The communist left and the counter-revolution, 1921-30

After 1921 the Bolshevik Party found itself in a nightmarish situation. Following the defeat of workers’ uprisings in Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere between 1918 and 1921, the world revolution went into a profound reflux from which it was never to recover, despite sending out after-shocks like Germany and Bulgaria in 1923 and China in 1927. In Russia both the economy and the proletariat itself had reached a level of near disintegration; the working masses had withdrawn or been chased from political life. No longer an instrument in the hands of the proletariat, the Soviet state had effectively degenerated into a machine for the defence of capitalist ‘order’. Prison­ers of their substitutionist conceptions, the Bolsheviks still believed that it was possible to administer this state machine and the capitalist economy while waiting for and even assisting the resurgence of the world revolution. In reality, the neces­sities of state power were transforming the Bolsheviks into overt agents of the counter­revolution, both at home and abroad. Inside Russia they became the overseers of an increasingly ferocious exploitation of the working class. Although the NEP brought with it a certain relaxation in the state’s economic domination, especially over the peasants, it did not see any let up in the party’s dictatorship over the proletariat. On the contrary, since the Bolsheviks still considered that the main danger of the counter-revolution within Russia came from the peasants, they concluded that the econo­mic concessions given to the peasants had to be counter-balanced by a strengthening of the political domination of Russian soci­ety by the Bolshevik Party; and this brought with it a reinforcement of tendencies towards monolithism in the party itself. This ‘tightening up’ of control by the party, and within the party, was seen as the only way of erecting a proletarian dam against a flood-tide of peasant capitalism.

Internationally, the requirements of the Russian state were, through the medium of the dominant Russian party, having a more and more pernicious effect on the policies of the Communist International: the United Front, the workers’ government -- reactionary ‘tactics’ such as these were to a large ex­tent the expression of the need for the Russian state to find bourgeois allies in the capitalist world.

Although the Bolshevik Party had not yet definitively abandoned the proletarian revolution, the whole logic of the situation it was in more and more pushed the party into a final and complete identification with the demands of Russian national capital. Lenin’s last writings show an obsessive concern with the problems of ‘socialist construction’ in backward Russia. The victory of Stalinism merely made this logic explicit, eliminating the dilemma between internationalism and Russian state interests by simply abandoning the former in favour of the latter.

The events of the last fifty years have shown that a proletarian party cannot sur­vive in a period of reflux or defeat in the class struggle. Thus, the only way that the communist parties could preserve their physical existence after the failure of the revolutionary wave was to pass lock, stock and barrel into the camp of the bourgeoisie. In Russia the tendency towards degeneration was further accelerated by the fact that the party had fused with the state and thus had to adapt itself even more quickly to the demands of national capital. In a per­iod of defeat, the defence of revolutionary positions can only be carried on by small communist fractions who detach themselves from the degenerating party or survive its demise. This phenomenon took place in Russia, mainly between 1921 and 1924, with the emergence of small groupings determined to defend communist positions against the betrayals of the party. As we have seen, the emergence of oppositional tendencies within the Bolshevik Party was not new, but the conditions in which these fractions had to operate after 1921 differed dramatically from those under which their predecessors had worked.

The precondition for defending a communist perspective against the advancing counter­revolution was, especially in Russia, the ability to place loyalty to those perspec­tives above all sentimental, personal, and political attachments to the original organ­izations of the class, now that the latter had embarked upon a path of class betrayal. And, indeed, this was the great achievement of the Russian left fractions; their defiant commitment to carry out communist work against the party and against the Soviet state as soon as such work could no longer be carried on within those institutions.

For the left, communist positions came first. If the ‘heroes’ of the revolution no longer defended the communist programme, then those heroes had to be denounced and left behind. It is not surprising that the Russian left communists tended to be made up of relatively obscure individuals, main­ly workers, who had not been part of the Bolshevik leadership during the heroic years. (Miasnikov even used to deride the Left Opposition as being nothing but an “opposition of celebrities” who only oppo­sed the Stalinist faction for their bureau­cratic reasons -- see L’Ouvrier Communiste, no. 6, January 1930). These revolutionary workers were able to understand the condi­tions facing the Russian proletariat much more easily than high-ranking Bolshevik officials who had really lost touch with the class and were only capable of seeing the problems of the revolution in terms of state administration. At the same time, however, the obscure origins of the left fractions’ members were often a factor of weakness in these groups. Their analyses tended to be based more on a raw class instinct than on a profound theoretical formation. Coupled with the historic weak­nesses of the Russian workers’ movement, which we have already mentioned, and the isolation of the Russian left from communist fractions outside Russia, these factors placed serious limits on the theoretical evolution of left communism in Russia.

Despite the left’s ability to break from ‘official’ institutions and to identify with the struggle of the class against them, the immense retreat of the class in Russia posed the left fractions with a series of opaque and contradictory problems. Despite its rapid degeneration after 1921, the Bolshevik Party remained the focus of pro­letarian life in Russia since the soviets, factory committees and other mass organs of the class were dead, and the state itself had become an organ of capital. Because of the apathy and indifference of the class, political debate and conflict were centred almost exclusively around the party. It is true that the very indifference and non-activity of the class made most of the ideo­logical debates within the party in the twenties sterile from the beginning, but the fact that the party was a kind of oasis of political thought in a desert of working class apoliticism could not be ignored by revolutionaries.

This situation placed the left fractions in a horrible dilemma. On the one hand the apathy of the masses, together with the rep­ressive actions of the state, made it extr­emely difficult to militate within the pro­letariat ‘in general’. On the other hand, any work towards the party was severely hampered by the banning of factions in 1921 and the increasingly stifling atmosphere within the party; it was almost impossible for any genuinely oppositional group to do legal work within the party. Even the rel­atively mild criticisms voiced in 1923 by the Platform of the Forty-Six (the founding document of the Left Opposition) contained the complaint that “free discussion within the party has in fact disappeared; the party’s social mind has been choked off”. For the tendencies to the left of the Left Opposition, the situation was even worse; and yet all of them continued to combine propaganda work among the ‘broad masses’ of the factories with secret work within the local party cells. The Workers’ Group in its 1923 Manifesto spoke of the “neces­sity to constitute the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) on the basis of the programme and statutes of the RCP, in order to exert a decisive pressure on the leading group of the party itself.” The Workers’ Truth group’s 1922 Appeal expressed the view that “everywhere in the mills and factories, in the trade union organizations, the workers’ faculties, the Soviet and party schools, the Communist Union of Youth, and the party organizations, propaganda circles must be created in soli­darity with the Workers’ Truth.”1 Such declarations of intent demonstrate the extreme difficulty facing these groups in their efforts to find an echo in the Russian proletariat and the impossibility of their finding clear-cut organizational solutions in a period of disarray and confusion.

Finally, we must bear in mind the fact that these groupings were subject to the most intense persecution and repression at the hands of the party-state. Precisely because Russia had been the ‘land of the Soviets’, the country of the proletarian revolution, the counter-revolution there had to be total, ruthless and implacable, burying the last traces of everything that had been revolu­tionary. Even before the victory of the Stalinist faction, the left groupings had been subject to investigation by the GPU, arrest, imprisonment and exile. Deprived of funds and equipment, constantly on the run from the secret police, it was difficult for them to carry out even a bare minimum of political propaganda. The solidification of the counter-revolution after 1924 made things even harder. And yet throughout these dark years of reaction the left commu­nists continued to fight for the revolution. As late as 1929 the Workers’ Group was pub­lishing an illegal paper in Moscow, The Workers’ Road to Power. Even in the Stali­nist labour camps their political voices were not silenced. A proletarian revolution does not die easily. The revolutionaries who fought on in such adverse circumstances derived their courage and their tenacious­ness from the simple fact that they had been born out of a revolution of the working class. Let us therefore examine in more detail the principal groupings who kept the flag of the communist revolution flying in spite of everything that was piled up against them.

1. The Workers’ Truth

The Workers’ Truth group was formed in the autumn of 1921. It appears to have been composed mainly of intellectuals, and to have grown out of the ‘Proletkult’ cultural milieu whose main animator was Bogdanov  - a party theorist who had clashed with Lenin over philosophical problems in the 1900s and who had been prominent in the ‘left’ tendencies in Bolshevism at that time. In its 1922 Appeal, Workers’ Truth characteri­zed the NEP, “the rebirth of normal capita­list relations”, as signifying a profound defeat for the Russian proletariat:

“The working class of Russia is disorgan­ized; confusion reigns in the minds of the workers; are they in a country of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, as the Communist Party untiringly reite­rates by word of mouth and in the press? Or are they in a country of arbitrary rule and exploitation, as life tells them at every step. The working class is leading a miserable existence at a time when the new bourgeoisie (ie the responsible functionaries, plant directors, heads of trusts, chairmen of execu­tive committees, etc) and the Nepmen live in luxury and recall in our memory the picture of the life of the bourgeoisie of all times.”

For the Workers’ Truth the ‘Soviet’ state has become “the representative of the nation­wide interests of capital ... the mere dir­ecting apparatus of political administra­tion and economic regulation by the organizer intelligentsia.” At the same time the working class had been deprived of its defensive organs, the unions, and of its class party. In a manifesto issued to the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923, Workers’ Truth charged the unions with:

“converting themselves from organizations to defend the economic interests of the workers into organizations to defend the interests of production, ie of state capital first and foremost.” (Quoted in E.H. Carr, The Interregnum.)

As for the party, the Appeal asserts that: “The Russian-Communist Party has become the party of the organizer intelligent­sia. The abyss between the Russian Communist Party and the working class is getting deeper and deeper ...”

They therefore declared their intention of working towards the formation of a real “party of the Russian proletariat”, though they admit that their work will be “long and persistent, and first of all ideologi­cal”.

Although the relatively modest aims of the Workers’ Truth group appear to express some understanding of the defeat the class had suffered and of the consequent limitations on revolutionary activity in such a period, their whole framework is vitiated by a peculiar ambiguity about the historic epoch and the tasks confronting the class globally. Perhaps basing themselves on Bogdanov’s idea that until the proletariat has matured into a capable organizing class, socialist revolution would be premature, they imply that the revolution in Russia had had the task of opening up a phase of capitalist development:

“After the successful revolution and civil war, broad perspectives opened be­fore Russia, of rapid transformation into a country of progressive capitalism. In this lies the undoubted and tremendous achievement of the revolution in October.” (Appeal)

This perspective also led the Workers’ Truth group to advocate a strange foreign policy for Russia, calling for rapproche­ment with ‘progressive’ capitalism in America and Germany against ‘reactionary’ France. At the same time the group seems to have had little or no contact with left communist groups outside Russia.

It was positions such as these which no doubt led the Workers’ Group of Miasnikov to proclaim that it had “nothing in common with the so-called ‘Workers’ Truth’ which attempts to wipe out everything that was communist in the revolution of October 1917 and is, therefore, completely Menshevist” (Workers’ Dreadnought, 31 May 1924) -- though in its 1923 Manifesto the Workers’ Group acknowledges that groups like the Workers’ Truth, Democratic Centralism and the Workers’ Opposition contain many honest proletarian elements and calls on them to regroup on the basis of the Workers’ Group’s Manifesto.

At the time of the Russian Revolution those who talked about the ‘inevitability’ of a bourgeois evolution for Russia tended to be identified as Mensheviks. But in the light of subsequent experience, we prefer to com­pare the positions of the Workers’ Truth group to the analysis arrived at by the German and Dutch left in the 1930s. Like the Workers’ Truth, the latter began with some perceptive insights into the nature of state capitalism, but undermined their anal­ysis by concluding that the Russian Revolu­tion had from the beginning been an affair of the intelligentsia carrying out the organization of state capitalism in a coun­try which had been unripe for communist revolution. In other words, the analysis put forward by Workers’ Truth is that of a revolutionary tendency demoralized and confused by the defeat of the revolution and thus led to call into question the orig­inal proletarian character of that revolu­tion. In the absence of a clear and coher­ent framework in which to analyze the degeneration of the revolution, such devia­tions are inevitable particularly in the adverse conditions in which revolutionaries in Russia found themselves after 1921.

But despite a certain pessimism and intell­ectualism, the Workers’ Truth group did not hesitate to intervene in the wildcat strikes which swept across Russia in the summer of 1923, attempting to raise political slogans within the general class movement. This intervention, however, brought the full force of the GPU down on the group and its back was broken quite quickly in the repression that followed.

2. The Workers’ Group and the Communist Workers’ Party

We have seen that many of the weaknesses of groups like the Workers’ Opposition and Workers’ Truth can be traced to their lack of an international perspective. As a coro­llary to this we can say that the most impor­tant of the left communist fractions in Russia were precisely those who emphasized the international nature of the revolution and the need for revolutionaries of the whole world to join together. This was the case with the elements in Russia who corres­ponded most closely to the German KAPD and its fraternal organizations.

On 3 June and 17 June 1922, the Workers’ Dreadnought published a statement by a recently formed group calling itself the “Group of Revolutionary Left Communists (Communist Workers’ Party) of Russia”. They announced themselves as a group that had left “the social democratic Russian Commu­nist Party which has made business its chief concern” (WD, 3 June); and although they pledged themselves to “support all that is left of revolutionary tendencies in the Russian Communist Party” and to “welcome and support all the demands and propositions of the Workers’ Opposition which point in a sound revolutionary direction”, they insisted that “there is no possibility of reforming the Russian Communist Party from within. In any case the Workers’ Opposition is not capable of doing it.” (WD, 17 June). The group denounced the efforts of the Bolsheviks and the Comintern to compromise with capi­tal both in Russia and abroad, and in parti­cular attacked the Comintern’s United Front policy as a means for the “reconstruction of the capitalist world economy” (WD, 17 June). Since the Bolsheviks and the Comin­tern were taking an opportunist course which could only lead to their integration into capitalism, the group affirmed that the time had come to work for a Communist Workers’ Party of Russia aligned to the KAPD of Germany, the Dutch KAP, and other parties of the Communist Workers’ International.2

The subsequent development of this group is obscure, but it seems to have been closely bound up with the better known Workers’ Group (also known as the Communist Workers’ Group) of Miasnikov -- in fact the Russian ‘CWP’ of 1922 seems to be a precursor of the latter. On 1 December 1923 the Dread­nought announced that it had been sent a copy of the Workers’ Group’s Manifesto by the CWP, along with a protest by the CWP against the imprisonment in Russia of Miasnikov, Kuznetzov, and other militants of the Workers’ Group. In 1924 the KAPD published the Manifesto in Germany and described the Workers’ Group as the “Russian section of the IVth International”. In any case, the defence of left communism as exemplified by the KAPD was henceforward to be carried on in Russia by the Miasnikov group.

Gabriel Miasnikov, a worker from the Urals, had leapt to prominence in the Bolshevik Party in 1921 when, immediately after the crucial Tenth Congress, he had called for “freedom of the press from monarchists to anarchists inclusive” (quoted in Carr, The Interregnum). Despite Lenin’s attempts to dissuade him from this agitation, he refused to climb down and was expelled from the party in early 1922. In February-March 1923 he joined with other militants to found the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), and they published their Manifesto, which was distributed at the Twelfth Congress of the RCP. The group began to do illegal work amongst party and non-party workers, and seems to have had an important presence in the strike wave of summer 1923, calling for mass demonstrations and trying to politicize an essentially defensive class movement. Their activities in these strikes were enough to convince the GPU that they were a real threat; a wave of arrests of their leading militants dealt a severe blow to the group. But as we have seen, they carried on their underground work, if on a reduced scale, until the beginning of the 1930s.3

The Workers’ Group’s Manifesto is a consid­erable advance on the Appeal of the Workers’ Truth, but it still shows the hesitations and half-formed ideas of the communist left, especially in Russia, in that period.

The Manifesto contains the usual denuncia­tions of the dreadful material conditions being suffered by the Russian workers and of the inequalities that accompany the NEP, and asks “is it in reality possible that the Nep (new economic policy) is changing into the NEP - the New Exploitation of the Prole­tariat?”. It goes on to attack the suppres­sion of dissent inside and outside the party, and the danger of the party being transfor­med into “a minority, wielding control of power and of the country’s economic resour­ces, which will end up as a bureaucratic caste”. It argues that the unions, soviets and factory committees have lost their func­tion as proletarian organs, so that the class has no control either of production or the political apparatus of the regime. And it calls for a regeneration of all these organs, a radical reform of the Soviet system which will enable the class to exert its domina­tion over economic and political life.

This immediately brings us to the major problem which faced the Russian left in the early twenties. What attitude should they take up to the Soviet regime? Did the re­gime still have any proletarian character, or should revolutionaries call for its out and out destruction? The trouble was that during those years there simply was neither the experience nor the established criteria for deciding whether or not the regime had become completely counter-revolutionary. This dilemma is reflected in the ambiguous attitude the Workers’ Group took up towards the regime. Thus it attacks the inequali­ties of the NEP and the danger of its “bureaucratic degeneration” while at the same time asserting that “the NEP is the direct result of the situation of the prod­uctive forces of our country. It must be used to consolidate the positions conquered by the proletariat in October.”4 The Manifesto thus puts forward a series of suggestions for ‘improving’ the NEP – workers’ control, non-dependence on foreign capital etc. Similarly, while criticizing the degeneration of the party, the Workers’ Group, as we have seen, opted for work among party members and for putting pressure on the party leadership. And although else­where the group posed the question whether the proletariat might not be “compelled to once again start anew the struggle -- and perhaps a bloody one -- for the overthrow of the oligarchy” (quoted in Carr, The interre­gnum), the main emphasis of the Manifesto is on the regeneration of the Soviet state and its institutions, not on their violent overthrow. The position of ‘critical sup­port’ is further underlined by the fact, that, in the face of the war threat posed by the Curzon Ultimatum of 1923, the members of the Workers’ Group are reported to have taken an oath to resist “all attempts to overthrow the Soviet power” (Carr, Ibid). Whether or not it was ‘correct’ to defend the Russian regime in 1923 is not really the point. The positions the Workers’ Group took up then certainly did not make it counter-revolutionary, because the exper­ience of the class had not yet definitively settled the Russian question. Its ambigui­ties about the nature of the Russian regime are above all testimony to the immense dif­ficulties this question posed to revolution­aries in the confusion and disarray of those years.

But the most important aspect of the Workers’ Group was not its analysis of the Russian regime but it’s intransigently internationa­list perspective. Significantly, the 1923 Manifesto begins with a powerful description of the world crisis of capitalism and posed the choice facing mankind as a whole: socialism or barbarism. In attempting to explain the delay in the working class arriving at a revolutionary consciousness in the face of this crisis, the Manifesto mounts a marvelous attack on the universally counter-revolutionary role of Social Democracy:

“The Socialists of all countries, are at any given moment the only saviours of the bourgeoisie from the proletarian revolu­tion, because the working masses are accustomed to be suspicious of everything which comes from their oppressors, but when the same things are described as being in its interests and are adorned with socialist phrases, then the worker who is misled by these phrases believes the traitors and expends his energies in a hopeless struggle. The bourgeoisie has, and will have, no better advocate.”

This understanding allows the Workers’ Group to make a series of bitter denuncia­tions of the Comintern’s tactics of the United Front and the Workers’ government as so many ways of tying the proletariat to its class enemies. Though less aware of the reactionary role of the unions, the Workers’ Group shared the KAPD’s perception that in the new epoch of capitalist decay all the old reformist tactics had to be jettisoned:

“The time when the working class could improve their material and legal position by strikes and entrance into Parliament is now irrevocably past. It must be said openly. The struggle for the most immed­iate objectives is a struggle for power. We must drive home by our propaganda that, though we have called for strikes in various cases, these cannot really improve the workers’ conditions. But you, workers, have not yet overcome the old reformist illusions and are carrying on a fight which only exhausts you. We are in solidarity with you in your strikes, but we always insist that these movements will not liberate you from slavery, expl­oitation and hopeless poverty. The only road to victory is the conquest of power by your own rough hands.”

The role of the party, then, is to prepare the masses everywhere for civil war against the bourgeoisie.

The Workers’ Groups understanding of the new historic epoch appears to contain all the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the KAPD’s idea of the “death crisis of capital­ism”. For both, once capitalism had entered into its final crisis, the conditions for a proletarian revolution exist at any time: the role of the party is thus one of detona­ting the class into a revolutionary explos­ion. Nowhere in the Manifesto is there any understanding of the reflux of the world revolution that has taken place, requiring a careful analysis of the new perspectives open to revolutionaries. For the Workers’ Group in 1923, world revolution was just as much on the agenda as it had been in 1917. Thus it could share the KAPD’s illusions in the possibility of building a IVth Interna­tional in 1922, and as late as 1928-31 Miasnikov was still trying to organize a Communist Workers’ Party for Russia.5 It appears that only the Italian Left was able to develop an appreciation of the role of the communist fraction in a period of reflux, when the party can no longer exist. For the KAPD, the Workers’ Dreadnought, Miasnikov and others, the party could exist at any time. The corollary to this immediatist view was an inexorable tendency towards political disintegration: even allowing for the effects of repression, the German left communists, like their Russian and English sympathizers, found it almost impossible to sustain their political existence during the period of counter-revolution.

The concrete proposals advanced by the Wor­kers’ Group concerning the international regroupment of revolutionaries show a healthy concern for the maximum possible unity of revolutionary forces, but they also reflect the same dilemmas about the relationship of the communist left to the degenerating ‘offical’ communist institutions which we have noted elsewhere. Thus while fiercely opposing any United Front with the Social Democrats, the Workers’ Group’s Manifesto calls for a kind of united front of all genuine revolutionary elements, among whom it included the parties of the IIIrd Inter­national as well as the Communist Workers’ Parties. On another occasion the Workers’ Group is reported to have entered into neg­otiations with the KPD left around Maslow in an attempt to draw Maslow into its aborted ‘foreign bureau’. The KAPD in its comments on the Manifesto was extremely critical of what it called the Workers’ Group’s “illu­sion that you can revolutionize the Commu­nist International….the IIIrd Internatio­nal is no longer an instrument of proletarian class struggle. This is why the Commu­nist Workers’ Parties have founded the Communist Workers’ International.” However the Workers’ Group’s dilemma about the nature of the Russian regime and of the Comin­tern was to be resolved in the light of practical experience. The victory of Stal­inism in Russia led it to take a more intran­sigent line against the bureaucracy and its state, while the rapid decomposition of the Comintern after 1923 made it inevitable that the future international ‘partners’ of the Workers’ Group would be the genuine left communists of different countries. It was first and foremost this ‘international connection’ with the survivors of the rev­olutionary wave which allowed revolutiona­ries like Miasnikov to attain a relatively high level of clarity in the sea of confu­sion, demoralization and dupery which had engulfed the Russian workers’ movement.

3. The ‘irreconcilables’ of the Left Opposition

We cannot go into the whole question of the Left Opposition here. Although their confu­sed defence of party democracy, of the Chinese Revolution, and of internationalism against the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country’ demonstrate that the Left Opposition was a proletarian current, in fact the last spark of resistance in the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern, the inade­quacy of their critique of the advancing counter-revolution makes it impossible to consider the Left Opposition, as a body, part of the revolutionary tradition of the communist left. On the international level, their refusal to question the Theses of the first four Congresses of the Comintern pre­vented them from avoiding a pathetic repeti­tion of all its errors. Within Russia, the Left Opposition failed to make the necessary break with the party-state apparatus, a break which could have placed them firmly on the terrain of the proletarian struggle against the regime, alongside the genuine left communist fractions. Although his enemies tried to implicate Trotsky for entering into relations with illegal groupings like the Workers’ Truth, Trotsky him­self explicitly dissociated himself from these groupings. He referred to the Workers’ Truth group as the “Workers’ Untruth” (Carr, The Interregnum) and himself participated in the repression of the ‘ultra-left’, for example by assisting in the commission which investigated the activities of the Workers’ Opposition in 1922. All that Trotsky would admit was that the groups were symptoms of a genuine degeneration in the Soviet regime.

But the Left Opposition in its early years was not simply Trotsky. Many of the signa­tories of the Platform of the Forty-Six were former left communists and Democratic Centralists like Ossinski, Smirnov, Piatakov, and others. And as Miasnikov said:

“There are not only great men in the Trotskyist opposition. There are also many workers. And these will not want to follow the leaders; after some hesita­tions, they will enter the ranks of the Workers’ Group.” (L’Ouvrier Communiste, no . 6, January 1930)

Precisely because the Left Opposition was a proletarian current, it naturally gave birth to a left wing which went far beyond the timid criticisms of Stalinism made by Trotsky and his ‘orthodox’ followers. To­wards the end of the twenties a current known as the ‘irreconcilables’ grew up with­in the Left Opposition, composed largely of young workers who opposed the tendency of the ‘moderate’ Trotskyists to move to­wards some kind of reconciliation with the Stalin faction, a tendency which accelera­ted after 1928 when Stalin appeared to be rapidly carrying out the Left Opposition’s programme of industrialization. Isaac Deutscher writes that among the irreconci­lables:

“ ... the view was already becoming axio­matic that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers’ state; that the party had betrayed the revolution; and that the hope to reform it being futile, the Oppo­sition should constitute itself into a new party and preach and prepare a new revolution. Some saw Stalin as the pro­moter of agrarian capitalism or even, the leader of a ‘kulak democracy’ while to others his rule epitomized the ascen­dancy of a state capitalism implacably hostile to socialism.” (The Prophet Outcast)

In his book Au Pays du Grand Mensonge, Anton Ciliga gives an eye-witness account of the debates within the Left Opposition that took place inside Stalin’s labour camps. He shows that some Left Opposition­ists stood for capitulating to the Stali­nist system, others stood for reforming it, and still others for a ‘political revolution’ to remove the bureaucracy (the position Trotsky himself was to adopt). But the irreconcilables or “negators” as he calls them (Ciliga himself was one):

“ ... believed that not only the political order but also the social and economic orders were foreign and hostile to the proletariat. We therefore envisaged not only a political but also a social revo­lution that should open up a road to the development of socialism. According to us, the bureaucracy was a real class, a class hostile to the proletariat.” (Reproduced in ‘Revolutionary Politics in Stalin’s Prisons’, an Oppositionist pamphlet.)

In January 1930, writing in L’Ouvrier Communiste (no.6) Miasnikov wrote of the Left Opposition that:

“There are only two possibilities. Either the Trotskyists regroup under the slogan ‘war on the palaces, peace to the cottages’, under the banner of the work­ers’ revolution, the first step of which must be the proletariat becoming the ru­ling class, or they will languish slowly and pass individually or collectively into the camp of the bourgeoisie. These are the only two alternatives. There is no third way.”

The events of the 1930s, which saw the def­initive passage of the Trotskyists into the armies of capital were to bear out Miasni­kov’s prediction. But still the best ele­ments of the Left Opposition were able to follow the other path, the path of the wor­kers’ revolution. Disgusted by Trotsky’s failure to confirm their analysis in his writings from abroad, they broke from the Left Opposition in 1930-2 and began to work with remnants of the Workers’ Group and the Democratic Centralism group in prison, evolving an analysis of the failure of the world revolution and the meaning of state capitalism. As Ciliga points out in his book, they were no longer afraid to go right to the heart of the question and to accept that the degeneration of the revolu­tion had not begun with Stalin but had gathered pace even under the aegis of Lenin and Trotsky. As Marx used to say, to be radical means to go to the root. In those dark years of reaction, what better contri­bution could the communist left have made than to have burrowed fearlessly to the roots of the proletariat’s defeat?

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

Some may see the debates that the Russian left communists carried on in prison as nothing but a symbol of the impotence of revolutionary ideas in the face of the capi­talist leviathan. But although their situa­tion was the expression of a profound defeat for the proletariat, the very fact that they continued to clarify the lessons of the revo­lution in such appalling circumstances is a sign that the historic mission of the pro­letariat can never be buried by the temporary victory of the counter-revolution – even if that victory lasts for decades. As Miasnikov wrote in connection with the imprisonment of Sapranov:

“Now Sapranov has been arrested. Even exile and the stifling of his voice did not succeed in diminishing his energy, and the bureaucracy could not feel safe about him till he was in the solid walls of a prison. But a powerful spirit, the spirit of the October Revolution, can’t be put in prison; even the grave can’t hide it. The principles of the revolution are still alive in the working class in Russia and as long as the wor­king class lives this idea cannot die. You can arrest Sapranov, but not the idea of the revolution.” (L’Ouvrier Communiste, 1929)

It is true that the Stalinist bureaucracy long ago succeeded in wiping out the last communist minorities in Russia. But today, when a new wave of international proletarian struggle is finding a muffled echo even amongst the proletariat in Russia, the “powerful spirit” of a second October has returned to haunt the minds of the Stalinist hangmen in Moscow and their offspring in Warsaw, Prague and Peking. When the workers of the ‘Socialist Fatherland’ rise up to destroy once and for all the vast prison of the Stalinist state, they will, in conjunc­tion with their class brothers all over the world, at last be able to solve the problems posed both by the revolution of 1917 and its loyal defenders: the revolutionaries of the Russian communist left.

“What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that sec­ondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!”

“This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the inter­national proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution)

C. D. Ward

The text we are publishing here was part of the introduction to the selection of artic­les from Bilan on the war in Spain, publis­hed by the ICC’s section in Italy (‘Bilan 1933-38, Articoli sulla Guerra di Spagna’, Rivista Internazionale, no.1, November 1976). Thus it doesn’t attempt to present all the positions of the Italian Left (which are developed in the articles themselves) but rather aims to define the historical con­text in which these positions evolved.

We are publishing it here not only because the texts it introduces are the ones that appeared in the International Review, nos. 4, 6, and 7, but also because they enable us to see the main stages of the struggle of the Italian communist left to keep alive the revolutionary theory of the proletariat during the period between the wars, a time when the counter-revolution was exerting a terrible weight on the workers’ movement after the crushing of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23. It thus gives us an invaluable insight into one of the most crucial qualities that a proletarian revo­lutionary can have: to know how to hold onto and clarify the historical experience of the class without falling under the ideological influence of the ruling class.

--------------------------------

“I am going to speak briefly, fully cons­cious of my responsibilities. What I have to say is extremely serious for the party and for us all, but the development of this painful situation has forced me to speak out. Independent of any consid­eration of the greater or lesser sincer­ity and purity of individuals, I have to declare, in the name of the Left, that the proceedings taking place here have not shaken our opinions, but on the con­trary have, together with the organization and preparation of the Congress and the programme being presented, served simply to strengthen our argument and reinforce the correctness of our judgment. I must state that sadly we consi­der the method employed here is a method harmful to the interests of our cause and to the proletariat. (...) We believe it to be our duty to state without hesi­tation and fully conscious of our respon­sibilities, this important fact: that no solidarity can unite us to people who independently of their intentions and their psychological characteristics, we judge now to be the representatives of an opportunist orientation within our party. (...) If I am a victim, if we are all victims, of a terrible error in our evaluation of what is happening, then I must be and we all must be considered as unworthy to be in the party and we will disappear in the eyes of the working class. But if this unrelenting opposi­tion that we have outlined is correct and has vital implications for the future, then we can at least say that we fought to the end against the pernicious methods which have been used to attack us, and that by resisting each threat, we brought a little clarity to the murky confusion created here. Now that I have had to speak, judge me as you wish.”

This is ‘Bordiga’s Declaration’ at the Lyon Congress in 1926 (which was reported in Prometeo, 1 June 1928) and it put the final stamp on the exclusion of the Left by the Communist Party of Italy. In fact it had been the Left which had founded and led the party during its early years and which had then carried out the arduous task of oppo­sition within it up until the Lyon Congress. The enlarged Sixth Executive of the Commu­nist International in February 1926 also finally sanctioned the defeat of the Ital­ian Left on an international level in a direct confrontation between Stalin and Bordiga.

It appears necessary to give some ‘dates’ and reference points regarding the process of degeneration of the CI; we are conscious, however, of their inevitable deficiencies and limitations in only being able to pro­vide a very pallid idea of the whole uphea­val experienced by the proletarian movement during those years. Then again the aim of this history is not to deal with the period, however rich and fertile it is in lessons; a great deal of documentary evidence exists on the subject, even though much has been produced by the counter-revolution. Our aim is to look at the organized activity of those communist groupings who, in the years following 1926, and despite almost unbearable conditions, could stand firm and continued a desperate and unequal struggle while being hunted down throughout Europe by Nazi fascism and Stalinist killers, viewed by both sides as the very worst enemies that had to be eliminated at all costs. Their activity and achievements have gone completely unrecognized and unknown, even by those all too few elements who feel the need to identify with this revolutionary tradition.

In 1921 at the Third Congress of the CI, the theory of the ‘United Front’ was put forward; the validity of the Livourne split was dis­cussed; and the KAPD in Germany already pushed to the sidelines, broke with the CI.

The Communist Left seemed to be defeated. Following the work of the Essen tendency of the KAPD, the ephemeral KAI formed. Their founding Manifesto stated, amongst other things: “Nothing can stop the flow of events, nor obscure the truth. We are saying this without useless reticence, without senti­mentalism: proletarian Russia of red October is becoming a bourgeois state.”

In 1922 the Second Congress of the Communist Party of Italy took place, and saw the proclamation of the Rome Theses. Also, the Fourth Congress of the CI occurred, at which the Italian Left opposed fusion with the socia­lists; the Left also made an analysis of fascism.

In 1923 Bordiga and other leaders of the Communist Party of Italy were arrested. The Bolshevization of the Communist Parties took place and the opposition between the Italian Left and the CI continued to develop.

In 1924 the magazine Prometeo appeared Bor­diga refused to stand for election, declaring that: “I will never be a delegate, and the more you make plans without me, the less time you will waste.” The Come Conference took place as well as the Fifth Congress of the CI.

In 1925 Bordiga wrote, The Trotsky Question and The Danger of Opportunism and the International. The ‘Comite d’Entente’ was formed and dissolved.

In 1926 the Left was excluded from the Party and the International. The period of emigration began; Bordiga wrote his letter to Korsch.

The letter sent by Bordiga from Naples to Karl Korsch (dated 28 October 1926) was in response to an attempt made by Korsch to implement a programme of international unification of what remained of the Communist Left. This is the sole remaining document from the correspondence Bordiga engaged in with other revolutionaries during those years (it seems that all the rest have dis­appeared without trace) and because of its particular interest we will quote below some passages which appear to be fundamental:

“. .., The way you express yourself (Bord­iga addressing Korsch) does not seem good to me. One cannot say that the “Russian Revolution is a bourgeois revolution”. The Revolution of 1917 was a proletarian revolution, although it would be an error to generalize ‘tactical’ lessons from it. Now the problem being posed is what happens to the dictatorship of the proleta­riat in one country when the revolution does not spread to other countries. A counter-revolution can take place; a process of degeneration can occur and the question is to discover and define the symptoms of such a degeneration, and its reflection within the communist party. One cannot simply state that Russia is a country where capitalism is expanding.

Our search is for the construction of a left orientation that is truly general and not circumstantial, which analyzes the phases and developments of different past situations from a sound revolution­ary basis and certainly not by ignoring their objective and distinctive charac­teristics.

In a general sense, I think that today the first task must be the preliminary work of the elaboration of a political ideology of the international Left based on the eloquent experiences of the Comin­tern, rather than organization and manoeuvring. Unless one holds this posi­tion, any international initiative re­mains difficult.

There is no need to try to split the (communist) parties and the International. We should allow their artificial and mechanical discipline to reach its logi­cal conclusions simply by going along with the absurdities of their procedure, without ever compromising our critical ideological and political positions and without ever joining the prevailing leadership.

I believe that one of the faults of the present International has been that it was based on a bloc of ‘local and natio­nal’ oppositions. We must reflect on that, not of course to exaggerate the situation, but to draw the lessons. Lenin carried out a large amount of ‘spontan­eous’ elaboration, reckoning on first of all materially regrouping different groups in order to fuse them later into one organization during the heat of the revolution. To a great extent this did not succeed.”

Thus, there appears in the letter a defence first of all of the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution against the facile and simplistic assertions of its ‘bourgeois nature’ by those who suddenly discovered that ‘something was wrong’ in Russia. Then the crucial problem is clearly posed: what becomes of the dictatorship of the prole­tariat if the revolution does not spread to other countries, and above all how to confront this question outside of a purely organizational solution based on alliances or various blocs, but within the context of the historic period, which was seen to be one of deepening counter-revolution; such questions were at the root of the difficult task of analysis, study and understanding of past errors, for the sake of the future upsurges in class struggle.

Amongst the intransigent positions defended there is one phrase in Bordiga’s letter that stands out: “There is no need to try to split the (communist) parties and the International”. Yet at that time the Left had already been put outside the Interna­tional. The Left was defending here the idea of remaining linked to what had, only five years before, been the real vanguard of the world proletariat. They thus wanted to hold on to the hope that the revolution was not truly finished for decades to come; that in the mortal crisis of capitalism, the working class, finding itself trapped in the terrible vice of the crisis, would still be able to raise its head; and that with a push from ‘below’ the positions defended by the Left could still triumph in the party and the International. But the class had been decapitated; the physical defeat of the proletariat in the struggle it had engaged in was reflected in the degeneration and betrayal of the communist parties and the International. The upsurge could not take place while the class was unable to secrete its vanguard, the party, which now no longer existed.

Bordiga also held the view that the Inter­national was in effect the world party of the proletariat. At the Fifth Congress of the CI (July 1924) he said:

“What I really mean is that in the pre­sent situation, it is the International of the world revolutionary proletariat which must repay a part of the many ser­vices it received from the Communist Party of Russia.”

According to this then, Bordiga was proposing that the International set itself in opposi­tion to the Russian party and not become an instrument of it -- to do so would spell the end of all hope. But this is what happened.

With this basic framework and preoccupation, the Italian Left began and continued its work in exile:

“In some ways we play an international role because the Italian people are a people of emigrants in the economic and social meaning of the word, and, after the birth of fascism, in a political sense as well. We have become a little like the Jews; if we were beaten in Italy, we can console ourselves with the thought that the Jews too are strong not in Palestine but elsewhere.” (Interven­tion by Bordiga at the Sixth Enlarged Executive of the CI.)

The whole emigration of communist militants from Italy did not take the same path. While the majority of them had to leave Italy after being pitilessly hunted down by the fascists and excluded from the Communist Party at the Lyon Congress (depriving them thus of any organized help and refuge), some elements had already gone to Austria and later in 1923 they went to Germany where revolutionary fighters experienced the tra­gic events of that year. They had been opposed to the decisions of the CI and had left the Communist Party of Italy. They represented, in practice, the first Left opposition to organize themselves in exile. They kept contact with the Entschiedene Linke1 and with Karl Korsch in Germany, as well as with comrades of the Left in Italy who formed the ‘Comite d’ Entente’. It was after this period that there was an attempt at contact between Bordiga and Korsch, and the letter quoted before was written.

This group of exiles then left Germany and met up again in France having travelled through Switzerland. While maintaining contact all the time with their German comrades, they joined a communist opposition committee (nothing to do with the Trotskyist Opposition) but did not in any sense lose the autonomy of their group.

In 1927 at Pantin, a Parisian suburb, the refuge for emigrants, the homeless, the hopeless and those driven from civil society, the Left Fraction of' the Communist Party of Italy was formed, but without Vercesi (Ottorino Perrone, later one of the main figures in Bilan) who had been expelled from ‘democratic’ France. There is all too much to say about the vicissitudes experien­ced by these comrades as they searched for work and for shelter, persecuted and unwan­ted in the democracies and tracked down by the Stalinists, and yet throughout it all continuing their intransigent struggle, defending and diffusing communist positions without fear or compromise. To exemplify the nature of the ‘relations’ existing with the Stalinists we will quote a part of a letter (dated 19 April 1929) from a certain Togliatti to Iaroslaysky:

“The struggle that our party must wage against the debris of the Bordigist oppo­sition which is,trying to organize all the malcontents into a fraction, is very difficult. We must struggle against these people in every country where the Italian emigration exists (France, Belgium, Switzerland, North America, South America etc). It is very difficult for us to wage this struggle if our sister parties do not come to our aid. The Communist Party of Italy asks the Communist Party of Russia for help in continuing this already difficult struggle, which can only be made more difficult by the exis­tence of any weaknesses. Our party has nothing more to say. It asks only that the greatest severity be meted out.”

We do not know if the scission which split the emigration in France into two parts, in­to a very reduced minority and a majority, had taken place before or after Pantin, al­though the information we have at our dis­posal makes us incline towards the second alternative. The first group, which repre­sented the continuity with the small nucleus whom we have already seen in Germany, brou­ght Le Reveil Communiste into being and appeared between 1928 and 1929. This publi­cation opened up its pages to Left groups in Germany (to Korsch from Kommunistische Politik and to what remained of the KAPD in those years) and also to the Russian Left in the person of Miasnikov.

The central point characterizing tale position of Reveil Communiste was the denial of any proletarian character in the Russian state -- a point which Bilan during the same years was much more cautious about -- and an open and manifest support for the posi­tions of the KAPD. Reveil Communiste was succeeded by L’Ouvrier Communiste based on openly councilist positions.

The second group was what was properly known as the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy; it published Prometeo, written in Italian from June 1928 to 1938, sometimes every fifteen days, sometimes every month, and Bilan from 1933 to 1938. The first years of their existence witnes­sed the debate with Trotsky, exiled from then on in Prinkipo, and with groups who claimed to be linked to Trotsky and who were organizing themselves mainly in France.

In November 1927 Contre Le Courant “organ of the Communist Opposition” appeared in Paris; it tried to put itself forward as a catalyst to the various small Trotskyist groupings and to encourage, or at least initiate, a process of regroupment of the whole left opposition, ‘An Open Letter to the Communists of the Opposition’ appeared in Contre Le Courant, no.12, June 1928, and was sent to the following organizations: the Marx-Lenin Circle which published Bulletin Communiste; the Italian Left Fraction; the Barre-Treint group which pub­lished Redressement Communiste; the Lutte de Classe group whose leader was Naville and Le Reveil Communiste, which has already been mentioned.

Nothing came of this project (it was only in 1930 that La Verite, with the direct support of Trotsky, became the mouthpiece of the whole Trotskyist opposition) but it is interesting to see how the Political Bureau of the Italian Fraction responded to this in a letter written by Vercesi:

“Many opposition groups believe they must limit their role to that of a sort of tribunal which records the progress of the course of degeneration and pres­ents to the proletariat only evidence of the truth that they presume to have dis­covered. We think that we must prepare our own future, and that the most impor­tant thing is to establish an orientation for communist activity.

We believe that the crisis of the Inter­national has very profound causes: its apparently uniform foundation, which was really heterogeneous; the absence of a solid body of politics and communist tac­tics, and, flowing from this, an adulter­ation of marxist principles that led to a series of revolutionary disasters.

Apart from the Russian Opposition, only our Fraction has elaborated in a Platform a course of systematic action, and this has been due to comrade Bordiga.2

There are many oppositions. That is bad; but there is no other remedy than con­frontation with their respective ideolo­gies, to engage in a polemic in order to finally reach what you are suggesting to us. If so many oppositions exist, it is because there are several ideologies whose actual substance must be made clear. And this cannot just be done through a simple discussion in a common organiza­tion. Our watchword is to take our eff­orts to their ultimate conclusion with­out being derailed into a ‘solution’ that would in reality be a new failure.

We believe that if the International, having officially altered its programme, has failed in its role of leader of the revolution, the communist parties have done no less. In view of the situation we are living in, these are the organs we must work within in order to struggle against opportunism, and even to trans­form these organs into a revolutionary vanguard.”

This letter (published in Contre le Courant, no.13, August 1928) ends finally by refusing the invitation to regroupment for the rea­sons given before. We can see how Vercesi’s response recalls the letter from Bordiga to Korsch, and shows the same emphasis on the necessity to examine the past in a critical way and to draw the lessons from the degen­eration and the counter-revolutionary wave which had crushed the proletarian movement; and again we see a confidence in an autono­mous, intransigent and principled struggle within the communist parties. More impor­tant still was the written correspondence between Prometeo (which first started to appear in June 1928) and Trotsky. (A good documentation of this correspondence appears in a book entitled Trotsky and Italian Communism by Corvisieri.)

In its first letter to Trotsky, Prometeo gave a brief outline of its history: the break with Reveil Communiste; its constitu­tion into a Fraction; the analysis of the international situation, whose main charac­teristic was the capitalist offensive; the analysis of Russia which had divided them into a majority which saw Russia as a pro­letarian state and a minority which “denied the proletarian character of the Russian state”; the Italian question, on which the Fraction refused to recognize that Social Democracy or the democratic forces of opposition could lead a struggle against fascism and affirmed that “only the working class had the possibility of leading the struggle on the basis of the communist programme”.

Following the non-participation of the Fraction at a conference of the ‘opposition’ in Paris, relations with Trotsky became more strained and the Russian revolutionary wrote a letter which posed the following questions to Prometeo:

“1. Do you consider yourselves as a national movement or part of an interna­tional movement?

2. What tendency do you belong to?

3. Why don’t you consider creating an international fraction of your tendency?”

Prometeo answered:

“Fundamentally, you are inviting us to tell you if we consider ourselves to be communists. (...) We will now answer your questions:

1. We consider ourselves to be part of an international movement.

2. We belong, since the foundation of the Communist International, and even before, to the tendency of the Left.

3. We are not considering the creation of an international fraction of our ten­dency because we believe as marxists that the international organization of the proletariat is not an artificial sum of groups and individuals from every country around a given group. On the contrary, we consider that this organiza­tion must be the result of the experience of the proletariat in every country.”

Thus there were opposing positions on ques­tions of method and principle between Prometeo and Trotsky: on the part of Prome­teo there wasn’t total acceptance of the first four Congresses of the CI, but a crit­icism of the ‘United Front’ tactic “which (wrote Prometeo) led to the peasants’ and workers’ government, to the Anglo-Russian Committee, to the Kuomintang, to the proletarian anti-fascist committees”. The events in Spain in 1930-1 led to a split and a definitive break in contact. On Trotsky’s part:

“The slogan of the Republic is naturally also a slogan for the proletariat. But for the proletariat it is not only a question of changing a king for a presi­dent, but also a purging of the debris of feudalism.”

and he also asserted:

“The separatist tendencies pose the democratic duty of national self-deter­mination to the Revolution ... Separatism for the workers and peasants is a way of expressing their social indignation.” (Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution and the Duty of Communists)

Prometeo’s response to this could only be: “It is obvious that we cannot take the same path and we reply to him (Trotsky) as much as to the anarcho-syndicalist leaders of the CNT by denying most vehe­mently that communists must stand in the forefront of the defense of the Republic. For any Republic and least of all for the “Spanish Republic”.” (Prometeo, 22 August 1931)

The split was therefore definitive and could only become more marked on questions such as the social nature of the USSR, Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucratic leadership in Russia, and the defense of Russia in case of imperialist war.

In November 1933 there appeared the first issue of Bilan, “the monthly theoretical bulletin of the Left Fraction of the Commu­nist Party of Italy”. A historic framework was immediately defined in the ‘Introduction’ and this underlined precisely what the work of the bulletin was and what tasks this group of revolutionaries was proposing to assume.

“It is not a change in the historic sit­uation which has allowed capitalism to weather the storm of post-war events, in 1933 as in 1917 capitalism stands con­demned definitively as a system of social organization. What changed between 1917 and 1933 are the relations of force between the two basic classes, between the two historic forces which confront each other in the present period: capitalism and the proletariat.

We have today reached a culminating point in this period: the proletariat is perhaps no longer able to oppose the outburst of a new imperialist war with the triumph of the revolution. Nevertheless if any possibility of an immediate revolutionary upsurge still remains it lies only with the understanding of past defeats. Those who prefer the catch-phrase of immediate mobilization of the workers to this indis­pensable work of historical analysis create only confusion and prevent the real upsurge of proletarian struggles.

The framework of the new parties of the proletariat can only arise on the basis of a profound understanding of the causes of the defeat. This understanding can brook neither censorship nor ostracism.

To draw up a balance-sheet (bilan) of the post-war events is therefore to establish the conditions for the victory of the proletariat in all countries.”

With this as their axis Bilan could make pro­gress and continue its work by coming to grips with all the fundamental questions of the revolutionary movement, from the analysis of the crisis of capitalism (decadence) to the criticism of national liberation move­ments, from the defining of those moments when the upsurge of the proletarian class would once more be possible, to the unrelen­ting criticism of the ‘communist parties’ and Russia. The social nature of Russia was still not clear, but its political role as an imperialist power which the working class must refuse to support in any way, especial­ly in view of the impending world war, was made clear. As a fundamental moment in revolutionary work Bilan also encouraged debate with other political groupings and published texts from other comrades.

In 1935 Bilan changed from being the “monthly theoretical bulletin of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy” to become “the monthly theoretical bulletin of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left”, a change which represented both the final split with a party which was from now on a tool of the capitalist counter-revolution, and the affirmation of the international nature of its tasks.

In 1936 divergences started to appear on the question of the Spanish war and these divergences provoked a split in Bilan. At the same time the links with the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes de Belgique which had been established at the end of 1932 were broken. This group had come out of Trotskyism and had immediately afterwards become subject to a strong councilist influence. In 1932, Bilan and the League took up the same positions in criticizing the International Left Opposition (Trotsky­ist) which when faced by the fascist attack in Germany launched an appeal for a united front for the defence of ‘democratic demands’, considering them to be stages in the struggle for the communist revolution.

The agreement between the two groups meant that they both refused the solution proposed by the Trotskyist Opposition for the recon­stitution of a communist party; this agree­ment also strengthened the possibility of contact and debate between the two organiza­tions, the aim of which had to be the recon­struction of the theoretical heritage of the proletariat, in order to provide an analysis of and a political response to the events of those years.

The Spanish war signaled the break-down of a debate which had been pursued for six years and which Bilan had greatly contribu­ted to. The majority of the League chose to give support to the anti-fascist war in an analagous form to the minority of Bilan and the French group L’Union Communiste.

In fact, Hennaut, a very important represen­tative of the League, wrote the following in a document sanctioning the break in February 1937:

“We know that the defense of democracy is only the formal aspect of the struggle; the antagonism between capitalism and the proletariat is its real essence. And on the basis of not abandoning the class struggle under any circumstances, the duty of revolutionaries is to participate in it.”

A substantial expression of the struggle of capitalism against the proletariat is here considered as a formal expression of the proletarian struggle against capitalism. ... But the whole League did not take this position. A small minority, but the major­ity in Brussels, defended the position of Bilan. It was expelled from the organiza­tion and formed the “Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left”. From 1937 to 1939 it published Communisme, a duplicated monthly magazine.

In 1938, Bilan ended and Octobre took its place, “the monthly organ of the Internatio­nal Bureau of the Communist Left”. Five issues of Octobre were published, the last in August 1939. A month later the second world carnage began.

What links do the groups who claim contin­uity (more or less organic) with the Ital­ian Left have with the work of the Fraction in exile? Let us examine the position of the International Communist Party (PCI) who publish Programme Communiste. Programme Communiste always claims, in words at least, to come from the work of Bilan and Prometeo -- perhaps to fill the gap existing between 1926 and World War II. It has never attemp­ted to clarify the work of Bilan for its militants and readers (except for some short articles in one issue of the magazine in 1957 when Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi) died) and so Bilan remains merely a name and not a very important one at that. To read Bilan would have been traumatic for those who then followed a diametrically opposed path to that laid down by the Ital­ian Fraction in exile. Today there doesn’t even appear to be any trace of this false modesty, for although no-one would say openly that they have nothing to learn from the work of Bilan, this is implicitly under­stood in certain articles which touch on the question of the workers’ movement in the thirties. Although in one article in Programma Comunista, no.21, 1971 there is still a criticism of Trotsky when he called for “a whole series of hybrid coalitions amongst the international opposition”, and goes on to say that “in the end this pot­pourri of opposition joined together to form the still-born IVth International”, in 1973 Programma Comunista could write:

“When Trotsky affirmed the prime necessity of forming a nucleus based solidly on revolutionary positions as an indispensable but not exclusive or sufficient condition for a revolutionary upsurge in the short-term or long-term and as the means by which the next conflict will become revolutionary, he was simply articulating a basic marxist truth, a truth all the more important when it is not so clear and can be ignored and even laughed at by the right, the ‘left’ and even the ‘extreme left’.”

Perhaps Programma Comunista mean by “based solidly on revolutionary positions” entrism into the social democratic parties, or even the defense of Russia during World War II? What other meaning can there be to the phrase “the means by which the next conflict become revolutionary” when those ‘means’ are the tactics of Trotskyism? Further on we find:

“If Trotsky was mistaken, it was not because he put forward the necessity of a IVth International, nor that he believed such a necessity to be the aim of his work, as opposed to those who abstractly recognized the necessity but sought ref­uge in the protected atmosphere of the libraries - like the Korschs and the Pannekoeks of this world.”

And why not write here ‘the Vercesis and the Bordigas’ etc? But the article continues:

“Only mindless sectarians could rejoice and mock the tragedy of the so-called IVth International, which fell because it became the prey of the most hetero­geneous forms of opportunism.”

and finally the article reaches its climax: “The IVth International remains to be built!” At last! What can a group which wants to “work today with patience, tenacity and modesty to make the day possible when the cry of the revolutionary vanguard will be: Long Live the IVth International” have to do with the Communist Left and Bilan?

Gentlemen, you have had to wait for the burial of their bodies before being able to write such things, which can’t be attributed to the madness of an imbecile writing under the anonymity of your magazine but are the ‘collective’ work of the ‘Party’.

The Internationalist Communist Party who publish Battaglia Comunista also claim origins in Bilan. One issue of Prometeo, the theoretical organ of Battaglia Comunista, was entirely dedicated to the theoretical and political work of Vercesi. We quote below some passages from this text:

“The Spanish events, superior by far to their protagonists, also brought to light the strong points as well as the weaker points of our analysis: the majority of Bilan held to a formulation which was theoretically impeccable but which had the fault of remaining a simple abstrac­tion; the minority on the other hand took the position of participation at all costs, and did not seem to be always aware of avoiding the antics of bourgeois jacobinism, even when on the barricades.

Given the objective possibilities, our comrades in Bilan had to pose the problem, the same one our party had to pose later on when faced with the question of the partisans, of calling on the workers who were fighting not to fall into the trap of the strategy of imperialist war.” (Prometeo, Series II, no.10, March 1958)

Exactly, Battaglia Comunista defended the same position in the immediate period after World War II as the minority of Bilan during the Spanish war (not to mention its electo­ral participation in 1948). The minority of Bilan did not go to Spain to defend the Republic against fascism (as is shown else­where in the texts we have published) but to defend communist principles and tactics within the militias.

But the problem does not rest there, be­cause the pivotal issue is that what Battaglia calls our ‘formalism’ or ‘abstrac­tions’ is for us a principle, a class line.

S.

The main task of any congress is to draw up a balance-sheet of the organization’s past activity and outline perspectives for the coming year. This task was particularly important for the First Congress of Inter­nationalisme, the ICC section in Belgium. It must be remembered that it was just over a year ago, at its Founding Congress, that the section in Belgium was formed from three groups (Journal des Luttes de Classe, Revolutionnaire Raden Socialisten, Vrije Raden Socialisten) which, with the help of the ICC, had surmounted their previous confusions. These three groups had been engen­dered by the re-emergence of the proletarian struggle, and, after several years of labor­ious study and debate, were gradually won over to class positions, despite several incursions into the mire of bourgeois ideo­logy. At the time, this event was hailed by the ICC as an important step in its own development, not so much because of the new section itself, but because of the positive lessons of this experience of three isolated groups unifying themselves on the basis of a proletarian programme. This was an expres­sion of the revolutionary movement’s growing understanding of the need for world-wide unification. Thus the primary tasks of Internationalisme in its first year were to overcome localist prejudices, to centralize the activity of the section in an effective manner, to overcome linguistic divisions and assure the publication of the magazine in two Languages (French and Dutch), to inte­grate itself into the work of the whole ICC and assimilate the experience of other sec­tions, and, finally, to ensure the rapid development of its militants, so that the section could catch up with the general theoretical level of the Current. The importance of all this work could not be under-estimated, and it was only a thorough grasp of the difficulties met with in the preceding period that allowed this step to be confidently taken.

After analyzing the economic and political situation at both national and international level1, the Congress concretized the further development and strengthening of the section by adopting political perspec­tives for the year ahead. The most import­ant aspect of these perspectives was un­doubtedly the decision to publish Internationalisme in both languages on a monthly basis as soon as possible. The increased frequency of the magazine’s appearance ref­lects the fact that the developing workers’ struggle is being confronted with more and more problems which the organization of revolutionaries must respond to if it is to fulfill its function within the proletariat. With the deepening of the crisis and the intensification of class struggle, revolu­tionaries will have to intervene more and more systematically, not only in response to the immediate needs of the struggle, but also to prepare themselves in a consistent and evolving manner for the revolutionary outbreaks which are now germinating in the fertile soil of the proletariat’s day-to- day struggles.

A second task of the Congress was also con­cerned with preparing the organization for the future. That is to say, the taking up of positions on general questions which are not being posed directly to the class today, but which will inevitably arise in the struggles of the future. Like the Second Congress of Revolution Internationale, the First Congress of Internationalisme dealt with the problem of the period of transition from capitalism to communism. This is by definition a problem which demands a lot of preparatory study. When the whole proleta­riat rises up against the bourgeoisie, when it smashes the bourgeois state from top to bottom, when the world is plunged into the whirlpool of the revolution, revolutionaries will have had to have really studied and drawn the lessons from the past if they are going to give answers to the immediate prob­lems of how the proletariat will organize its political power. Because the inner dia­lectic of the struggle of the working class today is leading it towards a revolutionary outcome; because each struggle contains within it the seeds of the revolution, of communism, the ICC considers it absolutely necessary for its next International Congress to take up a position on the general frame­work of the political relations that will exist during the period of transition.

Thus the adoption by the First Congress of Internationalisme of a resolution on this question is a moment in the international discussion which is preparing the ground for the Second International Congress. And although the resolution presented at the Second Congress of Revolution Internationale (published in International Review, no. 8) was also accepted by the Congress of Inter­nationalisme, the discussion on this ques­tion was both controversial and extremely fruitful. The basic debate concerned the nature of the state during the period of transition and has already appeared publicly in International Review, no. 6; and it was considerably enriched by the discussion at this Congress.

Finally, two important texts were presented to the Congress: theses on the class strug­gle in Belgium and theses on the continuity of communist groups in Belgium.2 This Congress was an important moment in the life of the section in Belgium, in many ways a step which marked the end of its initial phase of development and the opening up of a new phase of political evolution. It is absolutely necessary to understand where we have come from in order to know where we are going. These texts were for the young sec­tion in Belgium a way of renewing its ties with the past of the proletariat and of understanding itself as a link in the histor­ical chain which connects all the struggles and political expressions of the working class.

 

 

IR9, 2nd Quarter, April 1977

An important split has recently taken place in the ranks of the Communist Workers’ Organization (CWO), a revolutionary group in Britain that defends positions close to those of the ICC. Although the details of the split remain obscure, since the ‘seceders’ from the CWO have apparently failed to produce a single document explaining why they broke away, it seems that the entire Liverpool section – more or less the old Workers’ Voice group – has left the CWO complaining of its intolerant attitude both to other groups and to internal discussion. These charges have perhaps some solid justification. But the old Workers’ Voice group is hardly well-qualified to complain about intolerance towards other groups: it was the first of various groups to break off relations with the ICC, accusing it of being ‘counter-revolutionary’ on the flimsiest of political arguments (see WV 13, ‘Statement’). From what little evidence there is, it seems that the Liverpool group’s main motivation for leaving the CWO was a pronounced tendency towards localism and activism; a purely verbal commitment to ‘intervene in the working class’, seeing both intervention and the working class in the most narrow and fragmented way. Both these localist tendencies, and the Liverpool group’s failure to debate differences in a genuinely political manner, are in direct continuity with the practice of the old Workers’ Voce (see ‘Sectarianism Unlimited’ in World Revolution, 3).  The reaction of the remaining members of the CWO seems to be in line with that group’s tradition of self-enclosed dogmatism to the extent that their publications have not shown a concern to go more deeply into the political implications of this split.

We don’t want to dwell on the specific details of this split. We simply want to say that it is the logical conclusion of what we referred to as an “incomplete regroupment” (WR 5) when Workers’ Voice and Revolutionary Perspectives fused to form the CWO in September 1975. It is the inevitable result of the policy of sectarian isolation the CWO chose for themselves when they broke off with the ICC. This isolation has been growing ever since the CWO was formed: most of the contacts they have had with revolutionary elements in other countries (among them Pour Une Intervention Communiste in France and the ex-Revolutionary Workers’ Group in the US) have led nowhere. Now the group has lost one of its strongest sections. More than ever, the CWO remains a local group, trapped by the narrowness of its horizons. Although the CWO itself may be unable to understand why all this has happened in a period which is basically favourable to the regroupment of revolutionary forces, it is important for us to look at the whole experience of the CWO as a problem of the re-emerging  revolutionary movement, and to see  what lessons this experience holds for the process of revolutionary regroupment that is going on today. We would also like to take this opportunity to express our criticisms of what we consider to be the main political errors of the CWO. This critique will serve as a response to the polemic with the ICC in the CWO’s article in Revolutionary Perspectives 4, ‘The Convulsions of the ICC’, which purports to show why the ICC is part of the bourgeoisie.

THE PROBLEMS OF THE RE-EMERGING REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT

In order to understand the bizarre situation in which there are two revolutionary groups in Britain, both defending class positions, but who have no relationship with each other because one considers the other to be ‘counter-revolutionary’, we have to go back several years to the time when the small but growing revolutionary movement of today began to emerge out of the long night of the counter-revolution, whose end was signalled by the resurgence of proletarian struggle after 1968.

Precisely because the counter-revolution that followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 was so long and so deep, the re-emergence of the revolutionary movement in the late 1960s was hindered by innumerable obstacles and confusions. These is no automatic connection between the level of class struggle at a given time and the clarity of the proletariat’s revolutionary minorities. Following the May ’68 events in France, the international proletariat, reacting to the first shocks of the just beginning global economic exists, launched itself into a series of battles on a scale the world hadn’t seen for fifty years. But although the re-appearance of the proletariat on the scene of history posed the general conditions for the rebirth of a communist fraction within the class, the first revolutionary groups engendered by the reviving class struggle found it extremely difficult to understand the meaning of their own existence, the tasks which they had been created to fulfil.

The most serious problem confronting these groups was the complete break in organic continuity that existed with the revolutionary movement of the past. In previous periods, the proletariat had seen its parties collapse or betray the class, but each time a new organization had emerged after a brief period, taking the best elements of the old parties and creating a higher synthesis out of them. Thus although the 2nd International was lost to the proletariat when it capitulated to the imperialist war in 1914, the ‘wreckage’ was not absolute. Within a few years a new International had arisen like a phoenix out of the ashes, based on those elements of the old International who had remained loyal to the programmatic principles of the working class. While breaking with the parties of Social Democracy, the new Communist International (Comintern) did not have to ‘start from scratch’. It could count on an organizational experience and a presence within the working class built up by revolutionaries for decades before the disaster of 1914.

In contrast to this, the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, because it took place in a new period when the only perspective facing the proletariat was socialism or barbarism, and thus when the only proletarian political minorities were ones based on an explicitly communist programme, meant the virtual disappearance of the revolutionary movement from the scene of history. The Left Communist fractions that detached themselves from the degenerating Comintern continued to play a vital role in drawing the lessons from the defeat of the revolution, but in the end they were unable to resist the immense pressure of bourgeois ideology in a period of defeat and demoralization. The story of the Left Communist movement from the 1920s to the 1950s is one of growing isolation and fragmentation.

The tragic break in continuity with the past movement meant that the new groupings which emerged in the late 1960s were deprived of vital theoretical and organizational experience, lacked traditions of intervention in revolutionary struggle, were isolated from the class, and so on. In addition to this, the movement arose ‘in parallel’, as it were, with the so-called student revolt. Many of the new revolutionary elements had originally come out of the university milieu with all the confusions and prejudices that flourish in such an environment.

This petty bourgeois influence was most strongly felt in that area where the new revolutionary groups were the most confused: the question of organization. The betrayals of the Bolshevik Party, the transformation of the previous revolutionary parties into monstrous bureaucratic machines, had as early as the 1920s produced a reaction in the working class movement that tended to suspect any form of revolutionary organization as being an expression of a desire to substitute the organization for the working class. Certain tendencies coming from the Council Communists in the 1930s and 40s began to evolve towards the position that revolutionary organizations constitute a barrier to the development of an autonomous proletarian struggle.

It is hardly surprising that the young revolutionary movement of the 1960s should have adopted these ‘councilist’ errors at the beginning. Many individuals moved towards revolutionary positions in reaction to the bureaucratic and vanguardist pre-tensions of the various leftist organizations. And if one also bears in mind the fact that libertarian, situationist, and other ‘anti-authoritarian’ conceptions were intimately bound up with the petty-bourgeois milieu out of which many of the revolutionaries had come, we can see why the question of organization was such a stumbling block to the majority of the new revolutionary currents. The role of revolutionaries within the class struggle, the way to organize a revolutionary minority, the meaning of intervention in the class struggle – these questions were understood much less readily than more general class positions like the bourgeois nature of the trade unions or of the Stalinist regimes. There was an almost endemic fear of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Bolshevism’, a feeling that anyone who tended to stress the importance of the revolutionary organization must be ‘just the same’ as the Trotskyists or Stalinists, interested only in constituting themselves as fake ‘leaders’ of the working class. Similarly any attempt to organize revolutionary activity in a centralized manner was viewed with intense suspicion: the only centralism that could be imagined was the bureaucratic hierarchy of the leftist organizations. At the same time aspects of revolutionary work such as regular, methodical publication, a systematic approach to intervention and distribution of literature, etc – were often looked down upon as so much ‘organizational fetishism’. Needless to say, this suspicion, amounting at times to a virtual paralysis of any revolutionary work, was a direct product of the trauma of the counter-revolution: an understandable obsession, but one which had to be overcome as soon as possible if the revolutionary movement was ever to get of the ground.

Because of these problems, many of the groups that were produced by the first wave of proletarian struggle between 1968 and 1972 disappeared completely. And the majority of these were casualties of a deep confusion about organization. A typical example of this was the Swedish group Internationell Arbetarkamp (IAK). Beginning as a healthy reaction against Maoism, IAK came close to elaborating a clear communist platform but when it had to confront the problem of how to organize itself, it drew back in the most abject terror. Coming under the influence of ‘modernist’ ideas like those of Invariance in France, it quickly began to theorize its own inner decomposition, arguing that all groups are ‘rackets’ and bourgeois in nature and that the task of communists is to ‘live like communists’. Not surprisingly the group soon splintered into a number of demoralized individuals pursuing their own development via vegetarianism, writing ‘anti-capitalist’ novels, etc, etc.

One of the main problems during this period was that there was not yet a political current that was capable of acting as a solid pole of regroupment, of offering groups like IAK an alternative to political disintegration. This was inevitable because the fledgling revolutionary movement had no alternative but to grow and mature through its own experiences. Nevertheless, this process of maturation was slowly unfolding. An early sign of this was the disappearance of most of the currents who, dazzled by the post-war boom, had rejected the marxist conception of crisis, and now found their fantasies about a crisis-free capitalism shattered by the dramatic sharpening of the economic crisis after 1973 (situationism, Gauche Marxiste, ICO, etc). Throughout the period 1968-1973, there was a gradual and steady process of decantation going on in the revolutionary movement. In this context the persistence and perseverance of the international current (then represented by Revolution Internationale in France, Internationalism in the US, and Internacionalismo in Venezuela) in defending the need for a coherent political platform as the basis for a regroupment of revolutionaries were an expression of the objective needs of the revolutionary movement. For us to assert this today is not a question of retrospectively blowing our own trumpet, or arbitrarily declaring ourselves to be a pole of regroupment (unique and everlasting) as the CWO seem to claim in their ‘Convulsions of the ICC’. If the international current was the most consistent revolutionary regroupment of the post-1968 period it was because of its profound concern to re-appropriate and deepen the gains of the past revolutionary movement. The fact that some of the founding members of the international current had been directly involved in the Left Communist movement from the 1930s to the 1950s was an important element here though not the only decisive factor. As we have said any direct organic continuity with the Communist Left had been finally severed by the counter-revolution. But the international current was committed to building on a political continuity with the Left Communist movement of the past and thus elaborated a platform that aims at a synthesis of the fundamental contributions of the historical workers’ movement. This meant that the current tended to become a pole of regroupment and contributed to the clarification of the revolutionary movement of the early 1970s. But, because of its immaturity, it took a long time for the implications of this to be understood by the current itself, and many internal conflicts and confusions had to be resolved before the international current could fully assimilate the reality of its own existence. For example, it had to deal with ‘anti-organizational’ hesitations in its own midst, expressed by the departure of the activist elements of the PIC from RI in 1973 and of the modernist Tendence Communiste in 1974 and so. (In the ‘Convulsions of the ICC’, the CWO present these set-backs as the signs of a group in its death-throes; today they can clearly be seen as the growing pains of the ICC).

Thus, as with most of the revolutionary currents of the time, the international current that was growing into the ICC of today understood the organizational question last of all. The relative immaturity of the current at this time was inevitable, but it was to have important repercussions on some early attempts at regroupment. This was to become painfully clear in Britain.

SETBACKS TO REGROUPMENT IN BRITAIN

In May 1973 various groups and individuals attempting to clarify communist positions came together in Liverpool to discuss the perspective ahead of them. There were three groups from Britain: the Liverpool-based Workers’ Voice, which had broken away from Trotskyism and was trying to re-assimilate the gains made by the Left Communists in the early twenties; some comrades from Scotland who had split from Solidarity in order to defend a marxist conception of the capitalist crisis; and a London-based group, some of whose members had also split from Solidarity but who saw themselves as being close to the positions of Revolution Internationale and Internationalism (who also attended). On crucial questions like the trade unions, organization, and the decadence of capitalism, there was considerable confusion in the British groups. RI’s and Internationalism’s contributions were extremely important in trying to clarify some of these problems.

A number of meetings followed over the next few months and the groups in Britain made considerable progress. (The London group evolved into World Revolution, and the elements in Scotland into Revolutionary Perspectives.) Discussion between the groups was continuous, fraternal, and constructive; a number of joint interventions were made (such as the WR/WV leaflet on Chile in September 1973 when the Allende government fell). But a problem began to be posed by the fact that WR was moving much more quickly towards the platform and politics of the international current than RP or WV. Questions as crucial as the decadence of capitalism or the alternative of war or revolution, socialism or barbarism, evoked hesitations and incomprehension on the part of WV at first. RP, while denying the problem of the saturation of markets as a source for capitalist crisis, assimilated the general concept of decadence more quickly. RP however, expressed disagreements on the question of the Russian Revolution, and the Bolshevik Party in particular. It took RP a long time to fully grasp the proletarian character of the Bolshevik Party. This ‘uneven development’ of the three groups was to become a source of complications for one fundamental reason: the discussion and cooperation between the groups had at no stage been based on a clear conception of the regroupment of revolutionaries. From the beginning, regroupment was seen as a vague, distant prospect, perhaps only necessary when the revolution began. Discussion between the groups was conducted on the unspoken understanding that each group had its own ‘autonomy’, its own positions to develop and defend. The friendliness of the discussion was genuine enough, but it was unstable to the extent that it had not had to face the uncomfortable question of real unification, fusion into a single organization, centralized on an international scale.

Here again the international current was the first to pose the question of regroupment in a clear way. But by the time the question had been made explicit, its implicit emergence had already resulted in a deterioration of relations between the groups in Britain. This was especially true after a conference in Paris in January 1974 when WR changed its position on the Russian Revolution (viz. that the October insurrection was a state capitalist counter-revolution led by a ‘bourgeois’ Bolshevik Party) and showed its clear will to be part of the international current of RI/Internationalism/Internacionalismo, Workers’ Voice interpreted this as a ‘capitulation’ by WR to the semi-Bolshevik designs of the international tendency (an interpretation still put forward by the CWO in ‘Convulsions’), and relations between WR and WV deteriorated rapidly after this. WV increasingly retreated into a sullen unwillingness to discuss its differences with WR (see ‘Sectarianism Unlimited’, WR3) and did not respond to the various letters WR wrote to it in order to try to keep the discussion going. (It seems that today the Liverpool group intends to continue the same policy of silence over its differences with the CWO.)

By the time the international current really began to make it clear that regroupment meant regroupment today into a single international organization, it appeared to the groups ‘outside’ the current that the international current (which was now being joined by groups in Italy and Spain) was expressing some kind of ‘imperialist’ desire to expand at all costs, and to incorporate all the other groups into itself in order to puff up its own pretensions. The current was not only talking about regroupment; it had begun to construct an organizational framework in which this regroupment could actually take place. This provoked a suspicious response from the other groups, and not only in Britain. The Chicago-based Revolutionary Workers’ Group, which had broken from Trotskyism and had been moving towards the current in a very positive way, also began to draw back when the practical question of its integration into the current began to be posed. Some elements of WV and the RWG also harboured certain illusions as to the possibility of independent work with the modernist Tendance Communiste before the latter’s complete political disintegration and disappearance.

In November 1974, WV’s silence was broken by a statement asserting that the current was a counter-revolutionary force because of its position on the state in the period of transition. The RP group still showed a willingness to discuss political questions, but it now began to raise more and more objections to the positions of the current, especially on the Russian Revolution and the period of transition. After discussing the possibility of entering the international current as a ‘minority’ federation and finding this proposal severely criticized by the current, it began to consider itself as the ‘clearest’ group and thus to act as if it, and no longer the current, was the pole of regroupment for revolutionaries. It demanded that the current (which in January 1975 constituted itself as the International Communist Current) change its positions, which were now seen to ‘cross class lines’ on the question of the state, and on the final demise of the Russian Revolution. At this stage its perspective was one of convincing the ICC of its “errors (which) are subjective and do not represent an alien class viewpoint” (‘Open Letter to the ICC’, RP, February 1975). Shortly after this RP abandoned hope of reforming the ICC and concentrated on regrouping with the other groups who seemed to be closer to its own positions and who by now formed a kind of ‘counter-tendency’ to the ICC: WV, RWG, and the PIC. Discussions with RWG and the PIC were to reveal substantial differences, but in September 1975 WV and RP fused to form the CWO. Initially it appears that the RP elements in the CWO continued to regard the ICC as a ‘confusionist’, not a bourgeois group, but later on the whole CWO adopted the position of the old WV, viz. that the ICC was a counter-revolutionary faction of capital with whom all discussion was useless. Despite this the CWO claim in the ‘Convulsions of the ICC’ article that it was the ICC that put an end to discussion between the groups. This is an incredible assertion when one bears in mind the endless statements issued by the ICC both before and after the formation of the CWO, affirming its willingness to maintain a dialogue with the CWO, a position it still adheres to today, without putting any conditions on the debate. It is all the more incredible when one considers that during the regroupment process in Belgium, the different groups involved (RRS of Antwerp, the VRS of Ghent and Journal Lutte de Classe of Brussels) invited the CWO to participate in their conference with the full accord of the ICC. The CWO did not come however, and their silence was regretted in the documents that came out of the Conference in 1975 (see The International Review, no. 4).

THE PRICE OF IMMATURITY

This brief trajectory of the process which led to the formation of the CWO will convey very little unless we analyse the underlying reasons for it taking place, and try to draw some lessons from it. We don’t want to rake over all the details of this sad affair. It is a story of mistakes, misunderstandings, and immaturity ‘on both sides’, and it would be quite futile to engage in petty recriminations about who did what to whom. That kind of approach only serves to obscure the wider political issues involved. Our task today is to understand why such a deterioration of relations took place. Only by considering the general characteristics of the affair will it become possible to see how at certain junctures, petty and/or secondary questions could have exacerbated the problem so much. In retrospect, it is possible to see a number of general reasons for the failure of this attempt at regroupment.

On the part of the groups ‘outside’ the current, the main obstacles to regroupment were problems which, as we have seen, were common to many of the groups who had emerged from the period of counter-revolution: a traumatic fear of ‘Bolshevism’ and the legacy of the counter-revolution, and a profound lack of clarity on the question of organization.

1. One of the main bones of contention between the ICC and the other groups was the Russian Revolution and the lessons to be drawn from it. This is no accident. The Russian Revolution was one of the most important events in the proletariat’s history, and anyone who fails to understand the lessons of this experience will not succeed in disengaging themselves from the counter-revolution. The reaction of some elements of the proletariat to the defeat of this revolution was to reject the whole experience as being no more than a bourgeois revolution or a moment in the evolution of capital into new forms. The Bolshevik Party in particular was often scrubbed out of the whole proletarian movement, and portrayed as a standard bearer of state capitalism interested only in the modernization of Russia. This kind of interpretation, which we might refer to loosely as ‘councilist’, had a considerable influence on all the groups in Britain when they started out. WR had originally called itself Council Communism and was violently opposed to Bolshevism; WV went through an explicitly councilist phase when it rejected any idea of a revolutionary party; and RP started out with positions close to those of Otto Ruhle, i.e. that all parties are bourgeois and that 1917 in Russia was a bourgeois revolution.

In contrast to this, RI from the very beginning insisted on the proletarian character of the October insurrection and of the Bolshevik Party. This ‘naturally’ produced suspicions that RI was still somehow tainted with Bolshevism and Leninism, that it was prepared to excuse or apologize for all the anti-working class actions of the Bolsheviks after 1917. Further suspicion was engendered by RI’s affirmation that during the transition period a state was inevitable, a necessary evil that the proletariat would have to make use of but could never identify itself with. And since RI had always defended the need for a ‘revolutionary party’, the current’s talk about regroupment was interpreted as yet another party-building adventure of the Trotskyist kind. Failing to understand the method the international current used to draw the lessons from the Bolshevik experience, the other groups tended to suspect the ‘counter-revolution’ behind every position that they could not immediately grasp.

After a great deal of discussion, both WV and RP moved away from the councilist interpretation of the Russian Revolution and accepted the proletarian character of the revolution and of the Bolshevik Party. They also began to talk about the need for a revolutionary party. But they would not even consider the idea that the transitional state was something distinct from the working class, and implied that the ICC’s position menat repeating the Bolshevik mistake of subordinating the workers’ councils to an alien force. (This was exactly the reverse of the ICC’s position, which stressed the need for the workers’ councils to exert their power over all other institutions in society!)

At the same time, while accepting the proletarian character of the Russian Revolution, WV, RP (and the RWG) began to insist that anyone who didn’t acknowledge that the Bolshevik Party was finished in 1921 (Kronstadt, the NEP, the United Front) had ‘crossed class lines’ and become an apologist of the counter-revolution. We will discuss the absurdity of this position later on, but even its absurdity was not without significance. Never before in the history of the workers’ movement has a question of dates, of retrospective historical interpretation, been made into a class frontier. The only possible explanation for the intransigence with which WV, RP, and RWG defended their position on ‘1921’ is that they saw this date as a kind of ‘cordon sanitaire’ protecting them from any possible connection with the degeneration of Bolshevism. It was as though they were trying to allay their lingering suspicions about accepting the Bolshevik Party as part of their own history by saying ‘thus far, but no further’. They had moved from a councilist position to a more coherent one, close to that of the ICC, but as have said, they had not assimilated a coherent method of analysing the mistakes and even crimes of the past workers’ movement, nor its approach to the problem of the degeneration and death of proletarian organizations.

2.  The WV/RP confusions about regroupment and organization were again closely linked to their fears of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Bolshevism’. This was particularly marked with WV, who for a long time considered that any talk of regroupment today was ‘substitutionist’. Though they later changed this position (without ever explaining why), the issue of regroupment was never fully clarified in the CWO, as we shall see. Parallel to this hostility to regroupment there was the above-mentioned suspicion about the very idea of the party, and unease about the concept of centralization. WV’s ideas about organization were more or less federalist: each group was autonomous and had its own intervention to do in its own corner of the world. The prospect of being absorbed into a larger international body filled them with anxiety. RP accepted the idea of regroupment and centralization more easily, but their understanding of the implications of this was severely limited. This was demonstrated, for example, by their idea of entering the current as a bloc that had its own platform within the organization. And their subsequent shift from this semi-federalist conception to an extreme monolithism, in which regroupment was impossible until there was absolute agreement on every conceivable point, was further evidence that they had never really understood the concept of centralization. In general neither WV nor RP ever abandoned the idea that they had to make their own unique contribution to the workers’ movement, that they themselves had worked out and clarified the essentials of a revolutionary platform. True, they said, the international current had helped them quite a bit, but the main achievement was their own. They had pulled themselves out of leftism by their own bootstraps.

The truth was somewhat different. Neither RP, nor WV, nor the CWO has ever made a systematic critique of their own past, but if they had done so, they would have come to some uncomfortable conclusions. While discussion between revolutionaries is never a monologue, and both sides gained mutually from the debates that took place in Britain, a cursory look at the facts will leave us in no doubt about who was the main source of clarification. The current already had a clear platform before these discussions took place: that of RI’s Declaration of Principles in 1968 and the platform in 1972. When RP and WV began discussing with the current, they were deeply confused on absolutely vital questions like the shop stewards, the Russian Revolution, decadence, organization, the Left Communist movement, etc, etc. The clear positions they moved towards were positions that the current already defended; what they considered later on to be evidence of their superior clarity (1921, the state, etc) were, in the main, confusions, which they never managed to surmount. The result was that the platforms of WV, RP, and the CWO, are essentially watered-down versions of the ICC platform, with the addition of their own hobbyhorses.

Without the intervention of the international current, it is somewhat doubtful as to whether WV and RP would have arrived at a relatively clear political perspective. Once again, we are not asserting this merely to add to the prestige of the ICC. We are simply reaffirming the fact that historical circumstances led to the international current being the first to elaborate a coherent political platform, and thus endowed it with a particular responsibility in the development of other groups. Neither RP nor WV could ever bear to admit this fact. Their desire to defend their autonomy and to develop their ‘own’ ideas prevented them from seeing the need for communists to unite their efforts and to regroup into a single organization.

But the failings of WV and RP cannot explain the whole story. We are not dealing with autonomous psychological problems here: the hesitations, confusions, and fears of WV/RP were very much a historical product of the immaturity of the revolutionary movement. And this immaturity also affected the international current, and hindered its own efforts at constituting a pole of regroupment.

As we have seen, the groups of the international current, while having a more coherent view of the organizational question in general terms, took some time to draw all the practical conclusions from this overall understanding. This applies both to their internal structure and to the question of regroupment, both of which are aspects of centralization. Only gradually did it become clear that it was necessary today to build an internationally centralized organization of revolutionaries, which in turn would be a moment in the reconstitution of the world communist party in a period of heightened class struggle. Although it imposed its general clarity on the discussions with the other groups, the international current failed to pose the vital questions of regroupment from the beginning. It did not insist soon enough that the purpose of the discussion and cooperation between groups in Britain was the fusion of the different elements into a single international organization.

When differences between the groups emerged, the current did not always respond in a politically adequate manner, and this was fundamentally the result of its inexperience in dealing with such problems. The development of new groups is an extremely delicate process which requires, alongside an intransigent defence of general political positions, a great deal of flexibility and patience on the part of the more developed group. This is not to say that the whole problem would have been avoided if the current had been more ‘tactful’ – after a point even the tact and friendliness of the current were interpreted as manifestations of unprincipled opportunism. But when the revolutionary movement is small and immature, secondary and even personal problems can have an effect out of all proportion to their real importance. This means that the way political discussion is conducted is a matter of considerable interest. It is especially necessary to separate secondary issues from the main ones, and to conduct discussion on a strictly political level, without getting lost in the minutia of inter-group psychology.

The international current’s lack of experience in conducting such discussions was compounded by the fact that it did not yet have the organizational means to steer the debate to a successful conclusion. Because the current did not yet exist as a single, unified organization, it had no way of elaborating a fully consistent and global orientation for relating to other groups. For the same reason it was difficult for other groups to see it as a pole of regroupment when it had no common platform and no unified organizational structure. Groups like the RWG actually chided it for not being centralized, failing to understand that centralization was a process which could not be proclaimed overnight. The whole perspective of the current was that it should move towards a single international organization. But the fact that it had not yet reached this stage was to weight heavily on its early attempts to regroup with other elements. Moreover, the ‘birth’ of the ICC was accompanied by inevitable birth-pangs which gave rise to a number of defections as mentioned above.

“This period of deepening understanding in the Current undoubtedly disturbed all our international contacts. To see the organization to some extent split apart by violent polemic (particularly with the modernist Tendance Communiste within RI) did not inspire confidence in those who were in any case permeated with a fear of organization connected to ‘anti-Leninism’. It is difficult to integrate other elements into an organization during its particularly painful birth” (from the ICC text, ‘Lessons of Regroupment’).

If one compares the failure of regroupment with RP and WV in Britain with the successful regroupment that took place a year later in Belgium, it immediately becomes clear how important the existence of the Current as a unified body was. The three groups that began discussing revolutionary positions in Belgium started off with many of the problems the groups in Britain had faced: different backgrounds, an uneven development towards the politics of the ICC, etc. But this time the ICC not only existed as such; it had also learned from its negative experiences in Britain, and was able to situate the discussions in a coherent framework from the beginning. It was able to minimize secondary questions and patiently assist all the groups to arrive at the same level of understanding. It was made clear all along that the purpose of discussion was the unification of the different elements into a single international organization; and the ICC was able to present itself as such an organization. In fact it soon became clear to the Belgian comrades that the ICC was the only organization capable of providing a framework for international regroupment. The intervention of the PIC and the CWO in this process simply revealed their preoccupation with attacking the ICC and obstructing any unification in the revolutionary movement. The constitution of Internationalisme as the Belgian section of the ICC, together with other successful regroupments in Canada, Italy, and Spain, were evidence that the ICC had surmounted many of its earlier difficulties and was beginning to show a real capacity to act as a pole of clarification and regroupment.

It is unfortunate that many of the bitter lessons that the ICC learned about regroupment, such as the need to situate discussion in a global framework, the need for a unified international organization, etc, were learned through a negative experience in Britain. But then defeat has always been the school of the proletarian movement. The conditions that led to the formation of the CWO were above all a product of a particular phase in the reconstitution of the revolutionary movement, and will probably not repeat themselves. In this sense, the CWO is an anomaly left over from a period that is now behind us. This is underlined by the subsequent positive growth of the ICC, and the increasing isolation and fragmentation of the CWO.

THE ISOLATION OF THE CWO

Since its formation, the CWO has more and more retreated into a shell of misanthropic sectarianism. The main role it has played has been that of confusing elements moving towards communist positions, bewildering them with its obsessive emphasis on the ‘differences’ it has with the ICC. After all, what could be more confusing for people who are only just learning what real class positions are, what the real difference between a communist group and a leftist group is, to find a whole new set of ‘additional’ class lines presented to them? It is rather difficult at this state to assess the amount of damage the CWO had done to the emerging revolutionary movement. We have mentioned their negative role in the regroupment process in Belgium. In Britain, they have succeeded in derailing a few individuals into their isolationist fox-hole. Not to mention the fact that the militants of the CWO have removed themselves from the mainstream of the revolutionary movement, and thus have robbed themselves of making the contribution to the movement promised by their earlier development.

But it would be quite wrong to over-estimate the (negative) influence of the CWO. In many instances they have failed to convince newly emerging revolutionaries that their stance ‘against the ICC’ is based on serious political criteria (the groups in Belgium, for example, and with certain comrades in Britain). And since their sectarian attitude is no longer directed at the ICC alone, they have found it difficult to maintain contact with a number of other groups, let alone regroup with them. The attitude they took up towards the PIC is typical.  The CWO demanded that the PIC simply abandon its position on the crisis, based on Luxemburg’s analysis, as a minimum precondition for regroup (see WR 5, ‘An Incomplete Regroupment’). A similar sectarian approach was adopted towards a group in Gothenburg, Sweden, which was attempting to move away from anarchism: the CWO’s response to the group’s platform was not to make a criticism of its confusions, but to write a ringing attack on the historical anarchist movement (see ‘Anarchism’ in RP 3), and insist that the Gothenburg group reply to this attack before any further dialogue could take place! Not surprisingly neither the PIC nor the Swedish group were prepared to accept the CWO’s ‘purist’ ultimatum.

Other international contacts have similarly led nowhere. The CWO had a brief flirtation with the French group, Union Ouvriere, a split-off from the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere. Although the CWO correctly encouraged UO’s early efforts to move towards revolutionary positions, they underestimated the difficulties of making a complete break with a counter-revolutionary organizational past on an overall political level. The CWO’s desperate search for other revolutionary contacts once they had arbitrarily cut themselves off from the ICC and anything and anywhere in contact with it, led them to harbour illusions about the actual clarity of UO and to throw themselves into a heady proclamation that UO was on the road to victory before, unfortunately, all the battles were won.

In any case the CWO’s ‘political dialogue’ with UO seems to have ended in embarrassed silence since the latter has now fragmented into a number of modernist sects. The collapse of the CWO’s relationship with the American RWG, described in the early days of the CWO as the group that was closest to it (WV 15), was also passed over in silence. Being ‘close’ to the CWO wasn’t enough to prevent the RWG from getting thoroughly demoralized and dissolving itself (see WR 5, ‘An Incomplete Regroupment’). After briefly resurrecting itself as the ‘Proletarian Communist Group’, the vestiges of the RWG finally fused with a strange Chicago club called the ‘Committee for a Workers’ Council’ to form a ridiculous semi-modernist sect called ‘Forward’. Forward thinks that the whole historical workers’ movement from Marx to the Bolsheviks and the Communist Left was just the “left wing of Capital”, and that the defensive struggles of the class (which Forward contemptuously and erroneously identifies with “collective bargaining”) should not happen. Their paper is mainly devoted to windy attacks on both the ICC and… the CWO!

The breakdown of these international contacts emphasized the isolation of the CWO: its inability to offer any real perspective for the regroupment of revolutionaries. Although it has so far failed to draw up any balance sheet of these attempts at regroupment, this series of failures must have produced tensions within the organization. As we have seen, the seceding Liverpool section gave as one of its reasons for secession the CWO’s intolerant attitude to other groups. When a group is turned in on itself like the CWO, immense internal pressure inevitably builds up, leading to sudden and unexplained defections and splits.

The pressure inside the CWO has been further increased by the group’s monolithic character: its insistence on total agreement on all possible points of the platform, its refusal to a allow minority positions. As we predicted in WR 6, this monolithic conception of organization “will lead not just to two organizations, but an unending series of splits, expulsions, denunciations, and breaking off of relations, which can be expected to clarify the communist programme no more than the CWO’s present break with the ICC has done” (‘The CWO and the Organization Question’).

This monolithism never allowed differences within the CWO to emerge and be debated publicly, or according to the ‘seceders’, within the organization itself. This can only serve to drive real differences underground and creates a stifling atmosphere inside a group; but at the same time the CWO was unable to dispense with a monolithic structure. Originating in an over-reaction to the initial federalism of RP and WV, the CWO’s monolithism became a vital protecting device ensuring the uniqueness of the CWO’s platform and sealing the CWO off from other groups.

But it is also quite clear that this monolithic structure never really eliminated the fragility of the original regroupment between WV and RP. This is admitted by the CWO itself, in its recent letter to the ICC: “In the future we will have to be more careful in our dealings with elements who give out that they agree with our politics, but who seek to use us either as a life-raft to keep them afloat, or as a shield against another political organization.”

Underneath the apparent unity and “programmatic centralism” of the CWO, there were still two groups and the Liverpool group’s acceptance of the CWO’s professed political perspectives seems to have been fairly superficial, judging from its easy regression back to the localist, activist politics of the old WV. The joint organization was an artificial creation from the beginning, constructed on an entirely inadequate political basis, as a kind of negative mirror image of the ICC. The split was therefore written into the group from the beginning, and unless the CWO radically changes its present orientation, its points to further disintegratory tendencies in the future.

Another consequence of the CWO’s isolation is an accumulation of confusions and political misconceptions, which (in the absence of discussion with anybody else) don’t get clarified, but serve as further justifications of the ‘uniqueness’ of the CWO. For now one example will suffice: in RP 5 we find the incredible assertion that neither the July 19, 1936 uprising in Barcelona, nor the Barcelona May Days of 1937, were expressions of proletarian struggle. This view is totally at odds with the position defended by Bilan (see the appeal of the Communist Left published in the International Review, no. 6) and actually obscures the whole significance of what happened in Spain, particularly the role of the ‘extreme left’ which had such an important role to play in Spain precisely because the proletarian danger had been acutely felt by the Spanish bourgeoisie. We don’t wish to go into this question in detail here. We cite it as an example of the way the CWO’s isolation both from today’s revolutionary movement and from the tradition of the Communist Left is leading it to adopt more and more bizarre and unsubstantiated positions. The CWO continues to defend class positions, and remains within the proletarian camp; its political degeneration is taking place quite slowly. But the proliferation of confusions within its ranks will inevitably accelerate this tendency towards theoretical degeneration, which is becoming increasingly apparent.

CDW.

Introduction

The following article was written by a Dutch comrade who has left the Spartacusbond (SB). The article is composed from various texts written in preparation for the last confer­ence of the SB and serves as a parting letter to this organization. The aim of the present article is to clarify the developments within the SB to the outside world and, in doing so, to contribute to the process of international regroupment. This concern for the inter­national regroupment of revolutionaries has led FK to join the ICC, considering it to be “the only serious pole of international regroupment of revolutionaries today.”

Spartacusbond: Alone in the world

Since the second half of the 1960s, the workers’ struggle has taken on an openly revolutionary character once more. At the same time, revolutionary nuclei are emerging which try to understand the crisis of capit­alism and the revival of the workers’ strug­gle. In doing so these revolutionary groups lay the foundations necessary for taking up propagandistic activities, as did organiza­tions of revolutionaries which emerged during the first revolutionary wave of the world proletariat following the imperialist massacre of 1914-18. Such attempts are very diffic­ult since fifty years of counter-revolution have led to an organic break not only with those communist parties which organized to form the Third International, but also with those who remained faithful to the world revolution after the Third International and the Bolshevik Party had degenerated and dis­integrated. It is thus natural that the revolutionary groups emerging in recent years should engage in intense political discus­sion in order to re-appropriate the histori­cal political gains of the working class, to clarify class positions, and to regroup internationally on the basis of a platform in which class positions have been elaborated. The ICC is an expression of the theoretical and organizational efforts of those revolu­tionary groups which have become conscious of the fact that they can only carry out their responsibilities in the working class within an international framework.

This effort is not immediately understood by everyone. Moreover, the numerous existing counter-revolutionary organizations contri­bute to derailing this effort. They have the doubtful honour, with hardly an excep­tion, of being able to claim a living and organic continuity with currents which, one by one, have revealed themselves to be the executioners of the working class: for example, the Trotskyist/Stalinist/and Maoist products of the degeneration of the Third International and the Bolshevik Party. Like a bad penny they keep turning up in myriad forms. Counter-revolutionary groups are not threatened by a downturn in the workers’ struggle. On the contrary, they are bourg­eois expressions and contribute to acceler­ating any reflux. Their mystifications con­sist of presenting defeats of the workers’ struggle as victories. In the context of the trade unions such defeats are called ‘a growth in unity’;. relapses into parlia­mentarism become ‘political struggles’; relapses into nationalism are presented as ‘proletarian internationalism’; and the workers’ involvement in imperialist war is portrayed as the defence of some ‘socialist country’.

The role of bourgeois, counter-revolutionary organizations is clear. But within the proletarian camp, is the effort towards inter­national regroupment understood by the descendants of the Dutch and Italian Left; with­in those groups which are not the result of today’s revival of class struggle, but which were able to maintain a revolutionary stance towards certain vital problems which faced the class struggle in the past? Do such groups represent the living, unbroken, organic continuity with the revolutionary currents of the revolutionary wave of 1917-­20? In other words, do they defend class positions and do they carry out their tasks as revolutionary organizations with regard to the class? These questions cannot be answered in a bloc. In the following, article we will examine the case of the Spartacusbond, a Dutch organization which is sometimes considered to be the organic continuation of the Dutch and German Left of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

The origins of the Spartacusbond

When the Communistenbond ‘Spartacus’ (League of Communists ‘Spartacus’) re-emerged from illegality after world War II, many members of the pre-war GIC1 appeared to be part of this former Trotskyist group. Originally the Spartacusbond was one of the illegal groups continuing the work of the RSAP of Sneevliet (Maring). In the second imperia­list massacre, it held a coherent proletar­ian internationalist position by refusing to take sides in the imperialist war and de­fended working class struggle. The later Spartacus faction evolved particularly posi­tively toward class positions by further abandoning Trotskyist positions. It under­stood the capitalist nature of the Soviet Union; rejected trade unionism; recognized factory committees as the organs of struggle of the working class; denounced parliamentarism; and insisted on the political nature of the struggle in the factories. The Spartacus group was further stimulated in its development by the former GIC, with whom it came into contact after the arrest and execution of Sneevliet and seven other comrades in 1943. The study and discussion of theoretical questions between the former Trotskyists and the GIC members evolved so positively that they decided to continue as Communistenbond ‘Spartacus’, which openly defended class positions in the Netherlands after World War II.

The end of World War II did not bring about the proletarian revolution contrary to expectations based on the events in Germany and Russia following World War I. Instead capitalism began its period of reconstruc­tion into which it could attempt to inte­grate the working class in general. The Eenheidsvakcentrale (United Trade Union), which the Spartacus group had contributed to creating during its final years of ille­gality, and which the Spartacists hoped, through their propaganda for factory organization, would evolve in the direction of a kind of Arbeiter-Union of the German Revolution, in fact became an ordinary trade union and on top of that fell into Stalinist hands.

They then founded the Onafhankelijke Verbond van Bedrijfsorganisaties (Independent Alliance of Factory Organizations) which although it was not dominated by the Sta­linists nevertheless also became a kind of trade union, given the pressures of the reconstruction period. After this, the Spartacists left the OVB. With the decrease in the number of wildcat strikes immediately following World War II, the SB entered a difficult period. Many members left and it became a small group desperately trying to row against the stream in the reflux of the workers’ struggle. Their dissemination of class positions found no audience because of the lack of movement in the class. In­evitably, the SB tried to account for this, but it fell into a gradual theorizing of the defeat. This process expressed itself, for example, in the emergence of a council­ist faction within the SB which started to publish Daad en Gedachte (Act and Thought) independently from the SB in 1965.

Councilism

Councilism2, as a current emerging from the reconstruction period, must be disting­uished from the pre-war Left Communists.The germs of councilism, a product of degen­eration after the war, can be found in some pre-war currents within the German and Dutch Left. This is particularly so in regard to the council communism of Otto Ruhle’s Einheidsorganisation (Unity Organization) and in the council communism of the GIC. Both these currents, however, were still an expression of the serious attempts made to clarify problems around the question of the Arbeiter-Union (Workers’ Union) prior to the war. Therefore, we call them council communists and not councilists. Although Otto Ruhle’s rejection of the need for political organization and the party was already at the time a mistake, we must understand his position in terms of the confusion which also existed in the KAPD over the question of the Arbeiter-Union. Only gradually was the insight gained that the working class could no longer have per­manent organizations. This insight came to be expressed in the conceptions of the GIC. The council communism of the GIC must there­fore also be distinguished from that of Ruhle.

Councilism, on the other hand, bases itself on fragments of the council communism of the GIC and particularly that of Otto Ruhle. Councilism must not be seen as an attempt to clarify the real problems arising from class struggle. Quite the opposite. It falls back to Ruhle’s rejection of political organization at a time when the questions raised about the organs of struggle and their position in relation to the political organization had already been clarified by the GIC. CounciIism thus neglects a funda­mental lesson drawn from the workers’ struggle. Councilists take a lot of pains to project their positions back to encompass revolutionaries like Pannekoek. Daad en Gedachte (D&G) even suggest that it is the continuation of the GIC since all the ex-­GIC members of the SB, became members of D&G in 1965. But the continuation of a revolutionary current is not guaranteed by the presence of certain people in an organ­ization. A revolutionary current can only be maintained within the framework of an organization which publicly propagates class positions. This certainly cannot be said of D&G. On the contrary, D&G considers the propagation of class positions to be a ‘party practice’, which in the councilist vocabulary refers to the Social Democratic and Leninist position on the tasks of the party. The councilists completely overlook the fact that, since the foundation of the KAPD in 1920, revolutionaries defend the position that the tasks of the party are res­tricted to propaganda and to the clarifica­tion of consciousness, while the task of leading the struggle and taking power is to be accomplished by the struggling masses which use their elected committees for this purpose. This conception, of the urgent task of the party to intervene in the class strug­gle in an exclusively propagandistic manner, is a class line. It is a fundamental lesson which the KAPD learned from the practices of the reformist parties and trade unions and the perpetuation of such practices by the ‘Zentrale’ of the KPD(S) following the Moscow ‘lead’3. Otto Ruhle turned away from the KAPD because, according to him, it was financed by Moscow and was following a Leninist line. Gorter, Hempel, and Pannekoek, on the contrary, disapproved of Ruhle’s position because they were convinced that the most conscious workers, necessarily, first come together to study and discuss and then spread their positions through the entire class.

The councilists think they have found an additional argument4 against the propa­gandistic tasks of the party in the fact that class positions are grounded in the creative activity of the struggles of the working class instead of being developed independently by armchair theorists contem­plating their navels. Indeed, class positions are the result of the study of workers’ struggle by the working class. Therefore, class positions change when the class strug­gle encounters opposition from a new obsta­cle and succeeds in creatively surmounting it. For that reason the councilists think it better not to propagate positions today which, in the future, might turn out to be limited. Secondly, they feel such activity would come down to an attempt to rob the workers of their chance of leading their own struggle. This opinion is based on a far too narrow definition of class positions.

Class positions are not detailed guide-lines telling the working class how to act in every given situation. They crystallize the political gains from the experience of the highlights of the workers’ struggles; as for example, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and German Revolution, or from the counter-revolution: the case of both world wars. Class frontiers are no more than a general orientation, a broad frame­work for the conscious action of the class, which can only be extended by events in the class struggle of world-historic dimensions. The fear of the councilists, that to propa­gate class positions comes down to political groups directing the workers’ struggle, is completely misplaced. This fear is even more out of place when we see that revolut­ionaries have argued since 1920 that the working class, through its struggles, pro­duces two organizations: the unitary organi­zation and the organization of revolution­aries.

Since the outbreak of World War I, capitalism has shown that it has entered its phase of decadence and revolution. In the period of decadence, gradual improvements in the position of the working class through parli­amentary and trade union struggle have become impossible, because of the lack of real growth of the productive forces. This means that the working class can no longer unite in permanent organizations of struggle, organizations like the trade unions and parliamentary parties used to be. Only during its direct struggles; in which it defends its immediate interests, can the class form temporary organizational units. Direct struggles and the independent unitary organ­izational forms engendered by such struggles always come up against the impossibility of the working class gaining any lasting reforms under decadent capitalism. What remains are the experiences of the struggle, of its organization and its results. In elaborating these experiences, within the process of the rising consciousness of the workers through their struggles, about capitalist relations of production and about their own forms of organization, the class prepares itself for the fulfillment of its global historic task: the conscious over­throw of capitalism and the foundation of workers’ power based on the councils, in order to realize the communist mode of production. The process by which the class becomes conscious of its historical task is, therefore, not some idealistic fantasy which can be injected into the class from the outside. On the contrary, this consciousness is generated by the working class elaborating its experiences by engaging in intensive discussions around various points of view.

In order to develop and propagandize their positions in the best possible way, those who hold the same positions unite in poli­tical organizations of revolutionaries, which are the permanent expressions of the workers’ struggle, in so far as they are based on the study of the experiences of that struggle from the point of view of the working class. Apart from these organizations, there exist the organizations of struggle, developing towards the unity and independence of the working class against capital. These are temporary expressions of the upsurges in the workers’ struggle. The workers’ councils become permanent when they have destroyed the bourgeois state.

Leaving the Spartacusbond

To understand the distinction between the unitary organs and the organization of revolutionaries, and also their mutual rela­tionship, is a fundamental requirement for an organization of revolutionaries to fulfill its tasks in the class in the best possible way. Only if a full understanding of this problem is present can we talk about a living, organic, continuity with the Communist Left of the pre-war period. D&G are clearly not a continuation of the Dutch Left, but it would be an exaggeration to call D&G a counter-revolutionary group. But what about the SB?

It is impossible to describe here the com­plete history of the SB. We will limit ourselves to the remark that the SB was not freed from councilism after the D&G faction split from it. D&G, it is true, is the group which contributed most to the theore­tical foundations of councilism and subse­quently put it into practice, even propaga­ting it at an international level. However, there are traces of councilism in the SB.

An evaluation of the councilist or communist nature of the SB becomes possible by studying developments at the latest conference of the SB. This conference was completely dedicated to the question of the organization of revolutionaries. The direction of the prac­tical decisions taken at this conference were for the writer of this article, reason enough to leave the SB. The considerations produced here are not unknown to the SB; they can be found in all kinds of papers written in preparation for the conference, and in letters sent to the SB after it took place.

At this conference, the councilistic inclin­ation to view all political/historical gains of the class struggle through the spectacles of defeat came very strongly to the fore. The conference, devoted to the question of the organization of revolutionaries, became necessary because of the faulty manner in which the SB worked. After publishing two international bulletins, the SB no longer appeared to be capable of reacting to the different groups that have recently arisen in the revolutionary milieu. The SB func­tioned so badly that even internal discus­sion became impossible. The conference could only have solved these problems by gaining some insight into the tasks and working procedures of a political organiza­tion. But the conference showed, alas, that there was a dreadful confusion in the SB about:

a. international regroupment;

b. the SB’s origins from the German and Dutch Left;

c. the tasks facing an organization of revolutionaries;

d, the regroupment of revolutionaries in the Netherlands.

a. International Regroupment

In its report of the conference of 25/26 September, the SB explains its refusal to develop a platform by, among other things, the following statement:

“In a platform (theses) one is obliged to reproduce one’s opinions in very general terms, because one must say a lot of things in a few words. Therefore, in practice, a platform can only be understood by other groups. And it is only useful in that kind of communication. Spartacus is different: we aren’t interested, firstly, in other groups.... Those who search for a party-form with other international groups need a platform, an elaborated declaration to decide if and with whom one can cooperate.” (Spartacus, 1976-11)

Well, at the conference it was never argued that a platform would only, or even pri­marily, be useful for contacting other groups. Apart from that, we must conclude from this quotation that the SB thinks that it is the only revolutionary organization in the world, or else it considers contact between these organizations of no importance. This isolationism shown by the SB is clearly not an acquisition from the Dutch Left, as is shown by the following facts:

1. When Gorter and Pannekoek left the Dutch Social Democratic Party in 1908 to found a new, marxist, social democratic party, they made very sure that the new party would be organized in the Second International. During this same period, Pannekoek was also active in the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party.

2. During the first imperialist massacre, particularly Gorter actively joined in the efforts towards regroupment of the Left at Zimmerwald which ended with the formation of the Third International.

3. During the German Revolution, Pannekoek, and Gorter engaged in passionate discussions within the KPD(S) and the KAPD. Gorter made a journey to Moscow to defend the positions of the KAPD in the Executive Committee of the Communist International. After the Third Congress of the Comintern, when efforts to form an opposition failed, Gorter became one of the initiators of the Communist Workers’ International.

4. After the splits in the KAPD and the ‘Union’, Canne Meijer and Hempel were closely involved in efforts made to regroup German revolutionaries in the Kommunistische Arbeiter Union.

5. In the GIC, Canne Meijer, Hempel, and Pannekoek drew out the lessons from the German and Russian Revolutions while in permanent contact with comrades in Germany, France, the United States, and Belgium.

6. After World War II, when the GIC members emerged from illegality as part of the SB, the SB didn’t hold itself aloof from international discussion: contacts existed in Germany, France and Belgium. In this period the SB also came into contact with the precursors of the ICC.

These facts clearly illustrate that there would not have been a Dutch Left had it not developed within the framework of inter­national discussions, both within the Second and Third Internationals, and among the international contacts after the degen­eration of the Third International. The working class and its struggles don’t stop at national frontiers. On the contrary, it forms a unity spanning all the national capitals. It has to do this because its starting-point and the object of its strug­gle -- capitalism -- is organized internation­ally at the level of the world market. Two world wars and two waves of international workers’ struggle, that of 1917-20 and the present one, have made this clear. The international nature of the workers’ strug­gle also means that the various organiza­tions of revolutionaries cannot lock them­selves behind national boundaries and thus study and discuss the struggle within such a limited framework. But, on the contrary, revolutionaries must lay the foundation for international regroupment.

Unfortunately, it is characteristic of the isolationism of the SB not to invite other groups to its conference in order “to prevent the discussions from centering too much around the positions of the various groups” (Spartacus, 1976-11). Before the conference the argument against inviting other groups was that the work of the conference would constitute a pre-condition and a basis for a systematic discussion of the positions of the several groups. But when “a very deviating position” (Ibid) was proposed at the conference, namely, to translate the platforms of several foreign groups (for example, that of the CWO, the PIC, the RWG, and Arbetarmakt in so far as they weren’t already translated as was the platform of the ICC ), and after that to study and evaluate them, this proposal was rejected. One must fear that at future conferences of the SB no other groups will be present. The SB’s self-chosen isolation in the face of the re-emerging internation­al class struggle and all the questions emerging from this will lead them to an increasingly dogmatic position. If the SB remains cut off from international contact, the progress of the new revolutionary wave will wash it ashore, in the bourgeois camp.

b. The Origins of the SB from the German and Dutch Left

The SB not only refuses to study the plat­forms of currently existing groups, it also refuses to examine the programmes of the organizations from which it emerged: the KPD(S), the KAPD, the KAPN (Dutch KAP), the GIC, and even its own programme of 1945. Its argument is that ‘This is all old hat. Now we live in other times.’ But the fact is that nearly everything the SB puts forward consists of bits of theory deliberately wrenched out of the context of the overall theory of the German and Dutch Left. Refusing to recognize this is not only terribly arrogant, it is also dangerous. It is precisely the uncritical and superficial manner in which the SB brings forward now this and then that element of the positions of Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Henk Canne Meijer, or Hempel which will inevitably bring the SB to the very dogmatic position it is so afraid of. The only way to arrive at class positions and to see how eventually they have to be extended or changed, as a consequence of radical changes in the class struggle, is to study the fundamental positions of the German and Dutch Left within the context of the circumstances in which they were developed and against the background of the present period which separates us from the pre-war communists. In the first place, the SB isn’t aware of the totality of the positions of the German and Dutch Left. Secondly, the SB has never heard about the positions of, for example, the Italian Left regarding various questions. Thirdly, the SB hasn’t got the faintest idea what the words ‘class frontier’ mean, from which it concludes, for reasons of minor importance, that a certain position ‘out of its time’ is dangerous or even counter-revolutionary.

The critical study of the positions on several questions of the German and Dutch Left and those of existing organizations could have led the SB to accept a platform. Even the way the SB chose to reject a platform shows its tendency to bring forward un-reflected fragments of theory:

“Our work consists in making our positions clear to people, to struggling indivi­duals. To put it better, we try to pro­pagate the class struggle. With a plat­form you run the risk of judging develop­ments too much from the past, that you start working conservatively.” (Spartacus, 1976-11, underlined by F.K)

This is not a new contribution of the SB. No, this is a portion of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory, as can be seen from the following quotation:

“In general, the tactical policy of the Social Democracy is not something that may be ‘invented’. It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward. The unconscious comes before the conscious. The logic of the historic process comes before the sub­jective logic of the human beings who participate in the historic process. The tendency is for the directing organs of the socialist party to play a conserva­tive role. Experience shows that every time the labour movement wins new terrain those organs work it to the upmost. They transform it at the same time into a kind of bastion, which holds up advance on a wider scale.” (Underlined by Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy’, pt. l)

But for Rosa Luxemburg this consideration was not a justification for opposing the existence of a party programme. Some lines further on she says:

“Evidently, the important thing for the Social Democracy is not the preparation of a set of directives all ready for the future policy. It is important: 1. to encourage a correct historic apprecia­tion of the forms of struggle correspon­ding to the given situations, and 2. to maintain an understanding of the rela­tivity of the current phase and the in­evitable increase of revolutionary ten­sion as the final goal of the class struggle is approached.” (Luxemburg, Ibid)

Rosa Luxemburg gives an excellent definition of the origins and functions of the class positions that are written down in the plat­form or party programme of every revolution­ary organization. Indeed, to record class positions has nothing at all to do with efforts to take over the leadership of the working class struggle or (what would be the result of this) obstructing the ‘often spontaneous class struggle’.

The text of Rosa Luxemburg, from which these quotations are taken, was written at a time when the period of capitalist decadence hadn’t yet begun and the working class could still force by means of parliament and the trade unions, a still-expanding capitalism to grant reforms. At that time revolutionaries were active in the Social Democratic organizations because they were permanent proletarian organizations of struggle and propaganda. The programme on which the KAPD was founded in 1920, took into account the period of the decadence of capitalism, which apparently had started in 1914. It also explained the marked inade­quacy of parliament and the trade unions as means of struggle of the proletariat and recognized the distinction between the unitary organizations of the class and the organization of revolutionaries. This dis­tinction marks a continuous theoretical evolution which began with Rosa Luxemburg’s opposition within Social Democracy. This theoretical evolution is in no way a result of navel-gazing, but of a thorough elabora­tion of the developments within the workers’ struggle up to 1920 which shows a distinc­tion between the organizations of struggle and the organizations of the revolutionaries in the reality of class struggle. World War I and the revolutionary wave of 1917-20 shifted class frontiers, and the programme of the KAPD takes this into account. If the SB is suggesting that the class frontiers described in the programme of the KAPD have changed, through claiming they are ‘old hat’, then the SB’s responsibility is to show the historic facts proving this. It is our con­viction that these facts do not exist. But the SB has very good reasons for refusing to study the programmes and platforms of the KAPD and its continuations in the Dutch Left. At present the SB is only held to­gether by its councilist and activist re­fusal to take up its tasks as an organiza­tion of revolutionaries. The councilists, the older militants in the SB, gave up bringing forward class positions after the disappointing experiences which followed their efforts to do so during the now-ended period of reconstruction. The younger acti­vists in the SB -- in a functioning organiza­tion of revolutionaries -- are afraid to give up the safe, localistic, limitations of their own place of work or their own dis­trict, and at the theoretical level, prefer their ‘chats’ with the workers.

c. The Tasks of the Organization of Revolutionaries

During the conference, the SB couldn’t deny the distinction between the organization of revolutionaries and the unitary organiza­tions. But this was arrived at only after the greatest effort and in spite of objec­tions of a kind that can also be found in the report of the conference the SB pub­lished:

“But the conception that the political organization is so schematically distinct from the unitary organization that in practice it even boils down to a separa­tion, doesn’t fit in with reality. In the first place it hardly ever happens that only direct and immediate interests are in the focus of a struggle or action. Precisely in the concrete struggle, interests and ideas develop which trans­cend the material, temporary, and local point of struggle. It is precisely here that the basis for further political evolution is laid. And in the second place, in many movements there is no unity of class but the co-operation of the interests concerned dominates (for example, actions in workers’ districts). There must be an evolution by unitary organizations and action groups towards study and the deepening of more general questions: an evolution from practice towards study of that practice. Of course the political group is distinct from the action groups and strike committees. Because the political group has a speci­fic task of placing the experiences gained through these struggles in a broader perspective.” (Spartacus, 1976-11)

Now what the SB says here is very correct.

But it is no argument at all against the necessity for the organization of revolu­tionaries to be a political organization based on a platform. Because consciousness develops within the struggle from experiences, this is no automatic and simultaneous process. That’s why the elements which first come to consciousness must come together to deepen and propagate their understanding and positions. The SB seems to confirm this when it says:

“A platform consists of one’s positions written down in the form of theses. Posi­tions relating to the history of class struggle, to actual and international experiences, to capitalism and the per­spectives for the future. Everybody is agreed that these are things which a political group such as the SB should be engaged in. There has been a great deal of discussion about this and also a lot of confusion, but in this report we can be brief about it; everybody agreed and still agrees.” (Spartacus, 1976-11)

But what was the disagreement at the con­ference? According to the SB: “The dis­agreement was around the need to reproduce one’s positions in the form of theses and on the emphasis placed on studying a certain point.” (Spartacus, 1976-11)

Of course the disagreement wasn’t about the form a platform should take, whether theses, an essay, a poem, or a declaration of prin­ciples. The disagreement was, and is, about the content of a platform, a declaration of principles, or whatever you wish to call it. This is shown by the following: “If we want to accomplish our tasks, namely to pro­pagate the insight resulting from study, then we need a permanent discussion. The evolution of many groups has shown in practice that a platform (along with its consequences -- national guidelines which local sections have to obey, months of discussion about the formulation of objectives and procedures, etc) only obstructs that permanent confron­tation with reality.” (Spartacus, 1976-11)

By ‘reality’, the SB means the “everyday practice” of the activist who has chosen a certain “field of action”, this means for a partial struggle, and who doesn’t want to hear anything about matters which, according to him, have nothing to do with this. If he has chosen a certain workers’ district, he doesn’t want to hear about wage struggles, nor about struggles in the districts of Soweto, or Vitoria, or Gdansk, and least of all about the class positions elaborated from the highlights of the workers’ struggles historically.

The activists are characterized by their factual refusal of the organization of revolutionaries, which they wrongly identify with the Leninist party. The activists think ‘the’ political organization superfluous because they demand that political positions be directly applicable to their “field of action”. The positions resulting from past revolutionary highlights of the workers’ struggle, or from other countries, they consider to be “theory” and hence “impractical”. Activism in fact is an a-historic, localist tendency principally restricting itself to partial struggles. At its best, activism can be the reflection of a limited workers’ struggle. But activism can never help to transcend these limitations. On the contrary, it propagates the limitations of the partial struggle by holding it up before the class as exemplary.

While the working class as a class is always forced to generalize its struggle to all aspects of life and throughout a constantly enlarging part of itself, in order to make its proletarian revolution, it is confronted by the same kind of problems that earlier revolutions had to overcome. The activists stand there rejecting the experiences of earlier revolutionary highlights which have been elaborated and are formulated in the positions of the currents of the workers’ movement. Just like Lenin, the activists consider these theoretical conceptions as something which are properly alien to the working class, which according to them, only struggle on the basis of limited interests -- to which Lenin adds -- and which never can transcend this limitation without the leading role of the intelligensia. The activists con­clude from this, differing from the Leninists, that ‘the’ political organization is super­fluous. In doing so they find themselves in the company of the councilists who no longer believe in propagating class positions be­cause they are tired of rowing against the reflux of the class movement during the last fifty years of counter-revolution. Leninists, activists, and councilists all agree, despite their other differences, in their denial of the origins of class positions from the historical workers’ struggle. Hence their rejection of the exclusively propagandistic intervention in the working class by the organization of revolutionaries.

The propagandistic intervention seems after all, only completely natural and necessary if one thinks that the positions are elabor­ated from the experiences of the class it­self and that propaganda is a contribution to the elaboration of those experiences with­in the class, a contribution to the discus­sion in the working class.

A nice illustration of the SB’s tendency to consider class positions as products of navel-gazing theorists are the marginal notes in Spartacus, 1976-10 which is completely dedicated to the workers’ struggle in Poland during the winter of 1970-71 and the summer of 1976. About the author of the Poland edition, the SB remarks:

“He is ... himself not free from party conceptions, conceptions which should be distinguished from those which corres­pond to state-capitalist theories in which the party ‘leads’ or ‘uses’ the working class; a party which has to seize state-power. Nevertheless, the author has the conception of a party which puts forward the aim of the strug­gle -- the conquest of workers’ power -- and which always stimulates the workers to prepare themselves in every aspect of struggle for that ultimate goal. We get the impression that, through having these conceptions, he overlooks the im­mensely important fact that the working class will not permit its struggle to be directed by social ideals, but that the working class is inspired by the social reality it experiences.” (Spartacus, 1976-12)

As if the final object of the struggle, the conquest of workers’ power, is an ‘invention’ of the party! Even in the earlier years of scientific socialism the conquest of workers’ power was not the product of pure thought but a conclusion drawn from the historic, materialist inquiry into the essence and development of capitalism. And, at least since the Russian Revolution, the conquest of workers’ power is a fact of experience. For the workers of Szczecin during the winter of 1970-71, workers’ power was not an unknown fact; they held power over the city in their hands for some time: This power was snatched away from them by Gierek’s arrival at the shipyards. The discussions between the Szczecin workers’ council and Gierek and among the workers themselves (which is reproduced at length in Spartacus 1976-10), centred around the question of the “maintenance of workers’ power, or the handing of power over to Gierek in exchange for the satisfaction of demands.” In this respect Poland is a testing-ground for the position of the SB in a revolutionary situation:

“So it is our opinion that the workers of Szczecin and of some other towns in Poland were not able to bring down Eastern-European state capitalism. This need not be more surprising than the final defeat of the revolts in East Germany in 1953 and that of the Hungarian workers in 1956. In their isolation they were too restricted in their possibilities to allow for the complete conquest of power by those workers.” (Spartacus, 1976-12)

d. The Regroupment of Revolutionaries in Holland

Given the revival of the revolutionary workers’ struggle after fifty years of counter-revolution, the SB’s councilist tendency to view all events through the glasses of defeat, turns into the open pro­paganda of defeat. The recent workers’ struggles in Poland are not isolated pheno­mena behind the Iron Curtain, but are part of the international workers’ struggle since the second half of the sixties: France in ‘68, Belgium ‘'73, Portugal ‘74/5, Spain, and again Poland 1976. Not to mention the struggles in other parts of the world. It is the task of revolutionaries always to propa­gate class positions. Once this was also the opinion of the SB:

“Only when the third opposition group left the ranks of the SB, did it become clear that the second and also the third split-off really did have principled reasons for doing so. The real disagree­ment was about the SB’s position in the present workers’ movement, at a time when, according to those who split off, there could be no revolutionary mass movements -- or if there could be -- these would not have a revolutionary character. The opinion of those former comrades was that the SB, while sticking to propaganda calling for ‘all power to the workers’ councils’, ‘production in the hands of the factory organizations’ and ‘communist production on the basis of calculating prices on the basis of the average working hour’5, should not intervene in the struggle of the workers as they appeared in an immediate context. The propaganda of the SB should have to be of a princi­pled purity and if the masses were not interested at the moment, this would change when the mass movements would again become revolutionary.” (Uit Eigen Kring, end 1947)

So far the summary of the political reasons for the two opposition groups leaving the SB, by those who remained. The fear of the second and third opposition groups that the SB would become ‘diluted’ in the period when the workers’ struggle once more took on a revolutionary character, has come true. In a period of reviving revolutionary class struggle it becomes an absolute necessity to bring forward in the clearest possible way the historic acquisitions of the class, the class positions. The SB isn’t able to do this. An organization of revolutionaries which isn’t based on permanent discussion involving all its members on its fundamental positions, recorded in a platform, will perish. Because such an organization:

-- is not able to optimally propagate its positions (since they have not yet been determined) in the class from which they have been elaborated;

-- has no membership criteria. Thus it either has to isolate itself from potential new members and die out, or it has to open its door to all kinds of positions;

-- cannot distinguish itself from ‘competing’ organizations. Thus, it becomes a factor of confusion instead of clarification in the class struggle.

Conclusion

The refusal of the SB to inaugurate a discus­sion aimed at forming a platform, essentially comes down to its refusal to submit to a rejuvenation cure against the three complaints of old age mentioned above. The SB has now been in existence for thirty-seven years. But this alone doesn’t make it the continua­tion of the Dutch Left. Its confused positions on the question of the organization of revo­lutionaries, and on its tasks, prove that there has been a real break in continuity with the pre-war communists. By adopting the position it chose at its latest conference, it can hardly be considered to be a func­tioning pole for the regroupment of revolu­tionaries in Holland. The deepening crisis and the upsurge in class struggle make regroupment an absolute necessity.

Unlike the period in which the Dutch Left was active, the Netherlands is now a highly industrialized country with a fully-developed working class. This doesn’t imply that the formation of an organization of revolution­aries in Holland should ever be restricted by national frontiers. The Dutch economy, especially since the reconstruction period, is firmly attached to the German economy and the Dutch bourgeoisie can use Germany’s relatively strong position and its own rich supply of natural gas to relieve the results of unemployment by welfare benefits and by stimulating industry through state interven­tion. Through the phasing-in of the crisis in the Netherlands, it has been possible until recently, to contain the workers’ struggles by channeling and detouring them into demands like the leveling of wage dif­ferentials and nationalizations. But revolu­tionaries know that although the leveling of wage differentials and nationalizations may well slow down the crisis, it will in­evitably return like a boomerang. Recently, the crisis is being felt harder. The Social Democratic/Christian Democratic coalition government is starting to attack welfare benefits. Automatic compensation made to wage-earners to offset inflation is also being threatened. Slowly the Dutch working class is beginning to free itself from con­tainment by the trade unions: in 1976 we saw wildcat strikes in the ports and in the construction industry, two traditionally militant sectors of the working class. The CP, Trotskyists, and Maoists played their part as the left support of Social Democracy. Their tactic was to drive the workers back into the trade unions, or into alternative mini-trade unions, set up by the Maoists. They put forward a bourgeois caricature of political struggle by defending parliamen­tarism, nationalizations, and national ‘independence’.

In view of the still weak development of the workers’ struggles in the Netherlands, the task of the revolutionary organization is to make the working class aware of the struggles of its class brothers in those countries which have already been hit by the crisis, and conscious of the historical perspectives of these struggles. This means that the formation of an organization of revolutionaries in Holland can only take place within an international perspective and therefore an international framework. Consequently, the activity of the ICC and especially its Belgian section, in relation to the Netherlands must be applauded.

The decision of the SB not to engage in a discussion to set up a platform does not have to be final. All the questions that were discussed at the last conference will return when the SB tries to formulate a ‘declaration of principles’. If this happens within a framework of an international discus­sion on the positions of the Communist Left during the period before World War II and the positions of existing revolutionary groups, it will certainly be a contribution towards the creation of a pole for regroup­ment of revolutionaries in Holland. Above all the SB could make a valuable international contribution by aiding the revolutionary groups which emerge towards a critical re­appraisal of the political gains of the Dutch Left. Because the SB never was, and is not now, alone in the world.

F.K.

We are publishing below a letter from the Combate group in Portugal. In order to understand and dispel the misunderstandings which have arisen in our relations with this group some explanations are required.

In the midst of the tremendous confusion in which the events in Portugal took place after the fall of the Salazar-Caetano regime, Combate appeared to be the only group situa­ting itself on a class terrain. For this reason we always tried to establish and main­tain contact with this group -- by going to see them, by inviting those comrades respon­sible for making visits to come to Paris to debate with us the problems affecting the proletarian struggle in Portugal, and, equally, by carrying on the debates and criticisms in our publications – natural activities between revolutionary groups.

Our divergences with Combate are certainly substantial. That is no reason to pass over them in silence or to be content to simply exchange ‘information’, but, on the contrary, it is the duty of any revolutionary group to discuss and openly confront these diver­gences. This is a condition for managing to clarify these divergences and eventually to overcome them.

It was with these concerns and while a com­rade from Combate was with us that we had the bewildering surprise of receiving a letter from Combate on 9 September, laconi­cally informing us of the decision to sus­pend selling ICC publications in the Combate bookshops. Our reply, published in the International Review (no. 8), was a vehement protest against such a decision which we described quite rightly as “aberrant”. We demanded an explanation in that letter and demanded that Combate withdraw its decision.

We are satisfied to have received now both the explanations and rectification which we demanded and will let pass the ironic comments accompanying them. The healthy relations which should exist between mili­tant groups of the class are for us an extremely serious problem. We intend to remain firmly resolute and alert to defending these relations in order to root out the perverted customs which Stalinism introduced into the life of the class for the past decades.

We will keep in mind the suggestion to repu­blish material from Combate on concrete struggles. We must, however, assert that we have significant differences with Combate on what the task of the revolutionary press should be. For Combate the press is essen­tially a vehicle for information and descrip­tion, for us it is an instrument of inter­vention and political orientation.

The question is not a difference between workers in struggle and ‘professors’, but between immediatists who are content to ‘inform’ and political groups who say who they are, and who defend a revolutionary orientation within the class and in its struggles.

Also, we hope to see Combate defend a clearer orientation in its publications by openly confronting the positions of other political currents.

A mountain out of a molehill

Dear Comrades,

Your interpretations are quite remarkable and it’s a great pleasure to read them, but, alas, the facts are much more prosaic and banal. It’s always better to check up on the facts before hurling down the gauntlet.

The facts: a comrade who misunderstood a decision taken at a meeting; other comrades who don’t read letters once they have been written. The decision: the bookshop in Oporto decided that it would no longer look after the distribution of your publications in the bookshops of Oporto, Lisbon and Coimbra, because of commercial problems. This has nothing to do with the selling of your publications in our bookshops. More­over, the bookshop in Lisbon has always dis­played your publications, and will continue to do so.

We thank you for your concern for us, which has twice led you to consider Combate’s ideas sufficiently interesting to figure as the subject of your critiques in the pages of your publications. We would like to point out, however, that in the pages of Combate you will find a lot of information provided directly by workers from concrete struggles -- banal, of course, but such things make up the small world the working class lives in while it waits for the pro­fessors to change society. Perhaps some of your readers would like to see some of this material in your publications?

Revolutionary greetings,

The Combate Collective

CONTRA-A-CORRENTE,

Edicoes - Livraria,

Lisbon, 5 January 1977.