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:
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:
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.
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.
10. It’s probably in the area of following the economic crisis that themost obvious difficulties of the ICC have been expressed. In particular:
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.
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:
1 Bilan was the name of the journal published from 1926 by Italian Left in exile in France.
2 An internal text currently under discussion in the organisation