What balance sheet and perspectives for our activity?

“Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history.” (Rosa Luxemburg, An Anti-Critique)

Last spring the ICC held its 21st Congress. Since this event coincided with 40 years of existence of our organisation, we took the decision to give this Congress an exceptional character with the central objective of making a critical balance sheet of our analyses and activities over these four decades. The work of the Congress was therefore committed to making as lucid an examination as possible of our strengths and weaknesses; of what was valid in our analyses and what errors we have made in order to arm ourselves to overcome them.

This critical balance sheet was fully in continuity with the approach that has always been adopted by marxism throughout the history of the workers’ movement. Thus Marx and Engels, loyal to a method that is both historical and self-critical, were able to recognise that certain parts of the Communist Manifesto had been proved wrong or overtaken by historical experience. It is this ability to criticise their mistakes that has enabled marxists to make theoretical advances and continue to make their contribution to the revolutionary perspective of the proletariat. In the same way that Marx was able to learn from the experience of the defeat of the Paris Commune, the Italian Left was able to recognise the profound defeat of the world proletariat in the late 1920s, to make a balance sheet or “bilan”1 of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and of the programmatic positions of the Third International. It is this critical balance-sheet that allowed them, despite their errors, to make invaluable theoretical advances, both in terms of the analysis of the period of counter-revolution and on the organisational level by understanding the role and tasks of a fraction within a degenerating proletarian party and as a bridge to a future party when the previous one had been won by the bourgeoisie..

This exceptional Congress of the ICC was held in the context of our recent internal crisis that led to the holding of an extraordinary international conference a year ago.2 It was with the utmost seriousness that all delegations prepared for the Congress and participated in the discussions with a clear understanding of the issues and of the necessity, for all the generations of militants, to make this critical evaluation of 40 years of the existence of the ICC. For the militants (especially the younger ones) who were not members of the ICC at its founding, this Congress and its preparatory texts allowed them to learn from the experience of the ICC while actively participating in the Congress’s work and taking a stand in the debates.

The critical balance-sheet of our analysis of the international situation

The foundation of the ICC was a sign of the end of the counter-revolution and the historic resurgence of the class struggle, which was shown particularly by the May ‘68 movement in France. The ICC was the only organisation of the Communist Left to analyse this event in the framework of the re-emergence of the open crisis of capitalism in 1967. With the end of the “30 Glorious Years”, and with the continuation of the Cold War arms race, the alternative was again posed of “global war or the development of proletarian struggles”. May ‘68 and the wave of workers’ struggles that developed at the international level marked the opening of a new historic course: after 40 years of counter-revolution, the proletariat had raised its head again and was not prepared to be mobilised for a third world war behind the defence of national flags.

The Congress underlined that the emergence and development of a new international and internationalist organisation confirmed the validity of our analytical framework on this new historic course. Armed with this concept (as well as the analysis that capitalism had entered its historic period of decadence with the outbreak of the first world war), the ICC has continued throughout its existence to analyse the three components of the international situation – the evolution of the economic crisis, the class struggle and imperialist conflicts – in order not to fall into empiricism and to establish the orientations for its activity. Nevertheless, the Congress applied itself to making the most lucid examination possible of the mistakes we have made in some of our analyses in order to allow us to identify the source of these errors and thus improve our analytical framework.

On the basis of the report submitted on the evolution of the class struggle since 1968, the Congress underlined that the main weakness of the ICC, since its origins, has been what we have called immediatism; that is to say a political approach marked by impatience and which is focused on immediate events to the detriment of a broad historical view of the perspective from which to understand these events. While we rightly identified that the return of the class struggle in the late 1960s marked the opening of a new historic course, the characterisation of this as a “course towards revolution” was wrong and we corrected it by using the term “course towards class confrontations.” This more appropriate wording however, due to a certain imprecision, did not close the door to a linear, schematic vision of the class struggle, with a certain hesitation among us to recognise difficulties, defeats and periods of retreat for the proletariat.

The inability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise the working class of the central countries for a third world war did not mean that the international waves of struggles that followed up until 1989 would continue in a mechanical and inevitable way towards the opening of a revolutionary period. The Congress confirmed that the ICC has underestimated the seriousness of the rupture in the historic continuity with the workers’ movement of the past and the ideological impact, within the working class, of 50 years of counter-revolution; the impact of which showed itself particularly in a suspicion, and even a rejection, of communist organisations.

The Congress also underlined another weakness of the ICC in its analyses of the balance of forces between the classes: the tendency to see the proletariat constantly “on the offensive” in each movement of struggle, even when the latter had only gone as far as defensive struggles for its immediate economic interests (important and meaningful as they are) and had failed to take on a political dimension.

The work of the Congress allowed us to note that these difficulties in analysing the evolution of the class struggle were based on an erroneous vision of the functioning of the capitalist mode of production, with a tendency to lose sight of the fact that capital is first of all a social relationship, which means that the bourgeoisie is obliged to take account of the class struggle in the implementation of its economic policies and its attacks against the proletariat. The Congress also highlighted a certain lack of mastery by the ICC of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory as an explanation of the decadence of capitalism. Following Rosa Luxemburg, to be able to continue its accumulation capitalism needs to find outlets in extra-capitalist sectors. The gradual disappearance of these sectors condemns capitalism to increasing convulsions.This analysis was adopted in our platform (even though a minority of our comrades based themselves on another analysis to explain decadence: that of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). This lack of mastery by the ICC of Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis (developed in her book The Accumulation of Capital) was reflected in a “catastrophist” vision, an apocalyptic view of the breakdown of the world economy. The Congress recognised that throughout its existence, the ICC has consistently overestimated the pace of the development of the economic crisis. But in recent years, particularly with the sovereign debt crisis, our analyses had in the background the underlying idea that capitalism could collapse by itself since the bourgeoisie was “at an impasse” and had exhausted all the palliatives that had allowed it to artificially prolong the survival of its system.

This “catastrophist” vision is due, in large part, to a lack of deepening our analysis of state capitalism, an underestimation of the capacity of the bourgeoisie, that we identified a long time ago, to draw the lessons of the crisis in the 1930s and to support its bankrupt system by all sorts of manipulations and trickeries with the law of value, through permanent state intervention in the economy. It is also due to a reductionist and schematic understanding of the economic theory of Rosa Luxemburg, with the mistaken idea that capitalism had already exhausted all its capacities for expansion in 1914 or in the 1960s. In reality, as Rosa Luxemburg stressed, the real catastrophe of capitalism lies in the fact that it subjects humanity to a decline, a long agony, by plunging society into a growing barbarism.

It is this error of denying any possibility of capitalism’s expansion in its decadent period which explains the difficulties the ICC has had in understanding the dizzying growth and industrial development in China (and other peripheral countries) after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Although this industrial take-off in no way calls into question the analysis of the decadence of capitalism3, the ensuing vision that there was no possibility of development for the ‘Third World’ countries in the period of decadence does not hold. This error, highlighted by the Congress, led us to not consider the fact that the bankruptcy of the old autarchic model of the Stalinist countries could open up new opportunities, previously frozen, for capitalist investments4 (including the integration into wage labour of an enormous mass of workers who previously lived outside of directly capitalist social relations and who were subjected to a ferocious exploitation).

On the question of imperialist tensions, the Congress confirmed that the ICC had in general developed a very solid framework of analysis, whether during the epoch of the Cold War between the two rival blocs or after the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist regimes. Our analysis of militarism, the decomposition of capitalism and the crisis in the Eastern countries allowed us to see the weaknesses that would lead to the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The ICC was the first organisation to have predicted the disappearance of the two blocs led by the USSR and United States, as well as the decline of US hegemony and the development of the tendency for “every man for himself” on the imperialist scene with the end of the discipline of military blocs.5

If the ICC was able to correctly understand the dynamics of imperialist tensions, this is because it was able to analyse the dramatic collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes as a major manifestation of capitalism’s entry into the final phase of its decadence: that of decomposition. This framework was the last contribution that our comrade MC6 bequeathed to the ICC to enable it to face an unprecedented and particularly difficult historical situation. For over 20 years, the rise of fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, the development of terrorism and nihilism, the unleashing of barbarism in armed conflict, the resurgence of pogroms (and, more generally, of a mentality of looking for scapegoats), only confirms the validity of this analytical framework.

Although the ICC understood how the ruling class was able to exploit the collapse of the Eastern bloc and of Stalinism to turn this manifestation of the decomposition of its system against the working class by unleashing its campaigns on the “bankruptcy of communism”, we greatly underestimated the depth of their impact on the consciousness of the proletariat and the development of its struggles.

We underestimated the fact that the deleterious atmosphere of social decomposition (as well as deindustrialisation and the relocation policies of some central countries) contributed to undermining the confidence and solidarity of the proletariat and reinforcing the loss of its class identity. Because of this underestimation of the difficulties of the new period opened up with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the ICC has had a tendency to retain the illusion that the deepening economic crisis and attacks against the working class would necessarily, and in a mechanical way, provoke “waves of struggle” that would develop with the same characteristics and on the same model as those of 1970-80. In particular, despite rightly saluting the movement against the CPE in France and the Indignados in Spain, we have underestimated the enormous difficulties that confront today’s young generation of the working class to develop a perspective for its struggles (including the weight of democratic illusions, fear and rejection of the word “communism” and the fact that this generation has not benefited from the transfer of the living experience of the generation of workers, retirees today, who participated in the class struggles of the 1970s and 1980s). These difficulties affect not only the working class as a whole but also the searching young elements who want to engage in political activity.

The isolation and negligible influence of the ICC (like all the groups historically issuing from the communist left) in the working class for four decades, and particularly since 1989, indicates that the perspective of the world proletarian revolution is still far away. At its foundation, the ICC did not imagine that, 40 years later, the working class would still not have overthrown capitalism. This does not mean that marxism was mistaken and that the system is eternal. The principal error we made was that of underestimating the slow pace of the economic crisis which had resurfaced at the end of the reconstruction period after the Second World War, as well as the capacity of the ruling class to brake and prevent the historic collapse of the capitalist mode of production.

Moreover, the Congress highlighted that our latest internal crisis (and the lessons we have learned from it), has enabled the ICC to begin to clearly re-appropriate a fundamental acquisition of the workers’ movement highlighted by Engels: that the proletarian struggle has three dimensions – economic, political and theoretical. It is the theoretical dimension that the proletariat must develop in its future struggles in order to rediscover its identity as a revolutionary class, to resist the weight of social decomposition and put forward its own perspective of the transformation of society. As Rosa Luxemburg affirmed, the proletarian revolution is essentially a vast “cultural movement”, because communist society will not only have as its objective the satisfaction of the basic material needs of humanity but also the satisfaction of social, intellectual and moral needs. From the awareness of this gap in our understanding of the struggle of the proletariat (revealing an “economistic” and vulgar materialist tendency), we are able not only to identify the nature of our recent crisis but also understand that this “intellectual and moral” crisis, that we had already discussed at our extraordinary conference in 20147, has existed in reality for more than 30 years, and that the ICC has suffered from a lack of reflection and in-depth discussions on the roots of all the organisational challenges it has faced since its origins, and particularly since the late 1980s.

The ICC’s role as a “fraction of a certain type”

To begin a critical assessment of 40 years of the ICC, the Congress put at the centre of its work the discussion not only of a general report on activity but also on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”.

Our organisation has never had the pretension of being a party (let alone THE world party of the proletariat).

As underlined in our founding texts, “The effort of our current to constitute itself as a pole of regroupment around class positions is part of that process towards the formation of the party at a time of intense and generalised struggles. We do not claim to be a ‘party’” (‘Report from the International Conference’, International Review no.1). The ICC must still undertake work that has a number of similarities with a fraction, even if it is not a fraction.

The ICC arose after an organic break with previous communist organisations and did not issue from a pre-existing organisation. There was therefore no organisational continuity with a particular group or party. The only comrade (MC) who had come from a fraction of the workers’ movement issuing from the Third International, could not represent the continuity of a group, but was the only “living link” with the past of the workers’ movement. Because the ICC was not rooted in or a split from a party that had degenerated, betrayed proletarian principles and passed into the camp of capital, it was not founded in the context of a struggle against its degeneration. The first task of the ICC, because of the break in organic continuity and the depth of the 50 years of counter-revolution, was first to re-appropriate the positions of the groups of the communist left who had preceded us.

The ICC had therefore to build and develop itself at the international level somehow from “zero.” This new international organisation had to learn “on the job” in new historical conditions and with a first generation of young inexperienced militants, coming from the student movement of May ‘68 and very strongly influenced by the weight of the petty bourgeoisie, of immediatism, the atmosphere of the “generation war” and the fear of Stalinism, which was particularly manifested from the start by a mistrust of centralisation.

From its foundation, the ICC re-appropriated the experience of the organisations of the past workers’ movement (notably the Communist League, the IWA, Bilan and the GCF8) by adopting Statutes, principles of functioning that are an integral part of its platform. But unlike past organisations the ICC was not conceived as a federalist organisation composed of a sum of national sections, each with its own local specificities. By constituting itself from the start as an international and centralised organisation, the ICC was conceived as an internationally unified body. Its principles of centralisation were the guarantor of the unity of the organisation.

“While for Bilan and the GCF - given the conditions of the counter-revolution - it was impossible to grow and to build an organisation in several countries, the ICC has undertaken the task of constructing an international organisation based on solid positions (...) As an expression of the newly opened historic course towards class confrontations (...), the ICC has been international and centralised from the beginning, while other organisations of the Communist Left of the past were all confined to one or two countries.” (‘Report on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”’, presented to the Congress).

Despite these differences with Bilan and the GCF, the Congress emphasised that the role of the ICC was similar to that of a fraction: to constitute a bridge between the past (after a period of rupture) and the future. “The ICC defines itself not as a party, nor as a ‘miniature party’, but as a ‘fraction of a certain kind’” (‘Report on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”’). The ICC must be a pole of reference, of international regroupment and transmission of the lessons of the experience from the past workers’ movement. It must also guard against any dogmatic approach, knowing how to criticise, when necessary, erroneous or obsolete positions, to go beyond them and continue to keep marxism alive.

The ICC’s re-acquisition of the positions of the communist left was undertaken relatively quickly, although their assimilation was marked from the beginning by great heterogeneity. “Re-appropriation was not to say that we had arrived at clarity and truth once and for all, that our platform had become ‘invariant’ (...) The ICC modified its platform in early 1980 after intense debate” (Ibid). It was on the basis of this re-appropriation that the ICC could make theoretical elaborations of its analysis of the international situation (eg. the critique of Lenin’s theory of “weak links” after the defeat of the mass strike in Poland in 19809, and the analysis of decomposition as the final phase of the decadence of capitalism announced by the collapse of the USSR).10

From the outset, the ICC has adopted the approach of Bilan and the GCF who insisted throughout their existence on the need for an international debate (even under conditions of repression, fascism and war) to clarify the respective positions of the different groups by engaging in polemics on issues of principle. Right from the foundation of the ICC in January 1975, we took up this approach by engaging in numerous public debates and polemics, not with a view to a hasty regroupment but to promote clarification.

Since the beginning of its existence, the ICC has always defended the idea that there is a “proletarian political milieu” defined by principles and has endeavoured to play a dynamic role in the process of clarification within this milieu.

The trajectory of the Italian Left was marked, from beginning to end, by a permanent struggle for the defence of the principles of the workers’ movement and of marxism. This has equally been a permanent preoccupation of the ICC throughout its existence, either in external polemical debates or in the political struggles we have had to wage within the organisation, particularly in situations of crisis.

Bilan and the GCF were convinced that their role as fractions was equally the “formation of cadres”. Although this concept of “cadres” is very questionable and can lead to confusion, their main concern was perfectly valid: it was to train the next generation of militants by transmitting the lessons of historical experience so that it could pick up the torch and continue the work of the previous generation.

The fractions of the past did not disappear just because of the weight of the counter-revolution. Their erroneous analyses of the historic situation equally contributed to their demise. The GCF was dissolved following the analysis, which was not confirmed, of the imminent and inevitable break out of a third world war. The ICC is the international organisation that has had the longest life in the history of the workers’ movement. It still exists, 40 years after its founding. We have not been swept away by our various crises. Despite the loss of many militants, the ICC has managed to keep most of its founding sections and to constitute new sections allowing the distribution of our press in different languages, countries and continents.

However, the Congress emphasised, in a lucid way, that the ICC still carries the burden of the historical conditions of its origins. Because of these unfavourable historical conditions, there has been in our midst a generation “lost” after 1968 and a generation “missing” (because of the prolonged impact of the anti-communist campaigns after the collapse of the Eastern bloc). This situation has been a handicap to consolidating the organisation in its activity over the long term. Our difficulties have been further aggravated since the late 1980s by the weight of decomposition which affects the whole of society, including the working class and its revolutionary organisations.

In the same way that Bilan and the GCF had the capacity to carry on the fight “against the current”, the ICC, in order to assume its role as a bridge between past and future, must today develop that same fighting spirit knowing that we are also “against the current”, isolated and cut off from the whole of the working class (like the other organisations of the communist left). Although we are no longer in a period of counter-revolution, the historic situation opened up since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the very great difficulties of the proletariat to regain its revolutionary class identity and perspective (as well as all the bourgeois campaigns to discredit the communist left) have reinforced this isolation. “The bridge to which we must contribute will be one that goes from the ‘lost’ generation’ from 1968 and from the desert of decomposition towards the future generations” (Ibid).

The Congress debates emphasised that the ICC, over time (and especially since the death of our comrade MC which came shortly after the collapse of Stalinism), has greatly lost sight of the fact that it must continue the work of the fractions of the communist left. This was shown in an underestimation of the fact that our principal task is that of theoretical deepening11 (which must not be left to a few “experts”) and the construction of the organisation through the formation of new militants by transmitting the culture of theory. The Congress noted that the ICC has failed, over the last 25 years, to pass on to new comrades the method of the Fraction. Instead of transmitting the method of the long term construction of a centralised organisation, we have tended to transmit the vision of the ICC as a “mini party”12 whose main task will be intervention in the immediate struggles of the working class.

At the time of the ICC’s foundation, a great responsibility rested on the shoulders of MC, who was the sole comrade who could pass on to a new generation the marxist method, of the construction of the organisation and the uncompromising defence of its principles. There are today in the organisation many more experienced militants (who were present at the foundation of the ICC), but there is always a danger of “organic rupture” given our difficulties in carrying out this work of transmission.

In fact, the conditions that led to the foundation of the ICC were a huge handicap to the construction of the organisation over the long term. The Stalinist counter-revolution was the longest and deepest in the history of the workers’ movement. Never before, since the Communist League, had there been a discontinuity, an organic rupture between generations of militants. There had always been a living link of one organisation to the other, and the work of transmitting experience had never rested on the shoulders of a single individual. The ICC is the only organisation that has experienced this unprecedented situation. This organic break which lasted nearly half a century was a very difficult challenge to overcome and it was compounded by the reluctance of the young generation after May ‘68 to “learn” from the experience of the previous generation. The weight of the ideologies of the petty bourgeoisie in revolt, of the student milieu, contestating everything for its own sake and strongly marked by the “battle of generations ” (due to the fact that the preceding generation was precisely the one that had lived in the depths of the counter-revolution) further reinforced the weight of the organic break with the living experience of the past workers’ movement.

Obviously, the death of MC, at the very beginning of the period of capitalism’s decomposition, could only make the ICC’s efforts to overcome its congenital weaknesses more difficult.

The loss of the ICC section in Turkey was the most obvious manifestation of these difficulties in transmitting to young militants the method of the Fraction. The Congress made a very severe criticism of our error in having prematurely and precipitously integrated these ex-comrades when they had not really understood the Statutes and the organisational principles of the ICC (and tended to exhibit a strong localist, federalist tendency, conceiving the organisation as a sum of “national” sections and not as a unified and centralised body at the international level).

The Congress also noted that the weight of the circle spirit (and the dynamics of clans)13,which is part of the congenital weaknesses of the ICC, has been a permanent obstacle to its work of assimilation and transmission of the lessons of past experience to new militants.

The historic conditions in which the ICC lives have changed since its foundation. During the first years of our existence, we could intervene in a working class that was waging significant struggles. Today, after 25 years of stagnation in the class struggle at the international level, the ICC must now focus on a task similar to that of Bilan in its time: to understand the reasons for the failure of the working class to regain a revolutionary perspective almost half a century after the historic resurgence of the class struggle in the late 1960s.

“The fact that we are almost alone today to examine the colossal problems can prejudge the results, but not the need for a solution” (Bilan n° 22, September 1935,” Draft resolution on the problems of international links”).

“This work must bear not only on the issues we need to resolve today to establish our tactics but also on the problems that will arise tomorrow in the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Internationalise No. 1, January 1945 “Resolution on political tasks “).

The need for a moral and cultural “revival”

The debates on the critical evaluation of forty years of the ICC forced us to take the measure of the danger of sclerosis and degeneration that has always threatened revolutionary organisations. No revolutionary organisation has ever been immunised against this danger. The SPD (Socialist Party of Germany) was plagued by opportunism, to the point of a total questioning of the foundations of marxism; essentially because it had abandoned any theoretical work in favour of immediate tasks aimed at gaining influence among the working masses through its electoral successes. But the process of degeneration in the SPD began long before this abandonment of theoretical tasks. It began with the progressive destruction of solidarity between militants. Due to the abolition of anti-socialist laws (1878-1890) and the legalisation of the SPD, the solidarity between the militants, which had been a necessity in the preceding period, was no longer evident since they were no longer likely to be subjected to repression and the need for clandestinity. This destruction of solidarity (permitted by the “comfortable” conditions of the democratic bourgeoisie) opened the way to a growing moral depravity with the emergence of a pogrom mentality within the SPD, the leading party of the international workers’ movement, and which was manifested, for example, by the peddling of the most nauseating gossip about the most uncompromising representative of the left wing, Rosa Luxemburg.14 It is this combination of factors (not just opportunism and reformism), which opened the floodgates to a long process of internal degeneration leading to the collapse of the SPD in 1914.15 For a long time, the ICC had only addressed the issue of moral principles from an empirical, practical point of view (especially during the 1981 crisis when we were faced, for the first time, with thuggish behaviour with the theft of our equipment by the Chénier tendency). If the ICC had not been able to address this issue from a theoretical point of view, it is essentially because from the foundation of the ICC there was a rejection and a certain “phobia” of the term “morality”. Contrary to MC, the younger generation after the May ‘68 movement did not want the word “morality” to be included in the Statutes of the ICC (even though the idea of a proletarian morality was present in the statutes of the GCF). This aversion to “morality” was another manifestation of the ideology and the approach of the student petty bourgeoisie of the time.

It was only with the repetition, during the 2001 crisis, of thuggish behaviour (and after identifying the existence of a pogromist mentality among the ex-militants who were to form the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”) that the ICC understood the need for a theoretical re-appropriation of the achievements of Marxism on the question of morality. It took four decades for us to begin to realise the need to close this loophole. And it is since our last crisis that the ICC has begun a reflection aimed at a better understanding ofwhat Rosa Luxemburg meant when she said that “the proletarian party is the moral conscience of the revolution”.

The workers’ movement as a whole has neglected this issue. The debate at the time of the Second International was never sufficiently developed (apart from Kautsky’s book Ethics and the materialist conception of history) and the loss of morality was a decisive element in its degeneration. Although groups of the communist left have had the courage to practically defend proletarian moral principles, neither Bilan nor the GCF sufficiently addressed them theoretically. The difficulties of the ICC in this area must be seen in the light of the shortcomings of the revolutionary movement during the 20th century.

Today, the risk of the moral degeneration of revolutionary organisations is aggravated by the miasma of putrefaction and the barbarism of capitalist society. This question concerns not only the ICC but also the other groups of the Communist Left.

After our last Extraordinary Conference which was devoted to identifying the moral dimension of the crisis of the ICC, the Congress gave itself the objective of discussing its intellectual dimension. Throughout its existence the ICC has not ceased to point out its difficulties in deepening theoretical issues: the loss of the vision that the ICC plays the role similar to that of a fraction (and is not a “mini party”); immediatism in our analyses; activist and workerist trendencies in our intervention; contempt for theoretical work and the search for truth, have all been the breeding ground for the development of this crisis.

Our recurring underestimation of theoretical work (especially on organisational issues) finds its roots in the origins of the ICC: the impact of the student revolt with its academicist component (of a petty bourgeois nature), which has as its opposite an activist, “workerist” tendency (of a leftist nature), which confuses anti-academicism with a contempt for theory. And this in an atmosphere of infantile protest against “authority” (represented by the “old” MC). From the late 1980s, this underestimation of theoretical work in the organisation has been fuelled by the pernicious atmosphere of social decomposition which tends to destroy rational thought in favour of obscurantist beliefs and prejudices, which substitutes “gossip culture” for the culture of theory.16 The loss of our acquisitions (and the danger of sclerosis that this carries) is a direct consequence of this lack of a culture of theory. Faced with the pressure of bourgeois ideology, the gains of the ICC (whether programmatic, analytical or organisational) can only be maintained if they are constantly enriched by reflection and theoretical debate.

The Congress emphasised that the ICC is still affected by its “youthful indiscretion”, immediatism, which has repeatedly made us lose sight of the historic and long term framework for the functio of the organisation. The ICC was established by the regroupment of young elements who were politicised at a moment of spectacular revival of the class struggle (May ‘68). Many of them had the illusion that the revolution was already underway. The more impatient and immediatist were demoralised and abandoned their militant commitment. But this weakness was also maintained among those who stayed in the ICC. Immediatism continued to permeate us and was manifested on many occasions. The Congress realised that this weakness can be fatal for us because, linked to our loss of acquisitions, to the disdain for theory, it inevitably leads to opportunism; a drift that will always undermine the foundations of the organisation.

The Congress recalled that opportunism (and its variant, centrism) results from the permanent infiltration of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology into revolutionary organisations, demanding vigilance and a permanent struggle against the weight of these ideologies. Although the organisation of revolutionaries is a “foreign body”, antagonistic to capitalism, it arises and lives within class society and is therefore constantly threatened, either by the infiltration of ideologies and practices foreign to the proletariat, or a drift towards putting into question the gains of marxism and the workers’ movement. During these 40 years of existence, the ICC has constantly had to defend its principles and fight, in the course of difficult debates, all these ideologies that have shown themselves in its midst as, among others, leftist, modernist, anarcho-libertarian and councilist deviations.

The Congress also discussed the difficulties of the ICC in overcoming another major weakness of its origins: the circle spirit and its most destructive form, the clan spirit.17 This circle spirit is, as revealed in the history of the ICC, one of the most dangerous poisons for the organisation. And this for various reasons. It carries within itself the transformation of the revolutionary organisation into a simple grouping of friends, distorting its political nature as a product and instrument of the struggle of the working class. Through personalisation of political questions, it undermines the culture of debate and the clarification of disagreements through the confrontation of coherent and rational arguments. The constitution of clans or circles of friends clashing with the organisation or certain parts of it destroys collective work, solidarity and the unity of the organisation. Because it is powered by emotional, irrational approaches, by power relationships and personal animosities, the circle spirit is opposed to the work of thinking, of the culture of theory, in favour of a craze for idle gossip “between friends” and, in the end, for slander, undermining the moral health of the organisation.

The ICC has not succeeded in ridding itself of the circle spirit despite all the battles it has fought during these forty years of existence. The persistence of this poison is explained by the origins of the ICC, which was constituted from circles and in a “family” atmosphere where emotions (personal sympathies or antipathies) took precedence over the need for solidarity among militants fighting for the same cause and regrouped around the same programme. The weight of social decomposition and the tendency towards “every man for himself”, towards irrational actions, has compounded this original weakness. And above all, the lack of in-depth theoretical discussions on organisational issues has not allowed the organisation as a whole to overcome this “infantile disorder” of the ICC and the workers’ movement. The Congress underlined (in recalling the observation already made by Lenin in 1904 in his book One step forward, two steps back) that the circle spirit is conveyed essentially by the pressure of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie.

To face all these difficulties, and given the seriousness of the challenges of the present historical period, the Congress underlined that the organisation must develop a spirit of struggle against the influence of the dominant ideology, against the weight of social decomposition. This means that the revolutionary organisation must fight permanently against routinism, superficiality, intellectual laziness, schematism, to develop a critical spirit in lucidly identifying its mistakes and theoretical shortcomings.

To the extent that “socialist consciousness precedes and conditions the revolutionary action of the working class” (Internationalisme, “Nature and function of the political party of the proletariat”), the development of marxism is the central task of all revolutionary organisations. The Congress identified as a priority orientation for the ICC the collective strengthening of its work of deepening, of reflection, in re-acquiring the marxist culture of theory in all our internal debates.

In 1903, Rosa Luxemburg deplored the abandonment of the deepening of marxist theory thus:

“…it is only where economic matters are concerned that we are entitled to speak of a more or less completely elaborated body of doctrines bequeathed us by Marx. The most valuable of all his teachings, the materialist-dialectical conception of history, presents itself to us as nothing more than a method of investigation, as a few inspired leading thoughts, which offer us glimpses into the entirely new world (…) It is pure illusion to suppose that the working class, in its upward striving, can of its own accord become immeasurably creative in the theoretical domain.” (Stagnation and progress of marxism).

The ICC is today in a period of transition. Thanks to this critical balance-sheet, its capacity to examine its weaknesses and to admit mistakes, it is making a radical critique of the vision of militant activity that we have had until now, of relations between militants and between militants and the organisation, with as a guiding principle the question of the intellectual and moral dimension of the proletariat’s struggle. It is a real “cultural revolution” we must engage in, to continue to learn to assume our responsibilities. It is a long and difficult process, but vital for the future.

The defence of the organisation against attacks on the ICC

Throughout its existence, the ICC has waged a permanent struggle for the defence of its principles, against the ideological pressure of bourgeois society, against anti-proletarian behaviours or the manoeuvres of lawless adventurers. The defence of the organisation is a political responsibility and also a moral duty. The revolutionary organisation is not for the militants, but for the whole of the working class. It is a product of the latter’s historical struggle, an instrument of its fight for the development of its consciousness with the aim of the revolutionary transformation of society.

The Congress insisted on the fact that the ICC is a “foreign body” in society, antagonistic to and an enemy of capitalism. This is precisely why the ruling class has been very interested in our activities since the beginning of our existence. And this reality has nothing to do with paranoia or “conspiracy theories”. Revolutionaries must not be naive or ignorant of the history of the workers’ movement and even less yield to the siren song of bourgeois democracy (and its “freedom of expression”). If today, the ICC is not subject to the direct repression of the capitalist state, it is because our ideas are in a very small minority and do not represent any immediate danger to the ruling class. Like Bilan and the GCF, we swim “against the current”. However, even if the ICC today has no direct and immediate influence in the working class, in disseminating its ideas it sows seeds for the future. This is why the bourgeoisie is interested in the disappearance of the ICC which is the only centralised international organisation of the communist left having sections in different countries and continents.

This is also what fuels the hatred of declassed elements18 who are always on the lookout for “warning signs” of our disappearance. The ruling class cannot but rejoice to see a constellation of individuals claiming to be part of the communist left agitating around the ICC (through blogs, websites, internet forums, Facebook and other social networks) to peddle gossip, slanders against the ICC, pogromist attacks and police methods, targeting repeatedly and ad nauseam certain of our militants.

The Congress emphasised that the increase in attacks against the ICC by this parasitic milieu19, which seeks to recuperate and distort the militant work of the groups of the communist left, is a manifestation of the putrefaction of bourgeois society.

The Congress took full measure of the new dimension taken on by parasitism since the beginning of the period of decomposition. Its objective, avowed or not, is today not only to cause trouble and confusion, but above all to sterilise the potential forces that could become politicised around the historic organisations of the communist left. It aims to form a “cordon sanitaire” (notably by raising the spectre of Stalinism that is still allegedly rampant inside the ICC!) to prevent young searching elements from moving closer to our organisation. This work of undermining today complements the anti-communist campaigns unleashed by the bourgeoisie during the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Parasitism is the best ally of the decadent bourgeoisie against the revolutionary perspective of the proletariat.

While the proletariat has enormous difficulties in regaining its identity as a revolutionary class and reconnecting with its own past, the slanders, attacks and the sickening mentality of the individuals claiming to be part of the communist left and who denigrate the ICC can only defend the interests of the ruling class. In assuming the defence of the organisation, we will not only defend our own “chapel”. It is for the ICC to defend the principles of marxism, of the revolutionary class and of the communist left which risk being swallowed up by the ideology of “no future” that parasitism carries within it.

The strengthening of the public and intransigent defence of the organisation is an orientation given by this Congress. The ICC is well aware that this orientation may temporarily lead to being misunderstood, to being criticised for our lack of “fair play”, and so to an even greater isolation. But the worst thing would be to let parasitism do its destructive work without reacting. The Congress emphasised that in this regard too, the ICC must have the courage to “swim against the current,” just as it has had the courage to make a relentless critique of its own errors and difficulties during this Congress, and to publicly report them.

“Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life’s breath and light of the proletarian movement. (…) But we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn. And if the present leaders of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, do not understand how to learn, then they will go under “to make room for people capable of dealing with a new world.”” (Rosa Luxemburg, The crisis of social democracy)

ICC (December 2015)

As we have said in the article “40 years after the formation of the ICC – what is our balance-sheet and what are the perspectives for our activity?”, the ICC’s 21st Congress adopted a report on the ICC’s role as a “Fraction”. This report was in two parts, the first giving the historical context and a reminder of the Fraction as a concept, the second being a concrete analysis of how our organisation has discharged its responsibility in this respect. We publish below the first part of the report, which is of a general interest over and above the specific questions confronting the ICC.

The notion of the fraction in the history of the workers’ movement

The 21st International Congress will put at the centre of its concerns a critical assessment of 40 years existence of the ICC. This critical balance sheet is related to :

• the general analyses worked out by the ICC,
• the way the ICC assumed its role in the preparation of the future party.

The answer to this second question obviously supposes that the role which falls to the ICC in the current historical period is well defined. That’s to say: in a period in which the conditions do not yet exist for the appearance of a revolutionary party, i.e. of an organisation having a direct influence on the course of class confrontations:

“One cannot study or understand the history of this organism, the party, unless you situate it in the general context of the different stages the movement of the class has gone through, of the problems posed to the class, of its efforts at any given moment to become aware of these problems, to respond to them adequately, to draw the lessons from experience and use these lessons as a springboard towards future struggles. While political parties are a major factor in the development of the class, they are thus, at the same time, an expression of the real state of the class at a given moment in its history.

“Throughout its history, the working class has been subjected to the weight of bourgeois ideology which tends to deform and corrupt proletarian parties, to distort their real function. In response to this tendency, revolutionary fractions have arisen with the aim of elaborating and clarifying communist positions, of making them more precise. This was notably the case with the communist left which came out of the Third International: any understanding of the question of the party necessarily involves assimilating the experience and the acquisitions of the whole international communist left.

“It was the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, however, which had the specific merit of pointing out the qualitative differences in the organisation of revolutionaries according to whether the period was one of developing class struggle or one of defeat or retreat. The Italian Fraction showed what form the revolutionary organisation took in each of these two periods: in the first case, the form of the party, an organisation which could have a direct and immediate influence on the class struggle; in the second case, a numerically restricted organisation with a much weaker influence in the immediate life of the class. To this second type of organisation it gave the distinctive name of the ‘fraction' which, between two periods in the development of the class struggle, i.e. two moments in the existence of the party, constitutes a link, an organic bridge between the past and future party.” (International Review n°35, ‘On the party and its relation to the class’, point 9)

In this respect we are obliged to pose a certain number of questions:

• what is meant by this concept of the fraction at the different moments in the history of the workers’ movement?

• up to what point the ICC can be regarded as a “fraction”?

• what are the tasks of a fraction that are valid for the ICC, and what tasks are not?

• which particular tasks fall to the ICC and which tasks were not those of the fractions?

In the first part of this Report, we will primarily address the first of these four points in order to establish a historic framework for our reflection and to allow us to better approach the second part of the Report, which proposes to answer the key question mentioned above: which balance-sheet can one draw about the way the ICC has played its part in the preparation of the future party?

In order to examine this concept of the fraction at the different moments in the history of the workers’ movement, we will distinguish three periods:

• the early period of the workers’ movement: the Communist League and the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), known also as the First International;

• the age of its maturity: the Second International;

• the “period of wars and revolutions” (to use the Communist International’s expression);

But, to start, it may be useful to include a very short reminder on the history of the parties of the proletariat since the question of the fraction always compels us to pose the question of the party, which constitutes both the point of departure and the point of arrival of the fraction.

The party in the history of the workers’ movement

The notion of the party was gradually elaborated, theoretically and practically, through the experience of the workers’ movement (Communist League, IWA, parties of the Second International, Communist parties).

The League, which was an illegal organisation, still belonging to the period of the sects: “At the dawn of modern capitalism, in the first half of the 19th century, a working class still in its phase of constitution undertook local and sporadic struggles and could only give birth to doctrinal schools, sects and leagues. The Communist League was the most advanced expression of this period, while at the same time its Manifesto with its call ‘proletarians of all countries – unite’ heralded the period to come.” (‘Nature and function of the political party of the proletariat’, Internationalisme n°38, October 1948)

It was precisely the task of the IWA to go beyond the sects, allowing for a broader gathering of European workers and a decantation with respect to many confusions that weighed on their consciousness. At the same time, with its heterogeneous composition (trade unions, co-operatives, propaganda groups, etc.) it was not yet a party in the modern sense that the word acquired later on, within and thanks to the Second International. “The First International corresponded to the proletariat’s effective entry onto the stage of social and political struggle in the principal countries of Europe. It thus grouped together all the organised forces of the working class, its diverse ideological tendencies. The First International brought together both all the currents and all the contingent aspects of the workers' struggles: economic, educational, political and theoretical.”

“It was the highest point of the working class’ unitary organisation in all its diversity. The Second International marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle. In this period of the full flourishing of capitalist society, the Second International was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat, and at the same time it marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission”. (ibid)

It was within the Second International that the distinction was clearly made between the general organisation of the class (trade unions) and its specific organization, charged with the defence of its historical programme, the party. A distinction which was quite clear when the Third International (ie the Communist International, the CI) was founded, at the moment when the proletarian revolution was, for the first time, on the agenda of the history. For the new International, the general organisation of the class no longer consisted of the trade unions (which, in any case did not regroup the whole proletariat) but the workers’ councils (even if much remained unclear in the CI on the question of the trades unions and on the role of the party).

Despite all the differences between these various organisations, there is a common point between them: they have an impact on the course of the class struggle and it is in this sense that one can attribute them the name “party”. This impact was still weak for the Communist League at the time of the revolutions of 1848-1849 when it acted mainly as a left wing of the democratic movement. Thus, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Marx, and which had a certain influence in the Rhineland and even in the rest of Germany, was not directly the organ of the League but was presented as an “Organ of the Democracy”. As Engels pointed out: “(…) the League proved to be much too weak a lever as against the popular mass movement that had now broken out.” (‘On the history of the Communist League’, November 1885).

One of the most important causes of this weakness layin the proletariat’s weakness in Germany itself, where industrial development had not yet taken off. However, Engels also makes the point that “The League was incontestably the only revolutionary organisation that was of importance in Germany”. The impact of the IWA was much more important since it was to become a “power” in Europe. But it was above all the Second International (in fact through the different parties that composed it) which could, for the first time in history, claim to have a determining influence on the working masses.

The idea of the fraction at the dawn of the workers’ movement

The question was already posed at the time of Marx, but was of a much greater importance later on: what becomes of the party when the vanguard, which defends the historical programme of the working class, the communist revolution, has no immediate impact on the struggles of the proletariat?

To this question history gave different answers. The first answer is that of the dissolution of the party when the conditions of its existence are no longer present. This was the case with the League and with the IWA. In both cases, Marx and Engels played a decisive role in this dissolution.

It was thus in November 1852, after the Cologne communist trial which sealed the victory of the counter-revolution in Germany, that Marx and Engels called on the Central Council of the League to pronounce its dissolution. It is worth pointing out that the question of the activity of the revolutionary minority in a period of reaction had already been raised in the autumn of 1850 within the League. In the middle of that year, Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that the revolutionary wave was ebbing as a result of the economic recovery: “Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors – the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production — come into opposition with each other.” (Marx, The class struggles in France, Part IV)

Marx and Engels were thus led to fight the immediatist minority of Willich-Schapper that, despite the ebbing tide, wanted to continue calling the workers to insurrection: “During our last debate in particular, on the question of ‘The position of the German proletariat in the next revolution’, views were expressed by members of the minority of the Central Committee which directly contradict our second-to-last circular and even the Manifesto. A national German approach has replaced the universal conception of the Manifesto, flattering the national sentiments of German artisans. The will, rather than the actual conditions, was stressed as the chief factor in the revolution. We tell the workers: If you want to change conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty, or fifty years of civil war. Now they are told: We must come to power immediately or we might as well go to sleep. The word ‘proletariat’ has been reduced to a mere phrase, like the word ‘people’ was by the democrats. To make this phrase a reality one would have to declare the entire petty bourgeoisie to be proletarians, ie de facto represent the petty bourgeoisie and not the proletariat. In place of actual revolutionary development one would have to adopt the revolutionary phrase” (Marx, speaking to the meeting of the Central Council of the League of September 15th, 1850, cited in the “Preliminaries” of the Cologne Communist Trial1).

Similarly, at the Congress of the Hague of 1872, Marx and Engels supported the decision to transfer the General Council to New York in order to isolate it from the influence of the Bakuninist and Lassallean tendencies, which waxed just as the European proletariat had suffered a major defeat with the crushing of the Paris Commune. Moving the General Council out of Europe was intended to let the IWA lie dormant as a prelude to its dissolution, which took effect at the Philadelphia Conference in July 1876.

In a sense, the dissolution of the party, when the conditions no longer allow its existence, was much easier in the case of the League and of the IWA than later on. The League was a small clandestine organisation (except during the revolutions of 1848-1849), which had not occupied an “official” place in society.

As for the IWA, its formal disappearance did not mean that all its components disappeared. The English trade unions or the German Workers’ Party (SAP) survived the IWA. What disappeared was the formal ties between its various components.

Things changed after that. The workers’ parties no longer disappeared – they passed over to the enemy. They became institutions of the capitalist system and this conferred a new responsibility on the remaining revolutionaries.

When the League was dissolved, no formal organisation remained, charged with building a bridge towards the new party, which would emerge at some time in the future. During this period, Marx and Engels considered the work of theoretical elaboration to be the first priority. At this juncture, they were practically the only ones to master the theory they had developed, and they did not need a formal organisation to carry on this work. However, they remained in contact with a number of former members of the League, in particular those in exile in England.

There was even a reconciliation, in 1856, between Marx and Schapper. In September 1864, it was Eccarius, former member of the League’s Central Council, and who had close ties with the English labour movement, who asked Marx to join the platform of the famous meeting of 28th September at Saint Martin' s Hall, where the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was decided.2

The IWA’s General Council also contained a significant number of former members of the League: Eccarius, Lessner, Lochner, Pfaender, Schapper and, of course, Marx and Engels.

When the IWA disappeared, there remained, as we have seen, organisations that would be at the origin of the foundation of the Second International, in particular the German party, brought about by the unification of 1875 (SAP), and whose marxist component (Bebel, Liebknecht), known as the Eisenachers, had been affiliated to the IWA.

Here we should make a point with regard to the role these first two organisations were intended to fulfil at the moment of their formation. It is clear from the Communist Manifesto that the League expected to see the proletarian revolution in the near future. Following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions Marx and Engels understood that historical conditions were not yet ripe. In the same way, at the moment of the foundation of the IWA, there existed (according to its statutes) the idea of an “emancipation of the workers” in the short or medium term, (despite the diversity of the visions contained in this formula, and which corresponded to the different components of the IWA: mutualists, collectivists, etc).

The defeat of the Paris Commune highlighted once again the immaturity of the conditions for the overthrow of capitalism: the period that followed was one of massive capitalist expansion, expressed in particular by the emergence Germany as an industrial power that, by the beginning of the 20th century, had overtaken Britain.

The fractions in the Second International

During this period,3 while the revolutionary perspective remained distant, the Socialist parties acquired a major importance within the working class (particularly in Germany). This growing impact, at a time when the spirit of the majority of the workers was not revolutionary, is linked to the fact that the Socialist parties not only included in their programme the prospect of socialism, but also defended, in their daily newspapers, the “minimum programme” of reforms within capitalist society.

It was also this situation that led to the opposition between those for whom “the final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything” (Bernstein) and those who say that “the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question: ‘Reform or Revolution?’ as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social-Democracy the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the Party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement.” (Rosa Luxemburg Social Reform or Revolution, Preface;)

Despite the official rejection Bernstein’s theses by the SPD and the Socialist International, this vision actually gained the majority within the SPD (especially in the Party apparatus) and within the International. “The experience of the Second International confirms the impossibility of maintaining the party of the proletariat during a prolonged period marked by a non-revolutionary situation. The participation of the parties of the Second International in the imperialist war of 1914 only revealed the long corruption of the organisation. The permeability and penetrability of the political organisation of the proletariat to the ideology of the reigning capitalist class, which is always possible, can in long periods of stagnation and reflux of the class struggle assume such an extent that the ideology of the bourgeoisie ends up substituting itself for that of the proletariat, so that inevitably the party is emptied of all its original class content and becomes instead an instrument of the enemy class” (“Nature and function of the political party of the proletariat”, Internationalisme n°38, October 19484).

In this context, for the first time, real fractions emerged.

The first fraction was that of the Bolsheviks who, after the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Congress of 1903, assumed the fight against opportunism, initially on the question of the organisation and thereafter on the questions of tactics with respect to the tasks of the proletariat in a semi-feudal country like Russia. It should be noted that, until 1917, although the Bolshevik and the Menshevik fractions carried on their policy independently from each other, they formally belonged to the same party, the RSDLP.

From 1907, the marxist current which developed in Holland around the weekly magazine De Tribune (led by Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn and Ceton, but in which Gorter and Pannekoek also participated) engaged in a similar work in the Dutch SDAP (Social Democratic Workers’ Party). This current fought against the opportunist drift within the party (mainly represented by Troelstra and the parliamentary fraction) which proposed, at the 1908 congress to shut down De Tribune. Troelstra finally won the case at the Extraordinary Congress of Deventer (February 1909), which decided on the closure of De Tribune and the exclusion of its three editors from the party. This policy, which aimed to separate the Tribunist “leaders” from the sympathisers of this current, actually provoked a strong reaction by the latter.

In the final analysis, Troelstra’s policy of exclusion, backed up by the reformist-dominated International Bureau of the Socialist International, which had been called in to arbitrate coincided with the three editors’ desire to break from the SDAP (a wish that Gorter did not share 5) led the “Tribunists”, in March 1909, to found a new party, the SDP (Social Democratic Party). This party would, until World War I, remain a very small minority, with an insignificant electoral influence, but it benefitted from the support of the Left within the International, and in particular of the Bolsheviks, which allowed it, in the final analysis to be reintegrated into the International in 1910 (after a first refusal by the Bureau of the SI in November 1909) and to send delegates (one mandate against 7 for the SDAP) to the International Congresses of 1910 (Copenhagen) and 1912 (Basel). During the War, in which Holland remained neutral, but which nonetheless weighed heavily on the working class (unemployment, food shortages, etc) the SDP gained in electoral influence thanks to its internationalist policy and its support of workers’ struggles. Finally, in November 1918, and even before the foundation of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the SDP adopted the name of Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN).

The third current which played a decisive role as a fraction in a party of the Second International was to form the KPD. On the evening of 4th August 1914, after the unanimous vote for war credits by the Socialist deputies in the Reichstag, a handful of internationalist militants gathered in the Rosa Luxemburg’s apartment to work out the prospects for the struggle and the means to regroup all those who, in the party, wanted to fight the chauvinist policy of the leadership and the majority. These militants were unanimous in considering that it was necessary to carry out this combat within the party. In many cities, the party rank and file denounced the parliamentary fraction’s vote for war credits. Even Liebknecht was criticised for having given his support for this, out of party discipline, on 4th August.

At the second vote, on 2nd December, Liebknecht was the only one who voted against, but in the two votes that followed he was joined by Otto Rühle, then by a growing number of deputies. From the winter of 1914-1915, illegal leaflets were being distributed (in particular one entitled ‘The main enemy is at home’). In April 1915 the first and only issue of Die Internationale was published, selling up to to 5000 copies on the first evening, and giving its name to the Gruppe Internationale, around Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, and Clara Zetkin. In conditions of illegality, subjected to repression6, this tiny group, which adopted the name of “Spartacus Group” and then “Spartacus League”, led the fight against the war and the government as well as against the right and the centre of Social Democracy.

Spartacus was not alone: other groups, in particular in Hamburg and Bremen (where Pannekoek, Radek and Fröhlich were active) defended an internationalist policy even more clearly than the Spartakists. At the beginning of 1917, when the leadership of the SPD excluded the oppositions in order to stop the progress of their positions within the Party, these groups continued their activity autonomously, whereas the Spartakists continued as a fraction within the centrist USPD. Finally, these different currents came together at the moment of the foundation of the KPD, on 31st December 1918, but it was clearly the Spartakists who were the backbone of the new party.

A left fraction was formed in Italy somewhat later than in Russia, Holland and Germany. This was the “Abstentionist Fraction” (so called because it advocated abstention from parliamentary elections) around the newspaper Il Soviet, published in Naples by Bordiga and his comrades from December 1918, and which was formally constituted as a fraction at the congress of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in October 1919. In fact, as early as 1912, in the Federation of the Young Socialists and in the Naples federation of the PSI, Bordiga had animated an intransigent revolutionary current. This delay by the Italian left is partly explained by the fact that Bordiga, who was mobilised into the army, could not intervene in political life before 1917, but above all by the fact that, during the war, the leadership of the party had been in the hands of the left. The Congress of 1912 had expelled the reformist right and that of 1914 expelled the freemasons.

The PSI’s paper Avanti was run by Mussolini (who had presented the motions for exclusion at these congresses). He took advantage of this position to publish, on 18th October 1914, a leading article entitled ‘From absolute neutrality to an acting and working neutrality’, which declared for Italian entry into the war on the side of the Entente. Of course, he was dismissed from his post, but barely one month later, he published Il Popolo d'Italia, thanks to the funds brought by the French Socialist deputy Marcel Cachin (a future leader of the French Communist Party) on behalf of the French government and the Entente. He was excluded from the PSI on 29th November. Thereafter, as a situation dominated by the World War pushed towards a decantation of a Left, a Right and a Centre, the direction of the party oscillated between the right and left, between a “maximalist” standpoint and a reformist position.

“It is only in 1917, at the Rome Congress, that the opposition between the right and the left hardened. The former obtained 17,000 votes, the latter 14,000. The victory of Turati, Treves and Modigliani, at the time when the Russian revolution was already underway, precipitated the formation of an intransigent revolutionary fraction in Florence, Milan, Turin and Naples.” (The Italian Communist Left). It was only from 1920, under the impetus of the revolution in Russia, the formation of the CI (which gave its support) and also of the workers’ struggles in Italy, in particular in Turin, that the Abstentionist Fraction gained an influence in the party. It also came into contact with the current gathered around the newspaper Ordine Nuovo, animated by Gramsci, even if important disagreements existed between the two currents (Gramsci was in favour of participation in elections; he defended a kind of revolutionary trade unionism and hesitated to break with the right and the centre and to form an autonomous fraction).

“In Milan in October the United Communist Fraction was formed. It put out a Manifesto calling for the formation of the communist party through the expulsion of Turati’s right wing; it gave up the electoral boycott, applying the decisions of the Second Congress of the Comintern.” (ibid.). At the Congress of Imola, in December 1920 the principle of a split was decided: “our work as a fraction is and must be terminated now (…) an immediate exit from the party and the congress (of the SPI) as soon as the vote puts us in a majority or a minority. From this follows (…) the split with the centre” (ibid.). At the Congress of Livorno, which started on 21 January 1921, “the Imola motion obtained a third of the votes: 58,783 against 172,487. The minority leaves the congress and decides to settle as the Communist Party of Italy, the section of the Communist International. Just before leaving the Congress Bordiga passionately declared: ‘we take with us the honour of your past.’” (ibid.).

This (very rapid) examination of the work of the main fractions which were constituted within the parties of the Second International makes it possible to define the primary role that falls to a fraction: the defence of revolutionary principles within a degenerating party:

• initially to gain a maximum of militants for these principles and to exclude from the party the positions of the right and the centre;

• then to transform itself into a new revolutionary party, when circumstances require it.

It should be noted that practically all the currents of the left tried to remain as long as possible within the party. The only exceptions are those of the Tribunists (though Gorter and Pannekoek did not share their haste) and of the “radical lefts” animated by Radek, Pannekoek and Fröhlich which (unlike the Spartakists) , refused to enter the USPD after the opposition was expelled in 1917. The separation of the left from the old party, which had betrayed, resulted either from its exclusion, or from the need to found a new party, able to become the vanguard of the revolutionary wave.

It should also be noted that the action of the left was not condemned to remain a minority within the degenerating party: at the Tours Congress of the French Socialist Party (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO), the left’s motion calling for adhesion to the CI was passed by a majority. The Communist Party founded at Tours thus kept the newspaper L’Humanité founded by Jaurès. Unfortunately, it also kept Frossard, the general secretary of the SFIO, who pfor a while was to be the leading figure of the Communist Party (PCF).

A last note: this capacity of the left fractions to constitute the new party right away was only possible because of the short period between the proven treason of the old party and the sudden appearance of the revolutionary wave. Thereafter, the situation would be quite different.

The fractions that emerged from the Communist International

The Communist International was founded in March 1919. At that moment, very few Communist Parties already existed (the Communist Party of Russia, of the Netherlands, of Germany, of Poland and some others of less importance). And yet, at that moment, a first “Left” fraction (and announced as such) was emerging within the principal party, the one in Russia (which only adopted the name Communist in March 1918, during the 7th Congress of the RSDLP): at the beginning of 1918 this current was grouped around the paper Kommunist and was animated by Ossinsky, Bukharin, Radek and Smirnov. This fraction’s principal disagreement with the orientation followed by the Party was over the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The “Left Communists” were opposed to these negotiations and recommended “revolutionary war”, ”exporting” the revolution to other countries at gunpoint. But, at the same time, this fraction undertook a criticism of the authoritarian methods of the new proletarian power and insisted on the broadest participation of the working masses in this power, a criticism that is rather close to those of Rosa Luxemburg (see her pamphlet ).

The signature of the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement announced the end of this fraction. Not long afterwards, Bukharin became a representative of the right wing of the Party, but certain elements of this fraction, such as Ossinsky, were to join the left fractions that arose later. Thus, whereas in Western Europe some of the fractions in the Socialist parties, which were to give birth to the Communist parties, had yet to be formed (the Abstentionist Fraction animated by Bordiga was only constituted in December 1918), the Russian revolutionaries had already begun the combat (obviously in a very confused way) against the deviations that affected the Communist Party in their country. It is worth remarking (even if it is not necessary to analyse this phenomenon here) that, on a whole series of questions, the Russian militants were in the van during the first years of the 20th century: the constitution of the Bolshevik fraction after the Second Congress of the RSDLP; a clear position against the imperialist war in 1914; leading the Left at Zimmerwald; the recognition of the need for the foundation of a new International, the foundation of the first Communist Party in March 1918, the stimulus to and political orientation of the 1st Congress of the Communist International.

And this “precocity” is also to be found in the formation of fractions within the Communist Party. In fact, from its particular role of first (and only) Communist Party to come to power, the Russian Party was also the first to suffer the pressure of the main element in its decay (besides, obviously, the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary wave): its integration into the State. So, faced with this process of degeneration of the proletarian party, forms of resistance, however confused they may have been, started much earlier than elsewhere.

From then on, the Russian Party saw the emergence of a significant number of other “left” currents:

• in 1919 the “Democratic Centralism” group, formed around Ossinsky and Sapronov, fought against the principle of “individual authority” in industry and defended the collective or collegial principle as being the “most effective weapon against the departmentalisation and bureaucratic stifling of the state apparatus.” (Theses on the Collegial Principle and Individual Authority).

• also in 1919, many members of “Democratic Centralism” were engaged in the “Military Opposition”, which had been formed for a short period in March 1919 to fight against the tendency to shape the Red Army according to the criteria of a traditional bourgeois army.

During the civil war, criticism of Party policy surfaced less often because of the threat of the White Armies to the new regime; but as soon as this ended with the victory of the Red Army over the Whites, they redoubled in force:

• At the beginning of 1921, on the occasion of the 10th Party Congress and the debate on the trade union question, the “Workers’ Opposition” was formed, led by Shliapnikov, Medvedev (both metal-workers) and, especially, Alexandra Kollontai, author of its Platform. Like the revolutionary syndicalists, this Opposition wanted to entrust the management of the economy to the trade unions instead of the state bureaucracy.7 After the prohibition of fractions, a decision taken at this very Congress (which was held during the insurrection of Kronstadt), the Workers’ Opposition dissolved, Kollontai later becoming a faithful follower of Stalin.

• In the autumn of 1921 the group “Workers’ Truth” was constituted, made up mainly of intellectuals and followers of the “Proletkult” like its principal organizer, Bogdanov. This group, together with the other currents of the opposition, denounced the bureaucratisation of the party and of the State but, at the same time, adopted a semi-Menshevik position, considering that the conditions of the proletarian revolution were not mature in Russia, that these conditions had to be created on the basis of modern capitalism (a position that, later, would become the position of the “councilist” current);

• in 1922-23 the “Worker’s Group” was constituted, led by Gabriel Miasnikov, a worker from the Urals, who had distinguished himself in the Bolshevik Party in 1921 when, immediately after the 10th Congress, he had called for the “freedom of the press, from the monarchists to the anarchists”. Despite Lenin’s efforts to engage a debate on this question, Miasnikov refused to withdraw and was then expelled from the Party at the beginning of 1922. With other militants of working class origin, he constituted the “Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)” that distributed its Manifesto at the RCP’s 12th Congress. This group started illegal work among the workers of the Party and seems to have had a significant presence in the strike waves of summer 1923, where it called for mass demonstrations and tried to politicise a primarily defensive class movement. Its activity in these strikes convinced the GPU that the group constituted a threat and its leaders, including Miasnikov, were imprisoned. The activity of this group went on in an illegal way in Russia (as well in exile) until the end of the 1920s, when Miasnikov succeeded in leaving the country and, exiled in Paris, took part in the publication of L’Ouvrière Communiste that defended positions close to those of the KAPD.

Of all the currents that conducted a battle against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, it is certainly the Workers’ Group which was the most politically clear. It was very close to the KAPD (the latter published its documents and remained in contact with it). In particular, its criticisms of the policy pursued by the Party were based on an international vision of the revolution, contrary to those of the other groups who tended to focus on questions of democracy (in the Party and the working class) and on the management of the economy. It rejected the United Front policies of the CI’s 3rd and 4th Congresses, unlike the Trotskyist current which continued to refer to the first four congresses. There were however discussions (in particular in exile) between the left wing of the Trotskyist current and elements of the Workers’ Group.

The Workers’ Group was probably the only current to emerge within the Bolshevik party to have consistently acted like a fraction.. But the terrible repression which Stalin unleashed against revolutionaries (and which put Tsarist repression into the shade) removed any possibility of developing along this path. After World War II, Miasnikov decided to return to Russia.. Predictably, he disappeared immediately, depriving the weak forces of the communist left of one of its bravest militants.

The combat of the left fractions in the other countries necessarily took other forms than in Russia; but to return to the three other Communist Parties mentioned above we can see that the left currents also started the struggle very early.

At the foundation of the German Communist Party, the positions of the left had a majority. On the trade union question, Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote the Program of the KPD and presented it to the Congress, was very clear and categorical: “[trade unions] are no longer workers’ organisations; they are the most solid defenders of the state and bourgeois society. Consequently it follows that the struggle for socialisation must entail the struggle to destroy the unions. We are all agreed on this point.” On the parliamentary question, the Congress rejected, against the position of Spartakists (Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches, etc), participation in the elections which were to be held shortly after. After these militants’ assassination, the new leadership (Levi, Brandler) initially seemed to make concessions to the left (which remained the majority) on the trade union question. But from August 1919 (Frankfurt Conference of the KPD), Levi, who wanted a rapprochement with the USPD, opted for work in parliament as well as in the trade unions; and, at the Heidelberg Congress in October, it succeeded thanks to a manoeuvre, in excluding the left-wing anti-trade union and anti-parliamentary majority.

The majority of excluded militants refused to give in. They were firmly supported by the militants of Dutch Left (in particular Gorter and Pannekoek) who had great authority within the CI at the time and who pushed for the formation of the Amsterdam Bureau, appointed by the International to coordinate work in Western Europe and America. Only six months later (April 1920), faced with the February KPD Congress’ refusal to reintegrate the expelled militants, and also faced with the Party’s conciliatory attitude towards the SPD during the Kapp Putsch (13-17th March), the excluded militants founded the KAPD (Communist Workers’ Party of Germany).

Their approach was reinforced by the support of the Amsterdam Bureau, which organized an International Conference in February where the Theses of the left triumphed (on the trade union and parliamentary questions and on the rejection of the opportunist turn of the CI, expressed in particular by the insistence that Communists in Britain should enter the Labour Party)8. The new Party was boosted by the support of the left minority (led by Gorter and Pannekoek) of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), which published in its newspaper the KAPD programme adopted by the latter’s founding congress. This did not prevent Pannekoek from criticising the KAPD (in his letter of 5th July, 1920), in particular with regard to its position towards the “Unionen” (warning against any concession to revolutionary syndicalism) and above all for the presence of the “National Bolshevik” current in its ranks, which he regarded as a “monstrous aberration”. At this moment, on all the crucial questions facing the world proletariat, (trade unions, parliament, the party9, the attitude towards the Socialist parties, the nature of the revolution in Russia, etc.) the Dutch left (and particularly Pannekoek), which inspired the majority of the KAPD, was situated at the vanguard of the workers’ movement.

The Congress of the KAPD, which took place between 1st and 4th August, pronounced itself in favour of these orientations: at that moment the “National-Bolsheviks” left the Party and, a few months later, it was the turn of the federalist elements who were hostile to membership of the CI. For their part, Pannekoek, Gorter and the KAPD were determined to remain within the CI, to fight against its increasingly opportunist drift. For this reason the KAPD sent two delegates to Russia, Jan Appel and Franz Jung, for the Second Congress of the CI, which was to take place from 17th July 1920 in Moscow10. But in the absence of any news from them, it sent two others delegates, one of them being Otto Rühle. But, faced with the catastrophic situation the working class in Russia was suffering, and with the process of bureaucratisation of the governmental apparatus, they decided not to take part in the Congress, even though they had been called upon to defend their positions and were entitled to vote there. To prepare this Congress, Lenin wrote Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder. It should be noted that in this pamphlet, Lenin wrote that: “the mistake of Left doctrinarism in communism is at present a thousand times less dangerous and less significant than that of Right doctrinarism”.

From the standpoint both of the CI and the Bolsheviks on the one hand, and of the KAPD on the other, there was a real will to integrate the KAPD into the International, and thus into the KPD; but the regrouping of the latter with the left of the USPD in December 1920 to form the VKPD, a regroupment which all the left currents of the CI opposed, blocked this possibility. The KAPD nevertheless acquired the statute of a “Party sympathizing with the CI”, got a permanent representative in its Executive Committee, and sent delegates to its Third Congress in June 1921. In the meantime however, this cooperation strongly deteriorated, in particular after the “March Action” (an adventurist “offensive” promoted by the VKPD) and with the repression of the Kronstadt revolt (a repression which the left initially supported, believing that this insurrection was indeed the work of the Whites, as the propaganda of the Soviet government claimed). At the same time, the right leadership of the CPN (Wijnkoop, who was called the “Dutch Levi”), with the support of Moscow, undertook a policy of anti-statutory exclusions of the left-wing militants. Finally, in September, these militants would found a new party, the KAPN, on the model of the KAPD.

TheUnified Front policy, adopted at the CI’s Third Congress, only worsened things, as did the ultimatum addressed to the KAPD to merge with the VKPD. In July 1921, the leadership of the KAPD, with Gorter’s support, adopted a resolution breaking all links with the CI and calling for the constitution of a “Communist Workers’ International” (KAI) – this call was issued two months before the congress of the KAPD planned for September. It was clearly an over-hasty decision. At this Congress the question of the foundation of a new International was discussed (militants of Berlin, and in particular Jan Appel, were opposed to it) and the Congress finally decided to create a Bureau of Information with this aim in mind. This Bureau acted as if the new International had been formed already, even though its founding conference only took place in April 1922. At the same time, the KAPD went through a split between, on the one hand, the majority of the “Berlin tendency”, which was hostile to the formation of a new International and, on the other hand, the “Essen tendency” (which rejected the struggle around wages).

Only the latter tendency took part in this Conference, along with Gorter, who was the author of the KAI programme. The participating groups were few in number and represented very limited forces: besides the Essen tendency, there was the KAPN, the Bulgarian Communist Left, the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) of Sylvia Pankhurst, the KAP of Austria, described as a “Potemkin village” (ie a sham) by the KAPD of Berlin. In the end, this rump “International” was to vanish with the disappearance or progressive withdrawal of its components. The Essen tendency went through multiple splits. The KAPN disintegrated, initially as a result of the appearance of a current attached to the Berlin tendency, hostile to the formation of the KAI, then by internal conflicts, based more on clan conflicts than political principles. In fact, the essential element making it possible to explain the pitiful and dramatic failure of the KAI is to be found in the ebb of the revolutionary wave that had served as a springboard for the foundation of the CI:

“The mistake of Gorter and his supporters was to proclaim the KAI artificially, when there still remained within the Komintern left fractions which could have been regrouped into an international left communist current. This error weighed heavily on the German revolutionary movement. (…) The decline of the world revolution, which was evident in Europe by 1921, hardly allowed the formation of a new International. Thinking that the course was still towards revolution, with the theory of ‘capitalism’s mortal crisis’, there was certain logic in the Gorter and Essen current’s proclamation of the KAI. But their premises were wrong.” (from our book The German and Dutch Left, Chapter V.4.d)

The final failure of the KAPD and the KAPN illustrates in a striking manner the need for revolutionaries to have the clearest possible vision on the evolution of the balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

If the German-Dutch Left became aware of the ebb of the revolutionary wave only after much delay11, this was not the case with the Bolsheviks, the leaders of the Communist International, or the Communist Left of Italy. But they responded in radically different ways:

• for the Bolsheviks and the majority of the CI, it was necessary “to go to the masses” since the masses were no longer moving towards the revolution. This resulted in an increasingly opportunist policy, in particular towards the “centrist” Socialist parties and currents as well as towards the trade unions;

• for the Italian left, on the contrary, it was necessary to continue to show the same intransigence that had characterised the Bolsheviks during the war and up until the foundation of the CI; for them it was out of the question to attempt to take short-cuts towards the revolution by negotiating on principles and by watering them down; such short cuts were the most certain way towards defeat.

In reality, the opportunist course that affected the CI, already at the Second Congress, but especially from the Third Congress on, and which called into question the clarity and the intransigence of the First Congress, not only expressed the difficulties encountered by the world proletariat to continue and reinforce its revolutionary combat, but also the insoluble contradiction in which Bolshevik Party found itself. On the one hand the Bolsheviks – in effect the CI’s leadership – had been in the vanguard of the world revolution, and had played the same role in the Russian revolution. They had always insisted that the latter was only one very small step towards the world revolution and were quite conscious of the fact that the defeat of the world proletariat would mean the death of the revolution in Russia.

On the other hand, as a Party holding power in an entire country, the Bolsheviks were subject to requirements that are suited to the function of a national state and, above all, to the need to ensure external and internal “security”. In other words: to follow a foreign policy in conformity with the interests of Russia and an internal policy guaranteeing the stability of state power. In this sense, the repression of the strikes in Petrograd and the bloody crushing of the Kronstadt revolt, in March 1921, were the other side of the coin of the policy of the “open hand”. Under the cover of the “United Front”, it conducted this policy towards the Socialist parties with the idea that the latter could exert pressure on their governments to orientate foreign policy in a direction favourable to Russia.

The intransigence of the Italian Communist Left, which was actually at the head of the Communist Party of Italy (the “Rome Theses ” adopted by its Second Congress in 1922 were written by Bordiga and Terracini) found exemplary expression towards the rise of fascism in Italy, following the defeat of the class struggles of 1920. On the practical level, this intransigence expressed itself in a total refusal to make alliances with parties of the bourgeoisie (liberal or “Socialist”) faced with the fascist threat: the proletariat could fight fascism only on its own terrain, the economic strike and the organisation of workers’ militia for its self-defence. On the theoretical level, we owe to Bordiga the first serious analysis (which remains valid to this day) of the fascist phenomenon, an analysis which he presented to the delegates of the CI’s Fourth Congress, rejecting the latter’s analysis:

• “Fascism was not the product of the middle classes and of the landed bourgeoisie. It was the product of the defeat which the proletariat had suffered and which had the indecisive petty-bourgeois strata behind the fascist reaction” (from our book The Italian Communist Left, Chapter I)

• “Fascism was not a ‘feudal’ reaction. It was born first of all in the big industrial towns, like Milan…” (ibid) and had the support of the industrial bourgeoisie.

• “Fascism was not opposed to democracy. It was its indispensable complement when ‘the State was no longer able to defend the power of the bourgeoisie’” (ibid.)

This intransigence was also expressed with regard to the policy of the United Front, of the “open hand” towards the Socialist parties and its corollary, the slogan of the “workers’ government which amounts to a denial in practice of the political programme of communism, i.e. the necessity to prepare the masses for the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat”. (Bordiga, quoted in The Italian Communist Left)

This same intransigence opposed the CI’s policy of merging the Communist Parties with the left currents of the Socialist parties or “centrists”, which led to the formation of the VKPD in Germany. In Italy it resulted in the entry, in August 1924, of 2000 “terzini” (partisans of the Third International) into a party that counted no more than 20,000 members, as a result of repression and demoralisation.

Finally it was expressed in its opposition to the policy of “bolshevisation” of the CP’s, put forward at the Fifth Congress of the CI in July 1924. This policy was also combated by Trotsky. In brief, it consisted in reinforcing the discipline in the Communist Parties, a bureaucratic discipline intended to silence resistance against its degeneration. Bolshevisation also consisted in promoting a mode of organisation of the CPs based on “factory cells”, something that focused the workers on the difficulties that arose in “their” enterprise to the detriment, evidently, of a general vision and perspective on the proletarian struggle.

Although the left was still the majority within the Party, the CI imposed a rightwing leadership (Gramsci, Togliatti) that supported its policy, a manoeuvre facilitated by the imprisonment of Bordiga between February and October 1923. However, with the clandestine Conference of the Italian Party in May 1924, the theses presented by Bordiga, Grieco, Fortichiari and Repossi, which were very critical of the policy of the CI, were approved by 35 out of 45 federation secretaries and by 4 out of 5 interregional secretaries. In 1925 the campaign against the oppositions broke out within the CI, starting with the “Left Opposition” led by Trotsky. “In March-April 1925, the Enlarged Executive of the CI put on the agenda the elimination of the ‘Bordigist’ tendency at the Third Congress of CPI. It forbade the publication of the article of Bordiga favourable to Trotsky.” (The Italian Communist Left, Chapter I).

“The Bolshevisation of the Italian section began with the removal of Bruno Fortichiari from his post as the federal secretary of Milan. In April, the left, through Damen, Repossi and Fortichiari, founded an ‘Entente Committee’ (Comitato di intesa) in order to co-ordinate its activities. The Gramsci leadership violently attacked this Committee, denouncing it as an ‘organised fraction’. In fact, the left still did not want to constitute itself into a fraction; it did not want to provide any pretext for its expulsion from the Party while it was still a majority. At first, Bordiga refused to adhere to the Committee, as he did not want to go outside the framework of discipline that had been imposed. it was only in June that he rallied to the position of Damen, Fortichiari and Repossi. He was given the task of drawing up a ‘platform’ of the left, which was the first systematic attack on Bolshevisation.” (ibid.)

“Under the threat of expulsion, the Entente Committee had to dissolve, respecting the principle of discipline. It was the beginning of the end for the Italian Left as a majority.” (ibid.)

At the January 1926 Congress, which was held abroad because of fascist repression, the left presented the “Lyon Theses” which only received 9.2% of the votes: the policy that had been followed, applying the instructions of the CI, of an intensive recruitment of young and barely politicised elements, now bore fruit. The Lyon Theses were to orientate the policy of the Italian left in emigration.

Bordiga was to carry out a last battle during the 6th Enlarged Executive of the CI, from February to March 1926. He denounced the CI’s opportunist drift and mentioned the question of the fractions, without considering it to be on the immediate agenda, affirming that “the history of the fractions is the history of Lenin”; they are not a disease, but the symptom of this disease. They are a reaction of “defence against opportunist influences”.

In a letter to Karl Korsch, in September 1926, Bordiga wrote: “We needn’t aspire to a splitting of the parties and the International. Before a split is possible, we need to allow the experience of an artificial and mechanical discipline, with the resulting absurd practices, to run their course, never renouncing however our political and ideological positions or expressing solidarity with the prevailing line. (….) In general I think that the priority today is not so much in the realm of organisation and manoeuvres, but in the elaboration of a political ideology; one which is left-wing and international and based on the revealing experiences undergone by the Comintern. Weakness in this respect will mean that any international initiative will be very difficult.” (Bordiga, quoted in The Italian Communist Left)

These were also the bases on which the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy would finally be constituted, after its first conference in April 1928 in the Paris suburb of Pantin. At that moment it counted four “federations”: Brussels, New York, Paris and Lyon, with militants in Luxemburg, Berlin and Moscow.

This Conference unanimously adopted a resolution defining its perspectives:

1. “To constitute a Left Fraction of the Communist International
2. (...)
3. To publish a bimonthly, to be called Prometeo.
4. To constitute left groups whose task will be to wage a ruthless struggle against opportunism and the opportunists (…)
5. To take up as an immediate goal:

   1. the reintegration of all those expelled from the International who adhere to the Communist Manifesto and accept the theses of the Third World Congress.

   2. to call the 6th World Congress under the presidency of Leon Trotsky.

   3. to put on the agenda of the 6th World Congress the expulsion of all those who declare themselves to be in solidarity with the resolutions of the 5th Russian Congress.”

As can be seen:

• the Fraction did not conceive itself as “Italian”, but as a fraction of the CI;

• it considered that a proletarian life still existed in the CI and that it could still be saved;

• it considered that the Russian Party must be submitted to the decisions of the Congress of the IC and “put its own house in order” by expelling all those who had openly betrayed (as had already been done earlier with respect to the other parties of International);

• it did not give itself the task of a general intervention towards the workers, but primarily among the militants of the CI.

Thereafter the Fraction would undertake a remarkable work until 1945, a work continued and supplemented by the Gauche Communiste de France until 1952. We have already often referred to this work in our articles, internal texts and discussions and it is not necessary to return to it here.

One of the essential contributions of the Italian Fraction, and which is the heart of this Report, would be precisely the development of the conception of the Fraction on the basis of the whole experience of the workers’ movement. This conception is already summarily defined at the beginning of the Report. We will limit ourselves here to citing a passage from an article in our press where the conception of Fraction is defined (“The Italian Fraction and the French Communist Left”; International Review n°9012):

“In our press, we have often dealt with the distinction worked out by the Italian Left between the Party and fraction forms (in particular, see our study on ‘The relation between Fraction and Party in the Marxist tradition’, in International Review nos. 59, 61, 64). For clarity's sake, we can just recall the main lines of the issue here. The communist minority exists permanently, as an expression of the proletariat's revolutionary destiny. However, its impact on the class' immediate struggles is closely conditioned by their level, and the extent of the consciousness of the working masses. Only in periods of open and increasingly conscious proletarian struggle can the minority hope to have an impact. Only in these conditions can the minority be described as a party. By contrast, in periods where the proletarian struggle is ebbing historically, and the counter-revolution triumphs, it is vain to hope that revolutionary positions can have a significant and determining impact on the class as a whole. In such periods, the only possible - but vital - work is that of the fraction: preparing the political conditions for the formation of the future Party when the balance of class forces once again makes it possible for communist positions to have an impact throughout the proletariat.

“The Left Fraction is formed as the proletarian Party is degenerating under the influence of opportunism, in other words its penetration by bourgeois ideology. It is the responsibility of the minority which upholds the revolutionary programme, to conduct an organised struggle for its victory within the Party. Either the Fraction succeeds, its principles triumph, and the Party is saved, or the Party continues to degenerate and ends up passing arms and baggage into the bourgeois camp. The moment where the proletarian Party passes into the bourgeois camp is not easy to determine. However, one of the most important signs of this passage is the fact that no proletarian political life any longer appears within the Party. It is the responsibility of the Left Fraction to continue the fight within the Party as long as there remains any hope of redressing it: this is why, during the late 1920’s and early '30’s, the left currents did not leave the parties of the CI, but were excluded, often by means of sordid manoeuvres. That being said, once a proletarian Party has passed over to the bourgeois camp, no return is possible. The proletariat must then produce a new party, to return to the road towards revolution, and the role of the Fraction is to be a "bridge" between the old Party gone over to the enemy and the future Party, for which it must build a programmatic foundation, and whose skeleton it must become. The fact that once the Party has passed over into the bourgeois camp, there can no longer exist any proletarian life within it means that it is both useless and dangerous for revolutionaries to undertake "entryism", which has always been one of Trotskyism's ‘tactics’, and which the Fraction always rejected. Attempts to maintain a proletarian life within a bourgeois party, in other words one which is sterile as far as class positions are concerned, has never had any result other than to accelerate the opportunist degeneration of those organisations which have attempted it, without redressing the Party in the slightest. As for any ‘recruitment’ gained by such methods, it has always been particularly confused, and gangrened by opportunism, and has never been able to form a vanguard for the working class.”

“In fact, one of the fundamental differences between the Italian Fraction and Trotskyism was that when it came to regrouping revolutionary forces, the Fraction always put forward the need for the greatest clarity and programmatic rigour, although being open to discussion with all the other currents that had committed themselves to struggle against the degeneration of the CI. The Trotskyist current, by contrast, tried to form organisations in haste, without any serious discussion or decantation of political positions beforehand, relying essentially on agreements between ‘personalities’ and the authority of Trotsky as one of the most important leaders of the 1917 revolution, and of the early Cl.”

Another question that opposed Trotskyism to the Italian Fraction concerned the moment for the formation of a new party. For Trotsky and his comrades, the question of the foundation of the new party was immediately on the agenda from the moment the old parties had been lost for the proletariat. For the Fraction, the question was very clear: “The transformation of the fraction into a party is conditioned by two closely dependant elements”.

This paragraph evokes the methods of the Trotskyist current that, for lack of place, we have not mentioned above. But it is significant that two of the characteristics of this current, before it joined the bourgeois camp, were the following:

• at no moment did it integrate the notion of Fraction into its conception; for Trotskyism you passed from one party to another, and so during the time of retreat of the class, when revolutionaries were a small minority, their organisation had to be seen as a “mini-party”, a concept which had appeared within the Italian Fraction itself, in the mid-1930s, and which is that of the ICT today, since its main component is called the Partito Comunista Internazionalista;

• Trotsky (but he was not the only one) had absolutely not understood the extent of the counter-revolution. His incomprehension was such that he considered the strikes from May-June 1936 in France as the “beginning of the revolution”. In this sense, the concept of the historic course (also rejected by the ICT) is fundamental for the Fraction

The will to clarify, which has always animated the Italian left as a fundamental precondition for the fulfilment of its role, can evidently not be separated from the preoccupation for theory and the permanent need to call into question analyses and positions that once seemed to be definitive.

By way of a conclusion

To conclude this part of the report: we must very briefly come back to the later trajectory of the currents which left the CI The current emerging from the German-Dutch Left remained even after the disappearance of the KAPD and the KAPN. Its principal representative was the GIK (Group of Internationalist Communists) in Holland, a group which had an influence outside this country (for instance Living Marxism, animated by Paul Mattick in the United States). During one of the most tragic and critical moments of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, this group defended a basically internationalist position, without any concession towards antifascism. It stimulated the reflection within the Communist Left, including Bilan (which took up the position of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Left on the national question) as well as that of the Gauche Communiste de France, which rejected the Italian Left’s traditional position on the trade unions, adopting instead the position of the German-Dutch Left.

However, this current adopted two positions which proved to be fatal (and which would have been foreign to the KAPD):

• analysis of the Revolution of 1917 as bourgeois;

• the rejection of the need for the Party.

This led it to categorise as bourgeois a whole series of proletarian organisations of the past, to reject, in the final analysis, the history of the workers’ movement and the lessons which it could bring for the future.

This also led it to deny any role to the fraction since the task of the latter is to prepare an organisation the councilist current does not want, the Party.

As a consequence of these two weaknesses, it has prevented itself from playing a significant part in the process which will lead to the future Party, and thus to the communist revolution, even if councilist ideas continue to have an influence on the proletariat.

A last introductory point to the 2nd part of the Report: can the ICC be considered as a fraction? The answer leaps to the eyes: obviously not, since our organisation was, at no moment, constituted within a proletarian party. But this answer had already been given at the beginning of the fifties by comrade MC in a letter to the other members of the Internationalisme group:

“The Fraction was in a direct organic continuity with the old organisation since its existence was relatively brief. Often it remained within the old organisation up to the moment of the split. The split was often identical with the Fraction’s transformation into the new Party (eg the Bolshevik fraction and the Spartakusbund, like almost all the left fractions of the old International). Today, this organic continuity is all but non-existent (…) Because the Fraction did not have to confront fundamentally new problems such as those posed by our period of permanent crisis and evolution towards state capitalism, and was not shattered into the dust of tiny tendencies, it was more firmly anchored in its acquired revolutionary principles than called upon to formulate new principles; it had more to maintain than to build. Thanks to this, and, and to its direct organic continuity over a relatively short space of time, it was the new Party in gestation.

[Our group], though it has in part the tasks of the Fraction – ie the re-examination of past experience and the formation of militants – must also undertake the analysis of the newly evolving situation and the new perspective, but does not have to rebuild the programme of the future Party. It is only an element in this reconstruction, just as it is only an element of the future Party. Because of its organisational nature, its function of programmatic contribution can only be partial”.

Today, at the moment of 40 years existence of the ICC, we must have the same approach as when it was 30 years old, by pointing out: “We thus owe the ICC's ability to live up to its responsibilities during its 30 years of existence largely to the contributions of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. The secret of the positive balance sheets that we can draw of activity during this period lies in our fidelity to the teachings of the Fraction and, more generally, to the method and the spirit of Marxism which it had learnt so well.” (“30 years of the ICC: Learning from the past to build the future”, International Review n°12313).

From its inception, the ICC has always attempted to analyse the class struggle in its historical context. Our organisation recognised that it owed its very existence not only to the efforts of past revolutionaries, and those who had acted as a bridge from one generation of revolutionaries to another, but also to a change in the course of history inaugurated by the world wide resurgence of the proletariat after 1968, ending “forty years of counter-revolution” since the last ripples of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-27. But today, a further 40 years after its foundation, the ICC is confronted with the task of re-examining the whole corpus of the very considerable work it has carried out in relation to this historic re-appearance of the working class and the immense difficulties it has encountered on the road to its emancipation.

This report can only be the beginning of such a re-examination. It is not possible to go back in any detail to the struggles themselves and the various analyses that have been made of them, whether by mainstream historians or other elements in the proletarian movement. Instead we will have to restrict ourselves to what is already a rather daunting task: to look at the way the ICC itself has analysed the development of the class struggle through its own publications, principally its international theoretical organ, the International Review, which by and large contains the synthesis of all the discussions and debates which have animated our organisation throughout its life.

The historic resurgence of the proletariat

Before the ICC, before May 1968, the signs of a crisis in capitalist society were already growing: at the economic level, the problems of the US and British currencies; at the social-political level, protests in the USA against the Vietnam war and racial segregation; in the class struggle, Chinese workers rebelling against the so-called ‘cultural revolution’, wildcats by US car workers, etc (see for example the article from Accion Proletaria published in in World Revolution 15 and 16, which actually talks about a wave of struggles from 1965 onwards). This was the context in which Marc Chirik1 (MC) and his young comrades in Venezuela made their oft-quoted (by us at least) prognosis: “We are not prophets, nor can we claim to predict when and how events will unfold in the future. But of one thing are conscious and certain: the process in which capitalism is plunged today cannot be stopped? and it leads directly to the crisis. And we are equally certain that the inverse process of developing class combativity which we are witnessing today will lead the working class to a bloody and direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state”.

Here are all the strengths of the marxist method inherited from the communist left: a capacity to discern major shifts in the trajectory of capitalist society long before they become too obvious to deny. And so MC, most of whose militant life had been played out under the shadow of the counter-revolution, was able to announce a change in the historic course: the counter-revolution was at last over, the post-war boom was drawing to a close, and the perspective was a new crisis of the world capitalist system and a resurgence of the proletarian class struggle.

But there is a key weakness in the formulation, which could give the impression that we were already entering a revolutionary period – in other words, a period where the world revolution is on the short-term agenda, as it was in 1917. The article does not of course claim that revolution is just around the corner, and MC had learned the virtue of patience in the most trying of circumstances. Nor did he subsequently make the mistake of the Situationists who actually thought May 68 was the beginning of the revolution. But such an ambiguity was to have its consequences for the new generation of revolutionaries who were to make up the ICC. For much of its subsequent history, even after it recognised the inadequacy of the formulation ‘course towards revolution’ and replaced it with ‘course towards class confrontations’ at the 5th Congress,1a the ICC would be plagued by the tendency to underestimate both the capacity of capitalism to maintain itself despite its decadence and its open crisis, and the difficulty of the working class to overcome the weight of the dominant ideology, to forge itself into a social class with its own autonomous perspective.

The ICC was formed in 1975 on the basis of an understanding that a new era of workers’ struggles had opened up, engendering also a new generation of revolutionaries whose first task was to re-appropriate the political and organisational acquisitions of the communist left and work towards regroupment on a world scale. The ICC was convinced that it had a unique role to play in this process, defining itself as the “pivot” of the future world communist party (Report on the question of the organization of our International Communist Current [23], International Review n°1).

However, the wave of struggles inaugurated by the massive movement in France May-June 68 was more or less over before the ICC was formed, since it is generally seen as running between 1968 and 1974, although there were important struggles in Spain, Portugal, Holland etc in 1976-77. As there is no mechanical link between the immediate struggle and the development of the revolutionary organisation, the relatively rapid growth of the ICC in its early days continued despite the reflux. But this expansion was still profoundly influenced by the atmosphere of May 68, when the revolution had seemed to many to be almost within reach. Joining an organisation which was openly for world revolution did not seem such a big wager at that time.

This feeling that we were already in the last days of capitalism, that the working class was gaining strength in an almost exponential manner, was reinforced by a characteristic of the class movement at that time, where there were only short pauses between what we identified as “waves” of international class struggle.

The second wave, 1978-81

Among the factors that the ICC analysed in the retreat of the first wave was the counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie, which had been taken by surprise in 1968 but soon developed a political strategy aimed at derailing the class and providing it with a false perspective. This was summarised in the strategy of the ‘left in power’, promising a rapid end to the economic difficulties which were still comparatively mild at the time.

The end of the first wave in fact more or less coincided with the more open development of the economic crisis after 1973, but it was this development which created the conditions for fresh outbreaks of the class movement. The ICC saw the ‘second wave’ beginning in 1978 with the struggles of the lorry drivers, the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the steel workers’ strike in Britain, the oil workers’ in Iran which was organised through ‘shoras’, large-scale strike movements in Brazil, the Rotterdam dockers’ strike with its independent strike committee, the militant steelworkers’ movement in Longwy-Denain in France, and above all the huge strike movement in Poland 1980.

The movement that began in the Gdansk shipyards was a clear expression of the phenomenon of the mass strike, and enabled us to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon by returning to the original analysis of Rosa Luxemburg following the mass strikes in Russia that culminated in the 1905 revolution (see for example the article Notes on the Mass Strike [24] in International Review n°27). We saw the reappearance of the mass strike as the highest point of struggle since 68, answering many of the questions posed in previous struggles, especially about self-organisation and extension. We thus argued - against the vision of a class movement that must always go round in circles until the ‘party’ is able to direct it towards a revolutionary overthrow - that the workers’ struggles had a trajectory, that there was a tendency to advance, to draw lessons, to answer questions posed in previous struggles. On the other hand, we were able to see that the political awareness of the Polish workers lagged behind the real level of struggle. They formulated some general demands that posed more than just economic issues, but the domination of trade unionism, democracy and religion were very strong and tended to deform any attempt to advance onto the explicitly political terrain. We also saw the capacity of the world bourgeoisie to unite against the mass strikes, especially through the creation of Solidarnosc.

But our efforts to analyse the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie against the working class also gave rise to a very strong empiricist, ‘common sense’ tendency, expressed most clearly by the ‘Chenier’ clan (see note 2). When we observed a new political strategy of the bourgeoisie at the end of the 70s – the line-up of right in power, left in opposition in the central capitalist countries– we found ourselves having to go deeper into the question of the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie. The article in International Review n°31 on Machiavellianism, and the consciousness and unity of the bourgeoisie [25] examined how the evolution of state capitalism enabled this class to develop active strategies against the working class, and a further article [26] in International Review n°39, a response to correspondence [27] in International Review n°34 with an element from Hong Kong, LLM, sought to go further into the nature of the consciousness of the bourgeoisie in general and in its decadent epoch in particular (see appendix). To a large extent the majority of the revolutionary movement had forgotten that the marxist analysis of the class struggle is an analysis of both major classes in society, not only of the advances and retreats of the proletariat. The latter is not engaged in shadow boxing but is taking on the most sophisticated ruling class in history, which despite its false consciousness has shown a capacity to learn from historical events, above all when it comes to dealing with its mortal enemy, and is capable of no end of manipulations and deceptions. Examining the strategies of the enemy class was a given for Marx and Engels, but our attempts to continue this tradition have often been dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’ by many elements who are bewitched by the appearance of democratic freedoms.

Analysing the balance of forces between the classes also takes us to the question of the historic course. In the same International Review as the first major text on the left in opposition (International Review no 18 -3rd quarter [28] 1979, which contains the texts from the third ICC congress), and in response to confusions in the international conferences and within our own ranks (for example the RC/GCI tendency2 which announced a course towards war), we published a crucial contribution on the question of the historic course, which was an expression of our ability to continue and to develop the heritage of the communist left. This text set about refuting some of the most common misconceptions in the revolutionary milieu, in particular the idea, rooted in empiricism, that it is not possible for revolutionaries to make general predictions about the course of the class struggle. Against this notion, the text reaffirms the fact that its capacity to define a perspective for the future - and not only the general alternative between socialism and barbarism – is one of marxism's defining characteristics and always has been. More specifically, the text insists that marxists have always based their work on their ability to grasp the particular balance of class forces within a given period, as we saw again in the first part of this report. By the same token, the text shows that an inability to grasp the nature of the course had led past revolutionaries into serious errors (for example, Trotsky’s disastrous adventures in the 1930s).

An extension of this agnostic view of the historic course was the concept, defended in particular by the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, later to become the International Communist Tendency, to which we shall return below), of a "parallel" course towards war and revolution: "Other theories have also arisen more recently, according to which 'with the development of the crisis of capitalism, both terms of the contradiction are reinforced at the same time: war and revolution don't exclude each other mutually but advance in a simultaneous and parallel manner, without it being possible for us to know which one will reach its culminating point before the other'. The main error in this conception is that it totally neglects the factor of class struggle in the life of society, just as the conception developed by the Italian left [the theory of the war economy] was based on an overestimation of this factor. Beginning from the phrase in the Communist Manifesto which says that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle', the Italian Left applied this mechanically to the analysis of imperialist war and saw imperialist war as a response to the class struggle; it failed to see that, on the contrary, imperialist war could only take place thanks to the absence or weakness of the class struggle. Although it was wrong, this conception began from correct premises; the mistake lay in the way these premises were applied. In contrast, the theory of a 'parallelism and simultaneity of the course towards war and the course towards revolution' plainly casts aside this basic marxist premise, because it holds that the two principal antagonistic classes in society can go on preparing their respective responses to the crisis - imperialist war for the one, revolution for the other - completely independently of each other, of the balance of forces between each other, of confrontations and clashes between each other. If it can't be applied to something which is going to determine the whole historic alternative for the life of society, the schema of the Communist Manifesto has no reason for existing and we can consign marxism to a museum alongside other outmoded productions of human imagination".

Although it would be four years before we formally changed our formula ‘course towards revolution’, above all because it contained the implication of a kind of inevitable and even linear progress towards revolutionary confrontations, we already understood that the historic course was neither static nor predetermined but was subject to changes in the evolution of the balance of force between the classes. Hence our ‘slogan’ at the beginning of the 80s, and in response to the tangible acceleration of inter-imperialist tensions (especially the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the response it provoked in the west): the Years of Truth. Truth not only in the brutal language of the bourgeoisie with its new right wing teams, but truth also in terms of deciding the very future of humanity. There were certainly errors in this text: in particular the idea of the “total failure” of the economy and of an already-existing proletarian “offensive” when the workers’ struggles were still of necessity on a fundamentally defensive terrain. But the text also had a real predictive power: not only because the Polish workers rapidly offered us clear proof that the course towards war was not open and that the proletariat was capable of providing an alternative, but also because the events of the 80s did prove decisive, even though not in the way we had initially envisaged. The struggles in Poland were a key moment in a process leading to the collapse of the eastern bloc and the definitive opening of the phase of decomposition, the expression of a social stalemate in which neither class was able to put forward its historic alternative.

The ‘second wave’ was also the period in which Marc Chirik exhorted us to ‘come down from the balcony’ and develop the capacity to participate in the struggles, to put forward concrete proposals for self-organisation and extension as for example during the steel workers’ strikes in France. This gave rise to a number of incomprehensions: for example, the proposal to distribute a leaflet calling on workers in other sectors to join the steelworkers’ march in Paris was seen as a concession to trade unionism because this was a march organised by the unions. But the question posed was not one of abstract denunciation of the trade unions but of showing how in practice the unions oppose the extension of the struggle, and pushing forward tendencies to challenge the unions and take charge of the organisation of the struggle. That this was a real possibility was shown by the echo we received in certain interventions at formally union-called mass meetings, as in Dunkirk. The question of workers’ groups arising from the struggle [29] was also posed (see the article in International Review n°21). But there was a ‘negative’ side to this effort to intervene actively in the movement: the appearance of activist and immediatist tendencies which reduced the role of the revolutionary organisation to that of giving practical assistance to the workers. In the Rotterdam dock strike, we began to take on the role of ‘water carriers’ for the strike committee, and this gave rise to an extremely important contribution by MC (The proletarian struggle under decadence [30]  in International Review n°23) which systematically laid out how the move from ascendancy to decadence had brought profound changes in the dynamic of the proletarian class struggle, and thus to the primary functions of a revolutionary organisation, which could no longer see itself as the ‘organiser’ of the class but as a lucid minority providing political leadership. Despite this vital clarification, a minority of the organisation fell even further into workerism and activism, typified by the opportunism on the trade unionism question manifested by the Chenier clan, which saw trade union strike committees in the British steel strike as class organs, while at the same time refusing to recognise the historic significance of the movement in Poland. The Extraordinary Conference Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation [31] identified many of these errors (International Review n°29).

We saw the second wave coming to an end with the repression in Poland and this also accelerated a crisis in the revolutionary milieu (the break-up of the international conferences, the split in the ICC3, the collapse of the PCI: see The present convulsions in the revolutionary milieu [32] in International Review n°28 and The origins of the ICP(Communist Programme): what it claims to be, and what it really is [33] in International Review n°32). But we continued to develop our theoretical understanding, in particular by raising the problem of international generalisation as the next step in the struggle, and through the debate on the critique of the theory of the weak link (see The proletariat of Western Europe at the centre of the generalization of the class struggle [9] in International Review n°31, and Debate: On the critique of the theory of the "weakest link" [34] in International Review n°37). These two interconnected issues were part of our effort to understand the significance of the defeat in Poland. Through these discussions we recognised that the key to the next major development of the world-wide class struggle – which we defined not only in terms of self-organisation and extension but of international generalisation and politicisation – remained in Western Europe. The texts on generalisation and other polemics also reaffirmed that the best conditions for the proletarian revolution were provided not by war, as most groups from the Italian left tradition continued to argue, but from an open economic crisis, and that this was precisely the perspective that had been opened up after 1968. Finally, in the wake of the defeat in Poland some very far-sighted analyses of the underlying rigidity of the Stalinist regimes were put forward in articles such as Eastern Europe: Economic crisis and the bourgeoisie's weapons against the proletariat [35] in International Review n°34. These analyses were the basis for our understanding of the mechanisms of the collapse of the eastern bloc after 1989.

1983-88: the third wave

A new wave of struggles was announced by the public sector strikes in Belgium and this was confirmed over the next few years via the British miners’ strike, the struggles of the railway and health workers in France, rail and education sectors in Italy, massive struggles in Scandinavia, in Belgium again in 1986, etc. Nearly every issue of the International Review during this period had an editorial article about the class struggle and we published various congress resolutions on the question. There was certainly an attempt to situate these struggles in a more general historical context. In International Review n°39 and International Review n°41 we carried articles about the method needed to analyse the class struggle, responding to the dominant empiricism and lack of framework in the milieu, which could go from severe underestimation to sudden and absurd exaggerations. The text in International Review n°41 in particular reaffirmed some basic elements about the dynamic of the class struggle – its uneven, ‘wave like’ character, deriving from the underlying fact that the working class is the first revolutionary class to be an exploited class and cannot march from victory to victory like the bourgeoisie, but must go through a process of painful defeats which can be the springboard for future advances in consciousness. This jagged contour of the class struggle is even more pronounced in the decadent period, so that to understand the significance of a particular outbreak of the class struggle we cannot merely ‘photograph’ it in isolation: it must be located within a more general trajectory, which leads us back to the question of the rapport de forces between the classes, the question of the historic course.

This was again a period of heightened intervention, with a greater focus on intervention at the workplace, on a more active participation in struggle groups etc. Alongside this was the development of the debate on centrism towards councilism, which first manifested itself on the theoretical level - the relationship between consciousness and struggle and the question of subterranean maturation (see Reply to the CWO: On the subterranean maturation of consciousness [36] in International Review n°43). These debates enabled the ICC to make an important critique of the councilist view that consciousness only develops through the open struggle, and to elaborate the distinction between the dimensions of extent and depth (“consciousness of the class and class consciousness”, a distinction instantly seen as ‘Leninist’ by the future EFICC tendency). The polemic with the CWO on the question of subterranean maturation noted the similarities between the councilist views of our ‘tendency’ and those of the CWO, which at that point was openly advocated the Kautskyist theory of class consciousness (understood as something brought to the proletariat from the outside, by bourgeois intellectuals). The article tried to go further into the marxist view of the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious while making a critique of the vulgar ‘common sense’ vision of the CWO.

There is another area in which the struggle against councilism has not been taken to its conclusion: while recognising in theory that class consciousness can indeed develop outside periods of open struggle, there is a long-standing tendency to hope that, nonetheless, given that we were no longer living in a period of counter-revolution, the economic crisis would bring about sudden leaps in the class struggle and class consciousness. This smuggled the councilist conception of an automatic link between crisis and class struggle back in through the window, and it has frequently returned to haunt us, not least in the period following the 2008 crash.

A proletariat on the offensive? The difficulties of politicisation

Applying the analysis we had developed through the debate on the weak link, our principal texts on the class struggle in the period recognised the importance of a new development of the class struggle in the central countries of Europe. The Theses on the present upsurge in class struggle [37] (1984) published in International Review n°37, outlined the features of this wave:

“The characteristics of the present wave, as have already been manifested and which will become more and more discernible are as follows:

• a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one country, thus posing the basis for the geographical extension of the struggle;

• a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions;

• the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the world generalization of struggles in the future;

• a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists;

• the slow rhythm of the development of struggles in the central countries and notably of their capacity for self-organization, a phenomenon which results from the deployment by the bourgeoisie of these countries of a whole arsenal of traps and mystifications, and which has been shown again in the most recent confrontations”.

Most important of these “traps and mystifications” was the deployment of rank and file unionism against the real tendencies towards workers’ self-organisation, a tactic which was sophisticated enough to produce allegedly anti-union co-ordinations which actually functioned as a last rampart of trade unionism. But while by no means blind to the dangers facing the class struggle, the Theses, like the text on the Years of Truth, still contained the notion of an offensive of the proletariat, and predicted that the third wave would reach a higher level than the previous two, which implied that it would reach the necessary stage of international generalisation.

The fact that the course is towards class confrontations doesn’t imply that the proletariat is already on the offensive: until the eve of revolution, its struggles will be essentially defensive faced with the relentless attacks of the ruling class. Such errors were the product of a long-standing tendency to overestimate the immediate level of the class struggle. This was often in reaction to the failure of the proletarian milieu to see beyond its noses, a theme often developed in our polemics, and also in the resolution on the international situation from the1985 6th ICC congress, published in International Review n°44, which contains a long section on the class struggle. This section is an excellent demonstration of the ICC’s historical method for analysing the class struggle, a further critique of the scepticism and empiricism which dominated the milieu, and it also identifies the loss of historical traditions and the rupture between the class and its political organisations as key weaknesses of the proletariat. But in retrospect it places too much emphasis on disillusionment with the left and especially the unions, and the growth of unemployment, as potential factors in the radicalisation of the class struggle. It does not ignore the negative sides of these phenomena, but could not yet see how, in the approaching phase of decomposition, both passive disillusionment with the old ‘workers’ organisations, and the generalisation of unemployment, especially among the young, could become powerful elements in the demoralisation of the proletariat and the undermining of its class identity. It’s also telling, for example, that as late as 1988 (Polemic: Confusion of communist groups over the present period [38] in International Review n°54) we were still publishing a polemic on the underestimation of the class struggle in the proletarian camp. Its arguments were generally correct but it also showed a lack of awareness to what was just around the corner – the collapse of the blocs and the most drawn-out reflux we had ever experienced.

But towards the end of the 80s it became clear to a minority at least that the forward movement of the class struggle, which we had analysed in many of the articles and resolutions during this period, was getting bogged down. There was a debate about this at the 8th congress of the ICC (The 8th Congress of the ICC: the stakes of the Congress [39]in International Review n°59), in particular in relation to the question of decomposition and its negative effects on the class struggle. A considerable part of the organisation saw the ‘third wave’ going from strength to strength, and the impact of certain defeats was underestimated. This had been especially true of the UK miners’ strike, whose defeat didn’t stop the wave but had a longer-term effect on working class self-confidence and not only in the UK, while reinforcing the bourgeoisie’s commitment to going ahead with the dismantling of ‘old’ industries. The 8th congress was also the one where the idea was mooted that bourgeois mystifications now ‘lasted no longer than three weeks’.

The discussion on centrism towards councilism had raised the problem of the proletariat’s flight from politics, but we weren’t able to apply this to the dynamic of the class movement – in particular its lack of politicisation, its difficulty in developing a perspective, even when struggles were self-organised and showed a tendency to extend. We can even say that the ICC has never made an adequate critique of the impact of economism and workerism in its own ranks, leading it to underestimate the importance of factors which take the proletariat beyond the limits of the workplace and of immediate economic demands

It wasn’t until the collapse of the eastern bloc that the full weight of decomposition could really be grasped, and we then correctly foresaw a period of new difficulties for the proletariat (see Collapse of Stalinism: New difficulties for the proletariat [40] in International Review n°60). These difficulties derived precisely from the inability of the working class to develop its perspective, but were also to be actively reinforced by the vast ideological offensive of the ruling around the theme of the ‘death of communism’ and the end of the class struggle.

The period of decomposition

The subsequent reflux in the class struggle, faced with the weight of decomposition and the anti-communist campaigns of the ruling class, proved to be very deep, and although we saw some tentative expressions of militancy in the early 90s and again towards the end of the decade, it was to persist into the next century while decomposition advanced visibly (expressed most clearly in the attack on the Twin Towers and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq). In the face of this advancing decomposition we were obliged to re-examine the whole question of the historic course in a report to 14th Congress (The idea of the historic course in the revolutionary movement [41] published in International Review n°107. Other texts of note on this theme included Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism, Part 1 [42] and Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism, Part 2 [43] in International Review n°s 103 and 104 and the ICC 15th Congress: Resolution on the International situation [44], International Review n°113).

The 2001 report on the historic course, after reaffirming the theoretical acquisitions of past revolutionaries and our own framework as developed in the document from the 3rd Congress, focused on the definite modifications brought about by the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition, where the tendency towards world war was obstructed not only by the inability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat, but also by the centrifugal dynamic of ‘every man for himself’, which meant that the re-formation of imperialist blocs met with increasing difficulties. However, since decomposition contains the risk of a gradual descent into chaos and irrational destruction, it creates immense dangers for the working class, and the text reaffirms the view of the original theses that the class could be gradually ground down by the whole process to the point where it would no longer be able to stand against the advancing tide of barbarism. The text also tentatively distinguished between the material and ideological elements involved in the ‘grinding down’ process: the ideological elements emerging spontaneously from the soil of capitalist decay, and the conscious campaigns orchestrated by the ruling class, such as the endless propaganda about the death of communism; at the same time, the text identified more directly material elements like the dismantling of the old industrial centres which had often been the centres of militancy in the previous waves of class struggles (mines, steel, docks, car plants etc). But while the new report did not attempt to mask the difficulties facing the class, it examined signs of the class regaining its fighting spirit and the continuing difficulties of the ruling class in enlisting the working class for its war campaigns, and concluded that the potential for a revival of the class struggle was still largely intact, and this was to be confirmed two years later by the movements around ‘pension reform’ in Austria and France.

In the Report on the class struggle [45] in International Review n°117 we identified a turning point, a revival of the struggle, manifested in these movements around pensions and other expressions. This was confirmed by further movements in 2006 and 2007, such as the movement against the CPE in France and massive struggles in the textile and other sectors in Egypt. The students’ movement in France was particularly eloquent testimony of a new generation of proletarians facing a very uncertain future (see Theses on the spring 2006 students' movement in France [46], International Review n°125, and also the editorial from the same issue). This tendency was further confirmed by the ‘youth’ struggles in Greece in 2008-9, the student revolt in the UK in 2010, and above all by the Arab Spring and movements of the Indignados and Occupy in 2011-2013, which gave rise to a number of articles in the International Review, in particular The Indignados in Spain, Greece and Israel [47] in International Review n°147. There were definite gains in these movements – the affirmation of the assembly form, a more direct engagement with political and moral issues, a clear sense of internationalism, elements whose significance we will return to later. In our report to the October 13 plenary session of the International Bureau we criticised the workerist and economist dismissal of these movements and a temptation to shift the focus of the world class struggle to the new industrial concentrations in the Far East. But we did not hide the basic problem revealed in these revolts: the difficulty of their young protagonists in seeing themselves as part of the working class, the immense weight of the ideology of the citizen and thus of democratism. The fragility of these movements was indicated very clearly in the Middle East where we could see clear regressions in consciousness (eg in Egypt and Israel) and, in Libya and Syria, an almost immediate collapse into imperialist war. There had indeed been a genuine tendency towards politicisation in these movements since they posed deep questions about the very nature of the existing social system, and like previous upsurges in the 2000s, they gave rise to a tiny minority of searching elements, but within this minority there was a huge difficulty in advancing towards revolutionary militant commitment. Even when these minorities seemed to have escaped the more obvious chains of decomposing bourgeois ideology, they very often encountered them in the more subtle or radical forms that are crystallised in anarchism, ‘communisation’ theory, and similar tendencies, all of which furnish additional evidence that we had been very much on the right track when we saw ‘councilism as the main danger’ in the 80s, since all these currents founder precisely on the question of the political instruments of the class struggle, above all the revolutionary organisation.

A proper balance sheet of these movements (and of our discussions about them) has not been drawn and can’t be attempted here. But it seems that the cycle of 2003-2013 has come to an end and we are facing a new period of difficulties4. This is most obvious in the Middle East, where social protest has given way to ruthless state repression and imperialist barbarism; and this horrible involution can only have a depressive effect on workers all over the world. In any case, if we recall our analysis of the uneven development of the class struggle, the reflux from these upsurges is unavoidable and for some time this will tend to further expose the class to the noxious impact of decomposition.

Underestimating the enemy

"...According to the reports, you said that I had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. There is a slight error there somewhere. All I said was that we might possibly come to power by 1898. If this does not happen, the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed"  (Engels, letter to Bebel 24-26 October, 1891).

In this short passage the flaw is so obvious that it hardly needs commenting on: the notion of the working class coming to power by 1898 was in all probability an illusion generated by the rapid growth of the social democratic party in Germany. Here a drift towards reformism was melded with the old over-optimism and impatience which in the Communist Manifesto had given birth to the formulation that “the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (and maybe not so far off…). But alongside this is a very valuable idea: that a society which has been condemned by history can still maintain its “rotten casing” well after the need to replace it had emerged. In fact not decades but now a century after the First World War, we are witness to the grim determination of the bourgeoisie to keep its system alive at whatever cost to the future of the species.

Most of our errors over the past 40 years seem to be in the direction of underestimating the bourgeoisie, the capacity of this class to maintain its rotting system, and thus the enormity of the obstacles facing the working class in assuming its revolutionary tasks. In drawing up a balance sheet of the struggles between 2003 and 2013, this has to be a key element.

The report to the 2014 Congress of the section in France reasserts the analysis of the turning point: the 2003 struggles raised the key issue of solidarity and the anti-CPE 2006 in France was a profound movement which took the bourgeoisie by surprise and forced it to retreat as it posed the real danger of an extension to the employed workers. But following this there was a tendency to forget the capacity of the ruling class to recover from such shocks and to renew its ideological offensive and manoeuvres, particularly when it comes to restoring the influence of the unions. We had seen this in France in the 80s with the development of the co-ordinations and we again recognised it in 1995, but, as the report on the class struggle to the last Congress of Révolution Internationale points out, we forgot it in our analyses of the movements in Guadeloupe and the pensions struggle in 2010, which effectively exhausted the French proletariat and prevented any serious contagion from the movement in Spain a year later. And again, despite our past emphasis on the enormous impact of the anti-communist campaigns, the report to the French section’s congress also suggests that we have been too quick to forget that the campaigns against marxism and communism still have a considerable weight on the new generation that has appeared in the last decade.

Some of the other weaknesses in our analysis during this period are only beginning to be recognised.

In our criticisms of the ideology of the ‘anti-capitalists’ of the 1990s, with their emphasis on globalisation as a totally new phase on the life of capitalism – and of the concessions made within the proletarian movement to this ideology, especially in the case of the IBRP which seemed to be putting the decadence of capitalism into question – we didn’t recognise the truth at the heart of this mythology: that the new strategy of ‘globalisation’ and neo-liberalism enabled the ruling class to weather the recessions of the 80s and even opened up real possibilities for expansion in areas where the old bloc divisions and semi-autarkic economic models had erected considerable barriers to the movement of capital. The most obvious example of this development is of course China, whose rise to ‘super-power’ status we didn’t fully anticipate, although ever since the 1970s and the Sino-Russian split we had recognised that it was a kind of exception to the rule of the impossibility of ‘independence’ from the domination of the two blocs. We have thus been late in assessing the impact that the emergence of huge new industrial concentrations in some of these regions will have on the global development of the class struggle. The underlying theoretical reasons for our failure to predict the rise of the New China will have to be investigated in more depth in the discussions around our analysis of the economic crisis.

Perhaps most significantly, we have not adequately investigated the role played by the break-up of many of the old centres of class militancy in the heartlands in undermining class identity. We have rightly been sceptical of purely sociological analyses of class consciousness, but the changing composition of the working class in the heartlands, the loss of traditions of struggle, the development of much more atomised forms of labour, have certainly contributed to the appearance of generations of proletarians who no longer see themselves as part of the working class, even when they are engaged in struggle against the attacks of the state, as we saw during the Occupy and Indignados movements of 2011-13. Particularly important is the fact that the whole scale ‘relocations’ that have taken place in the western countries often resulted from major defeats - the UK miners and French steelworkers being cases in point. These issues, though posed in the 2001 report on the historic course, were not really taken up and had to be re-affirmed in the 2013 report on the class struggle. This is a very long delay, and we have still not really incorporated this phenomenon into our own framework, which would certainly require a response to the flawed efforts of currents like the autonomists and the ICT to theorise about the ‘recomposition’ of the working class.

At the same time, the prevalence of long term unemployment or precarious employment has exacerbated the tendency towards atomisation and loss of class identity. The autonomous struggles of the unemployed, able to link up with the struggles of the employed workers, were much less significant than we had foreseen in the 70s and 80s (cf the theses on unemployment, International Review n°14, or the resolution on the international situation from the 6th ICC Congress, referred to in the previous section) and large numbers of the unemployed or precariously employed have fallen into lumpenisation, gang culture, or reactionary political ideologies. The students’ movement in France in 2006, and the social revolts towards the end of the first decade of the new century, began to supply answers to these problems, offering the possibility of encompassing the unemployed in mass demonstrations and street assemblies, but this was still in a context where class identity was still very weak.

Our main emphasis on explaining the loss of class identity has been at the ideological level, whether we are talking about the immediate products of decomposition (every man for himself, gang culture, flight into irrationality, etc) or about the deliberate use of the effects of decomposition by the ruling class – most obviously the campaigns around the death of communism, but also the more day to day ideological onslaught of the media and of advertising packaging false revolt, obsession with consumerism and celebrity, etc. This is of course vital but we have in some ways only begun to investigate how these ideological mechanisms operate at the deepest level – a theoretical task clearly posed by the Theses on Morality5 and our efforts to develop and apply the marxist theory of alienation.

Class identity is not, as the ICT has sometimes argued, a kind of merely instinctive or semi-conscious feeling held by the workers, to be distinguished from the true class consciousness preserved by the party. It is itself an integral aspect of class consciousness, part of the process whereby the proletariat recognises itself as a distinct class with a unique role and potential in capitalist society. Furthermore, it is not limited to the purely economic domain but from the beginning had a powerfully cultural and moral element: as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the workers’ movement is not limited to “bread and butter issues” but is a “great cultural movement” The workers’ movement of the 19th century thus encompassed not only struggles for immediate economic or political demands, but the organisation of education, of debates about art and science, of sport and leisure activities and so on. The movement provided a whole milieu in which proletarians and their families could associate outside the workplace, strengthening the conviction that the working class was the true heir of all that was healthy in previous expressions of human culture. This kind of working class movement reached its peak in the period of social democracy but this was also the prelude to its demise. What was lost in the great betrayal of 1914 was not only the International and the old forms of political and economic organisation but also this wider cultural milieu, which only survived as a kind of caricature in the ‘fêtes’ of the Stalinist and leftist parties. 1914 was thus the first of a series of blows against class identity over the past century: the political dissolution of the class in democracy and anti-fascism in the 30s and 40s, the assimilation of communism with Stalinism, the break in organic continuity with the organisations and traditions of the past brought about by the counter-revolution: long before the unfolding of the phase of decomposition these traumas already laid heavily on the proletariat’s capacity to constitute itself into a class with a real sense of itself as the social force bearing within itself the “dissolution of all classes”. Thus any investigation into the problem of loss of class identity will have to go back over the whole history of the workers’ movement and not restrict itself to the last few decades. Even if it is in the last few decades that the problem has become so acute and so threatening to the future of the class struggle, it is only the concentrated expression of processes which have a much longer history.

To return to the problem of our underestimation of the ruling class: the culmination,, of our long-standing underestimation of the enemy – and which is also the greatest weakness in our analyses – was reached after the financial crash of 2007-8, when an old tendency to see that the ruling class in the centres of the system had more or less run out of options, that the economy had reached a total impasse, came to a head. This could only increase feelings of panic, the often unstated notion that the working class and the tiny revolutionary movement were either at the last chance saloon or had already ‘missed the boat’. Certain formulations about the dynamic of the mass strike fed into this immediatism. In fact, we were not wrong to see the ‘germs’ of the mass strike in the student movement in France in 2006 or struggles like those of the steel workers in Spain in the same year, in Egypt in 2007, in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Our mistake lay in seeing the seed as the flower, and in not understanding that the period of germination could be a very long one. Clearly these errors of analyses were closely linked to the activist and opportunist deformations of our intervention during this period, although these errors must also be understood in the broader discussion of our role as an organisation (see the text on the work of the fraction in this issue).

The moral dimension of class consciousness

“If the owner of labour-power works to-day, to-morrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a labouring individual. His natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed.  In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element” (Marx, Capital vol 1 chapter 6).

To approach Capital without really grasping that Marx is seeking to understand the workings of a particular social relation which has been the product of thousands of years of history, and which like other social relations is doomed to disappear, is to end up being bewitched by the reified view of the world which Marx’s study aims to combat. This includes all the academic marxologists, whether they see themselves as comfortable professors or ultra-radical communists, who tend to analyse capitalism as a self-sufficient system of eternal laws which operate in precisely the same way in all historical conditions, in the decadence of the system as in its ascent. But Marx’s remarks about the value of labour power take us away from this purely economic view of capitalism towards an understanding that “historical and moral” factors play a crucial role in determining a central ‘economic’ foundation of this society: the value of labour power. In other words, contrary to the assertions of Paul Cardan (alias Castoriadis, the founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group) for whom Capital was a book without class struggle, Marx argues that the assertion of human dignity by the exploited class – the moral dimension par excellence – cannot by definition be removed from a scientific examination of the operations of the capitalist system. In the same sentence Marx also answers those who see him as a moral relativist, as a thinker who rejects all morality as being the hypocritical cant of one ruling class or another.

Today the ICC is being obliged to deepen its understanding of the “historical and moral element” in the situation of the working class – historical not only in the sense of the struggles of the last 40, or 80, or 100 years, or even since the first workers’ movements at the dawn of capitalism, but in the sense of the continuity and rupture between the struggles of the working class and those of previous exploited classes, and beyond that, its continuity and rupture with all previous attempts of the human species to overcome the barriers to the realisation of its true potentialities, to “unlock its slumbering powers” as Marx defined the central characteristic of human labour per se. This is where history and anthropology come together, and to talk of anthropology is to talk of the history of morality. Hence the importance of the Theses on Morality6 and our discussions around them…..

Extrapolating from the Theses, we can note certain key moments marking the tendency towards the unification of the human species: the passage from the horde to a wider primitive communism; the advent of the ‘axial age’, connected to an incipient generalisation of commodity relations, which saw the emergence of most of the world religions, expressions in ‘spirit’ of the unification of a humanity which could not yet be united in reality; the global expansion of ascendant capitalism which for the first time tended to unite humanity under the admittedly brutal reign of a single mode of production; the first world revolutionary wave which contained the promise of the material human community. This tendency was dealt a terrible blow by the triumph of the counter-revolution and it is no accident that, on the verge of the most barbaric war in history, Trotsky in 1938 could already talk of the “crisis of humanity”. No doubt he had in mind, as evidence of this crisis, World War One, Stalinist Russia, the world economic depression and the march towards a second world war, but it was perhaps above all the image of Nazi Germany (even though he did not live to witness the most horrific expressions of this barbaric regime), which confirmed this notion, this idea of humanity itself being put the test, because here was an unprecedented process of regression in one of the cradles of bourgeois civilisation: the national culture that had given birth to Hegel, Beethoven, Goethe was now succumbing to the rule of thugs, occultists and nihilists, driven by a programme which sought to drive a final nail in the possibility of a united humanity.

In decomposition, this tendency towards regression, these signs of the whole of human progress up till now collapsing in on itself, is becoming ‘normalised’ across the planet. This is expressed above all in the process of fragmentation and every man for himself: humanity, at a stage where production and communication is more unified than ever, is in danger of being divided and subdivided into nations, regions, religions, races, gangs, all of this accompanied by an equally destructive regression at the intellectual level with the rise of numerous forms of religious fundamentalism, nationalism and racism. The rise of Islamic State provides a summary of this process on a historic scale: where once Islam was the product of a moral and intellectual advance across and beyond the entire region, today Islamism, both in its Sunni and Shia forms, is a pure expression of the negation of humanity - of pogromism, misogyny and the worship of death.

Clearly this danger of regression infects the proletariat itself. Sections of the working class in Europe, for example, having seen the defeat of all the struggles of the 70s and 80s against the decimation of industry and jobs, are being targeted with some success by racist parties who have found new scapegoats to blame for their misery – the waves of immigrants into the central countries, fleeing economic, ecological or military disaster in their own regions. These immigrants are generally more ‘noticeable’ than were the Jews in 1930s Europe, and those of them who espouse the Muslim religion can be directly linked to forces engaged in imperialist conflicts against the ‘host’ countries. This capacity of the right rather than the left to penetrate parts of the working class (in France for example, previous ‘bastions’ of the CP have fallen to the Front National) is a significant expression of a loss of class identity: where once we could point to workers losing their illusions in the left because of their experience of its sabotaging role in the struggle, today the declining influence of the left is more of a reflection of the fact that the bourgeoisie has less need of forces of mystification which claim to act on behalf of the working class because the latter is less able to see itself as a class at all. It also reflects one of the most significant products of the global process of decomposition and the uneven development of the world economic crisis: the tendency for Europe and North America to become islands of relative ‘sanity’ in a world gone mad. Europe in particular looks increasingly like a well-stocked bunker holding out against the desperate masses looking for shelter from a global apocalypse. The ‘common sense’ response of all the besieged, no matter how ruthless the regime inside the bunker, would be to close ranks and make sure that the doors to the bunker remain tight shut. The instinct to survive then becomes totally divorced from any moral feelings and impulses.

The crises of the ‘vanguard’ must also be located in this overall process: the influence of anarchism on the politicised minorities that were generated by the struggles of 2003-13, with its fixation on the immediate, the particular workplace, the ‘community’; the growth of workerism à la Mouvement Communiste and its opposing pole, the ‘communisation’ tendency which rejects the working class a subject of the revolution; the slide towards moral bankruptcy within the communist left itself, which we will be analysing in other reports. In sum, the incapacity of the revolutionary vanguard both to grasp the reality of the moral and intellectual regression sweeping the world and to fight against it.

This report argues not only that the cycle of struggles which went from 1968-1989 came to a halt because the proletariat was unable to offer an alternative to capitalism, definitively opening the phase of decomposition, but also that the first important cycle of struggles in the phase of decomposition also seems to have drawn to an end, and largely for the same reasons.

The historic course

The situation looks very grave indeed. Does it still make sense to talk about a historic course towards class confrontations? The working class today is as distant from 1968 as 1968 was from the beginnings of the counter-revolution, and in addition its loss of class identity means that its capacity for re-appropriating the lessons of struggles that may have taken place decades ago has diminished. At the same time the dangers inherent in the process of decomposition – of a gradual exhaustion of the proletariat’s ability to resist capitalist barbarism – do not remain static but tend to amplify as the capitalist social system falls deeper into decay.

The historic course has never been fixed in perpetuity and the possibility of massive class confrontations in the key countries of capitalism is not a pre-arranged staging post in the journey into the future.

Nevertheless, we continue to think that the proletariat has not spoken the last word, even when those who have spoken have little awareness of speaking for the proletariat.

In our analysis of the class movements of 68-89, we noted the existence of certain high points which provided an inspiration for future struggles and a yardstick to measure their progress. Thus: the importance of 68 in France in raising the question of a new society; of the Polish struggles of 1980 for reaffirming the methods of the mass strike, of the extension and self-organisation of the struggle, and so on. To a large extent these were questions that remained unanswered. But we can also say that the struggles of the last decade or so have also had their high points, above all because they began to raise the key question of politicisation which we have identified as a central weakness of the struggles in the previous cycle. What’s more the most important of these movements – such as the student struggle in France in 2006 and the revolt of the Indignados in Spain - posed many questions which demonstrated that for the proletariat politics is not about whether to keep to dump the governing bourgeois team but about changing social relations, that proletarian politics is about creating a new morality opposed to the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. In their ‘indignation’ against the waste of human potential and destructiveness of the current system, in their efforts to win over the most alienated sectors of the working class (the appeal of the French students to the ‘banlieu’ youth), in the leading role played by young women, in their approach to the question of violence and police provocation, in the desire for passionate debate in the assemblies, and in the incipient internationalism of so many of the movements’ slogans7, these movements shook a fist at the advancing tide of decomposition and affirmed that passively yielding to this tide is not at all the only possibility, that it is still possible to respond to the no-future of the bourgeoisie, with its incessant attacks on the perspective of the proletariat, with reflection and debate about the possibility of a different kind of social relationship. And in so far as these movements were forced to raise themselves to the general level, to pose questions about every aspect of capitalist society, from the economic and the political to the artistic, scientific and environmental, they provided us with a glimpse of how a new “great cultural movement” could reappear in the fires of revolt against the capitalist system.

There were certainly moments when we tended to get carried away with enthusiasm for these movements and to lose sight of their weaknesses, reinforcing our tendencies towards activism and forms of intervention that were not guided by a clear theoretical starting point. But we were not wrong in 2006, for example, to see elements of the mass strike in the movement against the CPE. No doubt we tended to see this in an immediatist rather than a long term perspective, but there is no question that these revolts did reaffirm the underlying nature of the class struggle in decadence: struggles that are not organised by permanent bodies in advance, that tend to spread rapidly throughout society, that pose the problem of new forms of self-organisation, that tend to integrate the political with the economic dimension.

Of course the great weakness of these struggles was that to a large extent they did not see themselves as proletarian, as expressions of the class war. And if this weakness is not overcome, the strong points of such movements will tend to become weak points: a focus on moral concerns will decline into a vague form of petty bourgeois humanism that falls easily into democratic and ‘citizen’ – i.e. openly bourgeois – politics; assemblies will become mere street parliaments where open debate around the most fundamental issues is replaced by the manipulations of political elites and by demands that fix the movement within the horizon of bourgeois politics. And this of course was essentially the fate of the social revolts of 2011-13.

The necessity to link the revolt in the street with the resistance of the employed workers, with all the various products of the working class movement, and to understand that this synthesis can only be based on a proletarian perspective for the future of society, which in turn implies that the unification of the proletariat must include the restoration of the connection between the working class and the organisations of revolutionaries. This is the unanswered question, the unfulfilled perspective posed by not only by the struggles of the last few years, but by all the expressions of the class struggle since 1968.

Against the common sense of empiricism, which can only see the proletariat when it comes to the surface, Marxists recognise that the proletariat is like Blake’s sleeping giant Albion whose wakening will turn the world upside down. On the basis of the theory of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, which the ICC is more or less alone in defending, we recognise that the vast potential of the working class remains for the most part hidden, and even the clearest revolutionaries can easily forget that this ‘slumbering power’ can have a huge impact on social reality even when it has apparently withdrawn from the scene. Marx was able to discern that the working class was the new revolutionary force in society on what seemed like scanty evidence, such as a few strikes by French weavers who had not yet completely gone past the artisan stage of development. And despite all the immense difficulties facing the proletariat, despite all our overestimations of the struggle and underestimations of the enemy, the ICC can still see enough in the class movements over the past 40 years to conclude that the working class has not lost this capacity to offer humanity a new society, a new culture, and a new communist morality…

Conclusion: posing the questions in depth

This report is already much longer than intended, and even then it has often been limited to posing questions rather than answering them. But we are not looking for immediate answers; rather we are aiming to develop a theoretical culture in which every question is approached in depth, linking them back to the intellectual treasure-troves of the ICC, to the history of the workers’ movement and to the classics of marxism as indispensible guides for exploring the new problems thrown up in the final phase of capitalist decline. A key question raised implicitly in this report – in its reflections on class identity, or on the course of history – is the very notion of social class and the concept of the proletariat as the revolutionary class of this epoch. The ICC has made some important contributions in this area – in particular Who can change the world? The proletariat is still the revolutionary class [48] International Review n°73 and 74, and ‘Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism’ in International Review n°103 [42] and 104 [43], both of which sought to answer doubts within the proletarian political movement about the very possibility of the revolution. It is necessary to go back to these articles but also to the marxist texts and traditions on which they are based, while at the same time testing out our arguments in the light of the real evolution of capitalism and the class struggle in the past few decades. Clearly such a project can only be undertaken in the long term. The same goes for other aspects of the report which could only be touched on, such as the moral dimension of class consciousness and its essential role in the capacity of the working class to overcome the nihilism and lack of perspective inherent in capitalism in its phase of decomposition, or the need for a very thorough criticism of the various forms of opportunism which have distorted both the ICC’s analysis of the class struggle and its intervention within it, in particular our concessions to councilism, workerism and economism (see appendix).

Perhaps the one weakness that appears most clearly in the report is our tendency to underestimate the capacities of the ruling class to maintain its decaying system, both at the economic level (an element to be developed in the report on the economic crisis) and at the political level through its ability to anticipate and derail the development of consciousness in the class through a whole panoply of manoeuvres and stratagems. The corollary to this weakness on our part is that we have been too optimistic about the ability of the working class to counter the attacks of the bourgeoisie and to advance towards a clear understanding of its historical mission – a difficulty which is also reflected in the often agonisingly slow and tortuous development of the revolutionary vanguard. It is a characteristic of revolutionaries to be impatient for the revolution: Marx and Engels considered that the bourgeois revolutions of their day could very rapidly be ‘transformed’ into the proletarian revolution; the revolutionaries who formed the Communist International were confident that the days of capitalism were numbered; our own MC hoped that he would live to see the beginning of the revolution. For cynics and purveyors of good old common sense, this is because revolution and the classless society are at best illusions and utopias, so you might as well hope for them to begin tomorrow or in a hundred years from now. For revolutionaries, on the other hand, this impatience to see the dawn of the new society is a product of their passion for communism, a passion which is not “based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer », but merely express « actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes » (Communist Manifesto). Of course, passion must also be guided and sometimes tempered by the most rigorous analysis, the most severe capacity for testing, verification, and self-criticism; and this above all is what we are seeking to do in the reports for the 21st ICC Congress. But, citing Marx once more, such self-criticism is not a mere passion of the head, but the head of passion.

1 For a presentation on Marc Chirik, see the footnote in the article ‘What balance sheet and perspectives for our activity’ in this issue

Basing ourselves on the history of the workers’ movement

1. In making a balance sheet of the last 40 years of its analyses of the international situation, the ICC can take inspiration from the example of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, the first open declaration of the marxist current in the workers’ movement. The achievements of the Manifesto are well-known: the application of the materialist method to the historical process, showing the transient nature of all hitherto existing social formations; the recognition that while capitalism was still playing a revolutionary role in unifying the world market and developing the productive forces, its inherent contradictions, manifested in the repeated crises of overproduction, indicated that it too was only a passing stage in human history; the identification of the working class as the gravedigger of the bourgeois mode of production; the necessity for the working class to raise its struggle to the level of taking political power in order to lay the foundations of a communist society; the necessary role of the communist minority as a product and active factor in the class struggle of the proletariat.

2. These steps forward are still a fundamental part of the communist programme today. But Marx and Engels, faithful to a method which is both historical and self-critical, were later able to recognise that some parts of the Manifesto had been surpassed or proved erroneous by historical experience. Thus, following the events of the Paris Commune in 1871, they concluded that the seizure of power by the working class would entail the destruction and not the seizure of the existing bourgeois state. And long before this, in the debates in the Communist League that followed the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, they realised that the Manifesto had been mistaken in its view that capitalism had already reached a fundamental dead-end, and that there could be a rapid transition from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution. Against the hyper-activist tendency around Willich and Schapper, they insisted on the need for revolutionaries to undertake a far deeper reflection on the perspectives of a still ascendant capitalist society. However, in recognising these errors, they did not call into question their underlying method – rather they returned to it to give the movement’s programmatic gains a more solid foundation.

3. The passion for communism, the burning desire to see the end of capitalist exploitation, has frequently led communists to fall into similar errors as Marx and Engels in 1848. The outbreak of the First World War, and the immense revolutionary upsurge it provoked in the years 1917-20, was correctly seen by the communists as definitive proof that capitalism had now entered a new epoch, the epoch of its decline, and thus the epoch of the proletarian revolution. And indeed world revolution had been placed on the agenda by the seizure of power by the proletariat of Russia in October 1917. But the communist vanguard of the day also tended to underestimate the huge difficulties facing a proletariat whose self-confidence and moral compass had been dealt a severe blow by the betrayal of its old organisations; a proletariat which had been exhausted by years of imperialist slaughter, and which was still weighed down by the reformist and opportunist influences that had grown up in the workers’ movement during the previous three decades. The response to these difficulties by the leadership of the Communist International was to fall into new versions of opportunism aimed at gaining influence within the masses, such as the ‘tactic’ of the United Front with the proven agents of the bourgeoisie active in the working class. This opportunist turn gave rise to healthy reactions from the left currents within the International, notably the German and Italian Lefts, but they themselves still faced considerable obstacles to understanding the new historical conditions. In the German Left, those tendencies who adopted the theory of the ‘death crisis’ mistakenly saw the onset of capitalism’s decadence – which would reveal itself as a whole period of crises and wars – as indicating that the system had come up against a brick wall and would be totally unable to recover. One result of this was the launching of adventurist actions aimed at provoking the proletariat into giving capitalism its death blow; another was the launching of an ephemeral Communist Workers’ International followed by the ‘councilist’ phase, a growing abandonment of the very notion of the class party.

4. The inability of the majority of the German Left to respond to the reflux of the revolutionary wave was a crucial element in the disintegration of most of its organised expressions. By contrast, the Italian Left was able to recognise the profound defeat suffered by the world proletariat by the late 20s and to develop the theoretical and organisational responses demanded by the new phase in the class struggle, encapsulated in the concept of a change in the course of history; in the formation of the Fraction; and in the idea of drawing a ‘bilan’1 (balance sheet) of the revolutionary wave and the programmatic positions of the Communist International. This clarity enabled the Italian Fraction to make priceless theoretical advances, at the same time defending internationalist positions when all around were succumbing to anti-fascism and the march towards war. And yet even the Fraction was not immune from crises and theoretical regressions; by 1938 the review Bilan had been renamed Octobre in anticipation of a new revolutionary wave resulting from the impending war and its ensuing ‘crisis of the war economy’. And in the post-war period, the Gauche Communiste de France - which was born in reaction to the crisis in the Fraction during the war and the immediatist rush to form the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943, and was able in a very fruitful period between 1946 and 1952 to synthesise the best contributions of the Italian and German lefts and to develop a deep understanding of capitalism’s adoption of totalitarian and statified forms - was itself undone by a faulty understanding of the post-war period, wrongly foreseeing the imminent outbreak of a third world war.

5. Despite these serious mistakes, the fundamental approach of Bilan and the GCF remained valid and was indispensible to the formation of the ICC in the early 1970s. The ICC was formed on the basis of a whole number of the key acquisitions of the communist left: not only fundamental class positions such as opposition to national liberation struggles and all capitalist wars, the critique of trade unions and of parliamentarism, the recognition of the capitalist nature of the ‘workers’ parties and the ‘socialist’ countries, but also:

• The organisational heritage developed by Bilan and the GCF, in particular, their distinction between the fraction and the party, and the critique of both councilist and substitutionist conceptions of the role of the organisation; in addition, the recognition of the questions of functioning and of militant behaviour as political questions in their own right;
• A number of indispensable elements for providing the new organisation with a clear perspective for the period opening up before it, in particular: the notion of the historic course and the analysis of the global balance of forces between the classes; the concept of capitalist decadence and the deepening economic contradictions of the system; the drive towards war and the constitution of imperialist blocs; the essential role of state capitalism in the system’s ability to maintain its existence despite its historical obsolescence.

Understanding the historic period

6. The focus of this resolution is the elements guiding our analysis of the international situation since our inception. And here it is clear that the ICC did not merely inherit the acquisitions of the past but was able to develop them in a number of ways:

• Armed with the concept of the historic course, the ICC was able to recognise that the May-June events in France in 1968, and the subsequent international wave of struggles, announced the end of the period of counter-revolution and the opening up of a new course towards massive class confrontations; it was therefore able to continue analysing the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes, the real advances and retreats of the class movement, in this global and historical framework, thus avoiding a purely empirical response to each episode in the international class struggle.
• On the foundations of its theory of capitalist decadence, the groups that came together to form the ICC had also understood that this wave of struggles was not, contrary the theory of the Situationists, provoked by boredom with the consumer society, but by the return of the open crisis of the capitalist system. Throughout its existence, the ICC therefore continued to follow the course of this economic crisis and point to its inexorable deepening.
• Understanding that the resurfacing of the economic crisis would push the capitalist world powers towards new conflicts and preparations for a new world war, the ICC recognised the need to continue with its analysis of the balance of forces between the imperialist blocs, and between the bourgeoisie and the working class, whose resistance to the economic crisis erected a barrier to the system’s capacity to launch a generalised holocaust.
• With its conception of state capitalism, the ICC was able to offer a coherent explanation of the long-drawn out nature of the crisis that emerged in the late 60s, which has seen the bourgeoisie use all kinds of mechanisms (nationalisations, privatisations, massive recourse to credit, etc) to distort the functioning of the law of value and thus to mitigate or postpone the most explosive effects of the economic crisis. By the same token, the ICC has been able to see how the bourgeoisie in its decadent phase has used its position in the state to carry out all kinds of manoeuvres (on the terrain of elections, trade union actions, ideological campaigns etc) to derail the class struggle and hinder the development of class consciousness. And it was this same theoretical framework which enabled the ICC to show the underlying reasons for the crisis in the so-called ‘socialist’ countries and the collapse of the Russian bloc after 1989.
• Drawing together its concept of the historic course and its analysis of the evolution of imperialist conflicts and of the class struggle, the ICC has been the only proletarian organisation to understand that the collapse of the old bloc system was the product of a historic stalemate between the classes and that it marked capitalism’s entry into a new and final phase of its decadence – the phase of decomposition, which in turn has brought new difficulties for the proletariat and new dangers for humanity.

7. Alongside its ability to incorporate and take forward the gains of the past workers’ movement, the ICC, like all previous revolutionary organisations, is also subject to the multiple pressures emanating from the dominant social order, and therefore to the ideological forms these pressures generate - above all, opportunism, centrism, and vulgar materialism. In particular, in its analyses of the world situation, it has fallen prey to the impatience and immediatism which we identified in the organisations of the past (...). These weaknesses have been aggravated in the history of the ICC by the conditions in which it was born, since it suffered from an organic break with the organisations of the past, from the impact of the Stalinist counter-revolution which introduced a false vision of the struggle and of proletarian morality, and from the powerful influence of the petty bourgeois rebellion of the 1960s – the petty bourgeoisie, as a class with no historic future, being almost by definition the embodiment of immediatism. Furthermore, these tendencies have been exacerbated in the period of decomposition which is both the product of and an active factor in the loss of perspectives about the future.

The class struggle

8. From the beginning, the danger of immediatism expressed itself in the ICC’s evaluation of the balance of forces between the classes. While correctly identifying the period after 1968 as the end of the counter-revolution, its characterisation of the new historic course as a “course towards revolution” implied a linear and rapid ascent from the immediate struggles to the overthrow of capitalism; and even after this formulation was corrected, the ICC maintained the view that the ensuing waves of struggle between 1978 and 1989, despite temporary retreats, amounted to a semi-permanent proletarian offensive. The immense difficulties of the class in moving from defensive movements to the politicisation of its struggles and the development of a revolutionary perspective were not sufficiently emphasised and analysed. Even though the ICC was able to recognise that the onset of decomposition and the collapse of the blocs would involve a profound retreat in the class struggle, we were still strongly influenced by the hope that the continued deepening of the economic crisis would bring back the ‘waves’ of struggle of the 70s and 80s; and while we were right in seeing that there was a turning point in the reflux after 2003, we often underestimated the huge problems facing the new generation of the working class in developing a clear perspective for its struggles, a factor affecting both the class as a whole and its politicised minorities. These errors of analysis have also fed some false and even opportunist approaches to intervention in the struggle and the construction of the organisation.

9. Thus if the theory of decomposition (which in fact was the last legacy to the ICC from comrade MC) has been a unique and indispensable guide to understanding the present period, the ICC has not always taken on board all its implications. This is particularly true when it has come to recognising and explaining the difficulties of the working class since the 1990s. While we were able to see how the bourgeoisie had used the effects of decomposition to mount huge ideological campaigns against the working class – most notably the barrage of noise about the ‘death of communism’ after the collapse of the eastern bloc – we did not go deeply enough into examining how the very process of decomposition tended to undermine the proletariat’s self-confidence and solidarity. In addition, we struggled to understand the impact on class identity of the break-up of old proletarian concentrations in some of the old capitalist heartlands and their re-location to the formerly ‘underdeveloped’ nations. And while we have had at least a partial understanding of the necessity for the proletariat to politicise its struggles if it is to resist the weight of decomposition, it has only been late in the day that we have begun to grasp that for the proletariat the recovery of its class identity and its adoption of a political perspective has a vital cultural and moral dimension.

The economic crisis

10. It’s probably in the area of following the economic crisis that themost obvious difficulties of the ICC have been expressed. In particular:

• At the more general level, a tendency to fall into a reified view of the capitalist economy as a machine governed solely by objective laws, obscuring the reality that capital is first and foremost a social relation and that the actions of human beings – in the form of social classes – can never be entirely abstracted from an analysis of the course of the economic crisis. This is particularly true in the epoch of state capitalism where the ruling class is permanently faced with the need to intervene in the economy and even to counter its ‘immanent’ laws, while at the same time being compelled to factor in the danger of the class struggle as an element in its economic policies.
• A reductionist understanding the economic theory of Rosa Luxemburg, coming to the false extrapolation that capitalism had already exhausted all possibilities of expansion by 1914 (or even by the 1960s). In reality when she formulated her theory in 1913 she recognised that there were still major areas of non-capitalist economy remaining to be exploited, even if it was less and less possible for this to take place without direct conflict between the imperialist powers.
• While recognising that with the reduction of these fields for its expansion, capitalism was more and more compelled to resort to the palliative of debt, this formula has sometimes become a catch-all explanation which did not go back to the underlying question of credit in the accumulation of capital; more seriously, the organisation has repeatedly predicted that the limits to debt had already been reached.
• All these elements were part of a view of the automatic collapse of capitalism,which became particularly prevalent in the wake of the 2008 ‘credit crunch’. More than one internal report or article in our press proclaimed that capitalism had already run out of options and was heading towards a kind of economic paralysis, an overnight collapse. In reality, as Rosa herself insisted, the real catastrophe of capitalism is that it subjects humanity to a long drawn out agonising decline, plunging society into an increasing barbarism, so that the ‘end’ of capitalism will not be a purely economic seizure but will inevitably be played out on the terrain of militarism and war, unless it is consciously brought about by the proletarian revolution (and to Rosa’s prognosis we must also add the increasing threat of ecological devastation, which will certainly accelerate the drive towards war). This idea of a sudden and complete collapse also forgets our own analysis of the capacity of the ruling class, through state capitalism, to prolong its system through all kinds of political and financial manipulations.
• The denial, in some of our key texts, of any possibilities of expansion for capitalism in its decadent phase also made it difficult for the organisation to explain the dizzying growth of China and other ‘new economies’ in the period since the downfall of the old blocs. While these developments do not, as many have argued, call into question the decadence of capitalism, and indeed are a clear expression of it, they have disproved the assertion that in the decadent period there is strictly no possibility of industrial take-off in any of the ‘peripheral’ regions. While we were able to refute some of the more facile myths about ‘globalisation’ in the phase following the collapse of the blocs (from the right seeing it as a new and glorious chapter in the ascent of capitalism, from the left as a basis for reviving old nationalist and state capitalist solutions), we were not able to discern the kernel of truth in the globalisation mythology: that the removal of the old autarkic model did open up new spheres for capital investment, including the exploitation of a huge new fund of labour power reared outside of directly capitalist social relations.
• These errors of analysis are coupled to the fact that the organisation has found considerable difficulty in developing its understanding of the economic question in a genuinely associated manner. A tendency towards economic questions being the sphere of ‘experts’ became apparent in the debate about the ’30 glorious years’ in the first decade of the 21st century. Although the ICC certainly needed to understand and explain why it had rejected the idea that the reconstruction of war-shattered economies in itself explains the survival of the system in decadence, in practice this debate was a failed attempt to grapple with the problem. It was not well understood inside and outside the organisation and has left us theoretically rudderless. It needs to be re-framed in relation to the whole period of decadence, with the aim of clarifying the role of the war economy and the meaning of the irrationality of war in decadence.

Imperialist tensions

11. In the sphere of imperialist tensions, the ICC has in general had a very solid framework of analysis, showing the different phases of the confrontation between the blocs in the 70s and 80s; and, despite being somewhat ‘surprised’ by the sudden collapse of the Eastern bloc and the USSR after 1989, it had already developed the theoretical tools for analysing the inherent weaknesses of the Stalinist regimes; linking this to its understanding of the question of militarism and to the concept of decomposition that it had begun to elaborate in the latter half of the 80s, the ICC was the first in the proletarian milieu to predict the end of the bloc system, the decline of US hegemony, and the very rapid development of ‘each for themselves’ at the imperialist level. While remaining aware that the tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs had not disappeared after 1989, we showed the difficulties facing even the most likely candidate for the role of bloc leader against the US, the newly reunified Germany, in ever being able to fulfill this imperialist ambition. However, we were less able to foresee the capacity of Russia to re-emerge as a force to be reckoned with on the world arena, and most importantly, we have been very late in seeing the rise of China as a new and significant player in the great power rivalries which have developed over the past two or three decades – a failure closely connected to our problems in recognising the reality of China’s economic advance.

A better understanding of still valid perspectives

12. Taken as a whole, the existence of all these weaknesses should not be a factor of discouragement, but a stimulus for undertaking a programme of theoretical development which will enable the ICC to deepen its grasp of all aspects of the world situation. The beginnings of a critical balance sheet of the last 40 years undertaken in the congress reports, the discussion on the Theses on morality2 the attempts to go to the root of our method for analysing the class struggle and the economic crisis, the redefinition of our role as an organisation in the period of capitalist decomposition – all these are signposts pointing towards a real cultural renaissance in the ICC. In the coming period, the ICC will also have to return to such fundamental theoretical questions as the nature of imperialism and decadence in order to provide the most solid framework for our analyses of the international situation.

13. The first step in the critical balance sheet of 40 years of analysis of the world situation is to recognise our errors and to begin digging down to their origins. It would therefore be premature to try to apply all their implications to the current world situation and to the perspectives for the future. Nevertheless, we can say that despite our weaknesses, the fundamentals of our perspectives remain valid:

• At the level of the economy, there is every reason to expect that the economic crisis will continue to deepen and that, while there will be no final economic apocalypse, there will be phases marked by severe convulsions that shake the system to the core, as well as the continuation of the situation of precarity and endemic unemployment that already weigh heavily on the working class. Certainly we cannot underestimate the resilience of this system and the determination of the ruling class to keep it going despite its historical obsolescence, but as we have always said, the very remedies that capital applies to its mortal sickness, while bringing some short term relief, tend to make the patient even more sick in the long run.
• At the level of imperialist tensions, we are currently seeing a real acceleration of military chaos, most notably in Ukraine, the Middle East,Africa and the China sea, bringing with them an increasing threat of ‘blow back’ to the central countries (as with the recent killings in Paris and Copenhagen). The stage of imperialist conflict is growing larger and so are the alliances being forged to wage them, as we can see in the case of the conflict between Russia and the ‘west’ over Ukraine, or in the growing cooperation between Russia and China over the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. But these alliances remain very contingent and lack the conditions for evolving into stable blocs. The primary danger facing humanity is not from a classic world war but from a degeneration of regional conflicts into an uncontrollable spiral of destruction.
• The premises of this spiral are already discernible and they have the most negative consequences for the proletariat, whose ‘peripheral’ fractions are being directly mobilised or massacred in the present conflicts, and whose central fractions find themselves incapable of reacting to the growing barbarism, reinforcing the tendency to fall into atomisation and despair. But despite all the very real dangers posed by the advancing tide of decomposition, the potential for the working class to respond to this unprecedented crisis of humanity have not been exhausted, as indicated by the best moments of the student movement in France in 2006 or the social revolts of 2011, where the proletariat, even without clearly recognising itself as a class, showed evidence of its capacity to unify across all its divisions, in the streets and in the general assemblies. Above all, the young proletarians engaged in these movements, insofar as they have begun to challenge the brutality of capitalist social relations and to pose the question of a new society, have taken the first timid steps towards reaffirming that the class struggle is not only an economic struggle, but a political struggle; and that its ultimate aim remains what was outlined so audaciously in the Manifesto of 1848: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the inauguration of a new human culture and a new morality.

The article that follows is a document under discussion in the ICC, written in June of this year, a few weeks before the “Brexit” referendum in the UK. The corresponding article in this issue of the Review is an attempt to apply the ideas put forward in this text to the concrete situations posed by the referendum result in Britain and by the candidature of Trump in the US.

We are presently witnessing a wave of political populism in the old central countries of capitalism. In states where this phenomenon is more long established, such as France or Switzerland, the right wing populists have become the biggest single political party at the electoral level. More striking however is the encroachment of populism in countries which until now were known for the political stability and efficiency of the ruling class: the USA, Britain, Germany. In these countries, it is only very recently that populism has succeeded in having a direct and serious impact.

The contemporary upsurge of right wing populism

In the United States the political establishment initially strongly underestimated the presidential candidature of Donald Trump in the Republican Party. His bid was at first opposed more or less openly both by the established party hierarchy and by the religious right. They were all taken aback by the popular support he found both in the Bible belt and in the old urban industrial centres, in particular among parts of the “white” working class. The ensuing media campaigns designed to cut him down to size, led among others by the Wall Street Journal and the East Coast media and financial oligarchies, only increased his popularity. The partial ruining of important layers of the middle, but also of the working classes, many of whom lost their savings and even their homes through the financial and property crashes of 2007/08, has provoked outrage against the old political establishment which rapidly intervened to save the banking sector, while leaving to their fate those small savers who had been trying to become owners of their own home.

The promises of Trump to support small savers, to maintain health services, to tax stock exchange and financial big business, and to keep out immigrants feared as potential competitors by parts of the poor, have found an echo both among Christian religious fundamentalists and more left, traditionally Democratic voters who, only a few years before, would not even have dreamt they could vote for such a politician.

Almost half a century of bourgeois political “reformism”, during which candidates of the left, whether at the national or municipal/local level, whether in parties or trade unions, having been elected to allegedly defend workers’ interests, consistently upheld those of capital instead, have prepared the ground for the proverbial “man on the street” in America to consider supporting a multi-millionaire like Trump, with the assumption that he at least cannot be “bought” by the ruling class.

In Britain the main expression of populism at the moment seems to be not a particular candidate or political party (although the UKIP1of Nigel Farage has become a major player on the political stage), but the popularity of the proposal to leave the European Union, and of deciding this by referendum. The fact that this option is opposed by most of the mainstream of the finance world (City of London) and of British Industry has, here also, tended to increase the appeal of “Brexit” among parts of the population. Apart from representing particular interests of parts of the ruling class much more closely tied to the former colonies (the Commonwealth) than to continental Europe, one of the motors of this opposition current seems to be to take the wind out of the sails of new right wing populist movements. Perhaps the likes of Boris Johnson and other Tory “Brexit” advocates would, in the event of an eventual exit, be the ones who would then have to salvage whatever can be saved by trying to negotiate some kind of a close associated status to the European Union, presumably along the lines of that of Switzerland (which usually adopts EU regulations, without however having any say in formulating them).

But it is also possible that politicians of the Conservative Party have themselves become infested by the populist mood, which, in Britain also, gained ground rapidly after the financial and housing crises which negatively affected significant parts of the population.

In Germany, where, after World War II, the bourgeoisie has always succeeded until now in preventing the establishment of parliamentary parties to the right of Christian Democracy, a new populist movement appeared on the scene, both on the streets (Pegida) and at the electoral level (Alternative für Deutschland) in response, not to the “financial” crisis of 2007/08 (which Germany weathered relatively unscathed) but to the ensuing “Euro-Crisis”, understood by part of the population as a direct threat to the stability of the joint European currency, and thus to the savings of millions of people.

But no sooner was this crisis defused, at least for the moment, than there began a massive influx of refugees, provoked in particular by the Syrian civil and imperialist war and by the conflict with ISIS in the north of Iraq. This re-energised a populist movement which was beginning to falter. Although a sizeable majority of the population still support the “welcoming culture” of chancellor Merkel and of many leaders of the German economy, attacks against refugee shelters have multiplied in many parts of the country, while in parts of the former GDR2 a veritable pogrom mood has developed.

The degree to which the rise of populism is linked to the discrediting of the party political establishment is illustrated by the recent presidential elections in Austria, the second round of which was fought between candidates of the Greens and the populist right, whereas the main parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, who together have run the country since the end of World War II, both suffered an all time electoral debacle.

In the wake of the Austrian Elections, political observers in Germany have concluded that a continuation of the present Christian and Social Democratic coalition in Berlin after the next general elections would be likely to further favour the rise of populism. In any case, whether through Grand Coalitions between left and right parties (or “cohabitations” like in France), or through the alternation between left and right governments, after almost half a century of chronic economic crisis and around thirty years of capitalist decomposition, large parts of the population no longer believe there is a significant difference between the established left and right parties. On the contrary, these parties are seen as constituting a kind of cartel defending their own interests, and those of the very rich, at the expense of those of the population as a whole, and of those of the state. Because the working class, after 1968, failed to politicise its struggles and to take further significant steps towards developing its own revolutionary perspective, this disillusionment presently above all fans the flames of populism.

In the Western industrial countries, in particular after 9/11 in the USA, Islamist terrorism has become another factor accelerating populism. At present this poses a problem for the bourgeoisie in particular in France, which has once again become a focus of such attacks. The need to counter the continuing rise of the Front National was one of the motives for the anti-terrorist state of emergency and for the war language of François Hollande after the recent attacks, posing as the leader of an alleged international coalition against ISIS. The loss of confidence of the population in the determination and the capacity of the ruling class to protect its citizens at the security (not only the economic) level is one of the causes of the present populist wave.

The roots of contemporary right wing populism are thus diverse and vary from country to country. In the former Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe they seem to be linked to the backwardness and parochialism of political and economic life under the previous regimes, as well as to the traumatising brutality of their transition to a more effective, Western style capitalism after 1989.

In as important a country as Poland the populist right already runs the government, while in Hungary (a centre of the first wave of the proletarian world revolution in 1917-23), the regime of Victor Orban more or less openly promotes and protects pogromist attacks.

More generally, reactions against “globalisation” have been a leading factor of the rise of populism. In Western Europe, the mood “against Brussels” and the EU have long belonged to the staple diet of such movements. But today, such an atmosphere has also appeared in the United States, where Trump is not the only politician threatening to ditch the TTIP3 free trade agreement being negotiated between Europe and North America.

This reaction against “globalisation” should not be confused with the kind of neo-Keynesian correction to the (real) excesses of neo-liberalism propounded by representatives of the left such as ATTAC. Whereas the latter put forward a responsible coherent alternative economic policy for the national capital, the populist critique represents more a kind of political and economic vandalism, such as already partly manifested itself as a moment of the rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in referendums in France, the Netherlands and Ireland.

The possibility of government participation by contemporary populism and the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The populist parties are bourgeois fractions, part of the totalitarian state capitalist apparatus. What they propagate is bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology and behaviour: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, cultural conservatism. As such, they represent a strengthening of the domination of the ruling class and its state over society. They widen the scope of the party apparatus of democracy and add fire-power to its ideological bombardment. They revitalise the electoral mystification and the attractiveness of voting, both through the voters they mobilise themselves and through those who mobilise to vote against them. Although they are partly the product of the growing disillusionment with the traditional parties, they can also help to reinforce the image of the latter, who in contrast to the populists can present themselves as being more humanitarian and democratic. To the extent that their discourse resembles that of the fascists in the 1930s, their upsurge tends to give new life to anti-fascism. This is particularly the case in Germany, where the coming to power of the “fascist” party led to the greatest catastrophe in its national history, with the loss of almost half of its territory and its status as a major military power, the destruction of its cities, and the virtually irreparable damage to its international prestige through the perpetration of crimes which have gone down as the worst in the history of humanity.

Nevertheless, and as we have seen until now, above all in the old heartlands of capitalism, the leading fractions of the bourgeoisie have been doing their best to limit the rise of populism and, in particular, to prevent if possible its participation in government. After years of mostly unsuccessful defensive struggles on their own class terrain, certain sectors of the working class today even seem to feel that you can pressurise and scare the ruling class more by voting for the populist right than by workers’ struggles. The basis for this impression is that the “establishment” really does react with alarm to the electoral success of the populists. Why this reticence of the bourgeoisie in face of “one of its own”?

Until now we have tended to assume that this is above all because of the historic course, (i.e. the still undefeated status of the present generation of the proletariat). Today it is necessary to re-examine this framework critically in face of the development of social reality.

It is true that the establishment of populist governments in Poland and Hungary is relatively insignificant compared to what happens in the old Western capitalist heartlands. More significant however is that this development has not for the moment led to a major conflict between Poland and Hungary and NATO or the EU. On the contrary, Austria, under a social democratic chancellor, after initially imitating the “welcoming culture” of Angela Merkel in summer 2015, soon followed the example of Hungary in erecting fences on its borders. And the Hungarian prime minister has become a favourite discussion partner of the Bavarian CSU who are part of Merkel’s government. We can speak of a process of mutual adaptation between populist governments and major state institutions. Despite their anti-European demagogy, there is no sign for the moment of these populist governments wanting to take Poland or Hungary out of the EU. On the contrary, what they now propagate is the spreading of populism within the European Union. What this means, in terms of concrete interests, is that “Brussels” should interfere less in national affairs, while continuing to transfer the same or even more subventions to Warsaw and Budapest. For its part, the EU is adapting itself to these populist governments, who sometimes are praised for their “constructive contributions” at complicated EU summits. And while insisting on the maintenance of a certain minimum of “democratic standards”, Brussels has refrained for the moment from imposing any of the threatened sanctions on these countries.

As for Western Europe, Austria, it should be recalled, was already a forerunner in once including the party of Jörg Haider as junior partner in a coalition government. Its aim in so doing – that of discrediting the populist party by making it assume responsibility for running the state – partly succeeded. Temporarily. Today however the FPÖ4, at the electoral level, is stronger than ever before, almost winning the recent presidential elections. Of course in Austria the president plays a mainly symbolic role. But this is not the case in France, the second economic power and the second concentration of the proletariat in continental Western Europe. The world bourgeoisie is looking anxiously towards the next presidential election in that country, where electorally the Front National is the leading party.

Many of the political experts of the bourgeoisie have already concluded from the apparent failure of the Republican Party in the USA to prevent the candidature of Trump, that sooner or later the participation of populists in western governments has become more or less inevitable, and that it would be better to start to prepare for such an eventuality. This debate is a first reaction to the recognition that the attempts, to date, to exclude or limit populism have not only reached their own limit but have even begun to have the opposite effect.

Democracy is the ideology best suited to developed capitalist societies and the single most important weapon against the class consciousness of the proletariat. But today the bourgeoisie is confronted with the paradox that, by continuing to keep at arms length parties which do not abide to its democratic rules of “political correctness”, it risks seriously damaging its own democratic image. How to justify the maintenance in opposition indefinitely of parties with a sizable, eventually even with a majority share of votes, without discrediting oneself and getting caught up in inextricable argumentative contradictions? Moreover, democracy is not only an ideology but a highly efficient means of class rule – not least because it is able to recognise and adjust to new political impulses coming from society as a whole.

It is in this framework that the ruling class today poses the perspective of possible populist involvement in government in relation to the contemporary balance of class forces with the proletariat. Present trends indicate that the big bourgeoisie itself does not think that a still undefeated working class necessarily excludes such an option.

To begin with, such an eventuality would not mean the abolition of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, such as was the case in Italy, Germany or Spain in the 1920/30s after the defeat of the proletariat. Even in Eastern Europe today the existing right wing populist governments have not tried to outlaw the other parties or establish a system of concentration camps. Such measures would indeed not be accepted by the present generation of workers, particularly in the western countries, and perhaps not even in Poland or Hungary.

In addition however, and on the other hand, the working class, although not definitively historically defeated, is presently weakened at the level of its class consciousness, its combativeness and its class identity. The underlying historical context here is above all the defeat of the first world revolutionary wave at the end of World War I and the depth and length of the counter-revolution which followed it.

In this context, the first cause of this weakening is the inability of the class, for the moment, to find an adequate answer, in its defensive struggles, to the present stage of state capitalist management, that of “globalisation”. In its defensive struggles, the workers rightly sense that they are immediately confronted with world capitalism as a whole. Because today not only trade and commerce but also, and for the first time, production is globalised, the bourgeoisie can rapidly reply to any local or national scale proletarian resistance by transferring production elsewhere. This apparently overwhelming instrument of the disciplining of labour can only effectively be counteracted by international class struggle, a level of combat which the class in the foreseeable future is still incapable of attaining.

The second cause of this weakening is the inability of the class to continue to politicise its struggles after the initial impetus of 1968/69. What resulted is the absence of the development of any perspective for a better life or a better society: the present phase of decomposition. In particular, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe appeared to confirm the impossibility of an alternative to capitalism.

During a brief period, maybe from 2003 to 2008, there were tender, relatively inconspicuous first signs of a beginning of the necessarily long and difficult process of proletarian recovery from these blows. In particular, the question of class solidarity, not least between the generations, began to be put forward. The anti-CPE5 movement of 2006 was the high point of this phase, because it succeeded in making the French bourgeoisie back down, and because the example of this movement and its success inspired sectors of youth in other European countries, including Germany and Britain.

However, these first fragile buds of a possible proletarian recovery were soon frozen to death by a third negative wave of events of historic importance in the post 1968 phase, constituting a third major setback for the proletariat: the economic calamity of 2007/08, followed by the present wave of war refugees and other migrants – the biggest since the end of World War II.

The specificity of the 07/08 crisis was that it began as a financial crisis of enormous proportions. As a result, for millions of workers, one of its worst effects, in some cases even the main one, was not direct wage cuts, tax hikes or mass lay-offs imposed by employers or the state, but loss of homes, savings, insurance policies, and so on. These losses, at the financial level, appear as those of citizens of bourgeois society, not specific to the working class. Their causes remain unclear, favouring personalisation and conspiracy theories.

The specificity of the refugee crisis is that it takes place in the context of “Fortress Europe” (and Fortress North America). As opposed to in the 1930s, since 1968 the world capitalist crisis has been accompanied by an international state capitalist management under the leadership of the bourgeoisie of the old capitalist countries. As a result, after almost half a century of chronic crisis, Western Europe and North America still appear as havens of peace, prosperity and stability, at least by comparison with the “world outside”. In such a context, it is not only the fear of the competition of the immigrants which alarms parts of the population, but also the fear that the chaos and lawlessness perceived as coming from the outside, will, along with refugees, gain access to the “civilised” world. At the present level of the extension of class consciousness it is too difficult for most workers to understand that both the chaotic barbarism on the capitalist periphery and its increasing encroachment on the central countries are the result of world capitalism and of the policies of the leading capitalist countries themselves.

This context of the finance, Euro and then the refugee crises have, for the moment, nipped in the bud the first embryonic strivings towards a renewal of class solidarity. This is perhaps at least partly why the Indignados struggle, although it lasted longer and in some ways appeared to develop more in depth than the anti-CPE, failed to stop the attacks in Spain, and could so easily be exploited by the bourgeoisie to create a new left political party: Podemos.

The main result, at the political level, of this new surge of decline in solidarity from 2008 to today has been the strengthening of populism. The latter is not only a symptom of the further weakening of proletarian class consciousness and combativeness, but itself constitutes a further active factor in this. Not only because populism makes inroads into the ranks of the proletariat. In fact, the central sectors of the class still strongly resist this influence, as the German example illustrates. But also because the bourgeoisie profits from this heterogeneity of the class to further divide and confuse the proletariat. Today we seem to be approaching a situation which, at a first glance, has certain similarities with the 1930s. Of course, the proletariat has not been defeated politically and physically in a central country, as took place in Germany at the time. As a result, anti-populism cannot play exactly the same role as that of antifascism in the 1930s. It also seems to be a characteristic of the phase of decomposition that such false alternatives themselves appear less sharply contoured than before. Nevertheless, in a country like Germany, where eight years ago the first steps in politicisation of a small minority of searching youth were being made under the influence of the slogan “down with capitalism, the nation and the state”, today they are being made in the light of the defence of the refugees and the “welcoming culture” in confrontation with the neo-Nazis and the populist right.

In the whole post 1968 period, the weight of anti-fascism was at least attenuated by the fact that the concretisation of the fascist danger lay either in the past, or was represented by more or less marginalised right wing extremists. Today the rise of right wing populism as a potentially mass phenomenon gives the ideology of the defence of democracy a new, much more tangible and important target against which it can mobilise.

We will conclude this part by arguing that the present growth of populism and of its influence on bourgeois politics as a whole is also made possible by the present weakness of the proletariat.

The present debate within the bourgeoisie about the rise of populism

Although the bourgeois debate about how to deal with a resurgent populism is only beginning, we can already mention some of the parameters being put forward. If we look at the debate in Germany – the country where the bourgeoisie is perhaps the most aware and vigilant about such questions – we can identify three aspects being put forward.

Firstly that it is a mistake for the “democrats” to try and fight populism by adopting its language and proposals. According to this argument, it was this copying of the populists which partly explains the fiasco of the governing parties at the recent elections in Austria, and which helps to explain the failure of the traditional parties in France to stop the advance of the FN. The populist voters, they argue, prefer the original to any copy. Instead of making concessions, they argue, it is necessary to emphasise the antagonisms between “constitutional patriotism” and “chauvinist nationalism”, between cosmopolitan openness and xenophobia, between tolerance and authoritarianism, between modernity and conservatism, between humanism and barbarism, According to this line of argumentation, Western democracies today are “mature” enough to cope with modern populism while maintaining a majority for “democracy” if they put their positions forward in an “offensive” manner. This is the position for instance of the present German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Secondly, it is insisted, the electorate should be able to recognise again the difference between right and left, correcting the present impression of a cartel of the established parties. This idea, we suspect, was already the motivation for the preparation, over the past two years, by the CDU-SPD6 coalition, of a possible future Christian Democratic coalition with the Greens after the next general elections. The exit from atomic power after the Fukushima catastrophe announced not in Japan but in Germany, and the recent euphoric support of the Greens for a “welcoming culture” towards refugees associated not with the SPD but with Angela Merkel, were the main steps to date of this strategy. However, the unexpectedly rapid electoral rise of the AfD today threatens the realisation of such a strategy (the present attempt to bring the liberal FDP7 back into parliament might be in response to this, since this party could eventually join a “Black-Green” coalition). In opposition the SPD, the party which in Germany led the “neo-liberal revolution” with its Agenda 2010 under Schröder, could then adopt a more “left” stance. As opposed to the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the conservative right under Thatcher and Reagan imposed the necessary “neo-liberal” measures, in many European continental countries the left (as the more political, responsible and disciplined parties) had to participate or even lead their implementation.

Today however it has become clear that the necessary stage of neo-liberal globalisation was accompanied by excesses which sooner or later will have to be corrected. This was particularly the case after 1989, when the collapse of the Stalinist regimes appeared overwhelmingly to confirm all the ordo-liberal8 theses about the unsuitability of a state capitalist bureaucracy to run the economy. Such excesses are now increasingly been pointed to by thoughtful bourgeois commentators. For instance, it is not absolutely indispensable for the survival of capitalism that a tiny fraction of society owns almost all the wealth. This can be damaging, not only socially and politically but even economically, since the very rich, instead of spending the lion’s share of their wealth, are above all concerned about preserving its value, thus augmenting speculation and withholding solvent purchasing power. Equally, it is not absolutely necessary for capitalism that the competition between nation states takes, to the present extent, the form of the cutting taxes and state budgets so that the state can no longer undertake necessary investments. In other words, the idea is that, through an eventual comeback of a kind of neo-Keynesian correction, the left, whether in its traditional form or through new parties like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, might regain a certain material basis for posing as an alternative to the ordo-liberal conservative right.

It is important however to note that today’s reflections within the ruling class about a possible future role of the left are not in the first instance inspired by fear (in the immediate) of the working class. On the contrary, many elements of the present situation in the main capitalist centres indicate that the first aspect determining the policy of the ruling class is presently the problem of populism.

The third aspect is that, like the British Tories around Boris Johnson, the CSU9, the “sister” party of Merkel’s CDU, thinks that parts of the traditional party apparatus should themselves apply elements of populist policy. We should note that the CSU is no longer the expression of traditional Bavarian, petty bourgeois backwardness. On the contrary, alongside the adjacent southern province of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria is today economically the most modern part of Germany, the backbone of its high-tech and export industries, the production base of companies such as Siemens, BMW or Audi.

This third option propagated in Munich of course collides with the first one mentioned above propounded by Angela Merkel, and the present head-on confrontations between the two parties are not just electoral manoeuvres or (real) differences between particular economic interests, but also differences of approach. In view of the chancellor’s present determination not to change her mind, certain representatives of the CSU have even begun to “think aloud” about putting up their own candidates in other parts of Germany in opposition to the CDU at the next general elections.

The idea of the CSU, like that of parts of the British Conservatives, is that if it has become inevitable, to a certain extent, that populist measures are taken, it is better if they are applied by an experienced and responsible party. In this manner, such often irresponsible measures could at least be limited on the one hand, and compensated for by auxiliary measures on the other hand.

Despite the real friction between Merkel and Seehofer, as between Cameron and Johnson, we should not overlook the element of division of labor between them (one part “offensively” defending democratic values, the other recognising the validity of the “democratic expression of enraged citizens”).

At all events, what this discourse, taken as a whole, illustrates, is that the leading fractions of the bourgeoisie are beginning to reconcile themselves to the idea of populist governmental policies of some kind and to some degree, as is already partly being practised by the Brexit Tories or the CSU.

Populism and Decomposition

As we have seen, there has been, and there remains a massive reticence of the main fractions of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe and North America towards populism. What are its causes? After all, these movements in no way put capitalism in question. Nothing they propagate is foreign to the bourgeois world. Unlike Stalinism, populism does not even put in question the present forms of capitalist property. It is an “oppositional” movement of course. But so, in a certain sense, were Social Democracy and Stalinism, without this preventing them from being responsible members of governments of leading capitalist states.

To understand this reticence, it is necessary to recognise here the fundamental difference between present day populism and the left of capital. The left, even when they are not former organisations of the workers’ movement (the Greens for instance), although they can be the best representatives of nationalism and the best mobilisers of the proletariat for war, base their attractiveness on the propagation of former or distorted ideals of the workers’ movement, or at least of the bourgeois revolution. In other words, as chauvinist and even anti-Semitic as they can be, they do not deny in principle the “brotherhood of humanity” and the possibility of improving the state of the world as a whole. In fact, even the most openly reactionary neo-liberal radicals claim to pursue this goal. This is necessarily the case. From the onset, the claim of the bourgeoisie to be the worthy representative of society as a whole was always based on this perspective.

None of this means that the left of capital, as part of the rotten society, does not also put forward racist, anti-Semitic poison of a similar kind to the right wing populists!

As opposed to this, populism embodies the renunciation of such an “ideal”. What it propagates is the survival of some at the expense of others. All of its arrogance revolves around this “realism” it is so proud of. As such, it is the product of the bourgeois world and its world view – but above all of its decomposition.

Secondly, the left of capital proposes a more or less coherent and realistic economic, political and social programme for the national capital. As opposed to this, the problem with political populism is not that it makes no concrete proposals, but that it proposes one thing and its opposite, one policy today and another tomorrow. Instead of being a political alternative, it represents the decomposition of bourgeois politics.

This is why, at least in the sense the term is being used here, it makes little sense to speak of the existence of a left populism as a kind of pendant to that of the right.

Despite similarities and parallels, history never repeats itself. The populism of today is not the same thing as the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. However, fascism then and populism now have, in some ways, similar causes. In particular, both are the expression of the decomposition of the bourgeois world. With the historic experience of fascism and above all of national socialism behind it, the bourgeoisie of the old central capitalist countries today is acutely aware both of these similarities, and of the potential danger they represent to the stability of capitalist order.

Parallels to the rise of national socialism in Germany

Fascism in Italy and in Germany had in common the triumph of the counter-revolution and the insane fantasy of the dissolution of the classes into a mystical community after the prior defeat (mainly through the weapons of democracy and the left of capital) of the revolutionary wave. In common also is their open contestation of the imperialist carve up and the irrationality of many of their war goals. But despite these similarities (on the basis of which Bilan was able to recognise the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the change in the historic course, opening the way for the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat for world war), it is worthwhile – in order to better understand contemporary populism – to look more closely at some of the specificities of historic developments in Germany at the time, including where they differed from the much less irrational Italian fascism.

Firstly, the shaking of the established authority of the ruling classes, and the loss of confidence of the population in its traditional political, economic, military, ideological and moral leadership was much more profound than anywhere else (except Russia), since Germany was the main loser of the first world war, and emerged from it in a state of economic, financial and even physical exhaustion.

Secondly, in Germany much more than in Italy, a real revolutionary situation had arisen. The way the bourgeoisie was able to nip in the bud, at an early stage, this potential, should not lead us to underestimate the depth of this revolutionary process, and the intensity of the hopes and longings which it awakened and which accompanied it. It took almost six years, until 1923, for the German and the world bourgeoisie to liquidate all the traces of this effervescence. Today it is difficult for us to imagine the degree of disappointment caused by this defeat, and the bitterness it left in its wake. The loss of confidence of the population in its own ruling class was thus soon followed by the much more cruel disillusionment of the working class towards its own (former) organisations (social democracy and trade unions), and disappointment about the young KPD10 and the Communist International.

Thirdly, economic calamities played a much more central role in the rise of National Socialism than was the case with fascism in Italy. The hyper-inflation of 1923 in Germany (and elsewhere in Central Europe) undermined the confidence in the currency as the universal equivalent. The great depression which began in 1929 thus took place only six years after the trauma of hyper-inflation. Not only did the great depression hit a working class in Germany whose class consciousness and militancy were already smashed; the way the masses, intellectually and emotionally, experienced this new episode of the economic crisis was to an important extent modified, pre-formatted so to speak, by the events of 1923.

The crises in particular of decadent capitalism affect every aspect of economic (and social) life. They are crises of (over) production – of capital, commodities, of labour power – and of appropriation and “distribution”, financial and monetary speculation and crashes included. But unlike expressions of the crisis that appear more at the point of production, such as redundancies and wage cuts, the negative effects on the population at the financial and monetary levels are much more abstract and obscure. Yet their effects can be equally devastating for parts of the population, just as their repercussions can be even more world-wide, and spread even faster than ones taking place closer to the point of production. In other words, whereas the latter expressions of the crisis tend to favour the development of class consciousness, those coming more from the financial and monetary spheres tend to do the opposite. Without the aid of marxism it is not easy to grasp the real links between for instance a financial crash in Manhattan and the resulting default of an insurance company or even a state on another continent. Such dramatic systems of interdependence blindly created between countries, populations, social classes, which function behind the backs of the protagonists, easily lead to personalisation and social paranoia. That the recent sharpening of the crisis of capitalism was also a financial and banking crisis, linked to speculative bubbles and their bursting, is not just bourgeois propaganda. That a speculative false manoeuvre in Tokyo or New York can trigger off the collapse of a bank in Iceland, or rock the property market in Ireland, is not fiction but reality. Only capitalism creates such life or death inter-dependence between people who are completely indifferent to each other, between protagonists who are not even aware of each others’ existence. It is extremely difficult for human beings to cope with such levels of abstraction, whether intellectually or emotionally. One way to cope is personalisation, ignoring the real mechanisms of capitalism: it is all the fault of evil forces who deliberately set out to harm us. It is all the more important to understand this distinction between these different kinds of attacks today when, no longer mainly the petty bourgeoisie and the so-called middle classes lost their savings, as in 1923, but millions of workers who own or try to own their own homes, have savings, insurance policies etc.

In 1932 the German bourgeoisie, which already planned to go to war mainly against Russia, found itself confronted by a National Socialism which had become a real mass movement. To a certain extent the bourgeoisie was trapped, the prisoner of a situation it was largely responsible for having created. It could have opted for going to war under a Social-Democratic government, with the support of its trade unions, in a possible coalition with France and even Britain, initially even as a junior partner. But this would have entailed confronting or at least neutralising the Nazi movement, which had not only become too big to handle, but also mainly regrouped that part of the population which was longing for war. In this situation, the German bourgeoisie made the mistake of believing it could make use of the Nazi movement at will.

National Socialism was not simply a regime of mass terror exercised by a small minority against the rest of the population. It had a mass base of its own. It was not only an instrument of capital imposed on the population. It was also its opposite: a blind instrument of atomised, pulverised and paranoiac masses wanting to impose itself on capital.

National Socialism therefore was prepared, to an important extent, by the profound loss of confidence of large parts of the population in the authority of the ruling class and its capacity to run society effectively and afford a minimum of physical and economic security to its citizens. Bourgeois society was shaken to its foundations, first by World War I, then by economic catastrophe: the hyperinflation resulting from the World War (on the losers’ side) and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The epicentre of this crisis was the three empires – the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian – all of which collapsed under the blows of defeat in war and the revolutionary wave.

Whereas the revolution initially succeeded in Russia, it failed in Germany and in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. In the absence of a proletarian alternative to the crisis of bourgeois society, a deep void opened up, centred around Germany and, let us say, continental Europe north of the Mediterranean basin, but with world-wide ramifications, engendering a paroxysm of violence and pogroms centred around the themes of anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, culminating in the Holocaust and the mass liquidation of whole populations in particular on the territory of the USSR under German occupation.

The form taken by the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union played an important role in the development of this situation. Although there was no longer anything proletarian about Stalinist Russia, the violent expropriation of the peasantry (the collectivisation of agriculture and the liquidation of the “Kulaks”) terrified not only small property owners and savers in the rest of the world, but also many big ones. This was particularly the case in continental Europe, where these property owners (which could include the modest owners of their own dwellings) unprotected (unlike their British and American counterparts) from “Bolshevism” by seas or oceans, had little confidence in the existing unstable European democratic or authoritarian regimes at the beginning of the 1930s to protect them against expropriation by crisis or by “Jewish Bolshevism”.

We can conclude from this historical experience that, if the proletariat is unable to put forward its own revolutionary alternative to capitalism, the loss of confidence in the capacity of the ruling class to “do its job” eventually leads to a revolt, a protest, an explosion of a very different kind, one which is not conscious but blind, directed not towards the future but the past, based not on confidence but fear, not on creativity but on destructiveness and hate.

A second crisis of confidence in the ruling class today

This process we have just described was already the decomposition of capitalism. And it is more than understandable that many marxists and other astute observers of society in the 1930s expected this tendency soon to engulf the whole world. But as it turned out, this was only the first phase of this decomposition, not yet its terminal phase.

Above all, three factors of world historic importance pushed back this tendency to decomposition:

• firstly the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II, which considerably raised the prestige of Western democracy, in particular of the American model, on the one hand, and “socialism in one country” and the Soviet model on the other;
• and secondly the post World War II “economic miracle” above all in the Western bloc.

These two factors were the doing of the bourgeoisie. The third one was the doing of the working class: the end of the counter-revolution, the return of the class struggle to the centre stage of history, and with it the reappearance (however confused and ephemeral) of a revolutionary perspective. The bourgeoisie, for its part, responded to this changed situation not only with the ideology of reformism, but also with real material (of course temporary) concessions and improvements. All this enforced, among the workers, the illusion that life could improve.

As we know, what led to the present phase of decomposition was essentially the stalemate between the two principal classes, the one unable to unleash generalised war, the other unable to move towards a revolutionary solution. With the failure of the 1968 generation to further politicise its struggles, the events of 1989 thus inaugurated, on a world scale, the present phase of decomposition. But it is very important to understand this phase not as something stagnant, but as a process. 1989 marked above all the failure of the first attempt of the proletariat to re-develop its own revolutionary alternative. After 20 years of chronic crisis, and of worsening of the conditions of the working class and the world population as a whole, the prestige and authority of the ruling class was also eroded, but not to the same extent. At the turn of the millennium there were still important counter-tendencies enhancing the reputation of the leading bourgeois elites. We will mention three here.

Firstly, the collapse of Eastern bloc Stalinism did not at all damage the image of the bourgeoisie of the former Western bloc. On the contrary, what it appeared to disprove was the possibility of an alternative to Western democratic capitalism. Of course, part of the 1989 euphoria was quickly dispelled by reality, such as the illusion of a more peaceful world. But it remained true that 1989 had at least lifted the Damocles sword of the permanent threat of mutual annihilation in a nuclear World War III. Also, after 1989, both World War II and the ensuing Cold War between East and West could credibly be made to appear, in retrospect, as having been the product of “ideology” and “totalitarianism” (thus the fault of fascism and “communism”). At the ideological level it is extremely fortunate for the Western bourgeoisie that the new more or less open imperialist challenger to the USA today is no longer Germany (nowadays itself “democratic”) but “totalitarian China”, and that much of the contemporary regional wars and terrorist attacks can be attributed to “religious fundamentalism”.

Secondly the present “globalisation” stage of state capitalism, already introduced beforehand, made possible, in the post 1989 context, a real development of the productive forces in what until then had been peripheral countries of capitalism. Of course the BRICS11 states, for instance, constitute anything but a model of how workers in the old capitalist countries would want to live. But on the other hand they do create the impression of a dynamic world capitalism. It is worth noting, in view of the importance of the question of immigration for populism today, that these countries are seen at this level as making a contribution to stabilising the situation, since they themselves absorb millions of migrants who might otherwise move towards Europe and North America.

Thirdly, the really breathtaking developments at the technological level, which have revolutionised communication, education, medicine, daily life as a whole, once again create the impression of a vibrant society (vindicating, by the way, our own understanding that the decadence of capitalism does not mean the halt of the productive forces or technological stagnation).

These factors (and there are probably others), although unable to prevent the present phase of decomposition (and with it already a first development of populism), were still able to attenuate some of its effects. As opposed to this, the contemporary bolstering of this same populism today indicates that we may be approaching certain limits of these mitigating effects, perhaps even opening up what we might call a second stage in the phase of decomposition. This second stage, we would argue, is characterised by a growing loss, among increasing parts of the population, of confidence in the willingness or capacity of the ruling class to protect it. A process of disillusionment which, at least for the moment, is not proletarian, but profoundly anti-proletarian. Behind the finance, the Euro and the refugee crises, which are more triggering factors than root causes, this new stage is of course the result of the accumulated effects, over decades, of deeper lying factors. First and foremost the absence of a proletarian revolutionary perspective on the one side. On the other side (that of capital), there is its chronic economic crisis, but also the effects of the ever more abstract character of the mode of functioning of bourgeois society. This process, inherent to capitalism, witnessed a dramatic acceleration in the past three decades with the sharp reduction, in the old capitalist countries, of industrial and manual labour, and of bodily activity in general through mechanisation and the new media such as personal computing and the Internet. Parallel to this, the medium of universal exchange has been largely transformed from metal and paper to electronic cash, which is part of a wider process involving a radical separation from the body and its sensual reality.

Populism and violence

At the basis of the capitalist mode of production is a very specific combination of two factors: economic mechanisms or “laws” (the market) and violence. On the one hand: the precondition for equivalent exchange is the renunciation of violence: exchange instead of robbery. Moreover, wage labour is the first form of exploitation where the obligation to work, and the motivation in the labour process itself, is essentially an economic one rather than imposed by direct physical force. On the other hand, in capitalism the whole system of equivalent exchange is based on an original non-equivalent exchange – the violent separation of the producers from the means of production (“primitive accumulation”) which is the precondition for the wage system, and which is a permanent process in capitalism, since accumulation itself is a more or less violent process (see Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital). This permanent presence of both poles of this contradiction (violence and the renunciation of violence), and the ambivalence this creates, permeates the whole of life in bourgeois society. It accompanies every act of exchange, where the alternative option of robbery is ever present. Indeed, a society based at its roots on exchange, and therefore on the renunciation of violence, must enforce this renunciation with the threat of violence, and not only the threat – with the actual use of its laws, justice apparatus, police, prisons etc. This ambiguity is ever present particularly in the exchange between wage labour and capital, where economic coercion is supplemented by physical force. It is specifically present wherever the instrument of violence par excellence in bourgeois society is directly involved – the state. In its relation with its own citizens (coercion and extortion) and with other states (war), the instrument of the ruling class to suppress robbery and chaotic violence is itself, at the same time, the generalised, sanctified robber.

One of the focal points of this contradiction and ambiguity between violence and its renunciation in bourgeois society lies in each of its individual subjects. Living a normal, functional life in the present day world requires the renunciation of a plethora, of a whole world of bodily, emotional, intellectual, moral, artistic, creative needs. As soon as mature capitalism has passed from the stage of formal to that of real domination, this renunciation is no longer in the first instance enforced mainly through external violence. Indeed, each individual is more or less consciously confronted with the choice either of adapting to the abstract functioning of this society or of being a “loser”, possibly landing in the gutter. Discipline becomes self-discipline, but in such a way that each individual becomes the repressor of his own vital needs. Of course, this process of self-disciplining also contains a potential for emancipation, for the individual and above all for the proletariat as a whole (as the self disciplined class par excellence) to become master of its own destiny. But for the moment, in the “normal” functioning of bourgeois society, this self-discipline is essentially the internalisation of capitalist violence. Because this is the case, in addition to the proletarian option of the transformation of this self-discipline into a means of the realisation, the revitalisation of human needs and creativity, there also slumbers another option, that of the blind redirection of internalised violence towards the outside. Bourgeois society always needs and offers an “outsider” in order to maintain the (self) discipline of those who allegedly belong. This is why the blind re-externalisation of violence by the bourgeois subjects “spontaneously” directs itself (i.e. is predisposed or “formatted” to do so) against such outsiders (pogromisation).12

When the open crisis of capitalist society reaches a certain intensity, when the authority of the ruling class is damaged, when bourgeois subjects start to doubt the capacity and determination of the authorities to do their job, and in particular to protect them against a world of dangers, and when an alternative – which can only be that of the proletariat – is missing, parts of the population start to protest and even revolt against their ruling elite, not with the goal of challenging their rule, but in order to oblige them to protect their own “law-abiding” citizens against “outsiders”. These layers of society experience the crisis of capitalism as a conflict between its two underlying principles: between the market and violence. Populism is the option for violence to solve the problems the market cannot solve, and even to solve the problems of the market itself. For instance, if the world labour market threatens to flood the labour market of the old capitalist countries with a wave of have-nots, the solution is to put up fences and police at the frontier and shoot whoever tries to cross it without permission.

Behind populist politics today lurks the thirst for murder. The pogrom is the secret of its existence.

Steinklopfer, 8th June 2016.

1 United Kingdom Independence Party

The referendum that went out of control

More than thirty years ago in the “Theses on Decomposition”,1 we said that the bourgeoisie would find it more and more difficult to control the centrifugal tendencies of its own political apparatus. What this might mean concretely is demonstrated by the “Brexit” referendum in Britain, and Donald Trump’s candidature for the presidency in the United States. In both cases, unscrupulous political adventurers from the ruling class have exploited the populist revolt of those who have suffered most from the economic upheavals of the last thirty years, for their own self-aggrandisement.

The ICC has been late to recognise the rise of populism and to take account of its consequences. This is why we are publishing now a general text on populism, which is still under discussion in the organisation.2 The article that follows aims to apply the main ideas put forward in the discussion text to the specific situations of Britain and the USA. In a rapidly evolving world situation, it has no pretension to being complete, but we hope that it will give food for thought and further discussion.

The ruling class’ loss of control has never been more strikingly evident than in the spectacle of unprecedented shambolic disorder presented by the EU referendum in Britain and its aftermath. Never before has Britain’s capitalist class so far lost control of the democratic process, never before has it found its vital interests at the mercy of adventurers like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage.

The failure on all sides to prepare for the consequences of Brexit shows the extent of the disarray within the British ruling class. Within hours of the results being announced, the main Leave campaigners were explaining to their supporters that the £350 million per week extra for the NHS3 which they had promised a Brexit vote would bring – and a figure which had been plastered all over the sides of the Leave campaign buses – was in the nature of a “typing error”. Within days, Farage had resigned as UKIP4 leader, dumping the whole Brexit mess in the laps of his fellow Leavers; Boris Johnson’s former director of communications Guto Harri declared that Johnson’s “heart wasn’t in the Brexit campaign”, and there is more than a strong suspicion that Johnson’s espousal of the Brexit cause was a purely opportunistic, self-serving manoeuvre designed to boost his leadership challenge to David Cameron; Michael Gove, who had been Johnson’s campaign manager all through the referendum and was supposed to run Johnson’s campaign for PM (and who had repeatedly declared his own lack of interest in the job), stabbed Johnson in the back with only two hours to go before the candidature deadline, putting forward his own name for leader on the grounds that his longtime friend Johnson was not fitted to be PM; Andrea Leadsom entered the Tory leadership race as a firm Leave supporter – having declared only three years previously that leaving the EU would be a “disaster” for Britain. Lies, hypocrisy, double-dealing – none of this is new to ruling class politics of course. What is striking is the loss, within the world’s most experienced ruling class, of any sense of the state, of an overriding historic national interest which goes beyond personal ambition or the petty rivalries of cliques. To find a comparable episode in the life of the English ruling class, we would have to return to the Wars of the Roses (as dramatised in Shakespeare’s life of Henry VI), the last gasp of a decaying feudal order.

The unpreparedness of the financial and industrial bosses for a Leave victory is equally striking, especially given all the signs that the result was going to be “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life” (if one may be permitted to quote the Duke of Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo).5 Sterling’s immediate collapse by 20%, then 30%, against the dollar is an indication that Brexit was not an expected result – it had not been factored in to Sterling’s value before the referendum. We were treated to the unedifying spectacle of banks and businesses rushing for the exit as they looked to move offices, or even incorporation, to Dublin or Paris. George Osborne’s snap decision to reduce corporation tax to 15% was clearly an emergency move to keep companies in Britain, the British economy being one of the world’s most dependent on FDI (Foreign Direct Investment).

The Empire strikes back

All this being said, Britain's ruling class is not out for the count. Cameron’s immediate replacement as PM by Theresa May (not initially expected before September) – a solid and competent politician who had campaigned discreetly for Remain – and the demolition jobs done by the press and Tory MPs on her opponents Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove, demonstrate a real capacity for rapid, coherent reaction on the part of the ruling class’ dominant state factions.

Fundamentally, this situation is determined by the evolution of world capitalism and the balance of class forces. It is the product of a more general dynamic towards the destabilisation of coherent bourgeois policies in the present stage of decadent capitalism. The driving forces behind the tendency towards populism are not the subject of this article: they are analysed in the “Discussion contribution on the problem of populism” mentioned above. But these general international phenomena take concrete shape under the influence of specific national histories and characteristics. Hence the Tory party has always had its “Eurosceptic” wing which has never really accepted Britain’s membership of the EU and whose origins we can define as follows:

1. Britain’s – and before it England’s – geographical position off the coast of Europe has meant that Britain has been able to remain detached from European rivalries in a way that continental states cannot; its relatively small size, and its non-existence as a land power, has meant that it could never hope to dominate Europe as France did until the 19th century or Germany since 1870, but could only defend its vital interests by playing the main powers against each other and avoiding commitment to any of them.

2. Britain’s geographical position as an island, and its status as the world’s first industrial nation, have determined its rise as a maritime world imperialism. Since at least the 17th century, the British ruling classes have had a world outlook, which again let them maintain a certain aloofness from solely European politics.

This situation changed radically after World War II, first because Britain’s status as a dominant world power was no longer sustainable, second because modern military technology (airpower, long-range missiles, nuclear weapons) meant that isolation from European politics was no longer an option. One of the first to recognise this changed situation was Winston Churchill, who in 1946 called for the creation of a “United States of Europe”, but his position was never wholly accepted within the Conservative Party. Opposition to membership of the EU6 grew as Germany increased in strength, especially after the collapse of the USSR and Germany’s reunification in 1990 substantially increased the latter’s weight in Europe. During the referendum campaign, Boris Johnson famously caused a scandal by saying that the EU was an instrument of German domination “à la Hitler”, but he was hardly being original. The same sentiments, in much the same language, had already been expressed in 1990 by Nicholas Ridley, then a minister in Thatcher’s government. It is a sign of the loss of authority and discipline within the post-war political apparatus that whereas Ridley was immediately forced to resign from government, the repercussions for Johnson have been membership of the new cabinet.

1. Britain’s one-time status, and loss of status, as the world’s greatest imperial power is a deeply-rooted psychological and cultural phenomenon within the British population (including the working class). The national obsession with World War II – the last time Britain could appear to act as an independent world power – illustrates this perfectly. A part of the British bourgeoisie, and still more the petty bourgeoisie, has still not got the message that Britain is today merely a second or third rate power. Many of the Leave campaigners appeared to believe that if only Britain were free of the “shackles” of the EU, the world would rush to buy British goods and services – a fantasy for which the British economy is likely to pay a heavy price.

This sensation of resentment and anger at the outside world for a loss of imperial power is comparable to that felt by a part of the American population as a result of the United States’ perceived loss of status (a constant theme of Trump’s calls to “Make America a great again”) and inability to impose its own rule as it could during the Cold War.

The referendum as a concession to populism

The populist antics of Boris Johnson are more spectacular, and got more media hype, than David Cameron’s old school upper-crust “responsible” persona. But in reality, Cameron is a better indication of how far the rot has gone in the ruling class. Johnson may have been the principal actor, but it was Cameron who set the stage by using the promise of a referendum for party political advantage to win the last general election. By its very nature, a referendum is more difficult to control than a parliamentary election and as such always represents a gamble.7 Like an addict in a casino, Cameron showed himself to be a repeat gambler, first with the referendum on Scottish independence which he won by the skin of his teeth, then with Brexit. His Conservative Party, which has always presented itself as the best defender of the economy, the Union,8 and national defence, has ended up putting all three at risk.

Given the difficulty of manipulating the results, plebiscites about important matters of national interest are for the most part an unwarranted risk for the ruling class. In the classical concept and ideology of parliamentary democracy, even in its decadent sham form, such decisions are supposed to be taken by “elected representatives” advised (and lobbied) by experts and interest groups – not by the population at large. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, it is a pure aberration to ask millions to decide on complex issues like the EU Constitutional Treaty of 2004, when the mass of voters were unwilling and even unable to read or understand the treaty text. No wonder the ruling class so often got the “wrong” result in the referenda held over this treaty (in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Ireland in 2008 with the first referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon).9

There are those within the British bourgeoisie today who seem to hope that the May government will pull off the same trick as the French and Irish governments after their botched referenda over the Constitutional Treaty, and somehow just ignore or overturn the referendum. This seems to us unlikely, at least in the short term, not because the British bourgeoisie is more ardently democratic than its fellows but precisely because ignoring the “democratic” expression of the “popular will” merely gives credit to populist ideas and makes them more dangerous.

Theresa May's strategy so far has thus been to make the best of a bad job and to set out down the Brexit path with three of the best-known Leavers in ministerial posts, with responsibility for organising Britain's disentanglement from the EU. Even May’s appointment of the clown Johnson as Foreign Minister – greeted abroad with a mixture of horror, hilarity, and disbelief – is certainly part of this broader strategy. By putting Johnson in the hot seat of the negotiations to leave the EU, May has made sure that the Leavers’ main mouth will have to take much of the flak – and the discredit – for what will almost certainly be unfavourable terms, and is prevented from sniping from the sidelines.

The perception, especially by those who are voting for the populist movements in Europe or the USA, that the whole democratic process is a swindle because the elite simply ignores inconvenient results, is a real threat to the effectiveness of democracy itself as a system of class rule. In the populist conception of politics, “direct decision making by the people” is supposed to circumvent the corruption of elected representatives by the established political elites. This is why in Germany such referendums are excluded by the post-war constitution following the negative experience of the Weimar Republic and their use in Nazi Germany.10

The election that ran off the rails

If Brexit was a referendum that got out of control, Trump’s selection as Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2016 is an election that ran off the rails. When Trump’s candidacy was first declared it was barely taken seriously: the front runner was Jeb Bush, member of the Bush dynasty, preferred choice of the Republican grandees, and as such potentially a powerful fundraiser (always a crucial consideration in US elections). But against all expectations, Trump triumphed in the early primaries and went on to win state after state. Bush fizzled like a damp squib, other candidates were never much more than also-rans, and Republican Party bosses ended confronting the unpalatable prospect that the only candidate with any chance of defeating Trump was Ted Cruz, a man considered by his Senate colleagues as wholly untrustworthy, and only marginally less egotistical and self-serving than Trump himself.

The possibility that Trump might beat Clinton is in itself an indication of how insane the political situation has become. But already, Trump’s candidacy has sent shock waves through the whole system of imperialist alliances. For 70 years, the USA has been the guarantor of the NATO alliance whose effectiveness depends on the inviolability of reciprocal defence: an attack on one is an attack on all. When a potential US President calls into question the NATO alliance, and US readiness to honour its treaty obligations, as Trump has done by declaring that a US response to a Russian attack on the Baltic states would depend on whether in his judgment they had “paid their way”, it certainly sends shivers down the collective spines of the East European ruling classes that confront Putin’s Mafia state directly, not to mention of those Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Philippines) that are relying on America to protect them from the Chinese dragon. Almost equally alarming is the strong possibility that Trump simply does not know what is going on, as suggested by his recent statement that there are no Russian troops in the Ukraine (apparently unaware that Crimea is still considered part of the Ukraine by everybody except the Russians).

Not only that, Trump has gone on to welcome the Russian secret services hacking into the Democratic Party’s IT systems and more or less invited Putin to do his worst. How much, if at all, this will damage Trump is hard to tell, but it is worth recalling that ever since 1945 the Republican Party has been vigorously, if not rabidly anti-Russian, in favour of a powerful military establishment and a massive military presence world-wide no matter what the cost (it was Reagan’s colossal military build-up that really sent the budget deficit through the roof).

This is not the first time the Republican Party has fielded a candidate regarded as dangerously extreme by its leadership. In 1964 it was Barry Goldwater who won the primaries, thanks to support from the religious right and the “conservative coalition” – the forerunners of today’s Tea Party. His programme was at least coherent: drastic reduction of the Federal government especially social security, military strength and readiness to use nuclear weapons against the USSR. This was a classic far-right programme, but one that fitted not at all with the needs of US state capitalism and Goldwater went on to be heavily defeated in the election, partly as a result of the failure of the Republican hierarchy to back him.

Is Trump just a Goldwater 2.0? Not at all, and the differences are instructive. Goldwater’s candidacy represented a seizure of the Republican Party by the “Tea Party” of the time, which was sidelined for years following Goldwater’s crushing electoral defeat. It is no secret that the last couple of decades have seen a comeback for this tendency which has made a more or less successful takeover bid for the GOP.11 However, the Goldwater supporters were, in the truest sense, a “conservative coalition”: they represented a real conservative tendency within an America undergoing profound social changes (feminism, the Civil Rights movement, the beginning of opposition to the Vietnam War, and the breakdown of traditional values). Although many of the Tea Party’s “causes” may be the same as Goldwater’s, the context is not: the social changes he opposed have taken place, such that the Tea Party is not so much a coalition of conservatives as an alliance of hysterical reaction.

This has created increasing difficulties for the big bourgeoisie, which cares little or nothing about these social and “cultural” issues and is basically interested in US military strength and the free trade from which it profits. It has become a truism that anyone running in a Republican primary must prove himself “irreproachable” on a whole series of issues: abortion (you must be “pro-life”), gun control (against it), fiscal conservatism and lower taxation, “Obamacare” (socialism, it should be abolished: indeed Ted Cruz based a part of his credentials on a publicity-seeking filibuster against Obamacare in the Senate), marriage (sacred), Democratic Party (if Satan had a party this would be it). Now, in the space of a few short months, Trump has in effect eviscerated the Republican Party. Here we have a candidate who has shown himself “unreliable” on abortion, on gun control, on marriage (three times in his case), and who has in the past donated money to the Devil herself, Hillary Clinton. In addition, he proposes to raise the minimum wage, maintain Obamacare at least in part, return to an isolationist foreign policy, let the budget deficit go through the roof, and expel 11 million illegal immigrants whose cheap labour is vital to US business.

Like the Tories in Britain with Brexit, the Republican Party – and potentially the whole American ruling class – has found itself saddled with a programme which is completely irrational from the standpoint of its imperialist and economic class interests.

The implications

The only thing that we can say for certain, is that Brexit and the Trump candidacy will usher in a period of increased instability at every level: economic, political, and imperialist. At the economic level, the European countries – which, we should not forget, represent a major part of the world economy and its biggest single market – are already in a fragile condition: they have weathered the financial crisis of 2007/8 and the threat of a Greek exit from the Euro zone but they have not overcome them. Britain remains one of the major European economies and the long process of unravelling its connections with the EU will be fraught with unpredictability, not least on the financial level: nobody knows, for example, what effect Brexit will have on the City of London, Europe’s major centre for banking, insurance, and share trading. Politically, the success of Brexit can only encourage, and give greater credit to the populist parties on the European continent: next year sees a presidential election in France, where Marine Le Pen’s populist, anti-Europe, Front National is now the biggest single political party in terms of votes. The governments of Europe’s major powers are torn between the desire to make Britain’s separation from Europe as smooth and painless as possible, and a real fear that any concessions to Britain (such as, for example, access to the single market together with restrictions on movement of people) will give ideas to others, notably to countries like Poland and Hungary. The attempt to stabilise Europe’s south-eastern border by integrating the countries of ex-Yugoslavia will almost certainly come to a halt. The EU will find it more difficult to present a united response to Erdogan’s democratic coup d’Etat in Turkey and his use of Syrian refugees as pawns in a vile game of blackmail.

Although the EU itself has never been an imperialist alliance, most of its members are also members of NATO. Any weakening of European cohesion is therefore likely to have a knock-on effect on NATO’s ability to counter Russian pressure on its Eastern flank, destabilising further the Ukraine and the Baltic states. It is no secret that Russia has for some time been financing the French Front National and is at least using if not financing the German Pegida movement. The only outright winner from the Brexit referendum is in fact Vladimir Putin.

As we said above, the Trump candidacy has already dealt a blow to US credibility. The idea of a President Trump with his finger on the nuclear button is, it must be said, a frightening prospect.12 But as we have said many times, one of the major elements of instability and war today is the United States’ determination to maintain its dominant imperialist position against all comers and this situation will remain unchanged whoever becomes president.

Rage against the machine

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have more in common than a big mouth. Both are political adventurers, devoid of any principle or any sense of overriding national interest. Both are ready to twist and turn, to adjust their message to what their audience wants to hear. Their posturing antics are blown up by the media till they seem larger than life, but in reality they are complete non-entities, nothing but mouthpieces through which the losers from globalisation howl their rage, their despair, and their hatred for the wealthy elites and the immigrants they hold responsible for their misery. Hence Trump gets away with the most outrageous and contradictory statements: his supporters simply do not care, he is saying what they want to hear.

This is not to say that Johnson and Trump are identical, but their differences are less to do with personal character than they are with the differences between the ruling classes to which they belong: the British bourgeoisie has been playing a major role on the world stage for centuries, while the American’s brash, buccaneering, self-absorbed phase only really came to an end with Roosevelt’s defeat of the isolationists to enter World War II. Important fractions of the American ruling class remain deeply ignorant of the outside world, one is almost tempted to say that they are stuck in a state of retarded adolescence.

Electoral results will never be an expression of class consciousness; nonetheless they can tell us something about the condition of the working class. Whether it be in the Brexit referendum, in support for Trump in the USA, for Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, or for the German populists of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland, all the voting figures suggest that where these parties and movements gain workers’ support it is predominantly among those who have suffered most from the changes in the capitalist economy during the last forty years, and who have not unreasonably concluded, after years of defeat and endless attacks on their living conditions from governments of right and left, that the only way to frighten the ruling elite is by voting for demonstrably irresponsible parties whose policies are anathema to that same elite. The tragedy is that it is precisely these workers who were among the most massively involved in the struggles of the 1970s.

A common theme in both the Brexit and the Trump campaigns is the idea that “we” can “take back control”. No matter that “we” have never had any real control over our lives: as one resident of Boston UK put it “we just want things back the way they were”. Back to when there were jobs, and jobs with decent wages, when the social solidarity of working-class communities had not been broken down by unemployment and dereliction, when change seemed something positive and happened at a manageable speed.

It is undoubtedly true that the Brexit vote has created a new and ugly mood in Britain, one where the outright racists feel freer to crawl out from behind the woodwork. But many – probably the great majority – of those who voted Brexit or Trump to stop immigration are not racists as such, rather they are suffering from xenophobia: fear of the foreign, fear of the unknown. And this unknown is basically the capitalist economy itself, which is inherently mysterious and incomprehensible because it presents the real social relationships in the process of production as if they were natural forces, as elemental and uncontrollable as the weather, but whose effects on workers’ livelihoods can be even more devastating. It is a terrible irony, in this age of scientific discovery, that people no longer believe that bad weather is caused by witches, but are quite prepared to believe that their economic woes are caused by their immigrant fellows in misfortune.

The danger confronting us

We began this article by referring to the “Theses on decomposition”, written almost 30 years ago in 1990. We will conclude by citing them:

“We must be especially clear on the danger of decomposition for the proletariat’s ability to raise itself to the level of its historic task (…) The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

• solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

• the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

• the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

• consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch”.

That danger confronts us starkly today.

The rise of populism is dangerous for the ruling class because it threatens its ability to control its own political apparatus and at the same time maintain the democratic mystification which is one of the pillars of its social domination. But it offers nothing to the proletariat. On the contrary, it is precisely the proletariat’s own weakness, its inability to offer any alternative perspective for the chaos threatening capitalism, that has made the rise of populism possible. Only the proletariat can offer a way out of the dead-end that society finds itself in today, and it will never be able to do so if workers let themselves be taken in by the siren songs of populist demagogues promising an impossible return to a past which, in any case, never existed.

Jens, August, 2016

One hundred years ago, during the Easter of 1916, a handful of Irish nationalists seized strategic positions in the centre of Dublin and declared Ireland’s independence from the British empire, and the creation of an Irish Republic. They managed to hold out for a few days before being crushed by the British armed forces, which did not hesitate to shell the city using naval cannon. Among those summarily executed after the Easter Rising’s defeat was the great revolutionary James Connolly, one of the best known leaders of the working class in Ireland who brought his workers’ militia into the revolt alongside the nationalist Irish Volunteers.

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, support for the cause of Irish and Polish national independence had been a given of the European workers’ movement. Ireland’s tragedy and Marx’s belief in the necessity of Irish independence has been used over and over again to justify support for any number of “national liberation” movements against imperialist powers both old and new. But the outbreak of world war in 1914 set the seal on changed conditions which invalidated the old positions. As our predecessors of the French Communist Left put it: “Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are constantly being enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary”.1

Sean O’Casey reportedly said that when James Connolly was executed, the labour movement lost a leader and Irish nationalism gained a martyr.

How could this happen? How could a convinced and constant internationalist like Connolly throw in his lot with patriotism? We do not propose here to go over the evolution in his attitude in 1914: this is dealt with in an article first published in World Revolution in 1976, and which remains valid to this day2. Nor do we need to demonstrate his fundamental hostility to inter-classist nationalism: Connolly’s own words [67], in an article published on this site, are clear enough. Our purpose rather is to set Connolly’s thinking within the wider framework of the international socialism of his day, and to examine how the attitude of the workers’ movement to the “national question” evolved between the wave of popular uprisings against aristocratic and autocratic governments that swept Europe in 1848, and the outbreak of imperialist world war in 1914.

The events of 1848 were – as Marx was to show later – of a dual nature. On the one hand they were national democratic movements aimed at unifying a “nation” divided up among a multitude of petty semi-feudal fiefdoms: this was true above all in Germany and Italy. On the other, especially in Paris, they saw the nascent industrial proletariat appear for the first time3 on the historical stage as an independent political force. Not surprisingly, 1848 therefore also posed the question of the attitude that the working class should adopt to the national question.

The same year saw the publication of the Communist Manifesto, which laid out, clearly and unequivocally, the internationalist principle as the bedrock of the workers’ movement: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got (…) The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”4

This then is the general principle: the workers are not divided by national interests, they must unite across national boundaries: “United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat” (Manifesto). But how is the principle to be worked out in practice? In mid-19th century Europe, it was clear to Marx and Engels that for the proletariat to seize power it had first to become a major social and political force, and that this in turn was dependent on the development of capitalist social relations. Such a development meant the overthrow of the feudal aristocracy, the demolition of feudal particularism, and the unification of the “great, historic nations” (the expression is Engels’) to create the large internal market that capitalism needed to develop and in doing so, develop the numbers, strength, and organisation of the working class.

For Marx and Engels, and for the workers’ movement in general at the time, national unity, the suppression of feudal privilege, and the development of industry, can only be accomplished by a democratic movement: a free press, access to education, the right of association – these are all democratic demands, within the framework of the nation state, and whose existence is impossible without the nation state. How far these were necessary conditions is debatable. After all, 19th century industrial development was not limited to democracies like Britain or the United States. Autocratic regimes like Tsarist Russia or Japan under the Meiji Restoration also witnessed startling industrial progress during the same epoch. That said, the development of Russia and Japan remained essentially dependent on that of the more advanced democratic countries, and it is significant that the reactionary autocratic Prussian Junker regime that dominated Germany was forced to respect a certain number of democratic freedoms.

These democratic demands were also in the interests of, and important to, the working class. As Engels put it, they give the workers’ movement “room to breathe” and to develop. Freedom of association made it easier to organise against capitalist exploitation. Freedom of the press made it easier for workers to educate themselves, to prepare themselves politically and culturally for the seizure of power. Because it was not yet ready to make its own revolution, the workers’ movement at this point shared its immediate goals with other classes, and there was a strong tendency to identify the causes of the proletariat, of progress and of national unity with the fight for democracy.. Here, for example, is Marx speaking in 1848 [68] at a meeting in Brussels to celebrate the second anniversary of the rising in Krakow, Poland: “The Krakow revolution has set all of Europe a glorious example, because it identified the question of nationalism with democracy and with the liberation of the oppressed class (…) It finds its principles confirmed in Ireland, where O'Connell's party with its narrowly restricted nationalistic aims has sunk into the grave, and the new national party is pledged above all to reform and democracy”.

The struggle for national unity and independence was by no means a universal principle however. Hence Engels, writing in The Commonwealth in 1860 [69]: “This right of the great national subdivisions of Europe to political independence, acknowledged as it was by the European democracy, could not but find the same acknowledgement with the working classes especially. It was, in fact, nothing more than to recognize in other large national bodies of undoubted vitality the same right of individual national existence which the working men of each separate country claimed for themselves. But this recognition, and the sympathy with these national aspirations, were restricted to the large and well defined historical nations of Europe; there was Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary”. Engels goes on to say: “There is no country in Europe where there are not different nationalities under the same government. The Highland Gaels and the Welsh are undoubtedly of different nationalities to what the English are, although nobody will give to these remnants of peoples long gone by the title of nations, any more than to the Celtic inhabitants of Brittany in France”. Engels clearly distinguishes between the “right of national existence for the historic peoples of Europe” and that of “those numerous small relics of peoples which, after having figured for a longer or shorter period on the stage of history, were finally absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles”.

Was Ireland a “special case”?

This rejection of an all-embracing national principle naturally raises the question: what makes Ireland different? Why did Marx and Engels not advocate that Ireland should simply be absorbed into Britain, as a condition of its industrial development?

For there is no doubt that in their eyes, Ireland was a “special case” of particular significance. Marx at one point even went so far as to say that Ireland was the key to revolution in England, just as England was the key to revolution in Europe.

There were two reasons for this. Firstly, Marx was convinced that the brutal spoliation of the Irish peasantry by absentee English landlords was one of the main factors underpinning the reactionary aristocratic class that barred the way to democratic and economic progress.

Second, and perhaps more important, was the moral factor. England’s domination of an unwilling Ireland, and the treatment of the Irish, especially the Irish workers, as an enslaved underclass, was not only unjust and offensive, it was morally corrupting for the English workers. How, Marx reasoned, could the English working class rouse itself to the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order if it remained complicit with its own ruling class in the national oppression of the Irish? Moreover, as long as the Irish were deprived of their own national self-respect, there would never be a shortage of Irish proletarians ready to enlist in the service of the English army and help put down revolts by English workers – as Connolly was later to point out.

This insistence on Irish independence extended to the organisation of the First International, as Engels argued in 1872 [70]: “If members of a conquering nation called upon the nation they had conquered and continued to hold down to forget their specific nationality and position, to ‘sink national differences’ and so forth, that was not Internationalism, it was nothing else but preaching to them submission to the yoke, and attempting to justify and to perpetuate the dominion of the conqueror under the cloak of Internationalism. It was sanctioning the belief, only too common among the English working men, that they were superior beings compared to the Irish, and as much an aristocracy as the mean whites of the Slave States considered themselves to be with regard to the Negroes.

In a case like that of the Irish, true Internationalism must necessarily be based upon a distinctly national organisation; the Irish, as well as other oppressed nationalities, could enter the Association only as equals with the members of the conquering nation, and under protest against the conquest. The Irish sections, therefore, not only were justified, but even under the necessity to state in the preamble to their rules that their first and most pressing duty, as Irishmen, was to establish their own national independence”.

It was essentially the same logic that led Lenin to insist that the Bolshevik Party programme should include the right to national self-determination: this was the only way, in his view, to render explicit and unequivocal the Party’s rejection of “Great Russian chauvinism” – the equivalent among Russian workers, of the English workers’ feelings of superiority to the Irish.

National unity within defined national borders, democracy, progress, and the interests of the working class: all these, then, could be seen as moving in the same direction. Even Marx – who was hardly given to sentimental flights of fancy – could, in what was perhaps a moment of unguarded optimism, envisage the possibility of the workers taking power through the ballot-box in countries like Britain, Holland, or the United States. But at no point was national unity, or indeed democracy, the ultimate goal; they were merely contingent principles on the road to that goal: “The workers have no country. Workers of all countries, unite!”

The problem with such contingent principles is that they can become frozen into abstract, fixed principles so that they no longer express the dynamic vanguard of real historical development, but on the contrary become a drag, or even worse an active obstacle. This, as we shall see, was what happened to the socialist movement’s perspective on the national question towards the end of the 19th century. But first, let us pause for a moment for a brief overview of how Connolly's own thought gives concrete form to the dominant ideas of the Second International.

Although he spent some years in the United States, where he joined the IWW,5 Connolly remained very much the Irish socialist. He espoused the methods of industrial unionism, in opposition to narrow craft unionism, joining with Jim Larkin to build up the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union and playing a key role in the great Dublin strike and lockout of 1913. But even during his time in the USA Connolly was a member successively of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party, and of the Socialist Party of America, and it would be fair to say that his life was dedicated to building an Irish political socialist organisation. He would probably have thought of such an organisation as marxist, insofar as pinning theoretical labels on an organisation had any interest for him. Certainly, his Irish Socialist Republican Party6 was recognised as an Irish delegation in its own right at the 1900 Congress of the Second International. But there is little or no indication in Connolly’s writing that he knew of, or took part in, the debates within the International, on the national question in particular: this is all the more surprising in that he had taught himself to read German with some fluency.

Connolly believed that socialism could only grow in national soil. Indeed, his important study of “Labour in Irish history” is partly devoted to showing that socialism emerges naturally from Irish conditions; he highlights in particular the writings of William Thompson in the 1820s, who he considers not unjustly as one of Marx’s forerunners in identifying labour as the source of capital and profit.7

It is not surprising therefore, to see Connolly argue, in a 1909 article in The Irish Nation [71] titled “Sinn Fein, socialism, and the nation” for a rapprochement between “Sinn Feiners who sympathise with Socialism” and “Socialists who realise that a Socialist movement must rest upon and draw its inspiration from the historical and actual conditions of the country in which it functions and not merely lose themselves in an abstract ‘internationalism’ (which has no relation to the real internationalism of the Socialist movement)”. In this same article, Connolly opposes those socialists who “observing that those who talk loudest about ‘Ireland a Nation’ are often the most merciless grinders of the faces of the poor, fly off to the extreme limit of hostility to Nationalism and, whilst opposed to oppression at all times, are also opposed to national revolt for national independence” and those “principally recruited amongst the workers in the towns of North-East Ulster [who] have been weaned by Socialist ideas and industrial disputes from the leadership of Tory and Orange landlords and capitalists, but as they are offered practical measures of relief from capitalist oppression by the English Independent Labour Party, and offered nothing but a green flag by Irish Nationalism... naturally go where they imagine relief will come from”.

This identification of the working class with the nation could plausibly claim to derive from Marx and Engels. After all, we can read in the Manifesto that “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”. And the same idea is found in Kautsky, writing in 1887:8 “Just as for bourgeois freedoms, the proletarians must come to the defence of their nation’s unity and independence, both against reactionary, particular interests, and against possible outside attack (…) In the decadent Roman Empire, social antagonisms had reached such a pitch, and the process of decomposition of the Roman nation – if we can call it such – had become so intolerable that for many, the national enemy, the German barbarian, appeared as a saviour. We have not yet reached this point, at least not in the national states. Nor do we think that the proletariat will ever reach it. Certainly, the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is constantly increasing, but at the same time the proletariat is more and more the core of the nation in numbers and intelligence, and the interests of the proletariat and the nation are growing ever closer. A policy hostile to the nation would be pure suicide for the proletariat”.

With hindsight, it is easy to see the betrayal of 1914 – the defence of German “Kultur” against Tsarist barbarism – behind this identification of the nation and the proletariat. But hindsight is not much help in the present, and the fact is that the marxist movement at the end of the 19th century had largely failed to re-evaluate its view on the national question in the face of a changing reality.

For forty years, the socialist movement had not really challenged the Manifesto’s optimistic assumption that “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto”. On one level this was true – we will return to this aspect shortly – yet by the 1890s the “national question” was coming to the forefront of the political scene as never before, precisely as a result of the phenomenal expansion of capitalist social relations and industrial production. With the development of modern conditions of production, new national bourgeoisies with modern national aspirations were appearing in Eastern and Central Europe. The resulting debate over the national question took on a new importance, above all for the Social-Democracy of Russia with regard to Poland, and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with regard to the national aspirations of the Czechs and a multitude of smaller Slav peoples.

Luxemburg’s critique of the nation state

The last thirty years of the 19th century thus transformed the way in which the national question was posed.

Firstly, as Luxemburg demonstrated in The national question and autonomy [72], once the bourgeois class has conquered its internal market, it must inevitably become a conquering imperialist state. More, in capitalism’s imperialist phase, all states are constrained to seek by imperialist means to make a place for themselves on the world market. Answering Kautsky’s postulate of capitalism’s evolution towards a single “super-state”9 Luxemburg writes: “The ‘best’ national state is only an abstraction which can be easily described and defined theoretically, but which doesn’t correspond to reality (…) The development of world powers, a characteristic feature of our times growing in importance along with the progress of capitalism, from the very outset condemns all small nations to political impotence...” (Part 1, “The right of nations to self-determination”). “The argument that an independent nation-state is, after all ‘the best’ guarantee of national existence and development involves operating with a conception of a nation-state as a completely abstract thing. The nation-state as seen only from a national point of view, only as a pledge and embodiment of freedom and independence, is simply a remnant of the decaying ideology of the petty bourgeoisie of Germany, Italy, Hungary – all of Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a phrase from the treasury of disintegrated bourgeois liberalism (…) ‘Nation-states’, even in the form of republics, are not products or expressions of the ‘will of the people’, as the liberal phraseology goes and the anarchist repeats. ‘Nation-states’ are today the very same tools and forms of class rule of the bourgeoisie as the earlier, non-national states, and like them they are bent on conquest. The nation-states have the same tendencies toward conquest, war, and oppression – in other words, the tendencies to become ‘non-national’. Therefore, among the ‘national’ states there develop constant scuffles and conflicts of interests, and even if today, by some miracle, all states should be transformed to ‘national’, then the next day they would already present the same common picture of war, conquest, and oppression” (Part 2, “The nation-state and the proletariat”).

For the smaller nationalities, this inevitably meant that their only possible “independence” meant detaching themselves from the orbit of one great imperialist state, to attach themselves to another. Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than in the negotiations entered into by the Irish Volunteers (forerunners of the IRA) with German imperialism via the intermediary of the American Clan na Gael organisation, and Roger Casement who acted as an ambassador to Germany itself.10 Casement supposedly believed that 50,000 German troops would be necessary for a successful rising, but this was obviously out of the question without a decisive German victory at sea. The attempt to land a shipload of rifles from Germany in time for the 1916 rising ended in fiasco, but it remains a damning indictment of Irish nationalism’s readiness to participate in imperialist war.

By abandoning a marxist class analysis of imperialist war as the result of capitalism irrespective of nations, Connolly also abandoned the independence of the working class against the capitalists. How far he did so can be seen in the culpable naïvety of his idyllic depiction of “peaceful Germany”, combined with a semi-racist onslaught on the “half-educated” English workers:11 “Basing its industrial effort upon an educated working class, [the German nation] accomplished in the workshop results that this half-educated working-class of England could only wonder at. That English working class trained to a slavish subservience to rule-of-thumb methods, and under managers wedded to traditional processes saw themselves gradually outclassed by a new rival in whose service were enrolled the most learned scientists co-operating with the most educated workers (…) It was determined that since Germany could not be beaten in fair competition industrially, it must be beaten unfairly by organising a military and naval conspiracy against her (…) The conception meant calling up the forces of barbaric powers to crush and hinder the development of the peaceful powers of industry”. One wonders what the tens of thousands of Africans massacred during the Herero rising of 1904,12 or the inhabitants of Tsingtao annexed at gunpoint by Germany in 1898, might have thought of the “peaceful powers” of German industry.

Not only did “national states” tend inevitably to become conquering, imperialist states as Luxemburg demonstrated, they were also becoming less “national” as a result of industrial development and migration of the workforce from the countryside into the new industrial towns. In the case of Poland, by 1900 not only was the “Kingdom of Poland” (ie that part of Poland which had been incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th century) industrialising rapidly, the same was true of the ethnic-Polish areas under German13 (Upper Silesia) and Austro-Hungarian (Cieszyn Silesia) rule. Moreover, the industrial areas were less ethnic-Polish: workers in the great textile city of Lodz were Polish, German, and Jewish in origin, with a sprinkling of other nationalities including English and French. In Upper Silesia, workers were German, Polish, Danish, Ruthenian, etc. When Marx had called for Polish national independence as a bulwark against Tsarist absolutism a Polish working class barely existed: now, the question of Polish socialists’ attitude to Polish nationhood became acute, and led to a split between the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS) on the right and the Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy, or SDKPiL) on the left.14

For the PPS Polish independence meant Poland’s separation from Russia, but also the unification of those parts of historical Poland then under German or Austrian rule, where Polish proletarians worked side by side with Germans (and other nationalities). In effect, the PPS made proletarian revolution dependent on the “solution” of the “national question” – which could only, as Luxemburg said, lead to division within the ranks of the organised working class in German and Austria-Hungary. At best, this would be a distraction, at worst, destructive of workers’ unity.

For Luxemburg and the SDKPiL, on the contrary, any resolution of the national question was dependent on the seizure of power by the international working class.15 The only way for workers to oppose national oppression was to join the ranks of international social-democracy: by ending all oppression, the Social-Democracy would also end national oppression: “Not only did [the 1896 London Congress] set the Polish situation squarely on a level with the situation of all other oppressed peoples; it at the same time called for the workers of all such nations to enter the ranks of international socialism as the only remedy for national oppression, rather than dabbling off and on with the restoration of independent capitalist states in their several countries; only in this way could they hasten the introduction of a socialist system that, by abolishing class oppression, would do away with all forms of oppression, including national, once and for all”.

When Luxemburg undertook to oppose the PPS’ Polish nationalism within the Second International, she was well aware that she was attacking a sacred cow of the socialist and democratic movement: “Polish Socialism occupies – or at any rate once occupied – a unique position in its relation to international socialism, a position which can be traced directly to the Polish national question”.16 But, as she said and demonstrated very clearly, to defend in the 1890s the letter of Marx’s 1848 support for Polish independence was not only to refuse to recognise that social reality had changed, but to transform marxism itself from a living method for investigating reality, into a dried-up quasi-religious dogma.

Luxemburg went further than this. In effect, she considered that Marx and Engels had treated the Polish question as essentially a matter of “foreign policy” for the revolutionary democracy and the workers’ movement: “Even at first glance this standpoint [ie Marx’s position on Poland] reveals its glaring lack of inner relation to the social theory of Marxism. By failing to analyse Poland and Russia as class societies bearing economic and political contradictions in their bosoms, by viewing them not from the point of view of historical development but as if they were in a fixed, absolute condition as homogeneous, undifferentiated units, this view ran counter to the very essence of Marxism”. It is as if Poland – and indeed Russia as well – could be treated as somehow “outside” capitalism.

The development of capitalist social relations had essentially the same effect in Ireland as in Poland. Despite Ireland’s being above all a country of emigration, the Irish working class was by no means homogeneous: on the contrary, the most heavily industrialised area was Belfast (textile industry and the Harland & Wolff shipyards), whose workers were drawn from the Catholic, sometimes Gaelic-speaking Celtic population, and from the descendants of the Protestant, Scottish and English who had been “settled” in Ireland (thanks to the violent displacement of the original inhabitants) by Oliver Cromwell and his successors. And this very working class had already begun to show the road to the only possible solution of the “national question” in Ireland: by joining ranks in the massive Belfast strikes of 1907.17 Irish workers were present in all the major industrial areas of Britain, especially around Liverpool and Glasgow.

The moral question that Marx had posed – the problem of English workers’ sensation of superiority to the Irish – was no longer limited to Ireland and the Irish: capital’s constant need to call absorb more labour power led to mass migrations from agricultural economies to newly industrialising areas, while the expansion of European colonisation brought European workers into contact with Asians, Africans, Indians... all over the planet. Nowhere was immigration more important than in the capitalist powerhouse of the United States, which witnessed not only a huge influx of workers from all over Europe, but a massive importation of cheap labour from Japan and China and of course the migration of black workers from the cotton fields of the backward South into the new industrial centres of the North: the legacy of slavery and racial prejudice remains a “gaping wound” (to use Luxemburg’s expression) in America to this day. Inevitably, these waves of migration brought with them prejudice, misunderstanding, rejection... all the moral degradation that Marx and Engels had noted in the English working class was reproduced over and over again. The more migration mixed populations of different origins, the more absurd the idea of “national independence” as a solution to prejudice inevitably became. All the more so in that underlying all these prejudices was one, universal and far more ancient than any national prejudice, driven right through the heart of the working class: the unthinking assumption of male superiority to women. Marx and Engels had identified a real problem, a crucial one even. Unsolved, it would mortally weaken the struggle of a class whose only weapon is its organisation and its class solidarity. But it could, and can, only be solved through the experience of working and living together, through the mutual solidarity imposed by the demands of the class struggle.

What caused James Connolly to end his life in such flagrant contradiction with the internationalism he had espoused during it? Apart from the weaknesses inherent in his view of the national question, which he shared with the majority of the Second International, it is also possible – though this is pure speculation on our part – that his confidence in the working class had been shattered by two major defeats: the defeat of the Dublin strike of 1913, which was in large part due to the the abject failure of the British trade unions to give the ITGWU adequate and above all active support; and the disintegration of the International itself when confronted with the test of World War I. If such were the case, we can only say that Connolly drew the wrong conclusions. The failure of the Dublin strike as a result of the Irish workers’ isolation demonstrated, not that Irish workers should seek salvation in the Irish nation, but on the contrary that the limits of little Ireland could no longer contain the battle between capital and labour which was now being fought out on a far broader stage; and the Russian Revolution, only one year after the suppression of the Easter Rising was to show that workers’ revolution, not national insurrection, was the only hope of putting an end to imperialist war and the misery of capitalist domination.

Jens, April 2016

The article that we are republishing here first appeared in World Revolution 21 in 1978. In the first paragraph it establishes the framework in which ‘national liberation’ struggles should be seen.

“The 'small nations' like Ireland, which wanted to grab something for themselves, would have to try and exploit for their own interests the conflict between the big imperialist powers.”

This reality was identified by revolutionaries at the time of the 1916 Easter Rising. Trotsky (Nashe Slovo 4 July 1916) pointed out the military importance of Ireland in relation to British imperialism: "an ‘independent’ Ireland could exist only as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain”.

This lack of ‘independence’ is acknowledged in the Proclamation read out at the beginning of the Easter Rising when it declared that the Irish nationalists were “supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe”. This is a reference to funds received from supporters in the US and arms supplies from Germany. The ‘national’ struggle needed imperialist backers.

For more on the background to the 1916 events see “The national question 100 years after the Dublin Easter Rising” in this issue.

The 1978 article traces the development of the national situation and specifically the role of the IRA up to the early 1970s. If, after the passage of nearly 40 years, we can see that some of the formulations have not stood the test of time, the overall framework is still valid. And these formulations still pose important questions.

For example, the text talks about “the downfall of Unionism”. While it is true that the Unionist-dominated Parliament of Northern Ireland was abolished in the early 1970s, the pro-British Unionists have continued as a force to this day. But the dominance of their position has changed, especially after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

The text says that “the IRA will not disappear”. On the face of it, with the IRA’s declaration of an end to its armed campaign in 2005 and its statement that it would only pursue its goals by political means, this appears to be contradicted by events. However, the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, is now a leading part in Northern Ireland’s Executive, sharing power with Unionists as a fundamental pillar of the capitalist state’s political apparatus. That the article also mistakenly identifies Stalinist republicanism as a force for the future only demonstrates that the outcome of conflicts within the bourgeoisie can not be calculated in every detail. We can also add that the “armed wing” of Republicanism has not disappeared, even if it has taken the form of dissident breakaways from the IRA.

One other problematic aspect of the analysis (that is not limited to Ireland) can be seen in the idea that the difficulties of the Irish economy are due to “the fact that the world market is already divided among the great capitalist powers, and above all because the capitalist system itself prevents a global development of the productive forces.” The division of the world market between different national capitals is not fixed. Over the past 20 years, for example, we have seen a decline in the relative position of the Japanese economy and advances for Chinese capitalism. This is not to say that the decade of growth of the Celtic Tiger could have been sustained, but that, in the competition between capitals, the possibility of individual advances and retreats is not excluded. In addition there is in the quoted passage the implicit idea that there are no possibilities left for the expansion for capitalism. This is something that has marked other texts during the history of the ICC.

Above all, however, the article strikes exactly the right note when it finishes with the assertion that only the class war can confront the attacks of capitalism and its mobilisations for imperialist war.

The Easter Rising of 1916

The Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, typically petty bourgeois in its hopelessness--its heroism a product of pure desperation--opened a new period of social and political crisis in Ireland. Through the ruthlessness with which the British bourgeoisie crushed the Easter Rising, through the relatively disinterested and even hostile attitude of the Irish workers (their ears still ringing with the defeat of their strike wave in 1913) towards the goals of the ruling classes in Ireland, history had shown the Irish bourgeoisie that the era of the possibility of the bourgeois revolution in Ireland was at an end. The reality of the Great War was the violent re-division of the globe among the powerful but crisis-ridden imperialist powers. The 'small nations' like Ireland, which wanted to grab something for themselves, would have to try and exploit for their own interests the conflict between the big imperialist powers. Thus, after 1916, Sinn Fein’s1 policy revolved around the fight to gain admission to the post-war peace conference of the big powers, in the hope of gaining American backing for Irish independence against Britain. Similarly, the so-called Irish ‘Labour Movement' sent delegates to the wretched conference of Social Democratic reconciliation in Berne,2 in order to win the support of Europe's most eloquent butchers for the Irish cause.

Had Britain lost the war it might have been a different story. As it was, the Irish Nationalists were unable to persuade anyone. Their most radical factions had either stayed out of the war, or had attempted to enlist the support of German imperialism. Now they found themselves empty-handed.

Developments in the world during and immediately after the war had shaken the economy in Ireland. The massive concentration and centralisation of capital under the direction of the state in wartime Britain and Europe, and the grave economic crisis which followed the war and the dismantling of the war economy, threatened to ruin and eliminate the small manufacturing bourgeoisie in the South of Ireland. It was the desperate struggle for survival of such worn-out strata, faced as they were with the convulsions of a world capitalism itself in its death throes, which gave birth to that remarkable imperialist abortion - the Irish Free State. In this atmosphere, the bourgeoisie in the South was able to mobilise the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie for a guerilla war against the British forces. This became known as the War of Independence (1919–1921).

During this period, the Nationalists fashioned the nucleus of a separate state. It was modeled on the most modern lines: equipped with a parliament, a police force, courts, prisons, and--of course--an army. The Irish Republican Army was based on the Volunteer Brigades of 1916, but was well-disciplined and firmly wedded to the framework of the new state, itself a bulwark of capitalist order. The IRA entered the world with the blood of the proletariat dripping from its hands. In the South and the South-West, it didn't hesitate to move against striking workers (see 'James Connolly and Irish Nationalism' , WR 173). In the cities, its brutal terrorisation of the civilian population during the 'War of Independence" matched that dished out by the British Black and Tans.

Partition

Tottering on the brink of defeat, the Nationalists were forced to sign a treaty with Britain in 1921. This granted Ireland nominal independence. However, the country was to be partitioned: the industrial counties of the North-East received their own regional parliament and retained special connections with Britain.

The acceptance of the Treaty threatened to provoke an army coup. This didn't happen but it did lead to a split in the government and in the army in the South, with the Republican extremists wanting to hold out for a better deal from Britain.4 And although attempts were made to re-unite the IRA in order to launch an attack against Northern Ireland, in the face of the obvious impossibility of such a campaign, the Free State slid into a bourgeois faction fight still more savage than the War of Independence . This conflict ended with the victory of the pro-Treaty (British-backed) forces in the South.

These events show us not only the absolutely anti-proletarian character of 'Irish Independence and Unity’ in the present epoch, but its objective impossibility as well. Before 1916, the Ulster Unionists and the Southern Irish Nationalists were engaged in rival arms build-ups and the constitution of paramilitary armies. In the North, Craig--the Unionist leader--had generously sent the Ulster workers to the imperialist slaughter in order to show his love of King and Country. But the Unionists were prepared, even if it came to a show of arms, to resist any attempt by London to subordinate their interests in any way to the control of the Southern Irish bourgeoisie. Ulster's industry lived from, and produced for, the British and world market. It had no interest in supporting the stagnant Irish agricultural economy, or in becoming the victim of Southern protectionist policies.

The economic development of Ireland

In Ireland, only Ulster participated in the British industrial revolution. Politically and economically in control of the whole island, only the British bourgeoisie would have been capable of industrialising the South of Ireland. But within the United Kingdom, Ireland assumed the role of cheap supplier of agricultural products and labour power. If the Irish Republic finds itself in exactly the same situation today, then this is the result--not of '700 years of betrayals'--but of the fact that the world market is already divided among the great capitalist powers, and above all because the capitalist system itself prevents a global development of the productive forces. This, then, is no mere Irish question: we find ourselves in a beggar's world of hunger and misery, careering towards nuclear self-destruction if the resolution of the present crisis of capitalism is left up to the bourgeoisie.

The hostility of the North and South

The desperate hostility of the North and South in Ireland reflected the antagonistic imperialist aims of the Ulster and Southern bourgeoisies. In the face of a contracting world market, these aims could not be reconciled. But their conflict had a 'positive' aspect for capitalism in Ireland. The lords of the Belfast sweatshops, and the Republican Army of Dublin's men of property, ensured that the workers got caught in the cross-fire between them. In the industrial centres of the North, the Protestant and Catholic ghettos were made to compete against each other for whatever miserable jobs, wages and housing were going. Mobilised or intimidated behind the Orange and the Green, the class solidarity of the workers was answered with the tyranny of pogroms. In Belfast, the proletarian strike wave of 1919 was soon followed by bloody orgies, sparked off by the IRA's killing of Protestant workers, and taken up by Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. Over sixty died in this wave of barbarism. In the 1930s, the Republican and Unionist gangs would react with the same suspicion and hostility to the united struggle of the unemployed workers in Belfast.

Southern Ireland under de Valera

Through the Civil War, the pro-Treaty wing of the IRA established itself as the official army of the state in the South. Soon afterwards, de Valera and his supporters moved away from the extreme IRA and founded a political party, Fianna Fail, to represent the radical Republicans in parliament. In the face of the world economic collapse of 1929, de Valera came to power in the 1932 elections armed with a makeshift protectionist and state capitalist programme. His election victory owed much to the support given him by the IRA. However, although the Republicans took radical measures to shore up the national capital in Southern Ireland, they were unable to stimulate industrial growth. Their ‘Economic War’ with Britain led only to chaos in the vital, export-oriented agricultural sector. But despite the fiasco this policy represented, we can see how the Republicans established themselves during this period as the natural rulers of Irish capitalism. In the 1930s, de Valera was able to employ the full force of the state--plus the IRA.--in beating down the essentially pro-British Fascists of O'Duffy's Blueshirts. This was the time when the rebel IRA men flocked into the ranks of the official security forces of the state and the secret police to fight the fascist menace. And when the Blueshirts led farmers in withholding annuity payments to the government in an attempt to make de Valera call off the ‘Economic War’ with Britain, it was the Republican gunmen who confiscated these farmers' cattle and auctioned them off.

The ‘Economic War’ was a desperate response to the folding of the world market following the Great Crash. It neither did, nor could have posed, any threat to Britain's control economically over Ireland. And this is true despite the nostalgia of the Irish leftists today for this period. Between 1926 and 1938, the economic rate of growth in Southern Ireland was about 1% per annum. In the war years it would be nil. Out of necessity, the policy had to be abandoned before the outbreak of World War II. Indeed, London was quite prepared to make concessions in the immediate pre-war period. Chamberlain, when requested, evacuated the naval bases in Ireland. Later, Churchill would offer unification of Ireland to the Southern bourgeoisie in return for more open support from the 'neutral' Republic during the war. The idea of placing Ulster's war industries within the cocoon of Irish neutrality seemed tempting to the Southern bourgeoisie. But as ever, the intransigence of the Ulster Unionists--who were profiting from the British war economy--barred the way to this solution.

The legacy of 1916

‘Hatred of Britain' may have been the force animating the ‘men of 16’. But for the IRA, and for de Valera 's Republicanism, this legacy was used more as propaganda for their regime and as a recruiting weapon to win them support. Their aim, after all, was never to smash British imperialism, which (quite apart from being impossible in this epoch) would have amounted to slaying the hen which lays the golden eggs as far as they were concerned. The real world historical goal of the bourgeois forces behind the so-called Irish Revolution was either to cajole or force the British government into giving the Ulster Unionist bosses the kick in the teeth they had coming. And Britain was the only one around strong enough to do this.5 The Republicans reckoned that if they could bring together the industrial North with the agricultural South, they'd have tractors to plough their fields. They could then hope to feather their own nests while ‘invading' the British market. The plan was to reconcile Southern Irish and British imperialist interests at Ulster's expense. This grand expansionist strategy of the Republicans was referred to as 'the unification of Ireland’.

The outbreak of World War II seemed to change this situation. It presented to the Republicans the possibility of really toppling the Unionists themselves, and chasing the Brits out of Ireland by hanging on to the coat-tails of German imperialism. The 1939 bombing campaign in England (which involved the murder of British workers) was followed by hair-brained schemes of action worked out between the IRA anti-fascists and the Nazi government in Germany.6 However, the German bourgeoisie never seriously contemplated an Irish campaign, so the IRA succeeded only in bringing new waves of Fianna Fail repression upon itself. In moving against an unwanted political friend, the democratic Dublin government never hesitated to use concentration camps and open murder in its clampdowns against the IRA during the 1930s and 1940s. Just as today, the democratic government in Ireland organises systematic terror in defence of bourgeois ‘freedoms and civil liberties’ even while it breaks into floods of tears for the victims of the smaller-scale terror campaigns of the IRA.

The pulverisation of the IRA

By the 1960s, the IRA was militarily pulverised in the North and in the South. It had lost all its support among the ‘Catholic’ workers, who had been an important source of its cannon-fodder before. It then settled down to the formulation of a radical state capitalist programme to win back support and, as a result, began to lean towards the Russian imperialist bloc. The stunted Southern Irish economy, so as to benefit from the post-war boom, had had to lift its protectionist barriers. But with the close of the period of reconstruction after 1965, the Irish Republic found itself increasingly dependent on its more powerful neighbours. If its economy was to avoid collapse in the face of the world economic crisis, the Southern economy had to become more closely integrated into the Western bloc as a whole. Shortly thereafter, Ireland entered the EEC.

The IRA, would-be saviours of the nation. responded to the crisis- and to the alarming combativity of the working class in the South – by turning to Stalinism. But this smooth leftward swing was rudely interrupted by the events in Northern Ireland after 1969. The Ulster industrial caste, losers in the economic fight for survival, had become a real obstacle to Britain's political and economic management of the crisis. The bourgeoisie was aware it had to shift the Unionist rubbish heap. But when they tried to touch it, they found it crawling with angry rats. At this stage, with the Unionists resisting all reforms, the Dublin government intervened, first through its support for the civil rights movement in the North, and secondly by offering to support the Northern IRA in a new campaign. But this support was conditionally given. The Northern IRA had to agree to split from the Southern Irish IRA leadership.

These measures soon led to a split in the IRA. The Provisionals, straight-nationalist murder gangs, were based in the Ulster ghettos and the 'non-sectarian' Stalinists of the Southern Command comprised the Officials. As a result of its clever manoeuvre, the Dublin government hoped to achieve two things:

1. preparations of the military shove needed to topple the Unionists, the main barrier to ‘Irish Unification’.

2. the weakening of its Stalinist opponents in the IRA in the South.

Without going into the course of recent events in Ulster it is clear that the anti-proletarian part played by the IRA in this bloody holocaust marks a continuation of its bourgeois traditions. It has played its part, to be sure, in the downfall of Unionism. At the same time it has itself received a severe beating. Despite the IRA's continuing wild bombings and shootings, tomorrow and the future will see the British and the Irish security forces--the masters of the streets and the concentration camps, the armed anti-terrorists--as the main forces attempting to butcher the revolutionary movement of the proletariat on these islands. But however battered it may be, the IRA will not disappear. It remains the living symbol of a frustrated Irish imperialism. And particularly in its Stalinist form, it will have an important role to play in the coming fight against the workers.

Divided and demoralised by over fifty years of counter-revolution, the Ulster proletariat found itself driven into the ghettos in 1969, looking for security where none was to be found. Now it must emerge to meet the relentless attacks of capitalism as the economic crisis deepens. And gigantic as this task will be, there is no other way out. As militants of the working class, we denounce the cynical lies of the Irish and British bourgeoisie about reconciliations and a democratic 'settlement". And we call on the proletariat--North and South--to take up the class war.

Krespel, December 1978

The joint conference of the sections of the ICC in Germany and Switzerland, and the nucleus in Sweden, held in March 2016, adopted, among other documents, a report on the national situation in Germany, which we publish here. This report makes no claim to completeness. Instead it concentrates on points we think it are particularly important to reflect on and discuss now. Since these aspects in general have the dramatic events of the current situation as their point of departure, we add to the report the presentation made at the conference, which is partly devoted to bringing the report more up to date. Critical comments to the report and presentation made in the course of the ensuing debate are added as footnotes to the presentation. In view of the importance of the developments in what is the most central country of European capitalism today, we hope that these texts can be a positive contribution to the necessary reflection, from the point of view of the proletariat, about the present world situation.

The competitiveness of German capital today

Since the German nation state was not constituted until 1870, and was late in joining the imperialist carve-up of the world, it never established itself as a leading financial or colonial power. The main basis of its economic might was and remains its highly efficient industry and work force. Whereas East Germany (the old German Democratic Republic, GDR) fell behind economically through becoming part of the Eastern bloc, post-World War II West Germany was able to build on this foundation and even consolidate it. By 1989, the latter had become the world’s leading export nation, with the lowest state deficit of all the leading powers. Despite comparatively high wage levels its economy was extremely competitive. It also benefited, economically, from the world wide trade possibilities opened up by membership of the Western bloc, and from having a restricted military budget as the main loser of two world wars.

At the political and territorial levels Germany then profited most from the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, absorbing the former GDR. Economically however, the sudden absorbing of this zone, which had hopelessly fallen behind international standards, also represented a considerable burden, above all financially. A burden which threatened the competitiveness of the new, bigger Germany. During the 1990s it lost ground on the world market, while the state budget deficit levels began to approach those of other leading powers.

Today, a quarter of a century later, Germany has more than regained the lost ground. As an exporter, it is second only to China. Last year, the state budget had a surplus of €26 billion. Its growth of 1.7% was moderate, but for a highly developed country still an achievement. Official unemployment has dropped to its lowest level since re-unification. To date, the policy of maintaining a highly developed industrial production based in Germany itself has been a success.

Of course, as an old industrial country, the bedrock of this success is a high organic composition of capital, the product of at least two centuries of accumulation. But within this context, the high skills and qualifications of its population is decisive for its competitive edge. Before World War I, Germany had become the main centre of scientific development and its application in production. With the catastrophe of National Socialism and World War II it lost this advantage and has shown no signs since of recovering it. What remains however is its know-how in the production process itself. Since the demise of the Hansa,1 Germany has never been a leading, long lasting maritime power. Although long an essentially peasant economy, its soil, on average, is less fertile than that of France, for example. Its natural advantages lay in its geographic location at the heart of Europe, and in precious metals already mined during the Middle Ages. Out of this emerged a high aptitude for artisan and industrial labour and co-operation and a know-how developed and passed on from generation to generation. Although its industrial revolution benefited considerably from large coal resources, the demise of heavy industries from the 1970s on made clear that the heart of Germany’s economic ascendency lay not here, but in its efficiency in the production of the means of production, and more generally in the transformation of living into dead labour. Today Germany is world-wide the main producer of complex machines. More than the car industry, this sector is the backbone of its economy. Behind this strength, there is also the know-how of the bourgeoisie which, already during capitalist ascendency, concentrated essentially on its economic and business activities, since it was more or less excluded from positions of political and military power by the Prussian landowner (Junker) caste. The passion for engineering which this bourgeoisie developed continues to find expression not only in the machine-tool industry, still often based on mid-sized, family-run units, but in the particular capacity of the ruling class as a whole to run the entire German industry as if it were a single machine. The intricate and highly effective inter-connection of all the different units of production and distribution is one of the main advantages of the German national capital.

Confronted with the dead weight of the collapsing GDR economy, the turning point in the recovery of its competitive edge was reached in the first decade of the present century. Two factors were decisive. At the organisational level, all the main companies, including the mid-sized machine-tool manufacturers (Maschinenbau) began to produce and operate on a world scale, creating networks of production all centred around Germany itself. At the political level, under the leadership of the SPD (the Social-Democrats), the attacks against wages and social benefits (the so-called “Agenda 2010”) were so radical that the French government even accused Germany of wage dumping.

This turning point was favoured by three major developments in the global economic context which turned out to be particularly favourable to Germany.

Firstly the transition from the Keynesian to the so-called Neo-Liberal model of state capitalism favoured more export oriented economies. While strongly participating in the post 1945 Keynesian economic order dominating the Western bloc, the West German “model” was from the onset influenced by “Ordo-Liberal”2 ideas (Ludwig Erhard, Freiberger School), never developing the kind of “Statism” which continues to hamper the competitiveness of France today.

Second was the consolidation of European economic cooperation after the fall of the Berlin Wall (creation of the European Union, the Euro currency union). Although partly driven by political, essentially imperialist motives (its neighbours’ desire to keep “control” of Germany), at the economic level Germany, as the strongest competitor, has been the main beneficiary of the EU and of the currency union. The financial crisis and the Euro crisis after 2008, confirmed that the leading capitalist countries still have the capacity to deflect the worst effects of the crisis onto their weaker rivals. The different international and European salvage packages, such as those for Greece, essentially served the propping up of German (and French) banks at the expense of the “rescued” economies.

Thirdly, Germany’s geographical and historical proximity to Eastern Europe helped to make it the main beneficiary of the transformation there, conquering markets previously out of reach, including the extra-capitalist3 leftovers.

Relationship between German imperialism’s economic and military power

To illustrate the importance of the consequences of this competitive strength at other levels, we now want to examine the link to the imperialist dimension. After 1989, Germany could put forward its imperialist interests with greater determination and independence. Examples of this were its initiative, under Helmut Kohl, in encouraging the break-up of Yugoslavia (beginning with the diplomatic recognition of the state independence of Croatia and Slovenia), or the refusal, under Gerhard Schröder, to support the second Iraq War. In the past 25 years there have certainly been advances at the imperialist level. Above all, both the “international community” and the population “at home” have become accustomed to German military interventions abroad. The transition from a conscript to a professional army has been made. The German armaments industry has increased its share of the world market. Nevertheless, at the imperialist level it has been unable to regain ground anything like to the same extent as economically. The problem of finding enough volunteers for the army remains unresolved. Above all, the goal of the technical modernisation of the armed forces and the significant increase of its mobility and firepower has not at all been achieved.

In fact, during this whole period after 1989, it was never the goal of the German bourgeoisie to try, either in the short or medium term, to “pose its candidature” as a potential bloc leader against the USA. At the military level, this would have been impossible, given the overwhelming military might of the United States, and Germany’s present status as “economic giant but military dwarf”. Any attempt to do so would also have led to its main European rivals ganging up against it. At the economic level, supporting the weight of what would have had to be an enormous re-armament programme would have ruined the competitiveness of an economy already struggling with the financial burden of re-unification - as well as risking confrontations with the working class.

But none of this means that Berlin has renounced its ambitions to regain its status at least as the leading European military power. On the contrary, ever since the 1990s it has pursued a long term strategy aimed at augmenting its economic power as a basis for a later military renaissance. Whereas the former USSR offered a reminder of how military power cannot be maintained in the long run without an equivalent economic basis, more recently China has revealed the other side of the same coin: how economic ascent can prepare a later military one.

One of the keys to such a long term strategy is Russia, but also the Ukraine. At the military level, it is the USA, not Germany, which gained most from the eastward extension of the NATO (in fact Germany tried to prevent some of the steps of this roll-back of Russia). Germany, by contrast, hopes to profit from this whole zone above all economically. Unlike China, Russia for historical reasons is unable to organise its own economic modernisation. Before the Ukraine conflict began, the Kremlin had already decided to attempt this modernisation in cooperation with German industry. In fact, one of the main advantages of this conflict for the USA is that it blocks (via the embargo against Russia) this economic cooperation. Here also lies one of the main motivations for the German chancellor Merkel (and the French president Hollande as her junior partner in this affair) to mediate between Moscow and Kiev. Despite the present desolate state of the Russian economy, the German bourgeoisie is still convinced that Russia would be able to finance such a modernisation itself. The oil price will not remain forever as low as it is today, and Russia also has a host of precious metals to sell. In addition, Russian agriculture has still to be put on a modern capitalist basis (this is even more true for the Ukraine, which – despite the Chernobyl disaster – still has some of the most fertile soil on the planet). In the middle term perspective of food shortages and rising prices for agricultural products, such agricultural areas can gain a considerable economic and even strategic importance. The fear of the USA is thus not unfounded that Germany could profit from Eastern Europe to increase further its relative economic and political weight in the world, and somewhat reduce that of America in Europe.

An example of how Germany already successfully uses its economic strength to imperialist ends is that of the Syrian refugees. Even if it wanted to, it would be very difficult for Germany to participate directly in the present bombing of Syria, on account of its military weakness. But since, on account of its relatively low unemployment, it can absorb part of the Syrian population in the form of the present refugee influx, it gains an alternative means of influencing above all the post-war situation there.

Against this background, it is not surprising that the USA, in particular, is presently trying to use juridical means to curb the economic power of its German competitor, for instance by bringing Volkswagen or the Deutsche Bank to court, threatening them with punitive fines of billions of dollars.

The difficulties of the working class

The year 2015 witnessed a series of strikes above all in transport (DB-German Railways, Lufthansa) and of kindergarten employees. There were also more local but significant movements such as that at the Charité hospital in Berlin, where there was a movement of solidarity between nurses and patients. All of these movements were very sectoral and isolated, sometimes partly focusing on the false alternative of big against small corporatist trade unions, blurring the necessity for autonomous self-organisation by workers. Although all the unions organised strikes so as to cause a maximum of annoyance to the public, the attempt to erode solidarity, at least in the form of public sympathy with those on strike, only partly succeeded. The argument accompanying the demands in the kindergarten sector, for instance, that the regime of particularly low wages in traditionally female professions has to come to an end, while contributing to the isolation of this strike, was popular within the class as a whole, which seemed to recognise that this “discrimination” is above all a means of dividing the workers.

It is certainly an unusual phenomenon that, in contemporary Germany of all places, strikes played such a prominent role in the media in the course of 2015. These strikes, while giving proof of a still-existing militancy and solidarity, are not however evidence of a continuing wave or phase of proletarian struggle. They should at least partly be understood as a manifestation of the particular economic situation of Germany as described above. In this context of relatively low unemployment and shortage of qualified labour, the bourgeoisie itself put forward the idea that, after years of sinking wages inaugurated under Schröder (they sank more radically than almost anywhere in Western Europe), the employees should at last be “rewarded” for their “sense of realism”. The new Grand Coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats itself set the trend by finally (as one of the last countries in Europe to do so) introducing a basic minimum wage law, and raising some social benefits. In the car industry, for instance, the big companies in 2015 paid bonuses (which they called “profit sharing”) of up to €9000 per worker. This was all the more possible because the modernisation of the production apparatus has been so successful that – at least for the moment – the German competitive edge depends much less on low wages than a decade before.

In 2003 the ICC analysed the international class struggle, beginning with the protests against attacks against the pensions in France and Austria, as a turning point (unspectacular, almost imperceptible) for the better in class struggle, essentially because of the beginning of a recognition by the present working generation (for the first time since the last world war) that its children will have not better but worse conditions than themselves. This led to first significant expressions of solidarity between the generations in workers’ struggles. However, because of the intimidation of strike movements by growing unemployment and precarious working conditions this evolution expressed itself, at the “point of production” more at the level of consciousness than of militancy – it became increasingly difficult and daunting to go on strike. In Germany itself the initial response of the unemployed to Agenda 2010 (the “Monday demonstrations”) also soon ran out of steam. But on the other hand, a new generation began to take to the streets, benefiting from not yet being under the direct yoke of wage labour, to express not only their own anger and concern about the future, but also (more or less consciously) that of the class as a whole. In this, they were often joined by the precariously employed. These protests, extending to countries like Turkey, Israel and Brazil, but reaching their culmination in the anti-CPE and Indignados movements in France and Spain respectively, even found a small, weak but still significant echo in the movement of students and pupils in Germany. And they were accompanied, not yet by the crystallisation of a new generation of revolutionaries, but by its potential precursor.

In Germany this was expressed by a small but combative “Occupy” movement, more open than before to internationalist ideas. The slogan of the first Occupy demonstrations was “Down with capital, the state and the nation”. For the first time in decades in Germany, therefore, a politicisation was beginning which did not seem to be dominated by anti-fascist and national liberation ideology. This was taking place in response to the financial crisis of 2008, followed by the Euro crisis. Some of these small minorities were beginning to think that capitalism was on the brink of collapse. The idea began to develop that if Marx was being proven right about the crisis of capitalism, he might also be right about the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. The expectation grew that the massive international attacks would soon be met with similarly massive international class struggle. “Athens today – Berlin tomorrow – international solidarity against capital” became the new slogan.

What followed was not an historic defeat, but the story of how the bourgeoisie smashed, for the moment, the political opening up begun in 2003, bringing this phase of the class struggle to a close. What began as the US sub-primes crisis posed a very real menace to the stability of the international financial architecture. The danger was acute. There was no time for long drawn out negotiations between governments about how to handle it. The bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers had the advantage of obliging governments in all the industrial countries to take immediate and radical measures to salvage the situation (as the Herald Tribune later wrote: “if it had not happened, the Lehman collapse would have had to be invented”). But it also had advantages at another level: against the working class. Perhaps for the first time, the world bourgeoisie responded to a major, acute crisis of its system, not by downplaying but by exaggerating its importance. The workers of the world were told that unless they immediately accepted the massive attacks, states and with them pension and insurance funds would go bankrupt, private savings melt away. This ideological terror offensive resembled the “shock and awe” military strategy employed by the US in the second Iraq war, aimed at paralysing, traumatising and disarming its adversary. And it worked. At the same time, the objective basis was there for not attacking all the central sectors of the world proletariat at the same time, since large sectors of the class in the US, Britain, Ireland and southern Europe suffered much more than in Germany, France and elsewhere in north-west Europe.

The second chapter of this offensive of terror and division was the Euro-crisis, where the European proletariat was successfully divided between north and south, between “lazy Greeks” and “arrogant Nazi Germans”. In this context, the bourgeoisie has another trump card up its sleeve: the economic success of Germany. Even the strikes of 2015, and more generally the recent increases in wages and social benefits there, were all used to hammer home the message, to the whole European proletariat, that making sacrifices in face of the crisis pays off in the end.

This message, that struggle does not pay, was further underscored by the fact that, in those countries where political and economic stability are particularly fragile, and the working class weaker, the protest movements of the young generation (the “Arab spring”) only succeeded in triggering off internecine civil and imperialist wars and/or new waves of repression. All of this reinforced the feeling of powerlessness and lack of perspective in the class as a whole.

The non-collapse of capitalism and the failure of the European proletariat to oppose the massive attacks also took its toll on the precursors of a new generation of revolutionary minorities. The increase in public meetings and demonstrations which characterised this phase in Germany gave way to a real phase of demoralisation. Since then, other demonstrations have taken place – against “Pegida”, TTIP,4 gene technology or the surveillance of the Internet – but devoid of any more fundamental criticism of capitalism as such.

And now, since the summer of 2015, the blows of the financial and Euro-crisis offensives were followed by another: the present refugee crisis. This is also being used to the maximum by the ruling class against any developing reflection within the proletariat. But more than the bourgeois propaganda, the refugee wave itself strikes a further blow against the first seeds of a recovery of class consciousness from the blow of 1989 (the “death of communism”). The fact that millions from the “periphery” of capitalism are risking their lives to gain access to Europe, North America and other “fortresses” can only, for the moment, reinforce the impression that it is a privilege to live in the developed parts of the world, and that the working class at the centre of the system, in the absence of any alternative to capitalism, might have something to defend within capitalism after all. Moreover, the class as a whole, stripped for the moment of its own political, theoretical and cultural heritage, tends to see the causes of this desperate migration, lying not within capitalism, not being linked to contradictions centred in the democratic countries, but in an absence or lack of capitalism and democracy in the conflict zones.

All of this has led to a renewed retreat of both militancy and consciousness within the class.

The problem of political populism

Although the phenomenon of right wing terror against foreigners and refugees is not new in Germany, particular since re-unification and particularly (although not only) in its new, Eastern provinces, until now the rise of a stable political populist movement in Germany has been successfully prevented by the ruling class itself. But in the context of the Euro-crisis, the acute phase of which lasted until the summer of 2015, and the “refugee crisis” which followed it, there has been a new upsurge of political populism. This has manifested itself mainly at three levels: The electoral rise of the “Alternative for Germany” (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), which was originally constituted in opposition to the Greek salvage packages, and on the basis of a vague opposition to the joint European currency; a populist right wing protest movement centred on the “Monday demonstrations” in Dresden (“Pegida”); a new resurgence of right wing terrorism against refugees and foreigners, such as the “National Socialist Underground” (NSA).

Such phenomena are not new on the German political scene. But until now, the bourgeoisie has always succeeded in preventing them leading to any kind of stable and parliamentary presence. By the summer of 2015, it seemed as if the ruling sectors would succeed in this once again. The AfD had been robbed of its theme (the “Greek” crisis) and of some of its financial resources, and had suffered its first split. But then this populism made a comeback – stronger than before – thanks to the new wave of immigration . And since this immigration question risks playing a more or less dominant role in the foreseeable future, the chances have increased of the AfD establishing itself as a new, more lasting component of the party political apparatus.

The ruling class is able to use all of this to make its electoral game more interesting, to boost the ideologies of democracy and anti-fascism, and also to spread division and xenophobia. Nevertheless, this whole process neither corresponds directly to its class interest, nor is it able to control the process completely.

That there is a close connection between the sharpening of the global crisis of capitalism and the advance of populism is illustrated by the Euro-crisis and its effects on the German political scene. The economic crisis not only augments insecurity and fear, intensifying the struggle for survival. It also fans the flames of irrationality. Germany economically would have the most to lose from any weakening of the cohesion of the EU and the Euro. Millions of jobs are directly or indirectly dependent on exports and the role the EU plays for Germany in this context. In such a country it is all the more irrational to put in question the EU, the Euro, the whole world market orientation of the national capital. At this level, it is no coincidence that the recent appearance of such xenophobic movements was triggered by worries about the stability of the new European currency.

Rationality is a vital moment of human reason, though not the only one. Rationality centres around the element of calculation in thinking. Since this includes the capacity to calculate one’s own objective interests, it is an indispensable element, not only of bourgeois society, but also of the proletarian liberation struggle. Historically, it appeared and developed to a large extent under the impetus of equivalent exchange. Since, under capitalism, money fully develops its role as universal equivalent, the currency and the confidence it inspires plays a major role in “formatting” rationality in bourgeois society. Loss of confidence in the universal equivalent is therefore one of the main sources of irrationality in bourgeois society. This is why currency crises and periods of hyperinflation are particularly dangerous for the stability of this society. The inflation of 1923 in Germany was thus one of the most important factors preparing the triumph of National Socialism ten years later.

The present wave of refugees and immigration, on the other hand, accentuates and illustrates another aspect of populism: the sharpening of competition between the victims of capitalism, and the tendency towards exclusion, xenophobia and scapegoating. The misery under capitalist rule gives rise to a triad of destruction: firstly the accumulation of aggression, hatred, maliciousness and a longing for destruction and self-destruction; secondly the projection of these anti-social impulses onto others (moral hypocrisy); thirdly the directing of these impulses, not against the ruling class, which appears too powerful to challenge, but against apparently weaker classes and social strata. This three-pronged “complex” flourishes therefore above all in the absence of the collective struggle of the proletariat, when individual subjects feel powerless in face of capital. The culminating point of this triad at the root of populism is the pogrom. Although the populist aggression also expresses itself against the ruling class, what it demands, so vocally, from it is protection and favours. What it desires is that the bourgeoisie should either eliminate what it sees as its threatening rivals, or tolerate the fact that it starts doing so itself. This “conformist revolt”, a permanent feature of capitalism, becomes acute in face of crisis, war, chaos, instability. In the 1930s the framework of its development was the world-historic defeat of the proletariat. Today this framework is the absence of any perspective: the phase of decomposition.

As already developed in the ICC’s Theses on Decomposition, one of the social and material bases of populism is the process of déclassement, the loss of any class identification. Despite German national capital’s economic robustness and its shortages of qualified labour, there is an important part of the German population today which, although unemployed, is not really an active factor of the industrial reserve army (ready to take the jobs of others and therefore exercising a downward pressure on wages), but which belongs rather to what Marx called the Lazarus layer of the working class. Because of health problems, or being unable to bear the stress of modern capitalist labour and the struggle for existence, or the lack of appropriate qualifications, this sector is “unemployable” from the capitalist point of view. Instead of pressuring wage levels, these layers increase the total wage bill for the national capital through the benefits they live off. It is this sector also which most feels the refugees today as potential rivals.

Within this sector, there are two important groups of proletarian youth, parts of which can be prone to mobilisation as cannon fodder for bourgeois cliques, but also as active protagonists of pogroms. The first is comprised of the children of the first or second generations of Gastarbeiter. The original idea was that these “guest workers” would not stay when they were no longer needed, and above all that they would not bring their families with them or found families in Germany. The opposite took place, and the bourgeoisie made no particular effort to educate the children of such families. The result today is that, because unskilled jobs have to a large extent been “exported” to what used to be termed “third world countries”, part of this segment of proletarian youth is condemned to an existence from state benefits, never being integrated into associated labour. The other group is the children of the traumatic mass sackings in East Germany after re-unification. Part of this segment, Germans rather than immigrants, which were not brought up to match the highly competitive “Western” form of capitalism, and did not dare make the move to West Germany to find a job after 1989, as the more intrepid ones did, has joined this army of people living from benefits. These sectors in particular are vulnerable to lumpenisation, criminalisation and decadent, xenophobic forms of politicisation.

Although populism is the product of its system, the bourgeoisie can neither produce this phenomenon at will, nor make it disappear at will. But it can manipulate it to its own ends, and encourage or discourage its development to a greater or lesser degree. In general it does both. But this is also not easy to dominate. Even in the context of totalitarian state capitalism it is difficult for the ruling class to achieve and maintain a coherence in such a situation. Populism itself is deeply rooted in the contradictions of capitalism. The reception of refugees today, for instance, lies in the objective interest of important sectors of German capitalism. The economic advantages are even more apparent than the imperialist ones. This is why the leaders of industry and the business world are the most enthusiastic supporters of the “welcoming culture” at the moment. They reckon that Germany would need an influx of about one million each year in the coming period in view of the predicted shortage of qualified labour and above all the demographic crisis caused by the country’s persistently low birth rate. Moreover, refugees from wars and other catastrophes often prove to be particularly diligent and disciplined workers, ready not only to work for low wages, but also to take initiative and risks. Moreover, the integration of newcomers from “outside”, and the cultural openness this requires, is itself a productive force (and a potential strength for the proletariat too, of course). An eventual success of Germany at this level could give it an additional advantage over its European competitors.

However, exclusion is, at the same time, the other side of the coin of Merkel’s inclusion policy. The immigration needed today is no longer the unqualified labour of the Gastarbeiter generations, now that the unskilled jobs have been concentrated in the periphery of capitalism. The new migrants should bring high qualifications with them, or at least the willingness to acquire them. The present situation requires a much more organised and ruthless selection than in the past. Because of these contradictory needs of inclusion and exclusion, the bourgeoisie encourages openness and xenophobia at the same time. It responds today to this need with a division of labour between left and right, including within Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party and her coalition government with the SPD. But behind the present dissonance between the different political groupings about the refugee question, there is not only division of labour, but also different concerns and interests. The bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous block. Whereas those parts of the ruling class and the state apparatus closer to the economy push for integration, the whole security apparatus is horrified by Merkel’s opening of the frontiers in summer 2015, and by the numbers coming ever since, because of the loss of control over who enters the state territory which this had temporarily led to. Moreover, within the repressive and legal apparatus there are inevitably those who sympathise with and protect the extreme right out of a shared obsession with law and order, nationalism etc.

As for the political caste itself, there are not only those who (depending on the mood in their constituency) flirt with populism out of opportunism. There are also many who share its mentality. To all of this we can add the contradictions of nationalism itself. Like all modern bourgeois states, Germany was founded on the basis of myths about shared history, culture and even blood. Against this background, even the most powerful bourgeoisie cannot invent and re-invent at will different definitions of the nation to suit its changing interests. Nor would it necessarily have an objective interest in doing so, since the old nationalist myths are still essential, and a powerful lever of “divide and rule” towards the inside, and of mobilising support for imperialist aggression towards the outside. Thus, it is still not self-evident today that you can have something like a black or a Muslim “German”.

The German ruling class faced with the “refugee crisis”

In the context of decomposition and economic crisis, the principle motor of populism in Europe in recent decades has been the problem of immigration. Today this problem has been sharpened by the biggest exodus since World War II. Why is this influx apparently much more of a political problem in Europe than in countries like Turkey, Jordan or even the Lebanon, which receive much bigger contingents? In the older capitalist countries, the pre-capitalist customs of hospitality, and the subsistence economic and social structures which go with them, have withered much more radically. There is also the fact that these migrants come from a different culture. This is of course not a problem in itself, on the contrary. But modern capitalism makes it a problem. In Western Europe in particular, the welfare state is the main organiser of social aid and cohesion. It is this state which is supposed to accommodate the refugees. This already places them in competition with the “indigenous” poor over jobs, housing and benefits.

Until now, because of its relative economic, political and social stability, immigration, and with it populism, has caused less problems in Germany than in much of western Europe. But in the present situation, the German bourgeoisie is increasingly confronted by this problem, not only at home but in the context of the European Union.

Within Germany itself, the rise of right wing populism disturbs its project of integrating part of the immigrants. This is a real problem since, to date, all the attempts to raise the birth rate “at home” have failed. Right wing terror also damages its reputation abroad – a very sensitive point in view of the crimes of the German bourgeoisie during the first half of the 20th century. The establishment of the AfD as a stable parliamentary force could complicate the formation of future governments. At the electoral level, it is at present a problem above all for the CDU/CSU, the leading governmental party, which, until now, under Merkel, has been able to attract both social democratic and conservative voters, thus cementing its leading position towards the SPD.

But it is above all at the level of Europe that populism today threatens German interests. The status of Germany as economically, and to a lesser degree politically, a global player, depends to an important degree on the existence and coherence of the EU. The arrival in government of populist, more or less anti-European parties in Eastern (already the case in Hungary and Poland) and above all in Western Europe, would tend to hamper this cohesion. This in particular is why Merkel has declared the refugee question to be the issue which will “decide the destiny of Germany”. The strategy of the German bourgeoisie towards this question is to attempt to convert, at the European level, the more or less chaotic migration of the post-war Gastarbeiter and de-colonisation period into a meritocratic, highly selective immigration more on the Canadian or Australian model. The more effective sealing of the external borders of the EU is one of the preconditions for the the proposed conversion of illegal into legal immigration. It would also entail the establishment of yearly immigration quotas. Instead of paying horrific sums to get smuggled into the EU, migrants are to be encouraged to “invest” in improving their own qualifications in order to increase chances of legal access. Instead of setting off towards Europe on their own initiative, those refugees accepted would be provided with transport, accommodation and eventual jobs already designated for them. The other side of this coin is that the undesired immigrants would be stopped at the borders, or quickly and brutally expelled if they have already managed to gain access. This conversion of the EU borders into selection ramps (already an ongoing process) is presented as a humanitarian project aimed at reducing the numbers drowning in the Mediterranean, which, despite all media manipulation, has become a source of moral disgrace for the European bourgeoisie. Through its insistence on a European rather than a national solution, Germany is assuming its responsibilities towards capitalist Europe, at the same time underlining its claim to political leadership of the old continent. Its goal is nothing less than to defuse the time bomb of immigration, and with it of political populism, in the EU.

It was in this context that the Merkel government, in summer 2015, opened the German borders to refugees. At that moment, the Syrian refugees, who until then were ready to remain in eastern Turkey, began to lose hope in returning home, thus setting off, en masse, towards Europe. At the same time, the Turkish government decided, in order to blackmail the EU, which was blocking Ankara’s candidature for European entry, not to prevent their departure. In this situation, the closing of the German borders would have created a pile-up of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Balkans, a chaotic, almost uncontrollable situation. But by temporarily lifting the control of its borders, Berlin triggered a new flood of migration of desperate people who suddenly (mis)understood that they were being invited to Germany. All of this shows the reality of a moment of potential loss of control of the situation.

Because of the radical manner with which she has identified herself with “her” project, the chances of success for Merkel’s proposed “European solution” would considerably deteriorate were she to fail to be re-elected in 2017. One of the planks of Merkel’s re-election campaign seems to be an economic one. Given the present slowdown in Chinese and American growth, the export-oriented German economy would normally be heading towards recession. An increase of state spending and building activity “for the refugees” could avoid such an eventuality in the run up to the elections.

Unlike the 1970s (when in many leading Western countries left capitalist parties came to government: the “left in power”) or the 1980s (the “left in opposition) the present government strategy and electoral “game” in Germany is determined to a much lesser degree by the more immediate threat of the class struggle, and much more than in the past by the problems of immigration and populism.

The refugees and the working class

The solidarity with the refugees expressed by an important part of the population in Germany, although exploited to the hilt by the state to promote the image of a humane German nationalism, open to the world, was spontaneous and, at the beginning, “self-organised”. And still today, more than half a year after the beginning of the present crisis, the state management of the influx would collapse without the initiatives of the population. There is nothing proletarian about these activities in themselves. On the contrary, these people are partly doing the work which the state is unwilling or unable to do, often still without any payment. For the working class, the central problem is that this solidarity cannot take place presently on a class terrain. For the moment it takes on a very apolitical character, unconnected to any explicit opposition to the imperialist war in Syria for instance. Like the NGOs and all the different “critical” organisations of (in reality non-existent) civil society, these structures have more or less immediately been transformed into appendages of the totalitarian state.

But at the same time it would be a mistake to simply dismiss this solidarity as merely charity. All the more so since this solidarity is being expressed towards an influx of potential rivals on the labour and other markets. In the absence of pre-capitalist traditions of hospitality, in the old capitalist countries the associated labour and solidarity of the proletariat is the main social, material basis of any more generally felt solidarity. Its whole spirit has not been one of “helping the poor and weak”, but of co-operation and collective creativity. In the long term, if the class begins to recover its identity, consciousness and heritage, this present experience of solidarity can be integrated into the experience of the class and its search for a revolutionary perspective. Among the workers in Germany today, at least potentially, the impulses of solidarity express a certain kindling of a class memory and consciousness, recalling that in Europe also, the experience of war and massive population dislocation is not so very far away, and that the failure of solidarity in the face of this experience during the period of counter-revolution (before, during and after World War II) should not be repeated today.

The opposite pole of populism in capitalism is not democracy and humanism but associated labour – the main counter-weight to xenophobia and pogromism. The resistance to exclusion and scapegoating has always been a permanent and essential moment of the daily proletarian class struggle. There can today be the beginnings of a very unclear groping towards a recognition that the wars and other catastrophes which oblige people to flee are part of the violent separations through which, in a permanent process, the proletariat is constituted. And that the refusal of those who have lost everything to obediently stay where the ruling class wants them to, their refusal to renounce the pursuit of a better life, are constituting moments of proletarian combativeness. The struggle for its mobility, against the regime of capitalist discipline, is one of the oldest moments in the life of “free” wage labour.

Globalisation and the need for an international struggle

In the part on the balance sheet of the class struggle, we argued that the 2015 strikes in Germany were more an expression of a temporary, favourable, national economic situation, than an indication of a more widespread European or international militancy. It remains therefore true that it has become increasingly difficult for the working class to defend its immediate interests through strike action and other means of struggle. This does not mean that economic struggles are no longer possible, or have lost their relevance (as the so-called Essen Tendency of the KAPD wrongly concluded in the 1920s). On the contrary, it means that the economic dimension of the class struggle contains a much more direct political dimension than in the past – a dimension which it is extremely difficult to take responsibility for.

Recent ICC congress resolutions have rightly identified the intimidating weight of mass unemployment as one of the objective factors inhibiting the development of struggles in defence of immediate economic interests. But this is not the only, and not even the main economic cause of this inhibition. A more fundamental one lies in what is called globalisation – the present phase of totalitarian state capitalism – and the framework it gives for the world economy.

The globalisation of world capitalism is, in itself, not a new phenomenon. We already find it at the basis of the first highly mechanised sector of capitalist production: the textile industry in Britain was the centre of a triangle linked to the robbery of slaves in Africa and their labour in cotton plantations in the United States. In terms of world trade, the level of globalisation attained before World War I was not reached again until the end of the 20th century. Nevertheless, in the last three decades, this globalisation has acquired a new quality, above all at two levels: in production and in finance. The pattern of the periphery of capitalism providing cheap labour, agricultural plantation products and raw materials for the industrial countries of the northern hemisphere has been, if not wholly replaced, certainly substantially modified by global production networks, still centred in the more dominant countries, but where industrial and service activity is taking place all over the world. Inside this “Ordo-Liberal” corset, the tendency is for no national capital, no industry, no sector or business to be able to exempt itself anymore from direct international competition. There is almost nothing being produced in any part of the world which could not be produced somewhere else. Each nation state, each region, each city, each neighbourhood, each sector of the economy is condemned to compete with all the others to attract global investment. The whole world is spellbound, as if condemned to waiting for the salvation through the coming of Capital in the form of investments. This phase of capitalism is by no means a spontaneous product, but a state order introduced and imposed above all by the leading, old bourgeois nation states. One of the goals of this economic policy is to imprison the working class of the whole world in a monstrous disciplinary system.

At this level, we can perhaps divide the history of the objective conditions of the class struggle, very schematically, into three phases. In capitalist ascendency the workers were confronted first and foremost with individual capitalists, and could thus organise themselves more or less effectively in trade unions. With the concentration of capital in the hands of big enterprises and the state, these established means of struggle lost their effectiveness. Each strike was now directly confronted with the whole bourgeoisie, centralised in the state. It took time for the proletariat to find an effective answer to this new situation: the mass strike of the whole proletariat at the level of an entire country (Russia 1905), already containing within itself the potential for the seizure of power and spreading to other countries (the first revolutionary wave begun by Red October). Today, with contemporary globalisation, an objective historical tendency of decadent capitalism achieves its full development: each strike, each act of economic resistance by workers anywhere in the world, finds itself immediately confronted by the whole of world capital, ever ready to withdraw production and investment and produce somewhere else. For the moment, the international proletariat has been quite unable to find an adequate answer, or even to gain a glimpse of what such an answer might look like. We do not know if it will succeed in the end in doing so. But it seems clear that the development in this direction would take much longer than did the transition from trade unionism to mass strike. For one thing, the situation of the proletariat in the old, central countries of capitalism – those, like Germany, at the “top” of the economic hierarchy – would have to become much more dramatic than is today the case. For another, the step required by objective reality – conscious international class struggle, the “international mass strike” – is much more demanding than the one from trade union to mass strike in one country. For it obliges the working class to call into question not only corporatism and sectionalism, but the main, often centuries- or even millennia-old divisions of class society such as nationality, ethnic culture, race, religion, sex etc. This is a much more profound and more political step.

In reflecting on this question, we should take into consideration that the factors preventing the development by the proletariat of its own revolutionary perspective lie not only in the past, but also in the present; that they have not only political causes but also economic (more correctly: economico-political) ones.

Presentation on the national situation in Germany (March 2016)

At the time of the 2008 financial crisis there was a tendency within the ICC towards a kind of economic “catastrophism”, one expression of which was the idea, put forward by some comrades, that the collapse of central capitalist countries such as Germany might now be on the agenda. One of the reasons for making the relative economic strength and competitiveness of Germany an axis of this report is in the hope of contributing to overcoming such weaknesses. But we also want to enforce the spirit of nuance against schematic thinking. Because capitalism itself has an abstract mode of functioning (based on equivalent exchange), there is an understandable but unhealthy tendency to see economic questions too abstractly, for example judging the relative economic strength of national capitals only in very general terms (like the rate of organic composition of capital, labour intensive production, mechanisation, as mentioned in the report), forgetting that capitalism is a social relation between human beings, above all between social classes.

We should clarify one point: when the report says that the US bourgeoisie are using juridical means (fines against Volkswagen and others) to counter German competition, the intention was not to give the impression that the United States has no economic strengths of its own to throw into the scales. For example, the USA is presently ahead of Germany in the development of electric-powered and self-driving cars, and one of the hypotheses doing the rounds in the social media about the so-called Volkswagen scandal (that the information about the manipulation of emission measurements by that company may have been leaked to the American authorities from within the German bourgeoisie to oblige the German car industry to catch up at this level) are not wholly implausible.

On the way the refugee crisis is used for imperialist ends, it is necessary to bring the report up to date. At present, both Turkey and Russia are making massive use of the plight of refugees to blackmail German capital and weaken what remains of European cohesion. The way Ankara has been letting refugees move westwards is already mentioned in the report. The price for Turkish cooperation on this question will not only be many billions of Euros. As for Russia, it has recently been accused by a series of NGOs and refugee aid organisations of deliberately bombing hospitals and residential districts in Syrian cities in order to triggernew trails of refugees. More generally, Russian propaganda has been systematically using the refugee question to fan the flames of political populism in Europe.

As for Turkey, it is demanding not only money but also the acceleration of visa-free access of its citizens to Europe, and of negotiations towards membership in the EU. From Germany it is also demanding cessation of military aid to Kurdish unity in Iraq and Syria.

For Chancellor Merkel, who is the most prominent exponent of a closer collaboration with Ankara in the refugee question, and is a more or less staunch Atlanticist (for her, proximity to the United States is the lesser evil compared to proximity to Moscow), this is less of a problem than it is for other members of her own party. As the report already mentioned, Putin had planned the modernisation of the Russian economy in close collaboration with German industry, in particular its engineering sector which, since the Second World War, has been mainly located in the south of Germany (including Siemens, once based in Berlin and now in Munich, which seems to have been designated to play a central role in this “Russian operation”). It is in this context we can understand the link between the persistent critique of Merkel’s “European” (and “Turkish”) “solution” to the refugee crisis by the CDU’s companion party, the Bavarian CSU, and the spectacular semi-official visit by Bavarian party leaders to Moscow at the high point of this controversy5. This fraction would prefer to collaborate with Moscow rather than with Ankara. Paradoxically, the strongest supporters of the chancellor on this question today are not within in her own party, the CDU, but her coalition partner, the SPD, and the parliamentary opposition. We can explain this partly through a division of labour within the ruling Christian Democracy, the right wing of which is trying (for the moment not very successfully) to keep its conservative voters from defecting to the populists (AfD). But there are also regional tensions (since World War II, although the government was in Bonn and the financial capital in Frankfurt, the cultural life of the German bourgeoisie was mainly concentrated in Munich. It is only recently that this, following the move of the government there, has started to re-gravitate towards Berlin).

In relation to the present waves of immigration, there is not only an antagonism within Europe, of course, but also collaboration and division of labour, for instance between the German and the Austrian bourgeoisie. By initiating the “closing of the Balkan route”, Austria made Berlin less one-sidedly dependent on Turkey in holding up refugees, thus partly bolstering Berlin’s negotiation position towards Ankara6.

While an important part of the business world supported Merkel’s “welcoming policy” towards refugees last summer, this was far from being the case among the security organs of the state, who were absolutely horrified by the more or less uncontrolled and unregistered influx into the country. They have still not forgiven her for this. The French and other European governments were no less sceptical. They are all convinced that imperialist opponents from the Islamic world are using the refugee crisis to smuggle Jihadists into Germany, from where they can move on to France, Belgium etc. In fact, the criminal assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne already confirmed that even criminal gangs have been exploiting asylum procedures to position their members in the big European cities. You do not have to be a prophet to foresee that yet another expansion of the scale and importance of the police and secret services in Europe will be one of the principle results of the present developments7.

The report makes a connection between economic crisis, immigration and political populism. If we add the growing role of anti-semitism, the parallels with the 1930s become particularly striking. But it is interesting, in this connection, to examine how the situation in Germany today also illustrates the historical differences. The fact that there is no conclusive evidence, for the moment, that the central sections of the proletariat are defeated, disoriented and demoralised as they were 80 years ago, is the most important, but not the only difference. The economic policy favoured by the big bourgeoisie today is globalisation, not autarky, nor the protectionism advocated by “moderate” populists. This touches on an aspect of contemporary populism still underdeveloped in the report: opposition to the European Union. The latter is, at the economic level, one of the instruments of present day globalisation. In Europe, it has even become its main symbol. Part of the background of the formation of populist governments in central-eastern Europe recently is, for example, the negotiation of the TTIP trade agreement between North America and Europe, through which big industry and agri-business stand to benefit at the expense of small farmers and producers in places like the so-called Visegrad-states (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia).

As far as the situation of the proletariat is concerned, the concern expressed at the end of the report is that we should not only look at causes essentially lying in the past (such as the counter-revolution which followed the defeat of the Russian and world revolution at the end of World War I) to explain the difficulties of the working class to politically develop its struggle in a revolutionary direction after 1968. All these factors from the past, and which are all profoundly true explanations, nonetheless prevented neither May 68 in France nor the 1969 Hot Autumn in Italy. Nor should we assume that the revolutionary potential expressed at that time, in an embryonic manner, was condemned to failure from the onset. Explanations based one-sidedly on the past lead to a kind of determinist fatalism. At the economic level, so-called globalisation was an economic and political, state capitalist instrument which the bourgeoisie found to stabilise its system and to counter the proletarian threat, an instrument which the proletariat, in turn, will have to find an answer to. This is why the difficulties of the working class in the past 30 years to develop a revolutionary alternative are intimately linked to the politico-economic strategy of the bourgeoisie, including its capacity to postpone an economic Kladderadatsch (catastrophe) for the working class – and thus the threat of class war – in the old centres of world capitalism.