidarity" among the dif­ferent sectors of society, in other words that they should accept still more sacrifices to save the capitalists' profits.

The "solidarity pact" is in the form of an anti-inflationist program, similar in some ways to those adopted in countries like Ar­gentina, Brazil, or Israel. Starting with a general, sudden and unexpected price rise, com­bined with a wage freeze and a drastic diminu­tion in state spending (5.8%), it aims, little by little, to rein in inflation. This means nothing other than a new and terrible shrinkage in domestic trade, even if it is "regulated" by the state, and more company closures, starting with those owned by the state (closures which will in turn hit private industry).

In fact, during the last five years a whole string of semi-nationalized industries have been sold off at knock-down prices. This process, which the government calls "disincorporation" has hit some 600 companies, and in the case of some big ones like Fundidora Monterrey has brought in its wake the liquidation of a series of subsidiaries and suppliers. The "pact" has simply accelerated this process: during the "pact"'s first three months alone, the govern­ment authorized the liquidation of 40 companies (the most important being Aeromexico, employing 10,000 workers) and the sale of 40 others (including the Canaena, Mexico's largest copper mine).

This is what the deepening crisis means: the acceleration of the process of destruc­tion/devalorisation of capital, through the ma­terial destruction of means of production or their devalorisation, and through falling wages and massive redundancies (along with increasing rates of exploitation for those workers still in a job). Capital is trying, on this basis, to compensate the fall in profits, by expropriating more surplus-value in relation to invested capi­tal, which means putting cheaper, more competi­tive products on the international market.

With the "solidarity pact" the working class' living conditions can only get worse. Physical exhaustion at work, unemployment and poverty are increasing. Capitalist exploitation is becoming daily more intolerable.

The situation of the working class in Mexico

In Mexico, as in the rest of the world, the proletariat's situation is getting worse. The bourgeoisie's own figures are only a pale re­flection of this reality.

The collapse of the productive base is matched by massive unemployment. It is calcu­lated[4] that 4 million workers have been laid off in Mexico over the last 5 years, which, when combined with youngsters looking for work but unable to find it, brings us to 6 million unem­ployed. The DINA group, which once employed 27,000 workers, is a dramatic example: in 1982 it only employed 10,000, and in 1987 only 5,000; the "pact" will cut the number still further, especially since the decision to sell off seven subsidiaries (accompanied of course by appropri­ate "restructuring" measures, which will mean more lay-offs for the workers).

The immediate result of the "solidarity pact" was the loss of 30,000 jobs (13,000 in the state sector, and 17,000 in the semi-nationalized in­dustries)[5], and the redundancies are continu­ing.

To growing unemployment, is added the fall in the working class' real wage. We can get some idea of this fall if we look at the evolution of the "distribution of income", wages as a percentage of the GDP. In 1977, wages represented 40% of GDP; in 1986, they were 36%, and in 1987 hardly 26%. Everyone recognizes the collapse of the minimum wage (officially, its purchasing power only fell by 6% in 1987). It should be added that there are an incalculable number of workers who earn still less than the minimum, for example the municipal employees of Tampico [a port of some 230,000 inhabitants on the Atlantic coast, ed.] who went on strike to de­mand ... the minimum wage. The higher wage brackets are also falling: in 1976, for example, a university teacher earned 4 times, and a uni­versity worker 1.5 times the minimum wage; to­day, they earn 2.8 and 1.2 times the minimum respectively[6]. Other examples: wages in the maquiladoras[7] in the Northern frontier, re­gions have fallen to the point where they are the lowest assembly-line wages in the world; old-age pensions are only half the minimum wage. Re­searchers are forced to recognize the effects of the reduction in wages on workers' living condi­tions. Thus, for example, "between 1981 and 1985, low-income families (40% of the popula­tion) have suffered a serious decline in their standards of nutrition, to the point where they are below the level recommended by the FAO"[8]. It is also recognized that 100,000 young chil­dren die every year in Mexico for reasons di­rectly due to poverty (malnutrition, parasitic diseases).

The "pact" means a new, brutal and two-fold reduction in wages: on the one hand, cuts in government spending will mean cuts in the social wage -- education, health and other services; on the other, the basic mechanism for controlling inflation relies, as we have just said, on slow­ing down the rise in wages in relation to the rise in prices, or in other words on the falling purchasing power of wages.

To massive unemployment and falling wages should be added the conditions of work imposed by capital: contracts are being broken every­where with the replacement of permanent jobs by temporary ones (with the loss of all kinds of advantages such as holidays, etc), increases in work rates, all measures that the "pact" simply accelerates. One recent example is that of Nis­san, where the bosses wanted to do away with the workers' "leeway" of ten minutes at the begin­ning and end of each shift, which came down to producing an extra 12 cars per day.

Finally, as a direct result of economies in capital invested (which also implies economies in security measures), and of the increase in work rates, there is an increase in the number of "accidents" at work which is even recognized officially. A recent case is "accident" of 25th January in the Cuatro y Medio de Cohauila mine where 49 workers lost their lives; no matter how the authorities try to hide the causes of the collapse that buried the miners, the facts are there: the collapse was due to the explosion of an electrical transformer which in its turn caused the explosion of a highly concentrated pocket of firedamp; this highlighted both the lack of proper maintenance of mine machinery, and of a team to detect and extract the gas. The other miners were afterwards forced to go back to work in the same conditions.

There it is. The whole Mexican situation re­veals the same features of world capitalism. A chronic crisis, which for the proletariat means still more exploitation, still more poverty, and even its physical destruction. A growing social barbarism; a barbarism with no end to it. No "restructuration", no "program" will get capi­talism out of such a situation. For the world capitalist class (including its Mexican frac­tion), the only solution to the crisis would be a new world war as a means of destruction of the means of destruction a thousand times greater than before; this is the only basis which might, hypothetically, open the way to the development of new productive forces and a new division of the world market amongst the victors[9]. But the present capitalist crisis, with the aggrava­tion of living and working conditions it in­volves, is making things move in the minds of millions of proletarians. It is awakening their will to struggle against capitalist exploita­tion, a will which has been crushed under 50 years of triumphant counter-revolution, but which is reappearing on an international level with the massive strikes since the end of the sixties. The Mexican proletariat is also a part of this proletarian awakening.

The class struggle in Mexico

There is only one worldwide working class. Its condition as the exploited class and pro­ducer of all material wealth unites it with the sane historic interests and objectives: the abo­lition of wage labor. The chronic crisis sweeping across the whole planet makes it still more obvious that the conditions of capitalist exploitation are the same in every country throughout the world, whether they be "developed", "under-developed" or "socialist", and clearly demonstrates the united, interna­tional nature of the working class. In this sense, the struggle of the proletariat "in Mex­ico" is only a small part of the united world­wide proletarian struggle, even if for the mo­ment this unity is only determined "objectively" because of the increasing exploitation which ev­erywhere pushes workers to resist, and still de­mands a "subjective" unity, ie conscious and organized by the working class at an international level, in order to carry out its revolutionary objectives.

In the previous issue of Revolucion Mundial, we demonstrated that the Mexican working class is fighting back against capital's economic at­tacks, and that despite its weakness, its limi­tations, and the obstacles that capitalism puts in its way, this fight back is part of the wave of struggles that has swept the world since 1983. Its lynchpin was the strike of 36,000 electrical workers in early 1987, which although it remained under union control managed to involved hundreds of thousands of workers from other industrial branches in one demonstration, just as other fractions of the working class were struggling in other parts of the world.

During the first three months of 1988, Mexico has witnessed a new working class upsurge, which even though they are on a smaller scale than those in other countries nonetheless express the same general tendencies, the same difficulties, and the same confrontation with the attacks of the state.

Strikes have broken out throughout the coun­try almost simultaneously, because it is the "wage round" period of the year, both in the "state" and the "private" sector: in the car factories at Ford in Chihuahua, at General Mo­tors in Mexico City, at Volkswagen in Puebla and shortly afterwards at Nissan in Morelos; in other industries, such as the Quimica y Deriva­dos and the Celanese in Jalisco; at Central de Malta and the public transport system in Puebla; Productos Pesceros at Oaxaca; Aceitera B y G in San Luis Potosi; amongst the dockers of the port of Veracruz; amongst the pressed steel workers at CASA in Mexico City. A strike also broke out in the country's 25 insurance companies and 10 universities. In the regions of Tamaulipas and Sinaloa, the employees of the Ministry of Agri­culture stopped work; the workers on the Mexico City underground called a protest demonstration. And the employees of the Social Security held stoppages in Mexico City and several other provincial towns. All these strikes and stop­pages revolved around the central demands for wage increases and an end to the massive redun­dancies planned by capital. But all these strikes remained isolated, under the iron control of the unions, both "official" (Labor Congress) and "independent" (Bureau of Coordina­tion) -- with one exception: the movement in the Social Security (IMSS), of which we will speak later.

The unions' control over the movement was ex­pressed, for example, in the agreements that they put forward masquerading as "workers' soli­darity", but whose only aim was to put down the struggles: for example, the agreement by the five car industry unions to make each worker still at work give 1,000 pesos a week to "support" those on strike; they thus eradicated the possibility of creating any real solidarity (which can be nothing other than the strike's extension to other factories irrespective of their industrial branch), pretending that pas­sivity and isolation was in fact "support". A similar example is that given by the SUNTU (a sort of federation of unions of university work­ers), whose work was essentially to keep each strikebound university within a framework of separate negotiations.

The unions are always the first barrier in the way of the workers developing their strug­gle. The union is capital's main tool keeping the workers' struggles within the framework of isolated protests, preventing them from taking the road towards their coordination, and unifica­tion, thrusting aside their divisions by indus­trial branch or geographical region (which is possible today thanks to the simultaneity of the struggles themselves).

This is what gives the Social Security work­ers' struggle its importance; their efforts to rid themselves of the union yoke were an example to other workers, on the point of entering into struggle at the same time.

Already in 1986, different categories in the IMSS had mobilized in different parts of the country; now these categories all mobilized to­gether: nurses, doctors, ancillary workers, etc.

The immediate reason for this new struggle was the combined unions and employers sabotage of the contract review, demanding that the work­ers be satisfied with the "wage rise" allotted by the "pact of solidarity". In reply, the workers began spontaneous stoppages in every hospital in the capital, as well as in certain provincial towns, outside and against the offi­cial union; the shop stewards were explicitly identified with the government. The height of the movement was the militant demonstration by 50,000 workers on 29th January, which attracted the solidarity of workers from other parts of the Health Service, as well as of the "colons" (slum-dwellers). The workers also tried to give themselves a representative organism, but this did not come to anything in the end.

The movement was bitterly attacked by the state. The media merely repeated that the au­thorities and the unions would accept no demand made outside "the legal and trade-union frame­work". Many workers were threatened with disci­plinary measures at the workplace; more than a hundred were suspended. The police also came to repress those who barricaded the roads during the strike. But it was capitalism's left that took charge of the most important part of the at­tack on the workers.

Each time that the workers tried to get out of trade union control, it was the left of capi­tal that went to work to put forward a policy -- ­every bit as bourgeois and dangerous for the workers -- of "democratizing" the union, or of creating an "independent" one. Each time, the left attacked on two fronts: on the one hand trying to form a "front" to "put pressure on the union to make it do its job" ... as if it had not already done its job when it openly repressed the workers. On the other hand, by undermining the movement "from the inside", by leading the workers' efforts to organize themselves off towards the creation of a "coordination" which, far from putting forward the needs of the move­ment, gave itself the aim of "winning positions within the trade union in order to democratize it". At the same time, the capitalist left tried to reinforce the sector's strong corporatist tendencies, in order to keep it isolated from the other workers on strike. And this was how the struggle was exhausted without winning one of its demands.

Nonetheless, the struggle in the IMSS has once again demonstrated not only that the union, as an organ of capital, can very well openly suppress the workers' struggle, but more impor­tantly that it is possible to mobilize without relying on the union. This is therefore a step forward, an example for the whole working class to follow, even if sectional and regional dif­ferences, and the isolation of the struggle, still remain to be broken.

In short: the strikes that we have just been through in Mexico, reflect the same tendencies that can be made out in workers' struggles in other countries:

-- firstly, a growing tendency towards simul­taneity: series of strikes, breaking out every­where, in different branches at the same time;

-- attempts to break the control of the union, and in the most exemplaly cases, attempts by the workers to organize the struggle them­selves;

-- to a lesser extent, some demonstrations of solidarity between different branches.

These strikes are facing a concerted attack by the state, with the trade unions in its front line. The unions have not managed to prevent the strikes from breaking out, but on the other hand, they have succeeded in keeping them iso­lated, and within the framework of the demands a "particular" to each sector. Should the workers be determined to get rid of it, union control is certainly capable of changing its mask; it may replace an "official" union with one more "radical", more "independent", or present as "self-organization" something that is merely an empty shell without the slightest proletarian content, and which plays the same role as the union: the isolation and exhaustion of the struggle.

At the same time, the attack is concretized by a constant strengthening of the repressive apparatus, a massive use of police power against workers when they mobilize, and direct repres­sion of certain struggles.

And to all this should be added the campaigns designed to maintain the bourgeoisie's political domination of the workers thanks to the game of "democracy"; today in Mexico, this question is being used to the full in the face of the coming presidential elections. In this way, the oppo­sition parties have tried to channel the discon­tent at the "pact of solidarity" into the elec­tions, in particular by calling marches suppos­edly against the "pact", but which in fact end up asking support for some candidate or another. Lastly, the bourgeois state wants to appear be­fore the workers as something untouchable and unmoveable.

The latest expression of the recent wave of strikes in Mexico was the Aeromexico strike. More than 10,000 workers (essentially ground staff) rose against the company's proposal to decommision 13 aircraft, which would have brought a series of lay-offs in its wake.

Confident that the union had the workers well in hand, the government did not, contrary to what had been feared and to what is usual in "para-state" companies, "requisition" the com­pany,(which would have meant the arrival of the police and the scabs). Instead it let the strike break out, only to declare, after a few days and on the pretext that "the strikes had caused too many losses" that the company was bankrupt, leaving thousands of workers without a job.

It is obvious that on this occasion the state wanted to "give a lesson" not only to this branch but to the whole working class. The mes­sage, abundantly spread by the capitalist media, could not be any clearer: "Strikes are use­less ... workers will have to resign themselves to the inevitable".

But for the working class, the lessons left by these strikes are very different, and so are the perspectives that we should draw out from them.

Perspectives for the workers' struggle

For the moment, the strikes are over. But there is no need to be a magician to see that the workers will be pushed to resist as the cri sis deepens, and it will not be long before the struggle begins again. In fact, throughout the world the tendency is towards a multiplicity of strikes, even if they are still on the defen­sive, still strikes of resistance to capital's economic attacks.

However, as the strikes spread to draw in other fractions of the working class throughout the world, and to reveal attempts at active sol­idarity, to break with the unions and to organize the struggle autonomously, capital's counter-attacks will also be increasingly bit­ter. Confronting an enemy less and less s ready to accord any of their demands, each new strug­gle will become harder, will demand of the work­ers greater determination and energy. Each na­tional fraction of world capital will try to crush the struggle by any means at its disposal so as not to risk losing an inch of ground in the competition for markets.

For a long time already, isolated strikes of resistance have been unable to wrest the slight­est satisfaction of their demands from capital. Today, only a truly massive and militant strug­gle, involving hundreds and thousands of workers can hope to halt momentarily capital's economic attacks, and even this is becoming more and more difficult. This means that as long as the chronic crisis continues, the development of de­fensive struggles cannot bring about any real and lasting improvement for the workers. Conse­quently, the struggle can only advance through greater extension, the deepening of its aims, the passage from isolated struggles for particu­lar demands to a general and organized struggle for class objectives. The present efforts at solidarity and self-organization demonstrate this tendency.

But the defensive struggles will not take this direction automatically as a result of the crisis; it will demand a further effort by the working class to regain, assimilate and pass on the experience of its struggles, both recent and historic: the experience that demonstrates the need to rise from the struggles whose aim is simply to get rid the effects of capitalist ex­ploitation, to the struggle that aims to put an end to this exploitation definitively. To do so, the class will have to overthrow the bour­geoisie, seize political power, and install the dictatorship of the proletariat. This demands therefore that the proletariat raise itself to a consciousness of its historic revolutionary ob­jectives. This is a collective effort of the entire working class, within which the revolu­tionary organization (and later the World Party), as the most active and conscious part of the class, has a determining role to play. In the end, the result of the combat for class con­sciousness will be decisive in the class con­frontations to come.

Ldo. May 1988

---

[1]See Revolucion Mundial nos. 1 and 3. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a figure of bourgeois economy, which to an extent expresses economic growth from one year to the next. How­ever, it should be born in mind that, given the "scientists'" theoretical assumptions (division of the economy into industrial, agricultural and financial "sectors"; added value, etc) and their manipulation of the results, this kind of figure presents reality in a manner deformed according to the interests of capital.

[2]The tendency to "hyper-inflation" was obvious for anyone capable of adding two and two:

(GRAPH)

Inflation (annual percentage) / year  

[3]In the next phase of the game, the winners also recover at rock-bottom prices the actions issued, as well as keeping their cost. This is why the stock exchange seemed afterwards to re­cover to some extent.  

[4]According to data from the SIPRO (Servicios Informativos y Procesados AC), which coincides with that from other sources.

[5]Official report on the "pact" from the Secretariat of the Presidency, March 1988.

[6]Uno mas Uno, 27/01/88.  

[7]The "maquiladoras" are generally elec­tronic and automobile component industries set up by foreign capital, whose output is destined for the US market (which is why they are usually installed on the northern frontier). The table below shows the wages paid in these "maquiladoras" in relation to those in other countries:

Average basic hourly wage	1986
South Korea	$3.65
Taiwan	$2.95
Singapore	$2.30
Hongkong	$2.05
Jamaica	$1.25
Costa Rica	$1.05
Dominican Republic	$0.95
Mexico	$0.85
Source: El Financiero, 10/08/87

[8]Le Monde Diplomatique, Spanish version, Dec 1987

[9]The Mexican bourgeoisie took part in World War II, for example, not so much with troops (whose .presence· was purely symbolic), but by supplying raw materials. Afterwards, it bene­fited from the period of post-war reconstruc­tion, which made possible the country's rapid industrialization.

Introduction

70 years ago the proletariat in Germany threw itself into the most important experience of its history. It undertook the task of carrying forward the flame of the revolution, which the Russian proletariat had lit in 1917, and of spreading it to Western Europe.

Everywhere in Germany workers' and soldiers' were founded in the first days of November. The example of the workers in Russia, which was also taken up by the workers in Aus­tria and in Hungary, and to a certain extent in Italy as well, was to serve as a magnificent stimulus.

Revolutionaries had put all their hopes on Germany, because, more than any other section of the proletariat, the working class there, due to its key position in Europe, could come to the help of the isolated workers in Russia, by smashing the capitalist class in Germany and thus opening up the road towards world revolution.

The fate of the international working class, even of the whole of humanity, lay in the hands of the working class in Germany. Its capacity to push through a victorious revolution, to conquer power and to maintain it was to be decisive for the further course of the struggles in Russia, in the centre of Europe and on a world scale.

But as gigantic as the responsibility and the task of the working class in Germany were, just as tremendous were the obstacles that it had to push aside, because the proletariat was facing a capitalist class which was well-experienced and well-equipped in facing the working class. As, a ruling class of an industrialized country it was capable of mounting a much fiercer resistance than the bourgeoisie in  Russia, which had been chased away by the proletariat relatively rapidly without any bloodshed.

All the revolutionaries were aware of this. Thus Lenin wrote on 23.7.1918: "For us it was easier to start the revolution, but it is extremely difficult for us to continue and accom­plish it. And the revolution has tremendous dif­ficulties in coming about in such a highly industrialized country as Germany, in a country with such a well-organize bourgeoisie" (Lenin, Speech at a Moscow Conference of delegates of the factory committees, 23.7.1918).

And seeing what was at stake, revolutionaries in Russia in particular were ready to come to the help of the workers in Germany. Well before the actual outbreak of the workers' rising, Lenin wrote on Oct.1.1918: "For the German working masses we are preparing ... a fraternal alliance, bread and military aid. We will all put our life at risk, in order to help the German workers push forward the revolution which has started in Germany" (Lenin, 1.10.1918, letter to Sverdlov, in: Lenin, On Germany and the German Workers' Movement, Berlin, 1957, p. 448).

But the German bourgeoisie also got the support of the ruling class of the other countries, in particular of the ‘winners' of the First World War, who were scared by the specter of the spread of the proletarian world revolution. Whereas before the various national bourgeoisies had been trying to rip off each others' territories on the battlefields of the imperialist war at the expense of more than 20 million dead and an uncountable number of injured, they were now ready to close their ranks vis-a-vis a working class fighting on its class terrain. Once again it turned out to be true that the ruling class, divided by its very nature, can unify in a revo­lutionary situation in order to stand up against the working class. The ruling class in Germany had also started quickly learning the lessons of the revolution in Russia, in order to fight against the working class on the basis of this experience.

The onslaught of the working class in Germany against the capitalist regime was blocked by the bourgeoisie. More than 20,000 workers were massacred and more injured between 1918 and the begenning of the 1920s. The bourgeoisie in Germany managed to decapitate the leadership of the proletariat. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by the SPD-organized Freikorps in the January rising of 1919. Even though the KPD, which had been founded in the heat of the strug­gles in Dec .1918/Jan.1919 was one of the first to declare itself against the unions and parlia­ment, it stepped into these struggles with in­sufficiently elaborated programmatic positions, was organizationally ill-prepared, and split up a short time after its foundation. Politically weakened, the proletariat was not able to over­come these weaknesses in the course of its struggles.

The attempts to extend the revolutionary wave beyond the Russian borders were blunted through the defeat of the working class in Germany. This was to have catastrophic consequences for the international working class, since, as a result of the defeat of the struggles in Germany, the bourgeoisie was able to begin a worldwide offensive against the working class. This placed the workers in Russia in an even more isolated situation in face of the attacks of the White Armies. The smashing of the revolutionary strug­gles in Germany, and through this the isolation of the workers in Russia, thus accelerated the defeat of the revolution in Russia, where the backbone of an isolated proletariat could also be broken.

The struggles in Germany and Russia: the same force dynamized them, the same perspective united them

The struggles in Germany were stimulated by the same driving force as the struggles of the working class in Russia.

After the mobilization of the working class in Germany on the battlefield for the imperial­ist war aims of the German bourgeoisie, which had been facilitated through the betrayal of the parliamentary fraction of the SPD in August 1914, and after the unions had maintained a relative calm in the factories and in the working class as a whole in the first years of the war, the working class, from 1916 on, slowly began raise its head. The wave of wildcat strikes which from winter 1917 on began to shake the armaments industry, the growing resistance against war and its miseries. These workers' strug­gles, which were clearly under the influence of the Russian revolution, showed that in Germany too the working class, despite a significant weakening through the war, was not yet defeated. On the contrary, it was in the process of stand­ing up against the policy of ‘burgfrieden', class peace on the home front. This strike wave thus smashed the social peace which the unions and capital had agreed on at the beginning of the war. This agreement not only irreversibly brought the unions over into the camp of the bourgeoisie, but also constituted an irreplace­able pillar of the domination of capital.

The movement of Nov. 1918 put forward the same demands as had been raised a year before by the workers in Russia: bread and peace. The movement against the war began not at the front, but in the factories.

Its central unifying point was therefore the struggle against hunger, against the continua­tion of the war. It was necessary to bring down the ruling class in order to satisfy these de­mands.

That's why the Spartakists and Rosa Luxemburg summed up the goal and the first measures which would have to be taken in the following terms:

"The goal of the revolution (the abolition of the rule of capital, the achievement of the so­cialist order of society), clearly indicates its path, the task dictates the method. All power in the hands of the working masses, in the hands of the workers' and soldiers' councils, securing the work of the revolution in face of its cower­ing enemies: this is the orientation for all the measures of the revolutionary government:

-- the further development and the re-election of the local workers' and soldiers' councils in order that the first chaotic and impulsive ges­ture of their emergence can be replaced through the conscious process of self-understanding about the goals, tasks and the path of the revo­lution,

-- the permanent coming together of these rep­resentatives of the masses and the handing over of real political power from the tiny committee of the Vollzugsrat (executive council) to the broad foundation of the workers' and soldiers' councils,

-- formation of a proletarian red guard,

-- the immediate call for a world workers'congress in Germany in order to sharply and clearly stress the socialist and international character of the revolution. The international, the world r evolution of the proletariat is the sole anchor-point of the future of the German revolution" (‘The Beginning', 18.11.1918, R. Luxemburg, Selected Works, vol. 4, East-German Edition, p. 398).

Everywhere the workers were in the centre of the struggles. The workers came together in workers' and soldiers' councils in almost every big city. The trade unions, which during the war showed themselves to be the best bulwark of cap­ital, lost influence during this initial phase. As Lenin had pointed out, the workers' and sol­diers' councils proved themselves to be the finally discovered form for the organization of the workers' revolution. The workers came together in demonstrations in order to close their ranks as one class, in order to show their true force in society. Countless demos took place in Nov-Dec. in most big German cities. They were the point of unification of the working class beyond all factory and district limits. That's why the communists emphasized them so much in their agitation: "In times of revolutionary cri­sis, the masses belong as a matter of course out on the streets. They are the sole haven, the sole security of the revolution ... Their very presence, their contact with each other is a menace and a warning against all open and hidden enemies of the revolution" (‘Unaccomplished du­ties', R. Luxemburg, Jan. 8, 1919, Vol. 4, p , 524).

Just like in Russia the workers held meetings in the factories where resolutions were passed, delegations appointed, and measures taken against the state institutions.

The forms of struggle, which in the decadence of capitalism were to become the typical weapons of the proletariat, were applied: wildcat strikes, the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils as unitary organs of the class, mass demonstrations bringing together all workers, regardless of their profession, whether or not they were employed, the self-initiative of the workers themselves. As the workers' councils themselves and the revolutionaries at their head had proclaimed in Russia, the perspective of this movement consisted at once in the immediate extension of the revolution and the construction of a communist society.

" ... the moment of the final reckoning with capitalist class domination has come. But this great task cannot be fulfilled by the German proletariat alone. It can only struggle and win if it calls for the solidarity of the proletarians of the entire world" (‘To the Proletarians of All Countries', Nov.25, 1918, Spartakusbund).

The workers had massacred each other as cannon fodder in favor of each national capital in the imperialist war. The working class in Eu­rope was divided through this nationalist poi­son. Particularly in the ‘victorious' countries like France, the bourgeoisie was able to use this ‘victory' to keep chauvinism and national­ism alive in the working class. The Spartakists, taking into consideration this weakness of the international proletariat, and convinced as they were of the necessity of the extension of the revolution, thus proclaimed:

"Remember. Your victorious capitalists are prepared to bloodily suppress our revolution which they fear as much as their own, You yourselves have not become any freer through ‘victory', you have become only all the more enslaved. Should your ruling classes succeed in strangling the proletarian revolution in Germany and in Russia, they will turn against you with doubled ferocity ...

Elect workers' and soldiers' councils every­where in order to seize political power and to establish peace together with us ..." (ibid.).

The working class in Russia succeeded in top­pling the bourgeois government after months of the polarization of power between the soviets and the Provisional Government, in order to seize power itself through the soviets. The Provisional Government could be brought down with­out much bloodshed. The workers' and soldiers' councils were able to rapidly exercise a real control over the country. It was only some time after the successful taking of power through the workers' and soldiers' councils that the bour­geoisie could begin an effective counter-offen­sive which threw the country into a civil war. This in turn drained the blood of the workers and peasants and eventually resulted in depriv­ing them of any real power.

Although the movement in Germany was carried by the working class, which put forward the same perspectives as the struggles of the workers in Russia, the workers in Germany did not succeed in bringing down the capitalist class. The bour­geoisie torpedoed the power of the workers' and soldiers' councils from the very beginning. It never allowed for the formation of a new centre of the rule of the workers. It provoked prema­ture military confrontations at a moment when the working class was not yet ripe for the in­surrection. It immediately sought armed con­frontation and inflicted devastating blows against the workers on a military terrain after having politically prepared this terrain. The most important aspect of this was the political disarming and then the political destruction of the Berlin workers' and soldiers' councils, which survived in name only (and whose very name was employed by capital against the revolution).

The social democrats' grip on the councils, the transformation of the latter into organs controlled by the bourgeois state, had the ef­fect of destroying the councils from within. From being proletarian organs for the class organization of the proletariat and the destruc­tion of the bourgeois state, they became a cover for the social democratic state before being definitively suppressed by the setting up of the National Assembly. Strengthened by its control over the councils, social democracy could organize the provocation of 1919 in Berlin to decapi­tate the proletarian movement and the Spartakist party.

The ascent of the movement in Nov./Dec. was broken in the first months of 1919. With the help of the Freikorps, a counter-revolutionary military force set up in the wake of the disso­lution of the regular army at the end of the war with the aid of the SPD government, the bourgeoisie succeeded in massacring the workers in Berlin in January, in Bremen in February, in March in Central Germany and on the Ruhr, in April/May in Munich; one after the other, town by town, region by region, in one packet after another, crushing the backbone of the movement.

Although this did not put an end to the com­bativity of the working class, which kept, re­turning to the path of struggle up until 1923 (from the rising against the Kapp-Putsch in 1920 up until the rising in Central Germany and in Hamburg in 1923), in fact the movement was in retreat from the first months of 1919 on.

The origins of the defeat at the heart of the revolutionary wave

Just as with the failure of the previous most important workers' insurrections, 1848, 1871, 1905, the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave was not simply the result of the mistakes or even the absence of a revolutionary vanguard. In the same way, the defeat of the working class in Germany cannot simply be explained through the weak influence of the Communist Party. The relatively weak influence of the KPD reflected in its turn a deeply rooted weakness of the working class itself: the difficulty in under­standing the fundamental change in the communist perspective brought about by the beginning of a new historic period, that of the decadence and decomposition of the capitalist mode of produc­tion.

It's true that the delay in the formation of revolutionary fractions in Germany before the war was to hold back the communist minority's capacity to deal with the revolutionary situation at the end of the war. The Communist Party was formed too late and too hastily under the pressure of the November revolution, without a long tradition of struggles and of combat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois fract­ions in social democracy, whose counter-revolutionary policies were clearly revealed in 1914.

However, what also has to be understood is that the war was not the best condition for the victorious outcome of the revolution.

Indeed, although both the Paris Commune and the mass strike of 1905 in Russia broke out at moments when war was taking place, the marxist movement had generally expected that the revolu­tion would be triggered off, not in reaction to war, but as the final consequence of the prole­tariat's resistance to the economic crisis.

The rapid fall of capitalism into the blood­bath of First World War made it incomparably more difficult for the working class to develop a full consciousness about the real gravity and significance of this war. Since the workers had witnessed above all the bestial slaughter of the war, they were conscious mainly of the consequences of this war, without yet being aware of the other consequences of capitalist decadence.

This fact already led Luxemburg to draw the following conclusion:

"Departing from the basis of historical de­velopment, one cannot expect that a Germany which has presented the terrible picture of Au­gust 4 (1914) and the four years which followed could suddenly on Nov. 9 1918 experience a magnificent class conscious revolution, fully aware of its goals. What we have lived through on Nov. 9 1918 was three quarters more a col­lapse of the existing imperialism than the vic­tory of a new principle. The moment had quite simply come at which this imperialism, like a giant with feet of clay, rotten from within, just had to collapse. What followed that was a more or less chaotic, unplanned, not highly con­scious movement, in which the sole link and the remaining saving principle was summarized only in the slogan: formation of workers' and sol­diers' councils" (Founding Congress of the KPD, 1918/1919, Collected Works, Volume 4, page. 497).

Although capitalism at that time had entered its decadent phase, this did not automatically and mechanically lead the working class to understand all the implications of the change of the period. The working class still suffered from the weight of reformism and was not able to draw all the lessons of this new epoch as quickly as the events themselves evolved.

This is why the illusion of a return to the prosperity of the 19th century was reinforced the moment the bourgeoisie conceded the demand for peace.

(To be continued)

Dino, Summer 1988

IR 55, 4th Quarter, 1988

If we were to limit ourselves to a superficial examination of the state of the international political milieu, we could easily get depressed. Existing groups have split (A Contre Courant from the GCI, the Groppo Leninista Internazionalista from the OCI), are degenerating (Daad an Gedachte has capitulated to democratic frontism through support for the anti-apartheid front in South Africa, the EFICC has more and more put into discussion the programmatic bases of the ICC from which it emerged), or are losing their way (Communisme ou Civilisation has discredited itself by proposing in a completely unserious way to put out ‘communist journals’ with anyone who cares to listen to it; Comunismo, the former Alptraum Collective, has overnight decided that it no longer agrees with the concept of decadence, upon which all its positions were based). Or, more simply, they have just disappeared (self-dissolution of Wildcat, gradual disappearance through self-dissolution into the void of the numerous fragments which survived the explosion of Programme Communiste).

It is in fact on the basis of the impressions received from such an examination that there has developed in the milieu an atmosphere of depression and pessimism, leading some of the veterans of 68 of proclaim that the time has come for “self-critical balance sheets”. [1]  And these balance sheets nearly all go in the same direction: despite the crisis, despite some important struggles by the working class, the influence and numerical importance of the revolutionaries have not grown, while at the same time the threat of war is still there... Thus everything is lost, or virtually lost.

In the first part of this article, we aim to show how this attitude of ‘retreat’:

-- does not in reality correspond to the state of the proletarian milieu

-- serves only to provide an ideological cover for the incapacity of a good part of the milieu to assume its responsibilities vis-a-vis the necessities of the class struggle.

In the context of this confusion, the responsibility that weighs on the shoulders of the two poles of regroupment, the ICC and the IBRP, is all the greater, since they are called upon to build a rampart against this insidious wave of distrust and desertion. In the second part of the article we will show how, because of its congenital incapacity to confront and resolve its internal contradictions, the IBRP is finding it more and more difficult to carry out this task and to provide an orientation for the debates within the milieu as a whole.

DEFEATISM AGAINST REVOLUTIONARY MILITANTISM

Although you can find signs of an attitude of distrust in the possibility of revolutionaries playing a role in the class struggle among nearly all the groups, their clearest expressions can obviously be seen in these groups who make distrust about the intervention of revolutionaries their sole reason for existence. The most exemplary case is without doubt that of the External Fraction of the ICC (EFICC), whose militants deserted the ICC in an irresponsible manner, under the pretext that it had so degenerated that it was no longer possible to struggle within it to prevent it throwing its original platform onto the scrap-heap. The falsity of this assertion is obvious today: three years later, the ICC has more and more strengthened its defence of its platform, whereas it’s the EFICC which is more and more discovering its ‘limits’. In reality, the divergence was on the analysis of the dynamic of the class struggle and the tendency for these comrades to arbitrarily give pride of place to internal debate above militant intervention in the class struggle. The EFICC denied this with virtuous indignation for three years, but now, given the pessimistic ambience reigning in the milieu, it has plucked up its courage and put its cards on the table. In issue no. 9 of International Perspective, we discover that “at the basis of the degeneration” of the ICC, there is the stagnation and degeneration of the whole milieu, and that, far from strengthening itself, it is today far weaker and more divided by sectarianism that it ever was in the 70s”. Consequently, we must have the courage to recognise that “in this period, theoretical elaboration (of which clarity in intervention is an integral part) is a much higher priority than organisation building... Therefore political clarification is our main task today.”

So finally we have a theorisation of what for three years was the EFICC’s practice of non-intervention in the class struggle. Naturally, such a regression, such an abandonment of militant commitment can only be greeted with enthusiasm by that part of the milieu which has always based its existence on a rejection of this militant responsibility in the confrontations of the workers’ struggle. Communisme ou Civilisation has already rejoiced in the steps the EFICC has taken in this direction: “next to the theoretical desert of the ICC, the EFICC’s prose can be compared to an oasis” (Communisme ou Civilisation. 22, May 87).

But it’s another sect which makes the struggle against the ICC its sole reason for existing, the Communist Bulletin Group (CBG), which has shown the greatest enthusiasm. This group (which put itself outside the proletarian political camp with its support for the gangsterist actions of the adventurer Chenier against the ICC in 1981) has rushed to declare itself “entirely in agreement” with the conclusions of the EFICC, or rather, and here it’s quite right, has underlined that the EFICC is now reaching the same exalted level of struggle against any militant, centralised communist activity that the CBG triumphantly attained at the beginning of the ‘80s. It is thus seizing a favourable moment for its defeatist propaganda that has finally ‘found an echo’. No. 13 of its bulletin immediately put at the disposal of those who have doubts and hesitations a ‘coherent’; theorisation of defeatism which is based on the following points:

1) “As the EFICC points out our fundamental assumption that the deepening economic crisis would find its counterpart in deepening class struggle and a corresponding growth in the size and influence of revolutionary fractions has been confounded by reality”.

2) The milieu developed positively from 68 to 75: “at that point the revolutionary movement had reached a plateau”. After that, “there has been no growth in numbers and influence... In many ways the milieu is weaker now than it was a decade ago.”

3) “Divisions which were emergent in the 1970s have now hardened into dogmatic barriers of such strength that it is difficult to see how they can be overcome. Certainly it does not seem at all to be correct to believe that greater militancy in the working class will draw revolutionaries together”.

The conclusions are predictable: we have to stop the effort to build a centralised organisation whose task is to intervene in the class struggle; we have to dedicate ourselves to a work of study and of ‘open’ debate, in which will participate, at a level of formal equality, militant organisations, individuals, and circles who have nothing better to do. This ‘fraternal’ academic debate will of course pose the bases for the future party of the proletariat.

Such theorisations can’t fail to find an echo here and there. The former Alptraum Communist Collective in Mexico, now Comunismo, would certainly be in agreement, since it has now resolved its long hesitations about intervening in the class struggle by denying the necessity for intervention and the reality of the class struggle today (both inventions of the ICC...) and by deciding that its sole task is the publication of a theoretical journal (with Communisme ou Civilisation, funnily enough), while awaiting the all-powerful party of tomorrow.

The comical side of this tendency towards strategic retreat is that it conglomerates into a single front both the partisans of the one and only, iron-hard, monolithic party (Communisme ou Civilisation, Comunismo), and the admirers of an ‘open’, democratic party, in which everyone is free to say and do whatever they please (EFICC, CBG). The only two things that unite this disparate front are:

-- the hope of living long enough to witness this ‘collapse’ of the ICC which they’ve been waiting for so long but which never comes;

-- the absolute conviction that in the present conditions of the class struggle, the intervention of revolutionaries plays no real role.

The two things are obviously interconnected: the ICC is today the main pole of regroupment in the international proletarian milieu, and the most determined defender of the role of revolutionaries in the class struggle. This means that any attempt to put this role into question is obliged to settle accounts with the ICC. But this also means that the ICC is ready to settle accounts with any effort in this direction, by going through the arguments one by one. This is what we have done and what we intend to continue doing.

THE DIFFICULT ADVANCES OF THE PROLETARIAN POLITICAL MILIEU

You can find a more detailed response to the attempts to falsify the last 20 years of the history of the workers’ movement in the series of articles ‘The evolution of the proletarian political milieu after 68’ (IR 53 and 54), and we refer readers to these articles. In the present article, we will therefore limit ourselves to replying to the various basic affirmations contained in the CBG’s theorisations about the milieu and shared by a good part of the milieu itself.

Let’s begin with the central observation, according to which the revolutionary movement grew numerically and politically from 68 to 75, then stagnated numerically and regressed politically. In order to present things in this way, it is necessary to falsify shamelessly the real dynamic of events. It is absolutely true that the years 68-75 saw a whole process of decantation and of politicisation around the French group Revolution Internationale, which led to an international regroupment in the ICC, and to one limited in Britain in the CWO. But it’s also true that the years 72-75 saw the outbreak of the ‘modernist’ mode, with the ensuing abandonment of marxism by an enormous number of militants who, in those years, had only just broken with the extra-parliamentary groups to discover the positions of the communist left. If the CBG thinks it can stir us by talking of the ‘good old days’ where it seemed that everything was moving towards the positions of the communist left, then it’s come to the wrong address. The fact that thousands of individuals, who the day before had sworn by Trotsky’s Transitional Programme or Mao’s Bloc of Four Classes, should suddenly start quoting Pannekoek and Bordiga, was not a strength but a weakness, and above all a very serious danger for the revolutionary movement.

If we were able to regroup a small part of these comrades in a homogeneous political organisation, it is because we understood and said all that at the time and not just today:

“The international reappearance of a communist current is laborious, uncertain, tentative, and it is late in relation to the resurgence of the class struggle. What’s more, it is often due to the conjuncture of elements coming together more by chance than by an historical determination. But at the same time, the long purgatory that the existing groups have gone through and the crises provoked within them by the increasingly opportunist, recruiting-sergeant, boot-licking course followed by the radical currents coming from the counter-revolution (Trotskyism mainly) will result and has already resulted in our ideas suddenly coming into fashion. Numerical weakness will no longer be the heavy burden our current bears; the main danger will be that of being ‘too many’, of being diluted into a mass of elements who have not yet fully understood our positions and their implications.” (Bulletin d’Etude et de Discussion de Revolution Internationale, no. 4, Jan 74).

We were able to constitute what is today the main pole of regroupment precisely because we did not lose our heads over the fact that the positions of the communist left suddenly came into fashion, but rigorously differentiated ourselves from all those who rejected political demarcations around clear positions. It was not by chance that, already in 1975, the constitution of the ICC was greeted by a unanimous choir of accusations about ‘monolithism’, ‘sectarianism’, ‘closing off from other groups’, ‘paranoiac isolation’, ‘thinking that we were the only depositories of truth’, etc from a whole crowd of circles and individuals who, one year later, fortunately dissolved themselves into the void.

The years between 1975 and 1980, far from showing that there was a new stagnation of the revolutionary milieu, were characterised by the fact that they saw an evolution in the majority of the groups in the milieu, whereas many of them had indeed stagnated during the phase of confrontation and regroupment in the years 1968-75. The whole milieu subdivided into three main tendencies:

a) isolation in passivity and academicism (the vestiges of the historical councilist current);

b) isolation in activism devoid of principles (Programme Comuniste, which throughout the 70s had been the main communist organisation);

c) the break with isolation through confrontation and political debate (the international conferences of the groups of the communist left, animated by Battaglia Comunista and the ICC).

The first balance sheet that we can draw is that the conferences were the first dynamic element capable of polarising the WHOLE milieu; in fact, even the groups who did not participate (Spartacusbond, Programme Comuniste, etc.) felt obliged to justify publicly their refusal. The second balance sheet is that, beyond the immediate results, which certainly did exist (rapprochement between Battaglia and the CWO, fusion of the NCI and Il Leninista, birth of a section of the ICC in Sweden), the conferences remain an acquisition for the future:

“The bulletins published in three languages after each conference and containing the various written contributions and the accounts of all the discussions have remained an indispensable reference for all the elements or groups which have since come to revolutionary positions.” (‘Evolution of the revolutionary milieu since 68’, IR 54.

The ideologues of the retreat are careful not to talk about any of this: the fact that the positions of the communist left are now present in India and are being defended in Latin America is probably for them nothing but an ‘exotic curiosity’. But let’s move on to another point, to the idea that the influence of the communist minority has not grown in parallel with the crisis and the class struggle. Naturally, if by influence one understands the number of workers directly organised in revolutionary organisations, then it’s clear that it hasn’t grown much. But in the decadent phase of capitalism, the influence of the revolutionary minority is manifested in a very different way; it is manifested in the capacity to play a role of political leadership within the significant struggles of the class. It’s on the basis of the strengthening of this capacity to push the struggles forward, to politically influence the most active, most militant workers that the conditions will develop for the integration of a growing number of worker militants into the revolutionary organisations.

If we consider things from this point of view, the marxist point of view, it’s a simple fact that in the last few years the organisations which, like the ICC, have maintained a constant pressure at the level of intervention in the class struggle, have been for the FIRST TIME capable of influencing minority sectors of the class in the course of wide-scale struggles, as was the case with the French railway workers or the Italian teachers. This never happened and COULD NOT have happened in the 70s, because the conditions for it did not yet exist [2]. Today, THIS IS BEGINNING TO BE POSSIBLE, thanks to the maturation of the crisis, of the class struggle AND of those communist organisations who have managed to come through the process of selection which has taken place over these last few years.

Finally, let’s deal with the third dolorous proposition: the notion that today the milieu is more divided and sectarian than in the 70s and that the class struggle itself cannot push the revolutionaries to discuss among themselves.

We have already seen that this pessimistic vision does not take into account the fact that the majority of the revolutionary milieu in the years 68-75 stayed rigorously outside any dynamic towards contact and discussion, whereas today, the two main poles of regroupment which exist at an international level – the ICC and the IBRP – both defend, even though in different terms, the necessity for a debate.

It’s no accident that the new groups that are now appearing, in particular on the peripheries of capitalism, tend immediately to refer themselves to the debates between these two poles. Today, however displeasing it may be to those who believe that debate between revolutionaries is a type of supermarket which, in order to be rich and satisfying, has to offer a choice between thousands of diverse products, this selection process is not an ‘impoverishment’ but a step forward. This polarisation allows the new elements to situate themselves clearly with regard to the FUNDAMENTAL political divergences that exist between the main currents of the revolutionary movement, instead of getting lost in the thousand secondary refinements of this or that sect. It’s obvious that this is bad news for the sects, and explains why they are screaming about the ‘strengthening of divisions’; what makes them cry so loud is simply the acceleration of history, i.e. of the crisis and the class struggle, which is continually pushing towards the decantation of the revolutionary camp. It is this acceleration that has compelled the comrades of Wildcat to recognise that they had reached a dead-end and to dissolve a group that was nothing but a source of confusion. It is this acceleration that has made possible the relatively rapid process through which a milieu of Mexican militants has managed to break with the counter-revolution, giving rise to a new communist group, the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista. It was the obligation to take account of this acceleration, which has given rise to this MILITANT communist group, that finally pushed the already existing group in Mexico, the Alptraum Collective, to resolve its six years of hesitations about militant commitment, by opting for the suicide of academic regression. Even a negative choice of this type is in any case preferable to ambiguity: from now on, the Mexican elements in search of a class coherence will be faced with a clear choice: either a commitment to revolutionary militancy with the GPI, or the hobby of discussions with no implications in Comunismo, ex-Alptraum (if in any case the latter survives at all).

The question of militant intervention in the class struggle is therefore becoming a factor of clarification and selection. But what is most important is that, contrary to the sombre prophecies of the birds of ill omen, intervention is also beginning to be a factor of INTERACTION among revolutionaries.

The progressive emergence of a definitely class conscious minority, which showed itself openly in the school workers’ struggle in Italy, has also and above all been the result of an ORGANISED and JOINT work on the part of the internationalist militants who participated in the struggle (militants of the ICC, of Battaglia, and of the Bordigist group Il Partito Comunista).

This is only a small example, but it is nevertheless the FIRST EXAMPLE of a collaboration in the struggle which the deepening of the class movement will no doubt make much more frequent.

The consequences for the whole milieu are obvious: the debates – often rather abstract – of the past will tend to deepen thanks to the confrontation of positions with the reality of the class struggle. Very good for the debate, very bad for the parasitic groups who have little or nothing to do with the class struggle.

THE IBRP AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE: A FEW CONTRADICTIONS TOO MANY

In this second part of the article, we will examine the difficulties encountered by the IBRP (the biggest pole of international regroupment after the ICC) in mounting an adequate resistance to the wave of defeatism that is flowing through the revolutionary milieu.

The first difficulty comes from the fact that the IBRP is itself the victim of a pessimistic vision of the present movement of the class struggle, and so finds itself poorly placed to resist the defeatist propaganda. In the previous issue of the International Review we looked more specifically at the question of the underestimation of the present class struggle by the milieu and by the IBRP in particular, while in nos. 50 and 51 we dealt with the IBRP’s incomprehension’s about the historic course and the union question. In this article, we will return specifically to a problem that we have underlined more than once: the growing contradictions in the positions taken up by the IBRP on all the questions of the hour.

For reasons of space, we will limit ourselves to one example that seems to us to be particularly significant. We want to talk about the central question, i.e. the level of the class struggle and whether or not there is a possibility for revolutionaries to play a role within it. In the now famous letter of June 87 from the IBRP to the Alptraum Collective, amply criticised by us in the previous issue of the IR, the struggle of the school workers in Italy, which for months was organised through the COBAS, was put at the same level as that of professionals such as pilots and magistrates, and thus left to its own devises more or less until the summer. In autumn 87 the CWO held its annual general meeting, which made a theory about the profound coma of the British proletariat and the Thatcher nightmare; and in its perspectives, given that there was a “period of social calm”, affirmed that “we have more need for, and more time for, a shift towards theoretical work: (Workers’ Voice no. 39. Feb-March 88).

In February 88 the annual assembly of Battaglia Comunista affirmed that:

“With the affair of the COBAS a new and interesting phase of the class struggle has begun in Italy, one which offers our organisation the possibility of arousing an interest from within the movement which is certainly greater than in the past.... The comrades of the CWO who intervened at the meeting referred to the recent developments in the class struggle in Britain: there were now strikes where there had been none before, and even solidarity strikes between workers of different sectors. These struggles also confirm the beginning of a period marked by the accentuation of class conflicts.” (from the report published in Bataglia Comunista no. 3, March 88).

As we can see, both the particular analysis of the situation in Italy and Britain, and the consequences drawn from it on a general level (“the  beginning of a period marked by the accentuation of class conflicts”) are in total contradiction (fortunately) with the preceding analyses. What is striking is that no. 39 of Workers’ Voice, which came out AFTER the wave of struggles in Britain, still contained, WITHOUT A WORD OF CRITICISM, the perspectives of the annual meeting of the CWO which were founded on the "demoralisation and passivity" of the British and world proletariat. What then, in Feb-March 88, was the position of the comrades of the CWO? The optimistic one published in Battaglia, or the pessimistic one published in Workers’ Voice?

The situation seems to get clearer in WV 40 of April-May 88, where, in the introduction to the article on May 68 (“the first generalised awakening of the class struggle after the years of post-war reconstruction”), it is nearly stated that “the last months have seen stirrings in the UK, Germany and elsewhere that foretell a renewal of the social conflict”. But any hope of having finally understood the position of these comrades is short-lived. A few weeks later, the CWO sends a letter to the Communist Bulletin Group on the same questions:

“...broadly speaking we have rejected what we feel is our last baggage from the ICC, i.e. the idea that May 68 opened up a new period, the end of the counter-revolution and the beginning of a new revolutionary period... what we are now definite about is that this is NOT  a ‘pre-revolutionary period’, but a continuation of the capitalist domination that has reigned, to be only fitfully contested, since the end of the posit-WW1 revolutionary wave. There are, as I’m sure you will agree, many consequences of this... The vanguard is doing badly because this is not a period of ‘pre-revolution’ but a period of (increasing) capitalist domination” (letter published in no. 13 of the Communist Bulletin).

This letter not only totally negates what was written in WV 40, which was being distributed at the same time, but also represents an UNCONDTIONAL CAPITULATION to the defeatist pressure coming from the parasitic elements in or around the milieu, and from the CBG in particular... Let us note that the CWO took the trouble to say that it had no objection to the publication of this letter. It was thus with great concern that we opened WV 41 which was to contain an article on the 20 years since 68 as promised in the letter to the CBG. But here was another volte-face; the article on 68 was not there, but there was on the other hand an article on the revolutionary milieu, which says:

“However, the May events in France in 1968 were the first of many workers’ strikes which signalled the end of the post-war capitalist boom... This gave birth to the present proletarian political camp... in recent years there has been a growth of communist groups in the capitalist periphery.”

This is exactly the opposite of what was written in the letter being published at the same moment in the Bulletin.

The least one can say is that on this question there are at least three different positions in the IBRP:

-- CWO no. 1: yesterday, end of the counter-revolution in 68, today, revival of struggles;

-- CWO no. 2: yesterday, no change in 68, today, growing domination of capital;

-- BC no. 3: yesterday no change in 68, today “something is beginning to move, even if it’s not yet sufficient” (Prometeo  no. 11, Dec 87).

We thus have three positions or perhaps four, since at the public meeting held by the ICC in Milan in June 88, a comrade of BC intervened to point out that “there are less of us today than there were in 68”.

It is obvious that “there are many consequences of this”. The first is that the IBRP is not only totally incapable of reacting adequately to the defeatist propaganda that is infiltrating the milieu, but that it is itself falling into the trap of defeatism, to the profound satisfaction of all the parasitic groups who struggle against militant involvement in the class movement.

The second observation we can make is that the IBRP, which rejects the necessity to define clearly the historic course (whether we are moving towards war or class confrontations) is necessarily forced to go up and down ad eternam on the see-saw of IMMEDIATISM as far as its analysis of the class movement is concerned.

We have seen how BC and the CWO, in the absence of struggles in Italy and Britain, talked about the passivity of the class, seeing as ‘exceptions’ without great importance the waves of struggle in Germany, Spain, etc (cf. ‘Perspectives for the CWO’, WV 39). With the development of struggles, first in Italy, then in Britain, BC first, then the CWO, began talking about the revival of struggles. With the reflux of these two outbreaks of the struggle, both in BC and (above all) the CWO, there was a return to the pessimistic analyses, to the discourses about the isolation of communists, etc. We are well aware that BC in no. 11 of its review Prometeo was at pains to deny that its analyses were dependent on local and/or immediatist influences. It seems to us however that the facts are more convincing that BC’s denials.

There’s a final problem arising out of the growing contradictions in the analyses of the IBRP. The fact that even on a question as decisive as ‘what’s happening and what should we be doing’ there are at least three positions in the organisation says a lot about their disorientation. But what is most serious is not that these different positions exist, but that they are expressed side by side, ignorant of each other, and with no concern for a debate to try to resolve the differences.

This is all the more serious in that in 1980 BC and the CWO, in order to justify their sabotage of the international conferences, insisted that it was necessary to put a stop to the “ICC’s own internal method of dealing with political differences – i.e. to minimise them – in order to keep the organisation together.” (Revolutionary Perspectives no. 18). The IBRP, on the other hand, created in order to “facilitate the political harmonisation (of the organisations affiliated to it) with a view to their organisational centralisation” (Statutes of the IBRP), now finds itself, after five years of its existence, with these results: non-homogeneity between BC and the CWO hasn’t diminished, but on the other hand it has got larger within the CWO itself. This should not astonish us, in that already in 1985 we noted that “we certainly can’t accuse BC and the CWO of ‘minimising’ their divergences: they simply make them disappear...” (‘Constitution of the IBRP: an opportunist bluff’, IR 41).

The result of this erroneous method is that the IBRP is finding it increasingly difficult to fulfil the role incumbent on a pole of international regroupment. This role does not only consist in trying to regroup around oneself the nuclei with whom one has points of contact, but also in knowing how to form a barrier against the negative tendencies which threaten the whole revolutionary milieu. The previously cited letter to the Alptraum Collective, which is an exhortation to not OVER estimate the class struggle, sent to a group which is on the verge of caving in because of its UNDER estimation of the class struggle, is a good example of this difficulty.

But the greatest risk resides in the contamination of the very political bases of the IBRP itself. The periodical turnabouts by the CWO, the tendency to withdraw from intervention in order to “do theory”, has not led to any theoretical deepening, but only to a systematic putting into question of the clarity they had previously attained (‘the motor force of history is no longer the class struggle, but war’, ‘state capitalism is no longer the dominant tendency in our epoch’, ‘we are in a phase of growing domination by capital’ are only a few examples of these interesting results).

It’s not by turning our backs on militant commitment that we will make any theoretical advances. Three years ago, in greeting the appearance of the theses of the Alptraum Collective, we already put them on their guard:  “the ACC must place itself more directly, more actively on the terrain of political intervention within the present movement of the proletariat... revolutionary theory can only live and develop in terms of this intervention, and never more so than in our present period.” (‘A New Class Voice in Mexico’, IR 40).

Today we can say the same thing to the comrades of the CWO, the IBRP, of all the groups in the revolutionary milieu. Decisive battles lie ahead of us. Let’s make sure they don’t find us with our head in the sand.

Beyle

The Peace of summer ‘88: The intensification of war preparations

According to the bourgeois press the world over, the summer of 88 will go down as the summer of peace, or at least of the hope of peace. Peace between Iran and Iraq, in Angola and Cambodia, and soon in Afghanistan. It will also, we are told, be remembered as the beginning of a process of nuclear disarmament between the two bloc leaders - the USA and the USSR - a process based on a real desire for peace by the rulers of the two main capitalist powers in the world. In short the perspective of peace is gaining the upper hand over the supposedly opposite perspective of a third world war.

Capitalism is war

One of the main positions of the theory of' the proletariat, of marxism, has always been that, in capitalism, peace and war are not con­tradictory, that they don't exclude each other. That they are two moments in the life of this mode of production; that peace is simply a preparation for war. Despite the ‘summer of 88', despite the agreements on ‘disarmament' between Reagan and Gorbachev, despite all the present pacifist propaganda, the historic alternative facing humanity is not between war and peace, but remains socialism or a third imperialist world war, socialism or barbarism. Or, more pre­cisely: socialism or an even more dramatic con­tinuation and development of capitalist barbarism.

We are thus confronted with two theses: that of bourgeois propaganda, and that of the revolu­tionary theory of the proletariat. The first contributes to the maintenance of the present social order by trying to develop the illusion that peace is possible under capitalism. For the second, for marxism, ‘war is necessary product of capitalism' (Lenin, the international social­ist congress of Stuttgart, 1907), and ‘humanity ... is threatened with destruction. There is only one force capable of having it, and that force is the proletariat.' (Platform of the Communist International, 1919).

The irreversible economic crisis is pushing capital towards imperialist war

Since 1945, the imperialist antagonism be­tween the western bloc and the eastern bloc has ceaselessly expressed itself in wars (Korea, Indochina, Middle East, etc ...). But today, the economic impasse, the slide into crisis, is more exacerbating these antagonisms and forcing capitalism into a headlong flight towards a third world war.

"From the moment that this crisis could no longer find a temporary solution in the expansion of the world market, world war in this cen­tury expresses and translates this phenomenon of the self-destruction of a system which by itself, cannot overcome its historic contradic­tions" (‘War in Capitalism', International Review 41, 1985).

The very basis of imperialist war resides in decadent capitalism's inability to avoid and overcome the economic crisis. It is the highest expression of this crisis and of the decline of the mode of production itself.

‘Peace' in the summer of 88: A step in the western offensive

‘It's peace', claim the papers and the TV: in Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and above all between Iran and Iraq. And of course all this has also come after the disarmament agreement between the USA and the USSR[1]. According to the media, reason and wisdom have been winning out. Gorbachev and Reagan have been touched by the grace of pacifism. The leaders of the two main powers are beginning to listen to each other, to overcome the imperialist antagonisms which threaten the world. Good will is triumph­ing over the very laws of capitalism.

There it is then: the proof that capitalism doesn't necessarily mean war as marxism claims. But we continue to insist that it's the latter which is right.

Let's look a t things a bit more closely. These different outbreaks of ‘peace' are all va­rieties of a Pax Americana: the Russian army is leaving Afghanistan, the Cuban forces Angola, and the Vietnamese Cambodia. In fact, these different Russian retreats are the result of the USA's economic and more and more, its military support to the Afghan resistance and to the war waged by South Africa and the UNITA guerillas against Angola. Just as it is the immense mili­tary and economic pressure of the western bloc which has got the better of the Iranian Ayatol­lahs in the conflict with Iraq. If there's any reason in all this, it's the reason of the strongest, as is expressed unambiguously by the presence of the western armada in the Persian Gulf and the effectiveness of American Stinger missiles against Russian planes in Afghanistan.

The truth is that these outbreaks of ‘peace' not, the product of ‘reason', or pacifist is ‘good' will, but of the present balance of forces, between the blocs., The ‘peace' of summer 88 is the product of war.     

A product of war, the ‘peace' of summer 88 is also a preparation for wars to come, as Marxism insists. Marxism alone can uncover the hidden reality of imperialist conflict, and even, very often, predict their outcome. This is how we characterized the evolution of imperialist conflicts in 1984:

"Contrary to the propaganda spewed out daily by all the media of the Western bloc, this evo­lution's major characteristic is an offensive of the American against the Russian bloc. The West­ern bloc's aim in this offensive is to com­pletely surround the USSR, and strip it of all its positions outside its immediate influence. The West aims to expel Russia definitively from the Middle East by reintegrating Syria into its bloc. This will include bringing Iran to hell, and resituating it in the US bloc as a major component in the bloc's military apparatus. The ambition is to follow up with the recuperation of Indochina. In the end, the West aims to strangle Russia completely, and strip it of its super-power status". (International Review No 36).

We are now seeing the culmination of the sec­ond phase of the offensive of the US bloc against the USSR: bringing Iran to heel. We have already seen Syria manifesting its reintegration into the Western bloc - the first phase of this offensive - by taking on the role of America's gendarme in the Lebanon. The bringing to heel of Iran will mean the more or less rapid return of this country into the discipline of the Western bloc, which made it its gendarme for the region in the time of the Shah. And for this, US impe­rialism is prepared to keep its military forces in the Gulf for as long as it takes to ‘help' Iran to understand its proper role: exerting a direct pressure on the southern frontier of the USSR. The latter, after being expelled from the Middle East, has been practically excluded from Africa - except for Ethiopia, but for how long? - ­and must now withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. This Western offensive is going to carry on in Indochina: we have already seen this with the proposal to withdraw the Vietnamese army from Cambodia. It is aimed at depriving Russia of its last strongholds outside of Eu­rope.

This is the point we are now reaching.

Capitalism's only perspective: A third world war

The success of America's offensive against the USSR means for the latter a situation of growing isolation and weakness. It is going to find itself more and more trapped behind its east European ramparts; increasingly strangled, in fact.

If this process of imperialist confrontation between east and west reaches its end-point, Russia will find itself in the same situation as Germany before the first two world wars: com­pelled, under threat of being smothered to death, to unleash a third world war. And this in spite of an extremely unfavorable economic and military situation vis-a-vis its western rival. And in spite of all its dramatic consequences for humanity given the nature of present day ar­maments. Because this process of confrontations leading towards war is inherent in capitalism and can only be stopped by the destruction of this mode of production.

Today capitalism means a slide into misery war and barbarism

For the moment this process, which would no doubt lead to the destruction of most of human­ity, if not to its utter extinction, can't reach its culmination. We will return to this.

But it remains the case that capitalism con­tinues to survive, and like an overripe fruit is rotting where it lies. This is why we say that the alternative is no longer ‘socialism or bar­barism' but socialism or the continuation and development of capitalist barbarism. 80 years of historic decadence marked by a level of misery never before seen in the history of humanity - in particular the fact that two thirds of all human beings suffer from hunger, endless massacres in uninterrupted wars - including two world wars with millions of deaths - have provided ample proof of the obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production which, once a bearer of historical progress, has been transformed into a barrier, a mortal threat to the development and very sur­vival of humanity.

And for those who doubt the validity of the marxist thesis about the decadence of capitalism, let us briefly recall the macabre reality of the conflict between Iran and Iraq, which was consciously provoked, unleashed and kept going by the USA and its allies. According to the press (22/08/88): one million 200,000 deaths, 900,000 of them on the Iranian side, and many of these old people, children and women. The number of wounded and crippled is twice as high. No point here of going back over the massive use of gas warfare. The economies of the two countries have been devastated: arms expenditures by the two countries reached a sum of 200 billion dol­lars, as has the total bill for the destruction caused by the war.

And all this horror without any historical, economic or even territorial ‘benefit' for the two belligerents - except for an assured place in the conflicts to come.

Because, despite the various cease-fires, it's not peace that awaits the countries di­rectly concerned. Whether or not they are des­tined to serve as strongholds for imperialism ­like Iran - war, misery and social decomposition are going to develop. Their immediate future is the situation of the Lebanon. For the African and Middle Eastern countries in particular, as well as for Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iran, etc, the ‘peace' of 88 will mark another step into social decomposition, famine and misery, into interminable wars between various local gangs and factions. For these countries, it's not peace, it's ‘Lebanonisation' which awaits them ­an even more dramatic development of the economic and social putrefaction of capitalism.

This ‘Lebanonisation' is being expressed in particular in the explosion of ethnic massacres - the latest being in Burundi where there have been 25,000 killed in clashes between ‘Hutus' and ‘Tutsis'-- and also in the ‘nationalities ex­plosions', themselves accompanied by massacres, as in India with the Sikhs, with the Kurds in Iran and Iraq, and even in the ,USSR, in Azer­baidjan. These conflicts are one of the expres­sions of the growing decomposition of the social tissue in all countries.  

All this horror is the reality of decadent capitalism. War and decomposition are the only perspectives that this rotting system can offer humanity.

The proletariat is the only obstacle to imperialist war

We have already said that the process of the development of imperialist antagonisms between east and west cannot at present reach its apoca­lyptic climax. Despite the depth and accelera­tion of the economic crisis[2], despite the fact that the two great imperialist blocs have been in place since 1945, despite the economy being geared principally towards the production of arms, the third world war hasn't yet broken out.

Certainly, time is on the USA's side. This power was able to wait for 8 years for Iran to be exhausted and to begin to come to heel. It adopted the same stance in Afghanistan vis-a-vis the USSR. Because it has the initiative, the western bloc can allow Russia to exhaust itself in the arms race. Especially because the eastern bloc faces a difficult internal situation. Espe­cially its dominant power: the USSR is itself confronted with the ‘nationalities explosion' -most recently in the Baltic states - which, as we have seen, is one of the expressions of decompo­sition.

At the same time, Russia is on the defensive and finds it harder and harder to bear the weight of the war economy and the costs of its various military occupations. It is desperately searching for air, a breathing space so that it can prepare to resist the process leading to its strangulation.

But this isn't the essential reason for the fact that a worldwide conflict between the two blocs hasn't yet broken out. All the conditions for this are there, save one: the adhesion and submission of the populations, and above all of the workers who produce the bulk of social wealth and all the armaments, and who would con­stitute the main contingents in a generalized war. The workers today are not prepared to sac­rifice their lives in a war. At the same of writing, whatever the particularities and limits of the movement, the workers' strikes in Poland have once again demonstrated the combativity of the international proletariat, its refusal to accept without reacting the economic attacks im­posed by the crisis, the immense misery which inevitably accompanies the development of the war economy.

This workers' combativity has been expressed in the struggles of the past few years in defense of living conditions and against their brutal and growing deterioration, principally in Western Europe[3]. It constitutes a fetter, an obstacle to the development of the capitalist war-drive and its logical culmination in a third world imperialist conflict.

Many individual workers and revolutionary militants, and nearly all the political groups of the proletariat, falling prey to bourgeois propaganda, despair of the workers' struggles and even go so far as to deny their existence. And faced with the question of why war hasn't yet broken out even though all the objective conditions are there, these comrades despair of marxism and call its very foundations into ques­tion.

Pacifism disarms the working class and prepares it for war

The bourgeoisie itself doesn't doubt the ex­istence and the danger of the workers' strug­gles. It also knows very well that the civilian populations aren't ready to put up with the sac­rifices of a war. This is the raison d'être for the pacifist campaigns in the east as well as the west: they are directed mainly against the workers.

Despite all its ideological power, the US capitalist state would have great difficulty to­day in sending an expeditionary force of 500,000 soldiers to the field of battle, as at the time of Vietnam, without provoking very dangerous popular, and no doubt working class, reactions. And, even if it wasn't the main one, one of the reasons for Russia's retreat from Afghanistan was also the growing discontent amongst the pop­ulation in the USSR, and even among the troops, as could be seen from the violent disturbances which took place at a gathering of 8,000 parachutists, veterans of the Afghanistan war, in Moscow on 2nd August.

After the agreements on Euromissiles between Reagan and Gorbachev, and after the agreements and negotiations on Southern Africa, Iran/Iraq and Vietnam, the international bourgeoisie has been using the USSR's retreat from Afghanistan to keep up pacifist illusions within the working class. The ‘peace' imposed on Iran has also made it possible to present the huge Western fleet in the Gulf as being on a civilizing peace-keeping mission as opposed to the Ayatol­lah's Islamic fanaticism.

These pacifist campaigns are being organized by the governments, the media, the left parties and the unions. Their aim is to lull the work­ing class to sleep by making it believe that peace is possible under capitalism. They thus seek to prevent the workers becoming aware of the dramatic stakes of the present his­toric situation: proletarian revolution or World War III.

"Pacifism and the abstract slogan of peace are one of the forms used to deceive the working class. Under capitalism, above all in its imperialist phase wars are inevitable". (Lenin, Resolutions of the sections of the RSDLP in exile, March 1915)

And above all, by spreading the idea that the choice is between war and peace, by making war an absolute evil, pacifism rejects the class struggle, more particularly the struggle of the working class and the perspective of the prole­tarian revolution. Pacifism wants to lead the working class to abandon its combat, to accept growing exploitation, poverty and sacrifices. It wants to make the workers powerless in the face of the present historical drama by turning them away from the fight against the increasing economic attacks of capitalism in crisis.

The working class must not be lured by the sirens of pacifism, or abandon its struggles in the name of peace. If it does, its reward will be defeat first, and then generalized war. Un­der capitalism, the only possible peace is the peace of the grave. The ‘peace of summer 88' is preparing the intensification of imperialist war. And the pacifist campaigns are aimed at hiding this monstrous reality from the workers.

"Historically speaking the dilemma facing humanity is posed in the following way: a col­lapse into barbarism or salvation by socialism. Thus today we are living through the truths which Marx and Engels formulated for the first time as the scientific basis of socialism in that great document the Communist Manifesto: so­cialism has become a historic necessity" (Rosa Luxemburg, Speech on the program of the Commu­nist Party of Germany, 1/1/1919).

26/8/88

 

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[1] On the reality behind the Euromissile agreements, see the editorial of IR no. 54.

[2] See the article oh the crisis in this is­sue.

[3] On the reality and significance of the present workers' struggles, see preceding issues of this Review (eg the editorial in no. 53), and in our territorial press.

Once again the proletariat of Poland, faced with an unbearable degradation of its living conditions, has taken the path of class resis­tance: its struggles of the second half of Au­gust 88, following those of the spring, are the most important since the movement of summer 1980. Once again the bourgeoisie has shown its skill in leading the workers' militancy into an impasse, thanks to a remarkable division of labor between the government and the opposition forces headed by Solidarnosc. These struggles are an appeal to the workers of all countries, particularly the most developed ones: because of their breadth, their determina­tion, their combativity, but also because only the proletariat of the most advanced countries, and especially of western Europe, is able to indicate how to fight the traps and mystifications which got the better of the workers in Poland.

Poland: 31 August 1980 - 31 August 1988

Separated by 8 years, two meetings between government authorities and the ‘representatives' of the working class symbolize the evolution of the social situation and the balance of class forces in this country.

On the government side the actors have changed. The minister of the interior in 88, Kiszczak, has replaced the vice-premier minister of 80, Jagrelski, but the job is the same: to represent the highest echelons of Polish national capital. Facing him, on the other hand, we have the same Lech Walesa, but in August 80 he was mandated by the organ formed by the working class in the course of its strikes, the MKS (inter-factory committee), while today he no longer represents the working class in struggle, but the national capital as well.

In August 80, the working class, in a strug­gle which to this day remains the most important one since the historic resurgence of the world proletariat at the end of the 60s, had really managed to force the bourgeois state into a mo­mentary retreat. Today the formidable militancy the workers have displayed for several months, and more particularly this August, has been de­railed and tied down by the sordid maneuvers of its enemies - the government and the party in power (though the latter is still called ‘the Workers' Party') and the organization which de­spite (or rather thanks to) its legal non-exis­tence, still enjoys the confidence of the work­ers: the trade union Solidarnosc.

On 31 August 1980, Lech Walesa was simply the mouthpiece of the workers in struggle, who could at any moment control the negotiations he was involved in with the government, which had been compelled to present itself at the workers' main bastion, the Lenin shipyard. On 31 August 1988, the same Lech Walesa was in a meeting, behind closed doors in a government villa in the best neighborhoods in Warsaw, with the minister of the interior, ie the government's specialist in the maintenance of capitalist order. These talks had one aim: to find the best way to re­ establish this order, which had been put into question by the workers' strikes.

On 31 August 80, Walesa called for a return to work because the government had conceded to the 21 demands elaborated by the strikers. On 31 August 88, he took advantage of the popularity he still enjoys among the workers to call on them to end their movement in exchange for vague promises about a ‘round table' which would look into the question of ‘trade union pluralism', ie the pluralism of organs whose task is to control the working class and sabotage its struggles. This is the reason why, whereas on 1 September80 the strikers went back with the feeling of having won som3thing, this time it took Walesa a good part of the night to convince the Gdansk inter-factory strike committee to call for a return to work, and a whole morning to get the workers of the Lenin shipyard to end their strike, while in other towns the strikes continued until the arrival of the ‘flying fireman'.

In brief, in August 80, the working class had obtained a victory (a provisional one certainly, but what other kind can their be in the present period?); in August 88, it suffered a defeat.  

Must we conclude from this that there has been a general retreat of the working class in all countries? Is this what the recent events in Poland tell us about the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes at a world-wide level?

Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the recent struggles of the proletariat in Poland provide a clear confirmation of the whole perspective put forward by our organization for 20 years: more than ever this is a time of the unfolding and intensification of the class struggle, and the conditions for this have continued to develop since the beginning of the historic resurgence two decades ago.

The inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis and the intensification of capitalist attacks

At the origin of the workers' struggles which have shaken Poland in recent months are the in­credibly brutal attacks on the living standards of the working class. Thus, at the beginning of the year the government decided that on the ­first of each of the following months, February, March, April, there would be a series of massive rises in the price of food products, transport services ... The rate of inflation in this period rose to 60%. Despite the wage increases which accompanied these rises, there was still a 20% loss in income for the population. In one year, certain prices were overturned several times: rents were doubled, the price of coal was multi­plied by three, the price of pears by four, linen shoes for children by five, and these are only a few examples among many. What's more, because of shortages (eg meat, children's milk, toilet paper) many basic goods have to be bought on the black market or at the ‘Pewex'. The dizzying price charged on the black market brings the average wage down to 23 dollars a month. In these conditions it's not surprising that the authorities themselves recognize that 60% of the population lives below the breadline.

This poverty is felt in a particularly harsh manner by the young workers who have formed the most determined battalions in the recent strug­gles. According to Tygodnik Mazowsze, Soli­darnosc's clandestine weekly in Warsaw, the young workers are "a generation without perspectives".

"The lives that they lead are a nightmare. Their chances of finding housing for themselves are practically nill. Most of them live in so called apartments supplied by the enterprise. Often six of them are crammed into two bedrooms. A couple with three children lives in a small room and a kitchen four meters square which only has cold water."

This unbelievable deterioration of the living conditions of the working class, in spite of (or rather because of) all the various ‘economic re­ forms' pushed through by the regime over a num­ber of years, can in no way be considered as ‘exception' or a ‘particularity' reserved for Poland or the other ‘socialist' countries. Even if in this country it takes on an extreme caricatured form, because of the acute level of the economic crisis there (Poland's foreign debt has risen to some $50 billion, $39 billion of them owed to the western countries), we find the same thing in all the eastern European countries and in the most advanced countries. In the USSR, for example, shortages have never been so catas­trophic despite the price rises which were supposed to make them disappear.  The famous ‘perestroika' of the economy is totally absent from the fridges, as has been humorously re­marked by the inhabitants of the ‘fatherland of socialism'; and in the same vein ‘glasnost' means mainly that you can see so well through the shop windows because there's nothing behind them. What is above all underlined by the strikes in Poland and the economic catastrophe that feeds them is the bankruptcy of the poli­cies of ‘perestroika' so dear to Gorbachev. And there's no mystery in any of this: whereas the economies of the most advanced countries only give the illusion of a certain stability by means of a headlong plunge into the abyss of astronomical debt, it is the weaker economies, like those of eastern Europe, and of Poland in particular, who are the first to pay the price of the world-wide collapse of capitalism. And no ‘restructuration' can change this. Like ev­erywhere else in the world, the ‘economic re­forms' can only have one consequence: new and still more brutal attacks on the living conditions of the working class.

Thus, what is clearly illustrated by the pre­sent situation in Poland is the insurmountable nature of the crisis of capitalism. The eco­nomic disarray of this country, the pauperization this means for the working class, simply indicate the direction which is also being followed by the most advanced countries, the ones which have up to now been most ‘spared' by the crisis.

For the working class, one way forward: The development of its struggles

The second lesson we have to draw from this situation is that, faced with the irreversible collapse of the world economy, faced with the unceasing growth of capitalist attacks, the working class of all countries has no choice but to take up and develop its struggles. And the struggles of the workers in Poland once again prove that this is indeed the path being followed by the world proletariat.

The recent struggles in Poland are particu­larly significant in this respect. In this country, in the wake of their magnificent strug­gle and their initial victory in 1980, the work­ers suffered a smarting defeat which was concretized by the ‘state of siege' set up in December 81. Tens of thousands of workers were put in prison; their resistance was broken by force, with dozens of them losing their lives. They had to put up with beatings and other kinds of ill-treatment, with years of police terror, per­manent surveillance and persecution. If they still tried to resist the attacks of capital, they risked losing their jobs, their lodgings, or even being thrown in prison. And despite this enormous pressure, despite the demoralization which has weighed on many of them since 81, last spring they once again took up the struggle against the new round of economic attacks. Not at all disarmed by the failure of this first at­tempt (when all of Walesa's skills had to be used to convince the young workers of Gdansk to go back to work[1], they again hurled them­selves into the fray this summer, in a much wider movement than the previous one. This il­lustrates one of the major characteristics of the present period: the acceleration of history under the pressure of the aggravation of the economic crisis, which at the level of the class struggle is manifested by a tendency for waves of struggle to be increasingly close together in time.

This movement had begun on 16 August in a spontaneous way in the heart of the Polish work­ing class, the mines of Silesia. This was par­ticularly significant because it affected one of the oldest and most experienced sectors of the working class - and one which traditionally has been most ‘'coddled' by the government (higher wage s and rations), mainly because of its eco­nomic importance (coal is the country's most im­portant raw material and source of energy and represents a quarter of its exports). Neverthe­less these workers demanded big wage increases (up to 100%, a figure never before raised in Poland). Day after day the movement spread to new mines and to other regions, notably Szczecin where the port and transports were paralyzed by strikes. Everywhere, the push for a strike was very strong, notably from the young workers. In Gdansk, at the Lenin shipyard, a beacon for all the workers of the country, the young workers again wanted to come out despite their setback in May. Again Walesa played the role of a temporizer. But on Monday 22 August, he himself could do nothing but call for a strike which im­mediately paralyzed the Lenin shipyard. In a few hours the strike spread to Warsaw (the Huta Warszawa steelworks, the Ursus tractor factory), Poznan, Stalowa Wola and other enterprises in Gdansk. Between 50,000 and 70,000 workers were on strike. On Tuesday 23 August, the strike continued to spread, particularly in Gdansk, to other shipyards, and to new mines in Upper Sile­sia. The working class seemed to be renewing the dynamic of the summer of 1980. But in fact the movement had reached its zenith and it began to fall back the next day, because this time the bourgeoisie was much better prepared than it had been 8 years before.

The defeat of the movement: Government and opposition divide up the work

It's possible that the government was sur­prised by the breadth of the struggles. How­ever, its conduct throughout the period they lasted showed that it had learned a great deal since the summer of 80 and that at no point had it been overwhelmed by the situation. Each time a new enterprise came out on strike it took care to encircle it with a cordon of ‘Zomos' (special anti-riot units). Thus, each workplace occupa­tion became a trap for the workers in struggle and prevented them from entering into combat with their class brothers and thus from unifying the movement, from forming a single battlefront. Repression and intimidation weren't limited to this. On 22nd August, the day the movement was extending the most, the interior minister, gen­eral Kiszczak, appeared in uniform on TV to an­nounce a series of measures aimed at blocking this extension: establishment of a curfew in the three regions most hit by the strikes; Katowice, Szczecin and Gdansk; any person ‘external' to an enterprise on strike would be removed and would risk imprisonment. He accused the strikers of being armed and raised the specter of a "bloodbath." At the same moment his performance was backed up by the one on Russian TV which put out pictures of striking enterprises and accused the strikers of being "extremists who exert pressure and threats on their comrades through illegal strikes." The iron bars with which workers equipped themselves to respond to a pos­sible police intervention were presented as the instruments used in these ‘threats.' Thus, when it's a question of dealing with a movement of the working class, Gorbachev sets his ‘Glasnost' to one side and uses the classical language of Stalinist terror: the workers in Russia must on no account get any ideas about imitating their class brothers in Poland and the latter must understand that they can expect nothing from ‘liberalization' (in any case they couldn't have had too many illusions since Gor­bachev visited Poland at the beginning of July and said that the Polish people "should be proud to have a leader like Jaruzelski," whom he referred to as his "personal friend."

The threats did not remain purely verbal. They were backed up by actions: Silesia was cut off from the country by army and police barri­ers; every day the Zomos intervened in new en­terprises to dislodged the workers (notably in Silesia where, below ground, the miners lacked food, medicine and blankets); arrests multi­plied.

These hit strikers but also members of the opposition and in particular leaders of Soli­damosc, such as Frasynink, the head of the union in Wroclaw and a member of the national leadership. In the first case the aim was to pressure the strikers to go back to work and to dissuade other workers from joining the struggle. But arresting the union leaders had an­other aim: to make Solidarnosc credible so that it could fully play its role of sabotaging the struggle. For once again the defeat of the workers derived above all from the action of trade unionism.

The anti-working class aims of Solidarnosc were defined candidly in May by Kuron, one of the main ‘experts' of Solidarnosc and founder of  the former KOR:  

"Only a government which had the confidence of society could stop the course of events, and call for austerity in the framework for reforms. What's really at stake in the present battle is the constitution of such a government." (interview with the French paper Liberation, 5 ­May 1988).

You could hardly be clearer: the goal of Soliarnosc is the same as the government's: to make workers accept "austerity."       

This is why, right from the beginning of the movement, the union was actively sabotaging it. One of the essential components of its strategy was to divert the workers' attention into a dead end. Whereas the movement began around wage demands, Solidarnosc threw all its weight into ensuring that there would be "only one demand: the ­legalization of the trade union." Thus, when Walesa called for a strike in the Lenin shipyard on 22 August, it was with the slogan: "no more joking, we want Solidarnosc now" - as if the workers' defense of their most elementary living conditions, their resistance against misery, were just jokes. For his part, the reputedly ‘radical' president of the Lenin shipyard strike ­committee also affirmed: "The only demand is the reestablishment of Solidarnosc."

Solidarnosc launched its appeals to the strike in a very selective manner. On the one hand, in many of the places where there was a very strong pressure for a struggle, Solidarnosc took care not to call for a strike; in order to keep the lid on the workers' militancy, it declared ‘a state of preparation for a strike', or else threatened to call for a strike in case the authorities unleashed a general repression - which they obviously avoided doing. On the other hand, the direct call for a strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, which since the summer of ‘80 has been a symbol for the whole working class in Poland, was also part of a maneuver. It's one of the enterprises where Solidarnosc is best implanted, notably because Walesa worked there; because of this, it would be easier to ­get workers there back to work, and this would in turn have a symbolic value, since in the rest of the country the workers would have the feel­ing that they could only imitate their comrades in Gdansk. Furthermore, at the Lenin shipyard, in order to facilitate this return to work, Walesa did all he could to present the strike as a calamity, inevitable only because of the bad will of the government which had refused to listen to its repeated calls for negotiation:

"I wanted to avoid the strikes. We shouldn't be on strike. We should be working. But we have no choice ... we're still waiting for serious dis­cussions," (22 August).

And in fact, in order to tire the workers out, the government and Solidarnosc played a cat and mouse game with each other for over a week, both giving proof of their ‘intransigence' on the question of trade union pluralism (thus polarizing the workers around a false question. This carried on until both parties ‘accepted' to meet each other to discuss "without taboos" (sic) about the agenda of a hypothetical "round table" which would get together, of course, when the workers had gone back.

Thus, the total complicity between the authorities and Solidarnosc is obvious. It is even more obvious when you know that one of the favorite sports of the leaders of Solidarnosc is to pass with impunity through the police cordons cutting off the enterprises and regions in struggle in order to join strikers, as in the case of Jan Litynski, founder of KOR and responsible for Solidarnosc in Warsaw, who managed to join the strike committee of the Silesian mines and become its most important ‘expert', and of Lech Walesa himself who ‘climbed the wall' into the Lenin shipyard. Really: the Polish cops are so inefficient.

As always in Poland, the Church participated in the division of labor; it could even afford the luxury of ringing out two tunes: the moderate tune of the chaplain of the Lenin shipyard who, on the eve of the strike, adopted a position against it, saying it would "set fire to Poland", and the ‘radical' tune which gave its full support to the strikers and their demand for ‘trade union pluralism.' Even the forces of the official power made play of their ‘disagreements' in order to disorient the workers. Thus on 24 August, the official unions, (OPZZ), whose president is a member of the political bureau of the Party, warned the govern­ment that it must "listen to their opinion" on the threat of calling a general strike. Jaruzelski must have been really scared.

Finally, thanks to these maneuvers, the bourgeoisie got what it wanted: a return to work without the workers having won anything. It was an important defeat for the workers which will leave its mark. It's all the more a defeat in that the sabotaging work of Solidarnosc, as an organization, has not been exposed - it was Walesa, who's always ready for this kind of job, to appear as the one who ‘sold out the strike'. His popularity will no doubt have lost a few feathers, but ‘you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs'. The essential thing is that the majority of workers still have their illusions in ‘free' trade unions. By refusing to legalize Solidarnosc (while in fact Solidarnosc is already well-established, with numerous weekly papers, collection of dues, regular meetings of its leaders - all that is ‘tolerated'), by continuing to ‘persecute' its leaders, the official power has made its own contribution to these il­lusions.

In Poland as all over the world, the perspective is above all one of class confrontations

August 80-August 88: the comparison between the results of the strikes in these two periods thus seems to indicate a very tangible retreat in the strength of the working class. A superfi­cial examination of these two moments of strug­gle could confirm such a view: it's true that eight years ago the working class was able to wage much more massive and determined struggles; it's true in particular that in 1980 it managed to create an organization which allowed it to control its struggle right up to its victory. But you can't stop at these elements on their own. In reality, the present weakness of the working class in Poland is fundamentally the expression of the political strengthening of the bourgeoisie in this country, just as the work­ers' strength in August 1980 was largely linked to the then weakness of the ruling class. And this strengthening of the bourgeoisie today is due, much more than to the increased subtlety of the country's leaders, to the existence of a structure for controlling the working class, a structure that was absent in 80: the trade union Solidarnosc. This was expressed very well by Kuron: "Contrary to July-August 1980, the oppo­sition today has at its disposal organized structures capable of controlling events, " (ibid).

In fact the working class in Poland is today confronted with the same kind of traps that the workers in the most advanced countries have been coming up against for decades. It's precisely because it has not yet had this experience that it could be trapped in this way by the maneuvers of trade unionism after its remarkable struggle of the summer of 1980. But the other side of this is that the whole experience accu­mulated by the proletariat of the great capital­ist metropoles, notably in western Europe, is now permitting it gradually to extricate itself from the grip of the unions (as we saw in the railway strike in France at the end of ‘86, or in Italy in the school sector in 87), and more and more to control and unify its struggles as did the Polish workers in 80. But when the workers in the west have really managed to do this, the bourgeoisie won't be able to make them go backwards as it has with the proletariat in Poland. It is thus these more advanced sectors of the world working class which can show the way forward for their class brothers, particu­larly those in Poland and Eastern Europe.

The struggles of summer 88 in Poland in no way indicate that there has been a retreat in the class struggle on an international scale. On the contrary they are testimony to the enormous reserves of combativity in the proletariat to­day. This combativity isn't wiped out by par­tial defeats - indeed it only accumulates more with the intensification of capital's attacks. Similarly, the strength of trade unionist, demo­cratic, and nationalist illusions weighing on the proletariat in Poland serves to highlight the steps that have been accomplished by the big workers' concentrations in the decisive centers of western Europe, and thus by the world proletariat as a whole; it thus demonstrates that the international working class is advancing towards increasingly autonomous, powerful and conscious battles.

FM  4.9.88.

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[1] On the strikes in the spring in Poland and their sabotage by Solidarnosc, see IR 54.

Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism, Part 5

In the fifth article in this series (see International Review Nos. 48 [12], 49 [13], 50 [14] and 54 [15]), we are returning to the critique or rejection of the notion of decadence by a series of groups in the proletarian political milieu (the Internationalist Communist Party (Programma, Bordigist) or ICP, the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI), A Contre Courant (a recent split from the GCI), Communisme ou Civilisation (CoC), and in part the External Fraction of the ICC (EFICC) [1] [16]. We will demonstrate that these critiques in reality hide a rejection of the marxist conception of historical evolution which is the foundation of the necessity of communism, and so weaken the necessary historical dimension in the proletariat’s coming to consciousness, or else in cases like the GCI end up presenting the revolution as the old utopia of the anarchists.

THE MARXIST ANALYSIS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORY

“The decadentist vision corresponds not to the proletarian, but to the bourgeois evolutionist viewpoint” (Le Communiste, (LC) no. 23). The GCI does not stop at throwing out the very idea of a decadence of the capitalist mode of production (see our previous articles [2] [17]), it generalises its refusal to the whole of human history. This group thus departs from the analysis of Marx, for whom each mode of production goes through a phase where the new relations of production act as a spur on the development of the productive forces, and a phase where these relationships are a hindrance to their growth: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.” (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Selected Works).

The better to reject any idea of a decadent phase, the GCI also rejects its corollary: the very existence of an ascendant phase. In the name of the defence of the exploited classes, the GCI takes up the moralistic vision of the anarchists who, arguing from the development of exploitation, throughout history, refuse to recognise the progressive role of the development of the productive forces: “For those of us who take as a starting point the vision of the whole historic arc from primitive communism to integral communism, it is on the contrary a question of seeing how the forced march of progress and civilisation has each time meant more exploitation, the production of surplus labour, in fact the real affirmation of barbarism by the increasingly totalitarian domination of value” (LC no. 23). Like Proudhon, the GCI sees in misery only misery, without seeing its revolutionary side. Considering, with Marx the succession of the “Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production... as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society” (Preface...), demonstrating the progressive role of past exploiting classes, comes down in the end to defending the latter against the exploited classes.... And so Marx becomes the worst of counter-revolutionaries, emphasizing as he does throughout the Communist Manifesto the role of the bourgeoisie in its ascendant phase: “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.... It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic Cathedrals... The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together” (Communist Manifesto in Selected Works).

BORDIGA AND ITS EPIGONS

It will do the GCI no good to cover itself with Bordiga’s authority to hide its evolution towards anarchism: “The marxist vision [of historical development, ed.] can be represented as so many branches, or curves all rising to summits which are followed by a violent and sudden, almost vertical collapse; when they have reached the bottom, a new social regime appears, a new rising historical branch” (Bordiga, “Proceedings of the Rome meeting, 1951”; published in Invariance no. 4). This is a rotten branch for several reasons, as we will demonstrate.

Bordiga wrote this text against those within the PCInt who still defended the gains of the International Communist Left. The birth of the Bordigist current in 1951 corresponded to the elimination within the PCInt of the remnants of the political positions defended by the Italian Fraction of the ICL from 1926 to 1945 [3] [18]. All the Fraction’s analyses and political positions revolved around the understanding that capitalism had entered its decadent phase since 1914: “Today, in the extreme phase of capitalist decadence, there is no longer any territory left for the bourgeois mode of production to conquer, since it has reached its final stage and the backward countries can only be industrialised by the proletariat in struggle for communist society (...) The progressive accumulation of capitalist surplus value takes this contrast (between paid and stolen labour) to its extreme when the productive forces, overflowing the framework of bourgeois production, come up against the historic limits of the field of distribution and realisation of capitalist products”. (Extracts from the Manifesto and Resolution on the constitution of an International Bureau by the Fractions of the International Communist Left, in Octobre no. 1, February 1938) [4] [19].

As for the GCI’s other references, they speak for themselves: “La Gauche Internationaliste”, a modernist group that emerged from the decomposition of maoism, since disappeared, and “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, a group which never really managed to break with Trotskyism and which throughout its life fought against those who kept up the work of the Italian Fraction: the Gauche Communiste de France” [5] [20].

CRITIQUE OF THE BORDIGIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORICAL  EVOLUTION

Bordiga breaks on three levels with the conceptions of marxism, as we intend to demonstrate on the basis of examples taken from historical reality itself. This reality is a violent disavowal of the viewpoint developed by Bordiga, but it fully confirms the theses of Marx.

The necessity of a period of transition

No society in the past has disappeared following a “sudden and violent collapse”. The graph No.1 showing the evolution of world population (see below) is a masterly confirmation, on the one hand of the succession of different modes of production (primitive, Asiatic, antique, feudal and capitalist), on the other of the slow movement of each mode of production’s ascendance and decadence, and finally of the long transition between them. We are far removed here from Bordiga’s “branches, or curves all rising of summits which are followed by a violent and sudden, almost vertical collapse” [6] [21].

 

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Graph 1

 

SOURCE: Essai sur l’evolution du nombre des hommes,  JN Biraben, in Population no. 1, 1979. This graph is the most recent and most coherent reconstitution of the evolution of the world population. We have inserted subdivisions in this curve to distinguish clearly the different phases of each mode of production. Given the low level of development of their productive forces, past societies’ demographic evolution was closely linked to the fluctuations in agriculture, which was their major productive activity. Changes in population are thus a good indicator of major economic tendencies and fluctuations in the development of the productive forces. For the societies that preceded feudalism, we can see a direct link between agricultural production and population movement. In the decadence of feudalism, however, the population curve, after falling, then continued to grow. This is due to the rise of capitalism (16th Century), which by increasing the productivity of labour broke this link. In fact, if we consider strictly feudal production in isolation, we note stagnation from the 14th to the 18th Century.

 

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Recent reconstitutions of economic history provide us with precious indications that confirm this overall evolution:

FEUDALISM. After a transition lasting seven centuries (from 300 to 1000 AD), during which the new feudal class and its new relations of production (serfdom) took root, the ascendant phase developed from 1000 AD to the 14th Century. “...Towards the end of the first millennium, the forces of production differed very little from those of antiquity (...) From the 10th to the 13th Century the development of every branch of society was fed by the agricultural revolution (...) a new farming system whose productive capacity was the double of the old (...) This is why cereal production grew in relation to demographic growth until the 14th Century (...)” At this time, feudalism enters into decadence until the 18th Century. “Conversely, agricultural and demographic growth came to a halt at the end of the 13th Century (...) We therefore suppose that already by the end of the 13th Century, medieval agriculture had reached a technical level in general equivalent to that of the early 18th” (quotes from: Agnes Geshard, La Societe Medievale and Guy Antonetti, L’Economie Feodale). Within this decadence, from the 16th Century on, began the transition to capitalism.

ANTIQUITY. The case of antiquity is too well known for us to linger on it; everyone has heard of the decadence of Rome at least once in his life. The growing needs of the empire, demographic pressure and the management of an increasingly large territorial area forced Rome to go beyond the limits allowed by its relations of production. Private ownership of land and the low productivity of slavery obliged Rome to pillage grain to feed itself, and to import slaves to work the land. At a certain stage of its expansion, Rome could no longer feed itself: conquests were increasingly far a field and difficult to keep hold of, and slaves became expensive (a slave’s price increased tenfold between 50 and 150 AD). To overcome slavery’s low productivity required other, more productive relations of production. But these could only come about through a social revolution, by the old ruling class linked to the old productive relations losing power. This is why, on top of the blockage of the economy, the ruling class blocked the development of the productive forces in order to preserve its political dominance. In the absence of technological innovation (i.e. an increase in the productivity of labour), agriculture was subjected to the law of falling output, famine developed, the birth-rate fell, the population declined; Rome was in its decadence. The graph (no.2) below is interesting in that it illustrates clearly the way in which the relations of production held back the development of the productive forces: we can see that the decline in scientific discovery precedes the drop in population.

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Graph 2

SOURCE : Julian Simon, The effects of population on nutrition and economic well-being,  in Hunger and History.

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This graph shows, on the one hand the evolution of the population (in millions of inhabitants, 2nd scale on the left), on the other its growth rate (in percentages, 1st scale on the left), and finally the number of scientific discoveries (scale on the right).

ASIATIC SOCIETY. An analogous phenomenon develops within societies dominated by Asiatic relations of production [7] [22]. Most of them disappeared between 1000 and 500 BC (see population curve). Their decadence appears in the incessant wars between kingdoms trying to compensate through pillage for internal blockages of production, constant peasant revolts and the gigantic development of unproductive state expenditure. Political blockages and rivalries within the ruling caste exhausted society’s resources in endless conflicts, and the limits of the empires’ geographical expansion reveals that the maximum development compatible with the relations of production had been reached.

PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES. Similarly, class society could only emerge from the decadence of primitive society, as Marx said: “The history of the decadence of primitive societies (...) has still to be written. Up to now we have had nothing but meagre sketches (...). Secondly, the causes of their decadence spring from economic facts that prevented them going beyond a certain degree of development (...) When reading the history of primitive societies as written by the bourgeois, one must be on one’s guard” (Letter to Vera Zassoulitch). “During the Palaeolithic period which preceded the Neolithic, population growth extremely slow (0.01% to 0.03% per year); nonetheless, this enabled the population to reach a figure of between 9 and 15 million (about 8000 BC).  These figures are certainly very low, but in the context of a hunter-gatherer society, they had reached a level where continued population growth would be impossible WITHOUT A RADICAL MODIFICATION OF THE ECONOMY (...) According to Hussan’s estimations (1981), the optimum world population in a society based on hunting and gathering would be about 8.6 millions” (P. Bairoch, De Jericho a Mexico).

Conditions for the emergence of a new revolutionary class and new social productive relations.

Decreeing, as Bordiga does, the non-existence of a phase of decadence in a society means that the passage to a new mode of production becomes impossible. Its necessity is a painful childbirth in the face of the blockage of the old mode of production. Why would men suddenly want to produce differently, if the society in which they were living were still ascendant and productive? Why, to satisfy what needs – let’s stay materialist after all – should part of society develop new more productive relations of production if the old ones are still performing? “...new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself” (Marx, Preface..., op. cit.).

The power of the dominant class and its attachment to its privileges are powerful factors in preserving a social form. A class’ power is at its greatest at the apogee of its mode of production, and only a long decadence can erode its power and call into question the legitimacy of its domination. When a social class has exhausted its historic role, this does not appear overnight within the social consciousness, and even if it did the old ruling class would not simply leave the way free for the new. It will defend its power by arms and repression right to the end. The old mode of production will only be abandoned after decades of famine, epidemics, war and anarchy: 700 years for slavery, 400 for feudalism. All the social relationships under which men have lived for centuries are not superseded overnight. Only such events can get the better of centuries-old customs, ideas and traditions. Collective consciousness always lags behind the objective reality in which it lives.

A new mode of production can only emerge if a new class exists as the bearer of the new more productive social relations of production, and only a period of decadence can create the conditions for its development. Moreover, and at the same time, the exploited class’ discontent must also ripen over a long period of time. Only decades of famine and humiliation will push the exploited to revolt alongside the new ruling class against the old.

The development of new, more productive, social relations of production is a long process, on the one hand because men never abandon a tool until it has proved itself worthless, and the other because they are born into a hostile environment, subjected to the matrix and the repression of the old mode of production.

The castes of societies belonging to the Asiatic mode of production could only develop out of the disintegration of primitive communism’s ‘egalitarian’ social relations of production.

The class of great slave-holding landowners was born in the decadence of the Asiatic mode of production: concretely, in Rome, out of the combat between the new force constituted by the landowners who appropriated the land as private property, and the princely caste of Etruscan royal society which still lived from tribute extorted from groups of village societies whose production was still dominated by communal relationships inherited from post-neolithic society.

Feudalism was born from the decadence of Rome. The new social relations of production – Serfdom – began to take root on the empire’s edges. The Roman masters freed their slaves; the latter could then cultivate a piece of land and possess their own means of production, in return for a fraction of their harvest.

The bourgeoisie was born out of the decadence of feudalism, as Marx said: “...the means of production and exchange which served as a basis for the formation of the bourgeoisie were created in feudal society [we are a long way, here, from Bordiga’s abrupt, vertical collapse at the bottom of which a new social regime appears]. Modern bourgeois society... has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society (...) They [i.e. world trade and colonial markets] gave... to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry...now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets (...) At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder” (Communist Manifesto) “...the capitalist era only dates from the 16th Century. Wherever it blossomed, the abolition of serfdom was already a long-established fact, and that glory of the Middle Ages, the sovereign town, was already in decadence (...) Capital’s modern history dates from the creation of trade and the markets of the old world and the new in the 16th century” (Marx, Capital). The rule of the sovereign towns lies in feudalism’s full ascendancy (11th to 14th centuries). Capitalism is born within the decadence of feudalism (14th to 18th centuries), at the moment of the 16th century’s great discoveries.

It took two centuries of Roman decadence for the new relations of production to emerge in primitive form at the periphery of the empire, and another four to six centuries for them to emerge and become generalised. It took two centuries of feudal decadence for capitalism to emerge, and another three centuries before it became generalised. We are thus an equally long way from the GCI’s principal, devoid of any theoretical or historical foundation, which in order to deny capitalism’s ascendant phase, postulates the idea that capitalism from birth is “directly and invariably universal (...) Thus capital itself poses all its presuppositions, it is itself auto-presupposition of its world domination, as soon as it appears as a mode of production it poses en bloc and world wide its universal character...” (LC, no. 23).  In this way, the GCI eliminates with a stroke of the pen the existence of extra-capitalist markets. Since it postulates the “full and complete existence of the world market as a presupposition of the appearance of the capitalist mode of production (...), exchange between capitalist and extra-capitalist production is meaningless...”.

The decades taken by the bourgeoisie to develop, and to extricate itself from the too narrow social relationships of feudalism are simply rubbed off the page of history; as indeed are pages where Marx describes the long and difficult process of capital’s primitive accumulation: “Modern industry has established the world market (...) This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry [where in Marx are we to find the “presupposition of the world market?] (...) We see therefore how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange”  (Communist Manifesto).

How can we take seriously a “group” which invents and rewrites history according to its own whims?

The consciousness of the political necessity of the destruction of capitalism can only spring from its historic crisis, not from a mere crisis of growth or restructuring. The proletariat will only be able to understand and take the full measure of the enormity of its task when it confronts today’s alternative: socialism or barbarism, the communist revolution or generalising imperialist war from which humanity will never recover. To deny decadence is to diminish communism’s necessity, and to weaken the histories dimension in the proletariat’s coming to consciousness. If capitalism were developing  “...at least twice as fast as in its ascendant phase” as the GCI claims [8] [23], then the revolution would be still less possible today than it was yesterday; it would become a far-off anarchist utopia. This is what the GCI is proposing to the working class today.

THE ANALYSIS OF DECADENCE AND TROTSKYISM

Our critics like to mix us up with Trotskyism. “Such a conception [i.e. decadence] could perhaps be explained in the inter-war period, when capitalist production did indeed stagnate. This was the period when Trotsky could declare at the beginning of the Transitional Programme that ‘humanity’s productive forces have ceased to grow. New inventions and new technical progress do not lead to an increase in material wealth’. This was also the epoch when certain left currents (the Gauche Communiste) based an analysis of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production on Luxemburgist theses, considering that surplus-value had ceased to increase” (CoC no. 22). “For the Trotskyist decadentists, the productive forces have stopped growing, since 1914 as far as capitalism is concerned (...) the conception of decadence is closely linked to that of the degeneration of the working class nature of the USSR, so dear both to Stalinists and Trotskyists” (LC no. 23).

From Marx to the 3rd International, the problematic of decadence has become a central question within the marxist current. With the degeneration of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, and of its political organisations, there began a long night of 50 years for the workers’ movement, which led Victor Serge to say that it was “midnight in the century”. Since then, the contributions on this question have been concentrated in the left groups that emerged in the combat against the degeneration of the 3rd International, and which included the International Left Opposition led by Trotsky until 1939 [9] [24]. These groups certainly had difficulties with a lot of questions. We are not Bordigists to consider old texts as untouchable tables of law. Nonetheless, and despite some mistakes, these groups did have the merit of developing revolutionary theory within a marxist framework, which is more than can be said for our critics who reject this framework merely after glancing at post-1945 growth rates. The former have left us a fertile framework of understanding, even with its imperfections; the latter would take us into a dead-end, or into anarchism.

But since they will use anything they can lay their hands on, the GCI and CoC wrongly attribute to us the conception developed by the trotskyist “4th International”. However, if we take a closer look, it is CoC and the GCI who merely produce pale copies of the positions of Mandel & Co. Certain trotskyists have long since abandoned the sentence pronounced by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme, to go back to that of Lenin for whom “On the whole, capitalism is developing infinitely faster than before”. For Mandel, “...it is not therefore the decline of the productive forces, but an exacerbated parasitism and increased waste accompanying growth, and taking control of it (...). The most damaging form of waste inherent in capitalism’s senility is henceforth the misuse of the productive forces;” the system’s rottenness is demonstrated by “...the pitiful results compared with the possibilities of the third technological revolution and automation (...). Measured in relation to these possibilities, the waste of potential and real productive forces has grown immeasurably. In this sense, - but only on the basis of this kind of definition – Lenin’s description of imperialism as ‘the capitalist mode of production’s phase of generalised decay’ remains justified”.  For Mandel, capitalism has three phases: “...the capitalism of free competition from Waterloo to Sedan, the epoch of classical capitalism up to the inter-war period, and the senility of capitalism today”, and, so he tells us, “in absolute value, the productive forces have grown more rapidly during the epoch of capitalism’s senility than previously”.  This is fine company that the GCI and CoC are keeping. Further on, Mandel explicitly reinterprets Marx’s definition of the decadence of a mode of production in the Preface: “It is all the more obvious that Marx is not referring here to the fall of capitalism, but to the fall of all class society. He would certainly not have had the idea of characterising the period preceding the victory of modern history’s bourgeois revolutions (the Netherlands in the 16th, the English in the 17th, and the American and the great French revolutions in the 18th centuries) as a phase of stagnation or even diminution of the productive forces” (Le troisieme age du capitalism).

What are we get out of this inextricable mess? A pure and simple negation of the marxist conception of historical evolution. The decline of a mode of production is no longer the result of a blockage of the productive forces by the relations of production, i.e. of the gap between potential and real growth, but, says Mandel, is defined as the difference between what is technically possible under a socialist mode of production and actual growth, between an economy of automation and abundance and today’s growth, which is “infinitely faster than before”, but oh!, so “wasteful” and “misused”. Defining capitalism’s rottenness by demonstrating the superiority of socialism demonstrates nothing at all, and certainly does not answer the question of why, when and how, a society enters into decline. But Mandel gets around this question, by denying decadence, like our critics. Thus he claims that the period from the 16th to the 18th century is not one of decadence of the feudal mode of production and of transition to capitalism, but of full-blown growth, which allows him to attribute to Marx a conception that is the contrary to everything he ever wrote on the subject. Mandel adds together two opposite dynamics, in a period where two different modes of production are intertwined: the decline of feudalism from the 14th to the 18th centuries, bringing in its wake famines, epidemics, wars and agricultural crisis, and the transition to capitalism which is bringing a new dynamic to production (the merchant and artisan classes...).

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Graph 3

 

Source: WW Rostow, The world economy, history and prospect, University of Texas Press, 1978.

This graph shows the growth of World Industrial Production (WIP) from 1820 to 1983 (continuous line with the index at certain key points shown under the little triangles). The indices are on a logarithmic scale, which allows us to appreciate the growth rates on the more or less steep slopes of the curve. The graph illustrates capitalism’s overall dynamic during its two historic phases. In its ascendancy, growth is continuous with minor fluctuations. Its rhythm is a cycle of crisis / prosperity / lesser crisis / heightened prosperity, etc. In decadence, apart from the overall brake put on the growth of the productive forces by capitalist social relations of production (which produces a differential between potential growth (dotted line: index 2401) and real growth (index 1440)), there are intense and unprecedented fluctuations: two World Wars and the severe slowdown of the last 15 years, or even stagnation during a little under ten years. If we deduct unproductive expenditure from real production, then the braking effect on growth reaches and even exceeds 50% World trade (small crosses) has never undergone such severe contradictions (stagnation from 1913 to 1948, violent restriction during recent years: a zero growth rate is expressed on the graph by a horizontal line), illustrating the constant problem, in decadence, of the lack of solvent markets. The strong growth of world trade between 1948 and 1971 is artificially swollen by taking account of internal trade within multinational companies. This statistical bias represents almost a third (33%) of world trade.

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The graph no. 3 above illustrates what we have just been saying (for a detailed commentary, see the previous article in IR no. 54), and demonstrates what should be understood by the decadence of the capitalist mode of production: not collapse or stagnation, as in previous modes of production, but a hindrance of the development of the productive forces by capitalist social relations of production. This is illustrated by the infernal spiral of crisis / war / reconstruction ten-fold crisis / still more violent war drugged reconstruction / etc, into which capitalism is plunging.

CMcl