The proletariat’s response to the first world war is fairly well known. However the episodes of class struggle which took place during the second world war in Italy in particular are not so clearly recognised. When bourgeois historians and propagandists make reference to them it is to try and demonstrate that the strikes of ’43 in Italy were the beginning of the “anti-fascist” resistance. As this year is the fiftieth anniversary of these events the unions in Italy have taken the opportunity to breath new life into this mystification with their nationalist and patriotic “commemorations”.

This article is dedicated to refuting this lie and to reaffirming the capacity of the class to respond to imperialist war on its own terrain.

1943: the Italian proletariat opposes the sacrifices demanded for the war

As early as the second half of 1942 when the outcome of the war was as yet undecided and fascism seemed to be firmly in power there were sporadic strikes against rationing and for wage increases in the large factories in the north of Italy. These were just the initial warnings of the discontent within the ranks of the proletariat produced by the war and all the sacrifices demanded in its name.

On 5th March 1943 the strike at Mirafiori in Turin began. Within a few days it had spread to other factories and involved tens of thousands of workers. The demands were very clear and straightforward: increased food rations, salary increases and... an end to the war. In the next few months the unrest spread to the large factories in Milan, to the whole of Lombardy, to Liguria and other parts of Italy.

The response of the fascist government was that of stick and carrot: they arrested the workers most in prominence but they also made concessions on the more immediate demands. Mussolini suspected that the anti-fascist forces were behind the strikes, nevertheless he could not allow himself the luxury of allowing the workers’ protest to grow. In fact his suspicions were unfounded. The strikes were completely spontaneous, they came from the workers themselves and out of their discontent with the sacrifices demanded for the war to the extent that “fascist” workers also participated in the strikes.

“What was typical of this action was its class nature which at an historical level gave the strikes of 1943-44 their own typical, unitary character even when compared to the general movement that was conducted together with the national liberation committees” [1] [1].

“Availing myself only of my prestige as an old union organiser I confronted thousands of workers who resumed work immediately in spite of the fact that the fascists proved to be completely passive in the work-places and unfortunately in some cases actually fomented the strikes. This is something that impressed itself upon me enormously” (statement of under-secretary Tullio Cianetti, quoted in Turone’s book page 17).

It was not only the fascist hierarchy who were impressed by the action of the workers, it was the whole of the Italian bourgeoisie. They saw in the March strikes the rebirth of the proletarian spectre, a far more dangerous enemy than their adversaries within their own battle camp. These strikes made the bourgeoisie aware that the fascist regime was no longer adequate to contain the workers’ discontent and they made ready to replace it and reorganize their “democratic” forces.

On 25th July the King dismissed Mussolini, had him arrested and gave Marshal Badoglio the task of forming a new government. One of the first concerns of this government was to rebuild “democratic” unions in order to create new vehicles to channel the workers’ demands because in the meantime they had created their own organs to lead the movement and were therefore out of all control. The Minister for the Corporations (they were still called that!) Leopoldo Piccardi let the old socialist union leader Bruno Buozzi out of prison and offered him the post of commissioner of the union organisations. Buozzi asked for and got the Communist Roveda and the Christian-Democrat Quadrello as deputy commissioners. The bourgeoisie’s choice was well considered; Buozzi was well-known for his participation in the 1922 strikes (the occupation of the factories) in which he demonstrated his bourgeois loyalties by making every effort to counter the potential growth of the movement.

But the workers did not know what to make of bourgeois democracy and its promises. They distrusted the fascist regime above all because they were no longer able to bear the sacrifices demanded of them for the war. The Badoglio government asked them to go on bearing them.

In the middle of August ’43 the workers of Turin and Milan went on strike demanding once more an end to the war and even more forcefully than before. The local authorities again responded with repression but what proved to be more effective was the trip north made by Piccardi, Buozzi and Roveda to meet the workers’ representatives and convince them to go back to work. Even before they had rebuilt their organisations the unionists of the “democratic” regime began their anti-working class dirty work!

Caught between repression, concessions and promises the workers returned to work and waited on events. These changed rapidly. By July the allied forces had landed in Sicily, on 8th September Badoglio signed an armistice with them, fled south with the King and called on the population to continue the war against Nazi fascism. After a few demonstrations of enthusiasm a disorderly demobilization ensued. A lot of soldiers threw away their uniforms and went home or into hiding.

The workers were unable to rise up on their own class terrain but they were not talked into taking up arms against the Germans and returned to work, prepared to put forward their immediate demands against the new bosses in north Italy. In fact Italy was split into two: in the south there were the allied forces and a show of legal government, the north on the other hand was again under the command of the fascists, more precisely the German troops.

Even without the participation of the people the war in fact continued. The allied bombings of north Italy were intensified and with them the living conditions of the workers worsened. So in November-December the workers took up the struggle again. This time they met with even harsher repression; besides the threat of arrest there was the even more serious danger of deportation to Germany. The workers put forward their demands courageously. In November the workers of Turin went on strike, a large part of their demands were accepted. At the beginning of December the workers of Milan went on strike, they too received a combination of promises and threats from the German authorities. The following episode is significant. “At 11.30 general Zimmerman arrived and made the following threat: those who did not resume work were to leave the building; those who did so would be declared enemies of Germany. All the workers left the building” (from a clandestine paper of the Italian PC, quoted by Turone page 47). In Genoa on 16th December the workers went onto the streets but this time the German authorities used force: there were confrontations that resulted in deaths and injuries. Equally harsh confrontations continued throughout Liguria for the rest of December.

This was the turning-point; the movement had been weakened in this way and also because Italy was divided in two. The Germans were in trouble on the front and could not allow production to be interrupted any longer. They confronted the proletarian danger resolutely (also because the same danger was beginning to emerge within Germany itself in the form of strikes). Finally the character of the movement began to be distorted; it lost its spontaneous, class nature. This was also thanks to the efforts of the “anti-fascist” forces that tried to turn the workers’ protest into a struggle for “liberation”, a task that was made easier by the fact that many of the most advanced workers who fled to the mountains to escape the repression were there recruited by partisan bands. In fact strikes were still taking place in the Spring of ’44 and ’45 but by this time the working class had lost the initiative.

The strikes of 1943; a class struggle, not a war against fascism

The propaganda of the bourgeoisie tries to present the whole strike movement from ’43 to ’45 as an anti-fascist struggle. The few elements that we have put forward show that this was not the case. The workers were struggling against the war and the sacrifices demanded from them in its name. In order to do so they fought against the fascists when they were officially in power (in March), against the government when it was no longer fascist - that of Badoglio (in August), against the Nazis when they were the real bosses in the north of Italy (in December).

What however is true is that right from the start the forces of “democracy” and the bourgeois left with the CP at its head tried to rob the workers’ struggle of its class character in order to divert it onto the bourgeois terrain of the patriotic, anti-fascist struggle. To this end they focused all their efforts. The spontaneous character of the movement caught them by surprise so the “anti-fascist” forces were obliged to run after it trying to mix their “anti-fascist” slogans into those of the strikers while the strikes were actually taking place. Their local militants were often unable to do so and were criticised by their party leaders because of it. The leaders of these parties were so caught up in their bourgeois logic that they were either unable or had difficulty understanding that for the workers the battle is always against capital regardless of what form it takes: “let’s recall what trouble we had in the early days of the liberation struggle getting workers and peasants to understand the situation when they had no communist background (sic!), when they understood that it was necessary to fight against the Germans as well but said ‘it doesn’t make a lot of difference to us whether the Italians or the Germans are our bosses’” (E. Sereni, head of the Italian CP at the time in “The government of the CL” quoted by Romolo Gobbi: Workers and the Resistance, page 34) [2] [2]. No, Signor Sereni, the workers understood quite clearly that their enemy was capitalism, that it was this they had to fight against in whatever form it took. Likewise you, as bourgeois as the fascists you were fighting, understood that this was the real danger that threatened!

We are certainly not among those who deny the necessity of a political struggle in the process of the proletariat’s self-emancipation. The problem is what politics, on what terrain, within what perspective. The “anti-fascist” struggle belongs wholly to the politics of patriotism and bourgeois nationalism. It in no way puts into question the power of capital. On the other hand the smallest demand for “bread and peace” if pursued to its conclusion (and this was what the Italian workers were unable to do) contains in embryo the perspective of the struggle against the capitalist system which is unable to give this peace or this bread.

In 1943 the working class again showed its anti-capitalist nature...

“Bread and peace” a simple and immediate slogan that made the bourgeoisie tremble and put its imperialist plans at risk. Bread and peace was the slogan that animated the Russian proletariat in 1917 and  was the departure point for the revolutionary path which resulted in its taking power in October. In fact it is well-known that in the strikes of  1943 there were also groups of workers who called for the formation of soviets. It is also acknowledged, sometimes even in the historical reconstructions of the “anti-fascist” parties, that a significant proportion of workers saw participation in the resistance as anti-capitalist rather than patriotic.

Moreover the bourgeoisie’s fear was justified by the fact that there were also strike movements in Germany in the same year (1943) and later in Greece, Belgium, France and Britain [3] [3].

With these movements the working class returned to the social scene and threatened the power of the bourgeoisie. It had already done so - victoriously - in 1917 when the Russian revolution forced the combatants of the first world war to end the war prematurely in order to present a united front against the proletarian danger which was spreading from Russia to the whole of Europe.

As we have seen, the strikes in Italy accelerated both the fall of fascism and Italy’s withdrawal from the war. This action of the working class during the second world war reaffirmed the fact that it is the only social force able to oppose war. Unlike petit-bourgeois pacifism which holds demonstrations to “ask” capitalism to be less bellicose, when the working class acts on its own class terrain it puts in doubt the very power of capitalism and therefore its capacity to pursue its warlike ventures. In potential the strikes of ’43 contained the same threat as 1917: the perspective of the proletariat’s revolutionary development.

Revolutionary fractions of the time seized on this possibility (which they overestimated) and did all they could to encourage its development. The Italian fraction of the communist left (which published the review Bilan before the war) overcame the difficulties it had experienced at the beginning of the war and together with the newly formed French nucleus of the communist left it held a conference in August 1943 at Marseilles. The basis for the conference was the analysis that the events in Italy had opened up a pre-revolutionary phase, a corollary of this was that it was the moment to “transform the fraction into the party” and to return to Italy to oppose the attempts of the false workers’ parties to “gag the revolutionary consciousness” of the proletariat. In this way they began working around the defence of revolutionary defeatism and in June 1944 this led the Fraction to distribute a leaflet to the workers of Europe enroled in the various armies at war calling on them to fraternize and struggle against capitalism whether democratic or fascist.

The comrades who had stayed behind in Italy also reorganized themselves and on the basis of an analysis similar to that of Bilan founded the Internationalist Communist Party. This organisation also began a revolutionary defeatist activity; it opposed the patriotism of the partisan groupings and made propaganda for the proletarian revolution [4] [4].

Fifty years on it is impossible to remember the work and enthusiasm of these comrades (some of whom lost their lives in the process) without a sense of pride. Nevertheless we have to recognise that the analysis they defended was wrong.

...but war is not the best situation for the development of the revolutionary process

The struggles that we have mentioned, particularly those in Italy in 1943, are undeniably the proof of the proletariat’s return to its own class terrain and the beginnings of what was potentially a revolutionary process. However the result was not the same as in the movement against the war that took place in 1917. The movement in Italy in 1943 did not succeed in putting an end to the war as did the one in Russia followed by Germany at the beginning of the century. Nor did it manage to develop to a revolutionary outcome (which was the only thing that could also have put an end to the war).

The reasons for this defeat are many; some of them are general, others are specific to the situation in which events unfolded.

In the first place although it is true that war pushes the working class to respond in a revolutionary way this is more particularly the case in the defeated countries. The working class of the victorious countries usually remain more firmly under the control of the dominant class’ ideology; this works against international extension which is indispensable to the survival of proletarian power. Moreover if the struggle manages to force the bourgeoisie to make peace it robs itself at the same time of the exceptional conditions which gave rise to the struggle. In Germany for example the revolutionary movement which led to the armistice of 1918 suffered greatly in the period after it was signed because of the pressure exerted by a significant number of soldiers who returned from the front with only one desire: to return to their families and take advantage of the peace that had been so ardently desired and won at so high a price. In fact the German bourgeoisie had learnt the lesson of the Russian revolution. In the latter instance the continuation of the war by the provisional government which succeeded the Czarist regime after February ’17 was effective in nourishing the revolutionary insurrection in which the soldiers played a prominent part. For this reason the German government signed an armistice with the Entente powers on 11th November, two days after mutinies among the war fleet in Kiel had begun to take place.

Secondly these lessons from the past were put to good use by the bourgeoisie in the period preceding the second world war. The dominant class only went to war once it was sure that the working class had been completely subdued. The defeat of the revolutionary movement in the 20s had plunged the proletariat into deep confusion; mystifications about “socialism in one country” and the “defence of the socialist fatherland” were then heaped onto demoralization. This confusion enabled the bourgeoisie to engineer a dress rehearsal of the world war in the form of the war in Spain where the exceptional combativity of the Spanish workers was derailed onto the terrain of the anti-fascist struggle. In the meantime Stalinism also succeeded in dragging significant battalions of the rest of the European proletariat onto the bourgeois terrain.

Finally during the war itself, when the working class began to act on its own class terrain in spite of all the difficulties it had encountered, the bourgeoisie immediately took counter-measures.

In Italy where the danger was greatest the bourgeoisie as we have seen lost no time changing its regime and after that its alliance. In autumn ’43 Italy was divided in two; the south was in the hands of the allies, the rest was occupied by the Nazis. On the advice of Churchill (“Italy must be left to stew in its own juice”) the allies delayed their advance towards the north and so achieved two things: on the one hand they left the job of repressing the proletarian movement to the German army; on the other they gave the “anti-fascist” forces the task of diverting the movement from the terrain of the anti-capitalist struggle to that of the anti-fascist struggle. This operation succeeded in almost a year and from then on the activity of the proletariat was no longer autonomous although it continued to make economic demands. Moreover in the eyes of the proletariat the war was continuing because of the Nazi occupation; this was a substantial part of the propaganda of the anti-fascist forces. The idea that the partisan war was a popular struggle is largely a myth. This was a real war, organized for real by the allied and anti-fascist forces and the population was enroled in it by force (or by ideological pressure) as it is in any war. However it is also true that leaving the Nazis the job of repressing the proletarian movement and making them responsible for the continuation of the war encouraged a growing hatred of them and the consequent reinforcement of the propaganda of the partisan forces.

In Germany, armed with its experience of what can happen in the period immediately after a war, the international bourgeoisie acted systematically to avoid a repetition of events similar to those of 1918-19. In the first place shortly before the end of the war the allies carried out the mass extermination of the population of the workers’ quarters by means of the unprecedented bombardment of large cities such as Hamburg or Dresden. On 13th February 1945, 135,000 people (twice as many as at Hiroshima) perished in the bombing. As military objectives there were worthless (moreover the German army was already thoroughly routed): in reality their aim was to terrorize the working class and prevent it from organizing itself in any way. Secondly the allies rejected outright the possibility of an armistice on the grounds that they had not occupied the whole of German territory. They were anxious to administer this territory directly as they were aware of the danger that the defeated German bourgeoisie would be unable to control the situation on its own. Lastly once the latter had capitulated and in close collaboration with them the allies hung onto their war prisoners for many months in order to avoid the explosive mix that might have resulted if they had encountered the civilian population.

In Poland during the second half of 1944 the Red Army too left it to the Nazi forces to carry out the dirty work of massacring the insurgent workers in Warsaw: for months the Red Army waited a few kilometres away from the city while the German troops crushed the revolt. The same thing happened in Budapest at the beginning of 1945.

So having been warned by the experience of 1917 and on the alert after the initial strikes of the workers, the bourgeoisie throughout Europe did not wait for the movement to grow and strengthen. By means of systematic extermination and the work of the Stalinist and anti-fascist forces to derail the struggles they managed to block the proletarian threat and prevent it from growing.

50 years after 1943 the proletariat must draw the lessons

The proletariat did not succeed in putting an end to the second world war or developing a revolutionary movement. But as is true for all proletarian battles the defeats can be transformed into weapons for future struggles if the working class draws the lessons correctly. And it is the role of revolutionaries to be the first to draw out these lessons and identify them clearly. Such a work means particularly that using a profound assimilation of the experience of the workers’ movement they must not remain imprisoned in past schemas as is still the case today for most of the groups of the proletarian milieu such as the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista) and the various chapels of the Bordigist movement.

Very briefly these are the main lessons that it is important to draw from the experience of the proletariat over the last half century.

Contrary to what revolutionaries of the past thought, generalized war does not create the best conditions for the proletarian revolution. This is all the more true today when the existing means of destruction make a potential global conflict so devastating that it would make any proletarian reaction impossible as it would result in the destruction of humanity. The lesson that the working class must draw from its past experience is that to fight against war today it must act before there is a world war, afterwards it will be too late.

The conditions for the outbreak of another world war do not yet exist. On the one hand the working class is not mobilized in such a way as to allow the bourgeoisie to unleash a world war, the only outcome it can conceive to its economic crisis. Secondly although the collapse of the eastern bloc has set in motion a tendency towards the formation of two new imperialist blocs we are still a very long way from the actual constitution of such blocs and without them there can be no world war.

This does not mean that there is no tendency to war or that no real wars are taking place. From the Gulf war in ’91 to the one in Yugoslavia today and bearing in mind all the conflicts throughout the globe there is enough to show that the collapse of the eastern bloc has not opened a period of the “new world order” but rather a period of growing instability that could only lead to a new world war (unless society is submerged and destroyed beforehand by its own decomposition) if the proletariat does not take the lead with a revolutionary movement. The consciousness of this tendency towards war is an important factor that reinforces this revolutionary potential.

Today the most powerful factor that contributes to the growing consciousness of capitalism’s bankruptcy is the economic crisis, a catastrophic crisis which is insoluble within a capitalist framework. These two factors create the best conditions for the revolutionary development of the working class struggle. But this development is only possible if revolutionaries themselves are able to leave behind the old ideas that belong to the past and adapt their intervention to the new historic conditions.

Helios.

In the autumn of 1992, the class struggle reawaken with mass workers' demonstrations in Italy[1]. In the autumn of 1993, the workers' demonstrations in Germany have confirmed the recovery in the class struggle against the attacks raining down on the proletariat in the most industrialised countries.

In the Ruhr, in the industrialised heart of Germany, 80,000 workers have taken to the streets and blocked the main roads, to protest against the planned redundancies in the mines. On the 21st and 22nd September, without waiting for union instructions (which is significant in a country with a reputation for social "discipline"), miners in the Dortmund region downed tools, and demonstrated along with their families, the unemployed, and workers from other branches of industry who were called to show solidarity.

Whatever the result of these demonstrations, which are still going on as we go to press[2], one aspect of this movement gives a good example of how the working class can engage in struggle: the answer to massive attacks on working conditions is a massive and united counter-attack.

The recovery of the class struggle

Today more than ever, the working class is the only force capable of intervening against economic disaster. It is the only social class able to break down the capitalist order's national and sectional barriers. The division of the proletariat, reinforced by today's general social rot, maintains these barriers, and leaves the way open to the "social" measures being applied the world over. The interest of the working class, subjected everywhere to the same exploitation, the same attacks by the capitalist state, whether government, bosses, parties or unions, lies in the greatest possible unity of the greatest number, in both action and thought, to discover the methods of organisation and the direction for the combat against capitalism.

Last year, the workers in Germany were led by the nose for months, in a series of sterile trade union manoeuvres. The fact that today the workers are reacting by themselves is a sign of the international proletariat's reawakening combativity. This is the most significant event for the moment, but it is not an isolated one. There have been other demonstrations in Germany, including 70,000 workers against the redundancy plans at Mercedes-Benz and tens of thousands of workers in Duisburg against the 10,000 lay-offs announced in the engineering industry. The number of strikes is increasing in several countries: they are still channelled by the unions and their allies, but they show that this is not a time of passivity. Internationally, we can expect to see a slow and lengthy development of workers' demonstrations, of confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In today's conditions, the international recovery of the class struggle will not be easy. There are many factors which tend to hold back the proletariat's consciousness and combativity:

- Social decomposition, corrupting social relationships and undermining the reflex of solidarity, encouraging the growth of despair and "every man for himself', generates a feeling that it is impossible to form a collectivity, to defend common class interests against capitalism.

- The avalanche of mass unemployment, which is running at a rate of 10,000 lay-offs a day in Western Europe alone, and which will go on growing, has at first a paralyzing effect on the workers.

- The systematic and repeated manoeuvres of the trades unions, whether official or "rank-and-file", which imprison the workers in sectionalism and division, have made it possible to control and contain the workers' discontent.

- The bourgeoisie's propaganda, whether based on the classic themes of the left fractions which claim to defend the "workers' interests" , or on the constant ideological campaigns since the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the "death of communism" and the "end of the class struggle", maintain a real confusion within the working class about the possibility of struggle. They reinforce the workers' doubts about the possibility of freeing themselves by the destruction of capitalism.

The proletariat will have to confront these problems in the struggle itself. More and more, capitalism will reveal the general and irreversible bankruptcy of its own system. It is true that the brutal acceleration of the crisis, and its catastrophic effects on the working class, tends at first to have a "knock-out effect". But it is also a favourable terrain for the proletariat to mobilize in defence of its class interests. This, coupled with the active intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle, to defend the communist perspective, will help the class to find the means to organize and to carry this confrontation in the direction of its own interests, and those of humanity as a whole.

The end of "miracles"

It is a long time since anyone dared talk about an "economic miracle" in the "Third World". It is succumbing to universal poverty. The African continent has been almost entirely left to its fate. In most parts of Asia, a human life is worth less than an animal's. Famines spread year on year, affecting tens of millions of human beings. In Latin America, diseases that were thought to have been eradicated have returned, in epidemic proportions.

In the ex-Eastern bloc countries, the prosperity promised to follow the bloc's collapse has been remarkable for its absence. Stalinism on its death-bed was given a "shot in the arm" of liberal capitalism, but this has only added to the economic bankruptcy of this extreme form of state capitalism, which has hidden for sixty years behind the lie of "socialism" or "communism". Here too, poverty is growing fast, and living conditions are more and more catastrophic for the vast majority of the population.

In the "developed" countries too, the "economic miracles" have had their day. The tidal wave of unemployment and the attacks on every level of workers' living conditions have brought the economic crisis once again to the fore. The propaganda on the "triumph of capitalism" and the "bankruptcy of communism" hammers home the message that "nothing is better than capitalism". The economic crisis shows that under capitalism, on the contrary, the worst is still to come.

Massive attacks against the working class

The crisis lays bare the contradictions at the heart of a capitalism which is not only unable to ensure society's survival, but is destroying its productive forces, the proletariat foremost among them.

The capitalist ruling class bears the responsibility for the barbaric poverty inflicted on billions of human beings, but at least in the more developed countries they could maintain the illusion that the system functioned "normally". In the "democratic" states of the "First World", the ruling classes have tried to give the impression that the system offers a job and decent living and working conditions to every citizen. And although the growth in recent years of a so-called" new" poverty was beginning seriously to tarnish the tableau, its propaganda could still present the phenomenon as the inevitable price of "modernization".

Now that the crisis is more intense than ever, the "democratic" states are forced to drop their mask. Far from offering any perspective, however far off, of peace and prosperity, capitalism is lowering the living conditions of the working class and brewing war[3]. If the workers of the great West European, North American, and Japanese industrial concentrations still have any illusions about the "privileges" that they benefit from, they are in for a nasty shock.

The lie of economic “restructuring”, which was used to justify the previous waves of redundancies in the “traditional” industries and services, is beginning to wear thin. Today, there are plans for job reductions and lay-offs by the hundreds of thousands in industries which have already been “modernised” (automobile and aerospace), in high-tech industries (computing and electronics), or in the “profitable” service industries (banks and insurance), and in a civil service already “slimmed” during the 1980s (postal services, health and education).

Some of the lay-offs announced in Europe during three weeks in September 1993. In total, more than 150,000 (Source: Financial Times)

Not one sector has escaped from the "demands" of the world economic crisis. Every capitalist unit has no choice but to cut costs, from the smallest to the largest, right up to the state whose responsibility is to defend the competitivity of the national capital. Even the richest states have been dragged into the crisis, and are witnessing a dizzy rise in unemployment. Not one island of economic health survives throughout the capitalist world. The "German model" is a model no longer, and everywhere social "plans", "pacts", and "shock therapy" are the order of the day. And the "shock" is first and foremost for the workers.

On average, almost one worker in every five is already unemployed in the developed countries. And one unemployed worker in five has been out of ajob for more than a year, with less and less chance of finding work again. Total exclusion from any normal means of subsistence is becoming a mass phenomenon: the "new poor" in the great cities are counted in their millions, the homeless in their tens of thousands.

The mass unemployment developing today is not a reservoir of manpower for a future economic recovery. There will be no recovery which would allow capitalism in the "developed" countries to reintegrate the tens of millions of unemployed into the productive process. The unemployed masses of today are no longer the capitalist "reserve army" that Marx described in the 19th century. They will swell the mass of those who are already completely excluded from normal living conditions in the "Third World" and the ex-Eastern bloc. They are the concrete expression of the tendency to absolute pauperisation created by the definitive bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production.

For those still at work, wage increases are either ridiculously low and eaten away by inflation, or blocked completely. Worse still, cash wage reductions are becoming more and more frequent. Added to the direct attacks on wages, are all the increases in both direct and indirect taxation, and the costs of housing, transport, health and education. Moreover, an increasing proportion of family income goes to the upkeep of children or relatives who are out of work. Benefits of all kinds - pensions, invalidity benefits, the dole - are either being reduced or simply abolished.

The working class must combat all this with vigour. The sacrifices that every state is asking of the workers today in the name of "national solidarity" will only be followed by more sacrifices tomorrow. Under capitalism, there will be no end to the crisis.

The crisis is irreversible

The class struggle is vital

Even those whose job it is to defend the lie of capitalism's economic health are looking down in the mouth. Even when the growth statistics show some tiny positive signs, they no longer dare talk of "economic recovery". At best, they speak of a "pause" in the recession, taking care to point out that "if there is a recovery, it is likely to be very slow and very weak"[4]. This cautious language shows that the ruling class is more at a loss today when faced with the crisis than it has been for twenty-five years.

Nobody dares any longer to talk about "the end of the tunnel". Those who don't see the irreversible nature of the crisis and believe in the immortality of the capitalist mode of production can only repeat like a litany: "there will necessarily be an economic recovery, because there has always been a recovery after the crisis". This sounds like the old fanner's saying "fine weather comes after the rain", and gives a good idea of just how far the capitalist class is incapable of mastering the laws of its own economy.

The most recent example is the disintegration of the European Monetary System throughout 1993, culminating in its collapse this summer[5]. The failure of the Western European states to adopt a common currency has put an abrupt halt to the construction of "European union", which its advocates argued would demonstrate capitalism's ability to cooperate economically, politically, and socially. Behind the summer's turbulence on the money markets, lie the unbreakable laws of capitalist exploitation and competition:

- it is impossible for capitalism to form a harmonious and
prosperous whole, at any level;

- the class which profits from the exploitation of labour power
is bound to be divided by competition.

While within each nation, the bourgeoisie is honing its weapons against the working class, internationally its quarrels and conflicts are proliferating. "Understanding amongst the peoples" which was supposed to have been modelled on the understanding between the great capitalist powers, is giving way to a merciless economic war, where "every man for himself' is the fundamental tendency. The world market has been saturated for years. It has become too narrow to allow the normal functioning of capitalist accumulation, and the expansion of production and consumption necessary for the realisation of profit - which is the motor that drives the whole system.

When a company goes bankrupt, its owners can simply put the key under the mat, sell up, and move on to more lucrative fields. But the capitalist class as a whole cannot declare itself bankrupt and liquidate the capitalist mode of production. This would be to declare its own disappearance, something which no exploiting class is capable of doing. The ruling class cannot just leave the stage on tiptoe when its time is up. It will defend its privileges tooth and nail, and to the hilt.

It is up to the working class to destroy capitalism. Its place within capitalist relations of production makes it the one class capable of putting a spanner in the works of the infernal capitalist machine. The working class has no economic power within society, and so has no particular interest to defend within it. Collectively, it has only its labour power to sell. The working class is the only force which bears within itself a perspective for new social relationships rid of the division into classes, scarcity, poverty, wars and frontiers.

This perspective is the international communist revolution, and it must begin with a mass response to the massive attacks of capitalism. This will be the first step in a historic combat against the systematic destruction of the productive forces, which is going on today all over the planet, and which has just speeded up abruptly in the developed countries.

OF, 23rd September 1993

The handshake between Yasser Arafat, President of the PLO, and Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, was historic ... and thoroughly photogenic. After 45 years of war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, this was an important event, and US President Clinton, who organized the ceremony, intended that it should have a symbolic significance: that the only possible peace is the "Pax Americana". And after all the upsets he has suffered since his arrival in power, Clinton certainly needed a success like this. The party laid on in his own (white) house aimed not just to resuscitate his falling popularity at home, but to deliver a strong message to the whole world: the USA is the only "world cop" capable of guaranteeing the planet's stability. A striking coup like this was all the more necessary in that, ever since Bush's announcement in 1989 of a "new world order" under the aegis of US imperialism, the situation has gone from bad to worse in every domain. The downfall of the "Evil Empire" was supposed to bring with it prosperity, peace, order, the rule of law between peoples and for the individual. Instead, we have had economic convulsions, famine, war, chaos, massacres, torture: in a word, barbarism. Instead of the increased assertion of the authority of the "world's greatest democracy" as guarantor of world peace, we have seen a growing contestation of this same authority by more and more countries, including its closest allies. By publicizing the effusive reconciliation of these two "hereditary" enemies of the Middle East, under the paternal benediction of the US President (who is young enough to be their son, which only gives the image greater impact), Clinton claims to have inaugurated a new "new world order", now that Bush's one has been consigned to the dustbins of history. But neither the grand gestures nor the televised set-piece speeches can change the fact that in decadent capitalism, peace declarations and agreements are nothing but preparations for new wars and greater barbarism.

The Washington agreement of 13th September 1993 has eclipsed another "peace process" begun during the summer: the Geneva negotiations on the future of Bosnia. Nonetheless, these negotiations, with all the diplomatic manoeuvres and military posturing surrounding them, are crucial to the present situation.

Ex- Yugoslavia: a US set-back

As we go to press, there has not been any definitive agreement between the three sides (Muslims, Croats, and Serbs) squabbling over the carcass of the late Republic of Bosnia- Herzegovina. The detailed frontiers of the proposed division of the country, presented to the negotiators on 20th August, are still under discussion. However, if we refuse to be taken in by the propaganda of the various parties to the conflict and the great powers behind them, what is really at stake in these negotiations, and in the continuing fighting, is plain enough.

In the first place, it is obvious that the war in Yugoslavia is not just an internal matter caused solely by inter-ethnic rivalries. The Balkans have for a long time been one of the main battlegrounds for the confrontations of the great imperialist powers. The name of Sarajevo did not acquire its lugubrious renown in 1992: for 80 years, it has been associated with the outbreak of World War I. This time too, as Yugoslavia began to fall apart in 1991, the great powers appeared as principal actors in the tragedy inflicted on the population of the region. Right from the start, Germany's firm support for Croatian and Slovenian independence fanned the flames of the conflict, as indeed did the support given to Serbia by France, Britain, Russia and the USA. Without repeating the analyses which have been expounded at length in this Review, it is important to highlight the antagonism between the interests of the greatest European power, which sees an independent and allied Croatia and Slovenia as a means to open a way to the Mediterranean, and those of the other powers which are utterly opposed to this extension of German imperialism.

When Bosnia itself declared independence, the USA hurried to support it. This difference in attitude compared with Croatia and Slovenia was indicative of the strategy of US imperialism: unable to make a reliable Balkan ally out of Serbia, given this country's ancient and solid links to Russia[1] and France, US imperialism aimed to make Bosnia its bridgehead in the region, over-shadowing a pro-German Croatia. Firm support for Croatia was a theme of Clinton's candidature. Once elected, he started out with the same policy, declaring in February 1993 that "The full weight of American diplomacy must be committed" to this objective. In May, Secretary of State Warren Christopher proposed to the Europeans two measures to halt the Serbian advance in Bosnia: lifting the arms embargo, and air strikes against Serbian positions. The US proposed in fact the same "solution" for the Balkans as they had already used in the Gulf: the big stick, and in particular the use of air power, which has the advantage of displaying the full extent of US superiority. France and Britain, in other words the two countries which had committed most of the ground troops to UNPROFOR, categorically refused. By the end of May, the Washington accords between the US and the European powers, despite Clinton's triumphalist declarations, effectively endorsed the Europeans' position on Bosnia: no counter-attack against the Serb offensive aimed at carving up Bosnia, limiting the UN forces, and eventually also those of NATO, to "humanitarian" missions.

It thus became clear that the world's greatest power was changing tack, and giving up the strategy conducted since 1992, with all the support of media campaigns on the defence of "human rights" and the denunciation of "ethnic cleansing". This was the recognition of a setback, which the United States blamed, not without reason, on the Europeans. Warren Christopher once again admitted the US' impotence on 21st July, when after describing the situation in Sarajevo as "tragic, tragic", he declared: "the United States is doing all it can, taking account of its own national interests".

And yet, ten days later, when the Geneva conference on Bosnia had begun, the Americans started banging the big stick again. Its leaders insisted, even more forcefully than in May, on the need for air strikes against the Serbs: "We think that the time for action has come ( ... ) the only realistic hope to bring about a reasonable political settlement is to put [NATO 's] air power at the service of diplomacy" (Warren Christopher in a letter to Boutros-Ghali, 1st August). "The United States will not stand by while Sarajevo is brought to its knees" (Christopher speaking in Cairo the following day). At the same time (2nd and 9th August), the US called two meetings of the NATO Council, to demand that its "allies" authorize and initiate air strikes. After hours of resistance, led mainly by France (but with British agreement), the principal of air strikes was agreed, but only on the condition (opposed by the Americans) that they be requested by the UN Secretary General. .. who has always opposed them. The new US offensive had run aground.

On the ground, Serbian forces loosened their grip on Sarajevo, and ceded control over the strategic heights overlooking the city, which they had seized from the Muslims a few days before, to UNPROFOR. But while the US attributed the Serb withdrawal to the NATO declaration, the Belgian general commanding UNPROFOR saw it as "an example of what can be done with negotiation", while his second-in-command, the British Brigadier Hayes asked: "What is President Clinton after? (. .. ) the Serbs will never be defeated with air power". This was a real affront to US diplomacy, and a sabotage of its diplomacy. Worst of all, for the US, their most faithful ally, Britain, acquiesced in or even encouraged it.

This being said, and despite their grandiloquent pronouncements, it is highly unlikely that the Americans seriously envisaged using air power against the Serbs during the summer. At all events, the die were cast: the perspective of a united, multi -ethnic Bosnia defended by both the Muslims and US diplomacy - had gone down the drain for good once the greater part of Bosnian territory had fallen into the hands of the Serbian and Croatian militia, with the Muslims only hanging on to a fifth, despite their representing almost half the pre-war population.

In fact, US objectives during the summer were already far removed from its diplomatic aims at the outset of the conflict. Its sole hope was to avoid the supreme humiliation of the fall of Sarajevo, and above all to introduce itself into a situation which had long since escaped from its control. As the last act of the Bosnian tragedy was played out in Geneva, the US had to make an appearance as "guest star", since the starring role had been denied it. And in the end, its contribution to the epilogue consisted of "convincing" its Muslim protégés to accept their capitulation as quickly as possible, in exchange for a few threats against the Serbs, since the longer the war continues in Bosnia, the more it shows up the impotence of the world's greatest power.

The American giant's pitiful efforts faced with the Bosnian war appear in a still cruder light if we compare them with its "management" of the Gulf crisis and war in 1990-91. Then, it kept all its promises to its Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti protégés. This time, it has been able to do nothing for its Bosnian client: its contribution to the conflict's "solution" has been to force the Bosnians to accept the unacceptable. In the context of the Gulf conflict, this would have been the equivalent of making gestures for several months, and then putting pressure on the Kuwaiti authorities to make them give up most of their territory to Saddam Hussein! Perhaps worse still, whereas in 1990-91 the Americans succeeded in dragging all the Western countries along with them (even if some, like the French and the Germans, dragged their feet), this time they have come up against opposition from other countries, even including the faithful Albion.

American diplomacy's obvious failure in the Bosnian conflict is a severe blow to the authority of a power which lays claim to the role of "world cop". How much confidence can other countries place in its "protection" now? How much fear can it inspire in those who might think of defying it? The full significance of the 13th September Washington agreement lies in its use as a means to restore this authority.

No 'Peace' for the Middle East

If proof were needed of the bourgeoisie's cynicism, the recent evolution of the Middle East situation would be largely sufficient. Today, the media are inviting us to shed a tear of joy over the historic handshake at the White House. They neglect to tell us how this handshake was prepared, less than two months ago.

In late July 1993, the Israeli state unleashed a massive bombardment on dozens of Lebanese villages. It was the biggest and bloodiest military operation since the "Peace in Galilee" operation of 1982. The dead were counted in the hundreds, if not the thousands, mostly civilian. Almost half a million refugees took to the roads. And this action, by a "democratic" state, led moreover by a "socialist" government, justified its action thus: the aim is to terrorize the civilian Lebanese population, in order to put pressure on the Lebanese government to crush Hezbollah. Once again, it is the civilian population which pays the price for imperialism's deeds. But the bourgeoisie's cynicism does not stop there: in reality, the question of Hezbollah was secondary - and as soon as the offensive was over, the latter renewed its attacks on Israeli troops in South Lebanon - and the Israeli military offensive was nothing other than a preparation for the touching ceremony in Washington, set up not just by Israel, but by its great American godfather.

On the Israeli side, it was important that the peace negotiations and its imminent truce proposals to the PLO should not be taken as a sign of weakness. The bombs and shells destroying the villages of southern Lebanon carried a message to the Arab states: "don't count on our weakness, we will only give up what suits us". This message was addressed especially to the Syrians, without whose permission Hezbollah could not operate, and who want to recover the Golan Heights annexed by Israel in the 1967 war.

On the US side, the intention was to demonstrate, through its henchman's military success, that it remains the boss of the Middle East, whatever difficulties it may encounter elsewhere. The message was addressed to any Arab state which might be tempted to play a different tune than the one ordered by the boss in Washington. It was useful, for example, to remind Jordan that it would be better not to repeat the infidelities of the Gulf war. Above all, it was time to remind Syria that its grip on Lebanon was due to America's good graces following the Gulf war, and that its historical links with France should remain just that: history. The same message was also addressed to Iran, the Hezbollah's godfather, and which is trying to renew diplomatic relations with France and Germany. In fact, the USA was addressing a warning to all the powers which might be tempted to come and poach in its own reserves.

Finally, the world's greatest power had to demonstrate clearly to all concerned that it still has the means to make itself respected, and that it could unleash the dogs of war as well as the doves of peace, as it likes. This was the message delivered by Warren Christopher during his Middle East tour, just after the Israeli offensive: "the present confrontations illustrate the urgent need for the conclusion of a peace agreement amongst the different states concerned". This is the classic method of the racketeer, who offers "protection" to the shopkeeper, after breaking up his shop.

As always in decadent capitalism, there is no fundamental difference between peace and war; the imperialist brigands prepare their peace agreements with war and massacres. And the peace agreements are never anything but a preparation for new and bloodier wars.

More war to come

After the negotiations and peace agreements in Washington and Geneva this summer, it is clear that there will be no more "new world order" under Clinton than there was under Bush.

In ex-Yugoslavia, even if the Geneva negotiations on Bosnia lead to agreement (for the moment the war is still going on, between Muslims and Croats, and within the different factions themselves), this will not mean an end to the conflict. The new battle-fields are already plain to see: Macedonia, almost openly claimed by Greece; Kosovo, whose largely Albanian population is tempted to merge in a "Greater Albania"; Krajina, a province of the Croatian Republic but now occupied by the Serbs and cutting the Croats' Dalmatian coastline in two. We also know that the great powers will not moderate these brewing conflicts: on the contrary, just as they have already done, they will be busy fanning the flames.

In the Middle East, peace is now in fashion. It won't last: fashions pass quickly, and there is no shortage of potential conflicts. The PLO, which will now be policing the territories that Israel has "granted" autonomy, must now confront the competition of the Hamas movement. Yasser Arafat's organisation is itself divided: its different factions, maintained by different Arab states, is bound to tear itself apart as the conflicts sharpen among these states themselves, now that the anti-Israeli "Palestinian cause" which once held them together has disappeared. Syria's grudging acceptance of the Washington agreement has not solved the problem of the Golan. Iraq is still ostracized. The Kurdish nationalists have not given up their demands in Irak and Turkey ... All these sources of conflict only sharpen the appetites of the great powers, which are always ready to discover a new "humanitarian" cause which just happens to correspond to their imperialist interest.

Nor are potential conflicts limited to the Middle East and the Balkans.

In the Caucasus and central Asia, Russia's imperialist appetites (though obviously more limited than in the past) are only adding to the chaos engulfing the old republics of the USSR, and sharpening the ethnic conflicts within them (Abkhazians against Georgians, Armenians against Azeris, etc). And this has not helped reduce the political chaos within Russia's own frontiers, as we can see from the confrontations between YeItsin and the parliament.

In Africa, war has been declared between the one-time allies of the Western bloc: "If we want to take the lead in the evolving world situation (. .. ) then we must be ready to invest in Africa as much as in other areas of the world" (Clinton, quoted in Jeune Afrigue);"Since the end of the cold war, we no longer have to align our positions in Africa with the French" (a US diplomat quoted in the same review). In other words: "If the French get in our way in the Balkans then we won't hesitate to go poaching in their African reserves". The Franco-US confrontation has already begun through their rival politicians or armies in Liberia, Ruanda, Togo, the Cameroons, the Congo and Angola. In Somalia, it is Italy which now finds itself in the anti-American front line (with France not far behind), and this in the framework of a "humanitarian" operation under the flag of that symbol of peace, the UN.

This list is neither exhaustive nor definitive. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, and so the inevitable disappearance of the Western bloc, have eliminated - for now - the threat of a third world war. Instead, they have opened a real Pandora's box. Henceforth, the law of "every man for himself' will more and more hold sway, even if new alliances appear in the far-off and uncertain perspective of a new division of the world into two blocs. But these alliances are themselves shaky, since countries which are no longer under the threat of the "Evil Empire" have no interest in increasing the power of a stronger ally. When a friend's arms are too strong, an embrace may stifle me! France, for example, has no interest in seeing its German accomplice become a Mediterranean power by laying hands on Croatia and Slovenia. Still more significant, Britain, despite being the US' most long-standing ally, has no interest in encouraging the latter's game in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, which it still considers to some extent a "Mare Nostrum" thanks to its positions in Gibraltar, Cyprus, and Malta.

In fact, we are witnessing a complete overthrow of the dynamic of imperialist tensions. In the past, when the world was divided into two blocs, anything which strengthened the bloc leader was good for its henchmen. Today, anything that reinforces the strongest powers is likely to prove bad for its weaker allies.

This is why the US set-back in the Balkans, which owes a lot to its British "friend", cannot simply be interpreted as a policy error by the Clinton team. In fact, the US is faced with a kind of vicious circle: the more they try to assert their authority to draw their "allies" closer, the more these same allies will try to escape from this stifling tutelage. In particular, although the demonstration and use of its massive military superiority is a trump card for US imperialism, it is also a card which tends to turn against its own interests, by encouraging a still greater indiscipline amongst its "allies". But although brute force is no longer capable of imposing "world order", there is no alternative in a system which is plunging deeper and deeper into crisis, and it will be used increasingly.

This absurdity is a tragic symbol of what the capitalist mode of production has become: a rotting society, sinking into a barbarism of chaos, wars, and slaughter.

FM, 27 September 93

In the summer of 1993, the crisis of the European Monetary System (EMS) highlighted the acceleration of some of the world economy's most important and deep-seated tendencies. These events have revealed the extent of artificial and destructive practices such as massive speculation; they have laid bare the power of the tendency to "look after number one" which is setting nations against each other. And in doing so, they have shown what will be the immediate future for capitalism: a future stamped with the mark of degeneration, decomposition and self-destruction.

These monetary upheavals are merely the superficial expressions of a far more dramatic underlying reality: capitalism's growing inability, as a system, to overcome its own contradictions. For the working class, and for the exploited classes all over the planet, this means the worst economic attack since the end of World War II, in terms of massive unemployment, the reduction of real wages, the fall in the "social wage", and so on.

"The speculators are burying Europe (...) The West is on the verge of disaster". These were the comments of Maurice Allais, a Nobel Prize winner in economics[1] on the events leading to the virtual disintegration of the EMS in July 1993. Such an eminent defender of the established order could hardly consider his system's economic difficulties as anything other than the result of the activity of elements "outside" the capitalist system: on this occasion, "the speculators". But the degree of economic disaster is at such a point that it has forced even the most obtuse bourgeois to a minimum of lucidity, if only to realise just how bad the
situation has become.

Three quarters of the planet (the "Third World", the ex -Soviet bloc) is not "on the verge of disaster", but right in the middle of it. The West, the last bastion, if not of prosperity then at least of non-collapse, is taking the plunge in its turn. For three years, powers like the United States, Canada, and Great Britain have been sinking into the longest and deepest recession since the war. The economic "recovery" greeted by the "experts" in the US on the grounds of renewed growth in GD P (3.2 % in the second half of 1992) has deflated since the beginning of 1993, with 0.7% growth during the first quarter, and 1.6% during the second, in other words virtual stagnation (the "experts" were expecting at least 2.3 % for the second quarter). The "American locomotive", which powered the Western recovery after the recessions of 1974-75 and 1980-82, is running out of steam even before it has begun to draw the train. As for Germany and Japan, the West's two other great economic poles, both are falling into recession in their turn. By May 1993, industrial production had fallen, year on year, by 3.6% in Japan, and by 8.3 % in Germany.

This was the backdrop for the crisis in the EMS, the second in less than a year[2]. Under the pressure of a worldwide tidal wave of speculation, the governments of the EEC were forced to abandon their commitment to keeping their currencies linked with stable exchange rates. By extending the "floor" and "ceiling" from 5 % to 30 % variation, they in effect reduced the agreement to mere verbiage.

Although these events take place within the special sphere of finance capital, they are nonetheless a product of the real crisis of capital. They are indicative, in at least three important ways, of the fundamental tendencies determining the world economy.

Unprecedented development of speculation, trafficking, and corruption

The size of the speculative forces that shook the EMS is a major characteristic of the present period. During the 1980's, speculative capital poured into everything from stocks and shares to property and art. As the 1990's began, many of these speculative values began to collapse, and capital has had to seek a refuge in speculation on the money markets. It has been estimated that on the eve of the EMS crisis, monetary speculation had reached $1,000 billion a day, the equivalent of one year's British GNP, and forty times greater than the flow of money corresponding to commercial payments! This is no longer an affair of a few rich and unscrupulous men ready to take risks in search of quick profits. The entire ruling class, led by its banks and states, is indulging in this artificial activity, which is totally sterile from the view-point of real wealth. They do so, not because this is the easiest way to make a profit, but because there is less and less possibility of investing capital profitably in the real world of trade and industry. The recourse to speculative profit is above all an expression of a difficulty in realising real profit.

This is also why capital's economic life is more and more infected with the most degenerate forms of illicit trade and generalized political corruption. The turnover of the world drugs trade has reached the same level as the trade in oil. The convulsions of the Italian political classes reveal the extent of the profits that can be made from corruption and all kinds of fraudulent deals.

Some radical bourgeois moralists deplore their ageing democracies' increasingly raddled image. They would like to rid capitalism of the "speculating vultures", the drug dealers and the corrupt politicians. Claude Julien, editor of the very serious Monde Diplomatique[3] has suggested, quite seriously that the democratic governments should" Sterilize the enormous financial profits produced by illegal trade, make it impossible to launder dirty money, by putting an end to banking secrecy, and eliminating tax havens".

Because they cannot imagine for a moment that there could exist a form of social organisation other than capitalism, these defenders of the system think that the worst aspects of present-day society could be eliminated with a few energetic laws. They think that they are dealing with curable ills, when in fact they are confronted with generalized cancer: the same kind of cancer that destroyed the decadent society of ancient Rome; a degeneration that will only disappear with the destruction of the society itself.

Capitalism forced to cheat its own laws

The inability of the EMS countries to maintain a real monetary stability expresses the system's growing inability to live in accordance by its own elementary rules. To understand the importance of the failure of the EMS, it is useful to remind ourselves why the EMS was created.

Money is one of the most important instruments of capitalist circulation. It provides a measure for exchange, of preserving and accumulating the value of previous sales in order to be able to buy in the future. It makes possible the exchange of the most varied commodities, whatever their nature and origin, by providing a universal equivalent value. International trade requires international money: sterling played this role until World War I, and has since been replaced by the dollar. But this is not enough. In order to buy and sell, and to make use of credit, different national currencies must trade "reliably", sufficiently constantly not to upset the entire exchange mechanism.

If there are not a minimum of rules respected in this domain, the results are felt throughout the economy. How is it possible to trade if nobody knows whether the price of a commodity will remain the same between the moment of placing the order and the moment of delivery? When currencies fluctuate widely, it is possible for a profitable sale to be transformed, in a matter of months, into a loss.

Today, international currency insecurity has reached such a point that we are seeing the resurgence of the most archaic form of exchange: barter, in other words the direct exchange of commodities without having recourse to money as an intermediary.

There are various ways of cheating with the monetary system in order to escape, at least temporarily, from the constraints of the law of capital. There is one today, which is gaining a special importance: what the economists like to embellish with the name "competitive devaluation". This is a way of "cheating" with the most elementary laws of capitalist competition: instead of improving productivity to win market share, a nation's capitalists devalue their currency. They therefore reduce the prices of their products on the world market. Instead of going through the difficult and complex business of reorganizing the productive apparatus, instead of investing in increasingly costly machinery to ensure an ever more effective exploitation of labour power, they need only let their exchange rate fall. Financial manipulation takes the place of real productivity. A successful devaluation can even allow a national capital to penetrate the markets of other more productive capitalists with their own commodities.

The EMS was an attempt to limit this kind of practice, which transformed all commercial "understanding" into a game for dupes. Its failure expresses capitalism's inability to ensure a minimum of rigour in a crucial domain.

But this lack of rigour, this inability to respect its own rules, is neither temporary, nor specific to the international money market. For 25 years, capitalism has been trying to "free" itself in every domain from its own constraints, its own stifling laws, often by using the apparatus in charge of its legality (state capitalism). During the first post-reconstruction recession, in 1967 it invented the "special drawing rights", which in fact were nothing but the ability of the great powers to print money on the international level, without any other backing than governments' promises. In 1972, the USA got rid of the constraint of the dollar's convertibility into gold, and of the monetary system established at Bretton Woods after the war. During the 1970s, monetary rigour gave way to inflationary policies, budgetary rigour to chronic budget deficits tight credit to unlimited, and unbacked, loans. The 1980s continued the same trend with the politics of so-called "Reaganomics , the explosion of credit and state budget deficits. Between 1974 and 1992, the overall public debt of OECD states rose from an average 35% of GDP to 65%. In countries such as Belgium and Italy, the state debt was greater than 100% of GDP. In Italy, the interest on this debt is greater than industry's entire wage bill.            .

For 25 years, capitalism has survived its crisis by cheating with its own mechanism. But this has changed none of the fundamental reasons for the crisis. It has merely succeeded in undermining its very foundations, and piling up new difficulties, new sources of chaos and paralysis.

The growing tendency to "look after number one"

The EMS crisis has really highlighted the intensification of capital's centrifugal tendencies: "every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost". The economic crisis endlessly exacerbates the antagonisms between every fraction of capital, both nationally and internationally. The economic alliances between capitalists are merely temporary agreements between sharks to confront other sharks. They are constantly threatened by the allies' tendency to devour each other. Behind the EMS crisis looms the development of all-out trade war: a merciless, self-destructive war, but one which no capitalist can escape.

The complaints of those who, whether cynically or unconsciously, sow illusions as to the possibility of a harmonious capitalism, can do nothing about it: "We have to disarm the economy. It is urgent that we ask the businessmen to abandon their generals' and colonels' uniform (...) The G7would do itself a favour by setting up, at its next meeting in Naples, a "Committee for World economic disarmament?"[4]. He might as well ask the summit of the seven main Western capitalist nations to form a committee for the abolition of capitalism.

Competition is part of capitalism's very soul, and always has been. Today it is merely being exacerbated in the extreme. This does not mean that no counter-tendency exists. The war of all against all encourages the formation, willy-nilly, of indispensable alliances. The efforts of the 12 EEC countries to ensure a minimum of economic cooperation against their American and Japanese competitors were not just bluff. But the reassure of the economic crisis, and the resulting sharpening of trade conflicts, these efforts already, and will increasingly, come up against more and more insurmountable internal contradictions.

Neither businessmen nor governments can "abandon their generals' and colonels' uniform", any more than capitalism can be transformed into a system of economic harmony and cooperation. Only the revolutionary overcoming of this decomposing system can rid humanity of the absurd and self-destructive anarchy that it is suffering.

A future of unemployment, destruction, and poverty

War destroys material productive forces with fire and steel. The economic crisis destroys the productive forces by paralyzing them. In 25 years of crisis, whole regions like the north in Great Britain or France, or around Hamburg in Germany, have been abandoned, littered with closed-down factories and shipyards, devoured by rust and desolation. For the last two years, the governments of the EEC have been conducting a program to reduce Europe's cultivated land by 25%, because of a crisis of over-production.

War destroys men physically, both soldiers and civilians; the dead are mostly the exploited - workers or peasants. The economic crisis unleashes the scourge of mass unemployment. It reduces populations to misery, through unemployment or the threat of it. It spreads despair among today's generation, and blights the future of those to come. In the under-developed countries, it takes on the form of a veritable genocide by hunger and disease: the major part of the African continent has been abandoned to death by famine and epidemic, to desertification in the real sense of the term.

Ever since the late 60's, which marked the end of the prosperity due to post-war reconstruction, unemployment has gone on increasing all over the world. Its development has been uneven from one region or country to another. There have been periods of rapid increase (the open recessions) and periods of respite. But the general direction has never wavered. With the new recession that began at the end of the 1980's, it has reached unprecedented proportions.

The countries which were the first hit by the new recession (the USA, Canada, the UK) are still waiting for the recovery in employment, which was announced three years ago. In the EEC, unemployment is growing at the rate of 4 million a year (20 million unemployed are forecast for the end of 1993,24 million for the end of 1994). It is as if, in one year, every job in a country like Austria were to disappear. Between January and May 1993, there were 1200 more unemployed every day in France, 1400 more in Germany (and this is only according to official statistics, which systematically under-estimate the real unemployment figures).

In branches of industry which had supposedly been "slimmed" (to use the cynical term of the ruling class), new bloodlettings are announced: the EEC steel industry, which has already been reduced to 400,000 jobs, plans a further 70,000 redundancies. IBM, the model company of the last 30 years, has not stopped "slimming", and is planning 80,000 more job losses. The German car industry plans to lose 100,000 jobs.

The working class of the most industrialised countries, and especially in Europe, has never seen such violent or widespread attacks.

The European governments do not hide their alarm. Jacques Delors, president of the EEC, speaks for its governments when he warns of the danger of a forthcoming social explosion. Bruno Trentin, a leader of the main Italian union (the CGIL) who last autumn was hissed and booed by angry workers demonstrating against the austerity measures imposed by the government with the help of the unions, sums up the fears of the Italian bourgeoisie:

"The economic crisis is such, and the financial situation of the great industrial groups is so desperate, that we can only fear social unrest next autumn" (La Tribune, 28th July 1993).

The ruling class is right to fear the workers' struggles that the aggravation of the economic crisis will provoke. It is not often that objective reality has so clearly demonstrated that it is no longer possible to fight the effects of the capitalist crisis without destroying capitalism itself. The system's degree of decomposition, and the gravity of the consequences of its continued existence are such that its revolutionary overthrow will appear more and more as the only "realistic" way out for the exploited.

RV

The Backdrop of History

In the previous article in this series (IR73) we saw that Marx and his tendency, having come to terms with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and the onset of a new period of capitalist growth, embarked upon a project of deep theoretical research aimed at uncovering the real dynamic of the capitalist mode of production, and thus the real basis for its eventual replacement by a communist social order.

As early as 1844, Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and Engels in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, had begun to investigate - and to criticise from a proletarian standpoint - both the economic foundations of capitalist society, and the economic theories of the capitalist class, generally known as 'political economy'. The understanding that communist theory had to be built on the solid ground of an economic analysis of bourgeois society already constituted a decisive break with the utopian conceptions of communism which had been prevalent in the workers' movement hitherto, since it meant that the denunciation of the suffering and alienation brought about by the capitalist system of production was no longer restricted to a purely moral objection to its injustices; rather, the horrors of capitalism were analysed as the inevitable expressions of its economic and social structure, and could therefore only be done away with through the revolutionary struggle of a social class which had a material interest in reorganizing society.

In the years between 1844 and 1848, the 'marxist' fraction developed a clearer understanding of the inner workings of the capitalist system, a more historically dynamic conception which identified capitalism as the last in a long series of class-divided societies, and a system whose fundamental contradictions would eventually lead to its downfall and so pose the necessity and the possibility of the new communist society (see the article in IR72). However, the prime task facing revolutionaries during that phase was to construct a communist political organisation and intervene in the enormous social upheavals which shook Europe in the year 1848. In short, the need for an active political combat took precedence over the work of theoretical elaboration. By contrast, with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, and the ensuing fight against the activist and immediatist illusions that led to the demise of the Communist League, it became essential to take a step back from pure immediacy and to develop a more profound, long-term view of the destiny of capitalist society.

Political economy - and beyond

For more than a decade, Marx therefore threw himself once again into the vast theoretical project he had set himself in the early 1840s. This was the period where he worked long hours in the British Museum, studying not only the classical political economists but a vast mass of information on the contemporary operations of capitalist society: the factory system, money, credit, international trade; not only the early history of capitalism, but the history of pre-capitalist civilisations and societies as well. The initial aim of this research was the one he had set himself a decade before: to produce a monumental work on 'Economics', which itself would only be part of a more global work dealing, among other things, with more directly political issues and the history of socialist thought. But as Marx wrote in a letter to Wedemeyer (MEW, XXVII, 486), "the stuff I am working on has so many ramifications", that the deadline for the work on Economics receded constantly, first by weeks, then by years; and in fact it was never to be completed: only the first volume of Capital was really finished by Marx. The bulk of the material deriving from this period either had to be completed by Engels and was not published till after Marx's death (the next three volumes of Capital), or, as in the case of the Grundrisse (the 'Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, rough draft'), never passed the stage of a collection of elaborate notebooks that were not available in the west until the 1950s, and were not fully translated into English until 1973. Nevertheless, though this was a period of great poverty and personal hardship for Marx and his family, it was also the most fruitful period in his life as far as the more theoretical side of his work is concerned. And it is no accident that so much of the gigantic output of those years was dedicated to the study of political economy, because this was the key to evolving a really scientific understanding of the structure and movement of the capitalist mode of production.

In its classical form, political economy was one of the most advanced expressions of the revolutionary bourgeoisie:

"Historically, it made its appearance as an integral part of the new science of humanity, created by the bourgeoisie in the course of its revolutionary struggle to install this new socio-economic formation. Political economy was thus the realistic complement to the great philosophical, moral, aesthetic, psychological, juridical and political commotion of the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' during which the spokesmen of the ascendant class expressed for the first time the new bourgeois consciousness, which corresponded to the intervening changes in the real conditions of existence" (Karl Korsch, Karl Marx, Editions Champ Libre, p103).

As such, political economy had been capable, up to a certain point, of analysing the real movement of bourgeois society: of seeing it as a totality rather than a sum of fragments, and of grasping its underlying relations instead of being deceived by surface phenomena. In particular, the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo had come close to laying bare the secret at the very heart of the system: the origin and significance of value, the 'worth' of commodities. Championing the 'productive classes' of society against the increasingly parasitic and idle nobility, these economists of the English school were able to see that the value of a commodity was essentially determined by the amount of human labour embodied within it. But again, only up to a point. Since it expressed the viewpoint of the new exploiting class, bourgeois political economy inevitably had to mystify reality, to conceal the exploitative nature of the new mode of production. And this tendency to apologise for the new order came to the fore the more bourgeois society revealed its inbuilt contradictions, above all the social contradiction between capital and labour, and the economic contradictions that periodically plunged the system into crisis. Already during the 1820s and 30s, both the class struggle of the workers, and the crisis of overproduction, had made a definite appearance on the historical scene. Between Adam Smith and Ricardo there is already a "reduction in the theoretical vista and the beginnings of a final sclerosis" (Korsch, op cit, p 106), since the latter is less concerned with examining the system as a totality. But later economic 'theorists' of the bourgeoisie are less and less able to contribute anything useful to the understanding of their own economy. This degenerative process has, as with all aspects of bourgeois thought, reached its apogee in the decadent period of capitalism. For most schools of economists today, the idea that human labour has something to do with value is dismissed as a laughable anachronism; it goes without saying, however, that these same economists are utterly baffled by the increasingly evident breakdown of the modern world economy.

Marx took the same approach to classical political economy as he did to Hegel's philosophy: by treating it from the proletarian and revolutionary standpoint, he was able to assimilate its most important contributions while going beyond its limits. He was thus able to demonstrate:

 - that although this primary fact is veiled in the capitalist production process, in contrast to previous class societies, capitalism is nonetheless a system of class exploitation and can be nothing else. This was the essential message of his conception of surplus value;

 - that capitalism, despite its incredibly expansive character, its drive to submit the entire planet to its laws, was no less a historically transient mode of production than Roman slavery or mediaeval feudalism; that a society based on universal commodity production was inevitably condemned, by the very logic of its inner workings, to ultimate decline and collapse;

 - that communism, therefore, was a material possibility brought about by the unprecedented development of the productive forces by capitalism itself; it was also a necessity if humanity was to escape the devastating consequences of capitalism's economic contradictions.

But if the core of Marx's work during this period is the study, sometimes in the most astonishing detail, of the laws of capital, the work as a whole was not restricted to this. Marx had inherited from Hegel the understanding that the particular and the concrete - in this case capitalism - could only be understood in its historical totality, that is, against the vast backdrop of all the forms of human society since the earliest days of the species. In the 1844 EPM Marx had said that communism was the "solution to the riddle of history". Communism is the immediate heir of capitalism; but just as the individual child is also a product of all the generations that have gone before him, so it can be said that "the entire movement of history is the act of genesis" of communist society (ibid). This is why a good deal of Marx's writings about capital also contain long excursions both into 'anthropological' questions - questions about the characteristics of man in general - and into the modes of production that preceded bourgeois society. This is particularly true of the Grundrisse; on one level a 'rough draft' of Capital, it is also a prologue to a more wide-ranging inquiry in which Marx deals at length not only with the critique of political economy as such, but also with some of the anthropological or 'philosophical' issues raised in the 1844 EPM, most notably the relationship between man and nature, and the problem of alienation. It also contains Marx's most elaborate presentation of the various pre-capitalist modes of production. But all these issues also find their way into Capital, particularly the first volume, if in a more distilled and concentrated form.

Before turning, therefore, to Marx's analysis of capitalist society in particular, we intend to look at the more general and historical themes that he deals with in the Grundrisse and Capital, since they are no less essential to Marx's understanding of the perspective and physiognomy of communism. 

Man, nature, and alienation

We have already (see IR 70) mentioned that there is a school of thought, and it sometimes includes genuine followers of Marx, according to which Marx's mature work demonstrates his loss of interest in, or even repudiation of, certain lines of inquiry which he had developed in his earlier work, particularly the 1844 or 'Paris' EPM: the question of man's "species being", the relationship between man and nature, and the problem of alienation. The argument is that such conceptions are tied to the 'Feuerbachian', humanistic, and even utopian view of communism which Marx held prior to the definitive development of the theory of historical materialism. While we don't deny that there are certain 'philosophical' hangovers in his Paris period, we have already argued (IR 69) that Marx's adherence to the communist movement was conditioned upon the adoption of a position that took him beyond the utopian socialists and onto a proletarian and materialist standpoint. The concept of man, of his "species being", in the EPM is not at all the same as Feuerbach's "dumb genus" criticised in the Theses on Feuerbach. It is not an abstract, individualized religion of humanity, but already a conception of social man, of man as the being who makes himself through collective labour. And when we turn to the Grundrisse and Capital, we find that this definition is deepened and clarified rather than rejected. Certainly, in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx categorically rejects any idea of a static human essence and insists that "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations". But this does not mean that man 'as such' is a non-reality or that he is an empty page that is moulded entirely and absolutely by each particular form of social organisation. Such a view would make it impossible for historical materialism to approach human history as a totality; you would end up with a series of fragmented shots of each type of society, with nothing to connect them into an overall picture. The approach taken to this question in the Grundrisse and Capital is very far from this sociological reductionism; instead it is founded upon the vision of man as a species whose unique characteristic is its capacity to transform itself and its environment through the labour process and through history.

The 'anthropological' question, the question of generic man, of what distinguishes man from the other animal species, is taken up in the first volume of Capital. It begins with a definition of labour, because it is through labour that man makes himself. The labour process is "the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase" (part III, chap VII, p 179, 'The labour process'). "Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of the body, in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal ... We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement" (ibid, p 174).

In the Grundrisse, the social character of this "exclusively human" form of activity is also stressed: "The fact that this need on the part of one can be satisfied by the product of the other, and vice versa, and that the one is capable of producing the object of the need of the other, and that each confronts the other as owner of the object of the other's need, this proves that each of them reaches beyond his own particular need etc as a human being, and that they relate to one another as human beings; that their common species-being is acknowledged by all. It does not happen elsewhere - that elephants produce for tigers, or animals for other animals..." (Grundrisse, Pelican Marx Library, 1973, p243). These definitions of man as the animal which alone possesses a self-conscious and purposive life-activity, who produces universally rather than one-sidedly, are strikingly similar to the formulations contained in the EPM [1].

Again, as in the EPM, these definitions assume that man is part of nature: in the above passage from Capital, man is "one of nature's own forces", while the Grundrisse uses exactly the same terminology as the Paris texts: nature is man's "real body" (p 542). But where the later works represent an advance over the earlier one is in their deeper insight into the historical evolution of the relationship between man and the rest of nature:

"It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital" (Grundrisse, p 489)

This process of separation between man and nature is viewed in a profoundly dialectical manner by Marx.

On the one hand, it is the awakening of man's "slumbering powers", the power to transform himself and the world around him. This is a general characteristic of the labour process: history as the gradual, if uneven, development of humanity's productive capacities. But this development was always held back in the social formations that preceded capital, where the limitations of a natural economy also kept man limited to the cycles of nature. Capitalism, by contrast, creates a wholly new potential for overcoming this subordination:

"Hence the great civilising influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature-worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces " (Grundrisse, p 409-10).

On the other hand, capital's conquest of nature, its reduction of nature to a mere object, has the most contradictory consequences. As the last passage continues:

"But from the fact that capital posits every limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension".

Having lived through 80 years of capitalist decadence, of an epoch in which capital has definitely become the greatest barrier to its own expansion, we can appreciate the full validity of Marx's prognosis here. The greater capitalism's development of the productive forces, the more universal its reign over the planet, the greater and more destructive are the crises and catastrophes that it brings in its wake: not only the directly economic, social and poetical crises, but also the 'ecological' crises which signify the threat of a complete break-down of man's "metabolic exchange with nature".

We can see plainly that, contrary to many would-be radical critics of marxism, Marx's recognition of capital's "civilising influence" was never an apologia for capital. The historical process in which man has separated himself from the rest of nature is also the chronicle of man's self-estrangement, and this has reached its apogee, or nadir, in bourgeois society, in the wage labour relation which the Grundrisse defines as "the most extreme form of alienation" (p 515). It's this which can indeed often make it seem as though capitalist 'progress', which ruthlessly subordinates all human needs to the ceaseless expansion of production, is more like a regression in comparison to previous epochs:

"Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production ... In bourgeois economics - and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds - this complete working out of the human content appears as a complete emptying out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end" (Grundrisse, p 487-8). 

And yet this final triumph of alienation also means the advent of the conditions for the full realisation of humanity's creative powers, freed both from the inhumanity of capital and the restrictive limitations of pre-capitalist social relations:

"In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc....? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, ie the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?" (ibid).

This dialectical view of history  remains a puzzle and a scandal to all defenders of the bourgeois standpoint, which is forever stuck in an 'either-or' dilemma between a blanket apology for 'progress' and a nostalgic longing for an idealized past:

"In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to this original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as its legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end" (Grundrisse p 162).

In all these passages we can see that what applies to the problematic of 'generic man' and his relationship to nature also applies to his concept of alienation: far from abandoning the basic concepts formulated in his earlier work, the 'mature' Marx enriches them by situating them in their overall historical dynamic. And in the second part of this article we will see how, in the descriptions of the future society contained here and there throughout the Grundrisse and Capital, Marx still considers that the overcoming of alienation and the conquest of a really human life-activity remains at the core of the whole communist project.

From the old community to the new

This contradictory 'decline' from the apparently more developed individual of earlier times to the estranged ego of bourgeois society expresses another facet of Marx's historical dialectic: the dissolution of primordial communal forms by the evolution of commodity relations. This is a theme that runs through the whole of the Grundrisse, but it is also summarized in Capital. It is a crucial element in Marx's response to the view of mankind contained in bourgeois political economy, and thus in his adumbration of the communist perspective.

In effect, one of the Grundrisse's persistent criticisms of bourgeois political economy is the way it "mythologically identifies itself with the past" (p 106), turning its own particular categories into absolutes of human existence. This is what is sometimes called the Robinson Crusoe view of history: the isolated individual, not social man, as its starting point; private property as the original and essential form of property; trade, rather than collective labour, as the key to understanding the generation of wealth. Thus, on the very opening page of the Grundrisse, Marx opens fire on such "Robinsonades", and insists that "the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity" (p 84).

Thus, the isolated individual is above all a historical product, and in particular a product of the bourgeois mode of production. The communal forms of property and production were not only the original social forms, in very primitive epochs; they also persist in all the class-divided modes of production which succeeded the dissolution of primitive classless society. This is most obvious in the 'Asiatic' mode of production, in which a central state apparatus appropriates the surplus of village communes who otherwise carry on the immemorial traditions of tribal life -  a fact which Marx takes as "the key to the secret of the unchanging nature of Asiatic societies, an unchanging nature in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asian states, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty" (Capital, I, chapter XIV, section 4, p 338). In the Grundrisse, Marx insists on the way that the Asiatic form "hangs on most tenaciously and for the longest time" (p486), a point taken up by Rosa Luxemburg in her Accumulation of Capital, where she shows how difficult it was for capital and commodity relations to drag the base units of these societies away from the security of their communal relations.

In slave and feudal societies, the ancient community was far more thoroughly pulverized by the development of commodity relations and of private property - a fact which goes a long way towards explaining why slavery and feudalism contained the inner dynamic which could permit the emergence of capitalism, whereas capitalism had to be imposed on Asiatic society 'from the outside'. Nevertheless, important remnants of the communal form can be found at the origin of these formations: the Roman city, for example, arises as a community of kinship groups; feudalism arises not only out of the collapse of Roman slave society but also from the specific characteristics of the 'Germanic' tribal commune; and the tradition of common land was held onto by the peasant classes - very often as a motivating theme of their revolts and insurrections - throughout the mediaeval period. The common characteristic of all these social forms is that they were dominated by natural economy: the production of use value took precedence over the production of exchange value, and it is the development of the latter which is the dissolving agent of the old community:

"Monetary greed, or mania for wealth, necessarily brings with it the decline and fall of the ancient communities (Gemeinwesen). Hence it is the antithesis to them. It is itself the community (Gemeinwesen), and can tolerate none other standing above it. But this presupposes the full development of exchange values, hence a corresponding organisation of society" (Grundrisse, p223).

In all previous societies, "exchange value was not the nexus rerum" but existed at their "interstices" (ibid); and so it is only in capitalist society, where exchange value finally seizes hold of the very heart of the production process, that the ancient Gemeinwesen is finally and completely broken down, to the point where communal life is portrayed as the actual opposite of human nature! It is easy to see how this analysis parallels and reinforces Marx's theory of alienation. 

The importance of this theme of the original community in Marx's work is reflected in the amount of time the founders of historical materialism devoted to it. It had already appeared in the German Ideology in the 1840s; Engels, leaning on the ethnographic studies of Morgan, was to take up the same issue in the 1870s, in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. At the end of his life Marx was again delving deeply into this issue - the little-explored 'Ethnographic Notebooks' stem from this period. It was an essential component of the marxist response to political economy's assumptions about human nature. Far from being essential and unchanging features of human existence, categories such as private property and exchange value were shown to be transient expressions of particular historical epochs. And while the bourgeoisie tried to portray greed for monetary wealth as something fixed in the fundaments of man's being, Marx's historical researches uncovered the essentially social character of the human species. All these discoveries were obviously a powerful argument for the possibility of communism. 

And yet Marx's approach to this question never slides into a romantic nostalgia for the past. The same dialectic is applied here as to the question of man's relationship to nature, since the two questions are really one: in primitive communist society, the individual is buried in the tribe, as the tribe is buried in nature. These social organisms "are founded on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community ... They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in other elements of the popular religions" (Capital, Vol 1, chapter I, section 4, p 84).   

Capitalist society, with its mass of atomised individuals separated and alienated from each other by the domination of the commodity, is thus the polar opposite of the primitive community, the result of a long and contradictory historical process leading from one to the other. But this severing of the umbilical cord that originally bound man to the tribe and to nature is a painful necessity if humanity is to at last live in a society which is at once truly communal and truly individual, a society where the conflict between social and individual needs has been overcome.

Ascent and decadence of social formations

The study of previous social formations is only made possible by the emergence of capitalism:

"Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organisation of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and relations of production  of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along with it...." (Grundrisse, Introduction, p105). At the same time, this understanding of social formations becomes, in the hands of the proletariat, a weapon against capital. As Marx puts in Capital Vol 1, "The categories of bourgeois economy ... are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz, the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production" (chapter I, section 4, p 81). In short, capitalism is only one of a series of social formations that have risen and fallen due to discernible economic and social contradictions. Seen in this historical framework, capitalism, the society of universal commodity production, is not the product of nature but is a "definite, historically determined mode of production", destined to disappear no less than Roman slavery or mediaeval feudalism.

The most succinct and well-known presentation of this overall vision of history appears in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1858 [2]. This short text was a summary not only of the work contained in the Grundrisse, but of the foundations of Marx's entire theory of historical materialism. The passage begins with the basic premises of this theory:

"In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it is their being that determines their consciousness".

This is the materialist conception of history in a nutshell: the movement of history cannot be understood, as it has done hitherto, through the ideas mean have had of themselves, but through studying what underlies these ideas - the processes and social relations through which men produce and reproduce their material life. Having summarized this essential point, Marx then goes on to say:

"At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - what is merely a legal expression of the same thing - with the property relations within the framework of which they have hitherto operated. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. At that point an era of social revolutions begins. With the change in the economic foundation the whole immense superstructure is more slowly or more rapidly transformed".

It is thus a basic axiom of historical materialism that economic formations (in the same text Marx mentions "the Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production" as "progressive epochs of the socio-economic order") necessarily go through periods of ascent, when their social relations are "forms of development" of the productive forces, and periods of decline or decadence, the "era of social revolution", when these same relations turn into "fetters". Restating this point here may seem banal, but it is necessary to do so because there are many elements in the revolutionary movement who lay claim to the method of historical materialism, and yet argue vehemently against the notion of capitalist decadence as defended by the ICC and other proletarian organisations. Such attitudes can be found both among the Bordigist groups and the heirs of the councilist tradition. The Bordigists in particular may concede that capitalism goes through crises of ever increasing magnitude and destructiveness, but reject our insistence that capitalism definitively entered its own epoch of social revolution in 1914. For them this is an innovation not catered for by the 'invariance' of marxism.

These arguments against decadence are to some extent semantic quibbles. Marx did not generally use the phrase "the decadence of capitalism" because he did not consider that this period had yet begun. It is true that during his political career there were times when he and Engels succumbed to an over-optimism about the imminent possibility of revolution: this was particularly true in 1848 (see the articles in IR 72 and 73). And even after revising this prognosis after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, the founders of marxism never quite gave up the hope that the new era would dawn while they were still around to see it. But their political practise throughout their lifetimes was fundamentally based on the recognition that the working class was still building up its forces, its identity, its political programme within a bourgeois society that had not yet completed its historical mission.

Nonetheless, Marx does talk about the periods of the decline, decay or dissolution of the modes of production that preceded capitalism, particularly in the Grundrisse [3]. And there is nothing in his work to suggest that capitalism would be different in any fundamental sense - that it would somehow avoid entering its own period of decline. On the contrary, the revolutionaries of the Second International were basing themselves entirely on Marx's method and anticipations when they proclaimed that the first world war had finally and incontestably opened up the "new epoch" of "capitalism's inner disintegration" as the first congress of the Communist International put it in 1919. As we argue in our introduction to the pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, all the left communist groups who took up the notion of capitalist decadence, from the KAPD to Bilan and Internationalisme, were merely carrying on this 'classical' tradition. As consistent Marxists, they could do no more or less: historical materialism required them to come to a decision as to when capitalism had become a fetter on humanity's productive forces. The swallowing up of generations of accumulated labour in the holocaust of imperialist war settled the question once and for all.

Some of the arguments against the concept of decadence go a bit further than semantics. They may even base themselves on another passage from the Preface, where Marx says that "a social order never perishes before all the productive forces for which it is broadly sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the womb of the old society". According to the anti-decadentists - especially during the 60s and 70s when the total inability of capitalism to develop the so-called third world was not yet as clear as it is today - you could not say that capitalism was decadent until it had developed its capacities to the last drop of workers' sweat, and there were still areas of the world where it had a prospect of growing. Hence the "youthful capitalisms" of the Bordigists and the many impending "bourgeois revolutions" of the councilists.

Given the fact that the 'third world' countries today present us with a horrifying picture of war, famine, disease and disaster, such theories are now largely an embarrassing memory, but there is a basic misunderstanding, an error of method, behind them. To say that a society is in decline is not to say that the productive forces have simply ceased to grow, that they have come to a complete halt. And Marx certainly did not mean to imply that a social system can only give way to another when every single possibility of development has been exhausted. As we can see from the following passage in the Grundrisse, he shows that even in decay a society does not stop moving:

"Considered ideally, the dissolution of a given form of consciousness sufficed to kill a whole epoch. In reality, this barrier to consciousness corresponds to a definite degree of development of the forces of material production and hence of wealth. True, there was not only a development on the old basis, but also a development of this basis itself. The highest development of this basis itself (the flower into which it transforms itself; but it is always this basis, this plant as flower; hence wilting after the flowering and as a consequence of the flowering) is the point at which it is itself worked out, developed, into the form in which it is compatible with the highest development of the forces of production, hence also the richest development of individuals. As soon as this point is reached, the further development appears as decay, and the new development begins from a new basis" (p 541).

The wording is complicated, unpolished: this is very often the problem with reading the Grundrisse. But the conclusion seems limpid enough: the decay of a society is not the end of all movement. Decadence is a movement, but one characterised by a slide towards catastrophe and self-destruction. Can anyone seriously doubt that twentieth century capitalist society, which devotes more productive forces to war and destruction than any previous social formation, and whose continued reproduction is a threat to the continuation of life on Earth, has reached the stage where its "development appears as decay"?

In the second part of this article we will look more closely at the way the 'mature' Marx analysed capitalist social relations, the contradictions inherent in them, and the communist society that was the solution to these contradictions. 

CDW

NOTES

In International Reviews no 71 [31] and no 72 [32] we published the first two articles in this series, in which we demonstrated how the proletarian revolution of October 1917 was the result of the conscious and massive action of the workers, of their political combat against the parties of the bourgeoisie (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries...) who tried to sabotage their struggle and ensnare them in the First World War. We also laid out how in this formidable display of consciousness and combativity the Bolshevik Party had clearly played a vanguard role in the development of class consciousness and was the crucible of this immense revolutionary energy that led towards the destruction of the bourgeoisie state in the insurrection of 24-25 October. Stalinism was not the continuation of this torrent of emancipatory energy, but its brutal executioner, as we have said on numerous occasions[1].

Faced with the degeneration embodied by Stalinism, many workers believe, accepting the lies spread by the bourgeoisie, that the Russian Revolution "rotted from within", that the Bolsheviks just used the Russian workers in order to take power[2]. When the bourgeoisie portrays October, it does no more than apply to the Russian revolution the characteristics that have always made up its politics: swindling and deceiving the masses. However, the course of events leading up to the insurrection of October was driven by the "historic laws" of the proletarian revolution and not by the Machiavellian politics of the bourgeoisie.

"The Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of any great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, breaking down all barriers with an iron hand and placing its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backwards behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution).

If the formidable abundance of experience from February to October 1917 demonstrates to the workers that it is possible to overthrow the bourgeois state, the tragedy of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution teaches us another equally important lesson: the proletarian revolution can only survive by spreading over the whole planet.

The Russian revolution fought with all its might to spread to other countries

"The fate of the revolution in Russia depended fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principle and the bold scope of their policies" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution).

In fact, from 1914 when the First World War made it clear that the period of capitalism's decadence had begun, the Bolsheviks were in the vanguard of revolutionaries, when they demonstrated that the alternative to world war can only be the world revolution of the proletariat.

With this firmly internationalist orientation, Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw in the Russian Revolution "...only the first stage of the proletarian revolution which will inevitably arise as a consequence of the war."

But the Russian Revolution did not passively leave its destiny to the development of the proletarian revolution in other countries. Despite all the difficulties it confronted in Russia, it continually took the initiative to extend the revolution. In fact the state which arose from the revolution was seen as the first step towards the International Republic of Soviets, delineated not by the artificial frontiers of the capitalist nations, but by class frontiers. For example, systematic propaganda was carried out towards war prisoners, in order to incite them to join the international revolution, and those who wanted to could become Soviet citizens[3].

Out of this propaganda arose the "Social Democratic Organisation of Prisoners of War in Russia". This organisation called on the workers of Germany, Austria, Turkey etc to rise up in order to put an end to the war and to spread the revolution.

Germany was the pivotal point for the extension of the revolution and it was towards the German workers that all the energies of the Russian revolution were poured. As soon as an embassy was installed in Berlin (April 1918), it was transformed into a kind of general headquarters of the German revolution. The Russian Ambassador Joffe bought secret information from German functionaries and passed it on to German revolutionaries in order to expose the imperialist policies of the government; he also bought arms for the revolutionaries; tons of revolutionary propaganda were printed in the embassy and every night German revolutionaries surreptitiously went there in order to discuss the preparations for the insurrection.

The priorities of the world revolution led the Russian workers, even though they were suffering from hunger, to sacrifice three train loads of wheat, from their own rations, in order to help the German workers.

It is worth while knowing what it was like to live in Russia during the first moments of the revolution in Germany. When it first began, at an impressive demonstration of workers in front of the Kremlin,

"Tens of thousands of workers burst into a wild cheering. Never have I seen any thing like it again. Until late in the evening workers and Red Army soldiers were filing past. The world revolution had come. The mass of people heard its iron tramp. Our isolation was over" (Radek, quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 3, p104).

Another contribution to this world revolution, although unfortunately delayed, was the first Congress of the Communist International, which took place in Moscow in March 1919. The International understood that:

"Our task is to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, cleanse the movement of the corroding influence of opportunism and social patriotism, and rally the forces of all truly revolutionary parties of the world proletariat. Thus, we will facilitate and hasten the victory of the communist revolution in the entire world" (‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the Whole World').

However, the proletariat was massacred in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Munich, and the Communist International began to make concessions to parliamentarism, trade unionism and national liberation (encapsulated in the so-called "21 conditions"). Similarly the extension of the revolution was now entrusted to the "revolutionary war", which the Bolsheviks, as we will see further on, had rejected when they signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918[4]. In December 1920, the Executive Committee of a CI already on the road to degeneration launched the nefarious slogan of the "United Front", based on a conviction that the European revolution was fading.

The fatalistic logic so common to bourgeois philosophy considers that "one thing leads ... to another". Thus, the Communist International, as well as all the other gigantic efforts of the working class and revolutionaries, is presented to us, from its beginnings, as a preconceived plan by the "Machiavellian" Bolsheviks, as a tool for the defence of the Russian capitalist state. But as we have said this is the logic of the bourgeoisie. For the proletariat by contrast, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International were the result of the defeat of the working class after a furious struggle against the bestial reaction of world capitalism. If it was "only a matter of time" before the revolution stewed in its own juice, as the bourgeoisie tell us today, why then did all the capitalists of the world join together in order to strangle the Russian revolution?

Capitalism lays siege to the Russian revolution

Between 1917 and 1923, i.e. until the failure of the revolutionary efforts of the world proletariat, all of the capitalists united in an international crusade under the slogan "down with Bolshevism". From German imperialism to the Czarist generals and the Western democracies of the Entente, who only a few months previously were entangled in the first world imperialist slaughter, they all signed up for this crusade. This is another essential lesson of October: when the workers' insurrection threatens the existence of capitalism, the exploiters put their differences aside in order to crush the revolution.

German imperialism

The first barrier the extension of the Russian Revolution faced was the siege by the Kaiser's armies. Therefore, it is certain that the Russian revolution, along with the revolutionary wave that arose as a response to the First World War, took place, as Rosa Luxemburg said, in "the most difficult and abnormal conditions" for the development and extension of the revolution, i.e. world war.

Peace was an imperious necessity and as such took first place in the priorities of the revolution. Peace talks began at Brest-Litovsk, on the 19th of November 1917. They were transmitted by radio nightly. Not only for the workers in Russia, but also the prisoners of war and the workers of the entire world. However, this does not mean that the Bolsheviks went to Brest-Litovsk with any confidence in the "peaceful" intentions of German imperialism:

"We conceal from nobody that we do not consider the present capitalist governments capable of a democratic peace. Only the revolutionary struggle of the working masses against their governments can bring Europe near to such a peace. Its full realisation will be assured only by a victorious proletarian revolution in all capitalist countries" (Trotsky, cited in E. H. Carr, op. cit. Vol. 3, page 41).

At the beginning of 1918 news began to arrive of strikes and mutinies in Germany, Austria, and Hungry[5], which encouraged the Bolsheviks to prolong the negotiations; but in the end these uprising were crushed. This led Lenin, again in a minority in the Bolshevik Party, to defend the necessity to sign the peace treaty as soon as possible. The extension of the revolution, for which they struggled dauntlessly, should not be confused with the "revolutionary war" that the Left Communists put forward[6]. It depended on the maturation of the revolution in Germany:

"It is fully admissible that with such premises not only would it be "convenient", but absolutely obligatory to accept the possibility of defeat and the loss of Soviet power. Nevertheless, it is clear that these premises do not exist. The German Revolution is maturing, but clearly it still has not broken out. It is obvious that we would not help but would block this process of maturation in Germany if "we accepted the possibility of the loss of Soviet power". This would help reaction in Germany, it would unleash difficulties for the socialist movement in Germany, we would divide the socialist movement of the proletarian and semi-proletarian masses of Germany who have still not incorporated socialism and who would be frightened by the defeat of Soviet Russia, in the same way that the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 scared the English workers" (Lenin, Selected Works).

This is the dilemma that exists in a bastion where the proletariat has taken power, but is momentarily isolated, since the revolution has not been spread by victorious insurrections in other countries. To cede the bastion or to negotiate, and therefore give way in front of superior military force, in order to try to obtain a respite and maintain the revolutionary bastion as a support for the world revolution?. Rosa Luxemburg, who certainly did not agree with the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, summed up with tremendous clarity how the struggle of the German proletariat was the only possible way of unblocking this contradiction, in a way which was favourable to the revolution:

"The whole assumption of the battle being carried out for peace by the Russians rests on the tactical hypothesis that the revolution in Russia will be the signal for the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat in the West ... In this case only and undoubtedly will the Russian Revolution have been the prelude to a generalized peace. Until now nothing like this has happened. The Russian Revolution, apart from a few valiant efforts by the Italian proletariat (the general strike of the 22nd August in Turin) has been abandoned by the proletarians of all countries ... however, the class politics of the international proletariat, by their nature and essence, can only be realised internationally ..."

(‘Historical Responsibility', Spartacus Letters no 18. Published in French in Rosa Luxemburg: Contre La Guerre Par La Revolution pages 128-129).

In the end, on the 19th of February, the German High Command suddenly renewed military operations ("The leap of this wild beast is very quick" Lenin said). Within a few weeks the German forces were at the gates of Petrograd and the Russian government finally had to accept peace on even worse conditions: the German armies occupied the former Baltic provinces in the Spring of 1918, the greater part of Byelorussia, all the Ukraine and the North of the Caucasus and later, in contradiction with its own agreement at Brest-Litovsk, the Crimea and the Trans-Caucasus (except Baku and Turkestan).

Along with the Italian Communist Left[7], we don't think that the peace of Brest-Litovsk represented a backward step for the revolution, but that it was imposed by the contradiction between the maintenance of the proletarian bastion and the extension of the revolution. The solution to this problem was not to be found at the negotiating table, nor at the military front, but in the response of the world proletariat. It was precisely when the capitalists managed to defeat the revolutionary wave that the Russian government accepted the conventional "foreign policy" of the capitalist states and signed the Rapallo agreement of April 1922, which neither in its form (a secret treaty), nor of course in its content (military aid from the Russian army for the German government) had anything to do with Brest-Litovsk or with the revolutionary politics of the proletariat. When the CI, in the full process of degeneration, called on the German workers to make a desperate action in October 1923, the arms used by the German state to massacre the workers had been sold to them by the Russian government.

Continual harassment by the "Western democracies"

The allies of the Entente, the "advanced democracies of the West" spared no effort in their aim of drowning the Russian revolution. In the Ukraine, in Finland, in the Baltic countries, in Bessarabia, Britain and France set up regimes which supported the counter-revolutionary White armies.

Not content with this, they also decided to directly intervene in Russia. Japanese troops disembarked at Vladivostok on the 3rd of April. French, British and American detachments arrived later:

"From the beginning of the November (1917) revolution the Entente powers took the side of the Russian counter-revolutionary parties and governments. With the help of the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, they have annexed Siberia, the Urals, the coasts of European Russia, the Caucasus, and part of Turkestan. They are stealing timber, petroleum, manganese, and other raw materials from these annexed territories. With the help of mercenary Czechoslovak bands they stole the gold reserves of the Russian empire. Directed by the British diplomat Lockhart, British and French spies organized the bombing of bridges and destruction of railways and tried to cut off food supplies. The Entente supplied money, weapons, and military aid to the reactionary generals Denikin, Kolchak, and Krasnov, who had hanged and shot thousands of workers and peasants in Rostov, Yuzovka (Donetsk), Novorossiak, Omsk and elsewhere" (‘The International Situation and the Policy of the Entente', First Congress of the Communist International, in Founding the Communist International page 218).

At the beginning of 1919, which is to say just as the German revolution broke out, Russia was completely isolated from the outside and confronted with one of the most intense periods of activity by the troops of the Western "democracies", as well as the White armies. To the troops sent by the capitalists to crush the revolution, the Bolsheviks again proclaimed the necessity for proletarian internationalism:

"You will be fighting not against enemies (ran a leaflet addressed to British and American troops in Archangel) but against working class people like yourselves. We ask you - are you going to crush us? ... Be loyal to your class and refuse to do the dirty work of your masters" (E.H.Carr, op. cit, page 99).

And again the calls of the Bolsheviks (this time in newspapers such as The Call in English or La Lanterne in French) had an effect on the troops sent to fight the revolution: "On the 1st March 1919 a mutiny occurred among French troops ordered to go up the line; several days earlier a British infantry company "refused to go to the Front" and shortly afterwards an American company "refused for a time to return to duty at the Front'" (E.H.Carr, op cit, page 134). In April 1919 French troops and the French fleet had to be withdrawn because of the indignation caused by the execution of Jeanne Labourbe, a Communist militant who had carried out propaganda in favour of fraternization between French and Russian troops. Likewise, British and Italian troops had to be withdrawn because in Britain and Italy workers were demonstrating against the sending of troops or arms to the counter-revolutionary armies. Therefore, the Western democracies were forced to change tactics and instead to use troops of the nations created by them out of the ruins of the old Russian empire as a cordon sanitaire against the spread of the revolution. In April 1919 Polish troops occupied part of Bylorussia and Lithuania. In April 1920 they occupied Kiev in the Ukraine and finally in May/June 1920, the Polish government supported by White general Denikin controlled almost all of the Ukraine. Enver Pasha, leader of the Young Turks "anti-feudal" revolution, ended up heading an anti- Soviet revolt in Turkestan in October 1921.

Internal reaction

After the October insurrection and the workers' seizure of power throughout Russia, the remains of the bourgeoisie, of the army, the reactionary officer castes (Cossacks, Tekins ...) immediately began to regroup their forces behind the flag of the Provisional Government (curiously enough the same flag that Yeltsin flies in the Kremlin), forming the first White armies under the command of Kaledin, chief of the Don Cossacks.

However, the immense chaos and penury that ravaged isolated Russia, the "self-demobilization" of the remains of the Czarist army, the meagre armed forces of the revolutionaries, but above all the actions of German imperialism and the Western democracies in support of the White armies, progressively tipped the balance of class forces towards Civil War. In the middle of 1918, the territory under the Soviets was reduced to that of the feudal principality of Moscow, and the revolution was also confronted with the revolt by the "Czech Legion" and the anti-Bolshevik government in Samara[8], which cut off vital communications with Siberia. To this we have to add the Cossacks of Krasnov (the general defeated at Pulkvo in the first days of the insurrection and later freed by the Bolsheviks), Denikin's army in the South, Kaledin's in the Don, Kolchak in the East, Yudenitch in the North. All in all a bloody orgy of terror, of massacres, murder and atrocities, loudly applauded by the "democrats" and blessed by the "Socialists" who in Germany, Austria, Hungry and elsewhere were crushing the workers' insurrections.

Bourgeois historians present the bestiality of the Civil War "as something that happens in all wars", as the fruit of human "savagery". However, the cruel Civil War that raged for three years and caused, along with the disease and hunger resulting from the economic blockade up to seven million deaths, was imposed on the population of Russia by world capitalism.

Along with the Western armies and the White armies, there were the sabotage and counter-revolutionary conspiracies of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. In July 1918 Savinkov[9] organized, with funds supplied by the French ambassador, Noulens, a mutiny in Yaroslav, where for two weeks an authentic terror and revenge was waged against all that smacked of the proletariat and revolutionary Bolshevism. Also in July, only a few days after the disembarkation of the Franco-British force in Murmansk, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries organized an attempted coup, after the assassination of the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, with the aim of immediately relaunching hostilities with Germany. Lenin called this "another monstrous blow by the petty bourgeoisie". All the revolution needed at that time was an open war with Germany!

The revolution struggled between life and death. Survival, which depended on the revolution in Europe, demanded endless sacrifices, not only on the economic terrain as we have seen, but also on the political terrain. In this article we don't want to enter into an debate about such questions as the repressive apparatus or the regular army[10], about which the Russian revolution supplies endless lessons. Nonetheless it is important to point out that the movement from revolutionary violence to outright terror, as well as the subordination of the workers' militias to a hierarchical army or the increasing autonomy of the state from the workers' councils, were in great part the consequences of the isolation of the revolution, of the increasingly adverse relation of force between the bourgeoisie and proletariat internationally, which is what definitively decided the fate of a revolution that had triumphed in a single country.

There is no logical evolution from the Cheka, which, when it was formed in November 1917, accounted for hardly 120 men and did not have cars to make arrests with, and the monstrous political apparatus of the GPU - used by Stalin against the Bolsheviks. This evolution expressed a profound degeneration resulting from the defeat of the revolution. Likewise, there was no preconceived continuity between the Red Guards, which were the military units mandated and controlled by the Soviets, and the regular army where conscription was re-introduced in April 1919, along with barrack-room discipline and the military salute: in August 1920 the Red Army already had 315 thousand military "spetsys" (specialists from the Czarist army). The connection between the two was the crushing weight of the struggle between a proletarian bastion that needed the air of the international revolution and a furious world counter-revolution, which became ever more potent with each defeat inflicted on the international body of the proletariat.

Economic asphyxiation

In these conditions of isolation, of permanent blockade by the capitalists, of internal sabotage, and independently of any illusions the Bolsheviks had about the possibility of introducing a distinct logic to the economy, the reality was that between 1918 and 1921 the economy in Russia, as Lenin pointed out, was a "besieged fortress", a proletarian bastion, that tried in the worst possible conditions to hold out in the hope of the extension of the revolution.

In other issues of the International Review we have demonstrated that socialism never existed in Russia, since this necessitates, even in its first steps, the triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie on an international scale. The economic policy that could be carried out in an isolated "revolutionary bastion" was necessarily dictated by capitalism's international domination. The idea of "socialism in one country" has always been denounced by revolutionaries as the ideological mask of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

What we want to point out in this article is that the terrible economic scarcity which ravaged the revolution in Russia was not brought about by socialism, but the impossibility of breaking out of this misery as long as the proletarian revolution remained isolated. The difference is without a doubt substantial: with the first thesis the capitalists hope that the workers will draw the lesson that "it is better not to make the revolution and destroy capitalism, because at least it allows you to survive", while the second draws out a fundamental lesson of the workers' struggle, valid for every movement from the strike in the smallest factory to a revolution which occupies a whole country: "if the struggles don't spread, if the revolution remains isolated, we cannot beat capitalism".

The workers' revolution in Russia arose from the First World War, and therefore inherited from this economic chaos, rationing, the subordination of production to the needs of war. Its isolation added further to this suffering due to the rigours of the Civil War and military intervention by the Western democracies. The same people who put on a humanitarian face at Versailles, under the slogan of "live and let live", did not hesitate to impose a draconian economic blockade which lasted from March 1918 to the beginning of 1919 (a few months before the definitive defeat of Wrangel's White army), and which even included the blocking of solidarity donations to the workers in Russia sent by their class brothers and sisters in other countries.

Thus, the population suffered all kinds of privations. Take the example of fuel. The cold sowed Russia with cadavers. Coal from the Ukraine was inaccessible until 1920 and the oil of Baku and the Caucasus was in the hands of the English from the Summer of 1918 until the end of 1919 as a result of the siege established by the capitalists. The total amount of fuel which reached the Russian cities in this period was no more than 10% of the normal supplies before the First World War.

There was bitter hunger in the cities. Bread and sugar had been rationed since the imperialist war. With the Civil War, this rationing reached inhuman levels due to the economic blockade and the sabotage of the peasants who hid part of their crops in order to sell them on the black market. When, in August 1918, the supplies to the shops in the cities had completely run out, it was decided to differentiate the rations:

• Workers in heavy industry received the first category of rations, which supplied approximately 1200 to 1900 calories a day, which is to say a quarter of their real needs. This level of rations was extended, during the Civil War, to the families of those who enlisted in the Red Army;
•   the lowest rations represented a quarter of the above and were those supplied to the bourgeoisie. The rest of the workers received the "medium" ration, three times more than the lowest.

In October 1919, with the White general Yudenitch at the gates of Petrograd, Trotsky described the population that had to take upon itself the breaking of the attacks by the White Guards, as a jumble of ghosts:

"The workers of Petrograd looked badly then; their faces were grey from under nourishment; their clothes were in tatters; their shoes, sometimes not even mates, were gaping with holes" (Trotsky, My Life, page 445).

In January 1921, although this was after the Civil War had finished, the black bread ration was 800 grams for workers in factories of continuous production and 600 grams for shock workers, and this was reduced to 200 grams for the carriers of "card B" (the unemployed). The same can be said of herrings, which had saved the day at other times, and which were now unavailable. Potatoes almost always arrived in the cities frozen, since the railways and locomotives were in a lamentable state (20% of their pre-war potential). At the beginning of Summer in 1921, a cruel famine developed in the Eastern provinces, such as the Volga region. During this period, according to the Congress of Soviets, between 22 and 27 million people were in need, threatened by starvation, cold and epidemics of typhus[11], diphtheria, flu ...

To these scarce supplies can be added speculation. In order to obtain something to supplement the official rations it was necessary to have recourse to the black market: the "sujarevka" (a name taken from Sujarevski Square in Moscow, where these types of transactions were carried out semi-clandestinely). Half of the grain that arrived in the cities came from the Commissariat of Supplies, the other half from the black market (at 10 times that of the official rate). There was another form of the black market: the illegal transport of manufactured goods to the countryside, in order to exchange them with the peasants for food. Soon the typography of the revolution produced a new person the "bag man", who on the ramshackle freight trains, took salt, matches, sometimes a pair of boots or a little oil in a bottle to the villages in order to exchange them for a few kilos of potatoes and some flour. In September 1918 the government tacitly recognised the black market, limiting it to only 1.5 punds (about 25 kilos) of wheat. From then on the bag man became known as the "pund and a half man", but still continued to profiteer. When factories began to buy goods with the products they produced, this practice spread likewise to workers, transforming them into "bag men", selling straps, tools etc to the villages.

As for working conditions, they were brutally aggravated by the tremendous misery, the isolation of the revolution and the Civil War. This laid ruin to the worker's demands, including the measures the government had adopted in order to satisfy them:

"Four days after the revolution a decree was issued establishing the principle of the 8-hour day and the 48-hour week, placing limitations on the work of women and juveniles and forbidding the employment of children under 14. One year later the Narkomtrud (the People's Commissariat of Labour) had to re-emphasis the obligatory nature of this decree. These prohibitions however had little effect in this period of extreme scarcity of labour due to the Civil War (E.H. Carr, op cit, Vol 2). The same Lenin who had denounced "Taylorism", that is to say the assembly line, identifying it as "the enslavement of man to the machine", finally gave into the demands to increase production, instituting "Communist Saturdays", for which the workers hardly received any food and were generally not paid, because they were seen as supporting the revolution. In the confidence that the revolution was still imminent in Europe, the most combative and conscious sectors of the Russian working class wanted to defend the proletarian bastion with this perspective. But deprived of their Soviets, their workers' assemblies and their class struggle against capitalist exploitation, they were progressively enchained to the most brutal forms of capitalist exploitation

Nevertheless, even despite this over-exploitation, the Russian factories still produced less, both because of the loss of productivity from a undernourished proletariat, and because of the chaos of the Russian economy. Even in 1923, three years after the end of the Civil War, the whole of Russian industry was functioning at 30% of its 1912 capacity. Only in small industry was workers' productivity 57% of that in 1913. This small industry developed above all from 1919, in great part it was rural (in fact its production was essentially of tools, rope, furniture ... for the local peasant market) and the workers in them worked in conditions similar to those in agriculture (particularly at the level of working hours).

Given the terrible living conditions in the cities, which we have seen, a large part of the workers emigrated to the countryside and were there integrated into small scale industry. And those still in the cities left the large factories to work in small workshops, where they could obtain bits to sell to the peasantry. In 1920, the total number of workers in industry was 2.2 million, of which only 1.4 million were employed in establishments of over 30 workers.

With the adoption of the NEP (the New Economic Policy) in 1921[12], state firms were confronted by competition from "private" Russian capitalists and the recently arrived foreign investors; therefore, as in any capitalist economy, the state-boss had to produce more and more cheaply. With demobilization after the Civil War and the application of NEP, a wave of unemployment ensued; for example, on the railways, up to half the work force was laid off. Unemployment grow rapidly from 1921. In 1923, there were 1 million officially registered unemployed in Russia.

The peasant question

The peasantry represented 80% of the population. During the insurrection the Congress of Soviets adopted the "Land Decree", which tried to deal with the need of tens of millions of peasants to get hold of a piece of land on which they could feed themselves, while at the same time eliminating the great landowners, which were not only the scourge of the peasants, but also a point of support for the counter-revolution. However, the measures taken did not contribute to the formation of large working units, in which the agricultural workers could exercise a minimum of workers' control. On the contrary, despite such initiatives as the "committees of agricultural workers", or the Kolkhozi ("collective farms"), or the Sovjozi ("Soviet granaries", also called "socialist grain factories", since their mission was to supply cereals to the proletariat of the cities), what spread was the small peasant unit, of ridiculous dimensions, and which could hardly supply the peasant family. In 1917 agricultural units of less than 5 hectares represented 58% of the total; by 1920 this reached 86% of cultivable land. Of course these units, given their meagre size, could in no way alleviate the hunger in the cities. The measures of "forced requisition" with which the Bolsheviks first tried to obtain the food necessary to cover the needs of the proletariat and Red Army not only led to a lamentable fiasco as regards the quantity collected, but more than that they pushed a great number of the peasants into the White armies, or into the armed gangs which very often fought the White armies and the Bolsheviks at the same time, such as was the case with the anarchist Makhno in the Ukraine.

From the summer of 1918 the state tried to help the middle peasants in order to achieve better results: in the first year of the revolution the Supply Commissariat had hardly collected 780 thousand tons of grain; between August 1918 and August 1919 it obtained two million tons. However, the peasant proprietor of a "medium" size holding was not disposed to collaborate:

"The middle peasant produces more food than he needs, and thus, having surpluses of grain, becomes an exploiter of the hungry worker. This is our fundamental task and the fundamental contradiction. The peasant as toiler, as a man who lives by his own toil, who has the oppression of capitalism, such a peasant is on the side of the worker. But the peasant as a proprietor, who has his surpluses of grain, is accustomed to look on them as his property which he can freely sell" (Lenin, cited in E.H. Carr, vol 2, page 164).

Here again the Bolsheviks could not carry out any other policy than the one imposed by the unfavourable balance of forces between the workers' revolution and the domination of capitalism. The solution to this pile of contradictions was not in the hands of the Russian state, nor did it reside in the relations between the proletariat and peasantry in Russia. The only solution could come from the international proletariat:

"At the IXth party congress of March 1919 which proclaimed the policy of conciliating the middle peasant Lenin touched on one of the sore points of collective agriculture. The middle peasant would be won over to the communist society "only... when we ease and improve the economic conditions of his life". But here was the rub:

"if we could tomorrow give 100,000 first-class tractors, supply them with benzene, supply them with mechanics (you know well that for the present this is a fantasy), the middle peasant would say: "I am for the commune (i.e. for communism)". But in order to do this, it is first necessary to conquer the international bourgeoisie, to compel it to give us these tractors".

Lenin did not pursue the syllogism. To build socialism in Russia was impossible without socialized agriculture; to socialize agriculture was impossible without tractors; to obtain tractors was impossible without an international proletarian revolution" (E.H.Carr, op. cit,. Vol 2, page 165). As one can see, neither during the period of "war communism" nor of the NEP was the Russian economy marked by socialism, but by the asphyxiating conditions imposed by the isolation of the revolution:

"We had even more reason to think that if the European working class had conquered power before, we could have remodelled our backward country - economically and culturally; we could have done this with technical and organizational support and that would have permitted us to correct and modify in part or totally our methods of war communism, leading us towards a truly socialist economy" (Lenin, "NEP and the revolution" in Economic Theory and Economic Policy in the construction of Socialism, page 40)

The defeat of the world proletariat revolutionary wave also led to the death of the Russian proletarian bastion. With the death of the revolution a new bourgeoisie could be reconstructed in Russia:

"The bourgeoisie was reconstituted as the revolution degenerated from within, not from the Czarist ruling class, which the proletariat had eliminated in 1917, but on the basis of the parasitic bureaucracy of the state apparatus which under Stalin's leadership was increasingly identified with the Bolshevik party. At the end of the 1920s, this party/state bureaucracy wiped out all those sectors capable of forming a private bourgeoisie, and with which it had been allied (speculators and NEP landowners). In doing so it took control of the economy" (from our supplement "Stalinism and democracy: two faces of capitalist terror').

The exhaustion of the workers' councils

The consequences of the isolation of the revolution were not only hunger and wars, but also the progressive loss of the principal capital of the revolution: the mass action and consciousness of the working class, which had expanded and deepened so much between February and October 1917 (see the article in International Review no 71).

At the end of 1918, the number of workers in Petrograd was 50% of those at the end of 1916, and in the Autumn of 1920, at the end of the Civil War, the birthplace of the revolution had lost 58% of its population. The new capital Moscow was depopulated by 45% and all of the provincial capitals by 33%. The majority of these workers emigrated to the countryside where life was less painful, but also a large number of these workers had gone into the Red Army and the service of the state:

"When it was hard at the front, we turned to the central committee of the Communist Party on the one hand and to the praesidium of the trade union central council on the other; and from these two sources outstanding proletarians were sent to the front and there created the Red Army in their own image and pattern" (Trotsky, cited in E.H.Carr, op cit, Vol 2 page 206).

Each time the Red Army, composed mainly of peasants, was routed or desertion was rife, brigades of the most determined and conscious workers were recruited, in order to be the vanguard of military operations or as a "containing wall" against peasant desertions. But also, every time they needed to suppress sabotage, organize the chaos in supplies, the Bolsheviks resorted to Lenin's famous slogan "proletarian energy is needed here!". Thus this energy of the revolutionary class was removed from the centres where it was born and where it had been refined, the workers' councils, the Soviets, and was increasingly integrated into the service of the state, which is to say, in the long run into the parasitic bureaucracy, into the organ that would become the organ of the counter-revolution[13]. A progressive devitalisation of the Soviets was the consequence of this:

"When the principal task of the government was the resistance to the enemy and we were obliged to push back all the attacks, control was exercised almost exclusively through orders and the dictatorship of the proletariat naturally took the form of a proletarian military dictatorship. Then, the open organs of Soviet power, the plenary assemblies of the Soviets almost disappeared and control passed directly to the Executive Committees, which is to say limited organs, committees of three or five persons, etc. Often, above all in the regions near to the front line, the "regular" organs of Soviet power, that is to say organs elected by the workers, were replaced local "revolutionary committees" which instead of submitting problems to the examination of the mass assemblies, resolved them on their own initiative" (Trotsky: The Theory Of Permanent Revolution page 126).

And this loss of collective reflection and discussion, took place not only in the assemblies, in the local soviets, but throughout the fabric of the workers' councils. From 1918, the sovereign Congress of Soviets, which was supposed to meet every three months, took place once a year. The Central Committee of Soviets is included in this; it was not able to carry out collective discussions and decisions. When at the VIIth Congress of Soviets (December 1919) the representative of the "Bund" (Jewish Communist Party) asked what the Central Executive Committee was doing, Trotsky replied "The CEC is at the battle front!".

In the end, all decisions and political life was concentrated in the hands of the Bolshevik Party. Kamenev at the IXth Congress of the Bolshevik Party made this clear:

"We administer Russia and we could not administer it any other way than through the communists" (our underlining). We agree with Rosa Luxemburg, who in The Russian Revolution makes the following critique:

""Thanks to the open and direct struggle for governmental power" (Trotsky writes) "the labouring masses accumulate in the shortest time a considerable amount of political experience and advance quickly from one stage to another of their development"

Here Trotsky refutes himself and his own friends. Just because this is so, they have blocked up the fountain of political experience and the sources of this rising development by their suppression of public life (...).

In reality, the opposite is true! It is the very giant tasks which the Bolsheviks have undertaken with courage and determination that demand the most intensive political training of the masses and the accumulation of experience".

The Italian Communist Left made the same point when it drew up a balance sheet of the causes of the defeat of the Russian Revolution:

"Although Marx, Engels, and above all Lenin pointed out many times the necessity to counter the state with its proletarian antidote, capable of impeding its degeneration, the Russian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and the vitality of the proletariat's class organisations, incorporated them into the state apparatus, thus devouring its own substance" (Bilan no 28).

It was of little importance that the Soviet constitution tried to preserve the political weight of the working class so that the latter had first place in representation in the state (1 delegate for each 25,000 workers, while 125,000 peasants also elected 1 delegate), when already the problem was the absorption of these workers into the conservative machinery of the state.

And once the proletarian revolution was completely defeated in Europe, nothing, not even the iron control the Bolshevik party maintained over society, could prevent world and thus Russian capitalism from taking control of the state and leading it in a direction absolutely opposed to what the communists were trying to do:

"The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was not going in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand. God knows who, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both. Be that as it may, the car is not going quite in the direction the man at the wheel imagines, and often it goes in an altogether different direction" (Lenin: "Political Report of the Central Committee of the RCP.', 27.3.22, Selected Works, Vol 3 page 620).

Conclusions

"The Bolsheviks feared the counter-revolution coming from the White Armies and other direct expressions of the bourgeoisie and defended the revolution against these dangers. They feared the return of private property through the persistence of small-scale production, particularly that of the peasantry ... But the danger of the counter-revolution did not come from the "kulaks" or from the horribly massacred workers of Kronstadt and the "White plots" the Bolsheviks thought they saw behind this uprising. The counter-revolution won over the corpses of the German proletariat defeated in 1919 and it took its hold in Russia through what was supposed to be the "semi-state" of the proletariat" (Introduction to the ICC's pamphlet The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, page 8).

The solution to the situation created by the insurrection of October 1917 did not lie in Russia. As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, "In Russia the problem can only be posed. But it cannot be resolved there". Meanwhile, the answer to this, the revolutionary wave which arose form the First World War, was defeated, as we will see in the next article in this series. This led to a course of events in Russia marked by the accumulation of contradictions, by a desperate search for solutions, none of which could cut the Gordian Knot because the revolution did not spread:

"In any case, the fatal situation in which the Bolsheviks today find themselves confronted with is, like the majority of their errors, a characteristic consequence, for the moment insoluble, of the problem the international proletariat, above all the German proletariat, confronts. To realise the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist revolution in only one country, besieged by a bestial reactionary imperialist domination and surrounded by the most bloody of the generalized wars that the history of humanity has known, is to square the circle. Any revolutionary party would be condemned to failure and to perish in this task, no matter how much it based its policies on a will to win and faith in international socialism or confidence in itself" (Rosa Luxemburg, "The Russian Tragedy" Spartacus Letters, no 11, September 1918).

The Russian revolution is the most important experience in the history of the workers' movement. The future revolutionary proletarian struggles cannot afford to spare any effort in re-appropriating its many lessons. But without doubt, the first of all these is the confirmation of the old marxist war-cry, "workers of the world unite!". This slogan is not just a "nice idea" but the vital precondition for the victory of the communist revolution. International isolation is the death of the revolution.

Etsoem, 27 July 1993

[1] See in particular our supplement "Communism is not dead, but its worst enemy, Stalinism".

[2] Unfortunately, as a consequence of the terrible disappointment that the failure of the Russian revolution assumed caused even amongst revolutionaries, theories such as the councilism have arisen, which present the Russian revolution as no more than a bourgeois revolution and the Bolshevik Party as a bourgeois party. Or there is the case of the Bordigists who define the Russian revolution as a double revolution (bourgeois and proletarian). We have dealt with these errors in articles in International Review no 12 [33] and 13 [34]: "October 1917: the Beginning of the Proletarian Revolution".

[3] The first Soviet Constitution of 1918 gave citizenship "to all foreigners who reside within the territory of the Federation of Soviets providing they belong to the working class or peasantry who do not exploit another's labour"

[4] The sessions of the 2nd Congress of the CI were carried out in front of a map where the advances of the Red Army in its counter-attack against Poland in the summer of 1920 were shown. As is well known, this military incursion served to push the Polish proletariat to close ranks with its bourgeoisie, and ended with the Red Army being defeated at the gates of Warsaw.

[5] In January 1918, a strike of half a million workers exploded in Berlin, which spread to Hamburg, Kiel, the Ruhr, and Leipzig, and in which the first workers' councils were formed. At the same time workers' uprisings took place in Vienna and Budapest, and even the majority of bourgeois journalists (cf. E. H. Carr, op. cit.) recognised that they were a reaction to the Russian revolution and, more concretely, the Brest-Litovsk negotiations.

[6] See International Reviews no 8 and 9 "The Communist Left in Russia".

[7] See International Review no 8, "The Communist Left in Russia', and International Reviews 12 [33] and 13 [34], "October 1917: The Beginning of the Proletarian Revolution". Also see our pamphlet The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism [35] where through the Russian experience, we examine the problem of negotiations between a proletarian bastion and capitalist governments.

[8] This government ended up controlling all of the middle and lower Volga. In October 1918 400,000 "Volga Germans" rose up and formed a "workers' Commune". The so-called "Czech Legion" were Czechoslovakian prisoners of war authorized by the Russian government to leave Russia via Vladivostok. On the way 60,000 of the 200,000 who made up the expedition mutinied (it also has to be said that 1200 soldiers from this "legion" joined the Red Army) creating an armed gang dedicated to pillage and terror.

[9] This former Social Revolutionary in September 1917 served as the clandestine go-between for Kerensky and Kornilov. In January 1918 he organized an assassination attempt on Lenin and then was the named representative of the "Whites" in Paris, where of course he rubbed shoulders not only with the Allies' secret services, but also with ministers, generals, etc, who as a reward for his "democratic" labours put him in command of the teams of saboteurs, the so-called "Greens", amongst whom figured the famous character Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies.

[10] See International Review no 3 "The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution'; nos 8 and 9 "The Communist Left In Russia", and 12 and 13, "October 1917: The Beginning of the Proletarian Revolution".

[11] The epidemics of typhus were so extensive and continuous that Lenin maintained that "either the revolution will destroy the lice or the lice will destroy the revolution."

[12] Despite what many members of the Communist Left in Russia thought, the NEP did not represent a return of capitalism, since Russia never had a socialist economy. We have taken a position on this question in International Review No 2, "Answer to Workers Voice" and nos 8 and 9 "The Communist Left in Russia".

[13] Our position on the role of the state in the period of transition, and the relationship between the workers' councils and this state, based on the lessons of the Russian experience, is developed in our pamphlet The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism and in International Reviews nos 8, 11, 15, and 18. Likewise, for our critique of the idea that the party takes power in the name of the working class see International Reviews nos 23, 34 and 35.