We shouldn’t be surprised about the silence of the international press about the violent confrontations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie which have been going on in France for the last three months. Revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks in particular, have always denounced the “abominable corruption of the press”, whose function in a period of class struggle is to obstruct any movement of proletarian solidarity by lies and, even more effectively, by silence. A huge noise about ‘peace in the Middle East’; silence about the violent confrontations between workers and police.

The French and international bourgeoisie is right to fear the return of the specter of international class struggle:

-- at the end of 1978: for several months, a total strike by the Iranian workers, whom Bazargan and Khomeini have only got back to work with great difficulty;

-- November/December: steelworkers’ strikes in the Ruhr, West Germany;

-- January/February 1979: British lorry drivers’ strike, followed by other strikes in the hospitals and car industry; the workers obtained up to 20-30% wage increases; at the time of writing, the strike movement isn’t yet extinguished;

-- February 1979: strike by the Renault workers in Valladolid, Spain. In March, metal workers strike in Bilbao;

-- March 1979: strikes which begin to go outside the unions in Sao Paolo, Brazil. More than 200,000 metal workers holding general assemblies.

It would be a serious mistake to see these simul­taneous confrontations as mere skirmishes pro­longing the wave of 1968-73, simply because the workers aren’t really questioning the trade unions or extending their struggles. We must be able to recognize this simultaneity and combativity as the first signs of a much broader movement that is in the process of maturing. The determined violence of the bourgeoisie’s attack on the proletariat is pushing the class into struggle. The workers of France and elsewhere are more and more feeling that “it’s time for action, not words” in the face of a cynical, ruthless ruling class which is waging a ‘hale and hearty’ economic war by laying-off workers, repressing them more and more openly, exploiting, humiliating, and mutila­ting them at work, getting them ready for the sup­reme mutilation: imperialist war.

This revival of class struggle, these symptoms of a new wave of struggle are unfolding before our eyes. Of course, it’s still at an embryonic stage. It’s not taking the form of generalized explosions like in 1968/69. But what it lacks in a spectacular appearance it makes up for in depth, by striking its roots into all layers of the proletariat. No-one can deny any more that the proletariat is the only key to the historic situation. The journalists and sociologists have had to bury the ‘student movement’ and timidly admit that the working class is not a myth, but a living reality.

Certainly, this is a slow, subterranean movement, but it’s a determined one. The proletariat is throwing itself into the heat of the struggle with its head held high. It is responding blow for blow to a slow, but inexorable crisis. Long and difficult battles await the international proletariat, battles that will be even more decisive than the ones going on now.

What are the lessons to draw from the confrontations in France?

In order to break through the silence and the lies of the bourgeoisie, we will give a precise, chronological account of the confrontations in Lorraine and the North, before drawing out lessons and perspectives for the near future.

“It’s time for action, not words”

After 1971, the French proletariat gradually fell into a state of apathy. The Left with its Programme Commun promised the workers mountains and miracles. Year after year, the unions dragged the workers into dead-end demonstrations, sectoral strikes, 24-hour strikes, shut them up in factory occupations, locked out the bosses, and amused them with attempts at self-management, as at LIP. The unions carefully acted as safety-valves while waiting for the great day when the Commu­nist Party and Socialist Party would come to power. The political crisis within the Left, their declarations in favor of sacrifices from 1975 onwards, gradually eroded some of the workers’ illusions. The failure of the Left in the elections of March 1978 signed the death warrant of the Programme Commun and, little by little, persuaded the workers that it was time to return to the path of struggle. Bitter strikes -- though still controlled by the unions -- broke out in the summer of 1978 in the arsenals, among air traffic controllers at Moulinex, and among the immigrant workers at Renault-Flins.

Barre’s so-called ‘restructuration’ plan was the decisive factor in setting light to the discontent that had been seething in the class for several years. The plan aimed at 30,000 lay-offs per month, at a time when unemployment was already at 1.5 million. Wage limits, price rises; in December, a savage increase in workers’ contribu­tions to social security; reduction or suppression of some unemployment benefits. The French work­ing class was hit by one economic hammer blow after another. Almost all layers of the class were affected: workers in the banks and insur­ance companies, television workers, teachers. But for the first time, the heart of the working class was being hit by the bourgeoisie’s offen­sive: shipyard workers, steelworkers threatened with 30,000 lay-offs in the coming year. This is what the bourgeoisie cynically calls its “policy of skimming off manning levels”.

In recent years, the workers in the peripheral, low concentration sectors have not reacted very strongly, or have done so in isolation. But the attack on the heavily concentrated steelworkers of the North and Lorraine was a decisive step in the bourgeoisie’s offensive against the whole working class. The unions, quite naturally, accepted the measures of the capitalist state by negotiating levels of unemployment. The French bourgeoisie, arrogant and self-confident, then added political violence to economic violence: systematic truncheoning of striking workers, forceful ejection of workers occupying factories.

Gradually the workers became aware that by aban­doning the union-guarded factories and hitting the streets, they would gain the freedom to act; that in order to push back the attacks of the bourgeoi­sie they had to go out and confront the state without any hesitation. Going outside the unions, they got involved in violent class confrontations. Surprised by their own audacity, the workers gradually grew bolder.

From November to mid-January, these confrontations began slowly and then began to gather pace.

17 November 1978: at Caen1 a union-led parade ended up in a confrontation with the police; the unions denounced ‘uncontrolled elements’ and ‘autonomes.

20 December 1978: at Saint-Nazaire (the biggest naval shipyard in France) the bosses were locked up in the offices. The police intervened. Confrontations.

21 December 1978: at Saint-Chamond (in the Saint-Etienne region) a small factory, occupied by striking workers, was taken over at night by the police who ejected the strike picket and replaced it by vigilantes (men hired by the bosses to ‘protect’ their firms); in this region, which is heavily affected by unemployment, the news spread like wildfire; in the morning about 5,000 workers from Saint-Chamond, from Saint-Etienne and from Rive de Giers, threatened to attack the factory being guarded by armed vigilantes. These vigilantes took refuge on the rooftops and were only to be saved by the joint intervention of the unions and the police; the factory has since been re-occupied by the workers.

The announcement of 20,000 lay-offs in the steel industry, planned for by Barre, accelerated the process begun in December 1978. There was nothing to hope for: the lay-offs would take effect in January 1979. The determination of the bourgeoi­sie increased the determination of the workers, who no longer had anything to lose, especially in Lorraine and the North, where the steelworks are the sole means of earning a livelihood.

As a prelude

4 January 1979: in Nancy, capital of Lorraine, a demonstration of 5,000 workers turned into violent confrontations with the CRS (police specially trained for repression). In Metz on the same day, the workers tried to seize the sub-prefecture (the police headquarters) guarded by the police.

17 January 1979: in the Lyon region, the second biggest industrial concentration in France, the director of PUK (Pechiney Ugine Kulmann, chemi­cals), was locked up by the workers and freed by the CRS. At the same time, strikes were spread­ing through the insurance companies in Paris, Bordeaux, and at Pau in the South-West.

Denain, Longwy, Paris

Denain and Longwy rapidly became the symbol of the workers’ counter-offensive. The closing of the USINOR steelworks, which completely dominate these two towns, with no chance of finding any other work and all this to be carried out in a few weeks -- pushed the workers to react quickly and violently, particularly because the police repression was so violent.

26 January 1979: in Denain, the USINOR steelwor­kers burnt the dossiers of the tax-collectors and were savagely truncheoned by the police.

29/30 January 1979: Then came the violent confron­tations in Longwy near the Belgian-Luxemburg border. A region in which the workers don’t exactly see themselves as natives of the Lorraine. Italians, Spaniards, Belgians, North Africans etc, all work in the local industry. Still the CGT (the Stalinist controlled union) called on them to save the country from the grip of German steel trusts! This time the steelworkers clearly went outside the unions and attacked the police commis­sariat, following an occupation by the police of a factory where the workers had locked up four directors. It was left to the Communist Party Mayor of the town to get the workers back to work: “Don’t respond to violence with violence. Go back to your places of work”. The workers replied: “Next time we’ll be properly equipped” (ie to attack the commissariat).

All through February and in early March there were daily confrontations, during which the unions tried to divide the movement and derail it towards nationalist objectives (the CP’s campaign against ‘German Europe’; the CP’s commando attacks on ‘foreign trains’ and coal), as well as denigra­ting it by denouncing the combative workers who escaped their grip as ‘provocateurs’ and ‘uncontrolled elements’.

2 February 1979: in the port of Dinard in Brittany, striking firemen demonstrated and managed to break through a CRS cordon.

6 February 1979: in the Lorraine iron-mining basin, in Briey, the CP-held town hall and the sub-prefecture were occupied by the workers, who confronted the police. In Denain on the same day, the USINOR offices were ransacked. The unions had great difficulty getting the workers to leave.

7 February 1979: Longwy. Occupation of the sub-prefecture. Confrontations with the police.

8 February 1979: Nantes, an Atlantic Port, the starting point of the factory occupation movement in 1968; demonstrations, confrontations, amidst attempted assaults on the sub-prefecture.

9 February 1979: Following the call of the unions, the Denain steelworkers went to Paris, but the unions were unable to prevent confronta­tions with the CRS occurring on the outskirts of Roissy airport.

Almost at the same time, a strike began of radio and TV technicians in the Societe Francaise de Production. The technicians had just received 450 letters of dismissal. The strike lasted over three weeks. The SFP technicians tried to make contact with the Lorraine steelworkers. On the same day, a one-day total stoppage (‘ville morte’) was held in Hagondage, the Lorraine steelworks, called by the unions.

13 February 1979: Ransacking of the USINOR offices in Denain. In Grenoble in the South-East, con­frontations between firemen and the police. At this point, the unions -- which were trying to control the movement by calling for demonstra­tions and regional strikes on the 16th – weren’t even able to control their own members. Young CGT workers said “... at the moment, the unions are having a hard time standing their ground. What’s more, we no longer feel that we’re union­ized. We’re acting by ourselves.” Or as a CP militant at Longwy confirmed bitterly: “We’ve begged them, we’ve run after them. There’s nothing we can do”. The CGT -- unlike the CFDT, which was able to follow the movement with more subtlety -- was reduced to pouring out torrents of nationalist garbage: “1870, 1914, 1940: it’s enough. Lorraine will not be tied to the big German concerns”. What was the response of the workers? In Nantes on 8 February, the workers demonstrated with the cry: “Down with the bourgeoisie!”.

Seeing the movement spreading across several regions, the unions tried to isolate the steelworkers of the North and of Lorraine by calling for a regional general strike for the 16 March. They hoped that the other workers wouldn’t move and everything would be nicely buried. Unfortunately for them!

16 February 1979: the trade union demonstration ‘degenerated’. In Sedan, the workers built barricades and fought the police for six hours. Confrontations in Roubaix.

20 February 1979: Rouen. Confrontations between strikers and the police. The CGT denounces ‘uncontrolled elements’.

Was this workers’ violence going to be organized by the workers themselves, asked the unions anxiously? “What we’re worried about now is that the lads will organize amongst themselves and carry out actions without warning us, because they know that they can’t count on our support”. The unions’ fears proved real.

20 February 1979: at Paris the strikes in the PTT (post office) began in several centers from the suburbs to the provinces. The strike spread slowly and only lasted a few days in the affected centers, but the workers were very combative and showed a great suspicion towards the unions. For the first time, we saw delegations of postal workers from the Parisian suburbs, themselves go to look for solidarity in the other centers in order to disrupt them. The failure of the 1974 postal strike was not forgotten: the conscious­ness of the workers had matured. The slogans appearing were: “Yesterday Longwy, today Paris”, "Less moans, more action”. The postal workers got the idea of coordinating the strike between every center. The unions did all they could to nip in the bud any coordination of independent struggles and bring it under their control. The postal workers went back to work at the beginning of March, but the idea of coordination was an essential acquisition of this struggle.

21 February 1979: occupations of the Longwy TV station by CFDT steelworkers. The continued operation of this station while the SFP workers were still on strike was a provocation, just as much as the lies and abuse it was pouring on their struggle. The journalists were locked-up and would only be released after an intervention by the CFDT central office. The workers showed a real hostility to these bourgeois scribblers.

A journalist was angrily ‘corrected’ by a worker several days later.

22 February 1979: in Paris, the employees of the Bourse (the stock exchange), occupied the Temple of Capital along with striking bank workers. After jostling the union steward they shouted: “We’re going outside the unions”.

23 February 1979: since the 21st, the transmitter occupied by the Longwy steelworkers was making broadcasts about the crisis in Lorraine. The police took over the transmitter. Workers immediately assembled in the middle of the night and reoccupied the transmitter. The crowd swel­led with the arrival of more steelworkers called out by sirens and bells. Singing revolutionary songs, the workers spent the whole night attack­ing the police commissariat. There was talk of people being armed with rifles. The CP Mayor (Porcu) denounced the ‘uncontrolled elements’. The steelworkers blocked the access roads into Longwy, attacked the bosses’ offices and burned the files.

In the face of events like these, the unions tried to prevent any confrontation between police and workers in the North, where the steelworkers were ready to take up the torch. “Longwy shows the way” was a very popular slogan.

28 February 1979: ransacking of bosses’ offices in Valenciennes in the North. The unions try to prevent the workers from attacking the commissa­riat and public buildings. A CFDT spokesman declared: “The lads must have a chance to act. That’s why we’ve drawn up a catalogue of actions”. But the unions hadn’t taken into account the deliberate, brutal attacks on the Denain workers by the CRS and flying squads.

7/8 March 1979: the CGT tried to divert the wor­kers into commando actions to block ‘foreign’ iron and coal at the frontiers. But it didn’t foresee that brigades of the CRS would arrest busloads of steelworkers going back to work in Denain, frisking them and savagely truncheoning them. As soon as news of this got out, the USINOR workers at Denain came out on strike. They held a meeting and decided to attack the police commissariat guarded by the police. They armed themselves with iron bars, molotov cock­tails, catapults, and even a bulldozer. A whole day of confrontations. In the evening the ‘Intersyndicale’, regrouping the CGT and CFDT, called on the workers to “immediately go back to the factories and occupy them”. The workers refused to go back and screwed up the union leaflet without reading it, crying: “It’s no longer time for discussions. It’s time for action”. The battles didn’t stop. They lasted for several hours longer and workers armed with rifles were shooting at the CRS.

10 March 1979: Following these confrontations, the unions, the CP and SP, decided to hold a huge rally in Denain to bury the struggle under­neath a torrent of blah-blah about regional elections. Hundreds of workers walked out of the stadium where the rally was being held, shouting: “Action, not words!”.

The sabotage of the march on Paris

For some weeks, hundreds of strikes had broken out in local regions throughout France. The major centers, Paris (except for postal workers, hospital, insurance and television workers) and Lyon were relatively untouched by the wave of strikes which went from one factory to another, from one region to another. The union knew they had to prevent an extension of the increasingly explosive movement of workers’ discontent to Paris, the political center and largest prole­tarian concentration. The union decided on sectoral ‘days of action’, teachers, railway workers, each taking place after the other.

But in the course of the struggles, an idea had been germinating in the minds of the workers of Lorraine and the North: they should march on Paris which held a symbolic value for all the workers’ accumulated discontent. To prevent any risk of an explosion like in 1968, the unions went into action. The CGT called for a march on Paris for 23 March; and meanwhile the CGT, CFDT and all the other unions, sabotaged the movement of discontent in Paris. They applied themselves to getting the bank workers, SFP workers and postal workers back to work and just like the bourgeois press they lied by making out that each strike movement was isolated from the other. They hid the extent of the strikes and the discontent, and ‘bit by bit’ they got the workers back to work.

But the union strategy to derail and exhaust the workers’ combativity had to be much more delicate when it came to the workers from Lorraine and the North. The aim of the unions was to slowly but surely exhaust this combativity of the steel­workers from Lorraine and the North before the workers in Paris reacted which would risk spark­ing off an explosion. They couldn’t be sure that the march on Paris, chosen for a date when some sectors would have already gone back to work, wouldn’t bring back on strike thousands of work­ers who would join this march.

The unions’ policy towards the demonstration (above all the CGT’s) was a masterpiece of sabotage. Everything was done to prevent workers from the Paris region, from Lorraine, from the North, uniting in struggle. The CGT, which had called for a march on Paris as early as 10 Feb­ruary abandoned this idea some days later and spoke of regional marches. They threw doubt on the idea of holding a march, an idea which had spontaneously arisen in the minds of the workers of Lorraine and the North, who, in a confused way, felt that their strength could only develop in direct association with the main industrial center (Paris and its suburbs). A detailed division of labor (planned by the union general staff) was organized between the CGT and the CFDT in order to repel workers from the idea of marching on to Paris. The CFDT announced it would not participate in the march. The CGT, in turn, announced that it would not call for a general strike in the Paris region for 23 March. The CGT hoped this march would be proof of its ability to contain the working class and show in deeds that it merited being heavily subsidized by the bourgeoisie. More than 300 CP thugs of the CGT, plus the employees from the communist municipali­ties were mobilized to make up the ‘service d’ordre’ (demo stewards), in order to prevent any solidarity between workers from the North, from Lorraine and from Paris. Up to the last minute it wasn’t known exactly when or by what means (coaches, trains) the workers from Lorraine and the North would arrive in Paris. At the dead of night they were picked up by CP/CGT coaches and dropped at five different points in the Paris suburbs, at communist municipalities, where local deputies met them, decked out in tricolor ribbons, mouths full of nationalist slogans.

But that was not all. The CGT changed the itin­ery of the demonstration at the last moment in order to prevent workers coming in contact with the Paris workers returning from work. The demonstration was diverted from the Gare St Lazare, where hundreds of thousands of workers pass daily, towards the posh quarters of the Opera.

That’s how the gut anger of the most combative workers from Lorraine and the North was frustra­ted from a solidarity march with the workers of Paris. The demonstration was smaller than expected: 100,000 demonstrators, but of these 100,000 you have to deduct the thousands of union police, demo stewards, and all the functio­naries of the CP. Certainly in spite of the sabotage, there was a good number of workers: SFP (television) , EDF (electricians) , railway workers, some workers from Renault. The workers from Denain and Longwy were dispersed into union processions in order to avoid any contamination of the demonstration and to stop them appearing as a united body. Nevertheless the union police couldn’t stop the Longwy steelworkers from break­ing through the union cordon sanitaire and march­ing at the head of the demonstration.

A direct collaboration was established between the CRS, the mobile police and union police to prevent workers dispersing and holding meetings. The police were everywhere, the union stewards immediately dispersed the workers arriving at the end of the route, giving the excuse that autonomes were present in the procession, and the police ‘generously’ sprayed the workers with teargas while the CP/CGT thugs savagely thumped young demonstrators and handed some of them over to the police. Finally, the union cops protected the CRS, who were striking demonstrators, from the anger of the steelworkers. Never has the collaboration between the union police and the police been quite so clear.

But more disgusting for the fighters from Longwy and Denain than being bombarded by police tear-gas, was to hear the incessant nationalist slo­gans and litanies from the CP and CGT, like “Save our national independence”, “Protect us from German trusts”. The workers, forced back to the trains by teargas and the truncheons of the police, will remember the appeals to disperse, the denunciation of the fighters as ‘agents du pouvoir’ (government agents). This led to conflicts even within the union.

The lesson is bitter but necessary: to win, the union cordon sanitaire must be broken through. For the workers who have struggled for weeks against the bourgeoisie, the lesson is not a negative one. The bourgeoisie has been able to exult in denouncing the “violence of the auto­nomes” and complaisantly spread out in its news­papers photos of hundreds of the CRS charging demonstrators.

To all you gentlemen of the CP, SP, RPR and of the UDF, all tied up in your tricolor sashes, to all you gentlemen leftist touts in the pay of the left of the bourgeoisie, to all you anarchists who clamor for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ from capitalist class justice, whatever you all shout about, the workers, who by their hundreds have today confronted the police, are strengthened by an experience that, without your power and in spite of it, they will add to and integrate into all workers’ struggles2.

Although isolated, the workers of the North and Lorraine haven’t lost their combativity, their will to fight the bourgeoisie. Certainly, there weren’t many workers from Paris participating in the demonstration. Certainly, many workers were disgusted by the maneuvers of the CGT and CFDT. But this demo was a lesson for them, showing that they either have to retreat and accept lay-offs, or deepen their movement, organize themselves outside the trade unions. The workers have lost their taste for union-led promenades, sectoral and regional strikes. They felt their own strength and determination when they were going outside the unions and confronting the state.

Some lessons

When looking at this list of recent events in France -- events which have been accelerating since February -- it is necessary to guard against both:

-- underestimating the situation. The extent of the confrontations, the tendency of the struggles to go outside the unions, the class violence, are only just beginning. The demonstrations and street battles have a different tone from what happened in previous years. There is a mounting movement which is a long way from its culminating point;

-- overestimating the situation. Although there has been a tendency to go outside the unions, the unions have not lost control. They will only lose control when the class violence goes onto a qualitatively higher level: the organiza­tion of the workers in general assemblies outside the unions. These have appeared in embryonic form in the organization of workers’ violence against the police. The workers still have to take the enormous step of organizing their own demonstrations, of going en masse to appeal to the solidarity of other workers who are still hesitating to go into action. This will require a clear consciousness of the m-ans and ends of the struggle. This consciousness will not develop in an abstract way, but only in the heat of experience. The proletariat has only begun its struggle. It’s a long way from really declaring class war, as can be seen by the per­sistence of illusions in the Left and elections. (The recent cantonal elections saw a triumph for the CP and SP and a strong participation by the workers.)

However, despite the Left’s influence over the proletariat, a number of illusions are gradually fading:

-- the unions together with the CP and SP signed an agreement with the bosses and the state which accepts lay-offs due to the bankruptcy of a firm and also accepts that workers will be paid only 65% of their wages and not 90% as before (because there are too many of them to be paid the larger amount) and as well as that they accepted cuts in unemployment benefits. “A great victory!”, claims the CGT and CFDT.

-- the Barre government, despite the combativity of the workers, refuses to give way on its intended lay-offs. The bourgeoisie is prisoner of its economic calculations. It hopes to gain time and relies on arrogance and repression, having for some years got used to a working class controlled by the unions and chloroformed by the Programme Commun. From an economic point of view the bourgeoisie has no choice: the choices are imposed on it by the crisis, and far from permitting greater political flexibility it is driven to be more rigid.

When the bourgeoisie isn’t prepared to give an inch, when the SP through the mouth of Rocard, justifies the austerity measures, then the prole­tariat has no choice but to answer blow for blow and to go onto the offensive. 11,000 lay-offs in the telephone industry, unemployment planned in the car industry, 30,000 teaching posts eliminated, that’s the reality of the promises made to the steelworkers about job redistribution.

The proletariat in France is at a crossroads. It isn’t its combativity which has surprised the bourgeoisie since 1968, for it has learnt to tremble before at the ease with which the workers are able to massively struggle. What’s worrying it, is to not only see the workers resolutely confront the state, but above all to see it go outside the unions. That didn’t happen even in, 1968.

“There’s a political void” screams every faction of the bourgeoisie, “There’s a union void” reply the Trotskyists in chorus, who are concerned about a “disaffection with the union organiza­tions, seeing as 50 per cent of CGT members from the Moselle metal industry didn’t take up their union cards in March 1973, and likewise 20 per cent of the CFDT members”3.

This ‘void’ which worries the bourgeoisie is the erosion of illusions in the proletariat. This disillusionment is hope. And the proletariat has clearly shown that through its fierce energy in resisting the bourgeoisie’s offensive, through its joy at seeing in Denain and Longwy that it could push back the bourgeoisie. A proletariat that believes in its strength isn’t a class to admit defeat. It now knows that it must go further, that it’s impossible to retreat. To make a sacrifice for its national bourgeoisie’s economic war today, is quite simply to sacrifice itself for out and out war tomorrow.

Certainly, the path of the class struggle is slow, with sharp advances, followed by brutal relapses. But the proletariat learns through its experience, knowing no other school than the struggle itself! It learns that:

-- struggle pays

-- the more the struggle finds its own instruments and its own objectives, the more it pays.

The higher stage of the struggle won’t be found in the multiplying of well-timed, isolated actions by the unions, but in the extension of massive actions organized independently from all union and political apparatuses of the bourgeoisie.

Towards this, the workers must speak out in general assemblies, must themselves seek the solidarity of other workers who are struggling, including the unemployed. The working class must have confidence in itself, it must become conscious that “the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves.”

The working class still hesitates, quite surpri­sed at its own audacity. What it needs now is more audacity.

Chardin

International Review 17, 2nd Quarter 1979

1) Since the beginning of the workers’ movement, one of the most fundamental concerns of revolutionaries has been for unity in their own ranks. This need for unity among the most advanced elements of the class is an expression of the profound, historic and immediate unity of interests in the class itself, and is a decisive factor in the process leading to the world-wide unification of the proletariat, to the realisation of its own being. Whether we are talking about the attempt, in 1850, to constitute a ‘World League of Communist Revolutionaries’ regrouping the Communist League, the Blanquists, and the left-wing Chartists; or the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864; of the Second International in 1889, or the Communist International in 1919, itself the result of the efforts towards regroupment at Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915-16, every important step in the evolution of the workers’ movement has been based on this quest for the worldwide regroupment of revolutionaries.

2) Although it corresponds to a fundamental necessity in the class struggle, this tendency towards the unification of revolutionaries, like the tendency towards the unification of the class as a whole, has constantly been held up by a whole series of factors, such as:

• the effects of the framework in which capitalism itself has developed, with all its regional, national, cultural and economic variations. Although the system itself tends to overturn this framework, it can never really go beyond it and it is something that weighs heavily on the struggle and consciousness of the class. 
• the political immaturity of revolutionaries themselves, their lack of understanding, the insufficiency of their analyses, their difficulties in breaking out of the spirit of sectarianism, of the shopkeeper mentality, and all the other influences of petty bourgeois and bourgeois ideology in their own ranks.

3) The capacity for this tendency towards the unity of revolutionaries to overcome these obstacles is, in general, a fairly faithful reflection of the balance of forces between the two major classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Periods of reflux in the class struggle generally correspond to a movement of dispersal and mutual isolation among revolutionary currents and elements; whereas periods of proletarian upsurge tend to see the concentration of this fundamental tendency towards the unification of revolutionaries. This phenomenon manifests itself in a particularly clear way at the time of the formation of proletarian parties. This has always taken place in the context of a qualitative development of the class struggle, and has in general been the result of the regroupment of the different political tendencies of the class. This was notably the case with:

• the foundation of German Social Democracy at Gotha in 1875 (Lassalleans and marxists)
• the constitution of the Communist Party in Russia in 1917-18 (Bolsheviks and other currents like Trotsky’s group and Bogdanov’s group)
• the foundation of the Communist Party in Germany in 1919 (Spartacists, ‘Left Radicals’, etc)
• the foundation of the Communist Party in Italy (the Bordiga current and the Gramsci current).

Whatever the weaknesses of certain of these currents, and although in general, unification has taken place around one current that is politically more solid than the others, the fact remains that the foundation of the party has never been the result of a unilateral proclamation, but is the product of a dynamic process of regroupment among the most advanced elements of the class.

4) The existence of this process of regroupment in moments of historic development in the class struggle can be explained by the fact that:

• the unifying dynamic going on in the whole class has its repercussions on revolutionaries themselves, pushing them to go beyond artificial and sectarian divisions
• the growing responsibility facing revolutionaries as active, influential factors in the immediate struggle obliges them to concentrate their forces and their means of intervention
• the class struggle tends to clarify problems which had been at the basis of divergences and divisions among revolutionaries.

5) The present situation of the revolutionary milieu is characterised by an extreme degree of division, by the existence of important differences on fundamental questions, by the isolation of its different components, by the weight of sectarianism and the shopkeeper mentality, by the sclerosis of certain currents and the inexperience of certain others. All these are expressions of the terrible effects of a half-century of counter-revolution.

6) A static approach to this situation can lead to the idea, defended notably by Fomento Obrero Revolucionario, that there is no possibility, either in the present or the future, for a rapprochement between the different positions and analyses which exist at the present time, for the kind of rapprochement which alone can allow for the shared coherence and clarity indispensable to any platform for the constitution of a unified organisation.

Such an approach ignores two essential elements:

• the ability of discussion, of confrontation between positions and analyses, to clarify questions, if only because they allow a better understanding of respective positions and the elimination of false divergences.
• the importance of the practical experiences of the class as a factor in going beyond misunderstandings and divergences.

7) Today, capitalism’s dive into acute crisis and the worldwide resurgence of the proletariat has put the regroupment of revolutionary forces on the agenda in a most pressing way. All the problems that, along with the class as a whole, revolutionaries will have to draw out of its concrete experience

• constitute a favourable terrain for such a process of regroupment
• will allow for clarification of the essential questions which currently divide the vanguard of the proletariat – perspectives for the crisis of capitalism, the nature of the trade unions and communists’ attitude towards them, the nature of national struggles, the function of the proletarian party, etc.

But while the demand for unity and, in the first instance, the opening up of debates between revolutionaries are absolutely necessary, they will not be translated into reality in a mechanistic way. They must be accompanied by a real understanding of this necessity and a militant will to carry it through. Those groups who, at the present time, have not become aware of this necessity and refuse to participate in the process of discussion and regroupment are doomed, unless they revise their positions, to become obstacles to the movement and to disappear as expressions of the proletariat.

8) All these considerations animate the ICC’s participation in the debates that have developed in the framework of the Milan conference May ’77 and the Paris conference of November ’78. It is because the ICC analyses the present period as one of historical resurgence of the working class that it attaches so much importance to this effort, that it strongly condemns the attitude of groups who neglect or reject such efforts, and considers that this sectarian attitude is itself a political position, the implications of which hamper the communist movement. The ICC therefore considers that these discussions are a very important element in the process of regroupment of revolutionary forces, which will lead to their unification in the world party of the proletariat, that essential weapon in the revolutionary struggle of the class.

At the end of 1978 an International Conference of groups of the communist left was held. This Conference, which had been called for by the Milan Conference of May 1977 organized by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) and attended by the International Communist Current, had the following agenda: 1. the crisis and perspectives; 2. the question of national liberation struggles; 3. the question of the party. Two pamphlets are being prepared, containing the correspondence between the groups, the preparatory texts for the Conference, and the proceedings of the debates. The most important step forward taken by this Conference was the fact that it had a broader participation. As well as the ICP (BC) and the ICC, the other groups involved were the Communist Workers’ Organization (Britain), Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista (Italy), the Marxist Work Group (For Kommunismen, Sweden). Two other groups agreed to participate but were unable to attend for various reasons -- Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire Inter­nationaliste d’Algerie (Travailleurs Immigres en Lutte) and Il Leninista (Italy). The latter group wrote a contribution which will appear in the pamphlet. The Ferment Ouvriere Revolution­naire (France and Spain) left the Conference at the beginning and thus didn’t take part in the debates. Other groups invited refused to partici­pate (cf the article on this in International Review, no.12).

We’re publishing here an article following up the one in IR, no.16, which dealt mainly with the groups who rejected the invitation. This article is a response to certain points in articles on the Conference written by the CWO (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.12) and Battaglia Comunista (BC, no.16, 1978), and it introduces the ICC Resolutions which the Conference refused to adopt. We’re also publishing a Resolution on the Process of the Regroupment of Revolutionaries by the ICC, synthesizing our general orientation on this question.

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

In the article on the second International Con­ference in International Review, no.16, we expl­ained our conception of discussion between revo­lutionary groups and refuted the arguments of those who refused to participate. We particularly insisted that these groups were showing a funda­mentally sectarian attitude. For the ICC, this attitude is itself an obstacle to the political clarification which is so indispensable in the workers’ movement; without a confrontation of positions, there is no possibility of clarifica­tion.

We are returning to this question in order to rectify certain of the positions expressed by Battaglia Comunista and the CWO on participation at the Conference. In these positions the ICC is glibly described as ‘opportunist’1 and it’s denied that there is any problem of sectarianism. It’s thus necessary to set the records straight on this. We will then briefly give our views on the content of the discussions in order to underline the importance we accord to political debate, against our detractors’ accusation that we relegate this to a secondary level.

Finally, we will explain why we proposed to the Conference the resolutions on the points of the agenda, published at the end of this article.

Where does sectarianism come from?

BC accuse us of having “the opportunist desire to cover up important divergences of principle in order to get together all sorts of groups which are quite distant from each other”. They claim that we hide behind our criticisms of the ‘chapel spirit’ in order to gloss over political divergences. Let’s say once again that we don’t hide political divergences. We insist on the need to fight against the refusal to discuss pre­cisely because this refusal is a refusal to dis­cuss divergences. It’s a fear of confronting political positions hiding behind grandiose claims to hold the truth. We don’t claim that we hold the truth; we defend a political platform which we confront as much as possible with the reality of the situation -- in our interventions and in discussion with groups and elements fight­ing for the communist revolution.

It’s a strange purism of BC to accuse us of hiding divergences for opportunist reasons. Let’s recall how BC called the first International Con­ference. Starting with an analysis of ‘Eurocommunism’, BC put forward three hypotheses for the perspectives of the international situation; faced with the gravity of the situation they called for an International Conference, putting forward three “effective weapons from the point of view of theory and political practice”:

“a. Leaving the state of impotence and infer­iority into which they have been led by a provincialism fostered by cultural factors, by a self-satisfaction which denies the prin­ciple of revolutionary modesty, and above all by the depreciation of the concept of being a militant, which is rejected as a form of sacrifice.

b. Establishing a historically valid program­matic base; for our party this is the theoret­ical and practical experience embodied in the October Revolution, and, internationally, a critical approach to the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International.

c. Recognizing that it is impossible to arrive either at class positions, or at the creation of the world party of the revolution, or at a revolutionary strategy, without first res­olving the need to set in motion a permanent international centre of liaison and informa­tion, which will be the anticipation and the synthesis of what will be the future Inter­national, just as Zimmerwald and above all, Kienthal were prefigurations of the IIIrd International.” (Texts and Proceedings of the International Conference of Milan, May ‘77)

The three points BC put forward for the framework of the Conference were thus: 1. breaking out of isolation 2. political criteria 3. organizational implications. The ICC responded positively to the calling of this Conference, but it requested more precise political criteria and thought it was premature to immediately set up an Inter­national Center of liaison and information:

“Obviously we think that such a conference can only take place when a minimum basis for agree­ment has been found by the participating groups and that it must address itself to the most fundamental questions in the proletarian movement today, in order to avoid any misunder­standings and give a solid framework for the debates ...

We do not think that it is necessary at this stage to answer your second proposition to create a center for international liaison, since this could only come as a conclusion to the international conference.” (Ibid, p.7)

At the time BC was saying that it was necessary to go beyond ‘provincialism’; we were in agree­ment with this and still are.

This is why we are returning to this point and are replying to BC’s accusation of opportunism, and to the CWO’s criticisms, which are quite similar. They don’t understand the ICC’s deter­mination to condemn the refusal to engage in poli­tical confrontation as such -- quite apart from the political divergences which are used as a ‘noble’ excuse for this attitude. This lack of understanding shows the persistence of a reflex towards isolation and self-protection. This re­flex is an inheritance from the period of counter­revolution when it was so vital to remain firm on class positions, even when it meant being alone. But it’s something which can become an obstacle when the class struggle is on the upsurge, when it is possible to engage in much wider debate without in any way renouncing one’s poli­tical platform, one’s program.

This is the most fundamental point in the ICC’s attitude towards groups which refuse to discuss. It’s not a question of glossing over political divergences and regrouping with anyone in any old way. It is a question of analyzing the pres­ent period of rising class struggle, of growing revolutionary potential, and of understanding that this is a favorable situation for the con­frontation of political divergences. It is a question of pushing forward in the direction the class struggle is going -- towards the generaliza­tion of struggles and of the debates coming out of these struggles. The ICC’s attitude towards participating in discussion is based on a precise political position which we don’t hide: the end of the period of counter-revolution, the perspec­tives of generalized class confrontations. This change in period implies a change in the way revolutionaries see discussion. It is no longer a question of protecting oneself from contamina­tion, from the degeneration of other organiza­tions, or resisting the demoralization of the proletariat. Now that the proletariat has made a breech in the domination of the bourgeoisie, we must seek to elaborate communist positions in the clearest and most coherent way possible.

In order to do that, we must first of all be able to make a distinction between misunderstandings and real political divergences. It is inevitable that there will be misunderstandings about what each group means; they are the tribute revolu­tionaries must pay to fifty years of counter­revolution. During this period, revolutionary organizations were dislocated and turned in upon themselves, like the proletariat as a whole. This was the real triumph of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionaries became a tiny minority, isolated from each other. This created habits which still weigh on them in the new period of upsurge. Like the proletariat, that great sleeping giant, revolutionaries are still having to shake off the dust of fifty years of isolation and dispersion. Either old habits persist when the period has changed, or else the inexperience, the lack of knowledge about the history of the workers’ move­ment suffered by the new groups arising out of the upsurge of the class, lead these groups to disappear, fall into activism, or fragment into mini-fractions with the first temporary reflux of the struggle. Then arrogance and ignorance become an article of belief, and history is re­written to accord with one’s own fantasies. Iso­lation, dispersion, the inexperience of revolutionaries are real problems and no organization can ignore them. Not to see that there is a problem of sectarianism, that is, of theorizing dispersion, is to ignore these problems.

BC and the CWO do not see that there is a prob­lem of sectarianism, of the ‘chapel spirit’. It’s a problem invented by the ICC, out of opport­unism according to BC. It wasn’t long ago, however, that BC did seem to be aware of this problem. Today, BC claims that the attitude of groups like Programa Comunista, Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC), or FOR is simply a question of political divergences. But there are political divergences between the groups who did participate at the Conference, more profound on some points than with the groups who refused to participate. There is no direct and immediate connection which allows you to explain every attitude as being the result of political diver­gences. It is too simplistic and it means for­getting one of the most violent consequences of the counter-revolution: the atomization of the proletariat, the fragmentation of revolutionaries who were forced to develop their political posi­tions in a vacuum, without a permanent confrontation of ideas.

In the period of reflux, in the 1930s and 1950s, clarification could only take place if you were prepared to be isolated, to go against the tide. In a period of resurgence, clarification can only take place if you participate actively in all the debates that arise in the course of the struggle. Today the attitude of revolutionaries towards political clarification must be the same as in previous periods of resurgence.

When the Eisenachians made concessions to the Lassalleans, Marx made very severe criticisms of the Marxists, whose concessions he judged to be unnecessary. Nevertheless, taking the period into account, he insisted on one point: “Every advance made by the real movement is worth a dozen programs” (Marx, Letter to W. Bracke, 5 May 1875, Preface to the Critique of the Gotha Program). Was Marx an opportunist? No; sect­arianism exists and is a problem in itself, not directly linked to political questions. Lenin was fighting against sectarianism when he pushed for the formation of the Russian Social Democra­tic Labor Party, while firmly criticizing poli­tical positions and without making any concessions.

This attitude of pushing for discussion is no less valuable in periods of isolation, where the conditions make contact difficult. A constant concern for discussion has always been shown by the most consistent revolutionaries (for example, Bilan in the 1930s).

By a curious inversion, whose secret is known only to themselves, Battaglia is now giving us lessons in political intransigence; but it was only a few years ago that they were calling for meetings without clear political criteria, like the ones with Lotta Comunista and Programma Comunista, or in the early 60s with R. Dunayeskaya’s News and Letters and the FOR of Munis, or the contacts they had with the French Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere. Are we to believe that when BC init­iates meetings and contacts of this type, it is a correct position, but when the ICC defends the necessity for confrontation between genuinely revolutionary groups on the basis of clear poli­tical criteria, that’s just opportunism?

There is a similar curious inversion in the atti­tude of the CWO, who not long ago considered the ICC to be in the camp of the counter-revolution, but have now changed their minds. Are we to believe that it is because the political positions of the CWO have changed so profoundly that they now deign to participate actively in international conferences (the first Conference in Milan, the Oslo Conference, the second Conference in Paris)? Or isn’t it rather that there has been a change of attitude, a recognition that it’s no good proclaiming yourself the only guardian of truth, that it’s necessary to discuss political diver­gences and not to look for pretexts for avoiding debate: in other words, the implicit recognition that there is such a problem as the attitude of revolutionary groups?

To wind up on this last point, we simply want to point out the incoherence of inviting groups to come to the International Conference, of asking for contributions on the points on the agenda, and then saying that their refusal to participate is quite ‘normal’, because such groups ‘have no place in Conferences like these’ because of the positions they are developing. Then why invite them? Out of some concern for ‘democracy’? If such groups are right not to come, then we’ve got to be consistent and admit that we were wrong to invite them. We don’t think so. Whatever poli­tical aberrations such groups defend, they are still part of the proletarian camp; in our opin­ion, direct, public confrontation is the best way to sweep away the aberrations which still exist in the workers’ movement.

Revolutionary organizations worthy of their name must fight against erroneous, sclerotic, or con­fused positions. We don’t recognize any group’s ‘right to be wrong’, we don’t ‘respect’ political positions which serve only to throw a bit more garbage into a movement which already finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the consequences of the counter-revolution. We don’t ‘respect’ the refusal to discuss in the name of divergences, because that means implicitly recog­nizing that there is a political validity and coherence in the positions each group defends: each group defends its own positions, and every­thing is for the best in the best of all possible revolutionary worlds!. We, on the other hand, call on all groups in the proletarian camp, on the whole working class, to speak up, to engage in an open, public and international confrontation of ideas, to defend their positions in interventions and class actions.

The work of the Conference

It is in this spirit that the ICC defended the necessity of making clear pronouncements on the questions on the agenda -- questions which aren’t academic problems, but which have increasingly urgent implications for the class struggle. In order to stimulate the adoption of clear positions, the ICC put forward -- in addition to the preparatory texts -- short synthetic resolutions on the present crisis and the perspectives for the period, on the national questions, and on the organization of revolutionaries. The principle of putting forward these resolutions was rejected.

We will summarize the main points of our inter­ventions at the Conference.

1. On the first point – The Crisis and Perspectives for the Present Period -- the ICC insisted on the necessity to put forward a clear perspective, based on a solid analysis, concretized by the situation unfolding in front of our eyes. Are we heading towards generalized class confrontations or a generalized imperialist conflict? As revo­lutionary organizations intervening in the working class and claiming to defend a political orienta­tion -- a political direction -- we must be able to pronounce on the general sense of the class struggle today. Revolutionaries in the past may have been wrong on the period, but they always pronounced on it.

On this question, BC defended the following posi­tion:

“In 1976, we put forward three possible hypotheses:

1. that capitalism will temporarily get over its economic crisis;

2. that the eventual aggravation of the crisis will create a subjective situation of generalized fear, which will lead to a solu­tion of force and a third world war;

3. the weakest link in the chain will break, reopening a revolutionary period for the proletariat, in historic continuity with the Bolshevik October...

Two years later, we can affirm that the present situation has taken the contours of our second hypothesis.” (Texts and Proceedings of the International Conference of Paris (Nov.1978))

As for the CWO, it doesn’t make a clear pronounce­ment: the two possibilities are open, war or revolution. This answer of ‘maybe yes, maybe no’ was however weighted by the CWO’s stress on the passivity and reflux of the class struggle today.

For the ICC, after the capitalist system has been in open crisis for ten years, the internal contra­dictions of the system have once again reached the point where imperialist confrontations are tending to generalize. The main points in this evolution are as follows: once Europe and Japan were reconstructed they entered into direct com­petition with the US; the crisis has led to the reinforcement of the imperialist blocs; the west­ern bloc has imposed a ‘Pax Americana’ on the Middle East and has redeployed its strategy in South East Asia, definitively integrating China into its orbit, etc. From the standpoint of inter-imperialist antagonisms, from the economic, political and military strategic point of view, the question that should be asked isn’t “when is imperialist war going to be generalized?” but rather “why hasn’t war already been generalized?”.

For the CWO, the magical curve of the falling rate of profit has not descended far enough. Capita­lism still has a number of possibilities open -- like measures of austerity (?) – before the condi­tions for a generalized war have been established. “The proletariat still has time and opportunity to destroy capitalism before it can destroy civilization”(Ibid).

What is the meaning of the growing military inter­vention of the capitalist powers in Zaire, Angola, Vietnam/Cambodia, China/Vietnam? What is the mea­ning of the ‘human rights’ campaign and other ideological battles? What is the meaning of the accelerated, bloated growth of the war industry?

The CWO replies quite correctly that they are preparations for war. However, according to the CWO, it is not the class struggle which is hold­ing back a generalized war – that’s “the absurd scenario of the ICC”. For the CWO, the struggles of the working class are “sectional struggles with little possibility of generalization into class-wide battles” (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.12). The CWO’s logical conclusion: “the crisis is still not deep enough to make war a necessary step for the bourgeoisie” (Ibid). This is simply a tautology and is merely saying: if the war isn’t here it’s because the conditions for it aren’t here. We agree, but we come back to the original question: what conditions? Failing to grasp a theoretical argument is understandable, but it’s hard to see how one can fail to be worried when the facts themselves remain unexplained. Events like the assassination of an archduke at Sarajevo have been used as a pretext to unleash a world war; today, far more important events like the wars in the Middle East in 1967 and 1973, in Vietnam, Cyprus, China/Vietnam etc, have not led to such a conflict. Why? Why didn’t the USSR intervene directly in Vietnam? Why didn’t the US intervene directly in Angola or Ethiopia? The ‘dialecticians’ will no doubt reply that the objective conditions haven’t been laid down. We agree but for the ICC the main condition that’s lacking today is the mobilization of the popula­tion, and above all the proletariat, behind the interests of national capital.

As far the other preconditions for a generalized conflict are concerned -- the existence of consti­tuted imperialist blocs, the open crisis of the capitalist system – they’re already there. The CWO’s and BC’s thermometer of the falling rate of profit doesn’t allow them to contradict this: all they could say is that the blocs aren’t reinforced ‘enough’, or that the crisis isn’t deep ‘enough’. Perhaps the ICC’s scenario is ‘absurd’ as the CWO says, but they’ve got to prove it. On the other hand, the political implications of BC’s idea of a “subjective situation of generalized fear” or of the CWO’s view of a “proletariat con­fused, disorientated, and pessimistic about struggle” (RP, no.12) are hard to believe.

Are revolutionaries supposed to tell a combative proletariat that has been fighting for ten years, a proletariat which nowhere in the world is march­ing behind the bourgeois ideals of defending the ‘democratic’ or ‘socialist’ fatherland, or behind appeals for austerity -- are they supposed to say the die is already cast? We’re no longer in the 1930s. The conditions are not the same today. All this means little to the CWO who doesn’t see the resurgence of class struggle today -- all they see is the reflux. It’s the same with BC for whom the recent anti-union strikes in the Italian hos­pitals mean very little, or for whom practically nothing happened in 1969, just a vague movement without any profound meaning for the working class, simply because BC wasn’t there. The ICC wasn’t there either, but we think history existed before us! The analysis of the present period and its implications, the development of a clear orienta­tion isn’t an academic quarrel, even though the CWO and BC may want to divert the debate into a battle of the theory of the falling rate of profit ‘versus’ the theory of the saturation of the market. For us, the theory of the saturation of the world market constitutes a coherent framework which enables us to understand the whole period from World War I to the present crisis: a frame­work which includes the theory of the falling rate of profit and doesn’t exclude it. The most impor­tant thing about the debate on the crisis today is the implications it has for our intervention. There’s an enormous weakness in the economic analysis of the CWO and BC at the theoretical level, but the fundamental weakness is their underestimation of the level of class struggle today, their inability to analyze what’s going on in front of our eyes, to see the embryonic signs of a class confrontation which will inevitably take place before the contradictions of capital explode into a new world holocaust.

2. The second question dealt with at the Confer­ence was the national question. Here although all the groups present except the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista (NCI) held that the proletariat can no longer support national liberation struggles, many nuances and divergences still separated the groups at the Conference.

The NCI sticks to the letter of the position defended by the Communist International, support­ing national liberation as a way of weakening imperialism, and thus as a positive aid to the struggle of the proletariat, which is supposed to put itself at the head of such movements. The fact that, over the last fifty years, this has never happened; the fact that, over the last ten years, every time the working class in any coun­try has entered into struggle it has come up against the political forces of ‘national libera­tion’ -- none of this bothers the NCI who can’t see ‘proof’ of the fact that their theory is invalid. The NCI is serving us a warmed-up vers­ion of the idea of a ‘welding’ of the social movement in the under-developed regions and the proletarian movement in the advanced countries. Not seeing that the only welding that can take place is among the ranks of the world proletariat, whether in the weak or strong areas of capitalism, the NCI has not yet cast off the distorting spect­acles of Bordigism. They still see a continuity between the dragooning of the masses into national struggles and proletarian mobilizations. On the contrary, the whole experience of this century shows that the proletariat can only make an uncompromising break with the national terrain -- wherever it is and whatever numerical strength it has within the national state that exploits it.

The ICC’s condemnation of all national struggles has nothing to do with indifference, abstraction, or contempt towards the popular revolts which the working class is also often involved in. It’s a denunciation of all those who manipulate these revolts for nationalist or imperialist ends, ie all those who claim that it’s possible to make a step forward at a national level. Only the wor­kers’ struggle can give a direction to these revolts; in its absence, they can only end up in misery, massacre, and war. And don’t tell us that this break is impossible without the party! Even without a party, the workers have already shown through their strikes that they can cool the ardors of nationalism. This has happened in Angola, Israel, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco. The break with ‘national liberation’ isn’t an abstrac­tion – it’s the reality of today.

More subtle than this is the ambiguity which still exists on this question with a group like BC. While qualifying ‘national liberation’ wars as moments of imperialist war, BC put forward the idea that the world proletariat -- and thus the proletariat of these countries -- has to “change ‘national liberation movements’ into proletarian revolution” by building the future Communist International. If the NCI’s position on this question has a coherence, BC’s falls between two stools. You’ve got to choose. Either “national liberation struggles have completely exhausted their historic function” (BC, emphasis by them) and you must draw the consequences: they can’t be used by the proletariat, which has its own histo­ric mission. The role of the class party isn’t to transform these struggles but to call on the proletariat to fight all the agencies which try to dragoon it into imperialist wars. Or else it is possible to “change them into proletarian revolutions”, and you must then recognize that they do have a historic function, as part of the historical tasks of the proletariat. You must then say that they are not simply imperialist conflicts.

It’s not a question of transforming national liberation into proletarian revolution, but of mobilizing the proletariat against all national movements, BC will probably reply once again that the ICC isn’t very ‘dialectical’. Again the ICC may be wrong, but you can’t take the discussion forward by appealing to an all-purpose ‘dialectic’, like the doctor who calls every illness an ‘aller­gy’. For BC the party is the answer to all unex­pected contradictions. But for the class party to act, it’s got to exist. And where is it going to come from? From national struggles? Certainly not. It will swell its ranks with those who have made a definitive break with nationalist politics of all kinds. And where will these elements come from? From class movements in all countries, including those which are now subjected to the blood and iron of world imperialism’s ‘national liberation struggles’.

A fundamental precondition for the capacity of the world proletariat to conduct its struggle is a clear, practical and theoretical understanding of the fact that it can only fight on its own terrain, the terrain of internationalism; that there is no possibility of using a movement which has arisen out of local and global imperialist antagonisms and which uses the masses as simple cannon-fodder.

Revolutionaries who still waver on this question are simply participating in the general confusion about nationalism which exists in the working class today. They are lending credit to the bourgeois idea that nationalism is just a little bit revolutionary. Only casuistry can explain to the workers, who are learning through their daily practice that the fight is the same in all coun­tries, that their struggle is the same and yet not the same; or that, by a clever use of strategy, the proletariat can enter the ranks of nationalism in order to turn them against nationalism. You might as well try entering the police to struggle against the police.

As for the CWO, who are very anxious to separate themselves from any support for national movements, who wanted to make this question a criterion for exclusion from the discussion, they didn’t argue at all against the positions of the Communist International as defended by the NCI. Their main concern was to insist on the idea that not all countries are imperialist, or rather not ‘really’ imperialist, that imperialism is the policy only of the principal capitalist powers.

We won’t enter into the details of this question, but will touch upon the way the CWO simplifies this question. In their article on the Confer­ence in RP no.12, the CWO asks: “how could it be argued that, for example, Israel was an indepen­dent imperialist power?”. There’s none so deaf as those that will not hear. The fact that no country today can escape from imperialism, that all countries in the world today are imperialist, means precisely that national independence is no longer possible. The most powerful countries have a wider margin of maneuver, not because they are imperialist and the weaker ones aren’t, but simply because they are more competitive on the world market and/or the most powerful on the international battle field. The fact that all countries are imperialist today means precisely that no national bourgeoisie can defend its inte­rests without coming up against the objective limits of a world market which has invaded the remotest corners of the planet. Our answer to the CWO’s question is: Israel is an imperialist state, but it’s not an independent state.

But the most important thing here is the political implications of the CWO’s view. If only the big powers have the means to conduct an imperialist policy, and the second order countries don’t, you have to be coherent and say that the national governments of the latter are simply ‘agents’ of the big imperialisms, or, to use the leftist terminology, ‘valets’ of the US, the superpowers, and of the USSR. This is true but it’s not sufficient. The condemnation of national strug­gles isn’t a moral question, a denunciation of nationalist factions for ‘selling out’ to imperialism. It’s based on a social reality: there is no possibility of defending the nation outside of the necessities of imperialism.

3. On the third point, during the discussion on the question of the Party, the ICC particularly insisted on one issue: does the party take power? The group For Kommunismen replied no, and the FOR, although absent from the Conference, con­tributed a text which clearly states what the ICC considers to be one of the essential lessons of the Russian Revolution. The role of the party isn’t to take power. Power is taken by the work­ers’ councils, which are the unitary organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, inside of which parties constitute the communist vanguard of the class, regrouping the clearest and most conscious elements in the movement towards commu­nism -- the withering away of the state, the dis­appearance of classes, the total liberation of humanity.

The NCI defended the position that the party takes power, identifying with Lenin’s criticisms of the left communists in An Infantile Disorder. They don’t understand that the critique of the CI’s errors on this question has nothing to do with bourgeois democracy. It’s based on the experience of the proletariat in Russia, of the Bolsheviks, and of Lenin, who, despite the false theorizations that he did develop, was capable of a striking clarity when he was expressing the highest moments of the proletarian struggle.

Thus Lenin talked of “the necessity for all power to pass into the hands of revolutionary democracy guided by the revolutionary proletariat” (emphasis by Lenin).

If there was one question that really had to be debated after the defeat of the world revolution of 1917-23, it was the question of the forms of power that emerge in the revolution. The CI’s error on this question proved to be an accelera­ting factor in the counter-revolution from the moment when isolation led the power in Russia to describe each retreat imposed by the situation as a gain for the proletariat; in this situation the power became more and more autonomous from the general organizations of the class, culmina­ting in the tragedy of Kronstadt, which saw an armed confrontation between the workers and the state, with the Bolshevik Party at its head. The idea that the party takes power reflected the immaturity of revolutionaries at the beginning of the century, when they were still impregnated with a period when bourgeois schemas were still the reference point for understanding the revolutionary process.

The CWO recognizes that the workers’ councils are the foundations of proletarian power, but it has revived the old ideas of bourgeois parliamenta­rism and transposed them into the councils. For the CWO, the seizure of power means that the majority of councils have been won to revolutio­nary positions, and since these positions are held by the party, the party ‘in practice’ seizes power once it has a majority in the councils. The circle is complete. According to the CWO, when it takes power the proletariat simply apes bourg­eois parliamentarism with its majorities and minorities, and the proletarian struggle becomes a struggle between ‘parties’ in which each one tries to win a majority for its positions so that it can take power.

Neither the Paris Commune nor the 1917 revolution followed this numerical parliamentary schema. They resulted from a profound evolution of the balance of forces between social classes, and had nothing to do with the mere parliamentary sanct­ioning of an already existing class rule based on definite relations of production. This is how the bourgeoisie functions. For the proletariat, the taking of power is the conscious, organized action of a class whose domination has not yet been achieved.

In its preparatory text for the Conference, BC correctly affirms that “without a party there can be no proletarian revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, just as there can be no proletarian dictatorship and workers’ state with­out the workers’ councils” (although we don’t accept the formulation ‘workers’ state’ to des­cribe the state that arises during the revolu­tion). Moreover BC claims that it distinguishes itself from the ‘superpartyism’ of the Bordigists, for whom the party is everything and the organiza­tion of the working class in councils a mere form to which only the party gives revolutionary con­tent. But on the question of taking power, in the last resort BC also says the party takes power! BC’s dearly beloved dialectic on the relationship between party and class is simplified considerably, and all their fine speeches about the workers’ councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat, all their fierce critiques of the ‘superpartyism’ of the Bordigists, fall to the ground. You’ve got to be clear. There are two essential organs in the revolution: councils and parties. If the party holds power, what is the role of the councils? What’s the difference between this conception and the idea that the power of the proletariat means the adhesion of the base (the councils) to a summit (the party) which in fact holds this power? The question of power is once again seen as the power of a part of the whole in the name of the whole. This isn’t possible for the proletariat. It’s only strength lies pre­cisely in its collective capacity to wield political power. Either the proletariat takes power collectively, or it can’t take power, and no-one can do it in its place. When the Bolshevik Party took power, it was with the slogan “all power to the soviets” and not “all power to the party”. It’s understandable that the distinction between the two was far from clear in the minds of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were the first to be surprised by the audience they found in the working class, and it was the initiative of the masses which pushed the Bolshe­vik Party forward on the question of the insurrec­tion and the seizure of power, even though Lenin himself was reticent about becoming the President of the Council of People’s Commissars.

It was later on, with the reflux of the revolu­tion, that we saw the tragic proof of the impossibility of the party substituting itself for a class power that was declining under the blows of exhaustion and international isolation. When the working class is mobilized it can allow the greatest clarity to develop in its party, it can allow it to express the greatest revolutionary firmness. But the greatest revolutionary firmness of the best of all parties cannot maintain the proletarian power of a demobilized class. Why? Fundamentally, because the nature of the prole­tariat’s power derives from its nature as an exploited class whose only strength is its collective strength. The question of taking power is complex, and it cannot be resolved by the megalomania of political groups who elude the problem by claiming power for themselves. The power of the party can never be a guarantee. The only guarantee is in the working class itself and it’s the role of revolutionary parties to defend this guarantee against any demobilization -- a demobilization which can only be accentuated by those who say to the proletariat: “give us the power, we’ll carry out the revolution”.

Remarks on the conclusion

The most important step forward in this Conference was the broadening of the debate to new groups who didn’t participate at the first Conference in Milan: the direct confrontation of the posi­tions of different groups, the clarification of the divergences which separate them, making formulations more precise in the light of these confrontations -- all this is vital for organiza­tions that intervene in the class struggle.

This is why the IC C throughout and after the Conference insisted on this question of sectarian­ism. On the same point, there were two things which, in our opinion, are to be deplored in the conclusions. While the groups were able to agree to carry on this work, the Conference made no pronouncement as such and was unable to make an official common statement about the work. In this sense, the Conference as a body remained dumb and was unable to draw up collectively an outline of the agreements and disagreements between the groups on the questions on the agenda.

The very principle of resolutions coming out of such a Conference was rejected. By proposing the resolutions published in this IR, the ICC wasn’t acting for itself, or trying to force a political agreement on anyone, or to alter its own political positions. It’s a question of establishing whether we are blatherers or revolutionary militants. We don’t participate in international conferences for the sole satisfaction of seeing a joint publi­cation coming out of a meeting where everyone can just express their positions and then go back to work as though nothing had happened. The prepar­atory texts and the debates are moments which should allow us to clarify points of agreement and disagreement. This must be translated into an ability to put things down in black and white, in public: not simply a juxtaposition of statements from each one of us but also a joint statement if that is possible.

This wasn’t possible and it was a weakness of the conference. Paradoxically, this desire to remain dumb as a Conference by refusing any joint decla­rations was accompanied by a concern to add further criteria for invitations to future con­ferences -- criteria of “selection” for BC and “'exclusion” for the CWO. We have here a proposal which is heading towards some sort of minimum platform instead of a framework for discussion, and at the same time a refusal to make joint pronouncements on anything. Good luck to those who can understand this. Even the decisions taken like the preparation of the next conference remain ‘up in the air’. It’s up to the reader of the forthcoming pamphlet to interpret the practical implications of the work done.

MG

Resolution on the Crisis

1) Even for the less aware sectors of the ruling class, the world crisis of capitalism is today becoming incontrovertible. But even if the eco­nomists, those apologists for the capitalist mode of production, are gradually ceasing to ex­plain the present crisis of the economy in terms of the rise in oil prices or the breakdown in the International Monetary System set up in I944, they are still not completely able to understand the real significance of these problems, a fact due to their class prejudices.

2) Only a Marxist analysis can explain the sig­nificance of the crisis. It teaches us that, as the C.I. made evident after the Ist imperial­ist war, the capitalist system has entered its decadent period. The cyclical crises of last century were like the heart beat of a healthy body; these have now been succeeded by a perman­ent crisis which the system can no longer survive except by a hideous cycle -- really its death rattle -- of acute crises, wars, reconstruction, even more acute crises.

3) We must therefore reject all theories -- even those which make reference to Marxism -- which see the present crisis as no more than a ‘cyclical’ crisis, or one of ‘restructuration’ or of ‘adapta­tion’, or ‘modernization’. Capitalism is com­pletely incapable of surmounting its present crisis and all its plans, whether to control inflation or to increase production, can only end in failure. All that capitalism can achieve with­in the logic of its own laws is a new imperialist world war.

4) Although the only perspective that capitalism can offer humanity is generalized war, history has sham, particularly by the events in 1917 in Russia and I918 in Germany, that there is a force within society that is capable of resisting, of driving back and overturning such a perspective -- the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. The inexorable aggravation of capitalism’s eco­nomic contradictions thus poses two alternatives: imperialist war or the revolutionary upsurge of the working class. What will decide the outcome is the balance of forces between the two main classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the prol­etariat.

5) The bourgeoisie has twice managed to impose its ‘solution’ to its economic contradictions. In 1914 it did so because of the gangrenous opportunism and betrayal of the main proletarian parties. In 1939 it was because of the terrible defeat inflicted upon the proletariat in the 20s, the betrayal of the communist parties, the weight of fascism and anti-fascist and democratic mysti­fications. But the present situation is quite different:

-- the containment of the proletariat by the left parties -- the CP and SP -- is much less effective than that of the social democratic parties of 1914;

-- democratic and antifascist myths (even if they are still frequently raised), the power of mys­tification of the so-called ‘workers state’ are more or less used up and exposed.

6) Therefore the perspective opened up by the intensification of capitalism’s contradictions at the end of the 60’s is not generalized imperialist war but generalized class war. Capitalism can only unleash a third world war after it has inflicted a crushing defeat upon the proletariat. This was shown in the proletarian response in France in 68, in Italy in 69, Poland in 70 and in many other countries during the same period. And although the bourgeoisie managed to cool down the struggle momentarily by means of a political/ideological counter-offensive carried out mainly by the left parties, the combative strength of the proletariat is far from exhausted. With the deep­ening of the crisis, austerity and unemployment, that combativity will erupt once more onto the surface. Contrary to the bourgeoisie’s hopes, this combativity will lead to major struggles against capitalism.

Resolution on the national question

1) Fundamental to the formation of the C.I. was the understanding that capitalism had entered its period of decadence, which put the proletarian revolution on the historical agenda. In the words of the C.I., with World War I “the epoch of im­perialist wars and revolutions was opened up”. Today, any coherent expression of the positions of the working class must be based upon the rec­ognition of this essential fact in the life of society.

2) Ever since the Communist Manifesto Marxism has always acknowledged the tendency for the cap­italist mode of production to unify the laws of the world economy, for the bourgeoisie “to create a world in its own image”. For this reason, Marx­ism has never considered it possible, once the proletarian revolution is on the agenda, for cer­tain geographical areas to escape the total development of capitalism, or that ‘bourgeois democratic revolutions’ or ‘national liberation struggles’ could be on the agenda at the same time as the proletarian revolution.

3) The experience of more than half a century has sham that bogus ‘national struggles’ are nothing more than moments in various inter-imperialist conflicts which lead ultimately to world wars, and that all the verbiage which attempts to lead the workers into participating in these struggles or into supporting them serves only to derail the real struggles of the proletariat, and are part of the preparation for imperialist world war.

Resolution on the organization of revolutionaries

1) From its beginning, the workers’ movement has recognized organization and consciousness as the two essential elements in the struggle of the working class. Like all human activity and particularly past revolutions, the communist rev­olution is a conscious act, but to a considerably heightened extent. The proletariat forges its consciousness of its being, of its goals and the means to achieve them through its total experience as a class. This process is difficult, uneven, heterogeneous, a process in which the class secretes political organizations which regroup the most conscious elements, those who “have the advantage over the rest of the proletariat of understanding the conditions, the line of march and the general tasks of the movement” (Communist Manifesto). The task of these organizations is to participate actively in this development of consciousness, and generalization and thus in the struggles of the class.

2) The organization of revolutionaries constitutes an essential organ of the proletariat’s struggle, before as well as after the insurrection and the seizure of power. The working class cannot acc­omplish its historic task, of destroying the cap­italist system and creating communism without the proletarian party, because its absence could only express an immaturity in the consciousness of the class.

3) Before the revolution and in preparation for it communists intervene actively in the class struggle and encourage and stimulate all expressions and all possibilities which emerge within the class and which express its tendency towards self-organization and the development of its consciousness (general assemblies, strike committees, unemployed committees, discussion circles or workers groups...). On the other hand, in order to avoid contributing to the confusion and mystification created by the bourgeoisie, communists must avoid all participation in the life of capitalist organs. Trade unions have definitively become such organs today.

4) During and after the revolution, the proletarian party actively participates in the life of the whole class regrouped in its unitary or­gans, the workers’ councils, in order to orientate them towards the destruction of the capitalist state, the seizure of political power, the de­struction of capitalist relations of production and the creation of communist social relations. However, and in spite of the indispensability of its activity, the communist party, in contrast to the pattern which prevailed in bourgeois rev­olutions, cannot substitute itself for the whole class in its seizure of power and the accomplishing of its historic task. In no circumstances can it become the proxy of the class; the nature of the goal for which the proletariat strives – communism -- is such that it can be achieved only through the seizure of power by the whole of the class, through the proletariat’s own activity and ex­perience.

5) After the deepest counter-revolution in the history of the workers’ movement one of the most important tasks which falls to revolutionaries is to contribute actively to the reconstruction of that organ which is so indispensable to the rev­olutionary struggle -- the proletarian party.

Although the emergence of the party is conditioned by the development and deepening of the class struggle, by the opening up of the movement to­wards communist revolution, it is not an auto­matic and mechanical product; it can by no means be extemporized.

Today’s preparations towards it demand:

-- the re-appropriation of the fundamental acquis­itions of the past experiences of the class

-- the actualization of these acquisitions in the light of new conditions in the life of capitalism and in the class struggle.

-- attempt at discussion between different communist groups, the confrontation and clarification of their respective positions. These are vital preconditions for the establishment of the clear and coherent programmatic base which is essential for the foundation of the world proletarian party.

Resolution on the process of regroupment

1) Since the beginning of the workers’ movement, one of the most fundamental concerns of revolut­ionaries has been for unity in their own ranks. This need for unity among the most advanced ele­ments of the class is an expression of the pro­found, historic and immediate unity of interests in the class itself, and is a decisive factor in the process leading to the worldwide unification of the proletariat, to the realization of its own being. Whether we are talking about the attempt, in 1850, to constitute a ‘World League of Comm­unist Revolutionaries’ regrouping the Communist League, the Blanquists, and the left-wing Chartists or the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864; of the Second International in 1889, or the Communist International in 1919, itself the result of the efforts towards regroup­ment at Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915-16, every important step in the evolution of the workers’ movement has been based on this quest for the worldwide regroupment of revolutionaries.

2) Although it corresponds to a fundamental nec­essity in the class struggle, this tendency towards the unification of revolutionaries, like the tendency towards the unification of the class as a whole, has constantly been held up by a whole series of factors, such as:

-- the effects of the framework in which capital­ism itself has developed, with all its regional, national, cultural and economic variations. Al­though the system itself tends to overturn this framework, it can never really go beyond it and it is something which weighs heavily on the struggle and consciousness of the class.

-- the political immaturity of revolutionaries themselves, their lack of understanding, the insufficiency of their analyses, their diff­iculties in breaking out of the spirit of sec­tarianism, of the shopkeeper mentality, and all the other influences of petty bourgeois and bourgeois ideology in their own ranks.

3) The capacity for this tenancy towards the unity of revolutionaries to overcome these obstacles is, in general, a fairly faithful re­flection of the balance of forces between the two major classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Periods of reflux in the class struggle generally correspond to a movement of dispersal and mutual isolation among revolutionary currents and elements; whereas periods of prol­etarian upsurge tend to see the concentration of this fundamental tendency towards the unifi­cation of revolutionaries. This phenomenon man­ifests itself in a particularly clear way at the time of the formation of proletarian parties. This has always taken place in the context of a qualitative development of the class struggle, and has in general been the result of the regroupment of the different political tendencies of the class. This was notably the case with:

-- the foundation of German Social Democracy at Gotha in 1875 (Lassalleans and Marxists)

-- the constitution of the Communist Party in Russia in 1917-18 (Bolsheviks and other currents like Trotsky’s group and Bogdanov’s group)

-- the foundation of the Communist Party in Germany in 1919 (Spartacists, ‘Left Radicals’, etc)

-- the foundation of the Communist Party in Italy (the Bordiga current and the Gramsci current).

Whatever the weaknesses of certain of these curr­ents, and although in general, unification has taken place around one current that is politically more solid than the others, the fact remains that the foundation of the party has never been the result of a unilateral proclamation, but is the product of a dynamic process of regroupment among the most advanced elements of the class.

4) The existence of this process of regroupnent in moments of historic development in the class struggle can be explained by the fact that:

-- the unifying dynamic going on in the whole class has its repercussions on revolutionaries themselves , pushing them to go beyond artificial and sectarian divisions

-- the groving responsibility facing revolution­aries as active, influential factors in the immediate struggle obliges them to concentrate their forces and their means of intervention

-- the class struggle tends to clarify problems which had been at the basis of divergences and divisions among revolutionaries.

5) The present situation of the revolutionary milieu is characterized by an extreme degree of division, by the existence of important differ­ences on fundamental questions, by the isolation of its different components, by the weight of sectarianism and the shopkeeper mentality, by the sclerosis of certain currents and the inexperience of certain others. All these are expressions of the terrible effects of a half-century of counter-revolution.

6) A static approach to this situation can lead to the idea, defended notably by Fomento Obrero Revolucionario, that there is no possibility, either in the present or the future, for a rapprochement between the different positions and analyses which exist at the present time, for the kind of rapprochement which alone can allow for the shared coherence and clarity indispensable to any platform for the constitution of a unified organization.

Such an approach ignores two essential elements:

-- the ability of discussion, of confrontation between positions and analyses, to clarify questions, if only because they allow a better under­standing of respective positions and the eliminat­ion of false divergences

-- the importance of the practical experiences of the class as a factor in going beyond misunder­standings and divergences.

7) Today, capitalism’s dive into acute crisis and the worldwide resurgence of the proletariat has put the regroupment of revolutionary forces on the agenda in a most pressing way. All the prob­lems which, along with the class as a whole, rev­olutionaries will have to draw out of its con­crete experience

-- constitute a favorable terrain for such a process of regroupment

-- will allow for clarification of the essential questions which currently divide the vanguard of the proletariat -- perspectives for the crisis of capitalism, the nature of the trade unions and communists’ attitude towards them, the nature of national struggles, the function of the proletarian party, etc.

But while the demand for unity and, in the first instance, the opening up of debates between rev­olutionaries are absolutely necessary, they will not be translated into reality in a mechanistic way. They must be accompanied by a real under­standing of this necessity and a militant will to carry it through. Those groups who, at the present time, have not become aware of this necessity and refuse to participate in the process of discussion and regroupment are doomed, unless they revise their positions, to become obstacles to the move­ment and to disappear as expressions of the proletariat.

8) All these considerations animate the ICC’s participation in the debates that have developed in the framework of the Milan conference May ‘77 and the Paris conference of November ‘78. It is because the ICC analyses the present period as one of historical resurgence of the working class that it attaches so much importance to this effort, that it strongly condemns the attitude of groups who neglect or reject such efforts, and considers that this sectarian attitude is itself a political position, the implications of which hamper the communist movement. The ICC therefore considers that these discussions are a very important ele­ment in the process of regroupment of revolution­ary forces, which will lead to their unification in the world party of the proletariat, that essential weapon in the revolutionary struggle of the class.

An analysis of the current situation at any time -- whether at the international level or in any one country -- can never be a simple snapshot; conjunctural events are only moments in a dynamic interplay of forces which develops over a period of time. Our previous analyses of the situation in Britain have been located within a view of its development through the period since 1967 when the sterling devaluation heralded the opening-up of the present open crisis of the world capital­ist system1. This text attempts to gain a broader perspective on the situation in Britain by examining its evolution since the outbreak of the Second World War.

The general significance of the period for Britain

1. The general significance of this period can be summarized by the following:

-- Britain’s capacity to remain a global imper­ialist power was broken by the systematic efforts of the US during the Second World War and its aftermath. This was done in such a way as to bring Britain to a position of total economic and military subservience to the US in the constitu­tion of the western bloc after the war.

-- The mantle of the ‘natural party of govern­ment’ has been irreversibly transferred from the Conservative to the Labour Party. This corres­pondence of the Labour Party to the overall needs of British capital has not been a product merely of conjunctural circumstances in the past few years, but has been the true state of affairs during and since the last world war. Indeed, it is the periods in which government power has rested with the Conservatives that have been the product of specific conjunctural circumstances.

-- The balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has undergone a change of historic proportion. If the Second World War marked the bourgeoisie’s zenith and the prolet­ariat’s nadir, the proletariat has now streng­thened to the point where it not only stands as a barrier to a third global war, but is develop­ing to go further and pose its own revolutionary solution to the historical crisis of capitalism. Although this shift of forces is an international one, its manifestations in Britain have had a profound effect on the situation.

These are the main themes of this text.

Britain and the formation of the US bloc

2. The Second World War changed the physiognomy of the world imperialist system of capital. It transformed the pre-1939 pattern of several competing ‘mini-blocs’ into two great global blocs each under the unassailable hegemony of its major national bourgeoisie, the US and Russia. The war was pursued not only militarily between the Allied and Axis powers, but economically among the Allies themselves, or rather between the US and each of the others. For Britain, its ‘war’ with the US was the crucial determinant of its post-war position.

3. The lynchpin of the British economy in the thirties was still the Empire which included outright colonies (such as India) as well as semi-colonies (such as China or Argentina). Its increasing importance as a primary source of wealth to the economy was irreplaceable and can be easily illustrated. With a base of 100 in 1924, the index of total national income had risen to nearly 110 in 1934 while the index of national income earned abroad had risen to nearly 140. In 1930 its level of investment abroad was higher than any other country in the world and 18% of the national wealth was derived from it. And throughout the thirties Britain retained the greatest share of world trade -- in 1936 it was 15.4%

In absolute and relative terms Britain’s foreign investments greatly exceeded those of the US. For example, in 1930 (on the eve of the depress­ion) the UK’s foreign investment was between 50 and 55 billion marks while that of the US was between 60 and 65 billion marks. In 1929 Britain’s income from long-term investment abroad amounted to 1219 million gold dollars while for the US it was 876 million gold dollars. However, the giant US economy (whose national wealth in 1930 was 1760 billion marks compared to Britain’s 450 billion marks) had been expanding far faster than the British economy and its need for foreign markets was becoming more and more pressing, as can be seen for example in the relative growths of capital invested abroad. British capital invested abroad in 1902 was 62 billion francs (at pre-war parity) and this rose to 94 billion francs in 1930; the equivalent figures for the US were 2.6 billion francs in 1900 and 81 billion francs in 1930. With such an appetite for foreign markets the US could only lust for the Empire clutched so desperately by the British bourgeoisie for its markets and raw materials.

With increasing competition (especially from the US and Germany) the loss of the Empire would have been catastrophic. Yet, at the same time, the cost of maintaining it was enormous. Threats came from all sides: German and Japanese military expansion; colonial bourgeoisies fighting to enlarge their own position at Britain’s expense; pressure, particularly from the US, for ending Imperial Preferences and opening the markets up for their own economic expansion. Some sections of the British bourgeoisie had been arguing for years for a less onerous way of maintaining British advantages but they were fighting against very entrenched interests. Consequently, right up to the beginning of the war, and even well into its first year, the British bourgeoisie was markedly divided about what was the best course to follow.

The basic ‘choice’ was: to go to war or to avoid war. Of those who wished to go to war there was a small pro-German faction in the Conservative Party, but far larger factions of the bourgeoisie saw greater gains to be made by defeating Germany. These included the left wing of the Labour Party and the faction of the Conservative Party led by Churchill. However, other factions of the bourge­oisie saw that whichever side Britain chose, the war would certainly lead to the dismemberment of the Empire to the advantage either of Germany or the US. This latter view was the one held by the Chamberlain government and led to the policy of appeasement, epitomized by the action at Munich in 1938. Only by avoiding war could Britain escape becoming a dependency either of the US or Germany.

However, for global, historic reasons, war was inevitable and the only question was: who was Britain to be allied with and against whom? In trying to avoid the question Chamberlain took up the ridiculous role of a Canute, and the rest of the bourgeoisie has despised him for it ever since.

4. In the event, a combination of German inter­ventions into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, combined with the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, meant that further German expansion would be towards the west. The threat to Britain’s own shores was clear, and Chamberlain declared war on Germany. However, a period of indecision followed during which the British bourgeoisie was led by those who had wanted to avoid war while, on the other hand, the German bourgeoisie hoped that the situation could quieten in the west so that they could expand to the east -- at the expense of Russia. This period was the ‘phoney war’ which ended with the advance of the German army through the Ardennes in May 1940 and the subsequent fall of France. These events pre­cipitated the fall of Chamberlain and the rise to power of a coalition of forces under Churchill which was totally committed to finding the solut­ion to British capital’s problems through the defeat of German expansionism. As it was clear that Britain’s productive capacity was not suff­icient to meet the requirements of the war the British bourgeoisie was forced to ask the US for help.

5. The objectives of the US bourgeoisie’s policy in regard to the war were:

-- to defeat Germany and Japan;

-- to prevent the rise of Russia in Europe;

-- to turn Britain and its Empire into depend­encies of the US.

In pursuit of these goals the US bourgeoisie’s policies were engineered to secure victory at the least possible cost. ‘Least possible cost’ meant: bleeding its allies as much as possible for repay­ments for war materiel without destroying their commitment to the war effort; using the massive market created by the war to stimulate the US economy and absorb the unemployed back into the process of production; minimizing domestic dis­content with the war by ensuring that the brunt of the slaughter on the battlefields would be sus­tained by the armies of its allies.

During the early stages of the war the application of these policies hit the British economy harder than the German bombers could. Through the cash-and-carry system, British financial reserves were steadily depleted to pay for war materiel, fuel and food, a substantial proportion of which never even reached Britain because of the shipping losses sustained by the North Atlantic convoys. The US bourgeoisie was thus able to systematically weaken the British bourgeoisie’s resistance to the cond­itions put on the economic and military arrangements which followed, and so, when in 1941 the Lend-Lease arrangements came to replace the cash-and-carry system (which had cost British capital nearly 3.6 billion dollars) Britain had only 12 million dollars in uncommitted reserves left. In the Lend-Lease Master Agreements the US began a whole program of schemes to force Britain to abolish Imperial Preference after the war, and to dismantle the Empire. And to ensure that Britain could not postpone all repayment until the end of the war, Reverse Lend-Lease was provided for in the summer of 1943. These were demands in kind placed by the US for raw materials, foodstuffs, military equipment and support for the US army in the European theatre of operations. On top of this, regular assessments of Britain’s reserves were made so that when the US government consid­ered they were ‘too large’, immediate cash pay­ments were demanded under the Lend-Lease arrange­ments.

The advantages gained by the US over Britain throughout the war were pressed home immediately the war ended. On VJ Day Trueman terminated all Lend-Lease, with the account standing at 6 billion dollars due to the US from Britain. Although the US wrote off a substantial proportion, the sum outstanding was left sufficiently high to ensure a continued US domination of Britain’s economic options. This residual sum was 650 million doll­ars which was greater than British foreign curr­ency reserves. In addition, the US refused to share the cost of amortizing the sterling balances (worth nearly 14 billion dollars) built up as part of the allied war debt.

By the end of the war the US was well on its way to achieving its wartime goals regarding Britain and the Empire, though they were not fully accom­plished for some years more. These goals became interwoven with the need to construct and consol­idate its bloc against that being built up by Russia, particularly since, in the second half of the 1940s, the possibility of a third world war was very real.

6. The US did not intend to repeat its post-World War I mistakes where it had bankrupted Europe by forcing repayment of war debts and rais­ing its tariff barriers. Its main objectives were to apply coordinated financial measures to the reconstruction of the countries in its bloc in such a way as to stimulate the US economy. The reconstruction of Europe and Japan would thus provide markets for US industry and agriculture, while making it possible for these countries to contribute to the military capacity of the bloc. These plans were set into motion even before the war finished -- mainly through the Bretton Woods systems (the IMF and World Bank).

However, in the context of this overall strategy, the US singled Britain out for special treatment. Since Churchill’s rearguard actions had resisted the US efforts to prise the Empire free from the grip of the British bourgeoisie, the US maintained the squeeze on the British economy. In return for the 3.75 billion dollar loan to offset the rigors of the end of Lend-Lease, the British government had to agree to help to impose the Bretton Woods plans on the rest of the bloc. It also had to make sterling convertible by mid-1947, which the US wanted in order to make Britain more vulnerable to calls on its reserves. (Indeed, this was too successful: when Britain lost 150 million dollars in gold and dollar reserves in one month, the US had to permit a suspension of convertibility.)

As the rivalry between the US and Russia became more intense, the US saw the need to accelerate the reconstruction process and to increase Euro­pean military spending. The Marshall Plan pro­vided the funds to do this between 1948-51 and in conjunction with this NATO was formed in 1949. Pressure was maintained on the British bourgeoisie throughout the 1940s to make a high contribution to this military force. So, while the US demob­ilized at a very high speed, Britain had to support substantial forces in Europe -- indeed, Britain still had one million men at arms as late as 1948. In 1950 the US committed first its own and then other allied (including British) troops to the Korean War; it also demanded an enormous increase in the British military budget -- to £4.7 billion that year. With German rearmament in 1950, the bill for the British army occupation was taken from the German bourgeoisie and pre­sented to the British bourgeoisie.

Several other measures were taken to keep up the economic pressures on British capital: for example, when the US gave the go-ahead to Japan­ese rearmament in 1951 it waived Japanese repar­ations to Britain; when Britain tried to waive its own debts to its colonies (created through non-payments for materials and services received during the war) the US blocked the move.

7. With greater or lesser degrees of success, successive British governments tried to defend the economy from the US bourgeoisie’s onslaughts on the home and colonial markets. They also tried to sustain Britain’s position as a global imperialist power.

But with the US cynically putting itself forward as the champion of anti-colonialism and national independence, war-drained Britain was completely unable to maintain its anachronistic colonial system. The war had given a huge impetus to national movements in the colonies -- movements supported by Russia and America, both of whom had a vested interest in the dismemberment of the British Empire. The British withdrawals from India and Palestine were the most spectacular moments in the breaking-up of the Empire, and the Suez fiasco in 1956 marked the end of any illus­ions that Britain was still a ‘first class power’. The US made it quite clear that it would not sanction any independent actions that did not correspond to its own requirements. The British government was helpless against this position and had to withdraw, and in doing so acknowledged that it was unable to defend its trade routes and colonies.

The dismantling of the British Empire gathered speed and the sixties saw a steady trail of colonies lining up for their ‘independence’. The final withdrawal by British forces from ‘East of Suez’ overseen by the 1964 Wilson government was only the last formality in a process which had begun decades previously.

8. The major conclusions we can draw from the process of the formation of the bloc regarding Britain can be summarized as follows:

-- The US bourgeoisie set out to reduce the British nation state to a secondary economic and military power. The main objective was to demolish the British Empire which was regarded as the main obstacle to American expansionism. By developing the appropriate policies and using its enormous economic and political power, it achieved this goal in the course of the war and the recon­struction which followed.

-- Cash-and-carry and Lend-Lease were used to generate claims on British concessions and access to raw materials. By these means control of deposits of strategic materials such as oil, minerals and rubber was transferred from the British to the US bourgeoisie. A state of permanent financial indebtedness was also created and maintained.

-- Post-war ‘aid’ was channeled into Europe in a manner which both stimulated the US economy and increased the military capacities of the western bloc. Thus Britain’s economic policies were dictated primarily by the needs of a permanent western war economy controlled by the US bourg­eoisie.

-- Although the reconstruction brought an appar­ent boom to the western economy, the benefits to the British economy were substantially tempered and carefully tailored by the US for its own interests. The loss of the Empire and the onset of the world economic crisis in the sixties thus found British capital in a very weak position, far less able than most other major economies (such as Germany, Japan or France) to face up to it.

-- The ‘special relationship’ which the British bourgeoisie has so often claimed it has with the US bourgeoisie is simply one of complete US hegemony. In the reinforcement of the bloc which has taken place in recent years as a result of the heightening inter-imperialist antagonisms, Britain has consequently been the most compliant of the US’ major allies.

Marlowe

(To be continued)

In this part of the article, we will try to show that the Dutch Left was always preoccupied with the task of forming a proletarian vanguard based on communist positions and capable of actively defending these positions in the class struggle. We can only really understand the Dutch Left’s position on the party if we avoid playing word-games like today’s councilists and other history ‘experts’. We’ve got to make a real effort to understand the debate which took place among revolutionaries in the 1920s, 30s, 40s -- the long years of counter-revolution which followed the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

The context of the debate on the Party

The revolutionary organizations which regrouped to form the Communist International, even though they may have had different approaches to the question, were all confronted with the problem of understanding how the consequences of the new period -- the “era of wars and revolutions”, the decadence of capitalism -- affected the question of the party.

In the ascendant period of capitalism, the party was a unitary organization of the class, which fought for parliamentary reforms and inside which revolutionaries could actively defend the pro­gram of the proletarian revolution. Alongside the political party, the trade unions were unitary organs at an economic level. These two types of unitary organization could exist in society in a permanent manner, because capitalism could still grant reforms to the working class; consequently, the class could struggle within capitalist society in a distinct and separate way, at the parlia­mentary-political and economic levels. But even before the First World War, Pannekoek, in agree­ment with Rosa Luxemburg, considered that the mass strike would involve political actions by the mass organs of the proletariat. In such action, the various goals of the political and trade union movements were mixed together and united into political goals. Mass strikes no longer simply demanded the expertise of represent­atives and spokesmen of the class, but the strength, discipline and class consciousness of the masses. Far from denying the necessity of the party, the Dutch Left shared the same concep­tion as the whole left-wing of the IInd Inter­national: the mass party (on the model of the German party) would be the instrument for the emancipation of the proletariat in the revolution. This idea was held by Lenin, Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek. But the Dutch and German Lefts already differed with the Bolsheviks when they insisted on the need to develop the creative ‘spontaneous’ strength of the proletarian masses; without this the victory of the proletarian revolution would be impossible. The Bolsheviks’ main contribution was on another aspect of the question of the party. In the particular circumstances of Tsar­ist Russia, Lenin was forced to build an organi­zation of revolutionaries in order to prepare the way for a mass social democratic party. An organization like this, made up of the most conscious elements of the class, was much better equipped for the change in period which capitalism was going through. As the possibility of gaining reforms within the system came to an end, the unions and parliamentary parties were only able to maintain themselves as permanent organizations by leaving the camp of the working class and integrating themselves into the bourgeois state, a process culminating in 1914. On the other hand, revolutionary mass actions gave rise to new uni­tary organizations of the proletariat: general assemblies, strike committees, workers’ councils. As before 1914, revolutionaries were the most active elements inside these unitary organs. But these new organizations, by the very nature of the revolutionary goals they pursued, could only exist in periods of struggle. Revolutionaries could now only organize themselves as a minority whose task was to contribute to the clarification of the means and ends of the struggle. Such revolutionary organizations, while calling them­selves ‘parties’, were not the same as the par­ties of the ascendant period of capitalism, when the term ‘party’ was more or less identical to the working class, when it was firmly united on the basis of understanding the communist program.

It was above all the German and Dutch Lefts which understood the necessarily minoritarian character of the organization of revolutionaries, of the party, so that any identification between party and class could only lead to a form of substi­tutionism. It was their understanding of the necessity for mass spontaneity which allowed the German and Dutch Lefts to defend the idea of an organization of revolutionaries without falling into substitutionism. On the other hand, the German and Dutch Lefts also had weaknesses in their conception of the party. These resulted from a failure to understand that, in the new period of capitalist decadence, the unitary organs of the class could only exist in periods of struggle, and that the organization of revo­lutionaries could only have a real influence in the class -- could only be a party -- during a revolutionary wave. It was over this first problem that the KAPD split into various fractions as the revolutionary wave subsided. The Dutch Left made important contributions to this question and ultimately resolved it. On the second prob­lem (the party), although the Dutch Left didn’t reach the same clarity as the Italian Left in exile (Bilan and Internationalisme), it was able to take up the tasks which fall to revolutionaries in a period of reflux (the twenties and thirties): preparing for the future party in the perspective of a proletarian resurgence after World War II. On the question of the party, today’s councilists have regressed in comparison to the Dutch Left -- they defend the anti-party position of Ruhle, which was never shared by Gorter, Pannekoek, Hempel or Canne Meyer.

Although the Dutch KAP (Communist Workers’ Party) didn’t create an AAU (General Workers’ Union), it divided into two tendencies like the German party (the KAPD. Gorter represented the Essen tendency of the KAP; Pannekoek didn’t take a position but published texts on the debate. As we shall see, the positions of Pannekoek already contained the seeds of a solution to the problem, which was resolved after the death of Gorter in 1927.

The splits in the Dutch KAP on the question of the AAU

The debates which finally led to the break-up of the party were concerned mainly with the rela­tionship between the party and the AAU. The German AAU (AAUD) claimed to be the synthesis of the factory organizations born in the German revolution. The program of the KAPD saw the factory organizations as “purely proletarian organs of struggle” which had the dual task of contributing to the denunciation and destruction of the counter-revolutionary spirit of the trade unions, and of preparing the construction of the communist society. In the factory organizations, the masses would be able to unite, to develop their class consciousness and class solidarity. The AUUD defined this second task as follows:

“In the phase of the seizure of political power, the factory organization must itself become part of the proletarian dictatorship, which is carried out in the factories by the factory councils structured on the basis of the factory organization. The factory organiza­tion is a guarantee that political power will remain in the hands of the executive committee of the councils.” (Program of the AAUD, December, 1920)

According to the KAPD, the factory organization as a unitary organ of struggle was a guarantee for the conquest of power by the proletariat and not by “a clique of party chiefs” (KAPD Program). The task of the Party, of the KAPD, wasn’t to take power but to “regroup the most conscious elements of the working class on the basis of the party program … The KAP must intervene in the factory organizations and conduct a tireless propaganda within them”, but what was expected didn’t take place. The tasks ascribed to the factory organizations, which were supposed to unite in the AAUD and quickly regroup the whole German proletariat, were not carried out. Even at this early period -- in a letter dated 5 July 1920 -- Pannekoek said that it was incorrect to envisage two organiza­tions of the most conscious workers, that both of them would end up as “minorities within the broad masses, who were still not active and still inside the trade unions”. In the long term, this dual form of organization would be useless because they would actually be regrouping the same people. Proletarian democracy had to be based on all those who worked in the enterprise and “who, through their representatives, the factory councils, would assume political and social leadership”. Accor­ding to Pannekoek, the communists were a more conscious minority whose task was to disseminate class positions and to give an orientation and a goal to the struggle. A second form of organiza­tion, the Unions, was of no use to the revolution. According to him, therefore, it was necessary to abandon the AAUD in favor of the party, although he did say that organizing in Unions was perhaps necessary in the specific situation in Germany.

Otto Ruhle and the AAU

Otto Ruhle and his group split on the basis of ideas that were the exact opposite of Pannekoek’s. Ruhle abandoned the party in favor of the Union, which he saw as the real unitary organization which did away with any need for a party. Ruhle saw the party as an enormous apparatus which sought to direct the struggle from above, down to its last details. This is the conception of the party that Rosa Luxemburg reproached Lenin for holding.

But the KAPD saw its task as contributing to the “development of the self-awareness of the German proletariat” (KAPD Program). In his splitting document with the KAPD (Grundfragen der Organisation), Ruhle ignored this task of clari­fication which the party had given itself. But even in the Program of the AAU(E) (E stands for ‘Einheit’s organization’, or ‘Unitary Organiza­tion’ to distinguish Ruhle’s AAU from the KAPD’s AAUD, we can find propagandistic tasks – although the federalist AAU(E) was unable to carry out these tasks because of the multifarious mish-mash of positions within it. Since all these positions existed within the AAU(E) without being discussed, it contributed practically nothing to the “development of the self-awareness of the working class” even though this was one of the points in its program. And despite Ruhle’s anti-party conceptions, he was unable to prevent a political group emerging out of the ‘Unitary Organization’ in 1921: a group calling itself ‘Gruppe des Ratekommunisten’ (Group of Council Communists).

The KAPD majority defended centralism from below, as opposed to Ruhle’s federalism. “Federalism is sheer nonsense if it means separating enterprises or districts when they actually represent a whole” (Karl Shroder: Vorn Werden Einer Neuen Gesellschaft). In the pamphlet Die Klassenkampf-Organisation des Proletariats (The Organization of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle), Gorter defended the idea of the distinct existence of the KAPD in relation to the ‘Union’.

It’s clear that you can’t identify Gorter and P annekoeks’ positions with those of Ruhle. At the beginning of the 1920s, Gorter and Ruhle opposed each other on the question of the party, although both of them believed that the Unions could grow into genuinely unitary organs. At this time Pannekoek was already stressing the minoritarian character of the Union and suggested the suppression of the AAU. The tragic end of the KAPD, a direct consequence of the defeat of the world revolution, meant that it wasn’t in the party, but in what remained of the Unions, that the need was felt for the regroupment of the rare elements who had remained faithful to the revolu­tion. This regroupment gave birth to the Kommunistische Arbeiter-Union (Communist Workers’ Union), a result of the fusion between the vest­iges of the AAU(E) and the Berlin fraction of the AAUD in 1931. In a text written at the end of the 1940s, Henk Canne Meyer recalled:

“This new name (KAU) in fact expressed the awareness of a gradual evolution in the conceptions of the movement for factory organiza­tions. This evolution was particularly concerned with the concept of the ‘organized class’. Previously the AAU had thought that it would organize the working class and that millions of workers would all adhere to this organization. But over the years the AAU had always defended the idea that the workers themselves had to organize their own strikes and struggles by forming and linking up action committees. This is how they would act as an organized class even though they weren’t mem­bers of the AAU. In other words, the ‘organized’ class struggle was no longer to depend on an organization formed previously to the struggle ... The role of the AAU, and later the KAU, was to carry out communist propaganda inside the struggle of the masses, to contribute to the struggle by indicating the way forward and the goals to be pursued.” (Die Economische Grondslagen van de Radenmaatschappy)

From Party to Fraction: the GIC

Towards the end of the 1920s and the beginnings of the 1930s, it was clear that revolutionaries had lost any real influence on the class struggle. Consequently the party tended to divide into tendencies defending different positions on the defeat of the world revolution. Henk Canne Meyer, who had been a representative of the Berlin tendency in the Dutch KAP, left the party in 1924 with the following declaration:

“The KAP (throughout most of its existence) was nothing but a swamp always producing new kinds of muck. You are well aware of all the noxious types who have developed inside it. It’s no longer possible to do anything inside it -- new, fresh forces will have to preserve themselves from this quagmire.”

In 1927 there was a series of discussion meetings between members and ex-members of the Dutch KAP and German revolutionaries on the problems of the period of transition. Hempel had begun work on a plan for a text based on his journeys to Soviet Russia as a delegate of the KAPD, on Capital and on the Critique of the Gotha Program. During the first of these discussions, Pannekoek was present and opposed the plan, basing himself on Lenin’s State and Revolution. On 15 September 1927 Gorter died, and with him went the last force capable of holding the Dutch KAP together. These discussion meetings on the period of transition gave birth to the Groep van Internationale Communisten (Group of Inter­national Communists, GIC), without doubt the most fruitful of the Dutch council communist groups. Many ex-members of the KAPD were then in exile in Holland, having fled the onward march of the counter-revolution. The GIC published Persmat­eriaal van de GIC (Dutch), Ratekorrespondenz (German) and Klasbatalo (Esperanto). It was in close contact with Council Correspondence, magazine of the German émigré Paul Mattick in the US, and with the remainder of the KAPD in Germany. Apart from its propaganda work towards workers and the unemployed, the GIC attempted to analyze the experiences of the past revolutionary period. In this context, the GIC developed Hempel’s planned text in a collective way and in 1930-1 published De Grundbegrinselen des Kommunistche Produktie en Distributie (Ground Principles of Communist Production and Distribution). This text is an interesting contribution to the economic ques­tions of the period of transition, although one can criticize its weaknesses and gaps on the political aspects of the period of transition to communism -- aspects which must be clarified before resolving any economic problems. H. Wagner, an ex-member of the Essen Tendency of the KAPD, was at this point writing Theses on Bolshevism1, which developed the erroneous idea that the revolution in Russia had been simultaneously bourgeois and proletarian, an idea which had already appeared in the program of the Kommunistische Arbeiter-Internationale2 in the early twenties. Pannekoek, after some years of almost total passivity, was in close contact with the GIC. In 1938, he published Lenin as Philosopher, a philosophical critique of Bolshe­vism based on Wagner’s Theses.

On the question of the party, which is what we’re mainly concerned with here, Canne Meyer’s text ‘Naar een Nieuwe Arbeidersbewegung’ (‘For a New Workers’ Movement’) is an interesting contribu­tion, published at the time in Dutch, German and English. Faced with the advancing counter­revolution and the powerlessness of the working class, the GIC proposed a new “organizational synthesis of those relatively few workers for whom the struggle for the autonomy of our class has become a reason for existence”. This synthe­sis was to be carried out by ‘work groups’. Canne Meyer believed that a regroupment of these ‘work groups’ was impossible for the moment be­cause “the collapse of the old movement has not yet allowed a sufficient convergence of positions” (‘Naar een Nieuwe Arbeidersbewegung’, 1935).

The GIC definitively finished off the KAP’s con­fusions about unitary organizations. Although the GIC was for the creation of ‘revolutionary factory nuclei’ with the same orientation as the ‘work groups’ -- they were to be propaganda organizations in the factories -- it made a clear distinction between general factory organizations and the organization of revolutionaries:

“The factory organization, as the expression of the unity of the working class at a given moment, will always disappear before the revo­lution and will only be a permanent form of workers’ organization at decisive moments when the balance of class forces is being overturned.” (‘Nelbingen Omtrent Revolution­naire Bedrigjfshernen’, Amsterdam 1935)

Pannekoek’s position in the 30s and 40s

For the councilists of today, it is

“obvious that Pannekoek didn’t just think that the Bolshevik Party was the opposite of a proletarian organization, but any kind of party. His critique of Lenin’s conception of the party was also a critique of the conception of the party in general ...” (Cajo Brendel, Anton Pannekoek, Theoretikus von Ret Socialisme pp. 99-100)

A few lines further down, Brendel shows what sort of party he’s referring to: the KAP. Brendel quite correctly shows that Pannekoek’s position in 1920 was that a proletarian party was neces­sary before and after the revolution. But Brendel goes wrong when he uses a whole series of quotes from Pannekoek in order to prove that:

“… the practice of this kind of party and above all of the workers’ struggle proved to Pannekoek not that each type of revolution has its own type of party, but that the party in any form was a phenomenon restricted to bour­geois revolutions and bourgeois society. The frontier wasn’t between the bourgeois party and the proletarian party, but between the bourgeois party and the organization of the proletarian struggle.” (Ibid, p.100)

But all the quotations from Pannekoek which Brendel uses -- from Lenin as Philosopher, Workers’ Councils (1945), Five Theses on the Class Struggle (1946) -- simply underline the critique of the substitutionist conception of the Bolsheviks and the necessity for the clarifica­tory activity of the revolutionary organization. Brendel has completely forgotten that it was only the Pannekoek of the late 1920s who used the term ‘party’ to cover the social democratic, Bolshevik and old bourgeois parties. This isn’t surprising since the KAP had disappeared as a proletarian party with a real influence. But Brendel is forced to admit that Pannekoek had “a slightly different tone” (Ibid, p.105) in the theses of 1946. But this wasn’t really a diffe­rent tone. The point is that Brendel is deaf to terms like ‘political clarification’. According to Brendel, this ‘slightly different tone’ of Pannekoek’s can be explained by the Spartacusbond text ‘Taak en Wezen van de Nieuwe Partij’ (Tasks and Nature of the New Party), which Brendel sees as an opportunist compromise between the posi­tions of the GIC and those of the Sneevliet group3, who regrouped together at the end of World War II. Although the text contains many confusions, it was one of the last signs of life of the Dutch Left, who, after the war, hoped for a resurgence of the working class and were prepa­ring for the formation of the class party as an indispensable instrument of the world revolution. Alas, the Dutch Left had been weakened during the war and didn’t survive the period of reconstruc­tion which allowed capitalism to continue the counter-revolution. In 1947, Canne Meyer left the Spartacusbond, which was dominated by an activist tendency which wanted to rebuild a sort of AAU. The text Economische Grondslagen van de Radenmaatschappy was published by Canne Meyer in Radencommunisme after he and other ex-members of the GIC had left the Spartacusbond. This didn’t stop today’s Spartacusbond, in its response to the criticisms of the ICC (International Review, no.12), from hiding behind this text in order to avoid any discussion with the existing revolutionary milieu, particularly those who identify with the KAPD tradition. Canne Meyer, Hempel and other old GIC members, on the other hand, never broke off contact with International­isme in the 1940s, the direct antecedent of the ICC.

But why does Brendel suggest in his book on Pannekoek that the regroupment between Sneevliet and the GIC was opportunist? Because he himself didn’t join the Spartacusbond until after 1947? What was his attitude towards the GIC’s positions? In the 1930s, Brendel was a member of a council communist tendency of which the GIC said that “it sees the road to mass movements lying through the simple provocation of class conflicts” (GIC, no.19, 1932). The GIC on the other hand thought that “the simple provocation of class conflicts leads to the most revolutionary sector of the proletariat wasting its energy, leads to defeat after defeat without contributing to the formation of a real class front” (Ibid). And the GIC quite correctly put forward the alternative of “direct propaganda for the class front” (Ibid).

Brendel’s group criticized the GIC’s text on the ‘new workers’ movement’ because “the working class will do its apprenticeship in practice, completely independently of study groups” (Brendel, Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung). Today he’s trying to devise theoretical formulae for a new workers’ movement and thinks that “the GIC largely marked itself off from the old workers’ movement but was not the new workers’ movement and couldn’t be, because the formation of this new movement can only be under­stood as a long process” (Ibid). Poor Brendel, falling once again into the same trap as in the 1930s: he sees the class as a whole on one side, and revolutionaries on the other, completely separated. For the GIC, the class as a whole constituted the movement of the workers and the organization of revolutionaries was the (new) workers’ movement4. Whereas the GIC was for a new workers’ movement, Brendel’s present group, Daad en Gedachte, not only doesn’t see the movement of the workers, but is opposed to any ‘workers’ movement’ -- the old one as well as the new one which is now developing in the process of discussion and regroupment among revolution­aries. Such is the tragic end of the Dutch Left. Yesterday’s activists survive only to distort all the positive contributions of the council communists and turn them into councilist absurdities.

FK

In the young revolutionary movement engendered by the resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 1960s, the first and most persistent obstacle to the reconstruction of an international organiz­ation of revolutionaries was what can generally be described as councilism. Traumatized by the decay of the Bolshevik party and the insidious experience of Stalinism and Trotskyism, the majority of these new revolutionary currents proclaimed that the working class had no need of a revolutionary party, that the unitary organs of the class, the workers’ councils, were alone necessary for the accomplish­ment of the communist revolution. According to this viewpoint, revolutionaries should avoid organizing themselves and acting as a vanguard in the class struggle; some currents even went so far as to reject any form of revolutionary group as nothing but a ‘racket’ dictated by the needs of capital, not of the proletariat. From the beginning of its existence, our international current clearly rejected these aberrations, and intervened actively to combat them -- for example at the international conference called by the French group Informations Correspondence Ouvrieres in 1969. We always insisted that the repudiation of the counter-revolutionary heritage of Stalinism and Trotskyism and the necessary critique of the errors of previous proletarian parties should not lead to a rejection of the need for a unified organization of revolutionaries today, or to a failure to understand the indispensable role of the communist party in the proletarian revolution. If this intransigent defense of the need for rev­olutionary organization was denounced as ‘Leninism’ by the councilists and sundry libertarians, so much the worse for them. The ICC has always claimed the vital historical contribution of Lenin and the Bolshevik party as part of its own heritage.

Councilist ideology, which puts all its emphasis on its own particular interpretation of the ‘mass spontaneity’ of the working class, can sometimes flourish during periods of mounting class activity, when the creativity of the class is reaching a high level and is leaving the revolutionary minor­ities stranded in its wake. Thus May ‘68 in France was the heyday of innumerable councilist tend­encies from the Situationist International to the GLAT. But such tendencies did not fare so well when the outburst of class struggle entered into a reflux. After the subsidence of the 1968-72 wave of struggles in the advanced capitalisms, the vast majority of these tendencies, based as they were on an immediatist and activist conception of revolutionary work, crumbled away or became sterile academic sects. The list of casualties is long: the SI, Gauche Marxiste, Pouvoir Ouvrier, Noir et Rouge, the GLAT, Combate, and the various modernist anti-organizational tendencies: Invariance, Mouve­ment Communiste, Kommunismen, Internationell Arbeitarkampf, Negation, For Ourselves ... In the difficult and sometimes disheartening atmosphere of the last few years, in which the deepening of the crisis has not provoked a corresponding level of class struggle, almost the only communist groups to survive or grow have been those who, in one way or another, put a particular emphasis on the necessity for organization: the ICC, CWO, Battaglia Comunista and, despite its political degeneration, the Bord­igist PCI. Just as, on a greater historical scale, the clarity of the Italian Left on the question of organization allowed it to survive the period of counter-revolution more surely than other left communist fractions, so these latter groups have been better equipped to deal with the effects of today’s period of relative class quiet.

But if councilist and anti-organizational devia­tions may flourish during periods of increasing class activity, then the opposite deviations tend to come to the fore during periods of class defeat or quiescence, when revolutionaries often lose conviction in the proletariat’s capacity to struggle autonomously and realize its revolutionary nature. The substitutionist exaggerations which appear in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? were to a large extent a product of the period of inter­national class peace of the last part of the 19th century. In the wake of 1905, and especially the 1917 revolutions, Lenin was able to criticize these exaggerations and link his own political positions to the mass self-activity of the class; the decline of the post-war revolutionary wave, however, led Lenin and the Bolsheviks to return to many of the old social democratic dist­ortions. Similarly, the price paid by the Italian Left for its achievement of hanging onto class positions during the long years of the counter­revolution was, particularly after World War II, an increasing over-emphasis on the role of the party, culminating in the party-megalomania of the Bordigists.

Thus in the present conjuncture, with the majority of the councilists in disarray, their bankruptcy proved by their own disintegration, the ICC has more and more been confronted with the opposite deviation: substitutionism, the underestimation of the importance of mass self-activity, and an over-estimation of the role of the party, to the extent that the party is ascribed with tasks that only the class as a whole can carry out, in part­icular the seizure and exercise of political power. Having been denounced as Leninists by the council­ists, the ICC is now being denounced as councilist by the Leninists ... Not only that but organizations which once had a clearer understanding of the rel­ationship between party and class, like the CWO, have begun to regress towards openly substitution­ist positions. Thus, in 1975, the platform of Revolutionary Perspectives stated that the revolutionary organization “cannot act 'on behalf of the class, but only as part of it, recognizing clearly that the main lesson of 1917 in Russia and Germany was that the exercise of political power during the dictatorship of the proletariat and the const­ruction of communism are the tasks of the class itself and its class-wide organizations (coun­cils, factory committees, armed militias).”

Today, the CWO argues that the party “leads and organizes” the struggle for power, (our emphasis; CWO text for the Paris Conference of revolutionary groups), and that

“At its victorious point, the insurrection will be transformed into a revolution, and majority support for communism will be manifested by the class -- via the party in the councils -- holding power.” (International Review, no.12, p.23)

Within the ICC itself, similar ideas have develop­ed, leading comrades in France and Italy into the reassuring dogmas of Bordigism. Tomorrow, when the proletariat decisively re-emerges onto the scene, we may well be faced with a second wave of councilists, ouvrierists and autonomists of all sorts. The resolution ‘The Role of the Party in the Proletarian Revolution’ which was adopted at the Third Congress of World Revolution is an attempt to counter both sets of deviations and provide a general framework for developing a more detailed and precise analysis of the role of the party -- an analysis which will necessarily remain incomplete until the future revolutionary struggle of the class answers as yet unsolved questions. If we concentrate in this accompanying contribut­ion on the question of substitutionism, it is because we think that the persistence of this ideology in the present workers’ movement is a major barrier to the development of a real under­standing of the positive tasks of the revolut­ionary party. Substitutionism is, for us, something that historical experience has already clarified. If the revolutionary vanguard is to assume its tasks in the class battles of tomorrow, it must ruthlessly cut away all the dead-wood from the past.

Substitutionism: Does it exist?

According to some, ‘substitutionism’ is a non-problem. Certain of these resort to philosophical profundities such as ‘how can the party, which represents the historic interests of the prolet­ariat, substitute itself for the class?’ Of course, the historic interests of the class can’t substitute themselves for the class, but the problem is that proletarian parties aren’t ideal metaphysical entities but products of the real world of class struggle: whatever level of theor­etical clarity they may have reached at a given time does not immunize them completely from the effects of bourgeois ideology, does not automat­ically exempt them from the very real pressures of the old world, from the dangers of conservat­ism, bureaucratization or outright betrayal. Enough parties have degenerated and betrayed for this are self-evident. And even when parties are very far from any definitive degeneration, they can still act against the historic interests of the class: we have only to look at the initial response of the Bolshevik party to the February revolution to understand that. There is no absolute guarantee that the actions or positions of a proletarian party will invariably coincide with the historic interests of the class, actions which revolutionaries believe to be carried out in the best interests of the class may often have the most disastrous consequences both for the party and for the class.

To be sure, a group like the CWO has a much more down-to-earth argument against the notion of substitutionism. They accept that substitutionism could mean “that a minority of the class attempts to carry out the tasks of the whole class” (‘Some Questions for the ICC’, International Review no12). For them this is a justifiable criticism of the Blanquist idea of a minority seizing power without the active support and participation of the majority of the class; or it’s merely a description of the objective situation the Bolsh­eviks found themselves in following the isolation of the Russian revolution. They could find noth­ing substitutionist in the party ‘taking power’ when it has won the support of the majority of the class, and sees no connection between the Bolsheviks’ conception of the role of the party in 1917 and its subsequent confrontations with the Russian working class. But this leaves too many questions unanswered. The point isn’t to reject the theories of Blanqui; Marxism has done that long ago, and even the Bordigists would agree that putsches and plots cannot lead us to communism. What we want to point out is that the very notion of the party taking power -- even when democratic­ally elected to do so -- is a variety of substit­utionism, since it means that “a minority of the class attempts to carry out the tasks of the whole class”. And, as we shall try to show, the Bolsh­eviks’ confusion on this question was a contrib­utory factor in their subsequent degeneration. For us, the problem of substitutionism is not a clever invention of the ICC, but a profound question rooted in the whole historical experience of the working class.

The historical context of substitutionist ideology

Contrary to those who imagine that the communist program and the class party exist in a sphere of invariant abstraction, the program and party of the class are nothing if not historical prod­ucts of working class experience. This exper­ience is bounded and shaped by the objective conditions of capitalist development at a given time, and by the general level of class struggle and activity that takes place within that devel­opment. Thus if Marx and Engels were able to have a clear general vision of the nature of the proletarian revolution and the tasks of commun­ists as early as 1848, it was objectively imp­ossible for them to have had a precise underst­anding of the way the proletariat would come to power, of the nature of the communist party and its role in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Their illusions in the possibility of the working class seizing hold of the existing bourgeois state could only be dispelled by the practical experience of the Commune (and then only in a partial sense). Similarly, their vagueness about the nature and role of the party could only be overcome by the development of the organized workers’ movement itself.

We should recall that Marxism emerged in a per­iod when even bourgeois political parties were only beginning to take on the unified and rel­atively coherent form they have today – a development determined by the movement towards univ­ersal suffrage, which made the old loose parliam­entary coalitions untenable. In this context, the proletarian movement didn’t even have a very clear conception of what it meant by the term party. Hence the extreme vagueness of Marx’s use of the word, which he used fairly indiscrim­inately to describe a few individuals united by a common viewpoint, or the entire class acting in a common political struggle, or a vanguard communist organization, or a looser association of different currents and tendencies. Thus the famous phrase in the Communist Manifesto, the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party” is both a profound statement of the political nature of the class struggle and of the necessity for a proletarian political party, and an expression of the immaturity of the movement, which had not yet arrived at a clear definition of the party as a part of the class.

The same lack of clarity inevitably affected Marxists’ understanding of the tasks of the party in the proletarian revolution.

“Although revolutionaries in the period before World War I took up the slogan of the 1st International ‘The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves’, they tended to see the seizure of power by the proletariat as the seizure of power by the proletarian party. The only examples of rev­olutions which they could analyze were bourg­eois revolutions, revolutions in which power could be delegated to a political party. As long as the working class had not had its own experience of the struggle for power, revol­utionaries could not be very clear about this question.” (‘The Present Tasks of Revolutionaries’, Revolution Internationale, no.27)

This ideological heritage of the bourgeois rev­olution was reinforced by the context in which the class struggle took place in the second half of the 19th century. Following the demise of the insurrectionary battles of the 1840s (which had allowed Marx to see the communist nature of the working class and the profound link between its ‘economic’ and its ‘political’ struggles) the workers’ movement entered the long period of fighting for reforms within the capitalist system. This period more or less institutional­ized the separation between the economic and political aspects of the class struggle. Part­icularly in the period of the Second Internat­ional, this separation was codified in the diff­erent mass organizations of the class: the unions were defined as the organs which waged the economic struggles of the class, and the party as the organ of political struggle.

Now, whether this political struggle was the immediate one to win democratic rights for the working class, or the longer term struggle for working class political power, it took place essentially on the parliamentary terrain, the terrain par excellence of bourgeois politics. The workers’ parties which fought on this terr­ain were inevitably impregnated with its assumptions and methods of operation.

Parliamentary democracy means the investing of authority in the hands of a body of specialists in government, of parties whose raison d’être is to seek power for themselves. In bourgeois society, the society of “egoistic man, of man separated from other men from the community” (Marx, On the Jewish Question) political power can only take the form of power over and above the individual and the community; just as “the state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom” (ibid), so in such a society there must be an intermediary between the ‘people’ and their own governing power. The atomized mass, which goes to the polling booth in bourgeois elections can only find a semblance of collect­ive interest and direction through the medium of a political party which represents the masses precisely because they cannot represent themsel­ves. Though unable to draw all the consequences of this for its own practice, the International­ist Communist Party of Italy expressed this reality of bourgeois representation very well: the bourgeois state was based on

“that fictitious and deceitful characteristic of a delegation of power, of a representation through the intermediary of a deputy, an election ticket, or by a party. Delegation means in effect the renunciation of the poss­ibility of direct action. The pretended ‘sovereignty’ of the democratic right is but an abdication, and in most cases it is an abdication in favor of a scoundrel.” (‘Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party’, Battaglia Comunista 3,4,5, 1951)

The proletarian revolution does away with this kind of representation, which is really a form of abdication. The revolution of a class which is organically united by indivisible class interests, poses the possibility of man recognizing and organizing “his own forces as social forces, so that social force is no longer sep­arated from him in the form of political force” (On the Jewish Question). The praxis of the proletarian struggle tends to do away with the separation between thought and action, directors and executors, social forces and political power. The proletarian revolution has, therefore, no need for a permanent specialized elite which ‘represents’ the amorphous masses and carries out their tasks for them. The Paris Commune, the first example of a proletarian dictatorship, began to illuminate this reality, by taking prac­tical measures to eliminate the separation between the masses and political power: abolish­ing the parliamentary separation of legislature and executive, ensuring that all deputies were elected and revocable at any time, liquidating the police and standing army, etc. But the experience of the Commune was too premature, too short-lived to eliminate entirely bourgeois democratic conceptions of the state and the role of the party from the program of the workers’ movement. What the Commune did show was that even without a communist party at its head, the working class can raise its struggle to the level of seizing political power; but the spineless vacillations of the proletarian and petty-bourgeois parties which found themselves leading the uprising also confirmed that, without the active presence of a real, communist party, the proletarian revolution is crippled from the beginning. Still, the exact relationship such a party should have to the Commune-state remained an unsolved problem.

Perhaps more important was the fact that the experience of the Commune did not put an end to revolutionaries’ illusions in the democratic republic. In 1917 Lenin could see that the Commune was the result of the revolution smashing the old bourgeois state from top to bottom. But in the latter part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Marxists tended to see it as a model for the workers in their strug­gle to seize control of the democratic republic, ‘lop off’ its worst features and convert it into an instrument of proletarian power.

“International socialism considers that the republic is the only possible form of social­ist emancipation -- with this condition, that the proletariat tears it from the hands of the bourgeoisie and transforms it from ‘a machine for the oppression of one class by another’ into a weapon for the socialist emancipation of humanity.” (Trotsky, ‘Thirty-five Years After: 1871-1906’ published in Leon Trotsky On the Paris Commune, Pathfinder Press).

And in many ways, the Commune, based as it was on territorial representative units, on universal suffrage did preserve many of the features of the bourgeois democratic state; as such it did not really allow the workers’ movement to go beyond the idea of proletarian power being mediated through a party. It was only with the emergence of the workers’ councils at the end of the period of capitalist ascendancy that this problem would begin to be resolved. In the councils the class was organized as a class; it was able to unify its economic, political and military tasks, to decide and act consciously without any intermediaries. The emergence of the councils allowed revolutionaries to make a final break from the idea that the democratic republic was a state form that could in some way be used by the proletariat; in fact it was the last and most insidious barrier against the proletarian revolution. But if in 1917 revolutionaries were able to rid themselves of all parliamentary illusions on the question of the state, the persistence of old habits of thou­ght still weighed heavily on their conception of the party.

We have seen that, in the social democratic world view, the economic struggles of the class were carried out by the unions, the political struggle, up to and including the struggle for power, by the party. Particularly because it was a quest­ion of ‘conquering’ bourgeois state power, the idea of mass political organs of working class revolution did not exist. The only political organ of the proletariat was the party. The state would only be given a proletarian function in so far as it was controlled by the proletarian party. Thus it was inevitable that the insurrection and the seizure of power should be organized by the party: no other organ could unify and mobilize the class on a political level. In theory, there­fore, the party had to become a mass party, a huge disciplined army, in order to carry out its revolutionary tasks. In reality, the mass basis of the party was a function of its struggle for reforms, not for revolution. The social demo­cratic model of revolution was never, and could never be, put into practice. But its importance lay in the ideological inheritance it passed on to the revolutionaries who were brought up in the schools of social democracy. And that herit­age could only be a substitutionist one: even though the revolution was to be carried out by a mass party, it was still a conception which ascribed to the party tasks which could only be carr­ied out by the whole class.

To be sure, these conceptions did not spring out of some moral weakness on the part of social democracy. The idea of a party acting on behalf of the class was the product of the practice of the workers’ movement in ascendant capitalism and was deeply entrenched within the whole class. In that period, the day-to-day struggle for reforms both on the economic and political levels, could to a large extent be trusted to permanent ‘representatives’, specialized trade union neg­otiators and parliamentary spokesmen. But prac­tices and conceptions that were possible during the ascendant epoch became impossible and react­ionary as the onset of capitalist decadence brought the period of reform struggles to a close. The revolutionary tasks now facing the proletariat implied very different methods of struggle.

At the beginning of the 20th century, revolution­aries like Lenin, Trotsky, Pannekoek and Luxem­burg attempted to clarify the relation between party and class in the light of changing historic conditions and the mass struggles these condit­ions provoked, particularly in Russia. If we take the most profound elements from their rich but often contradictory contributions, we can discern the development of an awareness that the mass social democratic party was suitable only for the period of reformist struggles. Lenin was the most capable of seeing that the revolut­ionary party could only be a tightly organized and severely selected communist vanguard; and Luxemburg in particular was able to appreciate that the task of the party was not to ‘organize’ the struggle of the class. Experience had shown that the struggle broke out spontaneously and compelled the class to go from partial to general struggle. The organization of the struggle came out of the struggle itself and embraced the entire class. The role of the communist vanguard within these mass struggles was not an organizational one in the sense of providing the class with a pre-existing structure for organizing the strug­gle.

“Instead of puzzling their heads with the technical side, with the mechanism of the mass strike, the social democrats are called upon to assume political leadership in the midst of the revolutionary period.” (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike)

In other words, the task of the party was to participate actively in these spontaneous movements in order to make them as conscious and as organized as possible; in order to indicate the tasks which the entire class, organized in its unitary organs, would be compelled to assume.

But it would have been impossible for all the implications of this to have been clear at once to the revolutionaries of that period. And here we return to the problem of substitutionism. The persistence of social democratic conceptions not only in the class as a whole but also in the minds of its best revolutionaries, the lack of any real experience of what it meant for the class to be in power, were to be a heavy burden on the class as it launched into the huge revolut­ionary confrontations of 1917-23.

The remnants of social democratic ideology can be seen, for example, in the Communist International’s official position on the trade unions. Unlike the German Left, who began to see that the trade union form of struggle was impossible in the epoch of decadence, the CI still remained tied to the idea of the party organizing the defensive struggles of the class, and the unions were seen as the necessary bridgeheads between party and class. Thus the CI failed to grasp the significance of the autonomous organs which the masses were creating in the course of their struggle outside of and against the trade unions.

More important in this context, however, is the way that the old patterns of thought dominated the CI’s understanding of the relation between party and councils. Although at its first Congress, Lenin’s ‘Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictatorship’ had, like State and Revolution, put all the emphasis on the soviets as organs of direct proletarian rule, by the Second Congress the effects of the defeats the class had gone through in 1919 were already making themselves felt: the emphasis now shifted to the party and away from the soviets. The CI’s ‘Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution’ explicitly stated that “Political power can only be seized, organized and led by a political party, and in no other way.”

In one way or another, this view was shared by all the currents in the workers’ movement up to 1920. All of them, including Luxemburg who criticized the idea of ‘the dictatorship of the party’ retained a semi-parliamentary view of the soviets electing a party to power. Only the German Left began to break from this idea, but it only devel­oped a partial critique which quickly degenerated into a purely councilist position. But to say that political power of the proletariat can only be expressed through a party is to say that the soviets are not capable themselves of being that power. It is to substitute the party for the most essential tasks of the soviets, and thus to empty them of their real content.

In 1917 these questions had not been particularly urgent. When the class is in movement on a vast scale, the problem of substitutionism cannot be an explicit one. In such moments, it is imposs­ible for the party to concern itself with ‘organ­izing’ the struggle: the struggle is there, the organizations of the struggle are there. The problem for the party is how to establish a real presence within these organizations and have a direct influence upon them. Thus those who ask: “Did the Bolshevik party substitute for the class in October 1917?” are missing the point. No, there was no substitutionism in the October insur­rection. The insurrection was not organized or executed by the Bolshevik party, but by the mil­itary revolutionary committee of the Petrograd Soviet, under the political leadership of the Bolshevik party. Those who think this is a pure­ly formal distinction should refer to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, where he underlines the political importance the Bolsheviks attached to the fact that the insurrection was carried out in the name of the Soviet -- the mass organ of the class -- and not of the communist vanguard. It is true that when the class is marching forward the relationship between the party and the mass organs tends to be extremely close and harmonious, but that is no reason to blur the distinction between the party and the unitary organs; indeed such a confusion of roles can only have fatal consequences later, if the class movement enters into a period of reflux. Thus in the Russian Revolution, the problem of substitutionism emerged into its full stature after the seizure of power: in the organization of the Soviet State and during the difficulties posed by the civil war and the isolation of the revolution. But although the objective diffic­ulties faced by the Bolsheviks and by the Russian revolution provide the underlying explanation for why the Bolsheviks finally ‘substituted’ themselves for the workers’ councils and ended up on the side of the counter-revolution, it is not enough to leave the analysis there. Otherwise there are no lessons to be drawn from the Russian experience except the obvious fact that the counter-revolut­ion is caused by ... the counter-revolution. If revolutionaries are going to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we must analyze how the political confusions of the Bolshevik party accel­erated the degeneration of the revolution and their own passage into the camp of capital. In particular, we must show why the Bolsheviks’ con­fusions on the relationship between party, class and state led to a situation where:

-- the Bolshevik party came into conflict with the unitary organs of the class almost immediately after it had become the party of government, and well before the mass of Russian workers had been dispersed and dec­imated in the civil war, or the international revolutionary wave had subsided.

-- it was the party, the most advanced express­ion of the Russian proletariat, which became the vanguard of the counter -revol­ution. This destroyed the party from within and led to the monstrous birth of Stalinism, a historical betrayal which has done more to disorientate the proletarian movement than any other treason by a prol­etarian organization.

If we are to avoid explaining these facts by resorting to the naive theories of the libertar­ians (‘the Bolsheviks did this because they were authoritarian’; ‘all parties seek power for themselves’; ‘power corrupts’, etc) we must look more closely at the problems of party, councils and state in the proletarian revolution.

Party and Councils

For some councilist currents, the contrast of interests between revolutionary political organizations and the unitary organs of the class is so great that they advocate the dissolution of all political groups as soon as the councils appear; or they are afraid to talk about the existence of a party or parties within the coun­cils, haunted as they are by the bourgeois vision of the party as nothing but a corps of special­ists whose sole function is to maneuver itself into power. For these currents, there is some Original Sin in political groups or parties which make them inevitably betray the class and try to manipulate or take over its organs of struggle. We hardly need to dwell on how childish this view is, and how much it actually strikes against the autonomy of the class. The tragic experience of the German revolution led the Communist Internat­ional to conclude quite correctly that

“... the existence of a powerful Communist Party is necessary in order to enable the soviets to do justice to their historic tasks, a party that does not simply ‘adapt itself’ to the soviets, but is in a position to make them renounce ‘adaptations’ of their own to the bourgeoisie and White Guard social democracy.” (‘Theses on the Role of the Communist Party’, Second Congress of the CI).

But the insistence on the necessity for the party to intervene in the councils and give a clear political orientation to all their actions should not lead us to ignore the experience of the past, particularly of the Russian revolution, and pretend that there is no problem in the relation­ship between party and councils, that the danger of the party substituting itself for the councils is just a councilist neurosis. In fact, the aberrations of councilism could only have had so much weight because they were a false solution to a real problem.

After all the heated debates that have taken place in the revolutionary movement over the past fifty years, it is rather sad to see a group like the CWO gloss over the whole problem with a purely sophistical argument. According to the CWO:

-- in order for there to be a revolutionary conquest of power, the party must have a majority of delegates to the workers’ coun­cils. Otherwise you must be saying that “the revolution could succeed while the major­ity of the class is not conscious of the need for communism, or while the majority of the delegates to the councils are not commun­ists.” (International Review, No 12, p.24)

-- since the party has a majority of delegates, it is effectively in power.

Voila! The logic is impeccable, but based on entirely false premises. To begin with, it rev­eals an absurdly formalistic and democratist view of class consciousness. Undoubtedly, the development of a decisive presence and influence of communist party militants within the councils is a necessary precondition for the success of the revolution. But to define this influence merely in terms of a statistical majority of delegates is absurd: a council could easily be won to revolutionary positions when only a minor­ity of its delegates were militants of the party. The CWO, however, seems to consider that only the members of the party are capable of revolut­ionary thought and action. The other delegates, whether members of other proletarian political currents or ‘independent’ workers, are presented as entirely unconscious, completely dominated by bourgeois ideology. In reality, class conscious­ness does not develop according to this sterile schema. The development of revolutionary consc­iousness in the class does not mean that a conscious party directs an unconscious class: it means that the whole class, through its struggle, through mass action, moves towards communist positions with the party pointing out the direct­ion that the whole class is already beginning to follow. In a revolutionary situation, conscious­ness develops at a very rapid pace, and the dynamic of the movement leads many workers to take up positions well in advance of their formal ‘party affiliations’. In fact, the very formation of councils, though not in itself sufficient for the carrying through of the revolution, already shows that a revolutionary level of activity is already being forced on the class. As the KAPD expressed it in its ‘Theses on the Role of the Party in the Proletarian Revolution’ (1921):

“The political workers’ councils (soviets) are the historically determined, all-embracing form of proletarian power and administration: at all times they pass the individual points of the class struggle and pose the question of complete power.”

In the proletarian movement, there can be no separation of consciousness and organization: a certain level of self-organization presupposes a certain level of class consciousness. The coun­cils are not mere forms into which a revolutionary content is injected by the party; they are them­selves products of an emerging revolutionary consciousness in the class. The party does not inject this consciousness: it develops and gener­alizes it to its utmost potential.

Recognizing the complexity and richness of the process by which the class becomes conscious, the revolutionary vanguard (whether we are talking about the party or the broader vanguard of delegates to the central soviet organs) can never measure the depth of the communist movement of the masses by purely statistical means, and it can certainly not limit its criteria for action on the mechanics of the formal vote. As Luxemburg said in her pamphlet on the Russian revolution:

“... the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of ‘winning a majority of the people’, which problem has ever weighed on the German social democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the­bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German social democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first, let’s become a ‘majority’. The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a major­ity -- that is the way the road runs.”

The second false premise of the CWO’s argument is that the party’s winning of a majority of deleg­ates to the councils is equivalent to the party being in power. This was the great confusion of the whole workers’ movement at the time of the Russian revolution and was to have the most pern­icious consequences. Today such a view is no longer excusable. As Revolution Internationale wrote in 1969 (Revolution Internationale 3, old series, ‘Sur l’Organization’):

“It is possible and even probable that at certain moments in the struggle, one or sever­al councils will be in full agreement with the positions of this or that revolutionary organ­ization. This simply means that, at a given moment, the group in question corresponds perfectly to the level of consciousness in the proletariat; in no way does it mean that the councils have to abandon their power to the ‘central committee’ of that group. It may even be that the delegates elected by that council are all members of that group. This is unimportant and does not imply that the council is in a relation of subordination to that group, as long as the council retains its power to revoke its delegates.”

This is not a democratic formalism, but a vital question of principle which is not answered by the neat schema of the CWO. The real question here is: who makes the decisions? Are council delegates revocable at all times or only until the ‘conquest of power by the party’? Is the election and recall of delegates only a means for the party to come to power -- after which it can be superseded -- or does it obey a deeper need in the proletariat? And another question, ignored by the CWO, but obvious to the Bordigists who make no pretence that they will abide by the democratic mechanisms of the councils: if the party is a world party, as it will be in the next revolutionary wave, then surely the assumption of power by the party even in one country means that power must be in the hands of the central organ of the world party? And how are the workers in one bastion to maintain their control of an organ which is organized on a world scale?

The truth of the matter is that you cannot be simultaneously for the power of the party and the power of the councils. As we saw earlier, deleg­ation of power to a party is inevitable in bourg­eois parliaments where the electors ‘choose’ an apparatus to rule over them throughout a given period. But such a schema is in total contradict­ion with the functioning of the councils, which seeks to break down the separation between the masses and their political power, between decision and execution, ‘government’ and governed. The class-based, collective structure of the councils, their mechanisms of election and recall, make it possible for the power to make and carry out dec­isions to remain in the hands of the masses at all times. Councils’ delegates who are party members will not hide their political affiliations: indeed they will actively defend the positions of their organization, but this does not alter the fact that they are elected by assemblies or coun­cils to carry out the decisions of those assemblies or councils, and will be recalled if they fail to do so. Even when there is close harmony between the positions of the party and the decisions of the councils, this does not mean that power has been delegated to the party. Delegating power, if it means anything at all, means delegating the capacity to make and enforce decisions to an apparatus which does not coincide with the appar­atus of the councils and can therefore not remain under their control. Once this has happened, election and revocability lose all their meaning: posts of the highest responsibility can be appoint­ed by the party, decisions of the most crucial kind can be made, with no reference to the counc­ils. Gradually, the councils cease to be the focus of the life of the revolution and are trans­formed into mere rubber stamps for the decisions of the party.

It is important to insist on this point, not because we are making a fetish out of democratic forms -- as we have said, class consciousness cannot be measured by votes alone. But this doesn’t alter the fact that unless the councils retain their ‘democratic’ mechanisms (election and recall, collective decision-making, etc) they will be un­able to carry out their essential political role as living centers of revolutionary clarification and action for the whole class. The democratic forms are indispensable because they enable the class to learn how to think, decide and act for itself. If socialism is the self-conscious control of the producers over their own destiny, then only a self-active and self-conscious working class can realize the socialist project.

Some people may object that the open democracy of the councils is no guarantee that they will act in a revolutionary manner. Of course this is true; indeed, this very openness leaves the councils ‘open’ to the influence of bourgeois organizations and bourgeois ideology. But such influences cannot be eliminated by party decree: the party can only counteract them by politically exposing them in front of the class, by demonstrating how they obstruct the real needs of the struggle. If the mass of workers are to fully understand the diff­erence between revolutionary and counter-revolut­ionary positions, they can only discover this for themselves, by practically understanding the con­sequences of their actions and decisions. The retention of decision-making power by the councils is a necessary, though not sufficient precondition for the development of communist consciousness. On the other hand, as the Russian experience con­firmed, the control over a passive, subdued soviet system by the best party in the world can only act against the development of such consciousness.

Now, contrary to what the councilists claim, the process whereby decision-making power passed from the councils to the Bolsheviks was not completed overnight and it was certainly not the result of a systematic effort by the Bolsheviks to undermine the power of the councils. The theor­ization of the ‘dictatorship of the party’ by elements like Zinoviev and Trotsky did not come till after the civil war and the ravages of the imperialist blockade had decimated the working class and sapped the material basis for the self-activity of the soviets. Before that (and in fact until the end of his life), Lenin was per­petually insisting on the need to regenerate the soviets, to restore them to the central place they had occupied at the beginning of the revol­ution. But it would be a mistake to think that the erroneous positions defended by the Bolsh­eviks played no part in the process whereby the party substituted itself for the councils; that the loss of power and influence by the councils was a purely automatic result of the isolation of the revolution. In reality, the transform­ation of the Bolshevik party into a government party, the delegation of power to the party, immediately began to weaken the effective power of the soviets. From 1917 onwards, more and more executive posts and commissions were instituted by the party with less and less reference to the soviet assemblies; soviet delegates were removed or appointed by the party ‘from above’ rather than by the soviet organs themselves; unitary organs like the factory committees were absorbed into the trade unions, organs of the party-state; the workers’ militias were dissolved into the Red Army in a similar way. And all this began to take place before the big concentrations of workers had been broken up by the civil war. The point is not to make a catalogue of Bolshevik errors on this question, but to show how their political positions, their conception of the party, accelerated the tendency for the unitary organs of the class to be subordinated to the administrative and repressive apparatus of the state. The political justification for this process can be seen in a statement by Trotsky in 1920:

“Today we received peace proposals from the Polish government. Who decided this question? We have Sovnarkom, but it must be subject to a certain control. What control? The control of the working class as a formless, chaotic mass? No. The central committee of the party has been called together to discuss the prop­osal and decide whether to answer it. The same is true of the agrarian question, the food question, and all other questions.” (Speech to the Second Congress of the CI).

Underlying this attitude is the old idea of social democracy that once the proletarian party has assumed state power, then the state will automatically be directed in the interests of the proletariat. The class ‘entrusts’ its power to the party, and the need for the soviets to actually make the decisions is done away with. In fact, this could only be an abdication of responsibility by the soviets, and make them much less able to resist the tendencies towards bureaucratization which developed so chronically during the civil war. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let us restate this point. We are in no way saying the party should not seek to win support for its positions. On the contr­ary it is essential for the party to try to win a decisive influence in the councils. But this influence can only be a political one: the party can only intervene in the decision-making process by politically convincing the councils of the correctness of its positions. Instead of arrog­ating decision-making responsibility to itself, it must insist again and again that all the major decisions affecting the course of the rev­olution are fully discussed, understood and acted upon in the councils. And this is why it is so erroneous to talk about the party ‘taking power’, with or without a formal majority in the councils. In the real world power is not a question of votes but a question of force. The party can only be ‘in power’ if it has the capac­ity to enforce its position on the class, on the council system. This implies that the party must have an apparatus of power which is separate from the councils. Parties of themselves, do not generally possess such an apparatus, and the Bolshevik party was no exception. In fact, the only way that the Bolshevik party could really be in power was to identify itself with the state. This is why it is impossible to understand the problem of substitutionism without a proper grasp of the problem of the post-revolutionary state.

Party and State

For various currents, including the CWO and various councilists, there is no real problem about the state in the period of transition. The state is the workers’ councils, and that’s that. Therefore any talk about possible conflicts between the unitary organs of the class and the transitional state is sheer nonsense. Unfortun­ately, this is an idealist view of revolution. As Marxists we have to base our conceptions of the revolution not on what we would like to see happen, but on what historical necessity has forced to happen in the past and will force to happen in the future. The only real example of the working class taking power at the level of an entire nation -- the Russian revolution -- forces us to admit that a society in revolution will inevitably give rise to forms of state organizat­ion which are not only distinct from the unitary organs of the class, but can indeed enter into profound and even violent conflict with them.

The unavoidable necessity to organize a Red Army, a state police, an administrative apparatus, a form of political representation for all the non-exploiting classes and strata: these material needs are what give birth to a state machine which -- whether or not you label it ‘proletarian’ cannot simply be assimilated to the workers’ councils. Contrary to what certain councilists say, the Bolsheviks did not create this machine ex nihilo to serve their Machiavellian ends. Although we must understand how the Bolsheviks’ conception of their role as a government party actively accel­erated the tendency for this machinery to escape the control of the workers’ soviets, they were only molding and adapting a state organ which had already begun to emerge before the October insur­rection. The Congresses of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets were evolving into a new state form even before the overthrow of the Kerensky regime. The necessity to give the post-insurrectional society an organized form consol­idated this process into the Soviet State. As Marx wrote in Critical Notes on ‘The Kind of Prussia and Social Reform’: “From a political point of view the state and the organization of society are not two different things. The state is the organization of society.”

If the Russian revolution has anything to teach us about this state it is that the isolation of the revolution, the weakening of the workers’ councils, will tend to reinforce the state appar­atus at the expense of the proletariat; will begin to turn that state into an instrument of oppression and exploitation against the class. The state is the most vulnerable point for the forces of the counter-revolution. It is the org­anism through which the impersonal power of capi­tal will tend to reassert itself, perverting a proletarian revolution into the bureaucratic nightmare of state capitalism. Those who pretend that the danger does not exist are disarming the class in the face of its future battles.

Some tendencies, particularly those who have some familiarity with the immense contribution of the Italian Left on this question, do understand that there is a problem here. Thus Battaglia Comun­ista, while stating at the recent international conference in Paris that the party must indeed take power, say in their platform that the cadre of the party must “keep the state on the path of revolutionary continuity” but “must not in any way be confused with the state or integrated into it”. Like Bilan in the 1930s, these tendencies want the party to take power, exercise the prole­tarian dictatorship, and control the state appar­atus -- but not become fused with the state as the Bolshevik party did, since they recognize that the entanglement of the Bolsheviks with the app­aratus of the Soviet state contributed to the degeneration of the party and of the revolution. But this position is contradictory. With Bilan, this contradiction was a fertile one, in so far as they were engaged in a movement towards clar­ifying the correct relationship between party and class; a movement that was, in our opinion, most fruitfully carried on in the work of Gauche Comm­uniste de France after the war and by the ICC today. But to go back to the contradictory pos­itions of Bilan today can only be a regression.

The position is contradictory because the party cannot ‘control’ the state without having a means of enforcing this control. To do this, either the party must have its own organs of coercion to ensure that the state follows its directives; or, as is more likely and as happened in Russia, the party must more and more identify itself with the commanding heights of the state, with its machin­ery of administration and repression. In either case the party becomes a state organ. To argue that the party can avoid this either through its programmatic clarity alone, or through organiz­ational measures like setting up a special sub­committee to run the state, supervised by the central committee, is to fail to understand that what happened in Russia was the result of huge social forces and can only be prevented from repeating itself by the intervention of even greater social forces, not just through ideolog­ical or organizational safeguards.

The transitional state, though an absolute nec­essity for the defense of the revolution, cannot be the dynamic subject of the movement towards communism. It is, at best, an instrument which the class uses to safeguard and codify the advan­ces made by the communist social movement. But the movement itself is led by the unitary organs of the class, which intimately express the life and needs of the class, and by the communist party, which continually puts forward the overall goals of the movement. The unitary organs of the class cannot become weighed down with the day-to-day functioning of the state. They can only exist in a state of permanent insurrection, ceaselessly breaking out of the narrow limits of constitutions, laws and administrative routines which, however, are the very essence of the state. Only in this way can they respond creatively to the immense problems posed by the construction of communism and compel the state machine to obey the global needs of the revolution. It is the same with the party, which both before and after the conquest of power must root itself in the masses and in their organs of struggle, tirelessly pushing them forward and criticizing their hesitations and confusions. The fusion of the party and the state will, as it did with the Bolsheviks, undermine its dynamic role and turn the party into a con­servative force, concerned above all with the immediate needs of the economy and with purely administrative functions. The party would then lose its primordial function of providing a pol­itical direction to which all administrative tasks must be subordinated.

The party will certainly intervene in the repres­entative organs of the state, but organizationally it will retain a complete separation from the state machine. Whatever direction it is able to give to the state will depend on its ability to convince politically the delegates of the territorial soviets, the soldiers’ committees, masses of small peasants, landless peasants, etc of the validity of its positions. But it cannot ‘control’ the state without becoming a state organ itself. Only the workers’ councils can really control the state, since they remain armed throughout the revolutionary process and can enforce their directives to the state through mass action and pressure. And the primary field of intervention for the party will be the workers’ councils, where it will continually agitate to ensure that the councils’ vigilant control over all the state organs does not waver for a moment.

Party and Class

Sooner or later, all groups in the revolutionary camp will have to come to terms with the ambig­uities or contradictions of their position on the party. There is a certain logic in saying that the party must take power, and in our opinion, the most logical exponents of this position within the proletarian movement are the Bordigists.

“The proletarian state can only be ‘animated’ by a single party and it would be senseless to require that this party organize within its ranks a statistical majority and be supported by such a majority in ‘popular elections’ -- that old bourgeois trap ... the communist party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. This bold declaration of not yielding to the deception of figures and not making use of them will aid the struggle against revolutionary degenerat­ion.” (‘Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party’, 1951)

Compared to the democratic formalism of the CWO this position is refreshingly clear. The comm­unist party, which invariably defends ‘the historic interests of the working class’, uses the democrat­ic mechanisms of the councils only to gain power: once it is in power, it uses the state to impose its decisions on the masses. If the masses act against what the party judges to be their own historic interests, it will use violence, the famous Red Terror, to compel the class to fall into line with ‘its own real interests’. Those who want the party to take power, but hesitate to follow this logic, are flying in the face of historical reality. But the remorseless way this logic imposes itself was graphically demonstrated by the CWO at the recent Paris conference, where they stated quite explicitly that once it is in power, the party should not hesitate to use viol­ence against ‘backward’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’ expressions of the class.

It is indeed ironic that the CWO, who have for so long insisted that the massacre of the Kronstadt uprising marked the passage of the Bolsheviks into the capitalist camp, who even denounced the ICC as ‘apologists’ for the massacre because it considers that 1921 was not the definitive end of the Bolsh­eviks as a proletarian party -- that the CWO should now be ideologically preparing the way for new Kronstadts. We must not forget that Kronstadt was only the culmination of a process in which the party had more and more been resorting to coercive measures against the class. The lesson of this whole process, tragically illuminated by the dis­aster of Kronstadt, is that a proletarian party with or without the support of the majority of the class cannot use physical repression against a section of the class without profoundly damaging the revolution and perverting its own essence. This was expressed very clearly by the Italian left in 1938:

“The question we are faced with is this. Circumstances could arise in which a sector of the proletariat -- and we will even concede that it may be the unconscious victim of the maneuvers of the enemy -- goes into struggle against the proletarian state. What is to be done in such a situation? We must begin from the principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the proletariat by violence and force. It would have been better to have lost Kronstadt if holding on to it from the geographical point of view could only have one result: distorting the very substance of the proletariat’s activ­ity. We know the objection to this: the loss of Kronstadt would have been a decisive loss for the revolution, perhaps even the loss of the revolution itself. Here we are getting to the nub of the question. What criteria are being used in this analysis? Those which derive from class principles, or others which simply derive from a given situation? Are we starting from the axiom that it is better for the work­ers to make their own mistakes, even fatal ones, or from the idea that we should suspend our principles, because afterwards the workers will be grateful to us for having defended them, even by violence?

Every situation gives rise to two opposing sets of criteria which lead to two opposing tactical conclusions. If we base our analysis on mere forms, then we will arrive at the conclusion which derives from the following proposition: such and such an organ are proletarian, and we must defend it as such, even if it means smash­ing a workers’ movement. If, however, we base our analysis on questions of substance, we will arrive at a very different conclusion: a proletarian movement that is being manipulated by the enemy contains within it an organic cont­radiction between the proletariat and their class enemy. In order to draw this contradiction to the surface it is necessary to use propaganda among the workers, who in the course of events themselves will recover their stren­gth as a class and will be able to foil the enemy’s schemes. But if by chance it was true that the outcome of this or that event could mean the loss of the revolution, then it’s certain that a victory would not only be a distortion of reality (historic events like the Russian revolution can never really depend on a single episode and only a superficial mind could believe that the crushing of Kronstadt could have saved the revolution) but would also provide the conditions for really losing the revolution. The undermining of principles would not remain localized but would inevitably extend to all the activities of the proletarian state.” (‘The Question of the State’, Octobre, 1938)

Although Octobre continued to argue in favor of the dictatorship of the party, for the Gauche Communiste de France and for us today, the only way of consistently applying these lucid insights is by affirming that the proletarian party does not seek power, does not seek to become a state organ.

Otherwise you are relying only on the ‘will’ or good intentions of the party being able to prevent it from coming into violent conflict with the class; but once it has become a state organ, the strongest will of the best communist party in the world is not enough to immunize it from the inex­orable pressures of the state. This is why the Gauche Communiste de France concluded in 1948 that

“During the insurrectionary period of the rev­olution, the role of the party is not to claim power for itself, nor to ask the masses to put their confidence in it. Its intervention and activity aim to stimulate the self-mobilization of the class struggle for the victory of revolutionary principles.

The mobilization of a class around a party in which it ‘confides’ or rather abandons leadership is a conception which reflects a state of immaturity in the class. Experience has shown that under such conditions the revolution will be unable to succeed and will finally lead to the degeneration of the party and a divorce between party and class. The party would soon be forced to resort more and more to methods of coercion to impose itself on the class and would thus become a formidable obstacle to the revolution.” (‘Sur la Nature et la Fonction du Parti Politique du Proletariat’; see RI Bulletin D’Etude et Discussion, no. 6, from Internationalisme no.38, October 1948)

Revolutionaries today are faced with a choice. On one hand, they can adopt positions which lead them towards Bordigism, towards an apology for and a theorization of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party, towards substitutionism in its fully devel­oped form. In this sense, they will discover that substitutionism is indeed ‘impossible’ for the proletarian movement, because it leads to practices and positions which are directly counter-revolutionary. Or they can take up the profoundly rev­olutionary spirit of Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the time of the October revolution, a spirit which led Lenin to say in his appeal ‘To the Population’ a few days after the insurrection:

“Comrade workers! Remember that you yourselves now administer the state. Nobody will help you if you do not unite and take all the affairs of the state into your own hands. Your soviets are henceforth the organs of state power, organs with full powers, organs of decision.”

It is in this spirit, sharpened by the insights on the relation between party, class and state afforded by the Russian experience, which has to guide us today. It is a spirit profoundly in accord with the aims and methods of the communist revolution, with the revolutionary nature of the working class. If we have to say it a thousand times we will do so: communism can only be created by the conscious self-activity of the entire proletariat, and the communist vanguard can never act in a way that runs counter to this fundamental reality. The revolutionary party can never use the lack of homogeneity in the class, the weight of bourgeois ideology, or the threat of counter­revolution, as a justification for using force to ‘compel’ the class to be revolutionary. This is a complete contradiction in terms and itself expresses the weight of bourgeois ideology on the party. The working class can only throw off the weight of bourgeois ideology through its own mass activity, through its own experience. At certain moments it may seem simpler to confer its most crucial tasks onto a revolutionary organization, but whatever short-term ‘gains’ this might appear to bring, the long-term effect could only be to weaken the class. There can be no stopping short in the proletarian revolution: “those who make a revolution half-way only dig their own graves” (St. Juste). For the working class, that means ceaselessly struggling to overcome all the passive conservative tendencies in its own ranks, tend­encies which are the bitter fruits of generations of bourgeois ideology; it means tirelessly devel­oping and expanding its own self-organization and self-consciousness before, during and after the seizure of political power. Pannekoek’s polemics against the parliamentary tactics of the CI can equally well be applied to those who see an essentially parliamentary role for the communist party in the soviets:

“Revolution also demands something more than the massive assault that topples a government and which, as we know, cannot be summoned by leaders, but can only spring from the profound impulse of the masses. Revolution requires social reconstruction to be undertaken, diff­icult decisions to be made, the whole prolet­ariat involved in creative action -- and this is only possible if first the vanguard, then a greater and greater number take matters in hand themselves, know their own responsibilities, investigate, agitate, wrestle, strive, reflect, assess, seize chances and act upon them. But all this is difficult and laborious: thus, so long as the working class thinks it sees an easier way out through others acting on its behalf -- leading agitation from a high platform, taking decisions, giving signals for action, making laws -- the old habits of thought and the old weaknesses will make it hesitate and remain passive.”(‘World Revolution and Communist Tactics’,1920)

There are many people who want to be ‘leaders’ of the working class. But most of them confuse the bourgeois concept of leadership with the way that the proletariat generates its own leadership. Those who, in the name of leadership, call on the class to abandon its most crucial task to a minor­ity are not leading the class towards communism, but strengthening the hold of bourgeois ideology in the class, the ideology which from cradle to grave tries to convince workers that they are incapable of organizing themselves, that they must entrust others with the task of organizing them. The revolutionary party will only contribute to the progress towards communism by stimulating and generalizing a consciousness which runs entirely counter to the ideology of the bourgeoisie: a consciousness of the inexhaustible capacity of the class to organize itself and become conscious of itself as the subject of history. Communists, secreted by a class which contains no new relations of exploitation within itself, are unique in the history of revolutionary parties in that they do everything they can to make their own function unnecessary as class consciousness and activity becomes a homogeneous reality throughout all of the class. The more the proletariat advances on the road to communism, the more the whole class will become the living expression of “man’s pos­itive self-awareness”, of a liberated and consci­ous human community.

C. D. Ward