In France, both CP and SP leaders waved the fascist menace, after long years in power when they used the far right Le Pen as bogeyman. To complete the tableau of the resurgence of the “fascist menace”, a dozen Waffen SS veterans visiting the Normandy beaches was held up as an example of the rising tide of “enemies of democracy”.
The 50 million dead in World War II are invoked as the victims of “Nazi barbarism” alone, from CNN to the most insignificant local paper. In most European countries, the slightest actions of a few hooligans are blown up out of all proportion. Right on time, Hollywood turns out a film on the massacre of the Jews in Europe, and exalts the idealism of the brave GIs who died in their thousands on the Normandy beaches in the name of “freedom”.
These militarist festivities carefully avoid mentioning the crimes of the “victorious democracies”, which are certainly enough [1] [1] to put the democratic leaders in the same company as Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. But even this is a concession to the false personification of “war crimes”. The dictators are only subordinates. It is the bourgeoisie as a social class which is the principal war criminal. When the sinister Goebbels declared that a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth, his cynical opposite number Churchill could assert that “In times of war truth is so precious that it should always be safeguarded by a rampart of lies” [2] [2].
Most of those enrolled in the two opposing camps hardly went to war enthusiastically, being still traumatised by the deaths of their fathers’ generation 25 years previously. The massive exodus in France, the terror of the Nazi state exercised over the German population, the massive deportations of state capitalist Stalinism: none of this is revealed in the complacent news reports of the time which are being rehashed for us today. All the “objective” but nonetheless abject documentaries and articles are dominated by one name: Hitler! uring the Middle Ages, the Plague was seen as the scourge of God. In the midst of decadent capitalism the bourgeoisie has found an equivalent for Holy Democracy: the Brown Plague. Successive ruling classes throughout history have invoked a higher evil in order to fabricate a commonalty of interest between the oppressed and their exploiters. The personification of events around the dictators, or Allied generals, is very useful to cover the fact that they were nothing but the spokesmen for their respective bourgeoisies. The magic of names is used to make the classes disappear at the moment of war: in a new crusade against evil, everyone is bound to join in unity.
1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, is a key date, as the revolutionaries of the Bilan group showed, not because it marked the “defeat of the democracies”, but because it meant the decisive victory of the counter-revolution, above all in the country were the proletariat was traditionally the strongest component in the workers’ movement. Hitler’s arrival in power cannot be explained solely by the humiliating treaty of Versailles in 1918, whose demand for “reparations” drove Germany to its knees. It was due above all by the proletariat’s disappearance from the social scene, as a threat to the bourgeoisie.
In Russia, the state was beginning to massacre Bolsheviks and revolutionary workers on a grand scale, with the silent approval of the Western democracies which has done so much to arm the White armies. In the Germany, the Weimar Republic’s social-democratic régime had quite naturally given way to Hitler’s Nazis after their victory in the republican elections. The “socialist” leaders who had massacred the revolutionary German workers - Scheidemann, Noske and Co - democratically gave up their ministries. They were never troubled during the next five years of the Nazi régime.
The struggles in France and Spain during the 1930s were only the fag-ends of strikes compared with the size of the defeat suffered by the working class internationally. Fascism’s electoral victory in Italy and Germany was not the cause, but the product of the proletariat’s defeat on its social terrain. In secreting fascism, the bourgeoisie invented, not a new kind of régime, but a state capitalism along the same lines as the Roosevelt New Deal or Stalinist capitalism. In time of war, the bourgeoisie’s factions naturally unite at the national level, since they have eliminated the proletarian threat worldwide, and this unification may take the form of the Nazi or Stalinist parties.
The “rising danger” was organised in complicity with Stalin and the Russian bourgeoisie by the Communist Party vassals of the new Russian imperialism, under the cover of the Popular Front ideology, which kept the workers disoriented behind the programmes of national unity and the preparation for the imperialist war.
The French CP hoisted the patriotic tricolour in 1935, with the signature of the Laval-Stalin Pact, committing the workers to get themselves massacred: “If Hitler, despite everything, starts a war, he should know that he will have to face the united people of France, with the Communists in the front rank, to defend the country’s security, and the liberty and independence of the people”. It was the CP in Spain that broke the last strikes, and shot down the workers with the help of the GPU, before Franco came to finish off their dirty work. The Stalinist leaders then took refuge in France and Russia, as De Gaulle and Thorez were to do when they fled to London and Moscow respectively.
From 1918 to 1935, war had continued all over the planet, but these were limited wars far from Europe, or wars of “pacification”, such as those conducted by French imperialism in Syria, Morocco, and Indochina. For the revolutionaries of the Bilan group, the first serious warning came with the war in Abyssinia, involving British imperialism and Mussolini’s army. It served the interests of some of the Western allies to identify fascism and war. The blame for the next World War could thus be laid largely at fascism’s door. The fascist scarecrow was given greater credit with the victory of Franco’s army in 1939. Allied propaganda could prove its case by pointing to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Francoism. A period of status quo followed, in the name of a search for “peace”, while Germany carried out the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, then the Anschluss with Austria in 1938. The Munich Conference of 30th September 1938 was followed in October by Germany’s seizure of the Czech Sudetenland. The Czech’s had not even been invited to attend at Munich, and when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia itself in March 1939, neither France nor Britain lifed a finger. Daladier and Chamberlain, on their return from Munich, were greeted enthusiastically by the crowds who believed that “peace” had been saved, but in fact both sides were playing for time. Official historians have since been content to explain events by the inadequate rearmament of the French and British states. In fact, the war-time alliances had not been finally settled: the German bourgeoisie still cherished the hope of an alliance with France and Britain against Russia. The German people were every bit as deceived as the French and British:
“(...) The Germans acclaimed Chamberlain wildly, seeing him as the man who would save them from war. More people cane to greet him than had come to greet Mussolini (...) Munich was festooned with Union Jacks, the crowds ecstatic. WHen Chamberlain returned to Heston aerodrome he was welcomed like the Messiah. In Paris, a public subscription was proposed to offer a gift to the British Prime Minister” [3] [3].
In 1937, the Japanese began their final invasion of China, seizing Peking and threatening US hegemony in the Pacific. On 24th August 1939, the Russo-German pact burst like a thunder-clap, leaving Hitler’s hands free to begin his assault on Western Europe. In the meantime, the German army invaded Poland on 1st September, joined by the Russians. Unwillingly, the French and British governments declared war on Germany two days later. The Italian army grabbed Albania. Without any formal declaration of war, Stalin’s army invaded Finland on 30th November. In the April of 1940, the Germans landed in Norway.
The French army began its offensive in the Saar, but was halted at the cost of a thousand men on either side. Stalin gave the lie to his supporters, who had pretended that the Russo-German treaty was a pact with the devil to prevent Hitler from attacking Wester Europe, by declaring:
“It is not Germany that has attacked France and Britain, but France and Britain that have attacked Germany (...) After the commencement of hostilities, German made peace proposals to France and Britain, and the Soviet Union openly supported Germany’s proposals. The leading circles of France and Britain brutally rebuffed both Germany’s peace proposals and the Soviet Union’s efforts to bring the war speedily to an end”.
Nobody wanted to take responsibility for starting the war, before the proletariat. After the war, indeed, governments no longer appointed “Ministers of War”, only “Ministers of Defence”. It is likewise striking to see the Nazi state’s desire to appear as the aggressed party in Germany itself. Albert Speer notes in his Memoirs this private declaration by Hitler: “We will not make the same mistake as in 1914. We now have to lay the blame on our enemy”. On the eve of the war with Japan, Roosevelt repeated the same thing: “The democracies must never appear as the aggressor”. The nine months of inactivity, known as the “phoney war”, confirm this hesitation of all the belligerants. The historian Pierre Miquel notes that Hitler put off the attack on the West no less than 14 times due to the German army’s lack of preparation and poor weather conditions.
On 22nd June 1941, Germany turned on the USSR, taking completely by surprise that “brilliant strategist” Stalin. On 8th December, after letting the Japanese massacre its own soldiers at Pearl Harbour (the attack was known well in advance by the secret service), the United States could pose as the “victims” of Japanese aggression and declare war on Japan. Germany and Italy finally declared war on the US on 11th December 1941.
This brief survey of the diplomatic road to world war, in a situation where the world proletariat had been reduced to silence, prompts a few remarks. Two local wars (Abyssinia and Spain) had finally stamped the fascists as war-mongers, after years of media excitement in Europe, denouncing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s demands, as well as their military parades: the latter were certainly better organised than the French 14th July, or the American or British nationalist festivities, but no less absurd. Two more local wars at the heart of Europe (Czechoslovakia and Poland) led to the rapid defeat of the “democratic” countries concerned. The “shameful” failure to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia (and Spain) made the “defence of democracy” and bourgeois freedom inevitable after Poland’s invasion by the two “totalitarian” powers. Politico-diplomatic manoeuvres can drag on for years. Armed conflict can settle matters on the ground in a few hours, at the price of a terrible slaughter. The war did not really become a World War until a year after Germany’s conquest of Europe. For more than four years, the US did not attempt any decisive operations against the invaders, leaving the German army to play the gendarme in Europe. The United States, far away from Europe, were initially more concerned by the Japanese threat in the Pacific. The World War lasted longer than the local wars had done, and this cannot be explained solely by the power of the German army or the ups and downs of imperialist diplomacy. It is well-known, for example, that a part of the American bourgeoisie would have preferred to ally itself with Germany rather than with Stalin’s “communist” régime, just as the German bourgeoisie had tried in vain to make an alliance with France and Britain against the “Reds”. Hitler’s government made peace overtures to Britain in 1940, in 1941 just before the beginning of the Operation Barbarossa onslaught on Russia, and after the defeat of Mussolini’s North African army. The British were all the more hesitant, in that they were tempted to leave the two great totalitarian powers destroy each other. But it would be wrong to rest here, and to argue as if the principal opposing class for every bourgeoisie, the proletariat, had simply disappeared from the concerns of the imperialist leaders thanks to the “unifying” - and “simplifying” - war!
Moreover, marxists cannot reason on war in itself, independently of historical periods. For youthful 19th century capitalism, war was essential in opening the possibility of further development, opening new markets at the point of the bayonet. This was shown in 1945 by the French Communist Left (GCF), one of the rare groups to have held high the standard of proletarian internationalism throughout World War II: “... in its decadent phase, capitalism has historically exhausted all possibilities of development, and finds in modern imperialist war the expression of this decadence which without opening the possibility of any further development of production, engulfs in the abyss the productive forces and heaps ruin on ruin, faster and faster (...) The more the market contracts, the more bitter becomes the struggle to possess sources of raw materials and to dominate the world market. The economic struggle between economic groups is increasingly concentrated, to its most complete form in the struggles between states. The exasperated economic struggle between states can only be resolved, in the end, by armed force. War becomes the only means for each national imperialism to try to extricate itself from its difficulties, at the expense of rival imperialist states” [4] [4].
Bourgeois historians tend to gloss over the rapid defeat of the once great French power. The German army’s attack was not delayed solely by the weather. The German state apparatus did not make a mistake in choosing Hitler, nor was it composed of imbeciles only able to march the goose-step. The main reason was once again the play of secret diplomatic consultations. Alliances can be overturned, even in the middle of war. Moreover, ever since the mutinies of German soldiers in 1918, the German bourgeoisie had taken care to see that their troops did not go hungry... The German bourgeoisie of 1938 was the heir of the Weimar Republic, which had bloodily crushed the attempt at proletarian revolution in 1919; the SS battallions were based on the old Frei Korps which a socialist government had used to crush the workers in revolt. Neither the eruption of the Paris Commune in 1870, nor the 1917 October Revolution, nor the Spartakist insurrection of 1919 had been forgotten. Even politically in defeat, the working class remained a danger in the face of a long imperialist war.
German imperialism’s rapid victory in Czechoslovakia was the result of a war of nerves, bluff, and careful manoeuvring, and above all of speculation on other governments’ fear of the consequences of a war generalised too quickly, and without the definite adherence of the proletariat. Whereas the French generals had stuck to the old conceptions of a “war of position” developed during the 1914-18 conflict, the German general staff had modernised its strategy in favour of the Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). According to this conception (much in vogue today, as we can see from the Gulf War), a slow advance without a ferocious strike was doomed to defeat. Worse still, since the population’s readiness for war was fragile, letting the war drag on and giving the combattants the possibility to address each other from the trenches led to the risk of mutinies and social explosions. In the 20th century, the working class has inevitably become the first battalion against imperialist war. Hitler himself at one point confided to Albert Speer: “industry is a favorable factor in the development of communism”. As he also told Speer - who became his Minister for Munitions during the war - following the introduction in 1943 of the forced labour system in France, strikes and revolts which hold back production are a risk to be run in time of war. The German bourgeoisie had inherited its reflexes from Bismarck, whose invasion of France had been blocked by the Parisian workers’ insurrection against their own bourgeoisie. He had been concerned then at the risk of contagion amongst the German workers and soldiers, as in fact happened nearly 50 years later when the German proletariat reacted to the war on revolutionary Russia by an insurrection against their own ruling class.
And yet, after the sudden halt of their first offensive, the Germans conducted a “war of boredom” for almost a year. Germany wanted above all to open up Lebensraum (“living space”) in the East, and would still have preferred to ally itself with the two Western democracies rather than waste its military potential by invading them. Germany supported Laval and Doriot, one-time pacifists claiming to be socialists, and who wanted to help the German war effort. These pro-fascist tendencies, who called for a Franco-German alliance, remained a minority. The bourgeoisie as a whole had no confidence in the proletariat’s readiness to mobilise for war. The French working class had not been defeated head-on, with bayonets and flame-throwers, as it had in Germany in 1919 and 1923.
The German bourgeoisie therefore advanced cautiously in a country which it knew to be fragile, not so much militarily as socially. In fact, they needed only watch the slow decomposition of the French bourgeoisie, with its cowardly generals on the one side and the pacifists, soon to become collaborators on the other, the latter keeping the workers in impotence.
The Popular Front had helped in the effort of rearmament (while disarming the workers politically), but had not completely succeeded in achieving national unity. Certainly, the police had broken many strikes, and interned hundreds of militants, who were not themselves very clear as to how to oppose the war. The left of the French bourgeoisie had calmed the workers with all the claptrap of the Popular Front and the congés payés (paid holidays), during which the workers were mobilised. The extreme left pacifist fractions completed the task of undermining any class alternative. The anarchists, who were still very influential in the unions, finished off the Stalinists’ work of sabotage, publishing the 1939 leaflet “Peace Now” in September 1939, signed by a gaggle of intellectuals “(...) No flowers in the gun-barrels, no heroic songs, no cheers as the troops depart. And we are told that it is like this in all the belligerant countries. The war stands condemned from day one, by the majority of its participants both on the front, and in the rear. Let us then make peace quickly”.
“Peace” cannot be an alternative to war in decadent capitalism. Such resolutions onyl encouraged the “every man for himself”, individual solutions and the flight abroad for those who could afford it. The proletarians’ disarray was increased, their alarm and their impotence concentrated on the general rout of the left parties and groups which had claimed to defend their interests, and left them trapped in anti-fascist “common sense”.
The disintegration of French society was such that the “drôle de guerre” (“phoney war”) on one side, the “komischer Krieg” on the other, was only an interlude allowing the German army, after a bloody bombardment of Rotterdam (40,000 dead) to push through the fragile French Maginot Line on 10th May 1940, almost without resistance. The French officers were the first to flee, leaving their troops flat. The populations of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and the north of France including Paris and the French government, fled in a mass, uncontrolled and panic-stricken dash towards the centre and south of France. This was one of the most gigantic exodus of modern times. This lack of “resistance” by the population was to become a subject for reproach by the ideologues of the maquis (many of home, like Mitterand and the Belgian and Italian “socialists”, only turned their coats in 1942), and was used after the war to blackmail the working class into sacrificing itself for the reconstruction.
The Blitzkrieg nonetheless caused 90,000 deaths and 120,000 wounded on the French side, 27,000 dead on the German. The collapse left ten million people refugees in terrible conditions. One and a half million POWs were sent back to Germany. And this was nothing compared to the 50 million dead in the slaughter to come.
In Europe, the population suffered the worst civilian casualties humanity had ever seen in war-time. Never had so many women and children joined soldiers among the dead. For the first time in history, the civilian casualties were greater than the military.
With its “Bismarckian” reflexes, the German bourgeoisie took care to divide France in two: an occupied zone, the north with the capital, to guard the coast against the British; and a free zone, the south, given legitimacy by the puppet government of General Pétain, the “hero of Verdun”, and the ex-socialist Laval. This collaborationist state took the load off the Nazi war effort for a while, until the Allied advance led German imperialism to boot it out.
The constant fear of a workers’ uprising against the war, weakened as they were, appears even amongst the right. A collaborationist paper, L’Oeuvre, speaks crudely of the occupying forces’ need for trades unions - the so-called social victory of the Popular Front - and in similar terms to those of any Left Wing or Trotskyist party: “The occupiers have the greatest concern not to antagonise the working class, not to lose contact, and to integrate them into a well-organised social movement (...) The Germans hope that all workers will be integrated into corporatism, and for this it seems that cadres will be necessary who have the real confidence of the workers (...) They need men who have authority, and whom others will follow” [5] [5].
From 1941 onwards, some in the collaborationist French government began to worry about the termporary nature of the Occupation, and the guarantee of social order that came with it. The Pétainist bourgeoisie and De Gaulle’s exiled Free French kept up discreet contacts, their main concern being to maintain social and political order in the transition from one epoch to another. The ideology of the - very weak - Resistance movement, propagated by the liberal fraction exiled in Britain and by the Stalinists of the PCF in France, at first had great difficulty in attracting the workers into a National Union for the country’s “Liberation”. In 1943 the German bourgeoisie helped reinforce the ranks of the “terrorists” despite itself, by instituting “the relief” - one worker forced to labour in Germany in exchange for each POW allowed to return to France. But fundamentally, it was the left and far-left parties who succeeded in drawing the workers into the Resistance on the basis of the “victory of Stalingrad”.
Changes of imperialist alliance and the proletariat’s possible reaction are lines of orientation for the bourgeoisie in the midst of war. Formally, the turning-point in the war came in 1942, with the halt to Japanese expansion and the battle of El Alamein, which freed the oil fields. In the same year, began the battle of Stalingrad, where the Stalinist state gained a victory thanks to the help of US military supplies (tanks and weapons that were more sophisticated than Russia itself could produce to confront the modern German army). During secret negotiations, Stalin had used his promise to declare war on Japan as a bargaining counter. The war could then have been brought to a rapid conclusion, especially since a part of the German bourgeoisie was keen to get rid of Hitler, and made an attempt to assassinate him in 1944. The Allies left the plotters isolated, to be wiped out by the Nazi state (Admiral Canaris’ Valkyrie plan).
But this did not take account of the Italian proletariat. It was necessary to prolong the war for two years in order to massacre the proletariat’s best forces, and avoid as hasty a peace as in 1918, concluded with the revolution at its heels.
Following the eruption of the Italian proletariat, 1943 was a turning-point in the war. At a world level, the bourgeoisie used the isolation and defeat of the Italian workers to develop the strategy of the Resistance in the occupied countries, in order to gain the populations’ support for the future capitalist peace. Up till then, most of the Resistance groups had been made up essentially of tiny minorities of nationalist petty-bourgeois, using terrorist methods. The Anglo-American bourgeoisie was to glorify the Resistance ideology more pragmatically after the victory at Stalingrad and the pro-Western turn of the CPs. The workers did not see much difference between exploitation by a German or a French boss. They had shown no desire to die in the name of Anglo-French imperialism to support Poland, they had made no effort to involve themselves in a war which seemed to have nothing to do with their interests. To mobilise them with a view to defending “democracy”, they had to be given a perspective which seemed valid from the class point of view. Stalingrad as the war’s turning-point, and the possibility of putting an end to the demands of the occupying army, of regaining “freedom”, even with “their own” police, raised the workers’ hopes, along with the “liberating communism” represented by Stalin. Without this lie (and the further oppression of “the relief”), the workers would have remained hostile to the armed Resistance bands, whose exactions increased the violence of Nazi terror. Without the support on the ground of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, the bourgeoisie in London and Washington would have had no hoping of bringing the workers into the war. Contrary to 1914, it is was not a question of lining the workers up in ranks to send them to the slaughter, but of gaining their adherence on the civilian terrain, in the Resistance network, behind the cult of the glorious victory of Stalingrad!
In fact, in both Italy and France many workers joined the maquis encouraged by the illusion of returning to the class struggle, and the Stalinists and Trotskyists even offered them the fraudulent comparison with the Paris Commune (weren’t the workers rising against their own bourgeoisie led by the new Thiers - Pétain - while the Germans occupied France, as before?). In the midst of a population terrorised and impotent since the outbreak of war, many workers enrolled in the Resistance bands went to their deaths under the impression that they were fighting for the “socialist liberation” of France or Italy, in other words in a new “civil war against their own bourgeoisie”; just as in 1914, the German and French workers had been sent to the front under the pretence that Germany and France “exported” socialism. The Stalinist and Trotskyist resistance groups concentrated their blackmail on the workers to put them “in the front line of the struggle for the independence of peoples”, in a key sector for the paralysis of the economy: the railways.
At the same time, and unknown to the workers, the domination of pro-Allied right-wing factions in the Resistance, for the restoration of the old capitalist order after the peace, was the object of a bitter struggle. Teams of American secret agents from AMGOT (Allied Military Government of the Occupied Territories) were sent to France and Italy (this was the origin of the P2 Lodge and the US and Italian bourgeoisie’s complicity with the Mafia), to ensure that the Stalinists did not grab enough power to attach themselves to Russian imperialism. From start to finish, the Stalinists new the limits of the role assigned to them, especially where they were most skilled: sabotaging the workers’ struggles, disarming the more utopian Resistance groups, and beating down those workers who protested at the demands of reconstruction. Immediately after the “Liberation” - and as a proof of the complicity of all bourgeoisies against the proletariat - the Western ruling class - while condemning, for form’s sake, a few “war criminals” - recruited a number of ex-Nazi and Stalinist torturers as useful secret agents in most of the European capitals. These new recruits’ first task was of course to counter their opposite numbers on the Russian side, but above all to struggle “against communism”, in other words against the natural goal of any generalised autonomous struggle by the workers themselves, which was inevitably a threat after the horror of war and the shortages that followed it.
We will leave the bourgeois to debate amongst themselves the exact number of dead in each country [6] [6], but there is no doubt that the Russians suffered most: 20 million dead on the European front. These were conspicuous by their absence from the festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Today’s Russian historians continue to accuse the United States of delaying the landings in order to bleed the USSR further, with a view to the Cold War to come: “The landings came when Germany’s fate was already sealed by the Soviet counter-offensive on the Eastern front” [7] [7].
At the end of the fat years of reconstruction, the bourgeois liberals with their high priest Solzhenitsyn began to wax indignant over the millions dead in Stalin’s gulags, pretending to forget that the real crowning of the counter-revolution came with the utter complicity of the West... in the war. We know how merciless is the bourgeoisie after a proletarian defeat (tens of thousands of Communards, their wives and children, were slaughtered and deported after the defeat in 1871). The way that World War II was conducted allowed it to increase tenfold the massacre of the class which had so frightened it in 1917. The Russians bore the weight of 4 years of war in Europe alone. It was only at the beginning of 1945 that the Americans set foot in Germany, reducing the numbers of their own dead and preserving their social peace. The millions of Russian victims showed a tragic heroism indeed, since without American military assistance the backward Stalinist régime would have been defeated by an industrialised Germany.
After such a blood-letting, the Russian state had no need of democratic niceties to impose order. The Allies let the Russian soldiery take its revenge on millions of Germans, raising Russia to the status of “victorious power”, which experience since 1914 has shown helps to keep the social peace. The Russian government and its dictator let the German’s massacre the proletariat in Warsaw, just as they left hundreds of thousands of civilians die of cold and starvation in Stalingrad and Leningrad, and according to Souvarine attributed the millions of deaths in the gulag to the war.
To satisfy the victorious imperialisms’ appetites (the Stalinist régime dismantled all the factories in Eastern Europe, while the West profited from the reconstruction paid for by the US), it was necessary that the proletariat should not try to steal the bourgeoisie’s “Liberation”.
An intense propaganda campaign was conducted in both the West and the “totalitarian” USSR over the genocide of the Jews, which the Allies had known about since the beginning of the war. As some more serious historians have recognised, the explanation for this genocide is to be found not in the Middle Ages, but in the framework of world war. The massacre reached a fantastic intensity after the beginning of the war with Russia, to resolve more rapidly the problem of the huge masses of prisoners and refugees, especially in Poland. The Nazi state was concerned to feed its own troops, if this meant sending to an early grave a population that held back the war effort (bullets had to be saved for the Russian front, especially since wiping out such huge numbers individually had proved demoralising even for the killers). At Bermuda conference in 1943 the Allies had decided to do nothing for the Jews, preferring to let them be exterminated rather than try to handle the enormous exodus that would have come as a result of a Nazi expulsion of the Jewish population. A number of negotiations were conmducted via Romania and Hungary. All met with Roosevelt’s polite refusal. The best-known proposal, masked today behind the limited humanist action of a Schindler, was made by Eichmann to Allied representatives: 100,000 Jews against 10,000 trucks. The Allies refused the exchange, in the words of the British state: “transporting so many people would be likely to damage the war effort” [8] [8].
This genocide of the Jews, the Nazi “ethnic cleansing” was a perfect excuse for any barbarity in the Allied “victory”. The camps were opened to enormous publicity.
The rampart of lies designed to assign a diabolic status to the defeated camp has served to silence any questioning of the Allies’ terror bombing, designed above all to silence the world proletariat. Some figures are enough to unmask the horror:
- July 1943, Hamburg, 50,000 dead;
- 1944, Darmstadt, Königsberg, Heilbronn, 24,000 dead;
- Braunschweig, 23,000 dead;
- 13th-14th February 1945, Allied planes carried out an intensive bombardment of Dresden, a town full of evacuees, causing 250,000 deaths: it was one of the war’s most terrible crimes;
- in 18 months, 45 of Germany’s 60 main towns were virtually destroyed, and 650,000 people killed;
- in March 1945, the bombardment of Tokyo killed 80,000 people;
- in France, as elsehwere, the working class areas were the main targets: thousands were killed in Le Havre and Marseille, while during the landings the bombing of Caen and other towns caused thousands of deaths among the civilian population, to add to the 20,000 dead on either side among the troops;
- four months after the Reich’s surrender, with Japan practically on its knees, the most terrifying weapon of all time obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under the pretext of saving American lives; it was necessary that the proletariat remember for years to come that the bourgeoisie is an all-powerful class...
In a future article, we will consider the working class reaction during the war, passed over in silence by official historians, as well as the positions and activity of the revolutionary minorities of the time.
Damien
[1] [9] See International Review 66: “The massacres and crimes of the great democracies”, 3rd Quarter 1991.
[2] [10] The Secret War, A.C. Brown.
[3] [11] 34-39: L’Avant-guerre, Michel Ragon, Ed Denoël, 1968.
[4] [12] Report on the International Situation, 14th July 1945.
[5] [13] L’Oeuvre, 29th August, 1940.
[6] [14] See the International Review, op. cit., as well as the Manifesto of the ICC’s 9th Congress: Communist Revolution or the Destruction of Humanity.
[7] [15] Le Figaro, 6 June 1994.
[8] [16] See L’Histoire de Joël Brand by Alex Weissberg. Half a century later, the refugee problem still encounters the same shameful capitalist restrictions: “For economic and political reasons (each refugees costs some $7,000), Washington does not want the number of Jewish refugees to increase to the detriment of other exiles - from Latin America, Asia, or Africa - who have no support and may be more “persecuted”” (Le Monde, 4th October 1989). Maastrichtian Europe is not to be outdone: “... for Europe, most asylum seekers are not “real” refugees, but ordinary economic migrants who cannot be tolerated on a saturated job market” (Libération, 9th October 1989). This is where decadent capitalism ends up. Unable to develop the productive forces, it prefers during times of war or peace, to leave a great part of humanity to die a lingering death. The hypocritical impotence displayed in the face of the “ethnic cleansing” in ex-Yugoslavia, or of the ungeard-of massacre of 500,000 human beings in Rwanda, shows what capitalism is capable of TODAY. By letting these massacres happen, just as they did with the genocide of the Jews, the Western democracies pretend they have nothing to do with the horror, when in fact they are its accomplices, and even play a more direct part than they did during the Nazi epoch.
IR78, 3rd quarter 1994
At the end of the first part of this article we cited a sentence of the PCI in PC nº92, which is particularly significant of this organisation’s dangerous vision:
“It flows from this [war as a manifestation of economic rationality] that inter-imperialist struggle and the confrontation between rival powers could never lead to the destruction of the planet, because this struggle derives not from excessive greed but from the necessity to escape overproduction. When the excess has been destroyed, the war machine stops, whatever the destructive potential of the weapons used, because at that point the causes of the war have also disappeared”
Such a vision, which puts on the same level the wars of the last century, which had, effectively, an economic rationality, and those of this century, which have lost such rationality, flows directly from the incapacity of part of the Bordigist current to understand the fact that capitalism, as the Communist International said, has entered into its period of decadence since World War I. However, it is important to come back to this vision because it not only turns its back on the real history of the World Wars, but completely demobilises the working class.
It is not true that the two World Wars ended when the economic causes which engendered them had disappeared. It is obviously necessary to agree on the real economic causes of the war. But, even from the point of view of the PCI that the objective of the war was to destroy enough constant capital to allow a sufficient rate of profit to recover, one can note that real history is in contradiction with the imaginary conception of this organisation.
If we take the case of World War I, to affirm such a thing is a shameful betrayal of the fight by Lenin and the internationalists throughout the war (less so when its a question of a crass ignorance of these historical facts). In fact, the resolution adopted at the 1907 congress of the 2nd International (Stuttgart Congress), with an amendment presented by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, and the Manifesto adopted by the Basle Congress in 1912, made it very clear that Lenin led the struggle, from August 1914, for revolutionaries “to use the economic and political crisis created by the war with all their strength to profoundly agitate the popular layers and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination” (Resolution of the Stuttgart Congress). He did not say to the workers: “the imperialist war will end in any case when the economic causes which engendered it are exhausted”. On the contrary, he showed that the only means of putting an end to the imperialist war, before it led to a catastrophic hecatomb for the proletariat and for the whole of civilisation, consisted in the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. Obviously PC takes up this slogan, and approves the policy of the internationalists throughout this war. But at the same time, it is not capable of understanding that the scenario that it presents of the end of the generalised imperialist war was not realised in 1917-18. On the contrary, the 1st World War ended, very rapidly, in November 1918, because the strongest proletariat in the world, that of Germany, had risen against it and was taking the road of revolution as the Russian proletariat had done one year before. The facts are eloquent: on the 9th November 1918, after several months of workers’ strikes throughout Germany, navy sailors based at Kiel mutinied against their officers, while an insurrectional mood developed within the proletariat; on the 11th November the German authorities signed an armistice with the countries of the Entente. The bourgeoisie had learned very well the lesson of Russia a year before when the decision of the provisional government, emerging from the revolution of February 1917, to continue the war constituted the principal factor in mobilising the proletariat toward the October Revolution and soviet power. Thus, history has proved correct the vision defended by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: it is the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat that has put an end to the imperialist war and not some destruction of excess commodities.
The 2nd World War, contrary to the First (and to the expectations of many revolutionaries) did not open the way to a new revolutionary wave. And it was unfortunately not the action of the proletariat that put an end to it. However, that doesn’t mean that it fulfilled the abstract schema of PC. If one studies seriously the historical facts, and takes off the deforming spectacles of ‘invariant’ Bordigist dogma, one can easily see that the end of the war had nothing to do with some ‘sufficient destruction of surplus’. In reality the imperialist war ended with the complete destruction of the military potential of the vanquished and by the occupation of their territory by the victors. The most explicit case was Germany once again. If the Allies took the trouble to occupy every inch of German territory, dividing it into four military zones, this was not for economic but social reasons: the bourgeoisie remembered the 1st World War. It knew that it could not count on a defeated government to guarantee social order in the enormous proletarian concentrations in Germany. According to PC itself (we can once more note its incoherence):
“During the 3 years from 45-48 a serious economic crisis hit all the European countries affected by the war [well! this was where the most constant capital was destroyed] (...) One can see that the post-war stagnation affected victors and vanquished alike. But armed with the experience of the period after World War I, the world bourgeoisie knew that this stagnation could give rise to explosions of class struggle and revolution. That’s why the post-war economic depression was also the period of the massive military occupation of Europe. This occupation only began to be reduced, in the western sector, from 1949, when the spectre of ‘social disorder’ became remote” (PC Nº 91, p43).
In reality, in the name of ‘marxism’ and even of the ‘dialectic’, PC gives us a mechanistic, vulgar-materialist vision of the process of the beginning and the end of world imperialist war.
For marxism the economic infrastructures of society in the last analysis determine its superstructures. Moreover all historical facts that affect the political, military or social scene have economic roots. However, it is once more ‘in the last analysis’ that this economic determination plays its role, in a dialectical, not a mechanical, way. There is, particularly at the beginning of capitalism, an economic origin to war. But the link between economic factors and war has always been mediated by a series of historical, political, and diplomatic factors, which allow the bourgeoisie to mask the real nature of war from the proletariat. That is already valid for the last century, when war had a certain economic rationality for capital. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was an example.
On the Prussian side this war had no immediate economic goal (even if, obviously, the victor allowed himself the luxury of imposing a price of 6 million gold francs in exchange for the departure of his occupation troops). Fundamentally the war of 1870 allowed Prussia to create German unity around itself (after it had beaten its Austrian rival for such a role at the battle of Sadowa in 1866). The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had no decisive economic interest, but constituted the wedding present for the different German political entities. And it was through this political unity that the capitalist nation could develop impetuously to become, and remain, the first economic power of Europe.
On the French side the choice made by Napoleon III to go to war was still more remote from a direct economic determination. Fundamentally, as Marx showed, it was a question of the monarch launching a ‘dynastic’ war which would permit the Second Empire, if victorious, to root itself more firmly at the head of the French bourgeoisie (which in its great majority, whether royalist or republican, was not over-fond of ‘Badinguet’ as Napoleon was known) and to allow Napoleon’s son to succeed him. That is why Thiers, representing the most clear-sighted of the capitalist class, was ferociously opposed to this war.
When one examines the causes of the 1st World War, one can equally note how far the economic factor, which is obviously fundamental, acts indirectly. We cannot, in the context of this article, develop on all the imperialist ambitions of the different protagonists of this war (at the beginning of the century revolutionaries devoted many pamphlets to this question). Suffice it to say that for the two principal countries of the Entente, Great Britain and France, the fundamental stakes was the preservation of their colonial empires against the ambitions of Germany, whose growing power and industrial muscle had practically no colonial outlets. That is why in the final analysis, the war was for Germany (which played the role of aggressor in the conflict) a struggle for a re-division of markets at the time when the latter were already in the hands of the older powers. The economic crisis which began to develop in 1913 was obviously an important factor which worsened imperialist rivalries that broke out on the 4th August 1914, but it would be totally false to pretend (which no marxist did at the time) that the crisis had reached such a level that capital could do nothing else than unleash the World War with its immense destruction, in order to overcome it.
In reality, the war could very well have broken out in 1912, during the Balkan crisis. But at this very moment, the Socialist International had mobilised itself and the working masses against the threat of war, notably at the Basle Congress. The bourgeoisie had to halt its advance along the road to generalised confrontation. By contrast, in 1914, the principal reason why the bourgeoisie could begin the World War did not lie in the level reached by the crisis of overproduction, which was far from the level reached today for example. It lay in the fact that the proletariat pacified by the idea that war no longer threatened and more generally by reformist ideology (propagated by the right wing of the socialist parties which in most cases was the leadership) made no serious mobilisation against the threat which increased sharply after the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 20th June 1914. For a month and a half, the bourgeoisie of the principal countries had plenty of time to verify that their hands were free to unleash the massacre. In particular, in Germany as much as in France, the governments directly contacted the leaders of the socialist parties who assured them of their loyalty and of their capacity to drag the workers toward the butchery. We are not inventing anything: these facts were put forward and denounced at the time by revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin.
Concerning the 2nd World War, one can also show how, after the economic crisis of 1929, all the elements which would end up in the outbreak of war in September 1939 fell into place: the arrival of Hitler to power in 1933, the rise to power in 1936 of the ‘popular fronts’ in France and Spain, the civil war in the latter from July of the same year. The fact that the open crisis of the capitalist economy would finally end in imperialist war was moreover seen very clearly by the bourgeois leaders. Cordell Hull, close collaborator of the American president Roosevelt, declared: “When goods circulate, soldiers don’t advance”. Hitler on the eve of the war said clearly that Germany “must export or die”. However, one cannot account for the moment when war broke out uniquely according to PC:
“After 29, the attempt was made to overcome the crisis in the USA by a kind of ‘new model of development’. The state intervened in a massive way in the economy... and launched gigantic plans for public investment. We know today that all that only had secondary effects on the economy, which in 37-38 sank once again into crisis: only the rearmament credits in 38 could spark a ‘vigorous’ recovery and attain historic levels of production. But public indebtedness and the production of armaments could only provide a break, it could not eliminate the tendency to crisis. Let us note that in 39 the war broke out to avoid the descent into a still more ruinous crisis... The crisis before the war lasted 3 years and was followed after 33 by a recovery which led directly to the war” (PC Nº90, p29). This explanation is not false in itself, even though one must reject the idea that the war would be less ruinous than the crisis: one only has to look at the state of Europe after the 2nd World War to see that such an affirmation is not serious. By contrast, such an explanation becomes false if one attempts to understand from it alone why the war broke out in 1939 and not at the beginning of the 30s, when the world and particularly Germany and the United States sank into the deepest recession in history.
To show the incredible schematism of the PC’s analysis, it is enough to cite the following passage:
“The development of the imperialist economy at a certain moment ‘made’ the war. And while it is true that the military confrontation temporarily resolved the problems posed by the crisis, it is necessary to underline however that the military confrontation did not flow from the recession but from the artificial recovery that followed it. Drugged by the intervention of the state, financed by public debt (military industry for a good part), production recovered; but the immediate consequence was the saturation of an already water-logged world market, reproduction under a more acute form of inter-imperialist confrontation and thus war. At this moment the states threw themselves at each other, they made war because of the threat from bulldozers, combine-harvesters and any other pacific machines that one can imagine...The power to launch the war did not come from the barrel of a gun but from the mass of unsold commodities” (PC Nº91, p37)
Such a vision makes a complete abstraction of the concrete conditions through which the economic crisis ended up in war. For PC things are reduced to the mechanism: recession, ‘drugged’ recession, war. Nothing else. One can already note that this schema could not be applied at all to the 1st World War. But, concerning the second, PC doesn’t rely on the form taken by the drugged recovery in Germany after 1933: that of a colossal rearmament effort by the Nazi regime, nor on the significance of the coming to power of this regime itself. Moreover PC doesn’t examine in the least the significance of the coming to power of the Popular Front in France, for example. Finally the events on the international scene as important as the Italian expedition of 1935 against Abyssinia, the war in Spain in 1936, the war between Japan and China a year later are ignored. In reality, no war can be waged with combine-harvesters. Whatever the pressure exercised by the crisis, war can only break out if the military, diplomatic, political and social conditions have been prepared and are mature. The history of the 30s is precisely that of these preparations. Without going over in detail here what we have already developed in other issues of this Review we can only say that one of the functions of the Nazi regime was to drive the reconstitution of German military potential on a grand scale and “at a rhythm which surprised even the generals” [1] [19]. The clauses of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had previously kept this potential in check. In France too, the Popular Front had been responsible for re-launching the armament effort on a scale unknown since the 1st World War. Moreover, the wars mentioned above took place within the perspective of military and diplomatic preparations for the generalised confrontation. The war in Spain must be mentioned particularly. It was the terrain where the two Axis powers, Italy and Germany, not only tested their weapons for the war to come but also reinforced their alliance in view of the latter. But not only that: the war in Spain perfected the physical and political crushing of the world proletariat after the revolutionary wave which had begun in 1917 in Russia and finished in China in 1927. Between 1936 and 1939 it was not only the proletariat of Spain that was defeated, firstly by the Popular Front, then by Franco. The Spanish war had been one of the essential means by which the bourgeoisie of the democratic countries, particularly in Europe, glued the workers to anti-fascist ideology, which allowed them to be used once more as cannon fodder in the 2nd World War. Thus the acceptance of the imperialist war by the workers of the fascist and Nazi regimes as a result of terror was obtained in the other countries in the name of the ‘defence of democracy’ with the active participation, obviously, of the left parties of capital, the ‘socialists, and ‘communists’.
The mechanical schema that led to the outbreak of the 2nd World War, according to PC, coincides with reality. But one can only understand the latter by looking at the specific conditions of this period and not from this single schema. In particular, as far as both Germany, but also countries like France and Great Britain were concerned (with a certain delay for other countries however) the armament effort was one of the causes of the recovery after the depression of 1929. But that was only possible because the principle capitalist states had considerably reduced their military capacity following the 1st World War because the main preoccupation of the world bourgeoisie was to face up to the revolutionary wave of the proletariat. In addition, bolstered by the experience of the 1st World War the bourgeoisie knew very well that it could only launch the imperialist war with the precondition of a totally submissive proletariat in order to avoid a revolutionary resurgence of the latter during the war.
Thus PC method consists in establishing as a historical law a schema that can only be applied once in history (since we have already seen that did not even apply before the First World War). To be valid in the present period the historical conditions of today would have to be fundamentally the same as those of the 30s. This is far from the case: never have armaments been so developed and the proletariat has not suffered a profound defeat as it did during the 20s. On the contrary since the end of the 60s, it has emerged from the profound counter-revolution, which had weighed on it since the beginning of the 30s.
PC’s schematic vision ends up in a particularly dangerous analysis of the present period. It is true that from time to time, in its study, PC seems to discover a slightly more marxist conception of the process that leads to World War. For example:
“For such masses of human beings to be sent to the slaughter, the populations must be prepared in time for the war: and for them to stand up to the effects of all-out war, this work of preparation must be followed by a work of constant mobilisation of the energy and consciousness of the nation, of all the nation, in favour of war (...) Without the cohesion of the whole social body, without the solidarity of every class in a war for which their own existence and hopes must be sacrificed, even the troops of the best armies are condemned to disintegrate under the blow of the privations and daily horrors of the conflict” (PC Nº91, p41).
But such completely correct affirmations are in flagrant contradiction with the approach adopted by PC when it tries to predict the years to come. Resting on its schema, recession-drugged recovery-war, PC indulges in studious calculations (which we will spare the reader) to end up with the following conclusion:
“We can now refute the thesis of the imminence of the 3rd World War” (PC Nº90, p27). “We can then situate the date of the presumed economic maturity of the conflict around the middle of the first decade of the next millennium (or if one prefers the next century)” (Ibid. p29).
We can note that PC bases such a prediction on the fact that “the process of drugged recovery typical of the war economy, which followed the crisis, has not happened yet, in a situation where the economic situation, which, from one recession to another is still far from exhausting the tendency to depression inaugurated in 74-75” (Ibid).
Now we can obviously show (see all our analyses on the characteristics of the present crisis in this Review) how, for more than a decade, the ‘recoveries’ of the world economy have been perfectly ‘drugged’. But PC says so itself some lines before:
“We only want to underline that the world capitalist system has used the same means to prevent the crisis, which it used after the 1929 crash”.
Coherence is not really a strong point of PC and the Bordigists: it is perhaps their conception of the ‘dialectic’, since they flatter themselves with being “experienced in the handling of the dialectic” (PC Nº91, p56) [2] [20].
That being said, beyond the contradictions of PC, it is important to underline the perfectly demobilising character of the predictions with which they amuse themselves with on the date of the next world conflict. Since its foundation the ICC has insisted that once capitalism had exhausted the effects of the reconstruction of the 2nd World War, the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production broke out once more in the form of open crisis (at the end of 60s, and not in 1974-75 as the Bordigists would like, in order to prove an old ‘prediction’ of Bordiga) the conditions for a new World War were given. It has also demonstrated that the military and diplomatic conditions for such a war were completely mature with the constitution of the two great imperialist blocs around NATO and the Warsaw Pact behind the two principle military powers of the world. The reason why the economic dead-end of world capitalism has not ended up in a new generalised butchery is to be found fundamentally in the fact that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have its hands free on the social terrain. Since the first bites of the crisis the world working class - in France in May 1968, in Italy in the autumn of 1969, and in all the developed countries afterward - raised its head and detached itself from the profound counter-revolution, which it had suffered for four decades. In explaining this, in basing its propaganda on this idea, the ICC (in a very modest way, obviously, corresponding to its actual strength) has helped to re-forge the self-confidence of the working class faced with the bourgeois campaigns, which permanently try to sap this confidence. By contrast, in continuing to propagate the idea that the proletariat was still totally absent from the historical scene (as if it were still ‘midnight in the century’) the Bordigist current made (involuntarily, certainly, but that doesn’t change anything) its small contribution to the bourgeoisie’s campaigns. Worse still, in letting it be thought that, in any case, the material conditions of a 3rd World War were not yet present, it has helped to demobilise the working class against this threat, playing, on a small scale, the role of the reformists on the eve of the 1st World War when they convinced the workers that the war was no longer a threat. Thus it is not only, as we have seen in the first part of this article, in affirming that a 3rd World War would not risk destroying humanity that PC has helped to mask the real stakes of the combat of the working class today, but also in giving credence to the idea that the class struggle has nothing to do with the fact the World War III has not broken out since the 70s.
The collapse of the Eastern Bloc, at the end of the 80s, has momentarily eclipsed the military and diplomatic conditions for a new World War. However, the mistaken vision of PC continues to weaken the political capacities of the proletariat. The disappearance of the blocs has not put an end to military conflicts, far from it. The large and medium powers continue to confront each other in the conflicts of small states and even through ethnic conflicts. The reason why these powers don’t engage more directly on the ground, or why when they do it effectively (like in the Gulf War in 1991) they only send professional soldiers or volunteers, is the fear that to send conscripts, that is workers in uniform, would provoke reactions and a mobilisation of the working class. Thus, at the present time, the fact that the bourgeoisie is not capable of dragging the proletariat behind its war objectives is a factor of first importance limiting the scale of imperialist massacres. And the more the working class develops its struggles, the more the bourgeoisie will be trapped in its disastrous projects. This is what revolutionaries must say to their class to help it become conscious of its real capacities and its responsibilities. Unfortunately, despite its completely valid denunciation of bourgeois lies on imperialist war, and notably of pacifism, this is not done by the Bordigist current, and not by PC in particular.
To conclude this critique of the analyses of PC on the question of imperialist war, we must return to some ‘arguments’ employed by this review when it tries to stigmatise the positions of the ICC. For PC we are “social-pacifists of the extreme left” on the same level as the Trotskyists (PC Nº92, p61). Our position is “emblematic of the impotent rage of the petit-bourgeoisie” (Ibid. p57). And why, may we ask? Because:
“If the outbreak of war definitively excludes the revolution, then peace, this bourgeois peace, becomes despite everything an advantage which the proletariat, while it doesn’t have the force to make the revolution, must protect like the apple of its eye. And here is, in the end, the old ‘struggle for peace’ ..in the name of the revolution. Wasn’t he fundamental axis of the propaganda of the ICC at the time of the Gulf War denunciation of the warmongers of all kinds, and the lamentations on the ‘chaos’, the ‘blood’ and the ‘horrors’ of the war? Certainly war is horrible, but bourgeois peace is too and the ‘peace-mongers’ must be denounced as severely as the ‘war-mongers’; as for the growing ‘chaos’ of the bourgeois world, it can only be welcomed by real communists because it only signifies the approach of the time when revolutionary violence must be opposed to bourgeois violence” (Ibid.).
Sincerely the ‘arguments’ of PC are a little poor, and above all, lies. When revolutionaries at the beginning of century, the Luxemburgs and Lenins, at each congress of International Socialism and in their daily propaganda, put workers on guard against the threat of imperialist war, when they denounced the preparations for the latter, they did not do the same thing as the pacifists and it seems to us that PC still identifies with these revolutionaries. Moreover, when, in the course of the war itself, they stigmatised with all their energy the imperialist bestiality of the ‘war-mongers’ and other ‘social chauvinists’ they didn’t add their voice to that of pacifists like Romain Rolland. It is exactly the same struggle of these revolutionaries that the ICC is demanding, and without the least concessions to pacifist propaganda, which they denounce with the same vigour as war propaganda contrary to what PC pretends (they should read our press a bit better). In reality the fact that PC is obliged to lie on what we really say only shows one thing: the lack of consistency of their own analysis.
To close, we would say to these comrades that it is no use to spend all their energy to predict the date of the future World War to end up in a ‘prediction’ for the period to come which comprises no less than four possible scenarios (see PC Nº 92, p57-60). The proletariat, to arm itself politically, expects clear perspectives from revolutionaries. To trace such a perspective it is not sufficient for the latter to content themselves with the “strict repetition of classical positions” as the PCI wants to do (PC Nº92 p31). While marxism can only rest on a strict respect of proletarian principles, notably in relation to imperialist war, as the ICC believes as much as the PCI, it is not a dead theory, incapable to taking account of different historical circumstances in which the working class develops its struggle, whether for the defence of its immediate interests or for communism (the two are part of the same whole). It must be able, as Lenin said, to “analyse concretely a concrete situation”. Any other analysis is no longer marxism, and is either useless or spreads still more confusion in the ranks of the working class. This is unfortunately the ‘marxism’ that the PCI gives us.
FM
[1] [21] History of international relations Book 6, page 142, by Pierre Renouvin (Paris 1972)
[2] [22] In the domain of the incoherence of the PCI, one could also cite the following: “if peace has reigned until now in the imperialist metropoles, it is precisely because of this domination by the USA and the USSR, and if war is inevitable … it is for the simple reason that forty years of ‘ peace’ have matured the forces that tend to put into question this equilibrium, which emerged from the last world conflict” (PC No. 91, page 47). The PCI should make up its mind once and for all. Why has the war not taken place yet? Because, exclusively, the economic conditions are not yet mature as PC tries to show through many pages, or from the fact that its diplomatic preparations are not yet ready? Understand who can.
Behind the banners of 'peace', 'civilization' and 'democracy', the greatest military powers of the world have just celebrated with all due pomp the anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy. The festivities organized for the occasion, the repulsive live shows enacted at the very scene of the butchery fifty years ago, the sonorous congratulations and hymns to their own glory exchanged by the most powerful heads of state on the planet - all this was the subject of a vast media operation on a world scale. The message was put across very clearly: "we, the great industrialized states and our democratic institutions are the heirs of the liberators who freed Europe from that incarnation of evil, the Nazi regime. Today as yesterday, we are the guardians of civilization, peace and humanity against oppression, terror, barbarism and chaos".
These people want us to believe that today, like yesterday, barbarism is the fault of ... someone else. The old lie that the 1939-45 butchery, its 50 million dead, its train of atrocities and suffering, was all the fault of the barbaric madness of Hitler and not of capitalism as a whole, not of the sordid imperialist interests of all the camps involved. We have been sold this lie for half a century, in the hope that a lie repeated a thousand times will become a truth. And if it's all served up to us again now, it's with the aim of once again excusing capitalism, and in particular the great 'democratic' powers, from the responsibility of the massacres, wars, genocides and growing chaos ravaging the planet today.
Half a million people involved in the operation, the most gigantic military expedition of all time, a frightful slaughter which, in the space of a few hours, left tens of thousands of corpses on the ground. This is what, in the name of 'peace', the crowned heads and presidents of the 'international community' celebrated this June 6 1994. Gathering hypocritically in front of the rows of white crosses, upon which are inscribed the ages of these children they call 'heroes' - 16, 18, 20 years old - the only true emotion this crowd felt was regret for the loss of the good old days of fifty years ago, when the working class was defeated and was ready to supply such abundant cannon-fodder (see the article '50 years of imperialist lies ' in this issue).
All of them, Clinton, Major, Mitterand and the rest, go on and on about peace. They did the same thing five years ago, when the Berlin wall fell. And it was in the name of peace that this same 'international community', a few months later, unleashed 'Desert Storm' on Iraq, with its tens of thousands of victims. They told us that out of this unspeakable butchery a 'new world order' would arise. Since then, it's again been in the name of peace and civilization that they've made their presence felt in Yugoslavia, in Africa, in the countries of the former USSR, in the Middle East and the Far East. The more these regions have been ravaged by war, the more the great powers set themselves up as defenders of peace, the more active they have become in all these conflicts, in order to defend the only 'just cause' that any capitalist state knows about: its own imperialist interests.
There can be no peace under capitalism. The end of the Second World War may have pushed war away from Europe and the most developed countries, but it only displaced it towards the periphery of the system. For 50 years, the imperialist powers large and small have not ceased confronting each other through local conflicts. For decades, these incessant local wars were moments in the rivalry between the two great imperialist blocs over the division of the world. The collapse of the eastern bloc and, as a result, the break-up of the western bloc as well, far from putting an end to the war-like and imperialist reality of capitalism, was the signal for it to intensify without limits.
In a world now ruled by the principle of every man for himself, yesterday's allies are fighting over spheres of influence all over the planet. The celebrations of D-Day, where the most powerful states got together to congratulate each other on having chased war away from Europe 50 years ago, took place at the very time that war has returned to this continent, to Yugoslavia - and it is a war that has been nourished actively by the rivalries between the great 'civilized' states.
No, the military chaos ravaging the planet today can't be explained away as the simple result of the return of 'ancestral hatreds' between backward populations - another version of the argument that barbarism is always someone else's fault. Everywhere it is being fed, sharpened, kept up, when it's not provoked outright, by the imperialist rivalries and ambitions of the very same states who give us such fine speeches about their humanitarian, peaceful and civilized intentions.
Rwanda: rivalries between France and America are responsible for the horror
A terrifying bloodbath. Entire populations coldly murdered with machetes and nailed clubs, children slaughtered in their cots, families hunted by hordes of killers to their last places of refuge and savagely massacred. The country transformed into a vast charnel-house and Lake Victoria polluted by thousands of rotting corpses. The number of victims? At least half a million, no doubt more. The scale of the genocide is not known. Never in history has there been such an exodus, in such a short time, of populations blindly fleeing from massacres.
The way the 'democratic' bourgeois media has portrayed this holocaust has been designed to get across this message: "look at the horrors that are the result of the ancestral racial hatreds that divide the backward populations of 'savage' Africa. In the face of all this the civilized states are powerless. But you should be glad to live in democratic countries which are shielded from such chaos. The day-to-day reality of poverty and unemployment that you have to put up with is a paradise compared to the massacres these populations are subjected to".
The lie is all the bigger, this time around, in that the so-called ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis was directly created by the imperialist powers in the period of colonization. At that time Hutus and Tutsis corresponded much less to 'ethnic' criteria than to social castes. The Tutsis were the reigning feudal caste who initially had the support of the colonial powers. Inheriting the Rwandan colony when the German empire was carved up by the victors of the First World War, it was Belgium who introduced the reference to people's ethnic group on their identity cards, sharpening the hatred between the two castes in order to gain support from the Tutsi monarchy.
In 1959, Belgium made an about-face and supported the Hutu majority which had taken power. The famous 'ethnic' identity card was maintained and so was discrimination between Tutsis and Hutus in the various spheres of social life.
Several hundred thousand Tutsis fled the country and wound up in Burundi or Uganda. In the latter country they were to be a recruiting base for the clique around the current President Museveni, who took power in Kampala with their support in 1986. In return, the new Ugandan regime gave arms and aid to the Tutsi guerillas, leading to the formation of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) which entered into Rwanda in October 1990.
In the meantime, Belgian imperialism's control over Kigali was replaced by France. The latter gave unstinting military and economic support to Habyarimana's Hutu regime, which imposed a reign of terror on the country and reinforced ethnic resentments against the Tutsis. It was thanks to the support of French imperialism which armed it and sent military reinforcements to help it that the regime was able to check the advances made by the RPF, which was discretely supported by the US, via Uganda which armed it and trained it.
From there the civil war took off, anti-Tutsi pogroms multiplied at the same time as those carried out by the RPF against all those suspected of 'collaborating' with the regime. In the name of 'protecting the innocent' Paris has sent in an expeditionary force. In reality the French state is simply defending its position against the offensive of the USA, which since the collapse of the eastern bloc has been trying to deprive France of its spheres of influence in Africa. The RPF guerillas are the spearhead of an American offensive aimed at bringing down the pro-French regime in Kigali.
In order to save the regime, France set out a 'peace' plan in August 93, comprising a more 'democratic' constitution, transferring some power to the Tutsi minority as well as the various opposition cliques.
This plan proved to be unrealizable. Not because 'ancestral hatreds' were too strong, but quite simply because the imperialist maneuvers and strategic calculations of the great powers could not accommodate it. On the very eve of the inauguration of the new constitution, the Rwandan and Burundi presidents were assassinated, burying the plan and unleashing the bloodbath.
The recent revelations in the Belgian press (Belgium has its own reasons for doing down its French rival in Africa) directly implicated French military elements in the 6 April assassination, suggesting that Paris could well have ordered the killings in the hope that, by pointing a finger at the RPF rebels, it would give the government army all the justifications it needed to put an end to the Tutsi rebellion. If that was the case, reality went beyond all its hopes. But it matters little which of the two cliques, the government or the RPF, and behind them France or the USA, had the greater interest in elevating the Rwanda conflict from simmering guerrilla war to all-out war. The very logic of capital pushes it in that direction: 'peace' is no more than a myth in capitalism, at best a pause during which new conflicts are being prepared. In the last instance war remains capitalism's only way of life, its only way of resolving its contradictions.
Today the sorcerers' apprentices are making a show of emotion about the scale of the conflagration they themselves have lit. However, for months all these good people allowed the massacre to go on while deploring the "impotence of the UN". The decision adopted by the UN Security Council in mid-May - more than a month after the war had begun and 500,000 were already dead! - to send 5,000 men in under the aegis of UNIMAR, wasn't even supposed to be carried through until July! Even if certain African states in the region have declared that they are ready to supply troops, among the great powers, who are charged with supplying equipment and finances, sloth and apathy have reigned, leading one UNIMAR official to protest: "it's as if we had become totally unfeeling, as though we were indifferent to all this". To which the diplomats of the Security Council replied: "in any case, most of the massacres are over, we have to wait and see what happens next". The other UN resolutions, which are supposed to stop war supplies through Uganda and Zaire, have had no more effect. And quite understandably so: we've see the same 'impotence' in Bosnia. It merely reflects the divergence of imperialist interests between those who present themselves as the 'forces of peace'.
The military-humanitarian pose was adopted most stridently by the French government in June, after a cease-fire was immediately violated. "We can't tolerate this anymore" claimed the French minister for Foreign Affairs, proposing an intervention "in the framework of the UN" but on condition that the operation should be under French command. The initiative immediately provoked the reaction of RPF representatives who said indignantly that "France can't stop the genocide that it has helped set in motion". As for the other big powers, they are doing all they can to hamstring the French, particularly the USA. First because if France aims to take charge of the operation, it's in order to conserve its role as the dominant power in the country, to put all its weight behind stopping the RPF's advance. Second because the USA, for their part, are not only supporting the RPF on the ground, but also want to make it clear that no one else except themselves can take on the job of gendarme. This is what really lies behind this new outbreak of 'humanitarian' posturing; it's got nothing at all to do with the fate of the massacred population.
Yemen: the strategic calculations of the great powers
Born out of the reunification of the two Yemens four years ago - in the euphoria created by the collapse of the eastern bloc, which suddenly left Aden and its one-party YSP regime without a backer - the newly unified Yemeni republic hasn't lasted long. The secession by the south and the renewed military conflict between the two parts of the country is yet another demonstration of what the 'new world order' really means: a world of instability and chaos, of states being torn to shreds by the pressure of social decomposition. But as in Rwanda or Bosnia, the chaos has been nourished and fed by the imperialist powers of the region and beyond, who are still trying to pull irons out of the fire for their own benefit.
Regionally the Yemen conflict has been fuelled on one side by Saudi Arabia, which reproaches the Islamic factions in the north for being too sympathetic to their menacing neighbor Iraq and to the regime in Sudan. It's Saudi, and behind it its powerful ally America, who has thus supported the secessionist clique in Aden with the aim of weakening the pro-Iraqi factions. On the other side, by supporting the northern offensive, Khartoum is defending its regional imperialist influence, in particular against its local rival Egypt, another American stronghold.
The stakes of this struggle are none other than control of the eminently strategic position of the port of Aden, which faces the French stronghold in Djibouti. And who is behind the military-Islamic Sudanese regime? As it happens, it's discretely backed by France which is seeking to counter the US offensive in Somalia which has threatened its position in Djibouti.
The hidden warfare between the great powers, particularly the US and France, in Africa and the Middle East, has led to this sordid reality which has seen France denouncing Islamic obscurantism in Algeria, where it is destabilizing its own sphere of influence with the blessing of the USA which is supporting the FIS more or less openly; at the same time we have seen the USA denouncing Islamic fundamentalism when it goes against its interests in Arabia, while France, forgetting its anti-clerical soul, finds militant Islam rather to its taste when it helps it to defend its imperialist interests at the entrance to the Red Sea. Yet another ideological justification which has collapsed in the face of the squalid reality of imperialism.
Bosnia: 'peaceful' missions fuel the war
The same cynicism, the same great power duplicity has been revealed in the war in Bosnia (see the article 'The great imperialist powers foment war' in International Review 77). The recent evolution of the diplomatic-military imbroglio between the great powers, as the massacres continue unabated, has given the lie to all their 'humanitarian' pretenses, which are just a cover for using the Serbian, Croatian and Muslim populations to advance their imperialist designs.
The Bosnian theatre, which for a long time has been a favorite hunting ground of the various European powers, has today become one of the cornerstones of the American offensive. With the NATO ultimatum and the threat of air attacks on Serb forces, Washington managed to regain the initiative in a very convincing manner, to slap down Russia's new pretensions in the region and to expose the total impotence of Britain and France, who have had to accept the American intervention that they have up till now rejected and sabotaged with all means at their disposal. And the USA has made further advances by overseeing the creation of the Croat-Muslim Federation. All of a sudden Germany's intention to use Croatia as a springboard to the Mediterranean has been kicked into touch. Here again, all these grand military-diplomatic maneuvers have nothing at all to do with 'the return to peace'.
As we said in our previous issue, "the Croatian-Muslim alliance which the USA is overseeing - if it does get realized - will take the confrontation with Serbia onto another level. The European powers which have just received a slap in the face won't hesitate to throw oil onto the fire". The vote of the American senate for lifting the embargo on arms supplies to the Bosnians - which received unexpected support from a handful of French armchair diehard intellectuals - can only encourage the Bosnian army, which has already been armed by the American bourgeoisie, to resume its military offensive. And the massacres won't be halted by the European plan for the partition of Bosnia, which is totally unacceptable to the Muslims, and to which the White House, in apparent disagreement with Congress, has pretended to support. Its predictable failure, and Washington's support for the new Croat-Muslim anti-Serb front, will make the widening of the war inevitable.
The butchery which has now been raging in ex-Yugoslavia for three years now is not about to end. It is potent proof of how the wars and chaos born out of the decomposition of capitalism are aggravated by the big imperialist powers. And also that, in the name of 'humanitarian intervention', the only alternative they can propose is either to bomb the Serb forces or arm the Bosnians. In other words, faced with the war and chaos provoked by the decomposition of the capitalist system, the most powerful and industrialized nations can only respond by adding more war.
Korea: towards new military clashes
While areas of conflict proliferate, another one is smoldering around North Korea, which is seeking to equip itself with a nuclear arsenal. The reaction of the USA, which has threatened Pyongyang with an escalating series of sanctions, has once again been presented to us as the attitude of a responsible and 'civilized' power concerned to stop the arms race and defend the peace. In fact this 'major crisis' is very similar to the USA's showdown with Iraq four years ago, which ended with the butchery of the Gulf war. And, as then, the pretensions of North Korea (which is already one of the most militarized countries in the world, with a million-strong army), its ambition to add nuclear weapons to an already huge arsenal, are basically just a pretext.
Behind the 'Korean crisis' and the media intoxication about Pyongyang's aggressive intentions towards its southern neighbor, we can see the USA reacting to the threats to its hegemony, to its status as world cop, posed by the alliance being formed between the two giants of the region: China and Japan. In threatening to go "as far as it takes", America's real targets are not Pyongyang but the former two countries. All this is part of the White House's pressure on China, which on the one hand is holding out the carrot of "Most Favored Nation" status, and on the other hand the stick, via its threats against its little North Korean protégé.
The aim behind deliberately raising the tension with North Korea is to force China and Japan to range themselves behind the USA, to oblige Beijing to break solidarity with Pyongyang, cut through the Sino-Japanese axis and stamp on any pretensions towards political independent these countries might have. Exactly the same as in the Gulf crisis, when the USA even provoked the crisis by encouraging Saddam Hussein's ambitions towards Kuwait, with the sole aim of forcing the European powers to line up behind the USA and, contrary to their own interests in the Middle East, to make an act of allegiance to America's military power. The operation was a great success then. The imperialist ambitions of the USA's European rivals were for a while smothered, at the cost of a revolting butchery.
Whether or not the USA goes all the way this time, repeating its bloody 'exploit', whether or not it unleashes its enormous military machine with the aim of bringing the Asian powers to heal, this new crisis shows the future that capitalism is preparing for us.
Capitalism is war
The ceremonies commemorating D-Day also had the aim of reminding everyone that it is the USA which lays down the law in 1994, just as it did in 1944. The slap in the face given to the Germans, who were visibly excluded from the festivities, was intended to remind it who lost the Second World War and to make it understand that it would not be a good idea to try to obtain a new status in the world imperialist balance of forces. The even more striking absence of Russia - which did not fail to protest against the fact that its participation in the victory of 1945 was being 'forgotten', as were the millions of proletarians it sacrificed on the altar of the world butchery - was also aimed at repudiating Moscow's ambition to regain a place among the leading powers of the world. As for the hypocritical speechifying of those who were invited, proclaiming their common concern to act 'for peace', all this cannot really hide the sordid reality of the confrontations between them all over the planet.
There will be no pause in the acceleration and spread of military conflicts. Since its birth, war has been part of capitalism's history. In the period of its decay, it has become the system's permanent way of life. The bourgeoisie wants us to believe that all this is inevitable, that there's nothing we can do except rely on the good intentions of the great powers and their efforts to limit the most devastating effects of all this. Nothing could be more false. As we have just seen, the great powers are the world's main warmongers. And for a very simple reason: this war-like chaos, this militarist folly has its roots in the accelerating downfall of the capitalist economy.
The answer is in the hands of the proletariat
Turn over this coin of the war and barbarism spreading all over the underdeveloped countries, and you will find the poverty and mass unemployment that are growing throughout the big industrialized countries. Permanent war and catastrophic economic crisis are both expressions of the same bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Capitalism is not only incapable of doing away with these scourges; as it rots on its feet, it can only offer more poverty, more unemployment, more wars.
There is an alternative to the frightful future that capitalism promises us. It is in the hands of the international working class and it alone. It is above all up to the workers in the great industrialized countries, who are being hit full tilt by the dramatic consequences of the crisis of the system, to develop this alternative by struggling on their class terrain in the most resolute, united, and conscious manner possible.
Against the feelings of powerlessness that the ruling class wants to inject it with, against its attempts to pull it behind its military adventures, the working class must respond by developing its class response to the attacks of capital. This is the only possible response to the barbarism of the system, because only the working class has the capacity to destroy capitalism before its murderous logic leads to the destruction of humanity. The future of the human species is in the hands of the proletariat.
PE, 19.6.94
The bourgeoisie knows that it is stuck in the crisis. The momentary weakness of the international working class is allowing it to get away with the cynical language of a historically moribund class which knows that it can only survive by intensifying oppression and exploitation.
The doctors have spoken. The economic 'experts' of the OECD Secretariat[1], after two years of intense reflection, declare that they have "carried out the mandate which the Ministers entrusted to them in May 1992". The object of their study? Unemployment, hypocritically called "the problem of employment". But what is the diagnosis? What remedies are being proposed?
The Study begins by attempting to measure the symptoms. "There are 35 million people unemployed in the OECD countries. Fifteen million workers, perhaps, have either given up looking for a job, or have accepted part-time work for want of anything better". The extent of the illness already poses a problem: the definition of unemployment is often different in different countries, and in all cases, it underestimates the reality for obvious political reasons. But even with these defects, the figures are unprecedented: 50 million people directly affected by the problem of unemployment: that's equivalent to the entire working population of Germany and France put together!
How do our medical experts explain why it's come to this - these people for whom capitalism is eternal and is supposed to have gone through a rejuvenation since the collapse of Stalinism?
"The emergence of large scale unemployment in Europe, Canada and Australia and the proliferation of mediocre jobs linked to the appearance of unemployment in the USA thus have one and the same underlying cause: the inability to adapt to the changes in a satisfactory manner".
What changes? "... new technologies, globalization, and the intense competition at national and international level. The existing policies and systems have made the economies rigid and paralyzed the capacity and even the will to adapt".
What does this "inability to adapt", this "rigidity" consist of? Naive types who still believe that economists are something other than charlatans whose job is to justify capitalism might have expected them to talk about the rigidity of the laws which, for example, oblige states to pay farmers not to cultivate the soil, or to close thousands of perfectly efficient factories while hunger and poverty spread all over the planet. But no. The rigidities our doctors are talking about are those which hold up the free and pitiless play of capitalist laws, the very laws that are plunging humanity into a growing chaos.
The Study cynically illustrates this point of view through the remedies, the "recommendations" that it puts forward:
"...Suppressing all negative connotations, in public opinion, relating to the failure of enterprises ...
Increasing the flexibility of the working day ...
Increasing the flexibility of wages, reducing the costs of non-salaried manpower ...
Re-evaluating the role of legal minimum wages ... by sufficiently modulating wage rates with regard to age and regions ...
Introducing "renegotiation clauses" which would make it possible to renegotiate onto a lower level collective accords drawn up at a higher level ...
Reducing the costs of non-salaried manpower ... by lightening deductions at enterprise level (ie, taxes payed by the bosses) and replacing them with other kinds of taxes, notably on consumption or income (ie taxes payed mainly by the workers).
"Fixing remunerations offered by job creation schemes at a lower level than the participant could obtain on the labor market in order to incite people to look for regular work ...
The systems of unemployment benefit have ended up constituting a semi-permanent guaranteed income in many countries, and this doesn't make people want to go out and work ...
Limiting the length of eligibility for unemployment benefit in countries where it is particularly long ..."
Rarely has the bourgeoisie allowed itself to come out with such brutal language at this level. The conclusions of the OECD are basically no different from those formulated by the 'experts' of the European Union or by the US president at the recent G7 meeting[2]. The Study will serve as a basis for the work of the next G7 meeting, which is again devoted to the problem of unemployment.
The ruling class is quite aware that the threat of unemployment can give it immense power over the exploited class. It knows that the workers are finding it hard to fight back at the moment. And this allows it to harden the tone. To speak without any flourishes.
In reality, in practice, all the governments of the world are already carrying out such policies to one degree or another. What this document announces is simply an aggravation of these policies.
But how effective can these 'remedies' be?
Capitalism cannot adapt in a healthy manner to the changes which it itself provokes at the level of the technical productivity of labor and the interdependence of the world economy.
The intensification of competition between capitalists, exacerbated by the crisis of overproduction and the scarcity of solvent markets, pushes the capitalists to continually modernize the process of production, replacing men by machines, in a frenzied search to 'reduce costs'. The same race obliges them to shift part of production to countries where labor power is cheaper (China and South East Asia today, for example).
But in doing so the capitalists don't solve the chronic problem of the lack of outlets which affects the whole world economy. All it can do is to allow some to survive at the expense of others, but at the global level the problem is merely aggravated.
The real inability to adapt does not lie somewhere between capitalism and the policies of the governments, who have for a long time now been attacking the living conditions of the exploited in the most industrialized countries. The real inability to adapt lies in the contrast between the actual technical capacities of society: the productivity of labor, the communications explosion, the internationalization of economic life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the continuation of the laws of capitalism, the laws of exchange, wage labor, of statified or individual private property. It is capitalism itself which cannot adapt to the capacities and needs of humanity.
As the Communist Manifesto put it: "bourgeois institutions have become too narrow to contain the wealth they have created".
The only interesting thing about the 'new' language of the ruling class is that it recognizes that it is faced with an economic crisis that is destined to last. Even if the bourgeoisie always thinks that its system is eternal, even if it talks about the recovery of the world economy, it is admitting today that it is doomed, at least for the years ahead, to go through a situation of constantly growing unemployment; that the trend for the number of unemployed people to go on growing all over the planet for the past quarter-century is far from over.
The Study displays a certain lucidity when it looks into the social future: "Certain people will not be able to adapt to an economy that is progressing (they should say: an economy whose mortal illness is progressing). Their exclusion from the mainstream of economic activity threatens to provoke social tensions which could have heavy human and economic consequences".
What these experts don't and can't see is that these "social tensions" contain the only way out for humanity and that the "heavy human and economic consequences" could be the world communist revolution.
RV, 18 June 1994
[1] The OECD is the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. It regroups the 24 most industrialized countries of the former US bloc (all the countries of Western Europe, the USA and Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand). Mexico is in the process of being integrated.
[2] See the article 'The explosion of unemployment' in International Review 77.
Class consciousness is a living thing. The fact that a part of the proletarian movement has attained a certain level of clarity does not mean that the whole movement has attained it, and even the clearest fractions can, in certain circumstances, fail to see all the implications of what they have seen, and even lose their grip on a previously-reached level of understanding.
This is certainly true for the question of the state and the lessons that Marx and Engels drew about the Paris Commune, which we analysed in the last article in this series (IR 77). In the decades that followed the defeat of the Commune, the ascent of reformism and opportunism in the workers' movement led to the absurd situation, at the turn of the century, in which the 'orthodox' marxist position on the state, as preached by the likes of Karl Kautsky, was the one which asserted that the working class could come to power through parliamentary elections, ie through capturing the existing state. So that when Lenin in his State and Revolution, written during the revolutionary events of 1917, undertook the task of "excavating" the real heritage of Marx and Engels on this question, the 'orthodox' accused him of sliding back into Bakuninist anarchism!
In fact, the struggle to disseminate the real lessons of the Paris Commune, to keep the proletarian movement on the right track to the communist revolution, was already underway in the aftermath of the French workers' insurrection. In this combat against the mephitic influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology on the workers' movement, marxism faced a battle on two fronts: against the 'state socialists' and reformists, who were particularly strong in the German party, and against Bakunin's anarchist tendency, which had a powerful presence in the less developed capitalist countries.
In this three-sided conflict, many issues were in debate, or were the seeds of future debates. With the German party, there was already the problem of confusing the necessary fight for reforms with the ideology of reformism, in which the ultimate revolutionary goals of the movement are forgotten altogether. The question of reforms was also posed by the Bakuninists, but from the other way round: they had nothing but contempt for the immediate defensive struggles of the class, and wanted to leap over them, straight into the grand "social liquidation". With the latter, as well, the question of the role and the internal functioning of the International was to become one of extreme acuity, hastening the demise of the International itself.
In the next two articles, we shall be concerned mainly with the way these conflicts related to the conception of the revolution and of the future society, though there are inevitably numerous points of contact with the issues mentioned above.
In the 20th century, the identification between socialism and state capitalism has been one of the most persistent obstacles to the development of class consciousness. The Stalinist regimes, in which a brutal totalitarian state has violently assumed control of virtually the entire economic apparatus, arrogantly called themselves 'socialist', and the rest of the world bourgeoisie obligingly agreed. And of all Stalinism's more 'democratic' or 'revolutionary' cousins - from social democracy on its right to Trotskyism on its left - have devoted themselves to spreading the same basic falsehood.
No less pernicious than the Stalinist version of this lie is the social democratic idea that the working class can benefit from the activity and intervention of the state even in those regimes which are explicitly defined as 'capitalist': in this vision, local councils, central governments controlled by social democratic parties, the institutions of the welfare state, the nationalised industries, can all be used on behalf of the workers, and even as stepping stones towards a socialist society.
One of the reasons why these mystifications are so deeply ingrained is that the currents who advocate them were once part of the workers' movement. And many of the ideological tricks they peddle today have their origins in genuine confusions existing in an earlier phase of that movement. The marxist world outlook emerges out of a real combat against bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the proletarian movement, and for this very reason is inevitably faced with an unending struggle to free itself from the subtle influences of ruling class ideology. In the marxism of the ascendant period of capitalism, we can thus discern a recurring difficulty in separating itself from the illusion that the statification of capital amounts to its suppression.
To a large extent, such illusions resulted from the conditions of the day, in which capitalism was still mainly perceived through the personality of individual capitalists, and where the concentration and centralisation of capital were still at an early stage. Faced with the evident anarchy created by a plethora of competing individual enterprises, it was easy enough to fall for the idea that the centralisation of capital in the hands of the national state would constitute a step forward. Indeed, many of the measures of state control put forward in the Communist Manifesto (a state bank, nationalisation of the land, etc - see the article in this series in IR 72) are done so with the explicit aim of developing capitalist production in a period when it still had a progressive role to play. Despite this, the issue remained clouded, even in the more mature writings of Marx and Engels. In the previous article in this series, for example, we cited one of Marx's comments on the economic measures of the Paris Commune, in which he appears to say that if workers' co-operatives centralised and planned production on a national scale, this would be communism. Elsewhere, Marx seems to advocate, as a transitional measure towards communism, the state administration of typically capitalist operations such as credit (cf Capital, Vol 3, chap. XXXVI).
In pointing to these errors, we are not issuing any moral judgement on our political ancestors. The clarification of such questions has only been achieved by the 20th century revolutionary movement after many decades of painful experience: in particular the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and, more generally, the growing role of the state as the organising agent of economic life in the epoch of capitalist decadence. And the clarification that has been achieved today is entirely dependent on the method of analysis elaborated by the founders of marxism, and on certain prophetic insights into the role that the state would, or could, assume in the evolution of capital.
What allowed later generations of marxists to correct some of the 'state capitalist' errors of the earlier ones was, above all Marx's insistence that capital is a social relation, and cannot be defined in a purely juridical manner. The whole thrust of Marx's work is to define capitalism as a system of exploitation founded on wage labour, on the extraction and realisation of surplus value. From this standpoint, it is entirely irrelevant whether the agent that sucks surplus value from the workers, which realises that value on the market in order to accrue a profit and expand its capital, is an individual bourgeois, a corporation, or a nation state. As the economic role of the state gradually increased and consequently fed the illusory expectations of parts of the workers' movement, it was this theoretical rigour which enabled Engels to formulate that oft-quoted passage in which he emphasises that "the transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head" (Anti-Duhring)[1].
Among the more sophisticated apologists for Stalinism have been those currents, usually Trotskyists or their offspring, who have argued that while the monstrous bureaucratic nightmare of the former USSR and similar regimes could not be called socialist, neither can it be called capitalist, because when you have the total nationalisation of the economy (although, in fact, none of the Stalinist regimes ever reached this point), production and labour power lose their commodity character. Marx, by contrast, was able to theoretically envisage the possibility of a country in which all social capital was in the hands of a single agency, without this country ceasing to be capitalist: "Capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were fused into a single capital. In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company" (Capital, Vol 1, chap XXV, section 2).
From the point of view of the world market, 'nations' are in any case no more than particular capitalists or companies, and the social relations within them are entirely dictated by the global laws of capitalist accumulation. It makes little difference whether buying and selling has been done away with inside this or that national border: such countries are no more 'islands of non-capitalism' in the capitalist world economy than the kibbutzim are islands of socialism in Israel[2].
Thus, marxist theory contains all the necessary premises for rejecting the identification between state capitalism and socialism. Furthermore, Marx and Engels were already faced with the need to deal with this 'state socialist' deviation in their own day.
Germany had never passed through a phase of liberal capitalism: the weaknesses of the native German bourgeoisie meant that the development of capitalism in Germany was largely overseen by a powerful bureaucratic state dominated by semi-feudal elements. As a result what Engels referred to as "the superstitious belief in the state" (Introduction to the Civil War in France) was particularly marked in Germany, and it strongly infected the emergent workers' movement there. This tendency was typified by Ferdinand Lasalle, whose faith in the possibility of using the existing state on behalf of the workers reached the point of making an alliance with the Bismarck regime against the capitalists. But the problem wasn't restricted to the 'Bismarckian state socialism' of Lasalle. There was a marxist current in the German workers' movement, led by Liebknecht and Bebel. But this tendency often fell into the kind of marxism that led Marx to declare that he wasn't a marxist: mechanistic, schematic, and above all, lacking in revolutionary audacity. The very fact that this current described itself as "social democratic" was in itself a backward step: in the 1840s, social democracy had been synonymous with the reformist 'socialism' of the petty bourgeoisie, and Marx and Engels had deliberately defined themselves as communist to emphasise the proletarian and revolutionary character of the politics they espoused.
The weaknesses of the Liebknecht-Bebel current were starkly revealed in 1875 when it fused with the Lasalle group to form the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP, later the SDP). The founding document of the new party, the 'Gotha Programme', made a number of totally unacceptable concessions to Lasalleanism. It was this that prompted Marx to write his Critique of the Gotha Programme in the same year.
This withering attack on the profound confusions contained in the new party's programme remained an 'internal' document until 1891: hitherto, Marx and Engels had feared that publishing it more widely would provoke a premature split in the SDP. In retrospect, one can debate the wisdom of this decision, but the logic behind it is clear enough: for all its faults, the SDP was a real expression of the proletarian movement - it had shown this in particular through the internationalist stand that Liebknecht and his current - and even many of the Lassaleans - had taken during the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. What's more, the German party's rapid development had already demonstrated the growing importance of the movement in Germany for the whole international working class. Marx and Engels recognised the need to wage a long and patient fight against the ideological mistakes of the SDP, and they did so in a number of other important documents written after the Critique. But this fight was motivated by the effort to build the party, not destroy it. This was always the method that informed the struggle of the marxist left against the rise of opportunism within the class party: the struggle was for the party as long as that party has any proletarian life within it.
In the criticisms that Marx and Engels made of the German party, we can see in outline many of the issues that were later taken up by their successors, and which were to become matters of life or death in the great historical events of the early twentieth century. And it is by no means accidental that all of them were centered around the marxist conception of the proletarian revolution, which was always the key question that distinguished the revolutionaries from the reformists and utopians in the workers' movement.
The second half of the 19th century was the period of capitalism's greatest acceleration and world-wide development. Within this context, the working class was able to wrest significant concessions from the bourgeoisie, considerably ameliorating the terrible conditions that had presided over the previous phases of capitalisms' life (limitations on the working day, on child labour, increase in real wages, etc). Combined with this were gains of a more political nature - the right to assemble, to form trade unions, to participate in elections, etc - which enabled the class to organise and express itself in the battle to improve its situation inside bourgeois society.
Marx and his tendency always insisted on the necessity for this fight for reforms, rejecting the sectarian arguments of elements such as Proudhon, and later Bakunin, who argued that such struggles were futile or a diversion from the revolutionary path. Against such ideas, Marx affirmed that a class which was unable to organise to defend its most immediate interests would never be capable of organising a new society.
But the very success of the struggle for reforms had its negative consequences - the growth of currents who turned this struggle into the ideology of reformism, openly rejecting the final communist goal in favour of concentrating on immediate gains, or mixing the two up into a confused and confusing medley. Marx and Engels may not have been able to see all the dangers involved in the growth of such currents - i.e. that they would end up dragging the majority of working class organisations into the service of the bourgeoisie and its state - but the combat against reformism as a species of bourgeois ideology inside the proletarian movement, a combat which was to occupy so much of the energies of later revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg, certainly begins in earnest with them.
Thus, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx points out that not only are the immediate demands it contains (e.g. over education, child labour) formulated in a confused way; more importantly, the newly formed party completely fails to distinguish between such immediate demands and the ultimate revolutionary goal. This is particularly marked in the call for "producers' co-operatives with state aid and under the democratic control of the working people", which would supposedly pave the way towards "the socialist organisation of labour". Marx mercilessly criticises this Lassallean "prophet's remedy": "Instead of being the result of the revolutionary process of social transformation in society, the 'socialist organisation of the whole of labour' 'arises' from 'state aid' to producers' cooperatives which the state, not the workers, is to 'call into being'. The notion that state loans can be used for the construction of a new society as easily as they can for the construction of a new railway is worthy of Lassalle's imagination!". This is an explicit warning against listening to those who claim that the existing capitalist state can in some way be used as an instrument for creating socialism - even if they present it in more sophisticated terms than those of the Gotha Programme.
By the end of the 1870s, the advocates of reformism in the German party had become even more brazen, to the point of questioning whether the party should present itself as a working class organisation at all. In their 'Circular letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke et al', written in September 1879, Marx and Engels made what is probably their most lucid attack on the opportunist elements who were more and more infiltrating the movement:
"The people who appeared as bourgeois democrats in 1848 can now just as well call themselves Social Democrats. Just as for the former the democratic republic was unattainably remote so, too, is the overthrow of the capitalist order for the latter, and it has therefore absolutely no significance for the political practise of the present day; one can mediate, compromise and philanthropise to one's heart's content. And it is just the same with the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. On paper it is acknowledged because its existence can no longer be denied; but in practise it is hushed up, watered down, attenuated. The Social Democratic Party is not to be a workers' party; it is not to incur the hatred of the bourgeoisie or of anyone; above all it should conduct energetic propaganda among the bourgeoisie; instead of stressing far-reaching goals which deter the bourgeoisie and are unattainable in our generation anyway, it should rather devote its whole strength and energy to those petty-bourgeois patchwork reforms which could provide the old social order with new supports and hence perhaps transform the final catastrophe into a gradual, piecemeal and, as far as possible, peaceful process of dissolution".
Here in outline is the marxist critique of all the later variants of reformism that were to have such a disastrous effect within the ranks of the international working class.
The Gotha Programme's inability to define the real connection between the defensive and offensive phases of the proletarian movement was also embodied in its utter confusion about the state. Marx lambasted its call for a "free people's state and a socialist society" as a nonsensical phrase, since the state and freedom are two opposed principles: "freedom consists in converting the state from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinated to it" (Critique). In a fully developed socialist society, there will be no state at all. But more important still is Marx's recognition that this call for a "people's state", to be realised by the granting of "democratic" reforms which a number of capitalist countries have already conceded, is a way of avoiding the crucial question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is in this context that Marx raises the question: "what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence that are analogous to present functions of the state? The question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand fold combination of the word people with the word state”.
Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
“Now the programme does not deal with this nor with the nature of the future state of communist society" (ibid)[3].
As we saw in the last article in this series, this notion of a proletarian dictatorship was, in 1875, something very real for Marx and his tendency: the Paris Commune, only four years earlier, had been the first living episode of the working class in power, and it had shown that such a vast political and social turn-around can only take place when the workers smash the existing state machine and replace it with their own organs of power. The Gotha Programme demonstrated that this lesson had not been assimilated by the workers' movement as a whole, and as the reformist current grew within the movement, it was to be forgotten more and more.
In the interests of historical accuracy, however, it is necessary to point out that even Marx and Engels themselves had not fully assimilated this lesson. In a speech to the Hague congress of the International, in September 1872, Marx could still argue that "heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such a America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, Holland, where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour".
It has to be said that this idea was an illusion on Marx's part - a measure of the weight of democratic ideology on even the most advanced elements in the workers' movement. In the years that followed, all sorts of opportunists were to seize upon such illusions to give Marx's seal of approval to their efforts to abandon any idea of a violent revolution and to lull the working class into believing that it could get rid of capitalism by legally and peacefully using the organs of bourgeois democracy. But the authentic marxist tradition does not lie with them: it lies with the likes of Pannekoek, Bukharin and Lenin, who took the most daring and revolutionary elements in Marx's thinking on the question, those which led inexorably to the conclusion that in order to establish the rule of labour in any country, the working class would have to use the lever of force, and first and foremost against the existing state machine, no matter how democratic its forms. What's more, reality, the real evolution of the democratic state, had assisted them in reaching this conclusion, for as Lenin put it in State and Revolution:
"Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and last representatives - in the whole world - of Anglo-Saxon 'liberty', in the sense that they had no militarist clique and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves. Today, in Britain and America, too, "the precondition for every people's revolution" is the smashing, the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery"".
The International Workingmen's Association had proclaimed that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves". Although it was not possible, in the workers' movement of the 19th century, to clarify all aspects of the relationship between the proletariat and its revolutionary minority, this affirmation is a basic premise of all subsequent clarifications. And in the polemics within the movement after 1871, the marxist fraction had a number of occasions to take the issue further than the IWA's general assertion. Particularly in the combat against the out-and-out reformist elements infesting the German party, Marx and Engels were led to show that elitist and hierarchical views of the relationship between party and class were the result of the penetration into the movement of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology, which was carried in particular by middle class intellectuals who saw the workers' movement as a vehicle for their own schemes for improving society.
The marxist response to this danger was not to retreat into workerism, the idea that an organisation made up solely of industrial workers was the best guarantee against the penetration of alien class ideas. "It is an inevitable phenomenon which is rooted in the course of the development that people from the hitherto ruling class join the struggling proletariat and supply it with educative elements. We have already stated this clearly in the Manifesto. But two points must be noted here: firstly, in order to be of use to the proletarian movement, these people must bring real educative elements with them. But this is not the case with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts ... Secondly, when such people from other classes join the proletarian party the first requirement is that they do not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty bourgeois etc prejudices with them, but that they adopt the proletarian outlook without prevarication. These gentlemen, however, as has been demonstrated, are chock full of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideas ... We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois" ('Circular Letter to Bebel ... ').
The notion that the workers can only be emancipated by the benevolent actions of an all powerful state goes hand in hand with the idea of a party of 'benefactors' descending from the clouds to free the poor benighted workers from their ignorance and servitude. Both were part of the same reformist, state socialist package that Marx and his current fought with such energy. It should be said, however, that the delusion that a small elite could act on behalf of the class or in its place was not limited to these reformist elements: it could also be held by genuinely proletarian and revolutionary currents, and the Blanquists were the prime example of this. The Blanquist version of substitutionism was a vestige of an earlier phase of the revolutionary movement; in his Introduction to The Civil War in France, Engels shows how the living experience of the Paris Commune had practically refuted the Blanquist conception of revolution:
"Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organised men would be able, at a given moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved, above all, the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the Commune, with its majority of these same Blanquists, actually do? In all its proclamations to the French in the provinces, it appealed to them to form a free federation of all French Communes with Paris, a national organisation which for the first time was really to be created by the nation itself. It was precisely the oppressing power of the former centralised government, army, political police, bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and which then had been taken over by every new government as a welcome instrument used against its opponents - it was precisely this power which was to fall everywhere, just as it had already fallen in Paris".
That the best of the Blanquists were obliged to go beyond their own ideology was also confirmed in the debates within the Commune's central organ: when a significant element in the Commune Council wanted to suspend the Commune's democratic norms and set up a dictatorial "Committee of Public Safety" on the model of the French bourgeois revolution, a considerable number of those who openly opposed this move were Blanquists - proof that a genuinely proletarian current can be influenced by the development of the real movement of the class, something that rarely happened in the case of the reformists, who represented a very material tendency for the organisations of the class to fall into the hands of the class enemy.
Although the Gotha Programme talked about the "abolition of the wages system", its underlying vision of the future society was one of 'state socialism'. We have seen how it contains the absurd notion of a movement towards socialism through state-assisted workers' cooperatives. But even when it talks more directly about the future socialist society (in which a "free state" still exists...), it is unable to go beyond the perspective of an essentially capitalist society run by the state for everyone's benefit. Marx is able to detect this under the cover of the Programme's fine phrases, in particular the sections which talk about the need for "the co-operative regulation of the total labour with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour", and "the abolition of the wage system together with the iron law of wages". These phrases reflect the Lassallean 'contribution' to economic theory, which was in fact a complete abandonment of Marx's scientific view of the origins of surplus value in the unpaid labour time extracted from the workers. The programme's empty words about "just distribution" conceal the fact that it actually makes no provision to do away with the basic mechanisms of value production, which is the infallible source of all "injustice" in distributing the proceeds of labour.
Against these confusions, Marx affirms that "within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as an objective quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour. The phrase "proceeds of labour", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning".
But rather than offering a utopian vision of the immediate abolition of all the categories of capitalist production, Marx points out the necessity to distinguish the lower from the higher phases of communism: "what we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges".
In this phase, there is still scarcity and still all the vestiges of capitalist 'normality'. On the economic level, the old wages system has been replaced by a system of labour-time vouchers: "the individual producer receives back from society ... exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour... He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds). and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour costs". As Marx points out in Capital, these certificates are no longer money in the sense that they cannot circulate or be accumulated; they can only 'buy' individual items of consumption. On the other hand, they are not entirely free of thee principles of commodity exchange:
"Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is the exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass into the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption. But, as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form. Hence equal right here is still - in principle - bourgeois right...", because, as Marx explains, workers have very different needs and capacities. It is only in the higher phase of communist society when "all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" that "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right can be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
What is the exact target of this polemic? Lying behind it is the classical conception of communism not as a 'state' to be imposed but as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs" as The German Ideology had put it thirty years earlier. Marx thus elaborates the vision of the proletarian dictatorship initiating a movement towards communism, of a communist society emerging from the collapse of capitalism and from the proletarian revolution. Against the state socialist view that capitalist society somehow transforms itself into communism through the action of a state acting as society's unique and benevolent employer, Marx envisages a dynamic towards communism founded on a communist basis.
The idea of labour-time vouchers has to be considered in this light. In the first instance they are conceived as an attack on value production, as a means of getting rid of money as a universal commodity, of halting the dynamic of accumulation. They are seen not as a goal but as a means to an end, one which could be immediately introduced by the proletarian dictatorship as a first step towards a society of abundance which will have no further need to measure the individual's consumption according to his individual output.
Within the revolutionary movement, there has been and will continue to be a debate on whether this system is the most appropriate way of achieving these ends. For a number of reasons, we would argue that it is not. To begin with, the 'objective' socialisation of many aspects of consumption (electricity, gas, housing, transport etc) would in the future make it possible fairly rapidly to supply many such goods and services free of charge, subject only to the total reserves controlled by the workers; as for more individual items of consumption, a system of rationing controlled by the workers' councils would have the advantage of being more 'collective', less dominated by the conventions of value exchange. We will come back to these and other problems in a future article. Our main concern here is to uncover Marx's basic method: for him, the system of labour vouchers had its validity as a means of attacking the foundations of the wage labour system, and should be judged against this benchmark; at the same time, he clearly recognised its limitations, because integral communism cannot be introduced overnight but only after a "more or less long period of transition". In this sense, Marx is himself the severest critic of the system of labour time vouchers, insisting that they do not escape "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right" and embody the persistence of the law of value. And in fact whatever method of distribution the proletariat introduces in the aftermath of the revolution, it will still be marked by the vestiges of the law of value. Any false radicalism here is fatal (and, in fact, conservative in practise) because it would lead the proletariat to confuse a temporary and contingent means with the real goal. This, as we shall see, is a mistake that many revolutionaries fell into during the so-called War Communism period of the revolution in Russia. For Marx, the final communist aim always had to be kept in sight; otherwise the movement towards it would go astray and, in the end, be caught up once again in the orbit of the planet Capital.
The next article in this series will examine Marx's combat against the principal version of false radicalism in his day: the anarchist current around Bakunin.
CDW
[1] Engels goes on to say that "Whilst the capitalist mode of production ... forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into state property", from which he concludes that "the first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society - the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society - this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state". Engels is doubtless referring here to the post-revolutionary state formed after the destruction of the old bourgeois state. The experience of the Russian revolution, however, has led the revolutionary movement to question even this formulation: ownership of the means of production even by the 'Commune state' does not lead to the disappearance of the state, and can even contribute to its reinforcement and perpetuation. But Engels could not have the benefit of such hindsight of course.
[2] Although Marx uses the term "society" here, he can only mean "country" and not capitalist society as a global whole: as he remarks elsewhere, a capital which does not confront other capitals is a "non-thing".
Capitalism cannot exist without competition between capitalist units. Moreover, history has shown that the nation-state is the highest level of effective unity that capitalism can attain. This has been confirmed recently by the disintegration of the imperialist blocs formed in 1945: once the dominant nation was no longer able to impose the unity of the bloc, it broke up into its component, and competitive, national units.
[3] In the last article in this series we referred to the experience of the Russian revolution, which for us has shown the need to make a distinction between the transitional state and the proletarian dictatorship, between the organ emanating out of the transitional society and charged with holding it together, and the actual instruments of proletarian power (workers' councils, factory committees, etc), which have the task of initiating and leading the process of communist transformation. On certain occasions, groups within the proletarian milieu have used this passage from the Critique of the Gotha Programme (ie. that the state can be nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat) to argue that this distinction is at odds with Marx and marxism. In reply we can only assert that the real movement of the class has clarified this question in practise as well as theoretically; but it is also important to understand the historical context of the passage, which was a polemic against those who wanted to leave the existing bourgeois state untouched and who shied away from the very idea of a proletarian revolution.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn1
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn2
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn3
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn4
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn5
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn6
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn7
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftn8
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref1
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref2
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref3
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref4
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref5
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref6
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref7
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_1944_01.html#_ftnref8
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/135/internationalism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_rejection02.html#_ftn1
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_rejection02.html#_ftn2
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_rejection02.html#_ftnref1
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/078_rejection02.html#_ftnref2
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/337/rejecting-notion-decadence
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1845/bosnia
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/yemen
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/rwanda
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/korea
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1929/communism-and-19th-century-workers-movement
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat