Valuation and perspectives

10 years of the ICC: Some Lessons

The International Communist Current is ten years old. Our international organization was formally constituted in January 1975. This experience of a decade of existence belongs to the world work­ing class of which the ICC, like all revolution­ary organizations, is a part, an active factor in the proletariat's historic struggle for eman­cipation. This is why, on the tenth anniversary of the foundation of our organization, we propose to draw for the whole of our class a number of the most important lessons of this experience, in particular those which serve to answer the question of how to build a revolutionary organization, how to prepare for the constitution of tomorrow's world communist party which will be an indispensable instrument of the proletarian revolution.

But before we can answer these questions we have to present a very short history of our organization, in particular of the period which pre­ceded its formal constitution, because it was in this period that the bases for all our later activity were laid.

A short history of our Current

The first organized expression of our Current appeared in Venezuela in 1964. It consisted of very young elements who had begun to evolve to­wards class positions through discussions with an older comrade who had behind him the exper­ience of being a militant in the Communist International, in the left fractions which were excluded from it at the end of the 1920s - not­ably the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy[1] - and who was part of the Gauche Comm­uniste de France until its dissolution in 1952. Straight away then, this small group in Venez­uela - which, between 1964 and 1968 published ten issues of its review Internacionalismo - saw itself as being in political continuity with the positions of the Communist Left, esp­ecially those of the GCF. This was expressed in particular through a very clear rejection of any policy of supporting so-called ‘national liberation struggles', a myth that was very prevalent in Latin American countries and that weighed heavily on elements trying to move to­wards class positions. It was also expressed in an attitude of openness towards, and making contact with, other communist groups - an att­itude which had previously characterized the International Communist Left before the war and the GCF after it.

Thus the group Internacionalismo established or tried to establish contacts and discussions with the American group News and Letters[2] (to whose congress in 1965 it sent three represent­atives and submitted theses on ‘national liber­ation') and in Europe with a whole series of groups who were situated on class positions - such as Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (Spain), Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista - Italy), the PCI (Programme Commun­iste), Groupe de Liaison pour 1'Action des Travailleurs, Informations et Correspondences Ouvrieres, Pouvoir Ouvriere (France) as well as with elements of the Dutch left in Holland.

With the departure of several of its elements for France in ‘67 and ‘68, this group interr­upted its publication for several years, before Internacionalismo (new series) began in 1974 and the group became a constituent part of the ICC in 1975.

The second organized expression of our Current appeared in France in the wake of the general strike of May ‘68 which marked the historic re­surgence of the world proletariat after more than 40 years of counter-revolution. A small nucleus was formed in Toulouse around a militant of Internacionalismo. This nucleus participated actively in the animated discussions of Spring ‘68, adopted a ‘declaration of principles' in June (see RI no 2, old series) and published the first issue of Revolution Internationale at the end of that year. Straight away, this group continued Internacionalismo's policy of looking for contact and discussion with other groups of the proletarian milieu both nationally and inter­nationally. It participated in the national con­ferences organized by ICO in 1969 and ‘70 as well as the international conference organized in Brussels in 1969. From 1970 onwards, it established closer links with two groups who managed to swim out of the general decompos­ition of the councilist milieu after May ‘68: the ‘Organisation Conseilliste de Clermont-Ferr­and' and ‘Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils (Marseille)', following an attempted discussion with the GLAT which showed that this group was moving further and further away from marxism. Discussion with the former two groups, however, proved much more fruitful and after a whole series of meetings in which the basic posi­tions of the Communist Left were examined in a systematic manner, RI, the OC of Clermont and CCC joined together in 1972 around a platform (see RI no 1, new series) which was a more de­tailed and precise version of RI's declaration of principles of 1968. This new group published the review Revolution Internationale as well as a Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion and was to be at the centre of a whole work of interna­tional contact and discussion in Europe up until the foundation of the ICC two and a half years later.

On the American continent, the discussions that Internacionalismo had with News and Letters left some traces in the USA and, in 1970, a group was formed in New York around an orientation text with the same basic positions as Internacional­ismo and RI (see Internationalism no 1). Part of the group was made up of former members of News and Letters, to whom this organization had res­ponded with denigration and disciplinary meas­ures rather than with a serious debate when these militants tried to raise questions about its political confusions. The new group began to publish Internationalism and like its predecessors set about establishing discussions with other commun­ist groups. Thus it maintained contacts and dis­cussions with Root and Branch in Boston, which was inspired by the councilist ideas of Paul Mattick, but these proved not to be fruitful since the Boston group was more and more turning into a club of marxology. In 1972, International­ism sent a proposal for international correspond­ence to twenty groups, in the following terms (see RI no 2 and Internationalism no 4):

"In the past five years we have seen an eruption of working class militancy on a scale unpreced­ented in the post-war era. These struggles have often taken the form of illegal and wildcat strikes under the direction of rank and file committees...  

These struggles have been particularly intense, and with the world-wide scope of the capitalist crisis they have taken on an international char­acter....

Together with the heightened activity of the working class there has been a dramatic growth in the number of revolutionary groups having an internationalist communist perspective. Unfort­unately, contact and correspondence between these groups has largely been haphazard and episodic.

Internationalism makes the following proposal with a view towards regularizing and expanding contact and correspondence between groups having an internationalist communist perspective...          

The choice of the groups to receive this appeal and participate in an International Correspond­ence Network naturally reflects criteria of a political nature. The groups named below, while differing on many fundamental issues, in general have in common a recognition of the counter-rev­olutionary character of Russia, the Soviet bloc and China; an opposition to all forms of reformism, frontism and class collaboration including national fronts, popular fronts and anti-fascist fronts; a theory and practice rooted in a crit­ique of the Third International; the conviction, which is the basis of our theoretical and prac­tical activities, that only the proletariat is the historical subject of revolution in our time; a conviction that the overthrow of the capitalist system requires the abolition of' wage labor; and a thoroughgoing internationalism."

In its positive response, RI said:

"Like you we feel the necessity for the life and activities of our groups to have as international a character as the present struggles of the work­ing class. This is why we have maintained contact through letters or directly with a certain number of European groups to whom your proposal was sent. We refer to Workers' Voice and Solidarity in the UK, Sociale Revolution and Revolutionarer Kamp f in Germany, Spartacus in Holland, Lutto de Classe and Bilan in Belgium.

We think that your initiative will make it poss­ible to broaden the scope of these contacts and at the very least, to make our respective posi­tions better known.

We also think that the perspective of a future international conference is the logical follow-on from the establishment of this political corres­pondence, and that this will allow a fuller know­ledge of the positions of other groups as well as a decantation of points of agreement and dis­agreement."

In its response, RI thus underlined the necessity to work towards international conferences of groups of the Communist Left, without any idea of haste: such a conference should be held after a period of correspondence. This proposal was in continuity with the repeated proposals it had made (in ‘68, ‘69 and ‘71) to the Partito Comun­ista Internazionalista (Battaglia) to call such conferences, since at the time this organization was the most important and serious group in the camp of the Communist Left in Europe (alongside the PCI - Programma Comunista, which was bask­ing in the comfort of its splendid isolation). But despite Battaglia's open and fraternal att­itude, these proposals had each time been re­jected (see our article, ‘The Constitution of the IBRP: An Opportunist Bluff' in this issue of the IR).

In the end, Internationalism's initiative and RI's proposal did lead, in ‘73 and ‘74, to the holding of a series of conferences and meetings (see RI 4, 7; Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion 5, 9; Internationalism 4) in England and France during the course of which a process of clar­ification and decantation got underway, notably with the evolution of the British group World Revolution (which came out of a split in Solid­arity) towards the positions of RI and Inter­nationalism. WR published the first issue of its magazine in May 1974. Above all, this pro­cess of clarification and decantation created the bases for the constitution of the ICC in January ‘75.

During this period, RI had continued its work of contact and discussion at an international level, not only with organized groups but also with isolated elements who read its press and sympathized with its positions. This work led to the formation of small nuclei in Spain and Italy around the same positions and who in ‘74 commenced publication of Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internazionale.

Thus, at the January ‘75 conference were Inter­nacionalismo, Revolution Internationale, Internationalism, World Revolution, Accion Prolet­aria and Rivoluzione Internazionale;, who shared the political orientations which had been devel­oped since 1964 with Internacionalismo. Also present were Revolutionary Perspectives (who had participated in the conferences of ‘73-‘74), the Revolutionary Workers' Group of Chicago (with whom RI and Internationalism had begun disc­ussions in ‘74) and Pour Une Intervention Comm­uniste (which published the review Jeune Taupe and had been constituted around comrades who had left RI in ‘73 because they considered that it didn't intervene enough in the workers' strugg­les). As for the group Workers' Voice, which had participated actively in the conferences of the previous years, it had rejected the invitation to this conference because it now considered that RI, WR, etc were bourgeois groups (!) because of the position of the majority of their militants on the question of the state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism, though this position wasn't officially adopted by the ICC till four and a half years later (see the articles ‘Sectarianism Unlimited' in WR 3 and ‘An Answer to Workers' Voice' in International Review 2) .

This question was on the agenda of the January 1975 conference and numerous contributions were prepared on it (as can be seen from the contents of IR 1). However, it wasn't discussed at the conference which saw the need to devote the maxi­mum of time and attention to questions that were much more crucial at that point:

- the analysis of the international situation;

- the tasks of revolutionaries within it;

- the organization of the international current.

Finally, the six groups whose platforms were based on the same orientations decided to unify themselves into a single organization with an international central organ and publishing a quarterly review in three languages[3] - English, French and Spanish (the publication of selections from this review in Dutch, Italian and German would be attempted later on) - which took over from RI's Bulletin d'Etude et de Disc­ussion. The ICC had been founded. As the present­ation to number 1 of the International Review said, "a great step forward has just been taken." The foundation of the ICC was the culmination of a whole work of contacts, discussions and con­frontations between the different groups which had been engendered by the historic reawakening of the class struggle. It testified to the real­ity of this reawakening which many groups still doubted at the time. But above all it lay the bases for even more considerable work to come.

This work can be seen by the readers of the IR and of our territorial press and confirms what we wrote in the presentation to IR 1:

"Some people will consider that the publication of the Review is a precipitous action. It is nothing of the kind. We have nothing common with those noisy activists whose activity is based on a voluntarism as frenzied as it is ephemeral."

You can get some idea of the work that has been done by noting that, since its foundation ten years ago, the ICC has published (not counting pamphlets) more than 600 issues of its various regular publications (whereas in the ten previous years, the six founding groups had only published 50 issues). Obviously, this is nothing if you compare it to the press of the workers' movement in the past, before the First World War and in the days of the Communist International. But if you compare it with what the various groups of the Communist Left were able to publish between the ‘30s and the ‘60s you get a fairly clear idea of the vitality of our organization.

But the publications of the ICC are only one aspect of its activities. Since its foundation, the ICC has been an integral part of the strugg­les of the working class, of its efforts to become conscious of itself. This has been express­ed through an intervention as broad as its lim­ited resources have permitted in the various combats of the class (distribution of the press, of leaflets, oral interventions in assemblies, meetings, at factory gates ...) , but also through an active participation in the international process of discussion and regroupment between revolutionaries and, as a precondition for all the other activities, through continuing the work of reappropriating and developing the acquisitions of the Communist Left, the work of politically reinforcing the organization.

The balance sheet

Throughout the ten years of its existence, the ICC has obviously encountered numerous difficult­ies, has had to overcome various weaknesses, most of which are linked to the break in organic continuity with the communist organizations of the past, to the disappearance or sclerosis of the left fractions who detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International. It has also had to combat the deleterious influence of the decomposition and revolt of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, an influence that was partic­ularly strong after 68 and the period of the student movements. These difficulties and weak­nesses have for example expressed themselves in various splits - which we have written about in our press - and especially by the major convuls­ions which took place in 1981, in the ICC as well as the revolutionary milieu as a whole, and which led to the loss of half our section in Britain (see the article ‘Present Convulsions of the Revolutionary Milieu' in IR 28). In the face of the difficulties in 81, the ICC was even led to organize an extraordinary conference in Jan­uary 82 in order to reaffirm and make more pre­cise its programmatic bases, in particular con­cerning the function and structure of the revol­utionary organization (see the report from this conference published in IR 29 & 33).

Also, some of the objectives the ICC had set it­self have not been attained. For example, the distribution of our press has fallen short of what we had hoped for, which has led us to slow down the rhythm of the appearance of the IR in Spanish and to suspend its publication in Dutch (a gap partly filled by the review Wereld Revolutie).

However, if we draw up an overall balance sheet of the last ten years, it can clearly be seen to be a positive one. This is particularly true if you compare it to that of other communist organizations who existed after 1968. Thus, the groups of the councilist current, even those who tried to open themselves up to international work like ICO, have either disappeared or sunk into lethargy: the GLAT, ICO, the Situationist International, Spartacusbond, Root and Branch, PIC, the councilist groups of the Scandanavian milieu...the list is long and this one is by no means exhaustive. As for the organizations com­ing from the Italian left and who all proclaim themselves to be the Party, either they haven't broken out of their provincialism, or have dis­located and degenerated towards leftism like Programma, or are today imitating, in a confus­ed and artificial way, what the ICC did ten years ago, as is the case with Battaglia and the CWO (see the article in this issue). Today, after the so-called International Communist Party has collapsed like a pack of cards, after the failure of the FOR in the USA (the FOCUS group), the ICC remains the only communist organization that is really implanted on an international scale. Since its formation in 1975, the ICC has not only strengthened its original territorial sections but has implanted itself in other countries. The work of contact, discus­sion and regroupment on an international scale has led to the establishment of new sections of the ICC:

- 1975: the constitution of the section in Belgium which published the review, now a newspaper, Internationalisme, in two languages French and Dutch, and which fills the gap left by the disappearance in the period after World War II of the Belgian Fraction of the Internat­ional Communist Left.

- 1977: constitution of the nucleus in Holland, which began publication of the magazine Wereld Revolutie. This was particularly important in a country which has been the stamping ground of councilism.

- 1978: constitution of the section in Germany which began publication of the IR in German and, the following year, of the territorial magazine Welt Revolution. The presence of a communist organization in Germany is obviously of the highest importance given the place occupied by the German proletariat in the past and the role it is going to play in the future.

- 1980: constitution of the section in Sweden which publishes the magazine Internationell Rev­olution.

At present the ICC has therefore ten territorial sections implanted in countries inhabited by more than half a billion human beings and more than 100 million workers. It publishes its press in seven languages which are spoken by nearly a quarter of humanity. But, more important, the ICC has a presence in the biggest working class con­centrations in the world (Western Europe, USA), which will play a decisive role at the time of the revolution. And even if our forces in these different countries are still very weak, they are a stepping stone, a bridge towards a much wider and more influential presence in the class struggle when it develops with the inevitable aggravation of the crisis of capitalism.

If we can draw a positive balance-sheet of the ICC's work and not the failure of other commun­ist organizations, it's in no way to fill our­selves with self-satisfaction. In reality, we are not at all satisfied with the present weak­ness of the communist milieu as a whole. We have always said that any disappearance or degenerat­ion of a communist group represents a weakening for the whole working class of which it is a part, a waste and dispersal of militant energies, which cease to work for the emancipation of the proletariat. This is why the main aim in our debates with other communist groups has never been to weaken them in order to ‘recuperate' their militants, but to push them to overcome what we see as their weaknesses and confusions so they can fully assume their responsibilities within the class. If we underline the contrast between the relative success of our Current and the failure of other organizations, it's because this demonstrates the validity of the orientations we have put forward in twenty years of work for the regroupment of revolutionaries, for the construction of a communist organization. It is our responsibility to draw out these orienta­tions for the whole communist milieu.

Indispensable orientations for a communist regroupment

The bases on which our Current has carried out this work of regroupment even before its formal constitution are not new. In the past they have always been the pillars of this kind of work. We can summarize them as follows:

- the necessity to base revolutionary activity on the past acquisitions of the class, on the exper­ience of previous communist organizations; to see the present organization as a link in a chain of past and future organs of the class;

- the necessity to see communist positions and analyses not as a dead dogma but as a living program which is constantly being enriched and deepened;

- the necessity to be armed with a clear and sol­id conception of the revolutionary organization, of its structure and its function within the class.

1. Being Based on the Acquisitions of the Past.

"The International Communist Current affirms its continuity with the contributions made by the Communist League, the First, Second and Third Internationals, and the left fractions which de­tached themselves from the latter, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Left. It is these essential contributions which allow us to inte­grate all the class positions into the coherent general vision which has been formulated in this platform" (Platform of the ICC)

Thus, in the platform it adopted at its First Congress in 1976, the ICC reaffirmed what had already been an acquisition at the time of the constitution of Internacionalismo in 1964. In the post-68 period, as had already been the case during the degeneration of the CI (notably on the part of the Dutch left), there has been a strong tendency to ‘throw the baby out with the bath water', to put into question not only the organizations which had degenerated and gone over to the bourgeois camp, not only the erroneous posi­tions of the revolutionary organizations of the past, but also the essential acquisitions of these organizations. Just as the councilist current in the 1930s ended up placing the Bolshe­vik Party, and thus the whole Communist Internat­ional, in the bourgeois camp from the very beginning, so the ‘modernist' current, whose mentors were Invariance and Le Mouvement Communiste, went about ‘making all things anew', rejecting with a flick of the wrist and the self-satisfaction of the ignorant the past organizations of the prol­etariat, to whom they actually owed the little they did know about class positions. The incap­acity to recognize the contributions of these organizations, notably of the Communist Internat­ional, an incapacity shared by the whole current from Socialisme ou Barbarie to Pouvoir Ouvrier as well as the councilist trend from Spartacusbond to the PIC, was directly behind the dis­appearance of these organizations. In rejecting the whole of the past, these organizations denied themselves any future.

There is no ‘new' workers' movement that has to be opposed to an ‘old' workers' movement. The workers' movement is one, just like the working class itself which constitutes the same historic being from its appearance around two centuries ago to its disappearance in communist society. Any organization that doesn't understand this elementary point, which rejects the acquisitions of the organizations of the past, which refuses to see itself as being in continuity with them, ends up putting itself outside of the historic movement of the class, outside the class itself. In particular, to the extent that:

"Marxism is the fundamental theoretical acquis­ition of the proletarian struggle. It is on the basis of marxism that all the lessons of the proletarian struggle can be integrated into a coherent whole" (Platform of the ICC).

Any revolutionary activity today must necessar­ily be based on marxist analyses and positions. Any explicit (as was the case with Socialisme ou Barbarie and its successor Solidarity) or implic­it (as with the GLAT and Pouvoir Ouvriere, who also came from Socialisme ou Barbarie) rejection of marxism condemns a group to becoming a vehicle for ideologies that are alien to the proletariat, in particular the ideology of the petty bourge­oisie.

2. A Living Program, not a Dead Dogma

"...although it is not a fixed doctrine but on the contrary undergoes constant elaboration in a direct and living relationship with the class struggle, and although it benefitted from prior theoretical achievements of the working class, marxism has been from its very inception the only framework from which and within which rev­olutionary theory can develop" (Platform of the ICC).

If the reappropriation of the acquisitions of the workers' movement and notably of marxist theory constitutes the indispensable starting point for any revolutionary activity today, it also has to be understood what marxism is, that it is not an immutable dogma, ‘invariant' as the Bordigists put it, but is a weapon of combat of a revolutionary class for whom "ruthless self-criticism is not only...a vital right" but also "the supreme duty" (Rosa Luxemburg). The loyalty to marxism which characterized great revolution­aries like Luxemburg or Lenin was never a loyal­ty ‘to the letter' but to the spirit, to the approach of marxism. Thus Luxemburg, in The Acc­umulation of Capital, used the approach of marx­ism to criticize certain of Marx's writings (in Book II of Capital), just as she used the marx­ist approach in her pamphlet The Mass Strike to combat the union leaders who stuck to the letter of Marx and Engels in order to reject the mass strike, or at the foundation of the Communist Party of Germany to criticize the parliamentary illusions that Engels displayed in his 1895 preface to The Class Struggles in France. In the same way, in order to demon­strate the possibility and necessity of the proletarian revolution in Russia, Lenin had to combat the ‘orthodox marxism' of the Menshe­viks and of Kautsky, for whom only a bourge­ois revolution was possible in that country.

Thus Bilan, in its first issue (November 1933) insisted on a "profound knowledge of the causes and of the defeats" which would "permit no censorship or ostracism". Bilan's whole app­roach was determined by these two preoccupations:

- starting off from and firmly basing itself on the acquisitions of the Communist International;

- subjecting the positions of the CI to the critique of historical experience, to take this critique forward prudently but resolutely.

It's this approach which enabled Bilan to make a fundamental contribution to revolutionary positions, to lay the bases of today's revolutionary pro­gram by criticizing the erroneous positions of the CI, which were to a large extent respons­ible for its degeneration.

And it's largely because it turned its back on Bilan's approach that the Bordigist current, in trying to hold on integrally to the positions of the first two congresses of the CI (like the Trotskyists who refer themselves to the first four), has in reality regressed well behind the errors of the CI. The same error on a position doesn't have the same value 40 years later. What might be an error of youth, an immaturity, is transformed, after a whole experience of the class, into a bourgeois mystification. An organization that tries today to keep to the letter of the positions of the 2nd Congress of the CI on the national question, ‘revolutionary parliament­arianism', or the unions condemns itself either to leftism or disintegration: two things which have happened to the Bordigist current.

But it's the approach of Bilan, then of the Gauche Communiste de France, that has always animated our Current. It's because the ICC sees marxism as a living theory that it has always sought to test and deepen the lessons of the past. This has been expressed in particular by placing on the agenda of each of its five con­gresses - alongside the examination of the international situation and of activities - questions that have to be deepened:

- 1st Congress (January 1976): thoroughgoing disc­ussions of the totality of our positions in order to adopt a platform, statutes and a mani­festo (see IR 5);

- 2nd Congress (July 1977): discussion on the question of the state in the period of trans­ition; adoption of a resolution on proletarian groups in order to develop a clearer orienta­tion towards the political milieu (see IR 11);

- 3rd Congress (July 1979): adoption of a res­olution on the state in the period of transition and of a report on the historic course (see IR 18);

- 4th Congress (June 1981): report on ‘historic conditions for the generalization of the historic struggle of the working class', which dem­onstrates why the most favorable conditions for revolution are not provided by imperialist war (as in 1917-18) but by a world economic crisis, as is the case today (see IR 35) ;

- 5th Congress (July 1983): report ‘on the party and its relationship with the class' which, with­out introducing anything new on the question, makes a synthesis of our acquisitions (see IR 35).

The texts which have deepened and developed our positions aren't the only ones that have been pre­pared and discussed for our congresses. Others have included the texts on ‘The Proletarian Struggle in the Decadence of Capitalism' (see IR 23) and on the ‘critique of the theory of the weak link' (see IR 31) which have made precisions on our analysis of the present and future conditions of the proletarian struggle towards revolution.

It's also necessary to point to the advances that have been made in our pamphlets, Unions Against the Working Class, The Decadence of Capitalism, Nation or Class, Communist Organizations and Class Consciousness, The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism.          

Finally, it was the capacity of our Current to avoid being imprisoned in the schemas of the past, which allowed it to understand, well before 1968, the perspective in the present world situation. Whereas the Gauche Communiste de France only saw the possibility for a proletarian upsurge in and during a third world war (see Internationalisme no.46, summer of 1952, ‘The Evolution of Capitalism and the New Persp­ective' republished in Bulletin D'Etude et de Discussion no.8), Internacionalismo was led to revise this view and to put forward our analysis of a historic course towards class confrontation arising out of the economic crisis and prevent­ing the bourgeoisie from imposing its own res­ponse to its insoluble contradictions: generalized war. Thus, in January 1968 (ie before the upsurge of May 68 and at a time when hardly any­one was evoking the possibility of a crisis): "The year 1967 brought us the fall of the pound sterling and 1968 the measures taken by Johnson....here we can see the decomposition of the cap­italist system which, for many years, has been hidden behind the intoxication of ‘progress' which succeeded the second world war...

In the middle of this situation, slowly and sporadically, the working class is advancing through a subterranean movement which sometimes appears non-existent, then explodes with a blinding light, only to disappear just as suddenly and reappear somewhere else: this is the reawak­ing of the working class, of its open struggle... We are not prophets and we don't claim to be able to predict, when and how future events will unfold. But what we are sure of concerning the present process that capitalism has fallen into is that it's not possible to stop it... and that it is leading directly to a crisis. And we are also sure that the inverse process of the combativity of the class, which, we are now seeing in a gen­eral way, is going to lead the working class to a bloody and direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state" (Internacionalismo 8: ‘1968: A New Convulsion of Capitalism Begins').

Thus, the whole effort of our Current towards the regroupment of revolutionaries has been based on granite foundations (and not on sand, as with Battaglia, for whom revolutionaries had to organize conferences because of the... ‘social-democratization' of the CPs). This granite base is the recognition of the end of the period of counter-revolution, of a new historic upsurge of the proletarian struggle which compels revolutionaries to orient their work towards the reconstitution of the world party.

But for revolutionaries to be able to work effectively in this direction they also need to be clear about their function in the class and their mode of organization.

3. Being Armed with a Clear and Solid Conception of the Revolutionary Organization

The primary necessity for a revolutionary organization is to understand its function in the class. This presupposes that it is aware that it has a function. This is why the almost complete disappearance of the councilist since 1968 was logical and predictable: when you theorize your own non-existence you have a good chance of ceasing to exist.

But recognizing that you have a function in the class, a fundamental role to play in the revolution, does not mean that you should see your­self as the ‘organizer of the class', its ‘gen­eral staff' or its ‘representative' in the seiz­ure of power. Such conceptions, inherited from the 3rd International and characterized by the Bordigist current can only lead to:

- underestimating or even rejecting any class struggle on which you have no direct influence (it was no accident that the Bordigist current and even Battaglia were scornful about the historic resurgence of May 68);

- trying at all costs to have an immediate influ­ence on the class, to get yourself ‘recognized' as its ‘leadership': this was the open door to opportunism which led to the dislocation of the PCI (Programma);

- in the final analysis, discrediting the very idea of a revolutionary party, thus giving an added boost to councilist ideas.

A clear conception of the function of the organization means seeing yourself as an integral part of the class struggle: this is why, from Interna­cionalismo to the ICC, we have always affirmed the necessity for a political intervention in the class against all tendencies which aim to trans­form the organization into a club for marxology, a ‘workshop' or ‘study group'. This is also why the ICC always fought for the three international conferences held between 1977 and 1980 not to be ‘dumb', to take a position on what's at stake in the present period.

Intervening in the class in no way means neglect­ing the work of clarification and theoretical-political deepening. On the contrary. The essen­tial function of communist organizations, to con­tribute actively to the development of conscious­ness in the class, presupposes that they are armed with the clearest and most coherent posit­ions. This is why the different groups who were to constitute the ICC all adopted a platform, and why the ICC did the same thing at its First Congress. This is why we have always fought against ‘recruiting' confused elements, against confused and hasty regroupments, for the maximum of clarity in debate. This is also why from the very beginning, notably in Internationalism's appeal in 72 and in our response to Battaglia in 76 (see the article on the constitution of the IBRP in this issue), we have defended the necessity to hold international conferences on the basis of political criteria.

We don't have the megalomaniac pretensions that we alone defend communist positions: those who accuse us of sectarianism don't know what they're talking about, as our whole history shows. On the other hand, we have always affirmed that the regroupment of revolutionaries, the creation of the future party, can only be based on the greatest clarity and programmatic coher­ence. This is why in 1975 we rejected Revolut­ionary Perspectives' proposal that they should join the ICC as a ‘minority', an idea they put forward before uniting with Workers' Voice in an ephemeral manner to form the CWO. This is why we didn't see the 1977-1980 conferences lead­ing to an immediate regroupment, contrary to the view defended by Battaglia today (see the art­icle on the IBRP), even if we were never opposed to the unification of certain of the participants at these conferences when they found that they shared the same political positions. Finally, this is why we consider that the present efforts of Battaglia and the CWO to set up a bastard international organization, half-way between a centralized political organization and a feder­ation of autonomous groups in the anarchist tradition, have the best possible chances of creat­ing not a pole of political clarity but a pole of confusion.

One of the essential preconditions for a communist organization being able to carry out its function is clarity on its structure. Since it's our Current has defended the necessity for an internationalized, centralized organization. This is in no way a ‘new' conception. It is based on the nature of the working class itself, which has to cement its unity on an international scale if it is to carry out the revolution. It is based on the whole experience of proletarian organizations, from the Communist League and the First International to the Communist International and the International Communist Left. This nec­essity was affirmed very clearly at the constit­utive conference of the ICC in 1975 (see the re­port ‘On the Question of the Organization of our International Current' in IR 1), but it had always been the basis for our efforts towards international contact and discussion, as our whole history shows. We also affirmed this necessity in all our work as an integral part of the cycles of international conferences in 1973-74 and 1977-80, and at the conferences of the Scand­inavian milieu in the late 70s (where we insisted that groups coming from the Italian Left like Battaglia should be invited). In these confer­ences, we fought against the idea of an inter­national organization based on a sort of federat­ion of national groups each with its own plat­form, as was defended by Battaglia in 1977 and which it is putting into practice today with the constitution of the IBRP.

Another lesson to be drawn from the experience of the ICC is that an organization of combat, which is what a communist organization is, is built through combat. This lesson isn't new either. Thus, the Bolshevik Party could only play its role in the October 1917 revolution and in the foundation of the CI because it had been tempered through a whole series of combats against populism and agrarian socialism, against ‘legal marxism', against terrorism, against ouvrierist economism, against the intellectual rejection of militant commitment, against Menshevism, against the liquidators, against nation­al defense and pacifism, against any support to the provisional government in 1917. Similarly, our organization was founded and tempered through a series of combats against all sorts of deviat­ions, including those in our own ranks:

- Internacionalismo's combat against the ouv­rierist councilism of ‘Proletario' (cf. RI's Bulletin D'Etude et de Discussion no.10);

- RI's combat against the councilism of ICO (1969-70), against the academicism of the tendencies around ‘Parti de Class' (1971) and Berard (1974), against the activism of the tendency that was to form the PIC (1973);

- the ICC's combat against the activism and the substitutionist vision of the tendency that was to form the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (1978);

- the ICC's combat against immediatism and the dilution of principles and for the defense of the organization against the ‘Chenier tendency' (1981).

The last lesson to be drawn from our experience is that you can't seriously work for the constit­ution of the future party if you don't know at what point in history it can arise - ie. during       periods of historical advance in the class struggle. This was the view defended by the Italian Communist Left against the constitution of the Trotskyist ‘4th International', and by the GCF against the foundation of the PCI in Italy after the war. The organizations that proclaim themselves to be the ‘Party' today are not parties; they can't carry out the tasks of the party, but neither can they carry out the real tasks of the day, the one which Bilan assigned to the fract­ions: to prepare the programmatic and organizational bases of the future world party.

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

Here are some ‘classic' lessons of the workers' movement which have been confirmed by ten years of experience in the ICC, and which are the indispensable preconditions for making a real contribution to the constitution of the revolut­ionary party and to the communist revolution itself.

FM

---

[1] On the history of the ‘Italian Left', see our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste d'Italie.

[2] News and Letters: a group coming out of Trotskyism, animated by a former secretary of Trotsky and which, despite many confusions on ‘national liberation struggles', the black prob­lem, feminism, etc, defended class positions on the essential question of the capitalist and imperialist nature of the USSR.

[3] The fact that we're now at IR 40 shows that its regularity has been consistently maintained since then.

 

The political positions of a revolutionary group are a crucial element in understanding its real­ity. But they are not enough. The practice of a group and the overall dynamic of its evolution - where it comes from, where it's going - must also be taken into account. The same political error, for example, has a very different meaning if it is the product of a new group trying to find its way towards a proletarian political coherence or if it is made by an ‘old' organization on the slide towards degeneration or irreversible sclerosis.

The Theses of the Alptraum Collective that we are publishing here are interesting in themselves, from a class point of view. But their real value can only be measured in terms of the context and dynamic they are part of.

In a country like Mexico a clear and explicit rejection of all nationalist demands, the denunciation of Cuban or Nicaraguan state capital­ism and all national liberation struggles from a proletarian point of view are all the more important and significant because the proletar­iat in Mexico is hammered from morning till night by all sorts of political organizations with a pernicious and all-pervasive nationalist propaganda based on ‘anti-Yankee' ideology. In these conditions, a voice raised to affirm the international character of the proletarian str­uggle and its totally irreconcilable opposition to all nationalist ideology is a breath of fresh air, a powerful beacon for the future.

The Theses are the result of a process, which over the past two years has led the elements of the Alptraum Collective to break with their original organization, the Mexican Party of the Proletariat - where genuine class positions floated in a general political incoherence and inconsistency - and move more resolutely to­wards a real political coherence.

These Theses can indeed represent an important step towards the development of a consistent and active communist expression in Mexico and should be greeted as such.

This should not, however, prevent us from point­ing out what seems to us to express weaknesses, which must be overcome if the comrades of Alp­traum wish to follow up this positive dynamic. That is what we shall try to do in the comments following this text.

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

"The life of industry becomes a succession of periods of normal activity, prosperity and stagnation." Karl Marx, Capital

- 1 -

The present capitalist crisis has an internat­ional dimension and must be seen as a classic crisis of over-accumulation confirming the nature of the industrial cycle with its moments of prosperity, crisis and stagnation.

The contradictory nature and movement of capit­alism is clear from the unfolding of the period­ic cycle of industry and its final result: generalized crisis.

The crisis of over-accumulation first appears in speculative investments and then reaches prod­uction, trade and the financial market. Specul­ation only offers a momentary relief from the over-accumulation of capital. The disorganization of production resulting from speculation is an inevitable by-product of the expansion of the preceding period of prosperity.

The scenario of the crisis is universal, because of the world-wide extension of capitalism, and the intensification of its control over all branches of production in the world economy.

The crisis has a world dimension because it has constantly widened out in a spiral starting from the developed capitalist countries (with a greater organic composition of capital) and now including all the rest of the countries in the world capitalist system. The effects of the crisis are intensely felt in the whole capit­alist economy.

The crisis we are now living through is the res­ult of the clash between the enormous develop­ment of the productive forces (existing wealth) and the capitalist relations of production imp­osed by private appropriation of production. The development of the productive forces has become an obstacle for capital. Capitalist production relations have become a block on the develop­ment of work as productive labor.

The growing crisis reflects the contradictory nature of capitalist reality and the historic­ally limited character of its production rel­ations, which can only hold back the progress­ive development of social productive forces. Moments of crisis occur when capitalism is ob­liged to destroy a growing mass of productive forces revealing the decadence of the system.

In this logic, capitalism is periodically led to destroy a growing mass of the social productive forces including the proletariat. From this internal tendency emerges the need for wars to prolong its existence as a whole. Historically, we have seen that after each war there is a period of reconstruction.

- 2 -

With the exacerbation of the crisis, the capit­alist system sets up the conditions for its own subversion.

The deepening crisis offers the conditions for the development of proletarian consciousness and its self-organization. But, capital attempts to destroy the germ of this consciousness by ty­ing the proletariat of each country to its ideo­logical constructs; in this way, by strengthening nationalist ideology and marginal ideologies such as feminism, ecology, the struggle for peace, the homosexual movement, etc capital tries to atomize and block proletarian consc­iousness which is international and total.

Capital knows that the only solution to the crisis of overproduction is war and that to get to this point, it must first destroy all traces of proletarian consciousness.

In the past, fascism and anti-fascism were eff­ective in integrating the proletariat into bourgeois ideology. Today the myth of the ‘socialist bloc' against the ‘democratic western world' is used. The defense of state capitalism in Cuba, in Nicaragua, in relation to movements of nat­ional liberation in Guatemala, in El Salvador, etc. have a clear meaning: to mobilize the world proletariat for the cause of one of the two cap­italist blocs and lead it to a third world war.

- 3 -

From the ‘60s on there has been a resurgence of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat on a world scale.

An international movement develops in the form of successive waves of advance and retreat when the different parts of the proletariat confront the power of the world bourgeoisie.

The historic course of the present class str­uggle is fundamentally determined by the bal­ance of forces between capital and the prolet­ariat in Western Europe. This correlation of forces will determine the outcome of the con­frontation between the two classes in the rest of the countries in the world unity of capit­alism.

With the defeat of the proletarian movement in Poland in 1981, basically due to the mediating actions of the union Solidarnosc, a period of reflux began. But it rapidly came to an end with the development of strikes in Holland and Belg­ium in 1983 and the recent mobilizations in France, Britain and Germany.

Today we are living in a period characterized by the reawakening of the proletariat, in its unity and its historical continuity as subject. In this sense, the resurgence of communist groups constitutes a moment in the development of prol­etarian self-consciousness.

- 4 -

Organizations which do not recognize the revol­utionary role of the proletariat cannot carry out the tasks which the historic movement of the class imposes on them. Communist organizations should be able to become theoretical-political bridges assimilating and transmitting the exper­ience and revolutionary heritage of the prolet­arian movement.

The program of these organizations will dev­elop and synthesize the experience and histor­ical heritage of the proletariat as a united whole. In this way, the class principles of the proletariat will express the historical dimen­sion of the proletarian movement and will synthesize its theoretical-political experience.

- 5 -

We recognize the existence of an international revolutionary marxist milieu made up of revol­utionary organizations (ICC, CWO, PCI, Battaglia Comunista) which, despite their many weaknesses, support and defend the essential political principles of the proletarian struggle.

Communists are not outside the proletariat; they constitute its most lucid elements. Their role is not merely to encourage the organization of the proletariat as a necessary moment of their own organization but to develop the self-con­sciousness of the proletariat. Communists embody the continuity of the historical struggle of the class in its highest moments such as the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the German Rev­olution, etc.

In our view, the central points that will diff­erentiate communists from the bourgeois camp are:

- the recognition of the decadence of the cap­italist system;

- the recognition of the working class as the subject of the revolution;

- the rejection of unions (by keeping outside them);

- the rejection of parliamentarism and of any electoral politics,

- the rejection of any type of alliance with any sector of the bourgeoisie;

- the rejection of popular fronts and movements of national liberation;

- the recognition that in the so-called ‘social­ist' countries the capitalist mode of prod­uction prevails in its specific form of state capitalism;

- the recognition that the communist revolution will have an eminently international charac­ter

- the recognition that socialism will succeed only through the abolition of capitalist rel­ations of production and specifically with the abolition of wage labor;

- the recognition of the need to forge the party of the proletariat which will have an international dimension.

From our point of view, with the acceleration of the class struggle, discussion among revolutionaries and their organized intervention on the international level are necessary and in­evitable.

- 6 -

We consider that capitalism is in decadence. Decadence implies the decline of the specific­ally capitalist mode of production, wherein industrial capital dominates as a social rel­ation of production.

The decadence of the system implies the accen­tuation of competition and the anarchy of spec­ifically capitalist production and, in general, the exacerbation and deepening of all contra­dictions because capitalism has attained its historical limits, the limits determined by its own development and its inherently contradictory nature. This is expressed in the periodic and increasingly violent clash between the product­ive forces and production relations.

The law that explains the development of the capitalist system of production is also an adequate basis for understanding its decadent nat­ures From our point of view, both the develop­ment and decline of the system reside in two essential factors: one expressing the form, in the general law of the tendency of the profit rate to decline; the other, expressing its content, in the formal and real domination of capital over the process of labor.

The tendency of the profit rate to decline expr­esses the decadent nature of the capitalist system. The aim of the system is to ensure an un­interrupted and growing accumulation of capital. This implies a growing expansion of capital and a concomitant increase in the social product­ivity of labor which means an accelerated dev­elopment of the productive forces.

As this growth in capital occurs, its organic composition changes. There is an increase in the volume of the means of production and in prod­uction itself even in relation to the composition of capital value. This leads to the grad­ual fall in the rate of profit since variable capital, the part producing surplus value, dim­inishes.

At this point, capitalist crisis occurs when the accumulated capital is more than the profit rate which it can sustain or when the growing organic composition of capital does not correspond to an equivalent increase in value.

In this way, the over-accumulation of capital in relation to its ability to exploit labor leads the capitalist system to a crisis. This crisis can be counter-balanced by capital accumulation itself through the different measures inherent in its process of accumulation. One of these means is the increase in the mass of surplus value obtained by an increase in the total mass of capital using a greater number of workers. Or else it can be counter-balanced by a greater productivity of labor implying an increase in the rate of exploitation gained through the extraction of relative and absolute surplus value. But these ways of counter-balancing the decline cannot be used indefinitely because there comes a time when the number of workers can no longer be increased, when the working day can be extended no further and when socially necessary labor can be no further red­uced because of natural and/or social limits.

The development of the productive forces thus leads to an open contradiction with capitalist means of production. Brought to its absolute limits this means a lack of surplus value in relation to the mass of capital accumulated and its need for expansion. Capitalism has arrived at these limits brought about by its own inherently contractory nature and which hinder the further development of the productive forces within this system.

- 7 -

We recognize the proletariat as the only revol­utionary subject. At this moment of the irreversible decadence of the capitalist system (see Thesis 6) the proletariat must break any ideo­logical or political entente with capital (whether it be private or state capital) .

We consider that any perspective starting from the national framework is condemned from the outset to be alienated to capital which bases its whole existence on the nation-state. The proletarian struggle must set itself to break with all national barriers.

All bourgeois tendencies and parties (of the right or left) defend inter-classist positions (feminism, popular fronts, etc) in their battle against the proletariat.

The proletariat struggles against capital as a whole and even if its struggle is formally carried on in a national framework, its content is international.

- 8 ‑

We consider that parliaments and the unions are not arenas or means of struggle for the prolet­ariat in this country or in any other because these forms are used by the bourgeoisie to mediate proletarian struggle and integrate them. Parl­iaments and unions are another mystification of capital, which strengthens its domination over the working class, alienating its revolutionary activity.

- 9 -

We consider that there are no progressive bourg­eois factions and that the strategy of the proletariat can include no alliance with any sector of the bourgeoisie, however ‘progressive' it may appear. The struggle of the working class must be the result of the working class itself.

- 10 -

We feel that the notion of monopoly state capit­al does not explain the development of capitalism in terms of its essential determinants. It is simply another ideological subterfuge on the interpretation of capitalist reality, which ser­ves as the basis for the left of capital to justify its alliances with private sectors of the bourgeoisie. The growing intervention of the state in the economy only obeys the anarchy of capitalist production itself: it expresses the exacerbation of the contradictions of the capit­alist system.

-11-

We think that nationalization or statification of the means of production, far from preparing the way to communism only strengthens the domin­ation of social capital over wage labor.

In the case of statification through the banks and specifically the kind that occurred two years ago in Mexico, finance capital as a spec­ific relation of production is not eliminated because its role in the reproduction process of capital still continues in force.

Social capital has not been eliminated either because, with statification, only the juridical property of a mechanism organizing the circula­tion of capital is affected but remains within the overall framework of capitalist relations of production.

In this way, the state becomes the juridical owner of capital in one of its reproductive expressions: the capital that pays interest.

The result of this movement is only the depersonalization of the function performed by finance capital within capitalist relations of production and its reproduction logic; the same function is maintained at a higher level of development.

In this way, we see that capitalist relations of production have a more abstract and impersonal character revealing even more clearly their in­herent fetishism. The state, as a real capital­ist collective integrates banking and salaried personnel in general into a more abstract and alienated schema of domination. Statification is a means of guaranteeing the logic of the national and international capitalist reproduction process independently and above any particular bourgeois faction.

In this sense, we can affirm that the measures taken by the Mexican state have one main aim: to maintain and preserve the capitalist social configuration.

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

Our comments and criticisms

The ACC, Alptraum Communist Collective, has evolved from the time when its members were still part of the PMP and this evolution is to a large extent the result of contacts with the ICC. This has led them to break with the vague­ness and inconsistency of the PMP and to define themselves politically within the proletarian camp. Their ‘Theses' represent a political orientation which places them within the frame­work defined by the theoretical-political exper­ience of the proletarian revolutionary movement throughout history.

The Theses take a position on all the major questions of the workers' movement since the last great international wave of struggle (1917­-1923) and the Third International which was its primary political expression.

They reaffirm the decadence of capitalism in its present historical phase and draw out all the consequences of this reality in terms of the forms and content of the workers' struggle in this epoch: the impossibility of achieving dur­able reforms within the system now, the rejec­tion of unionism, of parliamentarism, of nat­ional liberation struggles, the recognition of the capitalist nature of the so-called ‘comm­unist' countries and the universality of the tendency towards state capitalism, the reaffirm­ation of the international nature of the prolet­arian struggle and the need for political organization and intervention. Through its ‘Theses' the ACC has been able to define itself politic­ally in terms of the historic reality of the class struggle.

The Theses also develop an analysis of the course of history and recognize the importance and the scope of today's working class struggles and the crucial significance of the situation of the proletariat in Western Europe.

This all expresses a real class lucidity crystallizing the lessons of the past to better under­stand the present.

We have stated the many important qualities of this text but we'll have to look now at what seems to us to express omissions and weaknesses. Two main weaknesses: one on the role of revol­utionary organizations, the other on the econ­omic analysis which takes up a lot of space in the Theses.

Revolutionary Organizations

The Alptraum Theses clearly assert that commun­ist organizations belong to the proletariat and that they represent a clarity and historical continuity in the struggle of their class. But they say little, too little, about the active role of these organizations in the class str­uggle and about the crucial nature of their intervention in the present period.

Alptraum correctly quotes the famous passage from the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "theor­etically, (communists) have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."

Thus, the ‘Theses' say:

"Communists are not outside the proletariat; they are the most lucid elements of it .... communists embody the continuity of the historical struggle of the class in its highest moments such as the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, etc." (Thesis 5)

All of this is true and very important. But the greatest "lucidity", the greatest "synthesis of historical experience" would be nothing if it were simply "a way of interpreting the world". Communist organizations are an instrument of the proletariat in its own self-transformation, to transform the world.

Turning their backs on academicism, communists do not analyze reality for the sake of analysis alone but to better participate in and orient the real battles of their class - to intervene.

On this aspect of the activity of communists, the Theses merely say in passing:

"From our point of view, with the acceleration of class struggle, discussion among revolution­aries and their organized intervention on an international level are necessary and inevit­able."

At least in terms of where the emphasis falls, the Theses lack an insistence on the practical place of the organizations in their class, the fact that they are the most resolute avant‑garde in class battles. The other part of the quote from the Communist Manifesto is missing: "practically (the communists) are the most ad­vanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others."

It's not in some far-off future that the inter­vention of revolutionary organizations will be "necessary" and "inevitable". Right now, in to­day's battles, this intervention is indispens­able.

In its Theses, Alptraum deals with the serious­ness of the present historical situation: "we are living in a period characterized by the reawakening of the proletariat, in its unity and its historical continuity as subject."

And even more explicitly:

"With the defeat of the proletarian movement in Poland in 1981, basically due to the mediating actions of the union Solidarnosc, a period of reflux began. But it rapidly came to an end with the development of strikes in Holland and Belg­ium in 1983 and the recent mobilizations in France, Britain and Germany." (Thesis 3)

It is thus surprising that no emphasis is given to the importance of the intervention of commun­ist organizations now, in these strikes.

Of course, Alptraum is still a ‘collective', a sort of ‘circle'. But, first of all, that chan­ges nothing about the importance of interven­tion to define, in general terms, the role of revolutionary organizations. Second, Alptraum already has a political framework to enable it, in fact to oblige it, to deal with organized, systematic, continuous intervention in the class as an urgent task.

History is accelerating and revolutionaries must be able to adapt their existence to this fact.

Economic Analysis

There is perhaps a connection between this pol­itical ‘slowness' or ‘attentism' and certain aspects of the economic analysis developed in the Theses.

Thesis 1 says:

"The present capitalist crisis ... must be seen as a classic crisis of over-accumulation." A ‘classic' crisis of over-accumulation?

Alptraum seems to identify today's crisis with the periodic growth crises of the 19th century.

It's true that there are similar mechanisms and contradictions in all capitalist crises. But crises were like the heart-beats of a body in full development while, in the crises of decad­ent capitalism, the world wars and universal militarism are the death rattles of a dying body. In the 19th century, capital had the ent­ire world to conquer; it overcame its crises by opening new markets all over the world. But in the 20th century, its crises have led to world war, total war ... and today crisis has brought us to the brink of the annihilation of mankind.

Alptraum recognizes that capitalism has entered its period of decline and it implicitly deals with the ‘crisis-war-reconstruction' cycle which has characterized the life of capitalism since World War I. But when it comes to analyzing the basic principles, the ‘essential determinants', that lead capitalism to crisis and decline, the Theses make reference to what can only be con­sidered as inadequate factors.

Unaware of or rejecting the analysis of Rosa Luxemburg - of Marx, in fact - according to which the fundamental contradiction of capit­alism lies in its inability to keep on creat­ing the markets required by its expansion in­definitely, Alptraum writes:

"From our point of view, both the development and decline of the system reside in two essential factors: one expressing its form, in the general law of the tendency of the profit rate to decline; the other, expressing its content, in the formal and real domination of capital over the process of labor." (Thesis 6)

But neither the distinction between "formal" or "real domination" of capital nor the law of the tendency towards a decline in the profit rate are enough to explain why capitalism has experienced more than a half century of irrev­ersible historical decline or why the present economic crisis has nothing to do with the growth crises of the last century.

Marx used the distinction between ‘formal and real domination' of labor by capital to express the difference between, on the one hand, the period when the proletariat was mainly composed of ‘salaried' artisans (the Canuts of Lyons, for example) who were commercially subservient to capital but continued to produce with virtually the same methods and gestures that their ancest­ors had used in feudalism and, on the other hand, the period of the industrial revolution when the organization and methods of artisan labor had given way to large-scale industry with its proletarians molded to the needs of large factories.[1]

As interesting as this may be, the distinction says nothing about why at a given stage the capitalist production relations cease to stim­ulate the development of the productive forces and become instead a chronic and steadily grow­ing fetter on them.

It's the same for the tendency towards the dec­line in the rate of profit. Although this law is perfectly correct and important as a manifest­ation of a contradiction in the capitalist process of production, it is only a ‘tendential' law, a tendency which is constantly being counter-balanced. To find out at what moment, in what historical circumstances this tendency would lead to a real collapse of profits, we must look to the factors which counteract this general tendency. From Marx we know that capital slows down and compensates for the tendential decline in the profit rate through an increase in the mass of surplus value and through the intensification of exploitation (increase in productivity). Both these methods are dependent on capital's ability to expand its production which in turn depends on the existence of sol­vent markets - outside of its sphere of prod­uction.

If, like Alptraum, we ignore the contradiction at the heart of the capitalist system between, on the one hand, the need to produce more and more in order to exist and, on the other hand, the inability to create enough solvent markets, then one can only conclude that far from coming to the end of its existence, asphyxiated by fits own contradictions, capitalism still has a shining future ahead of it. As long as capitalism has no limits to the expansion of its trade out­lets, it can overcome and compensate for all the other contradictions. The market gives life to capitalism and it is its last limit.

If we had to wait - as Thesis 6 seems to say for capitalism to enter its phase of decline until "there comes a time when the number of workers can no longer be increased, when the working day can be extended no further and when socially necessary labor can be no further red­uced because of natural (sic) and/or social limits", we'd have to resign ourselves to waiting for centuries - for all eternity in fact. Capitalism will never reach ‘natural limits' that will prevent it from increasing; the number of workers, integrating all the unemployed and marginal elements of this world. Since the time when capitalism went into decadence, the number of non-integrated workers left by the wayside (especially in the Third World) has not been re­duced (approaching these so-called natural lim­its) at all. On the contrary, the number has in­creased at a phenomenal rate.

This brief article is not the place to develop a detailed polemic on the analysis of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism.[2] We just want to point out that:

1) the analysis presented in the Thesis is insufficient - if not wrong;

2) it could be used to theorize a more or less ‘attentist' attitude which (in contradiction to everything affirmed elsewhere in the Thes­es) would not understand the importance and the urgency of the practical intervention of communists today using the pretext that cap­italism is still far from having reached its ‘natural limits'.

Conclusion

"Without revolutionary theory there is no revol­utionary movement", so Lenin correctly said. The ACC Theses express an undoubted theoretical eff­ort and an understanding of the importance of this effort for the proletariat. But they also show that this effort has to be continued. To do this, the ACC must place itself more directly, more actively, on the terrain of political inter­vention within the present movement of the prol­etariat.[3]

The intervention of revolutionaries is nourished and sustained by revolutionary theory. But rev­olutionary theory can only live and develop in terms of this intervention and never more so than in our present period.

When they were still members of the PMP the elements who today constitute the ACC were among the most active in relation to intervention in Mexico City. With them, in Mexico City in the summer of 1982, the ICC held a public meeting on the workers' struggle in Poland.

This period of thought, of breaking away, and of political clarification they are going through should not - as the Theses sometimes leads one to believe - make them forget the primary aim of all this effort.

RV

---

[1] With the publication in French of the Unpub­lished Chapter of Capital at the beginning of the ‘70s - a chapter where Marx particularly de­veloped this distinction - certain currents like the group that published Invariance and other later ‘modernists', thought they'd found in this analysis a fundamental ‘new' element that could be used to understand 20th century capitalism. The taste for innovation for its own sake! But in fact the elements of this distinction (the concrete transformation of the labor process and especially the predominance of relative sur­plus value over absolute surplus value) basic­ally describes stages in the ascendant period of capitalism and not the key passage to the decadent phase. Thus, for example, capitalism developed in Russia at the end of the 19th cent­ury by taking, from the outset, the most modern forms of ‘real domination'.

[2] Cf ‘Theory of Crises' (critique of Bukharin) in IR 29 and 30 (1982); ‘Crisis Theories from Marx to the Communist International' in IR 22 (1980); ‘Crisis Theories in the Dutch Left' in IR 16, 17, 21; ‘On Imperialism' in IR 19 (1979); ‘Economic Theories and the Struggle for Social­ism' in IR 16 (1979) ; the pamphlet, ‘The Decad­ence of Capitalism'.

[3] The obscure, often needlessly abstract lang­uage of the Theses expresses not only a lack of clarity in thought but also a lack of concern to be understandable outside a restricted intell­ectual milieu.

 

With the publication in English and French of the first issue of the Communist Review (April 1984), the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, recently formed by the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista) of Italy and the Communist Workers’ Organisation of Britain, has at last found a voice. This event is all the more important since the collapse of the PCI (Programma Comunista) deprived the organisations springing from the ‘Bordigist’ tradition of the PCInt founded in 1943 of any expression at an international level. The regroupment of BC and the CWO is the result of a process announced by the CWO (in Revolutionary Perspectives no. 18) after the 3rd International Conference. The proletarian milieu had a right to expect, at the very least, an account of the discussions which made it possible to overcome their programmatic divergences to the point of founding a common organisation. Sadly, the foundation of the IBRP is in direct descent from the manoeuvres that sabotaged the International Conferences; it is made up of the kind of bluff and political opportunism that can only discredit revolutionary organisations, their importance, and the role they have to play in the class struggle.

THE VERITABLE SPLIT IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES

Primitive peoples, unable to understand their origins scientifically and historically, invented mythical explanations of the creation of the  world and of humanity. BC and the CWO, who hardly understand any better  the origins and function of the revolutionary organisation, have invented a mythical history of the International Conferences in order to explain the creation of the IBRP. While it is not our aim here to defend our conception of the International Conferences, a historical rectification is nevertheless necessary:

“Faced with the need to close ranks and re-launch, in a systematic and organised way, revolutionary political work within the world proletariat, revolutionaries were confronted by a multiplicity of unconnected groups and organisations. These groups and organisations were divided by theoretical and political differences but at the same time they often ignored the existence and nature of these differences. Concentrating on either ‘localism’ or theoretical abstractions, they were therefore incapable of developing a role in the events which were then beginning, and are now taking place... this situation had to be sorted out, and therefore it was necessary to do everything that could be done to change this... The PCInt responded to this necessity by calling the First International Conference of groups which recognised the following criteria:

* acceptance of the October revolution as a proletarian one,

* recognition of the break with Social Democracy brought about by the first and second Congresses of the Communist International,

* rejection without reservation of state capitalism and self-management,

* recognition of the Socialist and Communist parties as bourgeois parties,

* rejection of all policies which subject the proletariat to the national bourgeoisie,

* an orientation towards  the organisation of revolutionaries recognising Marxist doctrine and methodology as proletarian science.”

(Communist Review, no. 1, p. 1)

Bravo Battaglia! But why had it become necessary, in 1976, to “close ranks”? What had changed since 1968, when the little group that was to become Revolution Internationale called on you to convoke a conference, in order to confront the new situation created by the strikes of 1968? What had changed since November 1972, when our comrades of Internationalism (later to become our section in the US), launched a call for an “international correspondence network” with the perspective of an international conference? At the time, you replied:

“– that one cannot consider that there exists a real development in class consciousness,

– that even the flourishing of groups expresses nothing other than a malaise and a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie,

– that we must admit that the world is still under the heel of imperialism.”

Moreover, “after the experiences that our party has had in the past, we do not believe in the seriousness and continuity of international links established on a merely cognitive basis (correspondence, exchange of press, personal contacts and debates between groups on problems of theory and political praxis).” (Letter from BC to RI, 5.12.72, quoted in the letter of RI to BC, 9.6.80: see the Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference).

What had changed in 1976? The class struggle? The tensions between imperialist powers? In vain do we seek a reply in the texts of the IBRP.

By contrast, if we reread the text convoking the 1st Conference, we discover that Battaglia’s call was prompted neither by the development of the class struggle (since BC sees the waves of struggles from 1968 to 1974 as a merely student and petty bourgeois affair), nor by the development of inter-imperialist tensions, but... by the “social-democratisation of the Communist Parties”. Since then, this famous “Euro-communism” has proved to be purely conjunctural, linked to the period of the left in power to confront the class struggle. BC, on the other hand, still remains incapable of understanding the significance of the break with the counter-revolution constituted by the struggles of 1968-1974.

As for the criteria for adherence to the Conferences, not a trace of them is to be found in BC’s texts. On the contrary, it is the ICC that replies:

“For this initiative to be successful, for it to be a real step towards the rapprochement of revolutionaries, it is vital to clearly establish the fundamental political criteria which must serve as a basis and framework, so that discussion and confrontation of ideas are fruitful and constructive... The political criteria for participating in such a conference must be strictly limited by:

1) the rejection of any mystification about the existence of socialist countries or countries on the way to socialism,

2) the rejection of any idea that the CPs, SPs and others are workers’ organisations,

3) the rejection of any alliance and common action, even temporary,  with these organisations, as well as with those who advocate the possibility of such alliances,

4) the denunciation of all wars of so-called national liberation and independence,

5) the affirmation that the communist revolution is a class revolution and that the working class is the only revolutionary class in this epoch,

6) the affirmation that ‘the emancipation of the working class is the task of the class itself’ and that this implies the necessity for an organisation or revolutionaries within the class” (2nd letter from the ICC to the PCInt, 15.7.76, in the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference).

These are the criteria that we proposed and defended even before the Conferences. But BC can at least boast one originality: the proposition of a supplementary criterion, the recognition of the Conference as part of...

“the process leading to the International Party of the proletariat, the indispensable political organ for the political direction of the revolutionary class movement and  of proletarian power itself” (Communist Review, no. 1, p. 2).

This criterion was introduced with the thoroughly “serious” aim of excluding the ICC from the Conferences, and so opening the way “to the constitution of the international party”: “The conclusion of the 3rd Conference is the necessary acknowledgement of a situation in a phase of degeneration; it is the end of a phase of the Conferences’ work; it is the realisation of the first serious selection  of forces... We have assumed the responsibility that one has a right to expect of a serious leading force.” (BC’s reply to our ‘Address to the Proletarian Milieu’).

We do not judge an individual by his own opinion of himself, but by his acts; in the same way, an abstract and platonic political position is worthless: what is important, is its application and practice. It is therefore not without interest to examine the Proceedings of the 4th ‘International Conference’, whose opening speech announces right away:

“the basis now exists for beginning the process of clarification about the real tasks of the party... Although today we have a smaller number of participants than at the 2nd and 3rd Conferences, we are starting from  a clearer and more serious basis”  (Proceedings of the 4th International Conference, pp. 1-2).

We can already judge the great “seriousness” of this Conference from the fact:

-- that the ‘Technical Committee’ (BC/CWO) is incapable of publishing the slightest preparatory bulletin for the Conference, which is all the more of a nuisance in that the Conference is held in English, while BC’s texts for reference are all published... in Italian;

-- that the group organising the ‘Conference’ is incapable of translating half the interventions;

-- that the ‘Conference’ is held in 1982, and we have to wait... two years (!) for the Proceedings. At this rate, we will have to wait for the period of transition before the IBRP decides to take power!

But it would be petty of us to linger over such unimportant ‘practical’ details. Let us therefore pass in review the “forces” that BC and the CWO have “seriously selected” to “begin the process of clarifying the tasks of the party”:

-- there is ‘Marxist Worker’ from the US;

-- there is ‘Wildcat’, also from the US: we do not know what Wildcat – an organisation in the councilist tradition – is doing here, but anyway this does not matter, since by the time the ‘Conference’ meets, this group no longer exists, and nor for that matter does Marxist Worker; it is thus hardly likely to be called upon to contribute “seriously” to the construction of the party;

-- then there is ‘L’Eveil Internationaliste’ from France “which agreed to attend, but unfortunately was unable to do so.” (Opening of the 4th Conference); frankly, we have no idea why L’Eveil was invited, since at the 3rd Conference they had refused to take a position on BC’s criterion, saying that “BC and the ICC have always wanted to see these Conferences as a step towards the Party. This is not the case... One cannot hide divergences behind manoeuvrist resolutions, or discriminatory criteria... We reaffirm that we cannot today arrive at a clarification which would be a step towards the constitution of the Party.” (Proceedings of the 3rd Conference, pp. 48-52);

-- the Gruppe Kommunistische Politik (Kompol) from Austria was invited, but did not come, for reasons that are not clear; by contrast, the correspondence between Kompol and BC is very instructive. Kompol asks that the invitation be enlarged to include the Italian groups ‘Lega Leninista’ and ‘il Circolo Lenin’. BC replies:

“The latest document we have received between yourselves and these organisations doesn’t add anything on Poland to what has been said by other formations which go back, in a more or less correct way, to the Communist Left of Italy... Taken as a whole, we think we are the only ones, at least in Italy, who have carried out a deep, precise, and up-to-date examination of recent tendencies and to have drawn out conclusions and guidelines of a revolutionary nature which are still awaiting a reply from the many ‘revolutionaries’ who litter the Italian scene”  (Letter from the EC of the PCInt to Kompol, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference, pp. 40-41).

Here is BC introducing, under the table, a supplementary criterion for participation in the Conferences: if you are Italian, you must agree with BC’s analysis on Poland! The lesson is clear: in Italy at least, BC intends to remain ‘master in its own house’;

-- in the end, the only “serious” force in the 4th Conference is the SUCM from Iran, whom we will come back to in a later article. For the moment, it is enough to say that if the SUCM is indeed “for” the Party, this is for the simple reason that it is part of the Maoist current, which places it irremediably outside the proletarian camp.

It is with this “serious selection” that BC and the CWO intend to advance towards “the constitution of the International Party”.

All the old myths of creation bring on stage three elements: Good, Evil, and the mere mortals. In the mythology of BC-CWO, at the conferences, there was Good (BC-CWO), Evil (the ICC) and the mere mortals, made up of

“Various groups (who) showed themselves to be not only disarmed on the theoretical and political level, but also by their very nature incapable of drawing any positive elements from the ongoing polemic in order to further their own political growth and maturation” (Communist Review no. 1)

Here, as in the Bible, history gets ‘rearranged’ a bit, for the needs of mythology. Thus it is ‘forgotten’ that during the conferences, and partly thanks to them, the group For Kommunismen was able to “further its own political growth and maturation” by becoming the ICC’s section in Sweden.

And finally, Evil is also present. The Serpent has taken on the form of the ICC, the “resolution mongers” (CWO), who “want to present divergences as mere problems of formulation” (BC, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference). It is the ICC that...

“wanted the Conferences to imitate on a wider scale their own internal method of dealing with political differences – ie. to minimise them – in order to keep the organisation together” (RP 18, p. 29).

It is the ICC

“whose motives (in rejecting opposition to national liberation as a criterion for participation in the International Conferences) were marxist in form, but opportunist in content, since the aim was to gain adherence to future meetings of their satraps Nucleo Comunista, a Bordigist group with which the ICC manoeuvred opportunistically against the PCInt” (RP 21, p. 8).

It is the ICC who

“did their best to sabotage any meaningful debate at the 3rd Conference by refusing to accept a straight forward resolution on the fundamental role of the revolutionary party put forward by Battaglia... When it comes down to it, the ICC is always the first to sabotage discussion in a cloud of verbiage” (Workers’ Voice no. 16, p. 6). Far be it from us to play the Devil’s advocate. All that interests us, as revolutionary marxists, is the historical reality of the proletariat and its political organisations. We would therefore remind BC and the CWO that it is certainly not the ICC that “wants to present divergences as mere problems of formulation”; even before the 1st Conference, it is BC that proposes for the agenda:

“Ways of discussing and transcending those technical and practical differences between the groups (such as party and unions, party and councils, imperialism and colonial and semi-colonial wars)” (PCInt’s 3rd Circular Letter, Proceedings of the 1st Int. Conf., p. 12). To which we replied:

“We must be careful not to rush into things and cover over our differences, while at the same time retaining a firm and conscious commitment to clarification and to the regroupment of revolutionaries. Thus, while we are in agreement with the proposed agenda, we don’t understand why questions “such as party and unions, party and councils, imperialism and colonial and semi-colonial wars” are seen as “technical and practical differences”” (ICC Reply, Proceedings of the 1st Int. Conf. p. 13).

As for the resolutions that we laid before the Conferences, a quick reading of the first of them is sufficient to demonstrate that its aim is to set out as clearly as possible what unites the ICC and the PCInt, and what divides them, as a basis for clarification and discussion. The IBRP is moreover singularly ill-placed to talk of “minimising divergences”, as we shall see later.

As for our “satraps”, if our aim in the Conferences had been to manoeuvre in an opportunist manner, to “control” them, we had no need of “satraps”. We had only to accept BC’s original invitation, addressed not the ICC as such but to our various territorial sections. The arithmetical calculation is simple enough: nine territorial  sections equals nine votes in the Conferences – amply sufficient to “control” the Conferences from beginning to end, to vote all the resolutions we liked, and to make the Conferences take positions as often as we felt inclined. Instead, we replied: “Since we are not a federation of national groups, but an international Current with local expressions, our reply here is that of the whole Current.” (ICC’s first letter, Proceedings of the 1st Int. Conf., p. 7). In reality, the major criticism to be made of the ICC’s conduct at the Conferences is not one of opportunism, but of naivety. Our conception of revolutionary action excludes sham majorities, underhand tricks, and manoeuvres worthy only of parliamentary cretinism, and we were naive enough to think that the same was true of BC and the CWO; let them reassure themselves – we won’t make the same mistake twice.

As for our “opportunist manoeuvres”, we cannot help remarking that the CWO is incapable of giving the slightest concrete, and still less documented, example – and this not for lack of wanting to. After all, it was not the ICC, but BC and the CWO who held clandestine inter-group meetings in the corridors of the 3rd Conference. It was not the ICC, but BC  who, after denying any desire to exclude the ICC right up to the eve of the 3rd Conference, launched their excluding criterion at the end of this same Conference. Why? In order to put their manoeuvre to the vote after the departure of the NCI’s delegation, whose interventions had supported our rejection of this criterion (see the Proceedings of the 3rd Conference, and the ICC’s letter to the PCInt after their sabotage operation). This kind of manoeuvre, well known in the US Congress under the name of ‘filibuster’ is worthy of bourgeois democrats, not proletarian revolutionaries.

And it is with these bourgeois parliamentary methods that BC and the CWO intend to build the class Party, which will defend the principles of communism within the proletarian movement.

FOR WHAT PARTY?

For BC and the CWO, the end apparently justifies the means; and the end, provisionally at least, is the famous IBRP. The Bureau is a truly bizarre animal, which puts us in mind of that mythical creature the Griffon, which is made up of several real animals:  the head and wings of an eagle, the front paws of a lion, and the tail of a dolphin. In order to determine the Bureau’s real nature, it seems to us necessary to proceed by elimination, and decide first of all what the Bureau is not.

First of all, the Bureau is not a simple liaison committee, such as for example the one-time Technical Committee of the International Conferences. The TC’s function was to coordinate a job undertaken in common by several separate organisations, without this implying any regroupment, nor any identity of political positions. The TC carried out tasks that were both ‘technical’ (publishing bulletins, etc) and ‘political’ (decisions as to the agenda of the Conferences, on the groups to participate, etc); all this within the framework of the criteria for adhesion accepted by its members. By contrast, the Bureau, which defines itself as “a product of a process of decantation and homogenisation within the framework of the first four International Conferences of the Communist Left” (Communist Review no. 1, p. 12), looks more like a true political organisation, where adhesion is based on a platform of political positions and whose functioning is determined by its Statutes. The platform is apparently considered as constituting a political unity, since:

“Apart from exceptional cases, then only in the short-term, the admission of more than one organisation from the same country is not permitted.” (Ibid).

Right from the start, the Bureau is infected by a heavy dose of federalism: the organisations adhering in different countries keep their own separate identity, and “the Bureau only conducts relations with their leading committees” (Ibid). Yet another sign of the desire, so dear to the petty bourgeois, to remain “master in his own house”.

However, the IBRP is not a political organisation either – at least, not in the sense that we understand the term. The ICC is one single international organisation, based on a single platform, a single set of Statutes, and whose sections in each country are only local expressions of the whole. Faithful to the communist principle of centralisation, the ICC as a whole is represented by its International Bureau, elected at its International Congress; the positions of the IB always take priority at every level of the organisation, just as the whole is more important than any of its parts.

The IBRP by contrast, is not a single organisation; it is to “organised and coordinate the intervention of these organisations and promote their political homogenisation with the aim of their eventual organisational centralisation” (Ibid). Nor does it have a single platform, but three – of the Bureau, BC, and the CWO (not to mention the platforms of ‘factory groups’, ‘unemployed groups’, etc: a real embarrassment of riches!). When we look at the content of the IBRP’s platform, we have right to ask what is BC’s and the CWO’s “method for resolving political divergences... to maintain the unity of the organisation” if not to “minimise” them; what position, for example, are the wretched “French comrades”, “considered as militants of the Bureau” (Statutes of the IBRP), to defend on the question of revolutionary parliamentarism, given that BC is for, the CWO pretty much against, while the platform of the IBRP... has not a word to say on the subject! We certainly can’t accuse BC and the CWO of “minimising” their divergences: they simply make them disappear!

”The Bureau is not the Party, it is for the Party: (Communist Review no. 1). But what party is it “for”?

This is not the place to return to our basic conceptions on the constitution and function of the class party: we refer readers to our texts, in particular the text ‘On the Party’ adopted at the ICC’s 5th Congress (IR 35). However, it is necessary to insist that the concept of the party cannot cover anything and everything, and an essential aspect of this concept is the tight link between the existence of the party and the development of the class struggle. The party is thus necessarily a political organisation with a widespread influence in the working class, which recognises the party as one of its expressions. This influence cannot be reduced to a more question of the mechanical action of the party, where ‘revolutionary ideas’ win an ever greater ‘audience in the class. In the end, this comes back to the idealist vision, for which the party’s ‘ideas’ become the motive force for the inert ‘mass’ of the proletariat. In reality, there is a dialectical relationship between party and class, where the party’s growing influence depends on the proletariat’s organisational ability – in the assemblies and the soviets – to adopt and to put into action the party’s political orientation. The revolutionary programme is not merely a question of ‘ideas’ but a ‘critical practice’, to use Marx’s expression. Only through the revolutionary action of the working class can the positions of the party be concretely verified: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question” (Theses on Feuerbach). We cannot therefore, in the period of decadent capitalism, speak of the party existing outside revolutionary or pre-revolutionary periods – which obviously does not mean that the party can be created overnight, like Athena who sprang fully-grown from the head of Zeus. It will come into being after a long preliminary labour of clarification and organisation among revolutionary minorities or not at all.

Our conception of the party is thus radically opposed to that of the pure Bordigism of the PCI (Programma Comunista), for whom it is the party that defines the class. By contrast, BC and the CWO occupy a centrist position between the aberrations of Bordigism and the position of Marxism.

The definition of the party given by the Bordigists of Programma at least has the virtue of simplicity: there exists one, unique International Communist Party, based on a programme which is not only unique, but has remained unchanged since 1848. For the IBRP also, the party’s existence has nothing to do with its “influence” in the class, but depends on the programme, although the programme’s content evolves historically:

“The theoretical and political solutions to the problems connected to the withering away of the great Bolshevik experience in the soil of state capitalism allowed the re-organisation of tiny minorities around the theory and programme of communism. Even during the whirlwind of the second imperialist war there emerged a party which was opposed on the political, theoretical and organisational levels to all the bourgeois parties which operated both inside and outside the working class” (Platform of the IBRP, Communist Review no. 1, p.8).

The IBRP also recognises that the objective conditions of the proletariat’s existence mean that the same programme is valid for all countries; for the Bureau, therefore,

“The guiding political organ of the revolutionary assault must be centralised and international.” (Ibid).

A single international programme, then, defended by a single party internationally. But then, what is the IBRP for? If BC and the CWO are really convinced that “the problems tied to the retreat of the great Bolshevik experience” have been “resolved” in such a way as to allow the “erection” of a party – i.e. the PCInt of 1943 (or 1945? 1952?) – then why a Bureau to create another one? Why has the CWO not become the PCInt’s section in GB? If we are to believe the IBRP, another step remains to be taken:

“The formation of the International Party of the Proletariat will come about through the dissolution of various organisations which have worked on a national level in agreement with its platform and programme of action.” (Ibid).

Here is the International Party, which will be founded on the basis of national organisations, some of which at least are already parties, on a programme which remains to be defined, despite “the theoretical and political resolution of the problems linked to the great Bolshevik experience.” Unfortunately, we must demonstrate a great revolutionary patience, since BC and the CWO’s tests give not the slightest indication of what remains to be “defined” in their platforms. At least we won’t have too long to wait. “Where does communist consciousness lie today at the beginning of the revolutionary process?”, asks the CWO (‘Consciousness and the Role of Revolutionaries’, Workers’ Voice,  no. 16); and they reply: “It resides in the class party... (The Party) is inside the class’ daily struggle playing a leading role at every point in order to return to the proletarian mass of today the political lessons of its struggles of yesterday” (WV 16). Splendid! The “class party” exists already! “Communist consciousness” “resides in the class party. It resides with those who debate, define, and promote the goals based on the last 150 years of proletarian struggle” (Ibid, our emphasis throughout).

With this kind of definition, even the ICC could be the Party!

Well no, it’s not quite as simple as that, because a few paragraphs further on in the same article in Workers’ Voice, we read:

“This is why we affirm the need for a party which is active at all times to the limits of its strength within the working class and which unites internationally to coordinate the class movement across national frontiers. The coming into existence of such a party on an international scale is dependent on both the increase in class consciousness amongst workers as a whole and on the increasing activity within the day-to-day struggle of the communist minorities themselves” (Ibid, our emphasis).

Here then is the situation: the party exists and intervenes today, and it is the party that possesses class consciousness; but the party of tomorrow remains to be built, thanks to “the growth in consciousness amongst the workers”. It is for this reason that the CWO and the Internationalist Communist Party have created a Bureau “for the Party”.

As for what this party is going to do, there again we miss the clarity of Bordigism, which declares without any beating about the bush that the party governs for the class, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the party. Battaglia’s platform, on the other hand, is less clear-cut: on the one hand, “At no time and for no reason does the proletariat abandon its combative role. It does not delegate to others its historical mission and it does not give its power away ‘by proxy’, even to its political party” (Platform of BC, p. 6); but on the other hand, the party must “politically lead the proletarian dictatorship”, while “the workers’ state (is) maintained on the path of revolution by the party cadres who must never confuse themselves with the state nor mere with it” (Ibid, p. 4). The CWO is no better: on the one hand “Communism needs the active participation of the mass of workers who must be entirely conscious of the proletariat’s own revolutionary objectives, and who must as a whole participate in the elaboration and putting into action of communist policies through the intermediary of their mass organs whose delegates they control” (Platform of the CWO: our translation from the French version); but on the other hand, as the CWO has declared on several occasions, it is the party that takes power, and it is “the Communist party, the vanguard of the class, which organises and leads the revolutionary uprising and all the proletariat’s important actions during the period of transition, and the party will not abandon this role as long as a political programme is necessary” (CWO, The Period of Transition: our translation from the French)

We are waiting impatiently for the comrades of BC and the CWO, who are so fond of the “concrete”, to explain to us “concretely” how the party is going to “take” the power that the working class “does not delegate”. At all events, it is certainly not to the IBRP that we must look for an answer, since its platform has not a word to say on the subject.

When it comes down to it, the IBRP is neither a simple liaison committee, nor a real revolutionary political organisation. It is not the party, it is “for” the party, but it does not really know what party it is “for”. It is an animal even more monstrous than the Griffon, and, it must be said, even less viable.

INCOHERENCE IN DEFENCE OF CLASS POSITIONS

If these were merely the antics of music-hall clowns, we could laugh at them. But BC and the CWO are part of those meagre revolutionary forces who have the responsibility of defending class positions within the proletarian struggle; their failings, their concessions to bourgeois ideology in the defence of communist principles, weaken the revolutionary movement and the class as a whole.

Because it is an exploited class, the working class can only develop its consciousness through a permanent and bitter struggle. The slightest theoretical fault becomes a breach through which the class enemy injects its deadly poison. This is why marxism is a real fighting weapon, indispensable in the struggle; it also explains why marxist revolutionaries have always given such importance to general theoretical questions which may at first sight seem far removed from the ‘practical’ problems of the class struggle. Just as a defect in the foundations of a building affects the stability of the entire structure, so a defect in the basic conceptions of a revolutionary organisation inevitably weakens the whole of its activity.

The unions and rank-and-file unionism

BC and the CWO’s preliminary general declarations seem irreproachably clear:

“The Party states categorically that, in the present stage of totalitarian domination of imperialism, the unions are an absolutely necessary part of this domination since their aims correspond to the counter-revolutionary requirements of the bourgeoisie. We therefore reject as false the perspective that in future such organisations could have a proletarian function and that the Party should therefore reverse its view and reconsider the possibility of conquering the unions from within” (Platform of BC,  p. 7)

“Like Social Democracy the trade unions showed they had crossed over to capitalism by 1914 when they defended imperialist war and supported the “national interest” against the interests of the working class... Always the trade unions’ activity is based on containing and derailing the class struggle...”  Platform of the CWO, pp. 22-23).

But the explanation of why this situation exists is fundamentally wrong. For BC and the CWO, the unions, whether in ascendant or decadent capitalism, were and remain the “mediators” between capital and labour. Their “historical function (is that) of mediators between capital and labour”; they are the “mediators with the employers to negotiate the terms of sale of the workers’ labour power”  (‘Marxism and the Trade Union Question’, RP 20, pp. 19, 24).

It is impossible for “capitalism to realise its objectives of the monopolistic transformation of its economy without the trade unions’ collaboration with a wage policy which conciliates the needs of the workers with those of big capital” (BC, Piattaforma dei Gruppi Sindicali Comunisti Internazionalisti).

“The unions are the organs of mediation between labour and capital” (Platform of the IBRP). And the CWO even ends up by affirming that, at the beginning of capitalist decadence, “it was capitalism that changed, not the unions” (‘Trade unions and Workers’ Struggles’, WV 16).

On the contrary, capitalism’s passage into its decadent, imperialist phase changed the trade unions from top to bottom by transforming them into an integral part of the bourgeois state. Obviously, this transformation was not carried out overnight: the British unions, for example, were already associated with the first measures of Social Security in 1911. Nor was the process immediately clear to revolutionaries, as can be seen from the Communist International’s often contradictory positions on the union question. But this being said, we absolutely reject any idea of ‘mediation’ which, by introducing a perfectly inter-classist vision of unionism, obscures the reality that the unions, from being organs of the workers’ struggle against capital, have become cogs in the police apparatus of the capitalist state. BC and the CWO have still not understood this reality, because they have not understood that state capitalism is not merely a question of managing a decadent economy, but also – and even essentially – a question of an unremitting control of the whole of civil society.

We are therefore not surprised to see the notion of the unions ‘belonging’ to the workers, which BC and the CWO have just thrown out the door, coming back in through the window:

“The objective, irreversibly counter-revolutionary and anti-working class nature of the unions in the imperialist period does not alter their working class composition, or the fact that they are organisations in which the proletariat presses for its immediate self-defence” (Theses of the 5th Congress of the PCInt, translated in WV 16).

Unfailingly, theoretical weaknesses have brought with them concessions to unionism in practice. Already in 1952, BC was far from being as clear as the CWO likes to claim. In spite of its denunciation of the bourgeois nature of the unions, “the Party considers that its militants must participate, in the proletariat’s general interest, in all the internal expressions of union life, criticising and denouncing the policy of the union leaders... the Party does not underestimate the importance of being present, where the balance of forces allows it at elections to union or factory representative organs” (BC, 1952 Platform). This ambiguity is still more marked in a text entitled ‘Formation and Duties of Factory Groups’ : “Both unions and non-union members participate in the life of the “factory group”; the group’s duty is above all to conduct the struggle against the use and abuse of delegations imposed by the union leadership, which limits and hinders free participation in the union, adopting towards the workers a police discrimination aimed at removing all those suspected of having  a union line  opposed to the dominant line” (our emphasis). This, in a word, is the struggle for union democracy...

BC’s platform adopted in 1982 is not any clearer, but is more discreet: there is no longer any talk of union elections, but only of “the Party’s activity (which) will be carried out from inside or outside the union organisations, depending on the material conditions communists find themselves working in” (Platform of BC, p. 8).

By contrast, the CWO in its latest texts is in the process of abandoning the (very relative) clarity of its own platform. According to the Platform (adopted in July 1982), “Against those who argue that revolutionaries must work inside the trade union framework (eg. in shop stewards committees, union branch meetings et al.) to increase their influence in the working class, we maintain that such activities only sow illusions about the class nature of the unions and the possibility of their reform... The only way the class can begin to wage a struggle for its own interests in an era when reformism is impossible is by going outside of and beyond the framework of the trade union organisation”. Nine months later (in RP 20) we read:

“If being trade union members allows communists access to mass assemblies, strike committees, even branch meetings (although at present the latter would be pointless in Britain) in order to denounce the manoeuvres of the unions to the majority of the workforce and in order to put forward a practical revolutionary alternative, then we will not abstain” (“Marxism and the Trade Union Question’, RP 20, p. 25, our emphasis).

A year later, it’s the old leftist refrain:

“Often those who remain in the unions are amongst the most militant workers... Being ordinary members of unions can allow revolutionaries to fight the unions manoeuvres more effectively.” (WV 16, p. 4).

BC and the CWO have accused us of “sabotaging discussion”. How can we discuss anything seriously with people who change position on basic principles, class lines, from one month to the next and without a word of explanation?

The worst of it is that BC and the CWO’s vagueness and equivocation on rank-and-file union work has become doubly dangerous in the present period. The CWO declare that they understand nothing of our analysis of ‘the left in opposition because it supposedly has no impact on our intervention. What you have not understood comrades, is that its aim is not so much to modify our intervention as to maintain it in the face of the tactics of the bourgeois left. This analysis gives a theoretical framework to a process that anyone with even a minimal experience in the daily struggle can see already: faced with a growing disgust for the left parties, it is increasingly the unions that must control the workers, and faced with the progressive desertion of the unions, it is increasingly up to rank-and-file unionism to bring the workers back onto the ‘right path’.

With this framework, we can understand the growing involvement of the leftists in the unions, the appearance of ‘autonomous unions’ (France) or ‘fighting unionism’ (Italy), the radicalisation and politicisation of rank-and-file unionism in general.

And because they understand nothing either about the period, or about the development in class consciousness that it implies, or about the nature of the bourgeoisie’s attack, BC and the CWO are diving head-first into a radical rank-and-file union practice.

In the miners’ strike in Britain, the CWO’s whole intervention turns around the slogan “victory to the miners”. The frantic denunciation of scabs, the insistence on the need to block coal transport, simply comes down to radicalised union tactics. Certainly, the tens of thousands of mines who refused to follow the union line, the dockers who did the same during the latest strikes, are not a clear expression of an anti-union consciousness; but the imbecile reaction of the CWO, who can find nothing better than to outdo the union in its attacks on “the scabs” totally ignores the development in recent years of an enormous mass of distrust by workers towards anything to do with unions. The bourgeoisie is aware of this; they are prepared to do anything to prevent the juncture of these two masses of distrust and combativity, for fear that they become a critical mass.

We remember the CWO’s previous ‘practical’ demands: these ranged from ludicrous adventurism (the call for “revolution now” in Poland 1980) to banal leftism (the slogans against percentage increases and for flat rate wage rises). Clearly they have learnt nothing from these slidings into leftism, since today, once again the CWO calls on miners in Britain to establish “precise demands” (though without saying which ones, this time (‘Miners’ Strike Must be Won’, WV 16)). This kind of attitude towards the struggle stands communist intervention on its head. In reality, all large-scale struggles have a dynamic of their own, which very quickly tends to go beyond the “specific demands” with which they began. The example of Poland 1980 is striking in this respect: the initial demand of the Lenin Shipyard workers for the reinstatement of a sacked comrade became perfectly secondary as soon as the struggle spread to other sectors. The miners’ strike shows the same tendency: having started on the question of redundancies, it has since raised demands for the reduction of working hours, wage rises, etc.

By contrast, the real specialists of the “specific demand” are the unions and the rank-and-file unionists. For the unions, “specific demands” are an invaluable weapon for holding back the struggle, for fixing it at its starting-point, for diverting it toward bourgeois perspectives, for isolating it in its specificity instead of generalising it to the rest of the class. Here again, Poland 1980 and Britain 1984 provide striking examples. It is no accident that the Solidarnosc union was founded on the basis of the Gdansk agreements. As for the miners’ strike, the whole game of so-called “negotiations” between the NUM and the Coal Board on the exact definition of an “uneconomic” pit only serves to hide the profound identity of the miners’ strike with the struggle of the proletariat as a whole against an overall attack by the bourgeoisie.

In the same way, at the level of extending the struggle, the CWO remains a prisoner of its “precisions”. In the article on the miners’ strike cited above, workers’ solidarity is seen merely in terms of the miners’ strike an and the need to prevent the movement of coal. Quit apart from the fact that this kind of action is very easily recuperated by the unions (we remember the CGT’s nationalist campaigns against “German iron ore” during the recent struggles in the Lorraine), this ‘economistic’ view of the struggle ignores its real political development; above all, it completely misses the point of what a communist organisation’s specific intervention should be : to dissipate the smokescreens of British coal, the national economy, the policies of the right, etc, to bring out into the full light of day the need for workers’ solidarity and how to build it. To give an example, the participation by miners in the occupation of the Cammell Laird shipyards had nothing to do with the movement of coal; it had everything to do with the growing consciousness within the proletariat that its struggle is a general and political struggle against capitalism. Communists have the duty to push this consciousness forward, to develop it, by untiringly attacking everything that is likely to bog it down in the ‘specificities’ and the ‘precisions’ of each struggle.

Whereas the CWO is falling into the mire of rank-and-file unionist practice, BC have never really extricated themselves from it. An article from Battaglia Comunista translated in Workers’ Voice no. 17 (‘Communist Intervention in Italy’; from the style, we assume that this article is written by BC, though there is no indication of this in WV) shows us what the ‘factory groups’ are really capable of, and we can only regret that this significant article is so short on detail. After the Craxi government’s new ‘Decree on Wages’, “Our comrades had their work cut out simply getting the first assembly in the Milan Farini Station off the ground. They only succeeded in achieving this by gathering, together with the more combative delegates (only one of whom was a PCI (i.e. Italian CP member), the signatures of all the workers in the goods traffic sector”. The article does not make clear where these “delegates” came from – from the unions? From rank-and-file ‘struggle committees’? Nor is it explained why it was necessary to “gather signatures” to call a general assembly – unless, of course, it was an assembly called according to union rules. At all events, the result of this assembly is – a 24-hour strike! Here again, it is not clear what was Battaglia’s attitude towards this proposition, which is absolutely typical of the tricks used by rank-and-file unionism to get the workers to “let off steam”.

Better still, “The assembly... decided not to fix the date of the strike straight away since there was news that assemblies were being called in other plants and among the workers of Milan Central”. Here, once again, there is no indication of  BC’s position on this classic manoeuvre of rank-and-file unionists: under cover of ‘solidarity’, make the workers hang about in a debilitating ’wait-and-see’ attitude in order to break the dynamic towards the extension and radicalisation of the struggle.

And what do BC and the CWO draw from this lamentable episode? “There remains for our comrades the difficult task of clarification and organisation of the more combative vanguard that emerged in this struggle, with the object of preventing them being reabsorbed into the forces of the PCI and the majority (?? sic) of the CGIL” (Our emphasis). There at least, BC is going to “assume the responsibility that one has a right to expect from a serious leading force”. BC would do better to ask themselves what is the meaning of an activity that consists:

-- in working with “delegates” and “members of the Italian  CP”

-- in drawing up petitions for general assemblies,

-- in (apparently) supporting typically trade unionist ‘actions’ such as the 24-hour strike, the delayed strike, etc.

As far as we are concerned, BC’s “correct strategy” boils down to falling feet first into the trap of radical unionism.

Before concluding on the union question, we feel it’s necessary to single out a last, particularly repulsive ‘tactic’ that the CWO has discovered in the arsenal of rank-and-file unionism: the denigration of revolutionary organisations. In Workers’ Voice no. 17 (‘The Miners’ Strike and Communist Organisation’) we read that the ICC “defends scabbing and contributes to demoralisation”, that we “spread defeatism as well as adventurism”, that we “undermine the class’ attempts to hit the bosses by blocking coal movements”; and, in conclusion, that the ICC “defends, along with Thatcher and the police, the right to scab”.

In recent months especially, our militants have been systematically denounced to the police, or physically threatened, by union goons. On several occasions, they have been able to get away from under the noses of the unions solely thanks to the workers' protection. The unions accuse us of ‘breaking workers’ unity’, of being ‘wreckers’ of ‘provocateurs’, of being ‘in the pay of the fascists’ or of the CIA. We are used to this kind of slander from the unions and the leftists. Now the CWO has taught us that we can expect to hear it from revolutionaries as well. For our part, we will continue to agitate within the proletariat for the principle  that its assemblies, meetings and strike committees should be open to all workers and revolutionary organisations. This is the only way forward for the development of the political consciousness of the proletarian class.

In another article, we will analyse the slidings of BC-CWO on parliamentarism and national liberation struggles.

Arnold

The world economy heads for recession

1985 will see a new acceleration in the crisis of the world economy. Following Reagan's re-election as US president in Autumn 1984, the full extent of the crisis, which had been hidden by the Amer­ican ‘recovery' has reappeared in all its brutal­ity. The dissipation of the effects of the meas­ures used to create this ‘recovery', whose only impact has been on a few indicators of the cap­italist economy, essentially in the US, confirms the characteristics of the inevitable recession of the 1980s, which we named the ‘years of truth' as early as 1980.

"But what, allows us to affirm that the recession into which capitalism is now plunging will be the most extensive, the longest and the deepest since the war? Three kinds of factors:

1) the extent of the world economy's decline;

2) the growing ineffectiveness of capitalism's means for relaunching economic growth;

3) the growing impossibility for capitalist states to use these methods."[1]

The end of the American recovery

And, indeed, the 1980-82 recession was the most extensive, the longest and the deepest since World War II, and the 1983-84 recovery of the US economy the least effective since the beginning of the open crisis at the end of the 1960s.

Today, the once optimistic forecasts have been revised downwards: "the US Department of Commerce has just published the figures for the growth in GNP for the third quarter of 1984: 1.9% against the 2.7% previously announced. This is the weak­est rate since the fourth quarter of 1982, which marked the end of the recession." (Liberation, 22.11.84)

The threat of a collapse in the international banking system with the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois (the 10th largest US bank) and 43 others during the first six months of 1984, has shown that the various artificial tricks (indebt­edness, arbitrary exchange rates fixed for the dollar) have still less counterpart in production than before. Right from the start in fact, the ‘experts' pointed out the ‘originality' of this ‘recovery': the lack of any significant growth in productive investment. As we predicted: ‘the mechanism of the ‘recovery' in the US presages a catastrophic future for the world economy."[2] Contrary to Reagan's propaganda, the slowdown in the rate of inflation was not the fruit of ‘mon­etarist' policies, but the result of the recess­ion and the glut on the world market. It is this glut that forces each company to lower its prices to escape elimination by its competitors. And today, the time bomb of the capitalist world's gigantic indebtedness (debts of both the third world and industrialized countries, budget def­icits) has once again raised the specter of an inflation which has remained the rule in the more peripheral countries (1000% in Israel, for ex­ample). Today, the US National Debt has reached $1,500 billion: 42% of GNP against 25% in 1979. 40% of these dollars are merely paper which the ‘experts' discreetly admit as a "40% overvaluetion of the dollar." The US budget deficit has passed the $200 billion mark     

Capitalism is trying to cheat the law of value; it can only defer the system's contradictions and each time at a higher and more explosive level.

The absolute pauperization of the working class

One element of the economic ‘recovery' has been the massive attack on wages, justified in the name of ‘saving the company', ‘maintaining employ­ment' or ‘national solidarity'. In fact, wage freezes, limitations and reductions in the ‘soc­ial wage' (health, pensions, education, housing, unemployment benefit) have brutally accelerated without any significant diminution in unemploy­ment (except in the US, Australia and New Zeal­and). In countries like Belgium and Holland, where the attack on public sector wages provoked in autumn 1983 the first great strikes of the new upsurge in workers' struggles, unemployment has remained about 15%. In a country like France, increasing numbers of unemployed (such as the young or ‘long term' unemployed) simply dis­appear from the statistics. In the US, un­employment has momentarily dropped but the working class has been subjected to one of the sharpest wage cuts in its history - as much as 15% at Chrysler.

The planned redundancies mean tens of thous­ands of workers thrown onto the street with fewer and fewer resources, in mining, the steel industry, the public sector, shipyards, the car industry, etc, and .this more and more simultan­eously in different countries. In whole regions dependent on one dominant industry, all activity is menaced: in Spain, France, Great Britain. The ‘advantages' of bonuses, holidays, benefits of all kinds, are being suppressed, eaten away sub­ject to more restrictions. The soup kitchens, which had disappeared since World War II, are reappearing in countries as rich as France. Not merely relative but absolute pauperization is battening on the working class in every aspect; of its living conditions.

The bourgeoisie's ‘discovery' through its press and its ‘charitable' institution of the ‘Fourth World' or ‘New Poor' expresses not any moral or humanitarian concern but an anxiety at the reac­tions this deepening misery is likely to provoke. The pauperization of the working class and mass­ive unemployment do not have the same consequen­ces as in underdeveloped countries.

Class consciousness cannot develop there in the absence of powerful proletarian movements; soc­ial movements take the form of hunger and pov­erty riots, without being able to uncover the means and aims of the struggle against capital­ism. In the developed countries, it is the prol­etariat that is directly affected. 10%, 15%, 20% of the workers belonging to an established prol­etariat are deprived of all means of subsist­ence. Families include first one, then two, then three members out of work. The proletariat as a whole comes under attack.

With the development of the class' combativity and consciousness, massive unemployment constit­utes a decisive element for overcoming the sectoral, corporatist framework, encouraging the extension of the struggle and the proletariat's ability to assume the social, anti-corporatist character of its combat.

The ruling class' real concern about the ‘new poor' lies in the development of the class struggle; it uses this theme to strengthen the idea that those in work are ‘privileged', and to sugar the pill of its calls for ‘effort' and ‘national solidarity' taxes.

Against rising working class anger and struggles, the bourgeoisie will continue to use its polic­ies of austerity, proliferating campaigns of mystification and diversion, and increasingly systematic repression; above all, it will cont­inue to strengthen its left factions in the wor­kers' ranks, in their ‘opposition' role, to try to contain and divert the rage provoked by its crisis measures.

The intensification of imperialist tensions

Capitalism's only ‘way out' of its crisis is a headlong flight into an attempt at a violent new share-out of the world market in war between imperialist blocs. This is expressed in the permanent armaments drive on the part of every country despite the fact that military expenditure is an important accelerating factor in the crisis. (See ‘The Weight of Military Expendit­ure', IR 36, 1st quarter, 1984.) It is demon­strated in the constant and growing tension of the East-West confrontation, especially in those parts of the world that serve as ‘theat­res of operations': the Middle East and the Far East. The American offensive against the Russ­ian bloc will continue. The war-mongering of the Reagan administration has been damped down solely for internal US reasons: to avoid stirring up a scare, in order to ensure the re-election of the Republicans. These diplomatic and military maneuvers aim at stripping the Russian bloc of the remains of its influence outside its own fort­ress. They demand a tightening of the reins on Iran and increased subjection within the Western bloc.

These maneuvers have reappeared at the fore­front of ‘international tension' by the end of 1984: pressure on France to settle the situation in Chad and Libya, and Mitterand's trip to Syria; Arafat's new ‘peace' orientation, marking the PLO's increased submission to Western aims; the assassination of Indira Gandhi, which came at just the right moment to attach India more firmly to the Western bloc.

We shall not go into this question in the frame­work of this article. As long as the bourgeoisie keeps the historical initiative, inter-imperial­ist tensions will continue to increase. There is only one thing preventing a generalized world war: the fact that the bourgeoisie has still not been able to disorientate the working class to the extent of bending it to the defense of the national economy, and to the discipline and ideological control necessary for a generalized war, which would sign humanity's death warrant.

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

The acceleration of the class struggle

The perspectives that we traced out at the be­ginning of the 1980s remain valid: the working class has opened a historical period, which will lead to confrontations, class struggles that will be decisive for humanity's future. Either the workers will be able internationally "to keep the murderous hand of capitalism at bay and gather enough strength to overthrow it, or they will let themselves be worn out, tricked, and demoralized by its talk and repression, and so leave the way open to a new holocaust which is likely to wipe out all human society." (IR 20, 1st quarter 1980: ‘The ‘80s, Years of Truth') Since 1980, the bourgeoisie has inflict­ed a partial defeat on the world proletariat's 1978-81 wave of struggles. In Western Europe, it wiped out workers' resistance thanks to the cap­italist left's move into opposition in most of the highly industrialized countries. This defeat culminated in the isolation of the proletariat in Poland and the installation of the ‘state of war' in December 1981. After this defeat, the question was posed whether the world proletar­iat would be able to continue in the industrialized nations what the working class had been unable to achieve in Poland: "The Polish workers could only pose the problem of inter­national generalization in an objective manner. Only the proletariat in the other industrialized countries, and Western Europe in particular, will be able to give a practical answer." (IR 33, 2nd quarter 1983, ‘Towards the End of the Post-Poland Reflux') This reply has begun to appear in the present situation with the renewal of workers' struggles in the West, after a reflux between 1982-83.

Since autumn 1983, working class strikes and movements have proliferated throughout the world: from the US to India, from Peru to South Africa. Here, we shall only recall the most sig­nificant movements against redundancies and wage cuts in Western Europe: Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, Britain, Spain. The strikes have hit vital industrial sectors. Again naming only the most important: in Belgium, the state sector and the mines; in Holland, the state sector and the port of Rotterdam (the world's largest); in Germany, the shipyards, the printing and steel industries; in Britain, the mines, the car and steel industries; and in Spain, the shipyards and the steel industry. These strikes, accompanied by a chorus of strikes and demon­strations in these and other countries and in other branches of industry, are still going on and will accelerate[3]. They are the beginning of a third international wave of workers' struggles, following those of 1968-75 and 1978-81. The period that has opened will pose the ques­tion of the proletariat's ability to pass from resistance against austerity to the international generalization of its combat against capitalism.

The renewal of the struggle has sprung from a maturation in class consciousness. It demonstrates the loss of illusions in the possibility of getting out of the crisis, and the develop­ment of an awareness of the need to take on the open struggle against capitalism's attacks: the struggles are beginning again in spite of all the noise about the ‘economic recovery' and the appeals for ‘solidarity with the national econ­omy'. In this new upsurge of struggles there has been a slow and hesitant disengagement from the grip of the maneuvers of the left and its trade-union and leftist appendages: after two years of retreat to the lowest levels (sometimes the lowest for decades, as in Britain 1982), these maneuvers are no longer enough to pre­vent strikes from breaking out. The left fac­tions are forced to try to contain discontent more directly on the terrain of the working class. This orientation has been illustrated particularly by the CP's return to opposition in France, and the care given to Reagan's re­election. Everything was done to avoid an elect­oral accident in the US: to ensure the presence of the Democratic Party (and therefore of the unions) in opposition in the US itself; and above all because, as leader of its bloc, US policy must set the example and provide the thrust for all the countries of the bloc - particularly with regard to the orientation for maneuvers on the social terrain against the working class.

The international simultaneity of workers' struggles: The first step towards generalization

The growing simultaneity of strikes is a first step that shows the extent of the proletariat's international counter-attack. Even compared with the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, this is the most widespread situation of simultaneous str­uggle in the history of the workers' movement. It helps to bring into the full light of day the profound unity of the needs of the class str­uggle despite the attempted news blackouts, div­ersionary campaigns and the travesty of events presented as ‘national specificities' (the ‘Basque problem' in Spain against the movement in the shipyards) or ‘problems of particular sectors' (the ‘mining problem' in Britain) . This is the crucible where tens of thousands of workers undergo, in the same period of time, an­alogous experiences and confront similar prob­lems, therefore accelerating the possibility of drawing out general lines of action for the whole working class.

At present, the working class' strength lies in the fact that the proliferation of strikes hin­ders the bourgeoisie's international and con­certed planning, Increasingly frequent moments of struggle impose delays and modifications in redundancy plans, contrary to the ‘logic' of capitalist necessity. To take the European steel industry as an example, as early as 1982 more than 100,000 lay-offs were needed to ‘revive' the productive apparatus; if the bourgeoisie has not yet been able to impose them fully, this is due to the danger represented by foreseeable movements in the neighboring steel plants in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, sectors which have already demonstrated their ‘lack of discipline' on several occasions. And during the strikes in Belgium, the workers spoke of going to Longwy in France.

The simultaneity of strikes outlines the prol­etariat's international political response. In the period of capitalist decadence, and espec­ially in a period of open crisis, it is confronted with "a unity and solidarity among the capitalists greater than ever before. They have created specific organisms so as never again to confront the working class individually." (IR 23, ‘Proletarian Struggle in Capitalist Decadence') The unfolding of workers' strikes and movements, from one branch to another, from one country to another, hinders the bourgeoisie's attempts to demobilize and defeat them little by little, factory by factory, branch by branch. The simultaneity of workers' strikes in the middle of the ‘80s - the ‘years of truth' as we have called them - expresses a development of consciousness about their real interests and constitutes a step forward in their ability to unify the combat internation­ally.

According to many political groups and organizations, ‘this analysis is optimistic', ‘the ICC sees revolution everywhere', ‘the ICC over­estimates the class struggle'. Skepticism still reigns in the revolutionary movement[4]. This skepticism as to the evaluation of the class struggle springs from an observation of the weaknesses in the present wave of struggles, and is based on the following facts, taken together or separately:

-- workers' struggles remain under the leadership of the left and the trade union apparatus;

-- they remain at the level of economic demands, without emerging significantly from corporatism; there is no ‘qualitative leap' in the evolution of the strikes;

-- the working class has not set up its own auto­nomous organizations (strike committees, co­ordination committees, etc);

-- there is no party, no revolutionary organization, influencing and orientating the movement of struggles in a revolutionary direction.

While these weaknesses are certainly all real, it is nonetheless false to remain at the level of a mere observation of facts. This would be to take a budding movement for one in full bloom and to forget the international context of the class struggle, its historical dimen­sion that requires the development of con­sciousness throughout the working class and its ability to forge a true world-wide revolutionary party. Wanting the revolution, or even the mass strike, straight away demonstrates a narrow, immediatist vision typical of ‘radical' petty-bourgeois impatience; it means disdaining, and thus being unable to understand, the real advances and potential of the present situation. "Taking each struggle in itself, examining it statically, photographically, means being de­prived of any possibility of apprehending the significance of a struggle, and of the present recovery in the class struggle in particular." (IR 39, ‘The Method for Understanding the Re­surgence in Workers' Struggles') This is what transpires through the criticisms of our ‘opt­imism', our ‘over-estimation' of the struggle, or the ‘abstractness' of our intervention which is centered round the call for the extension of the struggle.

The same skepticism, but in the opposite direc­tion at the time, often held sway towards the ICC's positions on the reflux in class struggle during 1982-83. Then, the ICC was accused of ‘defeatism', of having a conception of an ‘all-powerful' bourgeoisie, because we insisted that the proletariat had been disorientated by the bourgeoisie's ability to maneuver internation­ally against the class struggle, The revolution­ary minorities were late in understanding the reflux, and they are late in beginning timidly to recognize the present wave of struggle, after more than a year of strikes throughout Europe. The proletariat has emerged from a period of disorientation but revolutionary groups are hav­ing profound difficulty in understanding ‘the process unfolding before our eyes', where the struggle has got to and where it is going.

Today, the proletariat is still far from the revolution; it has not yet gone onto the offen­sive, which would presuppose the international generalization of the struggle. The strikes are defensive struggles against the attacks of cap­ital. But, due to the objective and subjective historical conditions of our epoch, the charac­teristics of today's struggles mark the beginn­ing of a process that will have enormous hist­orical implications.

"In the advanced countries of Western Europe, the proletariat will only be able to deploy the mass strike fully after a whole series of com­bats, violent explosions, advances and retreats, during which it will progressively unmask all the lies of the left in opposition, trade union­ism and rank-and- filism." (IR 35, ‘Resolution on the International Situation from the ICC's Fifth Congress') The class has already launched this ‘series of combats'. By renewing the struggle, it is extending and deepening its consciousness of the unity of the problems it confronts, and of the force that it constitutes within society. What kind of solidarity? How to struggle? What action should we engage in, and what can we pit against the sterile ‘actions' of the unions? How to reply to speeches about ‘the defense of the firm'? How are we to confront repression? All these questions, posed in practice in the pre­sent struggles, weaken the prison walls of the ‘specificities' that hide the class unity, strengthen the already-present consciousness that capitalism has nothing to offer but misery and machine-guns, that only the struggle can hold back and then put an end to exploitation.

In pursuing its struggles, the class is extend­ing and reappropriating its communist consciousness.

The step forward constituted by the renewed str­uggle is not to be found in the form of each struggle, in an occasional ‘exemplary' strike, but in its underlying political content which goes beyond a superficial observation of the control that still weighs on the working class. This political content lies in the strikes' international simultaneity which is at pres­ent the most advanced aspect of the movement.

The proletariat's demystification of Western ‘democracy' will mean the collapse of a whole section of the bourgeoisie's ideological domin­ation over the entire working class. This is the direction that today's workers' struggles have taken. ‘Democracy' drops its mask and shows its true face, whether it be in the ‘young' Spanish democracy where the strikes in the shipyards clash daily with the forces of order, or in the ‘old' democracy of Britain where the workers are fighting ‘the most democratic police in the world'.

The present recovery traces the outlines and forges the indispensable precondition for the international generalization of workers' str­uggles. Already contained in today's struggles is the element that will increasingly be the catalyst transforming simultaneity into generalization: the tendency towards extension be­yond categorial sectors and barriers. In 1984, it is the situation of the class struggle in Britain that has most clearly illustrated this tendency.

An example of solidarity and extension: the strikes in Britain

It is in Britain that the class has gone fur­thest since the 1980-81 movement in Poland. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement con­firm several characteristics of the present period.

As the miners' strike has shown, the length of a strike in one sector is not the struggle's major strength in conditions of relative geo­graphical and economic isolation (isolated coal­fields and a declining coal industry). The eff­ort to make the strike last, originally an expr­ession of the miners' determination, has been used by the unions to maintain its isolation and corporatism, eg through the ‘administrative' aspects of such a strike (strike payments and collecting funds), in order to keep alive the craft spirit. The bourgeoisie has unleashed ideological campaigns, which an isolated strike is ill suited to resist - all the more so in a sector that has been held up as a sort of ‘sacrificial offering'. This campaign has in­cluded declarations on the ‘services given' to the nation by the miners during World War II; the image maintained by the NUM of a sort of ‘heroic, last-ditch' battalion, etc.

The strike derives its strength from the general situation of unrest in the working class in other branches and internationally, and from its thrusts towards solidarity and extension within this general situation.

The miners' strike has opened up a breach be­cause of the determination it has shown in rejecting the capitalist economic logic of ‘un­profitable sectors'. It has helped to overturn the myths of ‘peacefulness' and ‘fair play' in ‘British' social conflicts. But it is above all in the tendency towards extension that the events in Britain are an example to the whole working class. It is the unions, more than the workers that have pushed for a long strike, in order to avoid this ‘danger'.

Right from the beginning of the strike, the question of solidarity was posed in relation to the steelworkers. The unions insisted on the miners' ‘mistake' in 1980, of not expressing solidarity with the steelworkers, in order to make them give up this idea. They then concentrated attention solely on an extension in the same branch, as a precondition for any other extension, doing everything they could to pre­vent it, with the help of police barriers between strikers and non-strikers to avoid any direct contact.

The strike was isolated. It was the spontaneous upsurge of the dockers' strikes, first in July and then in August 1984, in explicit solidarity with the miners, that once again posed the question of extension. It proved impossible for the dockers to join up with the miners, but the tendency was clearly expressed and so began to break the ideology of ‘the' miners' strike by opening a second front of resistance, and so encouraging the struggles to continue. The bourgeoisie denounced the dockers' strikes. Right and left shared out the job, the right denouncing the strike's ‘political' nature and the left denying it with all its strength to keep the workers' attention fixed on the corpor­atist terrain of the capitalist economy. This is a classic illustration of the role of the left in opposition: the right speaks clearly and says the truth, the left says the opposite. The proletariat, with its illusions in the working class nature of the left, lets itself be taken in and this expresses one of today's major weaknesses: the proletariat's difficulty in assuming the political nature of its struggle, the under­standing that the battle must be fought against the entire capitalist state. As in the mines, the weight of corporatism in the docks - also an old sector - temporarily carried the day. The thrust of solidarity was blocked, despite the bourgeoisie's difficulties: after the second strike, movements continued in the docks in London and Southampton, showing that discouragement had not had the upper hand.

The car industry strikes early in November 1984 have taken the situation onto a wider level for the proletariat, a more dangerous one for the bourgeoisie.

"If the struggles in the GB car sector - simul­taneously with the miners and other struggles -did't raise, in an explicit manner, the ques­tion of solidarity within the class as a whole, they nevertheless represented a further acceler­ation in the evolution of the struggle as a whole, because;

- they involved workers at the heart of the nat­ional capital: one in ten workers in GB is employed in the car or related sectors;

- they involved workers situated, physically, in or near the major cities, in regular contact with workers from other sectors, not geographically or physically isolated like the miners;

- they had to surmount a whole gamut of union manipulations in order to launch the struggle, and faced the full range of base unionist myst­ifications during the struggle, unlike the min­ers who, atypically, faced a union machine whose most radical rhetoric generally came from the ‘top';

- they had to overcome a rigid compartmentalization by the unions - at least ten unions divide workers at Austin-Rover, for example, whereas the miners, in general, all belong to one union;

- they demonstrated not a solidarity fogged by union mystifications (such as blacking, etc), but the basic necessity of workers under attack today - to struggle, to strike, in an attempt to reverse the rapport de force with the bourg­eoisie;

- they demonstrated that the struggle to main­tain higher standards (higher wage claims) and the struggle to retain jobs ( the miners) is the same struggle, facing the same class enemy, its unions, laws and police;

- they demonstrated, like the miners' struggle has shown, the limits of a defensive struggle through the overall failure to achieve their ends, thus posing the question of a higher, more unified level of struggle.

In this sense, the struggles in the car industry - short explosive struggles involving key sec­tors of the class in large numbers against an experienced union apparatus - simultaneously with struggles in other industries and in other countries, are typical of struggles in the per­iod of decadent capitalism and confirm the ICC's analysis of the perspectives for the struggles internationally." (Communiqué of WR on class struggles in UK)

Faced with the strikes in the car industry, the bourgeoisie immediately handed out a few crumbs in certain factories (Jaguar, for example), to break their unity; it redoubled its ‘back to ­work' propaganda in the mines; it stepped up repression (more than 2000 arrests, several hun­dred injured, and three dead since the beginning of the miners' strike). It staged a campaign around the IRA bombing in Brighton where a min­ister was injured, to draw a parallel between workers' violence and manipulated terrorism, and to call for the defense of ‘democracy'. It prod­uced a multitude of ‘revelations' on links bet­ween Gadaffi and Scargill (leader of the NUM) and on the links between the NUM and the USSR, to try and present the working class as a mass ‘manipulated from abroad', etc.

While some ‘revolutionaries' remain unconvinced by the struggles, the bourgeoisie is convinced of the danger for itself represented by the act­ive solidarity between workers which is emerging in the tendencies towards the extension and sim­ultaneity of their struggles, internationally and even beyond the antagonisms between the blocs:

"The struggle of the miners in GB has attracted the sympathy and solidarity of workers the world over. What we want to draw attention to here is the way the bourgeoisie is trying to use this to blunt consciousness:

- in France, the idea that workers must show solidarity through the collection of funds and, above all, food. Many tons of food from French miners arrived in GB this week;

- in Sweden and elsewhere, that blockades of British goods, organized by the unions, are the way to show solidarity;

- in Belgium, tours by British TUC officials which aim to reduce solidarity to the passive attendance of union meetings whose culminations is ... the collection of funds;

- in Russia, the state has organized for striking British miners, and used this for its own propaganda purposes. (ibid)

1984 will not go down in history as a nightmare imagined by the British novelist George Orwell, who foresaw a world subjected to an all-powerful ‘Bog Brother'. On the contrary, the proletariat in Europe, above all in Britain and Spain at the end of 1984, and in other countries, has stepped up its response by disengaging itself from democratic totalitarianism which everywhere announces redundancies and represses resistance under the pressure of a crisis that goes on intensifying. The miners' arm-wrestling with the ‘iron lady' is giving way to a far more general test of strength between the working class and capital. In Europe, it is in the great cities that have not yet been at the heart of the struggles, that the proletariat's movement will continue, spread and deepen.

MG

6.12.84   

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[1] IR 20, ‘1980s, Acceleration of the Crisis'.

[2] IR 37, ‘Myth of the Economic Recovery'

[3] We cannot, in the framework of this article, give a detailed account of events. We refer the reader to the articles in IRs 37, 38, 39 and to our territorial press which tries, to the limits of its capacities, to fight the bourgeoisie's blackouts on workers' struggles. We also urge our readers to send us information on struggles.

[4] We are not talking here of the leftist or trade unionist groups, whose problematic, whatever the ‘working class' language they use, aims at controlling the proletariat and lies outside the workers' camp.

The task of this article is to put forward the position of the ICC on the danger of councilism. It brings to the outside the fruits of our int­ernal discussion, for the clarification of the revolutionary milieu.

The principle of the ICC has always been to express towards the outside its own internal debates from the moment when sufficient clarification has taken place to be able to put forward the point of view of the organization as a whole. Theoretical and political debate is not reserved for internal usage, any more than we pursue reflection for its own sake. A revolutionary organization worthy of the name rejects both the monolithism which bottles up and stifles debate, as well as the spirit of the circle which sees debate in a casual, undisciplined way. The militant organization of the proletariat is a political body secreted by the class, so that the latter is not only interested in but directly involved in the theoretical and political struggle of the organization it calls into being. The debates of a revolutionary organization cannot be kept secret from the class, since a revolutionary org­anization does not have secrets to withhold from the class. The politics of secrecy was that of the Bakuninist sects in the 19th century, but never that of marxist organizations. The ‘secret' character of these sects led inevitably to the politics of the maneuver. The secret organization of the Democratic Socialist Alliance of Bakunin in the First International could only express an attitude foreign to the proletariat.      

Marxist organizations have always allowed internal divergences to be expressed in their publications in order to work towards an ever sharper consciousness of the proletariat regarding its struggle for emancipation. The Bolsheviks, before they forbade fractions in their organization in 1921, the KAPD and the Italian Communist Left always pursued this objective. Not in order - in the manner of the degenerated ‘councilists' - to put over ‘points of view' for the proletariat to passively take account of, but in order to orientate and outline the debates in a firm manner so that the praxis of the class can be free of error and hesitation.

This mode of functioning of the marxist organization flows quite naturally from its function in the class; to be an active factor in the praxis of the class. The ICC rejects both the notion of the ‘opinion groups' of councilism, which end up in eclecticism and the dissolution of the organization in passivity, as well as the monolithic organizations of ‘Bordigism', in which internal life is stifled and paralyzed by the outlawing of any minority position. In both cases, the incom­prehension of the function of the organization can only lead to its disintegration. The disap­pearance of the main councilist organizations, as well as the break-up of the ICP, is the price paid for this incomprehension.

The ICC is not councilist

The ICC - contrary to the gratuitous assertions of Battaglia Comunista, or of the CWO which has recently thrown the acquisitions of the KAPD into the dustbin and discovered Bordigist sympathies (after the ICC went to great pains to draw it out of the councilist-libertarian swamp of Solidarity) - does not come from councilism. It was formed against councilism. The existence of Internacionalismo in Venezuela was made possible, and was consolidated at the end of the ‘60s, by a theoretical and political struggle against the councilist tendency of Proletario[1]. RI in France was born by demonstrating, in the face of a councilist milieu that was particularly prevalent at the time, the necessity for a militant revolutionary organization and therefore for the regroupment of revolutionaries. After some hesitations in recognizing the necessity for a revolutionary party[2]. RI did not cease to show the importance of regroupment, without which the basis for the party cannot be laid. The 1972 regroupment between RI, the Councilist Organization of Clermont Ferrand and Cahiers du Communisme des Conseils was not a 'councilist' regroupment       but a regroupment on the marxist basis of the recognition of the irreplaceable role of the organization in the class. It became possible after            long discussions, thanks to which the councilist confusions of the Clermont and Marseille groups were overcome. At the time, in the absence of an organic continuity with the German and Italian Left, it was inevitable that the groups coming out of the post-‘68 ferment would be looking for the principal acquisitions of the Lefts. In the face of Stalinism and leftism, and under the influence of the contestationist ‘anti-authoritarian' milieu, they were fully exposed to the effects of the councilist anti-organizational and anti‑Bolshevik ideology. In France, then in Britain and the US, RI (then the ICC after 1975) conducted patient work against this ideology which tended to penetrate the new discussion groups and which led, through a reaction against Stalinism, to the rejection of the entire history of the workers' movement. It was in recognizing the prol­etarian nature of the Russian revolution that in January 1974 the group World Revolution broke with councilism. The same goes for International­ism in the US, after discussing with RI and Inter­nacionalismo.

Certainly, the ICC has had to combat, even within its own ranks, Bordigist ideas on the role of the party and its relation to the state which arises in the revolution[3]. From the Parti de Classe group in 1972 to the tendency which went on to become the GCI in ‘79, the ICC has shown that its struggle against false conceptions of the organization was neither a regression towards councilism nor towards a ‘neo-Bordigism' in the manner of Battaglia Comunista and the CWO. If the political and theoretical combat in its press has above all been directed against Bordigism and neo-Bordigism, this is largely because the disappearance of the councilist milieu - which is anti-organizational by nature - cleared the deck for a current like the ICP, which developed directly as a result of its opportunist capitulations. In a certain way, the development of ‘Bordigism' was the price which the revolutionary milieu paid for the progressive disappearance of the councilist-oriented groups, who vanished in a swamp of confusion. But at the same time, the ICP's Bordigism acted as a real repellent for the new elements and discussion groups springing up. Its conception of a monolithic party ("compact and powerful" according to its own terminology), which will exercise its dictatorship and the "red terror" in the revolution, had the effect of discrediting the party. Incapable of making, as Bilan had done, a balance sheet of the counter-revolution to draw out its implications for the function and the functioning of the organization, preferring instead a dialogue ‘with the dead" and "with Stalin"[4], the ICP and the sub-products of Bordigism have added grist to the anti-organizational mills of councilism. Bordigism, as a current, is the vehicle of old substitutionist conceptions which were prevalent in the revolut­ionary movement of the past. The ICC has always combatted these conceptions and will combat them again tomorrow. Now councilism, at the theoretical level at least, since it does so politically in an organized manner, is against "substitutionism", but this in no way signifies that the ICC is on the side of councilism.

The ICC, in fact, has had occasion enough to combat councilist errors and aberrations, includ­ing those within its own ranks. In the face of activist-ouvrierist conceptions, expressed in particular in its section in Britain, the ICC was forced to call an extraordinary conference of the entire organization in January 1982, in order to re-affirm, not to establish, the ICC's conception of the evolution and the functioning of the revolutionary organization.

Unfortunately, councilist ideas continued to be expressed in an indirect manner - and that is all the more dangerous - within our organization. At the beginning of 1984, a debate was opened up on the role of class consciousness outside of open struggles. There were hesitations in recognizing the end of the reflux after Poland (1981­82), with the resurgence of the class struggle in the Autumn of 1983. This resurgence clearly illustrated a maturation of consciousness in the class, which had taken place in a subterranean manner outside of a period of open struggle[5].

Although the question was not new for the ICC, a debate was opened up in our organization on class consciousness. This continued in a milit­ant manner the work already accomplished in the pamphlet Class Consciousness and Communist Organizations. Taking up the classic distinction of marxism[6], the ICC distinguishes two dimensions of consciousness: its depth and its extension. In this manner, the ICC underlines several fundamental points:

- the continuity and the development of consciousness in extension and in depth which manifest themselves through a subterranean maturation and                                        is explained by the existence of a collective consciousness;

- class consciousness necessarily has a form (political and unitary organizations) and a content (program and theory); it finds its most elaborate - though not ‘perfected' - expression in the revolutionary organizations secreted by the class;

- this consciousness does not develop among the workers taken individually but collectively; it doesn't manifest itself in an immediate manner but historically;

- contrary to the megalomaniac assertions of Bordigism, class consciousness is not the exclusive property of the party; it exists necessarily in the class, since without its existence the revolutionary organization could not exist;

- against the ‘ultra-democratic' demagogy of councilism, the ICC affirms that the highest expression of consciousness is not the workers' councils - which develop in a difficult manner and through a great many errors - but the revol­utionary political organization, which is where the treasures of the entire historical experience of the proletariat are crystallized. It is the most elaborated, most concentrated form of the collective memory of the proletariat, which exists only in a diffused state in the class before the revolutionary period, the moment when the class reappropriates it most strongly.

­During this debate, the ICC had to fight positions which either rejected the idea of a subterranean maturation, or (while recognizing this process) underestimated the indispensable role of revolutionary organizations, in rejecting the dimensions of class consciousness[7].

Reaffirming that without the party there can be no revolution, since the revolution necessarily engenders revolutionary parties, the majority of the ICC reaffirms that these parties do not tail the workers' councils but are their most conscious avant-garde. To be an avant-garde does not bestow it with any rights, but the duty of being equal to the responsibilities that flow from its more elevated theoretical and programmatic conscious­ness.

In the wake of this debate - which is not yet finished - the ICC has seen a tendency among the comrades with minority positions towards concil­iation to councilism,(‘centrist' oscillations in relation to councilist ideas). Although these comrades claim the contrary, we think that counc­ilism constitutes the greatest danger for the revolutionary milieu of today. And, much more than substitutionism, it will become a very great danger for the intervention of the party in the future revolutionary struggles.

Will substitutionism be the greatest danger tomorrow?

a) The Objective Basis of Substitutionism

When we speak of substitutionism, we mean the practice of revolutionary groups who seek to direct the class and take power in its name. In this sense, the leftists are not substitutionist organizations: their activities do not aim at substituting for the action of the class, but at destroying them from within, in order to preserve the domination of the capitalist class. As such, they do not commit the errors of substitutionism,        but aim at taking control of the class struggle in order to derail it and submit it to the bourgeois order (parliamentarism, trade unionism).

Substitutionism is in fact a mortal error which developed in the workers' camp, before 1914, then after 1920 within the Communist International. From the pretension of directing the class in a military manner (cf. the "military discipline" proclaimed at the Second Congress), it was only one step to the conception of a dictatorship of the party, emptying the workers' councils of their real substance. But this step, which progressively led to the counter-revolution, could only be taken under determined historical conditions. To ignore and forget that such conceptions existed even in the German Left is not to understand the roots of substitutionism as a specific phenomenon:

a) The heritage of the social democratic conception of the party - the party as the unique carrier of consciousness which is injected from the outside by "bourgeois intellectuals" (cf. Kautsky and the Lenin of What is to be Done?), into the "disciplined army" of the proletariat - weighed heavily on the entire revolutionary movement at the time of the revolutionary wave. And it weighed all the more heavily where it struck a fertile soil in the underdeveloped countries - such as Russia and Italy - where the party was conceived as a kind of 'general staff', representing the interests of the class and therefore entrusted with taking power in its name.

b) Such errors could only take root in a period of numerical growth of the proletariat, when the latter - emerging with difficulty from petty bourgeois rural and artisanal illusions - was politically educated by the action of political organizations of the proletariat. In the absence of a rich revolutionary tradition that could politically mature the class and give it a true political culture, the tasks of organization and education occupied an important place in the work of proletarian parties prior to 1914. The conception that the party is the ‘general staff' of the class and brings political consciousness to the class found an echo essentially in those countries where the revolutionary movement still lacked maturity, and all the more so where its action unfolded in the strictest clandestinity, which called for extremely tight discipline and centralization.

c) Substitutionist ideas, before 1914, still constituted an error within the revolutionary movement. Already, the events of 1905, which revealed in an incredibly rapid way the spontan­eous creativity of the proletariat, in the mass strike, also showed the falsehood of such concep­tions. Lenin himself wasn't long in abandoning the theses which he had defended in What is to be Done? The revolution of 1905 led, within the Communist Left in Europe, and particularly on the part of Pannekoek, to a questioning of the Kautskyite conception; it showed the decisive importance of the self-organization of the prol­etariat, which in no way could be called into being by the social democratic ‘general staff', or the unions. The change of tactic noted by Pannekoek vis-a-vis parliamentary and trade union work, which from now on became secondary, showed a profound change in the function of the revol­utionary organization.

d) It is wrong to see Lenin and the Bolsheviks as the theoreticians of substitutionism before 1917, or even in 1920. The Bolsheviks were   brought to power in 1917 - with the Left Social Revolutionaries - by the workers' councils. The insurrection, in which many anarchists participated in the Red Guards, was made under the direction and control of the workers' councils. It wasn't until much later, with the isolation of the Russian revolution and the beginning of the civil war, that the theory of a dictatorship of the party began to be theorized - in the name of "Leninism". Substitutionism in Russia, where the councils were emptied of all life and vampirised by the single party, is less the result of a pre-existing will of the Bolsheviks than of the isolation of the Russian revolution from the revolution in western Europe.

e) The Italian left communist current - contrary to the assertions of the councilists who make an amalgam of ‘Leninism' and ‘Bordigism' (‘Bordigo-Leninism) - had always, even in 1920, with Bordiga, rejected the conception of consciousness coming from outside the proletariat via "bourgeois intellectuals". For Bordiga, the party is part of the class; the party is the result of an organic growth out of the class, in which the program and a militant will are fused into a single totality. During the ‘30s, Bilan always rejected the conception defended at the Second Congress of the CI of a dictatorship of the party. It took the profound regression of the Italian Left after 1945, under the influence of Bordiga, to return to the theory of substituteionism, codified after 1923 under the label of "Leninism". It was precisely the rejection of the conception of a ‘dictatorship of the party' which in Autumn 1952 was one of the reasons for the split which gave rise to the present group Battaglia Comunista.

b) A Lesser Danger

Today, substitutionist conceptions present a lesser danger than in the past, because of:

- the profound theoretical reflection within the German, Italian and Dutch Lefts during the 1930s, even if this was done in a partial manner within each Left. This reflection gave rise to a balance-sheet of the Russian revolution and made it possible to understand the roots of the count­er-revolution;

- the Stalinist counter-revolution, which gave rise, particularly in the proletariat of the advanced countries, to a more acute spirit of criticism towards the political organizations which arise within its ranks but which can come to betray it. The proletariat, on the strength of its historical experience, will in the future no longer have a blind and naive confidence in organizations which claim to be part of it;

- the impossibility of a revolution in the back­ward countries until the epicenter of the world revolution has manifested itself at the heart of the industrial countries of western Europe. The schema of an isolated revolution coming out of an imperialist war in a country where the bourg­eoisie finds itself in a position of weakness, as in Russia in 1917, will not reproduce itself. Coming out of an economic crisis affecting every country - not just the defeated ones - and centered around the most concentrated and most politically educated sectors of the class, the communist revolution of tomorrow will emerge in a much more conscious manner than before. The proletariat can only organize itself internationally, and will only recognize itself in its parties to the extent that they will be part of the internation­al workers' councils, which will have emerged not out of a ‘French' or a ‘German' revolution, but a really international revolution. The geograph­ical isolation of the revolution in a single the objective condition for substitutionism, is no longer possible. The real danger will be isolation at the level of a single continent. But even in this case, there wouldn't be the predominance of a national party, as in Russia: the International (the world communist party) will fully develop itself within the international workers' councils.

­This does not of course mean that the substitut­ionist danger disappears forever. In the moments of decline in a revolutionary period - which will be extended in time, as the example of the German revolution shows - the inevitable hesitations and even temporary exhaustion of the proletariat in the course of a long and devastating civil war, can be the fertile soil where the poisonous weeds of substitutionism, putschism and blanquism can germinate. On the other hand, the maturity of the revolutionary milieu, within which there will already have been a ruthless weeding out of organizations pretending to be the ‘brain' or the ‘general staff' of the class, will be a decisive factor in the energetic struggle against this danger.

The conditions of the appearance and the characteristics of councilism

But if substitutionism constitutes a danger above all in periods of reflux in the revolut­ionary wave, councilism is a much more formidable danger, above all in an ascendant period of the revolutionary wave, and all the more so at its point of culmination when the proletariat needs to act rapidly and with the greatest possible decision. This rapidity in its reactions, this acute sense of decision, culminates in the con­fidence which it reveals in the programs and slogans of its parties. This is why the councilist spirit of indecision and tail-endism, which flatters the least action of the workers, is particularly dangerous in this period. The councilist tendencies which appeared between 1919 and 1921 within the German proletariat were not an expression of the proletariat's strength. If they were not directly responsible for the defeat, they expressed a great weakness in the class. To make a virtue out of these weaknesses, as the councilists do, is the surest means to lead the revolution to defeat tomorrow. The councilist type of reaction in the German proletariat during these years must be understood in order to avoid a repetition of this weakness.

Contrary to appearances, councilism did not arise as a variety of anarchism, which found its privileged terrain in the underdeveloped countries where the proletariat was painfully emerging from a rural and artisanal state. Councilism arises within a long established proletariat, already sharpened by the class struggle and strongly politicized, acting collectively and freed of petty bourgeois individualism.

Councilist tendencies arose in the KPD (Spartakus), then in the KAPD which was formed in April 1920. Whereas Ruble (ex-IKD), the spokesman for these tendencies, finally became well and truly isolated in the KAPD outside of Saxony, the echo of councilist ideas finally resounded throughout   the radical German proletariat in all regions. The exclusion of Ruhle and of his Saxon partisans by the KAPD in 1920 did not prevent the rapid development of councilist theses which came to be adopted by the unitary ‘unionen' (AAU-E), regrouping at one time several hundred thousand workers.

The characteristics of German councilism, which to a large extent are reproduced today, are:

- the rejection of any political party of the proletariat as "bourgeois". According to Ruhle: "The party is in its essence bourgeois. It rep­resents the classic organization for the representation of the interests of the bourgeoisie. It is born of the epoch in which, the bourgeois class came to power. It arises precisely with parliamentarism..." (Von der Btrgerlichen zur Proletarischen Revolution, 1924). Here, Ruhle expresses the legitimate hatred of the proletar­iat for parliamentarism, without understanding that the function of the party changes in decad­ence, which by contrast the KAPD understood perfectly;

- the rejection of centralism as the expression of the dictatorship of a class: "The bourgeois essence is organizationally represented by cent­ralism" (Otto Ruhle, op.cit.). The councilists here attack forms in themselves, believing that they are able in this way to avoid the appearance of a "caste of leaders". In propagating decentralization and in cultivating ‘anti-authoritarian­ism' they could not but favor the absence of effective control by the workers of the organization they formed. The anti-centralism put forward by the ‘unitary' partisans of Ruhle didn't prevent the AAU-E falling under the sway of intellectuals and artists of Die Aktion (Franz Pfemfert in par­ticular) who were true self-proclaimed leaders;

- localism, the corollary of anti-centralism, led necessarily to workerist factoryism. The factory became the tiny universe of the unionists (the AAU which was close to the KAPD as well as the AAU-E), and thus a fortress against the influence of the parties. The cult of the worker in his enterprise went with an anti-intellectualism; the non-worker ‘intellectual' militants of the KAPD were suspected of aspiring to the role of ‘leaders' in substituting themselves for the spontaneous initiative of the workers;

- the confusion between workers' councils and political organizations set back the workers movement several decades - back to the First International in which there were unions, parties, cooperatives, etc. Thus, the Unionen had a revolutionary program inspired by the KAPD but were a strange mixture, half political and half trade unionist. Such a degree of confusion led inevitably to a neo-revolutionary syndicalism. It's not by chance that the AAU-E - close to Ruhle and to Pfemfert - rapidly came to collaborate with the an archo-syndicalists of the FAUD;

- finally, political councilism slid towards a semi-anarchism in its worst form - individualism. Ruhle himself slid progressively towards an anarchistic anti-marxism, seeing in Marx an irascible obduracy towards Bakunin. His cult of individualism led to the pedagogy of the individual worker, the spirit of which was that of ‘the factory chimney stack', to use the ironic exoression of the KAPD in defining Saxon individualism.

The ‘councilist' danger in the revolution

Councilism does no more than express the weakness of the working class. It is first of all a negative reaction, in which the class goes from a blind confidence in its old organizations - progressively gripped by opportunism and finally sinking into the counter-revolution - to a pos­ition of defiance towards every political organization. The councilist tendencies in Germany during the revolution were in direct proportion to the naive confidence which the German workers organized in councils in November 1918 bestowed on social democracy which went on to massacre them over the next three meetings. In the face of what the workers believed to be simply the treas­on of ‘leaders' - with every organization secret­ing this ‘poison' of leaders - anti-party and ‘anti-authoritarian' (anti-‘'top brass') tenden­cies inevitably developed. The tendency for the industrial workers to fall back into local enter­prise organizations (Betriebsorganisationen of the Unionen) and corporative unions (miners' union, marine workers' union in 1919) was not the expression of the growing force of a class recov­ering after the massacre of January 1919, but the product of an enormous weakness of a terrible disorientation.

Because it unfolded in a highly-developed industrialized country, the key to the world revolution, the class struggle in Germany is much more characteristic of the communist revolution of to­morrow than what took place in Russia. Council-type reactions, where the proletariat in the councils will manifest the greatest possible sus­picion regarding all revolutionary organizations, will have to be fought by the revolutionary party with the greatest firmness.

These reactions will be all the more powerful since the Stalinist counter-revolution and the image of the single party in the Eastern count­ries - alongside a healthy suspicion of the workers for the political parties of the left ‑ have rendered the class deeply suspicious towards any revolutionary organization. Such reactions - along with state totalitarianism which makes any revolutionary mass organization impossible - exp­lain the lack of militant political engagement in the class. Despite the growing resonance which their positions and their interventions find, revolutionary militants inevitably come up against such prejudices as: "the revolution with parties, even revolutionary ones, leads to dic­tatorship". It is also true that Bordigism, with its conception of a sole party exercising the ‘Red Dictatorship' through violence in the class, with its odious support for the massacre of the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, cannot but reinforce such councilist reflexes within the class. One can even say that Bordigism and neo­Bordigism are the best recruiting officers for councilism.

Revolutionary organizations and the ICC in particular, must be conscious of the fact that their organized action in the councils of tomorrow will not be easy. It will happen often enough at the beginning that they will be forbidden to sneak on account of being organized in parties. The bourgeoisie for its part, via its most dangerous agents, its rank and file trade unionists, will not be slow to encourage the anti-organization sentiments of the workers, their workerist re­flexes, in presenting revolutionary organizations as being organizations of ‘intellectuals' who want to ‘direct' the class in order to take pow­er. As with Rosa Luxemburg in 1918, the non-wor­ker militants of the party may well be excluded from speaking to the councils on the pretext that they are not workers. The danger of councilism during the revolutionary events must not be underestimated - it may even be a mortal one. To the extent that anti-organization ideas predomin­ate, the proletariat will be prone to the most deliberate provocations of the bourgeoisie. The cult of ‘anti-authoritarian' minorities can lead to the most disastrous putschism for the class. The suspicion of the program and of revolution­ary theory, seen as violating the consciousness of the individual worker, cannot but favor the penetration of petty-bourgeois individualist ideology which will be carried by the innumerable battalions of petty-bourgeois proletarianized by the crisis and unemployment. Worse still, this suspicion favors the penetration of bourgeois ideology which is the dominant ideology.

A real danger today in the revolutionary milieu

The danger of councilism - even if it fully man­ifests itself in the revolutionary events - is a danger today. It threatens essentially the weak revolutionary milieu as a result of the lack of organic continuity with the revolutionary organizations of the past (communist lefts). It presents itself in many equally negative forms:

- immediatist activism which leads fatally to the libertarian swamp, if not to leftism. The ICO in France, Arbetarmakt in Sweden finally dis­appeared as a result of their ouvrierist activ­ism which took them to leftism. Arbetarmakt ended up falling under the pressure of petty-bourgeois, then bourgeois, ideology and slid towards a neo-­rank-and-filism.

- the conception of work and study groups leads to putting the militant role of revolutionaries in question; circles from which one observes the class struggle from the grandstand. Such groups finally put the revolutionary role of the prol­etariat in question, falling very easily into pessimism or modernism. The adventures of the Barrot circle (‘Le Mouvement communiste') bear witness to this. Such circles have nothing to do with the revolutionary milieu; they are sim­ply submerged in the confusion distilled by the petty-bourgeoisie in full decomposition.

- the ‘anti-Bolshevik' ideology - with which the entire revolutionary past of the Bolsheviks is denied - can only lead to putting in question the entire history of the workers' movement and of marxism. The evolution of the group Pour une Intervention Communiste (PIC) in France is sympt­omatic. From primitive activism, it glided to­wards becoming a circle of academic study. Soon - with the exception of the ‘Polish Left'[8], the hobby-horse of certain militants of the PIC - the entire revolutionary movement was considered to be sullied by the spirit of the party. Marx himself becomes the main culprit for all the sins of the workers' movement in ‘inventing' the con­cept (sic) of the party. Worse still, this whole'anti-Bolshevik' reaction cannot but lead to com­promises with left socialism. (Thus, the final dissolution of the members of the PIC into the Cahiers Spartacus, editors of the most diverse socialist pamphlets);

- the underestimation of the role of the organization, based on a view which sees the consciousness of the workers to be as developed - if not more so - than the consciousness of .the organization, leads to the negation of the organization as a militant part of the class. This underestimation is a veritable suicide for the militants who defend councilist positions within organizations or circles. This is the danger menac­ing all groups basing themselves on ‘council communism'.

Even if today councilism is disintegrating, principally in Western Europe, leaving a jumbled collection of circles based on unclear, profoundly anti-organizational positions, its ideology survives. The discussion groups which have appeared in Scandinavia (Denmark) and Mexico these past few years are particularly vulnerable to such conceptions. It is evident that the ICC does not ignore such groups, leaving them to wallow in their confusion. It is conscious that the organic rupture with the organizations of the communist left means that more and more, very confused groups will arise, adhering to council communism and marked by a petty-bourg­eois, individualist, councilist ideology. The ICC has an enormous responsibility - having become, ­with the break-up of the ICP the sole revolutionary pole at the international level - weighing on ­its shoulders to make such circles evolve towards a militant marxist conception. Such circles, which often enough come from the petty-bourgeoisie with its prejudices and its academic preoccupations, are particularly vulnerable to councilist ideology. The ICC can only lead these elements, as it has done in Sweden and Holland, to a revolutionary proletarian conception, when it remains intransigent in its conception of a centralized and militant organization and combats councilist conceptions without the slightest hesitation and oscillation.

The councilist danger does not only threaten the confused groups or discussion .circles; it can appear even in the ranks of the groups claiming the heritage of the Italian Left such as Battaglia Comunista and now that political eel called the CWO. Their conception of a double political organization, the ‘party' (the obligatory megalomania) alongside the (phantom) ‘factory groups', can't fail to recall the conceptions of the KAPD with its factory organizations, except that if one retains any sense of proportion, we can see that these are dwarfs compared to the giant which was the KAPD. Tomorrow, the logic of the bluff of' ‘factory groups' could lead them to dissolve their political organization through pure suivism, to turn them into simple appendages of these groups for the sake of having a little echo in the class. Despite being hostile in principle to the KAPD - out of ignorance or opportunism, the former being the case for Battaglia Comunista and the latter for the CWO as the all-round champion of political about-faces - these two small groups, full of their own importance, would be well advised to modestly study the history of the KAPD. By virtue of the double organization, the KAPD finally began to disintegrate in 1929, the larger part organizing itself in an activist union (the KAU), whereas what remained of the KAPD - from now on hostile to every double organization - didn't make up any more than a small group. The tail-endism of Battaglia Comunista and the CWO in relation to Iranian nationalist organizations such as Komala or the ‘Communist Party of Iran', doesn't speak very much for the capacity of these organizations to firmly maintain an intransigent programmatic and organizational framework.

The danger of councilism therefore does not confine itself to the negators of the party; it can even menace an organization as well armed as the ICC. What is all the more dangerous is that councilism often does not announce itself by its name and hides itself behind a formal recognition of a programmatic framework and centralized organization.

The ICC must be more vigilant than ever in order to fulfill its militant function in the class. It is convinced that its function is irreplaceable          and that it is the highest expression of class consciousness. Its centralized functioning is          decisive in order to maintain its programmatic framework handed down by the communist left.

The ICC, like the KAPD and Bilan, is convinced of the decisive role of the party in the revolution. Without a revolutionary party, the fruit of a long work of regroupment and of political combat, there cannot be a victorious proletarian revolution. Today, any underestimation of the role of the organization can only contribute to the disintegration of an already particularly weak revolutionary milieu.

The councilist danger is a menace against which the ICC must be particularly armed, right into its own ranks. In underlining the danger of councilist vacillations which don't announce themselves by their names, the ICC is not falling into or regressing towards a kind of  ‘Bordigism' or ‘Leninism'.

The existence of the ICC is the fruit of all the communist fractions of the past. It defends their positive acquisitions against both the groups of the councilist tendency and the Bordigist groups,           without taking over their negative sides: substitutionism in the Russian left, negation of the party in the Dutch left, double organization in the German left, The ICC is not an organization of the past. The ICC is neither ‘councilist' nor ‘Bordigist', it is the latter-day product of the         long history of the international communist left. It's through a political struggle, without concessions, against every hesitation regarding its function and its place in the class struggle that the ICC will be worthy of its predecessors and even go beyond them in the fire of combat.

Chardin

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[1] See the ‘Bulletin d'Etudes et de Discussion', 1974.

[2] The first number of RI manifested councilist tendencies. But in 1969 a very clear text on the necessity of the party was presented to the national conference of ICO (see RI old series no 3).

[3] See the pamphlet, ‘Communist Organizations and Class Consciousness'.

[4] ‘Dialogue with the dead' and ‘Dialogue with Stalin' (sic) are titles of pamphlets by Bordiga.

[5] Resolution of the ICC of January 1984: "There exists between moments of open struggle a subterranean maturation of consciousness (the ‘old mole' dear to Marx), which expresses itself both through the deepening of and the clarifications of the political positions of revolutionary organizations, and by a reflection and a decantation within the class as a whole, a disengagement from bourgeois mystifications."

[6] See Marx, ‘The German Ideology'. Marx speaks of the "consciousness of the necessity of a revolution". This communist consciousness is produced "massively" by a transformation "which touches the mass of humanity which can only be realized in a practical movement, in a revolution." 

[7] We give here extracts of the resolution adopted in January 1984 (and which provoked certain ‘reserves' and disagreements on the part of certain comrade):

"Even if they form part of a single unity and act upon one another, it is wrong to identify class consciousness with the consciousness of the class or in the class, that is to say its extension at a given moment ... It is necessary to distinguish between that which expresses a continuity in the historical movement of the proletariat: the progressive elaboration of its political positions and of its program, from that which is linked to circumstantial factors: the extension of their assimilation and of their impact in the class."

[8] These militants only go to prove that they don't know much about history. The Bolshevik Party, which they accuse of being too centralized, was much less so than the party of the party of the polish left, the SDKPiL.