In the epoch of computers, of communication by satellite, information circulates at the speed of light around the globe, and exchange likewise. A few telephone calls, and billions of dollars have changed hands. Fortunes are made or lost in the space of a few minutes. The dollar continues its frenzied spree across the planet in an incessant movement: from New York to Chicago, from Chicago to Tokyo, from Tokyo to Hong-Kong, to Zurich, Paris, London...each financial centre serves as a sounding board for the others in maintaining the incessant movement of capital.

The rise of speculation

The dollar is the world currency par excellence; over 80% of world trade is conducted with dollars. Fluctuations of the dollar’s course affect the entire world economy. And the dollar’s course is anything but stable: over January and February1985 the dollar has continued its blazing, soaring ascent, at first by centimes a week in relation to the French franc, and accelerating its movement by 10 centimes a day subsequently. On February 27, after the alarmist declarations of Volcker, president of the American Federal Bank, and the intervention of the big central banks, there was a slithering drop. In the space of a few minutes the dollar shifted, in relation to the French franc, from 10.61 to 10.10 only to rise to 10.20FF : 40 centimes of a loss vis-a-vis the franc, a 5% devaluation vis-a-vis the German mark. In this way more than 10 billion dollars went up in smoke on the world market. Already, in September ‘84, the dollar went down by 40 centimes in one day, but that didn’t stop it resuming its ascent subsequently under the pressure of international speculation.

Why the dollar is soaring?

The economists are at a loss. And so, Otto Pohl, governor of the West German Federal Bank, at a symposium of the top nobs of international fin­ance, remarked ironically: “The dollar is mirac­ulous, and on this point our vision is confused, but after discussion we will be confused at a higher level.” Not very reassuring for the world economy.

What’s so miraculous about the present ‘health’ of the dollar in relation to other currencies? Simply that the present rise of the dollar’s course does not at all correspond to the econ­omic reality of the competitiveness of American capital in relation to its competitors. The doll­ar is enormously overvalued.

In this case, why such a frenzied speculation on the dollar on all the financial markets of the world? There are two essential reasons for this: 1) The American policy of budgetary and commerc­ial deficit creates an enormous need in the Amer­ican economy for dollars to cover this. The bud­getary deficit reached $195bn in 1983 and $184bn in 1984 (see table 3) and the commercial deficit amounted to $123.3bn in 1984. And this deficit is not shrinking, as table 1 shows.

 

TABLE I (in billions of dollars)
	Commercial deficit	Budgetary deficit
January 1984	9.5	5.62
January 1985	10.3	6.38

 

And the timid propositions to reduce the budgetary deficit announced by Washington since December1984 aren’t going to put a brake on this tendency. On the contrary, they will merely pressure speculators and push the dollar up even further. Which is effectively what is happening. 2) The USA is the leading world economic power, the fortress of international capital. With the recovery slowing up and the risk of recession looming on the horizon, the capital of the entire world flocks to the USA in order to try and save itself from the threatening reflux. The present movement of speculation is the sign of the worr­ied state of international finance.

Indebtedness: A time bomb at the heart of world economy

In order to cover its deficits, the USA goes into debt. The US cannot make too much use of the printing press for fear of triggering off an un­controllable inflationary process. Instead it draws in foreign capital. But as Volcker says: “The United States cannot live indefinitely beyond its means thanks to foreign capital.” And indeed, the present indebtedness is phenomenal.

The total debt of the USA is $6000bn. Such dizzying figure lose their meaning - a 6 followed by 12 noughts! That amounts to two years of the production of the USA, six of Japan, ten of Germany!

 

 

The public debt, which is alone $1500bn, required the payment of around $100bn interest in 1984, and the services on debts will surpass $214bn in 1989. At this rate the USA will become a debtor in relation to the rest of the world in 1985.

For any of the underdeveloped countries, such a situation would be catastrophic. The IMF would intervene urgently to impose a draconian auster­ity plan. This shows that the present strength of the dollar is a gigantic cheat of economic laws. The USA profits from its economic and mil­itary strength in order to impose its law on the world via the dollar - its national currency but at the same time the principal international exchange currency.

Do the economic laws no longer play their role? Is the dollar dodging all the rules? Is its ascent unstoppable and inevitable? Certainly not. The policies of state capitalism can postpone the day of reckoning of the crisis through mon­etary policies, but this only pushes the con­tradictions to a higher, more explosive level.

The declarations of Volcker which provoked the fall of the dollar’s course on February 27th are unambiguous on this point. He himself, hav­ing a year ago declared that the foreign debt was “a pistol pointing to the heart of the United States” followed this up by saying that “in view of the extent of the budgetary deficit, the swelling of American borrowing abroad contains the seeds of its own destruction”, and he added the precision in relation to the course of the dollar “I can’t predict when but the scenario is in place.”

The recession looming on the horizon

The growth of the American economy, which was very marked in the spring of 1984, has slowed up these last months. Orders from industry have slowed down: August - 1.7%, September - 4.3%, October - 4.7%, December - 2.7%. The growth of GNP, which reached 7.1% in the spring, was only 1.9% by the third quarter of 1984.

The American deficit no longer suffices, despite its importance, to maintain the world mini-rec­overy, the effects of which anyway mainly touched the USA while Europe was stagnating. The specter of recession is looming on the horizon, and this perspective cannot but stir up the horror of the capitalist financiers.

All the big American banks have lent out enorm­ous sums, up to ten times their real resources. For example, to mention simply the commitment of the principal American banks to five Latin Amer­ican countries (Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Chile): Citicorp 174% of the share hold­ings, Bank of America 158%, Chase Manhattan 154%, Manufacturers Hanover 262%, Continental Illinois 107%, etc. There are about 14,500 American banks in a similar situation. (Washington Institute of International Economy)

Recession means millions of workers reduced to unemployment, thousands of bankrupt enterprises, dozens of countries having to close payments. Sectors which cannot repay their debts in turn push the banks into bankruptcy. The bankruptcy of the Continental Illinois could only be avert­ed by injecting a further $8bn thanks to the aid of other banks and of the American state. But what’s coming up on the horizon will not be so easy to absorb. What is in the making is the bankruptcy of the international financial system, with the dollar at the heart of this bankruptcy.

A brief recession of only six months would increase the federal deficit from $200bn to $500bn, according to a study by Chase Econometrics. In the face of such a situation, the USA would haveno other choice but to cover this deficit through a massive recourse to printing money, since the capital of the entire world would no longer suf­fice, thereby relaunching the galloping inflat­ionary spiral which Reagan puffs himself up ab­out having vanquished. Such a situation could only provoke a panic on the financial markets, leading to a return to speculative tendencies, this time acting against the dollar, plunging the world economy into the throes of a recess­ion the like of which it has never known before, and all this going hand in hand with hyper­inflation.

That is the scenario which Volcker was talking about. It is a catastrophic scenario. The American government is trying to utilize each and every artifice in order to hold back this day of reckoning: suppression of orders at their source, the internationalization of the yen, Reagan’s appeals to the Europeans to put them­selves more in debt in order to support the American effort and maintain economic activity. But all these expediencies are not enough, and the present headlong flight can only show the impasse of world capitalism and announce the future catastrophe.

What are the consequences for the working class?

The Reaganite recovery is essentially limited to the USA where the rate of unemployment fell by 2.45%. In 1984, in contrast, for the entirety of the underdeveloped countries, there was a plunge into a bottomless misery, a situation of famine such as in Ethiopia or Brazil, whereas in Europe the relative maintenance of the economy hasn’t prevented an increase in unemployment: 2.5% in 1984 in the EEC. With the let-up of the recovery, these last months have seen an upsurge of unem­ployment: 600,000 more unemployed for the EEC in January 1985, 300,000 alone for West Germany, which, with this progression, has beaten its rec­ord of 1953 with 2.62 million unemployed. The perspective of the recession implies an explosion of unemployment and a descent into a Third-World­like misery at the heart of industrial capitalism. The complete collapse of the illusion in the possibility of an economic recovery will show the impasse of capitalism to the entire world proletariat. This poses all the more the necessity to put forward a revolutionary persp­ective as the sole means of survival for humanity, since capitalism is heading for its destruction.

World capitalism is in an economic impasse, on the edge of the cliff, and the bourgeoisie itself is beginning to take account of this. It is push­ed more and more from the economic terrain to­wards the military level in a headlong flight towards economic catastrophe.

The American budgetary deficit goes essentially to finance its war effort in which gigantic sums of capital are engulfed and sterilized (see table 3).

 

 

In January 1985 orders in durable goods increased by 3.8% in the USA. But if we take away military orders, there was in fact a drop of 11.5% of in­coming orders. Behind the accelerated nose-dive in the economic crisis which is shaping up is the exacerbation and acceleration of inter-imperial­ist tensions, the mad rush of the bourgeoisie towards war. Capitalism no longer has a future to offer humanity. The last illusions in its cap­acity to find a way out, through a hypothetical technological revolution, are being dashed against the reality of bankruptcy.

President Reagan will certainly not go down in history as the matador who conquered the crisis, but as the president of the biggest economic crisis that capitalism has ever known. The reck­oning of a reverse has begun; the recession cannot be averted. This recession will signify a new acceleration of tensions, a deepening of class antagonisms. On the capacity of the proletariat to develop its struggles, to put forward a revolutionary perspective, depends the future of humanity. Capitalism is heading towards bank­ruptcy and the whole of humanity risks being wiped out in a new nuclear holocaust.

The dollar is still the dollar-emperor ruling the entire world economy. But the emperor is naked and this fact will soon pierce the smoke­screen for capitalist propaganda.

JJ 2.3.85

 

In IR 40 we printed an article called ‘The Danger of Councilism' which defends the position the ICC has reached after more than a year of debate. In this debate, the ICC on the one hand reaffirmed that the perspectives of the proletarian struggle demand a clear rejection of the erroneous conceptions of ‘substitutionism' (the conception that the party is the unique repository of consciousness, leading to the conception of the dictatorship of the party) and ‘councilism' (the conception of consciousness as a simple reflection of immediate struggles, leading to the minimization of the function of the party and the negation of its necessity). On the other hand, the ICC was led to state precisely why, under the conditions of our period, the weaknesses and errors of a ‘councilist' type constitute a greater obstacle, a ‘greater danger', than the errors and conceptions of ‘substitutionism'. The ICC has not hesitated to systematize and refine its positions on consciousness, councilism, centrism, intervention, etc, by freeing them from any imprecisions and confused interpretations. But while the ICC sees this orientation as a way to place its positions on a terrain more firmly attached to the basis of marxism and at the same time to make them more able to deal with the questions raised by the acceleration of history, the article we are printing below sees this as a "new orientation", the acceptance of a theory of the "Lesser of two evils". It expresses the position of' minority comrades who have formed a tendency within the ICC. We can only regret that the article poses many questions without, in our opinion, trying to respond to the arrumentation of the article criticized. From our point of view, it expresses a centrist tendency in relation to councilism, because although it plat­onically asserts the danger of ‘councilism', it basically attenuates councilism's danger and only offers as a ‘perspective' that ... all errors are dangerous for the proletariat. We shall answer the different points raised in this article in the next issue of the Review.

ICC

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

In IR 40 is an article called ‘The Danger of Councilism' defending the new orientation of the ICC. According to this new theory, councilism is today, and will be in the future, the greatest dan­ger for the working class and its revolutionary minorities, a greater danger than substitutionism. In this article we wish to express the position of a minority of comrades in the ICC who do not agree with this new orientation.

There is no question that councilist positions are a danger; they have been in the past and will be in the future. Councilism - the rejection of the need for the organization of revolutionaries, the party and its active and decisive role in the working class' coming to consciousness - is, as the ICC has always said, a danger, particularly for the revol­utionary political milieu including the ICC, be­cause the end result of such a theorization is to deprive the working class of its indispensable instrument.

The divergence is not on whether councilism repres­ents a danger but:

a) over the new unilateral theory of councilism, the greatest danger;

- because it is accompanied by a dismissal of sub­stitutionism as "a lesser danger";

- because it turns its back on the essential danger for the proletariat coming from the capitalist state and its extensions in the working class (the left parties, leftists, rank and file unionism etc, the mechanism of capitalist recuperation in the era of state capitalism) and focuses instead on a so-called inherent councilist defect of the "proletariat of the advanced countries";

- because it can only lead and is already leading to serious regressions on the meaning of the lessons drawn from the first revolutionary wave and from the workers' movement in general in the period of decadence;

b) on the implications of this theory on the under­standing of the development of class consciousness: tending to reduce class consciousness to "theory and program" (IR 40) and the role of the class to ass­imilation of the program;

c) on a theory of "centrism/opportunism" which claims that "hesitation" and "lack of will" are the permanent ills of the working class movement; in the name of this theory, political parties and elements which definitively betrayed the proletariat are now put back into it, blurring class lines.

In this article, we shall only deal with the first aspect: the theory of councilism, the greatest dan­ger. Discussion will continue on centrism and class consciousness in other articles to appear soon in our press.

Councilism, the greatest danger?

The article in IR 40 develops the following argu­mentation:

- the danger of substitutionism exists only in per­iods of reflux in a revolutionary wave;

- the danger of councilism is, on the contrary, "a much greater danger, especially in periods of a rising revolutionary wave";

- substitutionism can only find a fertile field in underdeveloped countries; councilist-type reactions are more characteristic of the workers in advanced like the workers in Germany during the first revolutionary wave;

- substitutionism is an "error", a "unique phenomenon ... of the geographic isolation of a revolution in only one country, an objective factor of substitutionism which is no longer possible." (IR 40)

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

What are these so-called "councilist reflexes" of rising class struggle, how can they be identified? According to the article they are everything from ouvrierism, localism, tail-ending, modernism, any apolitical reactions of workers, the petty-bourg­eoisie, immediatism, activism and .... indecision. In short, the ills of creation. If every time the class hesitates, or falls into immediatism, if every time revolutionaries fall victim to tail-ending or fail to understand the way to form the party, it is interpreted as a manifestation of councilism, then ‘councilism' is indeed the new leviathan.

Through this trick of 'definitions', all the subjective weaknesses of the working class become councilist reflexes and the remedy is ... the party. In other words, the ICC, the proletarian political milieu and the entire working class will be protecting itself from any immediatism, petty-bourgeois influence, hesitation and so on by recognizing that the number one enemy is "underestimating", "minimizing" the party.

This whole idea of having to choose between 'under' or 'over'-estimating the party, this new variation of the politics of the lesser evil that the ICC had always rejected on a theoretical level, is being re-­introduced on a practical level under the pretext of wanting to present a more "concrete" perspective to the class: we have to now agree to say to the workers that the danger of councilism is greater than that of substitutionism - otherwise the workers won't have any "perspective"!

Make your choice, comrades: if substitutionism is a danger for you, you are yourselves just council­ists. If you refuse to choose sides, you are the carriers of "centrist oscillations in relation to councilism", "councilists who dare not speak their names." (IR 40)

It is claimed that "history" has proven this theory of councilism, the greatest danger. What history exactly? The ICC has always criticized in the German revolution the errors of Luxemburg and the Spartakists, the positions of the Essen tendency, of the anti-party tendency of Ruhle expelled from the KAPD in 1920 and the split of the AAUD(E) and in general, the disastrous consequences of the hesitation of the proletariat and the lack of confidence of revolutionaries in their role. Yet we have never before pretended to find the cause of this in a latent ‘councilism' of the proletariat of advanced countries. We have never tried to fit history into any cyclical theory of councilism as the greatest danger before a revolution and substitutionism only after a revolution.

Other than gratuitous assertions, the only ‘proof' offered in the article in the last issue is that "just as Luxemburg was in 1918, non-worker militants of the party will be in danger of being excluded from any possibility of speaking before the councils." And again in World Revolution 78 (December 1984): "the real danger facing the class is not that it will place ‘too much' confidence in its revolutionary minorities, but that it will deny them a hearing altogether." Here we are supp­osed to recognize the German proletariat's ‘councilism' against Luxemburg.

All this is a gross distortion of history. In Dec­ember 1918 at the National Council of the Workers' Councils in Germany, none of the Spartakus League, workers or not, could defend their positions - not because the working class didn't allow them to but because Spartakus was a faction within the USPD.

"...to consider the fate of the Congress, we must first of all establish the relationship between the Spartacus League and the Independents. For when you read the Congress report you must cert­ainly have wondered what had happened to the Spartakus group. You knew that some of us were there and you may have asked where were they? Or if you listened to any speeches you might have asked what were the fundamental differences bet­ween the Spartakus group and the Independents?...we were tied to the Independent faction, which hung around our necks like a millstone... which succeeded in interfering with the list of speakers and paralyzed our activities at every turn." (Levine's ‘Report on the First All-German Soviet Congress', in The Life of a Revolutionary, pp.190-192).

The revolutionary positions of Spartakus (that the councils declare themselves the supreme power, that they appeal to the world proletariat, that they support the Russian soviets, that they hear Luxemburg and Liebknecht speak on this) were presented and defended by the USPD ... which wanted to dissolve the councils in the Constituent Assembly. Spartakus (like the majority of the Communist International later on) wanted to "influence the masses" by trying to co-opt the USPD, "by seeing it as the right wing of the workers movement and not as a faction of the bourgeoisie." (IR. 2) But the ICC today, with its theory of ‘centrism', now sees the USPD, the party of Kautsky, Bernstein and Hilferding, as proletarian instead of recognizing it for what it was: an expression of the radicalization of the political apparatus of the bourg­eoisie, a first expression of the phenomenon of leftism, the extreme barrier of the capitalist state against the revolutionary threat. Already in the past, it was Spartakus that got co-opted by seeing itself as an opposition within the USPD, the left- wing of social democracy, still clinging to the outmoded notion of a ‘right', ‘left' and ‘centre' in the working class. Failing to draw this lesson today is an open door to leftist recuperation.

All this has nothing to do with the myth about wor­kers refusing to listen to revolutionaries because workers were or are councilists.

The errors of revolutionaries in the German revol­ution cannot be explained by an "underestimation of the role of the party." It isn't that they weren't ‘active enough' or didn't realize they had to intervene in struggle. The will to assume their role was definitely there. The tragedy was that they didn't know what to do, how to do it and with whom - in other words, what the new period of decadence meant for the communist program.

The difficulties revolutionaries faced in Germany are not attributable to a councilism of the German proletariat or its advance guard. They were funda­mentally due to the general difficulty in all coun­tries in getting free of social democracy, of its conception of the mass party and of substitutionism. At the time of the revolution, the predominant con­ception among revolutionaries and in the proletariat in Germany was not that the workers' councils were going to solve everything in and of themselves but that a party had to assume the power delegated by the councils. In actual fact, the councils were led to give their power to the social democracy.

How can anyone deny this obvious truth?

For the defenders of substitutionism, it's easy: when the class gave its power to the social democ­racy it was wrong; when it gave it to the Bolshev­iks it was right. The whole thing is for the class to ‘trust' the ‘right' party. The ICC hasn't fallen into this of course. But for the ICC, turning power over to the social democracy is apparently no proof that substitutionism is a danger in the upsurge. No, according to IR 40 it was just an example of the "naivety" of the workers!

Bourgeois parties and leftists, you see, cannot be called substitutionist because they "want to dev­iate the struggle." It's when those who don't want to destroy the workers make a mistake that substit­utionism comes into play. Thus, the same position, depending whose lips say it, can be a bourgeois position or not.

The minimization of substitutionism

In fact, unlike the position on unions and elector­alism in the ascendant period of capital, substit­utionism was always a bourgeois position, applying the model of the bourgeois revolution to the prol­etarian one. But because revolution was not yet historically possible, revolutionaries did not realize all the implications of this position. As the proletarian revolution approached, they began to feel the need for a major clarification of the program but were unable to develop all the ram­ifications of a new coherence. The first revolution­ary wave exposed the substitutionist position on the party and all it implied about the relation of party and class for what it really is: a bourg­eois position whatever the subjective intentions of those who defend it.

But for this new theory of councilism, the great­est danger in the upsurge, substitutionism is only a danger when the reflux of struggles gives strength to the counter-revolution. In other words, the counter-revolution is the greatest danger when it is already under your nose. Seeing its roots, going to the root of the matter is not necessary. First things first! First, fight ‘councilism'. Then we'll see what the proletariat can do with its par­ties.

The meaning and danger of substitutionism shrinks down to almost nothing. In referring to the Russian revolution the IR 40 explicitly states that before 1920 substitutionism didn't influence the degeneration of the revolution: "Only with the isolation and degeneration of the revolution did Bolshevik substitutionism become a really active element in the defeat of the class." (WR 73)

"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." (IR 40)

But the workers' councils in Russia didn't begin to be emptied of their proletarian life in 1920. On the contrary, that was the time of the last convul­sions against the suffocation of the councils. The roots of this go back right to the day after the insurrection by the councils. This has always been the ICC position on the Russian revolution: "Since the seizure of' power the Bolshevik Party had entered into conflict with the unitary organs of the proletariat and presented itself as a party of government." (ICC pamphlet, Communist Organizations and Class Consciousness)

And we've shown this in many articles right from the beginning of the ICC while defending the prol­etarian character of October.

To say that the Bolsheviks' conceptions on the par­ty were the cause of the degeneration is absolutely false but to assert, as the ICC apparently wants to today, that the Bolsheviks' positions did not play an active role (when they were wrong just as when they were correct) is untenable as a marxist posi­tion.

By reducing substitutionism, the ideological expr­ession of the division of labor in class society, to a negligible quantity, the new ICC theory ends up by minimizing the danger of state capitalism, the political apparatus of the state and the mech­anism of its ideological functioning.

The example of 1905, or even 1917 in Russia, is not the most telling way to predict how the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries will protect itself against revolution. The German bourgeoisie, warned after the first shock in Russia, with a more soph­isticated political arsenal, was able to penetrate the councils from within not only by the industr­ialists who ‘negotiated' with the councils but especially through the social democracy's sabotage. The social democracy (and the Independents) far from "forbidding all parties" as the IR seems to fear as the greatest danger, accepted all of them and demanded proportional representation in the government. It even asked Spartakus to join the SPD/USPD government. To recuperate the movement, the SPD played on all the siren songs (contrary to the ‘councilism/substitutionism' divisions of the new theory): in some regions only workers could vote, in others it was the whole "population", or more representation for small factories; for and against the soldiers' councils, depending on how they went. Anything to win: recognizing and prais­ing the councils, ouvrierism, democratism, the phraseology of the Russian revolution; anything to turn the workers from a final assault on the state. And all the while they were preparing the massacre. Spartakus itself didn't understand the radicalization of the bourgeoisie. And not one voice, even of the left clearer than Spartakus, was raised in protest from the beginning against this bourgeois vision of the relation between class and party in general.

In the future, the bourgeoisie will use anything and everything. Do we really believe that the bourgeoisie will not penetrate the councils? Or that the capitalist class is going to count on some fancied "councilist reflexes" of the workers spar­ing its system? Or will it simply rely on "council­ist organizations" of the "petty bourgeoisie" as the IR suggests? The scenario seems to be that in a councilist fever the workers risk forbidding all parties in the councils ... and what will the bourgeoisie be doing through all this? Saying "good, at least there won't be the proletarian par­ty there either"? Grudgingly, the IR admits that there may be base unionists in the councils. But how? As individuals? Who is behind base unionism if it isn't leftists, Stalinists and other organized political expressions? The struggle of the future won't be around forbidding parties but around which program and the need for the final assault on the state with all its tentacles.

This new theory mistakes the way the real danger for the working class - the capitalist state and all its extensions - will operate and vitiates the denunciation of substitutionism by presenting it as this ‘lesser evil'.

Today and tomorrow

It is impossible to work towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, to accelerate the process of consciousness in the class, by presenting substit­utionism and anti-partyism as separate notions, one of which it is essential to understand but the other not so important. The only way to contribute is to consistently denounce the shared theoretical foundation of both substitutionism and anti-party­ism and to defend a non-bourgeois vision of the relation of party and councils without concessions to any so-called lesser evils/dangers.

It is not as though the working class has never found the way to overcome the contradiction of sub­stitutionism/anti-partyism. In the course of the revolutionary wave, the proletariat - despite its tragic defeat - was able to give expression to the political positions of the KAPD which rejected sub­stitutionism yet reaffirmed the need for a party, offering elements towards understanding its true role. This heritage, because it was the highest point of the last wave, will be the departure point of the renaissance of tomorrow's workers' movement.

One of the greatest weaknesses of revolutionaries has always been to want to explain the slow, uneven, difficult process of the development of class cons­ciousness throughout the whole history of the prol­etariat by defects in the proletariat itself (its ‘trade unionism', its ‘anarchism', its ‘councilism', its ‘integration into capitalism', etc) .

This new theory is just a reflection of a certain discouragement with the difficulty the working class has in generalizing its struggle, in asserting its own perspectives for society. This difficulty can only be overcome through the development of strugg­les and the experience acquired through these batt­les that will allow the class to rediscover its historical potential. This potential is not only the party but also the councils and communism itself. Seeing ‘councilism' in the class' difficulty in asserting itself today is just a plain mystification. The working class is no more fundamentally sapped by councilism than by Leninism or Bordigism - but it must painfully shake off all aspects of the dead weight of the counter-revolutionary period.

The proof that the weight of the errors of the counter-revolutionary period is diminishing both in relation to councilism and Bordigism (the PCI, Prog­ramma Comunista) can be seen in the decantation pro­cess that has occurred in the political milieu these past 15 years. Bourgeois ideas on substit­utionism and anti-partyism have their main defend ers in the political apparatus of the ruling class (leftists, libertarians, etc) but because of the confusions of the counter-revolution, sclerotic proletarian currents have continued to defend these positions with different variations. The resurgence of proletarian struggles makes it possible to sweep away these vestigal positions whether through clari­fication of these groups or by their disappearance. We are not yet in a revolutionary situation where organizations defending bourgeois positions pass directly into the enemy camp but pressure from the acceleration of history, in the absence of clarific­ation (cf. the failure of the International Confer­ences) leads to a decantation in the political mil­ieu just as it leads to getting rid of illusions in the class as a whole.

After 15 years of decantation the remains of both the Dutch and the Italian left have both fallen into organizational decay. The course of history today shows the inadequacy and degeneration of both poles.

On the key question of our time, the road to the politicization of workers' struggles, both poles of reference from the past have shown their hist­oric failure through an under-estimation of the present resurgence, an inability to understand its dynamic. Neither councilism nor Bordigism can under­stand how the revolution will come about or the dynamic of the course towards class confrontation.

Programma's refusal to discuss, the sectarianism and sabotage of the International Conferences by Battaglia and the CWO, have done as much as coun­cilism to sterilize revolutionary energies and hinder the clarification so necessary to the re­groupment of revolutionaries.

The IR 40 article makes no mention of this historic decantation nor can its new theory of councilism, the greatest danger, explain it.

The ICC now seems to want to polemicize with fig­ments of its imagination. In the IR it's now Battaglia and the CWO who are ‘councilists' because their factory groups and gruppi sindicali are supposedly examples of the KAPD's confusions on the AAUD and not, as in fact they are, examples of the plain old party ‘transmission belts' to the class - an idea shared by many traditional currents of the Third International.

Desparately searching for a greater councilist danger, the IR finally fixes on "individualist petty bourgeois ideology" being the mortal scourge of the councils of tomorrow. At a time when everything points to the obvious fact that the illusions of the ‘60s are way behind us and that only collective str­uggle has any chance at all to make any dent in the system, how can anyone seriously maintain that "the greatest danger" for the revolution is petty bourg­eois individualism?

The future evolution of the political milieu will not be a farcical repetition of May ‘68. Moreover, to think that the weight of the petty bourgeoisie is only channeled into ‘councilism' is nonsense.

The proletarian political milieu of the future will be formed on the lessons of the decantation process of today. Councilism will not be the greatest dan­ger in the future any more than it was in the past.

The origins of the debate

When an organization starts to dabble in the polit­ics of the lesser of two evils, it doesn't necess­arily realize that it's going to end up distorting its principles. The process has its own logic.

As the IR article states, a confusion developed in the organization on the "subterranean maturation of consciousness". On the one hand, there was a rejec­tion of the possibility of the development of class consciousness outside of open struggle (and the non-marxist idea that class consciousness is just a reflection of reality and not also an active factor within it). On the other, there was a theorization which held that the proletariat's difficulties in going beyond the union framework required a qualit­ative leap in consciousness which would happen through a pure "subterranean maturation" during a "long reflux" after the defeat in Poland. Aside from this idea of a long reflux which was quickly proven wrong by the resurgence of class struggle, this debate revealed how difficult it is to under­stand - in real terms and not just in theory - the path of the politicization of workers' struggles via a resistance to economic crisis today and, more generally, the framework given by the period of state capitalism for the maturation of the sub­jective conditions of revolution.

The existence of a subterranean maturation of class consciousness, the development of a latent revol­utionary consciousness in the working class through its experience in the crisis and through the inter­vention of communist minorities within it, is a fundamental element of the entire conception of the ICC, the negation of both councilism and Bordigism. It was thus necessary to correct these confusions and clarify in depth. But even though subterranean maturation is explicitly rejected by both Battaglia and the CWO for example (see Revolutionary Perspectives 21) because this is perfectly consistent with the ‘Leninist' theory of the trade union consciousness of the working class (which Lenin defended at various times but not at others) and by the theorizations of degenerated councilism (but not by all of the Dutch left before the Second World War); the ICC decided that the rejection of subterranean maturation was ipso facto the fruit of councilism in our ranks. In the same way, the appearance of a non-marxist vision that reduced consciousness to a mere epiphenomenon, even though it denies both the role of a heterogeneous but inherent revolutionary consciousness in the class as a whole as well as the active role of revolutionary minorities, was interpreted just as unilaterally as a negation of the party. Thus in a resolution that was supposed to sum up the lessons of this debate, there was the following formulation:

"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."

This formulation is incorrect. It tends to intro­duce the notion of two consciousnesses. The notion of ‘extension' and ‘depth' applied to consciousness can and is, by other currents, interpreted as a question of qualitative and quantitative ‘dimen­sions' - especially since the formulation tends to reduce the question of class consciousness to theory and the role of the class to the ‘assimila­tion' of the program.

When reservations were expressed on this formula­tion, the new orientation on councilism, the great­est danger and on centrism were introduced into the organization. The present minority has formed a tendency in relation to all of this new theory in that it represents a regression in the theor­etical armory of the ICC.

The stakes of the present debate

This article has had to confine itself to answering the points raised in IR 40. But even though these debates have had only a faint echo in our press up to now, it is necessary to see the whole range of the new theory in order to understand the stakes of this debate.

To quote only our public press:

- In WR, the Kautskyist conception of class cons­ciousness is presented as simply a "bugbear"; the danger of substitutionism a mere diversion raised by ‘councilists'. The fact that giving a bourgeois role to the party does not defend the real function and necessity of the party any more than reject­ing all parties, seems to be fading out of our press.

- "The ICC, like the KAPD and Bilan, is convinced of the decisive role of the party in the revol­ution." (IR 40) But the KAPD and Bilan do not de­fend the same function and role of the party - why start to blur this? It is true that the Italian left regressed after Bilan but it always basically defended Bordiga's conceptions on the party. Bilan began a very important critique of the party as integrated into the state apparatus but it reprinted as its own Bordiga's texts on the relation of party and class with the same lack of understanding of the role of the councils (seen unilaterally through the prism of the anti-Gramsci struggle) and the development of consciousness and the theory of mediation. Furthermore, the conceptions of Internationalisme in the ‘40s are not the same as Bilan's. And there is yet another evolution between Internationalisme's position on class consciousness and the ICC's .

- In Revolution Internationale 125, the Chauvinist­ic elements Froissard and Cachin are rebaptised ‘centrists' and ‘opportunists' and thus proletarian according to the ICC's new theory while in reality they were counter-revolutionary elements. Calling them ‘centrists' on the model of the tendencies in the workers' movement in ascendancy only served to give an ideological cover to the disastrous policies of the Communist International against the Left in the formation of the CPs in the west. But the grave danger that the use of this concept of centrism represents in the period of decadence for any rev­olutionary organization including the ICC can be seen two months later in RI; in no.127 the CP is ‘centrist', in other words not so good but still proletarian, until 1934! This is in explicit contradiction to the Manifesto of the foundation of the ICC: "1924-26: the beginning of the theory of ‘building socialism in one country'. This abandonment of internationalism signified the death of the Communist International and the passage of its parties into the camp of the bourgeoisie."

It is now imperative, whatever the confusions on the use of the term ‘centrism' in the past and even among our own comrades to realize that today any conciliation with the positions of the class enemy in the epoch of state capitalism manifest itself by the direct surrender to and acceptance of capitalist ideology and no longer - as in the period of ascendancy - by the existence of ‘intermediary' positions, neither Marxist nor capitalist. And this realization must come before the gangrene of the theory of ‘centrism' destroys our basic principles.

The present debates coming during an acceleration of history are the price the ICC is paying for the superficiality of its theoretical work in the past few years.

Any attempt to apply the notion of ‘councilism, the greatest danger' coherently will lead to destruction of the ICC's position on class consciousness, the touchstone of a correct understanding of class struggle and the role of the future party within it; on the lessons of the revolutionary wave; on state capitalism; on the class line between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The ICC's ability to fulfill the tasks it was set up to meet in the future historic confrontation will depend, to a large extent, on our ability, all of us, to overcome the present weaknesses and redirect the orientation of the present debates.

JA

"Matters have reached such a pitch that today mankind is faced with two alternatives: it may perish in barbarism, or it may find salvation in socialism. As the outcome of the Great War it is impossible for the capitalist classes to find any issue from their difficulties while they maintain class rule...Socialism is inevitable, not merely because proletarians are no longer willing to live under the conditions imposed by the capitalist class, but further because, if the proletariat fails to fulfill its duties as a class, if it fails to realize socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom." (Rosa Luxemburg, Speech to the Founding Congress of the KPD)

Announced sixty years ago, this warning has acquired and acquires today an acute reality and current relevance. However, the correctness of this point of view, the only one which corresponds to the historical situation in which we live, does not, despite the sad experience of these sixty years separating us from the moment when those lines were written, represent the most widespread opinion - far from it.

From international confrontations to localized conflicts, localized conflicts preparing new international confrontations, the present and the preceding generations have been so marked by this atmosphere, this situation of permanent world war since the beginning of this century, that they have great difficulty in understanding its mean­ing and significance, and the perspectives that derive from it.

An all-pervasive ideology

An historical phenomenon, world war, through its omnipresent and permanent character, ends up haunting the spirit and becomes in the common view a natural phenomenon, inherent to human nat­ure. It goes without saying that this mythical view in the true sense of the term is largely nourished, supported and spread by the carriers of the dominant ideology, who are past masters of this permanent situation of war and the prep­aration for world war.

Pacifist ideology is itself the indispensable complement of this myth since it creates feel­ings of helplessness about every preparation for or situation of war.

At a moment when tensions are more and more sharpening on a worldwide scale, when the means of destruction are being accumulated at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to keep abreast with it, and when the world economic crisis, the source of world war, is plunging into a bottomless abyss, the old sermons are churned out more than ever.

"In face of the spectacular effectiveness of the American military-industrial system, it must seem astonishing that no consensus has been establish­ed in the USA around the idea that war, or its preparation, creates prosperity ...       

"Whereas periods of peace have always correspond­ed to periods of desolate (sic!) economic depr­ession, the high points of the economic conjunc­ture over four centuries now (broadly speaking, as far as Europe is concerned) have always been periods of conflict: the Thirty Years War, the Religious Wars (and their reconstruction), the European Wars of 1720, the Austrian War of Succession and the Seven Years War, with a pinnacle of prosperity in 1775, then - as after every peace-time depression - the wars of the Revolution and of the French Empire, followed by those of the end of the century at the moment of the Second Empire, then the First and Second World Wars." (J.Grapin, Forteresse America, ed Grasset, p 85)

This quotation summarizes the essentials of the dominant and decadent thought of our epoch. Dressed up in the clothing of common sense and objectivity, its goal is to justify war by a pseudo-prosperity; its method is confusion and historical amalgams, its philosophy returns to the crude morality of man being belligerent by nature. It comes as a surprise to nobody therefore that in the chapter from which the passage quoted was taken, one can read:

"It seems that man is organically incapable of replying to the question, ‘if he isn't making war, what is he to do?'"

We totally reject this ahistorical and meta­physical thought which traces a common trait in every war, from the Middle Ages to the last two world wars.

An amalgam between all the wars in the period to the present day is an abstraction and a complete historical falsehood, Both in their course and implications and in their causes, the wars of the Middle Ages are different to the Napoleonic Wars and the wars of the 18th century, just as the two world wars are different to all of these.

In affirming such absurdities, the theoreticians of the contemporary bourgeoisie stand far below the bourgeois theoreticians of the last century, for example General Von Clausewitz who declared: "Semi-barbarian Tartars, the republics of the ancient world, the lords and the merchant cities of the Middle Ages, the kings of the 18th century, the princes and finally the peoples of the 19th century: all waged war in their own manner, went about it differently, using different means and for different goals ..." (General Von Clausewitz, On War)

That the ideologists, advisers, researchers, parliamentarians, military men and politicians express and defend - and they are appointed to do so - this vision of the world in which war is presented as the driving force of history, is not surprising. What, on the contrary, is really terr­ible, is when we find this same approach among those who want to be a revolutionary force. Stripped of its moral attributes and other misty considerations about human nature, this time it's through an aura of a supposed materialist anti-marxist approach that certain currents of thought arrive at the same conclusions, considering war to be the driving force of history. This is what is behind the idea that war is a favorable obj­ective condition for a world revolution, behind the judgment of militarism as being a solution to overproduction, behind the vision of wars - and we are dealing here with world wars, peculiar to our epoch - as the means of expression and the solution to the contradictions of capitalism.

We don't want to say here that these elements share the preoccupations of the bourgeoisie and its advisers, something which would be gratuitous and unfounded. We don't question their conviction, but rather their analysis, approach and method.

This consists in brushing over the whole history of this century and of its two world wars, minimizing the present paramount importance of the al­ternative that is so vital for action: revolution or world war, radical transformation of the means and the goals of production, destruction of bour­geois political power, or the equally radical destruction of human society.

In the period between the two wars, revolutionar­ies saw in the perspective of a second world war, which approached more rapidly with each year, the future of the revolutionary process. Thus they en­visaged this future not as a catastrophic perspec­tive but as one opening the door to revolution as in the years 1917-18. The Second World War and its course cruelly destroyed this illusion. The strength of these comrades resided not in a blind obstinacy incapable of putting in question a false vision contradicted by historical reality, but on the contrary in their capacity to draw the lessons of historical reality, thereby permitting revolutionary theory to make a step forward.

The historical evolution of the question of war

Capitalism was born in dirt and blood, and its worldwide expansion was punctuated in the 19th century by a multitude of wars: the Napoleonic Wars which were to shake the feudal structures which were suffocating Europe, the colonial wars on the African and Asiatic continents, wars of independence such as in the Americas, wars of annexation such as in 1870 between France and Germany, and a host of other ones ...      

All of these wars represented either a culmin­ating point in the development of capitalism in its march of conquest across the globe, or the overturning of the old agricultural and feudal political structures in Europe. In other words, through these wars, capital unified the world market while dividing the world into irredeemably competing nations.

But all things come to an end, and the dizzying ascent of capitalism in its conquest of the world came to an end too, in the limitations of the world market. By the end of the last century, the world was divided into colonial ownerships and zones of influence between the different dev­eloped capitalist nations. From then on, war and militarism started to take on another dynamic: imperialism, the struggle to the death between the different nations for the division of the world, the limited extent of which no longer sufficed to satisfy the expansionist appetites of them all - appetites which have become immense in relation to their previous development. In order to describe this situation, we couldn't do better than Rosa Luxemburg, who drew the following pic­ture:

"As early as the eighties a strong tendency to­wards colonial expansion became apparent. Eng­land secured control of Egypt and created for itself in South Africa a powerful colonial emp­ire. France took possession of Tunis in North Africa and Tonkin in East Asia; Italy gained a foothold in Abyssinia; Russia accomplished its conquests in central Asia and pushed forward into Manchuria; Germany won its first colonies in Africa and in the South Sea, and the United States joined the circle when it procured the Philippines with ‘interests' in Eastern Asia. This period of' feverish conquests has brought on, beginning with the Chinese-Japanese War in 1898, a practically uninterrupted chain of' bloody wars, reaching its height in the great Chinese invasion and closing with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.

"All these occurrences, coming blow upon blow, created new, extra-European antagonisms on all sides: between Italy and France in Northern Afr­ica, between France and England in Egypt, between England and Russia in central Asia, between Russ­ia and Japan in Eastern Asia, between Japan and England in China, between the United States and Japan in the Pacific Ocean ...            

"... it was clear to everybody therefore, that the secret underhand war of each capitalist nation against every other, on the backs of the Asia­tic and African peoples must sooner or later lead to a general reckoning, that the wind that was sown in Africa and Asia would return to Europe as a terrific storm, the more certainly since incr­eased armament of the European states was the constant associate of these Asiatic and African occurrences; that the European world war would have to come to an outbreak as soon as the part­ial and changing conflicts between the imperial­ist states found a centralized axis, a conflict of sufficient magnitude to group them, for the time being, into large, opposing factions. This situation was created by the appearance of Ger­man imperialism." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet)

With the First World War, war thus radically changed its nature, its form, its contents and its historic implications.

As its name implies, it becomes worldwide, and it impregnates the entire life of society in a permanent manner. The capitalist world as a whole cannot re-establish a semblance of peace, except in order to wipe out a revolutionary upsurge such as in 1917-18-19, or, under the irresistible pressure of contradictions which it does not control, in order to prepare a new conflict at a higher level.    

This was the case between the two world wars. And since the Second World War, the world has not wit­nessed a single moment of real peace. Already at the end of the last one, the axis of a future world war was posed - namely the confrontation between the Russian and American blocs. Simil­arly, the dimension which it would take was est­ablished by the atomic bombardment of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Thus, whereas in the last century militarism re­mained a peripheral component of industrial production, and whereas warlike confrontations themselves found their theatre of operation on the periphery of the developed industrial centers, in our epoch armaments production is bloated out of all proportion to production as a whole and tends to take over all the energies and vital forces of society The industrial centers become the stakes and theatre of military oper­ations.

It is this process of the military sector supp­lanting and subordinating the economy for its own purposes which we have witnessed since the begin­ning of the century, a process which today is undergoing a shattering acceleration.

World war has its roots in the generalized crisis of the capitalist economy. This crisis is its source of nourishment. To this extent, world war, the highest expression of the historical crisis of capitalism, summarizes and concentrates in its own nature all the characteristics of a process of self-destruction.

"In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction .... And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce ." (Communist Manifesto)

From the moment when this crisis can no longer find a temporary outlet in an expansion of the world market, the world wars of our century express and translate this phenomenon of the self-destruction of a system which by itself cannot overcome its historical contradictions.

Militarism as an investment: war and prosperity - militarism and the economy               

The worst of errors concerning the question of war is to consider militarism as a ‘field of accumulation', an investment of some kind which will be profitable in periods of war, and war itself to be a means, if not ‘the means' of the expan­sion of capitalism.

This conception, when it is not a simple justification for militarism as with the ideologies of the bourgeoisie already quoted, consists of a schematic vision on the part of revolutionaries, coming for the most part from a wrong interpretation of wars in the last century.

The exact position of militarism in relation to the totality of the process of production could give rise to illusions in the phase of worldwide capitalist expansion and the creation of the world market. By contrast, the historical sit­uation opened up with the First World War, in placing war in an entirely different context to that of the preceding century, cleared up any ambiguities about a ‘military investment'. In the last century, when wars remained local and short-lived, militarism did not represent a productive investment in the true sense of the term, but always a wasteful expenditure. In any case, the source of profit did not lie in the exploitation of the workforce in uniform mobilized under the national flag, in the productive forces immobilized in the forces of destruction which weaponry represents, but solely in the enlargement of the colonial empire, of the world market, in the sources of raw materials exploitable on a large scale and at almost zero wage costs, in newly-created political structures permitting a capit­alist exploitation of the work force. In the dec­adent era, apart from companies producing armam­ents, capital, considered globally, draws no pro­fit whatsoever from armaments production and the maintenance of a standing army. On the contrary, all the costs engendered by militarism are going down the drain. Anything that goes through the industrial production of armaments in order to be transformed into means of destruction cannot be re-introduced in the process of production with the aim of producing new values and commod­ities. The only thing which armaments can give rise to is destruction and death - that's all.

This argument about ‘military investment', basing itself on the experience of the wars of the last century, is not new We can find exactly the same thing being defended by Social Democracy at the time of the 1914-18 war. Listen again to Rosa Luxemburg:

"According to the official version of the leaders of the Social Democracy, that was so readily adopted without criticism, victory of the German forces would mean, for Germany, unhampered, boundless industrial growth; defeat, however, industrial ruin. On the whole, this conception coincides with that generally accepted during the war of 1870. But the period of capitalist growth that followed the war of 1870 was not caused by the war, but resulted rather from the political union of the various German states, even though this union took the form of the crippled future that Bismarck established as the German Empire. Here the industrial impetus came from this union, inspite of the war and the manifold reactionary hindrances that followed in its wake. What the victorious war itself accomplished was to firmly establish the military monarchy and Prussian Junkerdom in Germany; the defeat of France led to the liquidation of its Empire and the establishment of a republic.

But today the situation is different in all of the nations in question. Today war does not function as a dynamic force to provide for rising young capitalism the indispensable political conditions for its 'national' development." (Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet)         

Moreover, this quotation is of twofold interest, because of its content, to be sure, but also because it stems from Rosa Luxemburg. As it happ­ens, all the revolutionary militants who defend the idea that militarism can constitute a ‘field of accumulation' for capital draw on the argumentation in a text by the very same Rosa Luxem­burg, a text written before the war of 1914-18 (The Accumulation of Capital) and which contains a chapter in which she herself defends the erron­eous idea that militarism constitutes a ‘field of accumulation'.

We see here, how the experience of the First World War made her radically revise her position (an example which our comrades should follow!)

War and prosperity

The other facet of this myth of militarism as an investment can be expressed in the following man­ner: the military domain perhaps burdens public finances at the beginning, provoking enormous deficits, devouring a large part of the social wage, consuming an important and essential part of the productive apparatus which of itself can no longer be used for the production of the means of consumption - but, after the wars, all these ‘investments' are justified by a new phase of prosperity Conclusion: military investment does not become productive immediately, in the short term, but it does so in the long term.

The so-called ‘prosperity' which followed the First World War was relative and limited. In fact, until 1924, Europe was sunk in an economic mire (especially in Germany where this more took on cataclysmic proportions), so that by 1929, its production levels had hardly caught up with those of 1913. The only country where this term had a semblance of reality was the USA (from where the term ‘prosperity' originated), a country whose contribution to the war was the most limited in duration and which suffered no destruction on its own soil.

As far as the period of reconstruction following World War II is concerned, while it spanned the years from 1950 to the end of the ‘60s, this is fundamentally because the productive apparatus ­of the leading economy of the world, far ahead of all the others, that of the USA, had not been destroyed by the war. With a production represent­ing 40% of total world production, the USA could permit Europe and Japan to reconstruct, despite the terrible destruction of the Second World War. Having arrived late on the world market, bene­fitting from the immense resources offered by the vast American continent, both with regard to materials and extra-capitalist markets, American capitalism - up until the mid-twenties - followed a somewhat specific dynamic in becoming the prin­cipal economy of the world, while old Europe was being plunged into crisis (the USA only particip­ated in the First World War, very minimally). It's only around 1925 that, having exhausted the resources of its own dynamic, US capital began to plunge into crisis, a crisis with the dimensions of the American economy.

It's in this way that the American economy, with the Second World War, turned all its energy ‑ militarily, to be sure - towards the rest of the world, while still being spared the destruction of war on its own soil.

One of the manifestations of this situation was the constitution of the Russian bloc, and at the end of the Second World War this gave rise to the ­conditions for a new worldwide confrontation, the preparations for which are accelerating today.

In twenty years world capitalism has cleared out every crack and crevice, exploited to the last square foot of the globe every possibility of extending the world market. One of the expressions of this is decolonization which opened these pseudo-autonomous nations to the free play of the competition of the world market - in other words to the struggle for influence between the two great imperialist blocs. This results in the fanning of the flames of local conflicts which, from Africa to Asia, have continued ever since as moments in the confrontation between the two great imperialist blocs.

One can call this ‘prosperity' perhaps; we for our part call it by its name: butchery, barbarism and decadence.

War as a controllable process

We have stated above that the characteristic of the crisis of overproduction, self-destruction, finds its highest expression in world war.

The same goes for the capacity of capitalism to control the military spiral and the mechanisms of war. Just as the bourgeoisie is incapable of mastering the process which plunges the economy into a chronic and increasingly devastating crisis, it is incapable of mastering the increasingly murderous military machine which menaces the     very existence of humanity.

Moreover, as with the economic crisis, each measure which the bourgeoisie takes to protect itself rebounds against it. Just as, in face of overproduction, it decides on a policy of general indebtedness, not seeing that this policy of desperation projects the crisis to previously unattained heights - and with no way leading back; in the same way, in face of the military threat posed by its adversary, a particular bourgeois bloc decides to develop more and more powerful weaponry, not seeing that the adversary ends up doing the same, and that this race never stops.

The characteristics of nuclear armaments make this situation very clear. At the end of the Second World War they had become a dissuasive force: the USSR would never have taken the risk of a world war in face of the menace of the atomic umbrella of the US bloc. However, by the end of the ‘50s, the USSR had equipped itself with armaments of a similar nature. For the first time in its history the USA found itself menaced on its own territory.

At this point we were still being reassured: nuclear armaments would remain a ‘deterrent force'. An immense chasm separated classical armaments from nuclear armaments, and the latter were supposed to have the vocation of holding back the two great world powers from any step towards a direct confrontation.

The history of these last 15 years, from the end of reconstruction to the present day, has swept aside this happy dream. In the course of these 15 years we have witnessed, slowly at first but in an accel‑erating manner, a process of the modernization of every kind of armaments, both conventional and nuclear. Nuclear weaponry has been miniaturized and diversified. Long-range missiles with massive firepower (inter-continental missiles) are being supplemented by middle-range types with a selective firepower (the famous SS-20 and Pershing which are springing up like mushrooms in eastern and Western Europe); these weapons are aimed at making possible a geographically limited nuclear confrontation.

Moreover, in addition to the parade of nuclear weapons developed for the purpose of retaliation, there is the development of defense systems, in other words of selective anti-missile systems, systems culminating at the present moment in what is known as 'star wars', with the employment of satellites.

On the other hand, conventional weaponry, in the process of its accumulation and modernization, is itself integrating its own nuclear firepower; a development which finds its clearest contemporary expression in the neutron bomb, a ‘close combat' nuclear weapon, in other words usable in a conven­tional conflict. A happy prospect and a fine succ­ess!

The alibi for the bombardment of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was, as stupid as it may seem today, ‘peace'. The same goes for the first big atomic bombs. In reality, the historical crisis of capitalism and the armaments race which it gives rise to has only succeeded in closing the gap which used to exist between conventional and nuclear weaponry, thereby delivering the material means of escalating the lowest level of conventional conflict to the highest level of massive destruction.

In conclusion we can say not only that the bourgeoisie is incapable of controlling armaments development today, but that in the event of a world-wide conflict it will not be able to control a terrible escalation towards generalized destruction.

From a certain point of view, the slogan ‘socialism or barbarism' is outdated today. The development of the decadence of capitalism means that today things must be posed as follows: socialism or the continuation of barbarism, socialism or the destruction of humanity and of all life-forms on earth.

We have arrived today at a fateful point in the history of humanity, where the existence of fantastic material and scientific capacities provide the means either for self-destruction or for total liberation from the scourge of class society and of scarcity.

We have dealt elsewhere with the argument that war will be a favorable condition for a revolutionary initiative (see our articles in IR 18 - ‘The Historic Course' - and 30 - ‘Why the Alternative is War or Revolution'). Here, therefore, we shall only examine some aspects of this question.

Those who affirm that world war is a favorable, even necessary condition for a revolutionary pro­cess, base this extremely dangerous assertion on ‘historical experience': the history of the Paris Commune which arose after the siege of Paris in the war of 1870, and even more so the experience of the Russian Revolution.

Our way of viewing history teaches us exactly the contrary. The experience of the first revolutionary wave, which gave rise to a fantastic uprising in which the working class succeeded in emerging from the butchery and the ruins of four years of war and affirm its revolutionary internationalism, will not repeat itself.

Looked at more closely, the situation at the beginning of this century shows us that this was a particular situation from which we cannot extrapolate the characteristics of our century, unless we do so negatively.

In any case, it mustn't be lost sight of that the first revolutionary wave, launched in Russia, did not spread to the principal countries. Neither in Britain nor in France, and even less so in the USA, did the working class succeed in taking up the revolutionary flame lit in Russia and in Germany.

We are not inventing anything in drawing the bal­ance sheet that war is the worst possible situation in which to launch a revolutionary pro­cess At the beginning of this century in Germany for example, revolutionaries drew the same lesson:

"The revolution followed four years of tear, four years during which, schooled by the social democracy and the trade unions, the German proletariat had behaved with intolerable ignominy and had repudiated its socialist obligations ... We Marxists, whose guiding principle is a recognition of historical revolution, could hardly expect that in Germany which had known the spectacle of 4th August, and which during more than four years had reaped the harvest soon on that day, there should suddenly occur on 9th November, 1918 a glorious revolution, inspired with definite class consciousness and directed     towards a clearly conceived aim. What happened on 9th November was more the collapse of the existing imperialism than a victory for a new principle." (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Speech to the Founding Congress of the KPD')

The Second World War, much more devastating and murderous, longer and more colossal, expressing at a higher level its worldwide character, did not in the least give rise to a revolutionary situation anywhere in the world. In particular, what allowed for fraternizations at the front during the First World War - the prolonged trench warfare in which the soldiers of the two camps were in direct contact - could not be repeated during the      Second World War with its massive use of tanks and aircraft. Not only did the Second World War not constitute a fertile terrain for the beginning of a revolutionary alternative, its disastrous consequences lasted much longer than the war itself. Thereafter, it took two decades before the struggle, the combativity and the sparks of consciousness of the proletariat reappeared in the world at the end of the ‘60s.

Twice this century, world war has rung out the darkest hour. The second time, the raging storm of barbarism unleashed on humanity was incomparably more powerful and destructive than the first time. Today, if such a catastrophe were to take place again, the very existence of humanity would be under threat. Apart from the ideological plague which, in a war situation, infests the consciousness of millions of workers, erecting an iron barrier against any tentative towards a revolutionary transformation, the objective situation of a world turned to ruins would wipe out this possibility.

In the event of a third world war, not only would any possibility of historically overcoming capitalism be swept away, but moreover we can be almost certain that humanity itself would not survive it. This underlines the crucial importance of the present struggles of the proletariat as the only obstacle to the outbreak of this cataclysm.

M. Prenat

IR-41, 2nd Quarter 1985

INTRODUCTION

Our intention in the first part of this article (see IR 40 [7]) was to show that the formation of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party by the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista) and the Communist Workers’ Organisation is in no way positive for the workers’ movement. This, not because we enjoy playing the part of the “eternal disparager”, but because:

-- the IBRP’s organisational practice has no solid basis, as we have seen during the International Conferences;

-- BC and the CWO are far from clear on the fundamental positions of the communist programme – on the trade union question in particular.

In this second part, we return to the same themes. On the parliamentary question, we shall see that the IBRP has ‘resolved’ the disagreements between BC and the CWO by ‘forgetting’ them. On the national question, we will see how BC/CWO’s confusions have led to a practice of conciliation towards the nationalist leftism of the Iranian UCM [1] [8].

THE QUESTION OF PARLIAMENTARISM

As with the union question, BC’s 1982 platform is neither different nor clearer on the parliamentary question than the Platform of 1952: BC has simply crossed out the more compromising parts. In 1982, as in 1952, BC writes:

“From the Congress of Livorno to today, the Party has never considered abstention from electoral campaigns as one of its principles, nor has it ever accepted, nor will it accept, regular and undifferentiated participation in them. In keeping with its class tradition, the Party will consider the problem of whether to participate on each occasion as it arises. It will take into account the political interests of the revolutionary struggle...” (Platform of the PCInt, 1952 and 1982).

But whereas in 1952, BC spoke of “the Party’s tactics (participation in the electoral campaign only, with written and spoken propaganda; presentation of candidates; intervention in parliament)” (1952 Platform), today, “given the line of development of capitalist domination, the Party recognises that the tendency is towards increasingly rarer opportunities for communists to use parliament as a revolutionary tribune.” (1982 Platform). When it comes down to it, this argument is of the same profundity as that of any bourgeois party which decides not to contest a seat for fear of losing its deposit.

For once, the CWO does not agree with its “fraternal organisation”:

“Parliament is the fig-leaf behind which hides the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The real organs of power in fact lie outside parliament... to the point where parliament is no longer even the executive council of the ruling class, but merely a sophisticated trap for fools... (...)... The concept of electoral choice is today the greatest swindle ever.” (Platform of the CWO, French version) [2] [9].

If the CWO want to take BC for fools, fine. But they should not do the same with the rest of the revolutionary milieu nor with the working class in general. Here is the IBRP, the self-proclaimed summit of programmatic clarity and militant will, englobing two positions which are not only different, but incompatible, antagonistic even. And yet, we have never seen so much as a hint of a confrontation between these two positions. As we have already pointed out [3] [10], the platform of the IBRP resolves the question, not by ‘minimising’ it, but by... ‘forgetting’ it. Perhaps this is the “responsibility” that we “have a right to expect from a serious leading force”.

It might be argued that parliamentarism is a secondary question. And it is indeed true that we will probably never have the pleasure of listening to the speech in parliament by an ‘honourable member’ from the CWO or BC. But to accept this kind of argument would mean fudging the fundamental issue. The abstentionist principle was one of the central positions which distinguished the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party, grouped around Bordiga (and which was called, precisely, the “Abstentionist Fraction”), from all the different varieties of reformists and opportunists. Today, BC does not even defend this initial position of Bordiga but the position he adopted in the Communist International “by discipline” (i.e. abstentionism as a tactic, not as a principle).

As for the CWO, the casual way in which they go back on their own declaration that “no theoretical aspect should remain in the dark, within an organisation as much as between organisations” (CWO Platform) only confirms that their position on the parliamentary question (as on so many others) is born of mere empirical observation. In fact, the anti-parliamentary position must spring from a profound understanding of the implications of capitalist decadence on the bourgeois state’s mode of organisation – state capitalism. Not understanding the parliamentary question means being incapable of understanding the political manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie’s different factions. For the latter, parliamentary power has become a perfectly secondary problem in relation to the demands of social control and mystification. It is thus hardly surprising that the CWO has consistently admitted its “inability to understand” our analyses of the ‘left in opposition’ [4] [11].

But their incomprehension of the implications of capitalist decadence, and so of the material bases of their own positions, is no excuse for the CWO’s practice on the parliamentary question. In an article published in Workers’ Voice no. 19 (‘Capitalist Elections and Communism’, Nov/Dec 1984), the CWO achieves the extraordinary feat of writing a long article on parliamentarism, quoting the positions of the Abstentionist Fraction (ie. the revolutionary left organised around Bordiga) of the Italian Socialist Party, without saying one word about the positions of their “fraternal organisation”, Battaglia Comunista. This kind of practice, which consists of ‘forgetting’ or hiding divergences of principle in the interests of superficial unity, has a name in the workers’ movement: that name is opportunism.

THE NATIONAL QUESTION AND CONCILIATION WITH LEFTISM

We have already seen that for the IBRP the difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ is the same as that between a closed door and an open window. The IBRP’s platform begins by closing the door on national liberation movements:

“The era of history in which national liberation was progressive for the capitalist world ended a long time ago. Therefore, all theories which consider the national question to be still open in some regions of the world – and thus relegate the proletariat’s principles, tactics and strategy to a policy of alliances with the national bourgeoisie (or worse, with one of the opposing imperialist fronts) – are to be absolutely rejected.” (Communist Review no. 1, p.9, April 1984). No sooner said, that it opens the window to conciliation in practice with leftism: “Though demands for certain elementary freedoms might be included in revolutionary agitation, communist party tactics aim for the overthrow of the state and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Ibid, p.10, our emphasis).

This ambiguity comes as no surprise to us, since Battaglia Comunista in particular has never been capable of carrying its critique of the CI’s positions on the national question through to their conclusion. In their interventions at the 2nd International Conference (November 1978), BC speaks of “the need to denounce the nature of so-called national liberation struggles as props for an imperialist policy”, but immediately follows this up by saying: “if the national liberation movement does not pose the problem of the communist revolution, it is necessarily and inevitably the victim of imperialist domination” (2nd Conference Proceedings, Vol. 2, p. 62 – these quotes are all taken from the French version). With this little “if”, BC stops half-way. This “if” expresses BC’s inability to understand that the “national movement” can never pose “the problem of the communist revolution”.  Only the proletariat’s independent struggle, on the terrain of the defence of its class interests, can pose this problem. As long as the proletariat struggles on the national terrain it is doomed to defeat since, in the period of decadent capitalism, all fractions of the ruling class are united against the working class, including the so-called ‘anti-imperialist fractions’. And as soon as the proletariat struggles on its own ground, it must fight the nationalism of the bourgeoisie. i.e. Only on its own ground of the international, and therefore anti-national, class struggle can the proletariat give a lead to the struggles of the poverty-stricken masses of the underdeveloped countries. And while the outcome of the workers’ struggle in these countries will indeed be determined by the struggle in capital’s industrial heartlands, this in no way diminishes their responsibility as a fraction of the world proletariat – and this includes the revolutionaries within that fraction. Because BC has not understood this, because they remain incapable of pushing their critique of the CI’s positions right to the limit, they end up by affirming that it is necessary to “lead the movements of national liberation into the proletarian revolution” (2nd Conference, Vol. 2,  p.62), and to “work in the direction of a class cleavage within the movement, not by judging it from the outside. Now, this cleavage means the creation of a pole of reference linked with the movement” (Ibid, p. 63, our emphasis).

Hardly surprising then, that when the UCM states: “We reject the idea that the movements (i.e. of national liberation – ICC note) are unable to attack capitalism in a revolutionary manner... We say these movements failed because the bourgeoisie had the leadership of them... It is possible for communists to take the leadership” (4th Conference  (September 1982), Proceedings,  p. 19), they add: “We agree with the way Battaglia approach the question” (Ibid).

Undoubtedly, it was the desire to “create a pole of reference linked with the movement” that led BC and the CWO to invite the UCM to the “Fourth International Conference of the Communist Left”. As far as the class nature of the UCM is concerned, we have little to add to the denunciation of the Communist Party of Iran (formed by the fusion of the UCM and Komala) published in the Communist Review no.1 (April 1984). This article shows us that “there exists no difference between the state capitalist vision of the left in Europe and that of the CPI”, and that the CPI is “communist in name only”. But the fact that the IBRP writes these words in 1984 puts us in mind of the young lover, who only realises that his loved one is religious... when she runs off with the vicar. The IBRP would like us to believe that the CPI’s programme dates from 1983, and did not exist “when we were carrying on a polemic with them (the UCM); i.e. before the UCM accepted the programme of the CPI” (Communist Review, no. 1, French edition p. 10). Nothing could be further from the truth. The CPI’s programme was published in English in May 1982, and a ‘note’ added by Komala shows that the two organisations had been holding discussion with a view to unification from 1981 onwards. Five months later, the UCM, which explicitly bases itself on the “Programme of the CPI”, is “seriously selected” by BC and the CWO, to “begin the process of clarification of the tasks of the Party” at the “Fourth International Conference”.

Better still – how gently, how circumspectly, ‘understandingly’ BC and the CWO answer the UCM!

“We agree generally with the SUCM’s intervention (on ‘bourgeois democratic revolutions’ – ICC note)” (BC). “The UCM’s programme appears to be that of the proletarian dictatorship” (BC again). “The term “democratic revolution” is confusing” (CWO); “we feel it is an idea (the “uninterrupted revolution” – ICC note) that has long been superseded (BC) (all quotes from proceedings of the Fourth Conference).

Even in 1984, the IBRP is not yet ready to denounce the CPI for what it is – an ultra-radical faction of the nationalist bourgeoisie. No, for the IBRP, “the CPI and the elements that gravitate in its orbit” are still “interlocutors”, while participation in imperialist war is no more than “the serious practical errors to which a political line lacking in coherence on the historical level may lead” (Communist Review no. 2, French edition, p.2).

BC and the CWO would do better to reappropriate in practice, and not in their present platonic manner, these words of Lenin :

“The person who now speaks only of a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle” (Letters on Tactics, published with the April Theses). “Only lazy people do not swear by internationalism these days. Even the chauvinist defencists, even Plekhanov and Potresov, even Kerensky, call themselves internationalists. It becomes the duty of the proletarian party all the more urgently, therefore, to clearly, precisely, and definitely counterpoise internationalism in deed to internationalism in word” (Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution).

Instead, here is where BC and the CWO’s desire to be “linked with the movement” leads: to holding ‘conferences’ with a bourgeois organisation that participates in imperialist war. “Linked with the movement”, fine – but which movement?

This attitude, this behaviour in practice, of the CWO and BC, and now of the IBRP, is not new in the workers’ movement. It is that of “the ‘Centre’ (which) consists of people who vacillate between the social-chauvinists and the true internationalists... The ‘Centre’ is for ‘unity’, the Centre is opposed to a split” (which today, the CWO “Second Series” [5] [12] describes as our “sectarianism” towards the UCM);  “The ‘Centre’ is a realm of honeyed petty bourgeois phrases, of internationalism in words and cowardly opportunism and fawning on the social-chauvinists in deeds” (Lenin, op. cit.). Although today, the 57 varieties of leftism, mouths full of “internationalism in words”, have taken the place of the out-and-out social-chauvinists, the centrist behaviour that Lenin denounced remains the same.

THE EMERGENCE OF COMMUNIST FORCES

If BC and the CWO have such difficulty in “counter-posing internationalism in deeds to internationalism in words”, this is also because they are seriously weakened by their incredible vision of the emergence of revolutionary groups, in particular in the under-developed countries. This in Revolutionary Perspectives no. 21 (1983), the CWO explains that there are only three possibilities for “the development of any political clarification”:

“1) The formation of a communist vanguard in these areas is irrelevant, since their proletarians are irrelevant to the revolution. We reject this as a conception verging on chauvinism... (...) ...

2) ... a communist party will emerge spontaneously out of the class struggle in these areas. That is, without any organic contact with the communist left... the proletariat of these areas will create a vanguard directly, which, out of the material of its own existence will formulate a global communist outlook. Such a view is spontaneism gone mad...

3) ...certain currents and individuals will begin to question the basic assumptions of leftism, and embark on a criticism of their own positions...” (p.7).

The first “possibility” is supposedly the position of the ICC, which allows the CWO to denounce us for “Euro-chauvinism”. Once again, the CWO reveal themselves as past-masters in the polemics of innuendo: not one of our texts is quoted to support this ludicrous accusation, and the supposed words of one of our militants (quoted in the same article) must have been gathered one day when the CWO had forgotten to wash their ears. Suffice it to say, here, that if we have, for ten years, constantly worked at contacts and discussion in Latin America, Australia, India, Japan and in the Eastern bloc... it is certainly not because we consider “the proletarians of these areas” as “irrelevant for the revolution”.

The second position is also supposed to belong to us. We would point out, first of all, that this vision – that sees the party emerging on a national basis and not internationally right from the start – belongs not to the ICC but to Battaglia (but then, contradictions have never bothered the CWO!). Moreover, it is obvious that the emergence of groups based on class positions can only be the fruit of a bitter struggle against the dominant ideology, all the more so in the underdeveloped countries, where militants must confront the full weight of prevailing nationalism as well as the extremely minoritarian situation of the proletariat. The survival of these groups thus depends on their ability to raise the lessons of the workers’ struggles against “their” supposedly “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie to the theoretical and militant level, by establishing contact with the political organisations of the world proletariat’s most advanced and experienced fraction – at the heart of the capitalist world, in Europe.

The third position – that of the IBRP – boils down to this: the emergence of proletarian groups is to be sought within the enemy class itself, amongst the leftist organisations whose function is precisely that of diverting, deceiving and massacring the working class, in the name of ‘socialism’. The IBRP demonstrably understands nothing of the dialectical movement of political groups. Whereas proletarian organisations are constantly subjected to the influence of the dominant ideology – which may eventually corrupt them to the point where they pass over into the bourgeois camp – the opposite is not the case. Bourgeois organisations, from the very fact that they belong to the ruling class, undergo no “ideological pressure” from the proletariat, and it is unheard of for a leftist organisation to pass over, as such, to the working class.

Moreover, the IBRP’s perspectives are founded on a false assumption: that groups like the UCM, originating in the Maoist movement, appear isolated from each other, each in its own country. The real world is quite different – which only goes to show the IBRP’s naivety. In fact, the life of these groups is concentrated in various countries of exile as much as in their “countries of origin” – above all among political refugees, heavily infiltrated by ordinary ‘European’ leftism. A quick glance at their press reveals, for example, the UCM’s Bolshevik Message publishing greetings from the one-time El-Oumami [6] [13] , or the Maoist group Proletarian Emancipation (India) publishing – without a word of criticism – the ‘Programme of the CP of Iran’. Our combat against these organisations is the same as our combat against leftism in the developed countries – and too bad for ‘Euro-chauvinism’.

Without a doubt, the organisations that have emerged from the working class in Europe, where the class has the greatest political and organisational experience, have an enormous responsibility towards the proletarian groups of the under-developed countries, who must fight often in difficult conditions of physical repression, and constantly under the pressure of the surrounding nationalist ideology. They will not fulfil these responsibilities by blurring the class line that separates leftism from communism; a striking example of this kind of ‘blurring’ is the publication side by side (in Proletarian Emancipation) of an article by the CWO on class consciousness, and the ‘Programme of the CP of Iran’.

CONCLUSION

We are not against the regroupment of revolutionaries: the ICC’s existence, and our work since the ICC’s foundation ten years ago is there to prove it. But we are opposed to superficial regroupments which depend on opportunism as regards their own disagreements, and on centrism and conciliation as regards bourgeois positions. The history of the PCI (Programma Comunista) has shown that this kind of regroupment inevitably ends up by losing, not winning, new strength for the proletarian camp. This is why we call on BC and the CWO to conduct a merciless criticism of their present positions and practice, so that they may truly take part in the work that must lead to the worldwide Party of the proletariat.

Arnold

"... We owe this whole salad above all to Liebknecht and his mania for giving favor to scribblers of cultivated rubbish and people occupying bourgeois positions, thanks to whom one can play at being important in front of the philistines. He is incapable of resisting the litterateurs and shop-keepers who make gooey eyes at socialism. But in Germany it's these people, who are precisely the most dangerous, and Marx and I have never stopped fighting them. ...their petty bourgeois viewpoint always enters into conflict with the radicalism of the prolet­arian masses and they always try to falsify class positions." (Engels to Bebel, 22 June 1885).

The products of Spartacus Editions in France aren't in the habit of giving up their idee fixe: distorting the main acquisitions of the workers' movement. The eclectic varieties of works published have the same basic meeting point: the assimilation of Bolshevism with Stalinism and Jacobinism with the aim of negat­ing any role for the party within the proletar­iat. This is the essential point of reference, the nec plus ultra of the two books Au-dela du Parti by the Collectif Junius (1982) and De 1'usage de Marx en Temps de Crise by ‘les Amis de Spartacus' (1984). These books have been put together by former militants of the PIC[1] and by a whole series of anarchist-councilist elem­ents. The Editions Spartacus have a somewhat confidential distribution, but it's still enough to influence elements of the class looking for some coherence on an international level, and to confuse or even destroy efforts to seriously reappropriate the past history of the workers' movement and its theoretical legacy. This is why our intention here is to denounce something that should not be taken as valid currency, despite the citations prised out of texts by Marx.

I. Rejecting the necessity for the Party

a) What has the party form of organization to do with the proletarian class struggle?

The subtitle of Au-dela du Parti claims that it is going to deal with "the evolution of the con­cept of the party since Marx." Straightaway the introduction says:

"The critique of the concept of the party, inc­luding that of the councilists and the diverse varieties of modernism (situationists, associat­ionists, autonomists of all kinds...), has fail­ed to clearly situate the origins of the erron­eous concept of the party in the theses of Marx himself. Worse, it has tried to oppose his theory of the proletarian party to all those who, beginning with social democracy and Lenin­ism, have assimilated the party with the repres­entation of the proletariat, with the incarnat­ion of its class consciousness."

From the beginning the enterprise of the former PIC militants betrays its intellectual approach. They don't situate themselves on the standpoint of the interests of the prolet­arian movement as a whole, but on the abstract standpoint of a "concept". The marxist approach is very different:

"You cannot study or understand the history of the organism, the party, unless you situate it in the general context of the different stages the movement of the class has gone through, of the problems posed to the class, of its efforts at any given moment to become aware of these problems, to respond to them adequately, to draw the lessons from experience and use these lessons as a springboard towards future strug­gles." (‘The Party and its Relationship to the Class', IR 35).

But let's see if the Collectif Junius does any better than the modernists. Going back to the time of Marx, the Collectif develops its critiques of the conceptions defended by the successive Internationals, then by the fractions who resisted the degeneration of October 1917 and by the ICC. By this going back into history they discover that it's a simple matter to re­write it according to their taste:

"...Thus, for Marx, going beyond the purely economic struggle (formation of unions) onto the level of political struggle was expressed above all by the constitution of a party of the proletariat, distinct and independent from other parties formed by the possessing classes. The political tasks of this party were to alter the capitalist system in a direction favorable to workers' interests, then to ‘conquer power'. This party thus corresponded to the political game of the 19th century which was favorable to a certain extension of the democratic process, characteristic of capital in its ascendant phase... Thus what was false in Marx's concept­ion was his assimilation of the political move­ment of the working class to the formation and action of a proletarian party...His concept of a ‘proletarian party' is the product of his separation between the political phase and the social goal." (p.10)[2]

Here we have the old refrain about the prolet­arian party being an anachronism of the 19th century. But let's still try to understand why the Collectif Junius considers that Marx separates the class struggle into two:

"For Marx, there was no rupture between bourg­eois democracy and the realization of communism but a certain continuity: the political phase in some way represented the watershed between the two because once power had been conquered, the guarantee of the following social trans­formation was the existence of a communist fraction tin the proletarian party" (p.11).

All this is subtle enough, but it shows a rather embryonic state of the art when you judge Marx's whole trajectory by fixating on one part­icular stage of the process. What reveals that this is all grandiloquent nonsense is its prof­ound incomprehension of the conditions of the ascendant period of capitalism, which enabled the proletariat - while still posing the long term question of revolution - to obtain real reforms. Right up until the beginning of the 20th century - the terminal phase of the ascend­ant period of capitalism - there had to be a complementarity between the fight for political liberties and the trade union struggle for the massive reduction of the working day. These we were part of the same dynamic towards the con­stitution of the proletariat into a class con­scious of itself, into an autonomous political force. This fight for reforms was not opposed to the final social goal because, as cited by the authors despite themselves, Marx and Engels always made it clear that "it's not a question of masking class antagonisms, but of suppressing classes; not a question of ameliorating the existing society, but of founding a new one" (1850). Paradoxically the Collectif Junius indulges in mocking Marx and Engels because at certain moments they thought that the European revolution was imminent, but it omits any refer­ence to the re-evaluation Engels made in 1895, in an introduction to The Class Struggles in France, where he admitted that history had shown their predictions to be wrong: "...It clearly showed that the state of development on the continent was very far from being ripe for the suppression of capitalist production".[3]

While avoiding the real question of proletar­ian parties in the 19th century, the Collectif Junius spends much time arguing that Marx simply modeled the form of the proletarian party on that of bourgeois parties. This isn't a new idea. It's taken from Karl Korsch[4]. It's true that Marx often evoked the revolution of 1789 which he considered to be the most exemplary of bourgeois revolutions. In each period, revolutionaries are influenced by the model of previous revolutions, and they have to study them in detail if they are to go beyond their old conceptions. And it wasn't just Marx who was impassioned by the French revolution, but practically all the revolutionaries of his day, the anarchists as much as the Blanquists. Marx however was the first, after Babeuf, to emphasize the limitations of this bourgeois revolution: look at the way he fired red bullets against all the hypocrisies of the ‘Rights of Man' (in The Jewish Question). Above all, he was the first to show the necessity of the proletarian revolution for the real emancipation of human­ity (cf. the ‘universal character of the proletariat' in The German Ideology).

The ascendant phase of capitalism did not permit Marx and his comrades to understand all the functions of the proletarian party, in part­icular those which differentiate it from the classical bourgeois parties: its function is not to take political power in place of the proletariat, it is not to organize the class or exercise terror or extend the revolution through a ‘revolutionary war' (all lessons which would be drawn out of the experiences of the Paris Commune and of October 1917). However, the movement of the class itself at that time - above all the revolutions of 1848 and 1871 - not only enabled Marx and Engels to go beyond the model of 1789, but also to draw lessons for the whole proletariat that weren't drawn by the ‘Quaranthuithards' or the ‘Communards' themselv­es. These lessons were par excellence the res­ult of the activity of militants of a revolution­ary organization, not of historians. These les­sons are so deeply ingrained in the workers' movement that when one talks about 1848 or 1871, one refers essentially to the political conclus­ions Marx and Engels drew from them, rather than to the events themselves! But rather than pointing to these political lessons and Marx's capacity to put his previous analyses into ques­tion when the living class struggle brought new enrichments[5], the Collectif Junius prefers to claim that the Commune proved Marx wrong, making sure that it doesn't mention the fact that there weren't many who supported the Paris insurrection or who stuck up for it after the bloody repression. Marx however supported it fully even if it hadn't been envisaged in his predictions. We might add that if posterity has been so interested in the Commune, it's to a large extent because of Marx. The Collectif blithely assures us that "the workers' insurr­ection...disproved Marx and Engels' previous analyses about the absolute priority of the democratic process" (p.14), and they say this to once again denigrate any activity of the proletarian party. It nevertheless remains the case that the weaknesses of the measures taken by the Commune, the lack of coordination, the low number of representatives of the Internat­ional Workingmen's Association, revealed for the future the necessity for a revolutionary minority to have a presence within the class, to be equipped with a coherent program and able to have a firm influence on the struggle.

But, despite everything, because of its prem­ature character, the Commune could be no more than a gigantic flash of lightning, heralding the social confrontations that would take place less than fifty years later, not on the scale of one city, but internationally, owing to capitalism's entry into its decadent phase. Just as the Paris Commune did not disprove the importance of a proletarian party capable of carrying out the tasks of the day, so it proved Marx right about the necessity for a transitional phase in order to reorganize society. But, in effect, our authors tell us that there can be no question of a period of transition: "this is the theorization of a separation between the political phase and the social goal (again!), thus of the contin­uity of certain functions of class society and of capitalism during the political phase (= the state)" (p.15). This is the same reasoning as that of Proudhon. Twenty years earlier, in the famous letter to Weydemeyer, Marx had ant­icipated the transitional content concretized by the Commune: "...the class struggle nec­essarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat...which itself only represents a transition towards the abolition of all classes and towards a classless society" (1852). The Commune remains an example of the transitional premises of the struggle for communism: it is clear that the political measures it took were much more important than its timid economic measures. In contrast to the bourgeois class, the proletariat can't guarantee its chances of success on any economic base. Certainly it will have to continuously overturn the economy throughout the future period of transition, but only to the extent that it affirms itself pol­itically. From this point of view, Marx rem­ained an intractable opponent of reformism, which for a long time was above all the charact­eristic of those who rejected political action and the function of the political class party, such as the different varieties of trade union­ists or anarchists, who would have approved of the arguments of our modern councilists. Final­ly, and above all, in trying to get us to swal­low the line that the Commune proved Marx wrong about the "democratic process", the Collectif Junius tries to make us lose sight of the main lesson of the Commune: the necessity for the destruction of the bourgeois state, which opp­ortunism in the 2nd International also tried to sweep under the carpet. Now on this point, Marx was correct as early as 1852, and he affirmed it in several places in The 18th Brumaire, for example: "All political upheavals perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The part­ies that strove in turn for mastery regarded possession of this immense state edifice as the main booty for the victor".

The Collectif Junius reproaches Marx above a all with being inspired by the "century of the Enlightenment". Actually, it throws a lot of shadow on the work of Marx, and itself revives a lot of old arguments from the last century, like the idealist Bauer whom Marx sarcastically referred to as "luminous"[6]. Marx was not content simply to copy this or that example from the revolutionary bourgeoisie (though our hist­orical experts seem to forget that the bourgeoisie was once a progressive class). His point of departure was the critical-revolutionary over­throw of Hegelian principles, and thus he elaborated a materialist method which deals with social ideas and alternatives in the context of a given historical epoch and of the form of society specific to that epoch. The Collectif Junius isn't at all concerned with the marxist method, and historical materialism does not exist as far as it is concerned. The narrow point of view it holds today is the peep-hole it uses to understand the different periods of the past!

The parties of the proletariat - we're not talking here about the bourgeois parties who claim to speak and take decisions in the name of the class - are secreted by it, they are as useful to it as oxygen is to air. And it is historical materialism that enables us to affirm:

"The formation of political parties expressing and defending class interests is not specific to the proletariat. We have seen it with all classes in history. The level of development, definition and structure of these forces ref­lects the classes they emanate from... However, if there are indisputable common points between the parties of the proletariat and those of other classes - notably the bourgeoisie - the differences between them are also considerable... the objective of the bourgeoisie, in establish­ing its power over society, was not to abolish exploitation but to perpetuate it in other forms; not to suppress the division of society into classes but to install a new class society; not to destroy the state but to perfect it...on the other hand... (the aim of proletarian parties) is not to take and hold state cower; on the contrary, their ultimate goal is the disappear­ance of the state and all classes" (‘On the Party...', IR 35).

It was logical, however, that even after the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx should still be influenced by his own period and that he should continue to support the idea of the party taking power. History has since settled this question; the Bolshevik experience has shown that this isn't the function of the party. But when we compare Marx to his contemporaries, to the various Bakuninist or Blanquist sects with their secret societies and their ridiculous plans for coups d'état - which of them can be placed alongside the formidable coherence and lucidity of Marx, whose method remains a weapon of combat? Perhaps the Collectif Junius in a time machine?

b) Class consciousness and the formation parties

According to the Collectif Junius,

"...once again the negative weight of the French revolution in Marx-Engels' consciousness...the separation between political phase and social phase (this is becoming an obsession!) gave rise to the conception and practice of a Jacob­in communist party, a party of specialists in politics, of professional revolutionaries, of theoreticians of the proletariat...for social democracy and Bolshevism, the party, built in advance of the revolutionary movement, became the introducer of an ideological consciousness into the proletariat, which was seen as purely trade unionistic".

Or again, because the whole point is to throw the entire history of the proletarian class struggle into the dustbins of the bourg­eoisie - after Marx, the 2nd International, then the 3rd, etc:

"...Lenin was to apply in practice the ultimate consequences of the negative aspects of Marx's organizational conceptions, which German social-democracy had already amplified."

Everything becomes the object of these anarch­ist insults: elitist party, politicians' stand­point, manipulation. It would be pedantic to res­pond to all the stupidities of this school-boyish compilation; the reader looking for a real hist­orical understanding would do better to refer to the texts of Marx and Lenin, or to a few serious historical works and the documents of the Internationals. Here we will simply recall a famous passage from the Communist Manifesto which remains valid: "(the communists) have no interests separate from those of the proletariat as a whole". Let's remember that Marx retor­ted to all the conspirators of his day that the class struggle needs clarity like the day needs light. As for the idea of ‘consciousness intro­duced from the outside into the proletariat' which the Collectif Junius points to, it figures neither in Marx nor in the Congresses of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. It's one thing to show that Kautsky and Lenin bent the stick too far in debates with the apolitical economists and trade unionists, but this idea never figured in any program of a workers' party before 1914; Lenin publically rejected this idea in 1907. In the post-68 milieu it was fashionable to gossip about the ‘renegade Kautsky and his disciple Lenin', an old refrain of the degenerat­ed Dutch Left. It's true that the errors of Kautsky[7] and Lenin were exploited by Stalinism and Trotskyism against the workers' movement, but it was through the battle waged by Kautsky, Luxemburg and Lenin against the revisionists and the economists that the function of the political class party could be affirmed and made more pre­cise.

As for the question of class consciousness, after all their demolition exercises, we can ask our valiant authors where they are going to look for it, since the only thing that counts in their eyes is the spontaneous moment: the moment of strikes, the instant of revolutions. Does the proletariat disappear in the meantime? In fact their vision is a simple one: class conscious­ness is merely the reflection of workers' strug­gles, never a dynamic factor. The whole work of theoretical elaboration, of taking up positions, is seen as elitist, the work of manipulative politicians, and thus of bourgeois parties. They don't see the existence of two dimensions in the same proletarian movement, that of its polit­ical organizations and that of the class as a whole, which react dialectically upon each other. In their vision, when the struggle ceases, the working class disappears[8], to be reborn out of the ashes in six months or ten years later, as though it had been in a total coma, as though the ‘old mole' had not been working at all at the level of class consciousness, and as though there had been no intervening dynamic of theoretical reflection and research. All this reminds one of the obtuse and anti-scientific spirit of the partisans of spontaneous generation who opposed Pasteur. In any case, the approach of the Coll­ectif Junius is highly scholastic: it paints a picture of one party throughout the ages, con­ceived by the sorcerer Marx who at one moment is accused of creating the party before the revol­ution, and then at another moment of contradicting himself by saying: "(the party) is born spontaneously from the soil of modern society" (1860). Clouded by the immediate and ephemeral, our Collectif shows its incapacity to understand marxism. For Marx the party is a natural product of the class struggle, in no way voluntaristic or self-proclaimed. It's not the static, omnipotent body of our authors' imagination, the dem­onic invention of Marx and Lenin to sabotage the revolution through the ages; it is a dynamic and dialectical element:

"Real history rather than fantasy shows us that the existence of the class party goes through a cyclical movement of emergence, development and passing away. This passing away may take the form of its internal degeneration, its passage into the enemy camp, or its disappearance pure and simple, leaving more or less long intervals until once again the conditions for its re‑emergence make their appearance... Obviously there is a continuity here... But there can be no stability or fixity in this organism called the party" (‘On the Party...', IR 35).

We can add that parties are much more indispensable to the proletariat than the bourgeoisie, whose parties didn't emerge in a clear form until quite late in capitalist society. The proletariat has a much greater task: it has to abolish all class divisions and all exploitation. Thus its theoretical elaboration has to be much more universal, and the problem of consciousness is much more central to it than the bourgeoisie in the progressive phase of capitalism, a society which was born out of "muck, blood and tears".

c) Councilist ouvrierism

The whole left of capital is there to tell us that consciousness has to be brought from the outside. But there's also a whole category of revolutionaries for whom the ‘workers' councils are a permanent incantation, even a kind of rev­elation, and the absurd logic of this approach also leads to the negation of the proletariat. Because they start by saying that parties are external to the proletariat, they end up saying that the class struggle is external to the proletariat! It's lucky for the proletariat that the Collectif Junius is there to defend the proletariat from Marx the ‘luminary', the En­lightenment philosopher:

"The conditions, the line of march, the goals... it's all drawn up, this ‘rest of the proletariat', which doesn't have the ‘advantage of a clear understanding' can thus make no theoretical contribution, at least nothing fundamental. It's like a blind man which has to be guided by those, the communists, who possess the program from A to Z" (p.21).

The broad lines of the 1848 Manifesto are "elitist", conclude our scourges of the parties. The battles, the sacrifices, the polemics and the directives of proletarian parties always have the aim of misleading the workers, as our ‘defenders of the proletariat' explain against the hateful Marx:

"(Concerning the non-publication of corrections of the Gotha Program)... Even though they are secondary; these reasons reveal the politician's, and thus bourgeois, vision which Engels had of the workers' movement; the workers are incapable of having a clear consciousness of things, so the party can manipulate them at its ease" (p.41).

Here anarchist invective replaces argumentat ion, shopkeeper's demagogy once again leads to the idealist negation of the reformist stage, of any need for maximum and minimum programs. This wild defense of the average worker sounds a bit like the boss who exclaims: "By talking to the workers about strikes and insurrections, you'll give them the wrong ideas!" Even Rosa Luxemburg is accused of having the conception of a party of leaders whose ‘credo' is the com­munist program. Against which the Collectif Junius (‘Junius' was Rosa Luxemburg's pseudonym during the war) sets up its own credo: "this is the philosophy of the Enlightenment still rav­aging on" (p.103). One thing is certain for the Collectif Junius: the working class is a homogeneous class which doesn't have years and years of experience, and in which the worker who goes on strike for the first day of his life all of a sudden knows as much as one who's been fighting for twenty years, and ten thousand workers on strike for a day count more on the level of historical experience than a revolution­ary minority which has been battling for fifteen years! They claim to be combatting the ‘bourgeois' workers' movement, but in fact they are merely rendering humble service to the most crass form of capitalist trade unionist ideology, the one which par excellence facilitates manipulation: ouvrierism. And, with a flick of the wrist, they deny the existence of an historic program of the proletariat!

d) Ignorance of the phenomenon of opportunism

The most striking thing about this disjointed and indigestibel anti-party pamphlet is not only its deafness to any understanding of the role of the party (1848 - 1871 - 1905 - 1917 - 1921) but - and this fundamentally derives from all the rest - a blindness about the notion of opportunism. Without showing any ounce of understanding, the term is used in several places. It evokes the critiques of opportunism by Pannekoek, Gorter, Luxemburg, Lenin. It even has a nice quote from Luxemburg: "It is...a thoroughly unhistorical illusion to think that...the labor movement can be preserved once and for all from opportunistic side-leaps" (p.94). But since it places itself outside the problematic of the workers' move­ment, it is impossible for the Collectif Junius to see what is valid in what it quotes. On the other hand, it identifies itself very well with degenerated German-Dutch Left, with the Pannekoek who inaugurated that very modernist term, "the new workers' movement" towards the end of the 1930s, and who is quoted with pleasure: "a party, of whatever kind, is small at the beginning (what wisdom!) - but in our days a party can only be an organization aiming at directing and dominating the proletariat" (p.124). In these conditions it becomes impossible to grasp the phenomenon of the degeneration of proletarian parties and their passage into the enemy camp, because everything is explained by: the bourgeoisie, the separation between political phase and social goal, the century of the Enlightenment. The acquisitions of the workers' movement are dealt with in the same way that university students approach the thoughts of the philosophers: through scholastic interpretation. But our Collectif grants no grace to the German-Left at the beginning either:

"...Gorter's conception of the party as a regroupment of the ‘pure' in the face of opport­unism is still strongly influenced by a vision inspired by the process of bourgeois revolution (philosophy of Enlightenment). This may explain his attitude of ‘searching for discussion' with Lenin and the Bolsheviks".

In fact it's the Collectif Junius which wants to be ‘pure', ideally pure, or at least searching for purity. It is thus not able to grasp the complex process of disengagement from bourgeois ideology by the proletariat and its organizations. It's so obsessed with purity that it confuses the bourgeoisie with its victims, because it can't see that there's a struggle going on here. It's like a judge sitting high above the social melee.

In general, opportunism is a manifestation of the penetration of bourgeois ideology into proletarian organizations and the working class; it leads to the rejection of revolutionary principles and of the general framework of marxist analysis. It is thus a permanent threat to the class and to the organizations or parties which are part of it. At best it can be corrected by sincere elements, at worst it leads to unpardonable weaknesses and errors. From this point of view, Marx, Lenin and many others more than once committed opportunist errors, but this did not mean that they were bourgeois! Partial or secondary concessions depending on the time and the general level of experience did not put into question the common method and function of the parties for which they fought so hard. The rev­olutionary movement cannot simply repeat itself - it has had to successively refine "the evolution of the concept of the party" (if we use the university terminology of the Collectif Junius).

When it devotes itself to systematically rejecting the successive contributions of the different parties of the proletariat, when it denies any distinctions within the working class, when it ferociously resists the form and function of the party, the Collectif Junius is typically councilist. But the incantation about ‘the class itself' or the ‘workers' councils' as a panacea is a modern and particularly pernicious form of opportunism that is much more widespread than just the readers of Spartacus publications. It's an ideology which, as can be seen in the form theorized by the Collectif Junius, makes all sorts of concessions to the dominant ideas of this epoch of capitalist decadence. We say this clearly: the rejection of organizing into a political party is dangerous. The thesis ‘all parties are bourgeois' and its corollary ‘only the workers' councils are revolutionary', leads to despising the working class, to demoralization, to leaving the field to the bourgeoisie. But more fundamentally, from the correct rejection of any distinction between maximum and minimum program in our epoch, it leads to denying the ­maximum program, the only one valid for today, because it is precisely the role of the revolutionary party to defend this program.

In the preface to this pamphlet it says that this work is the first part of an "incomplete" project. But this is something which by definition must remain incomplete and intangible, because it was produced by a groupuscule which has dissolved itself into petty bourgeois incoherence: the defunct PIC. What followed was the great void. Because if you try to make a clean           slate of the past (as in the song by Pottier so favored by the left fractions of the bourgeoisie), you end up wiping away the future of the class struggle.

II. The chrysanthemums of the petty bourgeoisie

"These gentlemen all talk about marxism, but of the kind you knew in France ten years ago and about which Marx said: ‘All I know is that I am not a marxist'. And probably he would say about these gentlemen what Heine said about his imitators: ‘I have sown dragons and reaped fleas'" (Engels to Lafargue, 27 August 1890).

We will not spend so much time on the second Spartacus booklet, which on the whole is no worse than the previous one, but which shows a bit more clearly that, among the various collaborators of the ‘Friends of Spartacus', the shortest route to the negation of the working class is to start by negating the militant Marx.

This booklet had been the object of a public appeal for contributions to it, and we replied to this appeal as follows:

"This approach...and this project are part of a whole campaign conducted by the wise monkeys of the universities of the bourgeoisie and launched on the occasion of the centenary of Marx's death with the aim of systematically denigrating and disfiguring marxism by identifying it with the Stalinist regime in the eastern bloc countries. Thank you for your invitation, ‘Friends of Spartacus', but count us out... You can set yourselves up as judges of the movement, we are revolutionary militants of the movement" (Revolution Intenationale, no.112, 1983).

We weren't wrong to reply like this to this nth funeral ceremony for marxism. The introduction to this so-called homage to Marx by the ‘Friends of Spartacus' is clear, and sums up the eclecticism of the texts included.

"The different contributions included in this booklet converge on this point. Whatever the angle of attack (sic) chosen by their authors, all are convinced that the limits of Marx are both the limits of his time and the limits of his relationship with his time" (p.9).

This bouquet of faded flowers summarizes 120 pages dedicated to rejecting the contributions of Marx (which are more than ever relevant) and reducing him to the role of an ‘interesting' writer. Naturally it includes denigrations of the same ilk as, and even directly taken from, the previous work: equals a sign between Jacobinism and marxism (Korsch's "contribution" is openly defended), equals signs between October 1917 and Stalinism, the same obsession about Marx ‘copying 1789' and the ‘century of the Enlightenment'. Marx is also seen as having an "ontological" vision and as being inspired by "Hegel's hypertrophy of politics".

All these people file past Marx's tomb with such a contrite air that they are in no way distinguishable from a procession of bigots from the old world. Let's choose for example one called Janover who, having also talked about the deleterious influence of 1789, demonstrates too his incomprehension of any notion of opportunism:

"Political marxism is thus both the product of this diversion (?) and the result of an accommodation... Its structure was in the image of the social democratic organisation, partly proletarian, partly bourgeois, but the dominant bourgeois structure soon came to the fore even before Marxism-Leninism had put forward its recipes for ‘socialist' accumulation to the elites of countries still at the pre-capitalist stage".

More typically, one called St James abstains from putting forward any hypothesis and aims at being more wooly than the others:

"Of course, neither can we eliminate the hypothesis that the present situation will evolve towards a frank and open crisis... But neither can we say there won't be a new return to prosperity... Of course certain people might object that we don't draw any definite conclusions from this analysis... It's clear that a theory that can be bent to take opposing phenomena into account can't ever be considered as scientific"

And these people dare to refer to Marx's teachings! Actually, they do have a Pope: the notorious intellectual councilist Rubel who, much more than Marx, is the inspiration for all their stupidities. Like Rubel, nearly all of them reject Marx the militant: they turn him into an intellectual flea like themselves. Like Rubel they believe that Marx was too content with uncertainties in his scientific work (though they abhor the scientific method); but, alas, he never reneged on "the almost daily political combat within the framework of an organization or as an isolated militant" (Rubel). Alas and alack: this is why Rubel, who like all petty bourgeois is incapable of understanding the revolutionary passion of the struggle, has specialized in doing research into Marx's intimate writings and his waste-paper bins with the aim of corroborating his own doubts ... "...even if he refused to leave to posterity any introspective confessions. Better than any such confidences, the mass of unedited and incomplete writings and notebooks are testimony of the hes­itations and doubts he had to face up to after being disarmed by the repeated triumphs of the counter-revolution".

In fact, because he can't stomach Marx the militant, he ascribes to him all his own petty bourgeois doubts. With a stroke of the pen he dismisses Marx's involvement in the collective movement of the proletariat, and all that's left is... "poetry" (Rubel). But Rubel, who vainly projects his own doubts on Marx, still has his certainties: "We are obliged to recognize that if capital is everywhere, it's because the prol­etariat is nothing and nowhere" (p.43). Here this philistine confirms that councilism is not only an opportunist danger for the proletariat but also that it leads to the negation of the working class, to modernism. In his conclusion, having abandoned the proletariat, Rubel joins the great impotents of history, the philosophers: "We, the living, we can and must act right now to launch a project for modifying the alienating forces that are the product of man's inventive genius and of his creative inventions".

The other philistines have only to follow in the footsteps of this great master of councilist­cum-modernist thought. The representative of the modernist circle ‘Guerre Sociale' can lament like the Collectif Junius:

"Marx's work expresses the historical circum­stances in which it was created, prolonging the bourgeois tendencies it came out of and tried to go beyond" (p.90).

A burial is always a painful "circumstance" when you're thinking about the living, so the anarchist Pengam whispers with head bowed: "...the working class aims, through the intermediary of ‘workers' parties', to get itself recognized in the state on account of the place it occupies in the relations of production" (p.103)

Finally, even an old hand of the revolutionary milieu like Sabatier puts on his black habits and sprinkles holy water on the anti-Bolshevism that is so de rigeur in the ceremonies of the ‘'Friends of Spartacus':

"The counter-revolution and its mystifying ideo­logies triumphed by drawing support from the med­iations introduced by Marx and by drowning any critical method in a flood of empty rhetoric" (p.83).

Petty bourgeois intellectuals, in abandoning the terrain of the defense of class principles, always end up agreeing with the bourgeoisie which has spent the last fifty years consciously deforming the real reasons of the degeneration of October 1917 and the failure of the revolutionary wave of the ‘20s. The proletariat must combat the arguments of these philistines right now if it is not to compromise its struggle for the destruction of the established capitalist order.

Gieller

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[1] The group Pour Une Intervention Communiste (Jeune Taupe) was formed in 1974 around elements who had left Revolution Internationale because they considered that it didn't intervene enough; after a few years the group foundered on the rocks of activism, councilism and modernism. Its heir Revolution Sociale has drawn almost no lessons from this disastrous trajectory (cf. its pamphlet pompously titled Bilan et Perspectives).

[2] An inconsistent argument because, just on the page before, the authors repeat the famous phrase from the pamphlet against Proudhon: "Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time a social movement". We can add that as early as 1844 Marx could write: "All revolution dissolves the old society; in this sense it is social. All revolution overturns the old power; in this sense it is political".

[3]A remark that can be found in many other texts since the Manifesto. But Lenin emphasizes the extent to which this is a question of method: "We can see just how much Marx kept strictly to the results of historical experience by the fact that in 1852 he did not yet concretely pose the question of what could replace the state machine once it was destroyed. At that time experience had not yet furnished the historical material needed to reply to this question, which history would put on the agenda later, in 1871" (State and Revolution).

[4] Karl Korsch, a former member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD from which he was expelled in 1926. Abandoning the marxist method he theorized the idea that Jacobinism was the fundamental source of Marx. Certain of his ideas were taken up by Mattick in the USA. His main translator in France is the councilist Bricianer.

[5] See our article for the centenary of Marx's death, IR 33, ‘Marx our Contemporary'.

[6] Marx, Bataille Critique Contre la Revolution Francais, La Pleiade, p.557.

[7] Here we're obviously talking about Kautsky before 1910, the Kautsky who, before becoming a centrist and then a renegade, was an authentic revolutionary militant, who alongside Rosa Luxem­burg was a leader of the left wing of social democracy in its struggle against opportunism.

[8] Certain Bordigists have a symmetrical, but finally identical vision: when the Party disappears the working class no longer exists!

For more than a year and a half; the world proletariat - and notably the workers o f western Europe - has returned to the path of class confrontations which it momentarily abandoned in 1981 with the defeat consecrated by the state of martial law in Poland. This resurgence has now been recognized by the majority of the political groups in the revolutionary milieu, but this recognition has often come rather late. There had to be an accumulation of a whole ser­ies of movements in France, Germany and especially Britain before groups like Battaglia Comunista[1] or the Communist Workers Organization[2] finally recognized the new upsurge of class combats after the 1981-82 retreat. As for groups like L'Association pour la Communaute Humaine Mondiale[3] (formerly the Groupe Volonte Communists), who had great difficulty in recognizing the retreat and defeat of 1981, they now show themselves incapable of recognizing the resurgence. For its part, the ICC was among the first to point out this resurgence, just as in 1981 it was able to recognize the reflux. We don't say this to sing the praises of our own organization in contrast to the weaknesses of other organizations of the commun­ist milieu. On a number of occasions we have shown that we do not see our relations with other organizations in terms of the ‘fuckers and the fucked', to use the terms of the former Programma Communista (see IR 16, ‘Second International Conference of Groups of the Communist Left'), ie in terms of competition and rivalry. What interests us above all is that there should be the greatest possible clarity among the revolutionary groups so that the influence they exert and will exert on the proletariat as a whole will be as positive as possible, that it will correspond fully to the tasks for which the class has engendered them: to be an act­ive factor in the development of class consciousness. The aim of this article is thus to continue the work we began in IR 39 (‘What Method for Understanding the Resurgence of Wor­kers' Struggles'): to put forward the framework which alone makes it possible to understand the present evolution of the class struggle and its perspectives. In other words, to draw out a series of elements which are indispensable for communist organizations to carry out their responsibilities in the class, elements which many organizations obstinately reject or merely pay lip-service to.

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

Well before the formation of the ICC in 1975, the groups who were to constitute it based their plat­forms and their general analysis of the present historical period on two essential elements (apart of course from the defense of a series of programmatic acquisitions which were the common heritage of the communist left which came out of the degenerating Third International - see IR 40, ‘Ten Years of the ICC: Some Lessons'):

- the recognition of the decadent character of the capitalist mode of production since the First World War;

- the recognition of the historical course opened up by capitalism's entry into a new phase of acute crisis at the end of the ‘60s, as a course not towards generalized war as in the 1930s but towards generalized class confrontations.

Since its constitution, the ICC, as is the duty of any living revolutionary organization, has continued to elaborate its analyses, and in particular has developed the following three elements:

- the fact that the proletarian revolution, un­like bourgeois revolutions, cannot unfold at different moments in different countries means that it will be the result of the world-wide generalization of workers' struggles. The pre­sent conditions of the development of a general and irremedial crisis of the capitalist economy are much more favorable for this process than those created by the imperialist war which gave rise to the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 (see IR 26, ‘The Historic Conditions for the Generalization of the Struggle of the Working Class');

- the decisive importance of the central count­ries of capitalism, and particularly those of western Europe, in this process of the world-wide generalization of class combats (see IR 31, ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Centre of the Generalization of the Class Struggle');

- the utilization, since the end of the ‘70s, by the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries, of the card of the ‘left in opposition' whose task is, through its ‘radical' language, to sabotage from the inside the class combats to which the inexor­able aggravation of the crisis is giving rise and will continue more and more to give rise (see IR 18: ‘In Opposition as in Government, the ‘Left' Against the Working Class').

For the ICC, the elaboration of these analyses is in no way a ‘luxury', deriving from the fact that we are "incapable of facing up to the reason for (our) existence and activily, and are forced to develop an unreal life, revolving around nominal­ist and scholastic debates ... to rationalize (our) inertia" as the CWO claims in Workers Voice 17. On the contrary, it's this work which has enabled our organization to correctly eval­uate the balance of class forces which, as we shall show, is an elementary precondition for being able to make a correct intervention in the class.

The analysis of the decadence of capitalism

Like the ICC, the various groups mentioned above (Battaglia, CWO and Volonte Communiste) agree with this analysis (unlike the ‘pure' Bordigist current which rejects it, even though it was an essential position of the Communist Internation­al). However, the admission that capitalism has been in decadence since the First World War does not automatically mean that all the implications of this have been grasped. These implications are numerous and have been examined on many occasions by our organization, notably in the article, ‘The Struggle of the Proletariat in Decadent Capital­ism' (IR 23). Here we shall only point to those implications that are most relevant to under­standing the evolution of the balance of class forces over the last five years:

- the jagged course of the workers' struggle;

- the use of repression by the bourgeoisie;

- the role of trade unionism.

a) The jagged course of the workers' struggle

Since it was masterfully described by Marx in the 18th Brumaire, this jagged course of the prolet­arian struggle has often been pointed out by rev­olutionaries, notably by Rosa Luxemburg in her last article (‘Order Reigns in Berlin'). This "is connected to the fact that, in contrast to previous revolutionary classes, the working class has no economic base society. Because its only source of strength is its conscious­ness and its capacity to organize, which are constantly threatened by the pressure of bourg­eois society, any mistake by the proletariat can mean not simply a standstill but a defeat which immediately plunges the class into demoralization and atomization.

"This phenomenon is further accentuated as capit­alism enters into its decadent epoch, when the working class no longer has any permanent organizations, such as the trade unions last century, to defend its interests as an exploited class." (IR 8, December 1976, ‘The International Polit­ical Situation', point 25.)

It was because it was armed with this vision that the ICC was able to see the historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the ‘60s, after more than 40 years of counter-revolution. It did not consider that this resurgence would take the form of a continuous development of workers' struggles but of a succession of waves of str­uggle (1968-74, ‘78-‘80, 83-?), each one reach­ing a higher level but interspersed by periods of ref1ux. Each time a new wave of struggles has appeared the ICC (or, before its formation, the groups who were to constitute it) recognized it rapidly:

- Internacionalismo (the only group at the time) saw the first wave as early as January ‘68 (cf the article from Internacionalismo 8 cited in IR 40, ‘Ten Years of the ICC');

- In IR 17 (second quarter of ‘79), the article ‘Longwy, Denain Show Us the Way' says:

"It would be a serious mistake to see these simultaneous confrontations (end of ‘78 in Germany, beginning of ‘79 in Britain, Spain, Brazil) as mere skirmishes prolonging the wave of 1968-73 ... We must be able to recognize this simult­aneity and combativity as the first signs of a much broader movement that is in the process of maturing ... This revival of class struggle, these symptoms of a new wave of struggle are unfolding before our eyes."

- in IR 36 ( first quarter of ‘84), the article ‘Inter-imperialist Conflicts, Class Struggle: the Acceleration of History' says:

" ... after a real lull following the defeat in Poland, the strikes that have been taking place in Europe for several months show a renewal of class struggle; they confirm that the proletariat, far from being beaten, has kept its combat­ive potential intact, and is prepared to use it." (article written in December ‘83)

In the same way, when there was a reflux in the class struggle, our organization was not afraid to point this out, both at the end of the first wave and of the second: "A calm has momentarily settled over the class battlefield as the prol­etariat assimilates the lessons of its recent struggles ..." (‘Report on the International Situation', IR 5), an idea made more precise a few months later:

"... Although in contrast to the 1930s the general perspective today is not imperialist war but class war, it must be said that the present situation is characterized by the large gap between the level of economic and political crisis and the level of class struggle ... We are not just talking about a stagnation of class struggle but an actual retreat by the proletariat." (IR8, ‘The International Political Situation', point 23)

Similarly in 1981, while class confrontations continued in Poland, the ICC already saw that Polish capitalism had re-established control over the situation,

"Not on an economic level: the situation is worse than ever ... but on the political level. On the level of its capacity to impose on the workers conditions of poverty much worse than in August ‘80 without the proletariat being able to respond on anything like the level of the strikes of that time.

"This reconstitution of the forces of the bourg­eoisie has only been able to take place because there has been a gradual retreat by the working class. This retreat is normal and predictable. It could not be otherwise after the high level of the struggles of August ‘80 and in the absence of a significant development of the class str­uggle in other countries." (Revolution Internationale 89: ‘Poland: The Nec­essity for Struggle in Other Countries', 30.8.81)

This analysis was to be made explicit after the December ‘81 coup:

"The declaration of martial law in Poland was a defeat for the working class. It would be illus­ory and even dangerous to hide this. Only the blind or the unconscious could claim any diff­erent ... It was ... fundamentally a defeat be­cause the coup is hitting the workers of all countries in the form of demoralization, of a real disorientation and confusion in the face of the campaigns unleashed by the bourgeoisie after 13 December, in full continuity with the preced­ing campaigns.

"The world proletariat suffered this defeat from the moment when capitalism, in a concerted mann­er, succeeded in isolating the workers of Poland from the rest of the world proletariat, in ideo­logically pinning the working class down behind the frontiers between blocs ... and countries ... from the moment when, using all the means to hand, it turned the workers of other countries into spectators - anxious but passive - and prevented them from giving vent to the only real form of class solidarity: the generalization of the struggle to all countries." (IR 29: ‘After the Repression in Poland: The Per­spective for the World Class Struggle',12.3.82 )

Because the ICC has assimilated one of the class­ic teachings of marxism, a teaching which it has completed in the light of the conditions created by the decadence of capitalism, it has been able to avoid the blindness which has hit other rev­olutionary groups. In particular it was able to understand that the combats in Poland were only one of the engagements among the many that the working class will have to undertake before launching a decisive assault on the fortress of capital. This is something that the CWO, for ex­ample, failed to understand when in the summer of ‘81 it called on the front page of Workers Voice (no 4) for the workers in Poland to make the ‘Revolution Now!'. Fortunately, the Polish workers don't read Workers' Voice: they certainly would not have been foolish enough to have followed the CWO but they might well have taken them to be police provocateurs.

Less aberrant and ridiculous, but just as serious, was the error committed by the Groupe Volonte Communiste, which wrote after the coup of 13 Dec­ember ‘81:

"Jaruzelski's coup is the direct consequence of the radicalization of struggles from the summer of ‘81, and also of the inability of Solidarnosc to really structure itself as a real trade union.

"Today, not only have Jaruzelski and his ‘state of siege' not resolved the question of the econ­omic crisis, but we are seeing a radicalization of the movement.

"Instead of the expected downturn, the dynamic of the struggle has continued. The Polish workers have engaged in what is only a moment in the ‘clash of steel between proletariat and bourg­eoisie'." (Revolution Sociale! no 14, December ‘82)

Quite clearly, such blindness about a reality which had become more and more obvious can only be explained by a deliberate refusal to admit that the working class can suffer a defeat. For a marxist, however dramatic it may be to admit it (especially when it's a question of defeats like those of the ‘20s which plunged the class into the most terrible counter-revolution), this has to be done every time the proletariat suffers a reverse because he well knows that "revolution is the only form of war - indeed this is one of the laws of its development - whose final victory can only be prepared by a series of ‘defeats'." (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Order Reigns in Berlin', 14 January 1919.)

On the other hand, when you lack confidence in the working class, as is the case with a group infested with petty-bourgeois ideology like Vol­onte Communiste, you are often afraid to admit that the proletariat can be defeated, even in a partial manner, because you imagine that it would never be able to get up again. Thus an over-estim­ation of the level of struggles at a given moment is not at all contradictory with an under-estim­ation of the real strength of the working class - in fact, the two inevitably complement each other.

This has been demonstrated by the members of Vol­onte Communiste who, in our public meetings (their publication, which appeared monthly during the period of reflux and then stopped coming out a few months before the resurgence) exhibited the greatest skepticism about the potential of the present struggles[4]. This was also demonstrated by the CWO who, after its excessive enthusiasm of summer ‘81, was (in company with its fraternal organization Battaglia) several trains late in recognizing the resurgence.

But we should come back to another idea contained in the article in Revolution Sociale: "Jaruzel­ski's coup is the direct consequence of the radicalization of struggles from the summer of ‘81." This shows that this group (like various others) has not understood the question of repression in the present historic period.

b) The use of repression by the bourgeoisie

Drawing the lessons from the 1981 defeat we wrote: "The 13 December coup, its preparation and its aftermath, was a victory for the bourgeoisie ... This illustrates once again the fact that in the decadent period of capitalism, the bourgeoisie doesn't confront the working class in the same way it did last century. At that time the def­eats and bloody repressions inflicted on the proletariat didn't leave any ambiguities about who were its friends and who were its enemies. This was certainly the case with the Paris Comm­une, and even with the 1905 revolution which, which already presaging the battles of this cent­ury (the mass strike and the workers' councils) still contained many of the characteristics of the previous century (especially with regard to the methods used by the bourgeoisie). Today, however, the bourgeoisie only unleashes open repression after a whole ideological preparat­ion, in which the unions and the left play a decisive role, and which is aimed at undermining the proletariat's capacity to defend itself and preventing it from drawing all the necessary lessons from the repression" (IR 29, ‘After the repression in Poland...')

This was in no way a ‘late' or retrospective dis­covery since, in March ‘81, an ICC leaflet in the Polish language said:

"It would be catastrophic for the workers in Pol­and to believe that passivity can save them from repression. If the state has been forced to step back, it has in no way renounced the aim of re­imposing its iron grip over society. If today it holds back from using the violent repression it has resorted to in the past, it is because it fears an immediate mobilization by the workers. But if the working class renounces its struggle each time the state threatens a new attack, the way will be open to demobilization and repress­ion." (IR 29)

It is vital that revolutionaries are clear about the weapons that the bourgeoisie uses against the working class. If their role is never to call for premature, adventurist confrontations, they must insist on the importance for the class to mobilize itself and extend its struggles as the best way of preventing brutal repression. This is what neither the CWO nor Volonte Communiste understood, and this is what explains why the latter group only recognized the defeat of the workers two years after the event, imagining that if the rep­ression had been unleashed in Poland, it was be­cause Solidarnosc had lost control over the workers. This also shows that it is important to be clear about the role and mode of operation of trade unionism in this period.

c) The role of trade unionism

In the period of the decadence of capitalism, the trade unions have become one of the bourgeoisie's essential instruments for controlling the prolet­ariat and smothering its struggles. All the groups who situate themselves on a class terrain have understood this. But it's also necessary to under­ stand fully what this means. In particular, the insufficiency of the analysis of the union question made by the Bordigist current was to a large extent responsible for its incapacity to recognize the importance of movements like the one in Pol­and in August 1980. In the period of the decadence of capitalism,

"The impossibility of lasting improvements being won by the working class makes it ... impossible to maintain specific, permanent organizations based on the defense of its economic inter­ests ... The proletarian struggle tends to go beyond the strictly economic category and be­ comes a social struggle, directly confronting the state, politicising itself and demanding the mass participation of the class ... The kind of struggles that take place in the period of decad­ence can't be prepared in advance on the organisational level. Struggles explode spontaneously and tend to generalize." (IR 23, Fourth Quarter of 1980, ‘The Proletarian Struggle in Decadent Capitalism')           

But the Bordigists can't grasp the idea of the spontaneous upsurge of struggles. They imagine that for struggles to attain a certain breadth, there must already exist a class organization, a ‘workers' association' (to use their term). Just as in 1968 in France this current completely underestimated the movement (before calling on the 10 million striking workers to line up be­hind its banners!), it was considerably late in recognizing the importance of the combats in Poland.

A lack of clarity on the union question can also be found in Volonte Communiste when it writes:

"In the democratic capitalist system, the trade union is an intermediary operating between the workers and the state. In a state capitalist system, when the question of the confrontation between the workers and the state is posed straight away, the trade union is an inoperable form and thus an immediate obstacle to the struggle against the capitalist power." (Revolution Sociale! no 14)

It's clear that with such a view of the unions, both in the west ("intermediary operating between the workers and the state" and not an organ of the state with the task of disciplining the workers) and the east ("an inoperable form" - despite the extraordinary effectiveness of Solid­arnosc against the class struggle), such a group cannot understand:

- that the strengthening of Solidarnosc in 1981 meant the weakening of the working class;

- that the whole union offensive in the west in the same period (their radicalization in the late ‘70s, the campaigns about Poland) was to weigh heavily on the proletariat in this part of the world;

- that the continuous weakening of the trade unions' influence in the last few years, the general phenomenon of falling union membership in the western countries, was one of the premises for the present resurgence of struggles.

The incomprehension of the implications of the decadence of capitalism (when the analysis isn't rejected altogether) for the conditions of the class struggle can have a catastrophic effect on programmatic positions (the national, union and parliamentary questions, frontism), threatening the very survival of an organization as an ­ instrument of the working class (as in the case of the opportunist degeneration of the Communist International, and more recently the decompostion of Programma Comunista and the evolution towards leftism of its descendant Combat).

This underlines the importance of developing the clearest possible analysis of this question, as the ICC has always sought to do (notably in its platform and its pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism). But clarity on another point which was at the basis of the constitution of the ICC, the analysis of the historic course, is also extremely important.

The analysis of the historic course

We have devoted enough articles in this Review to this question (notably a report to the Third Congress of the ICC in IR 18 and a polemic with the theses of the Fifth Congress of Battaglia Comunista in IR 36) for us not to have to go into it at length here. But we do want to point out the incredible lack of seriousness with which certain groups deal with this question. Thus, in Workers Voice 17, in response to our analysis we find: "The CWO has argued that the course of history can only be comprehended dialectically as one heading towards both war and revolution." So much the worse for the dialectic! Marx used it in a masterful way in all his work to demonstrate the contradictory nature of social processes (and above all to point out that "history is the history of class struggle"). His epigones, with small feet and rather weak minds, use it as a fig leaf to hide the contradictions and incoherence of their thinking.

The CWO's sister-organization, Battaglia, doesn't have the same stupid pretentiousness, but comes          to the same idea: "one cannot pronounce on the historic course." The theses of its 5th Congress (Prometeo no 7, June 1983) display a rare humility:

"The generalized collapse of the economy immediately gives rise to the alternative: war or revolution. But by marking a catastrophic turning point in the capitalist crisis and an abrupt upheaval in the system's superstructure, the war itself opens up the possibility of the latter's collapse and of a revolutionary destruction, and the possibility for the communist party to assert itself. The factors determining the social break‑up within which the party will find the conditions for its rapid .growth and self-affirmation - whether this be in the period preceding the conflict, during or immediately after it - cannot be quantified. We cannot therefore determine ‘a prior'i when such a break-up will take place (eg Poland)."

What kind of vanguard is it that can't say to its class whether we're heading towards world war or revolution: It would have been a fine thing if the Italian Left - from whom the CWO and Battag­lia claim descent - had said in the face of the events in Spain ‘36: ‘We have to comprehend the situation in a ‘dialectical' manner. Since the factors of the situation are not ‘quantifiable', we say clearly to the workers: we're going either towards world war, or the revolution, or both at the same time!' With such a coherence, the whole Fraction, and not only its minority, would have enlisted in the anti-fascist brigades (on this question see the articles in IR 4, 6 and 7 and our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste d'Italie)

Here we shall leave aside the question of the possibility of a revolutionary upsurge during or after a third world war (which is dealt with again in the article War in Capitalism in this issue). What we can say is that with a view which doesn't enable you to see that we are going towards generalized class confrontations which would have to be defeated before capitalism could unleash a new world war, with a view which considers that today "the proletariat is tired and disappointed" (Pro­meteo 7), it's not surprising that Battaglia only acknowledged the current resurgence eight months late, in April ‘84 (BC 6), and still in the form of a question: "Has the social peace been broken?"

In order to have seen the struggles of autumn ‘83 as the first stirrings of a new resurgence, it was necessary to have understood that, in the pre­sent historic course towards class confrontations, the acceleration of history provoked by the agg­ravation of the crisis in the 1980s - the ‘years of truth' - will express itself in the fact that moments of retreat will be shorter and shorter.

We should also say that the ‘dialectic' with a CWO sauce didn't prevent this group making the enormous blunder it did in the summer of ‘81 on the question of Poland, This blunder can also be explained by their total incomprehension of the two questions analyzed by the ICC.

The world-wide generalizations of workers' struggles and the role of the proletariat of Western Europe

If we were able to understand the retreat which took place in Poland it was - as we've already seen - because the balance of class forces in this country was largely determined by the balance of forces on an international scale and not­ably in the western industrial metropoles. The idea that the revolution was possible in Poland while the proletariat in these concentrations re­mained passive shows that a marxist teaching that is more than 100 years old was being lost sight of here:

"The communist revolution ... will not be a pur­ely national revolution; it will take place simultaneously in all the civilized countries, that is to say at the very least in England, America, France and Germany." (Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847)

It was on this basis that the ICC, following the struggles in Poland, developed its analysis on ‘The World-Wide Generalization of the Class Str­uggle' (IR 26) and on ‘The Proletariat of West­ern Europe at the Centre of the Generalization of the Class Struggle ( Critique of the Theory of the ‘Weakest Link')' in IR31, where we wrote:

"As long as important movements of the class only hit the countries on the peripheries of capital­ism (as was the case with Poland) and even if the local bourgeoisie is completely outflanked, the Holy Alliance of all the bourgeoisies of the world, led by the most powerful ones, will be able to set up an economic, political, ideolog­ical and even military cordon sanitaire around the sectors of the proletariat concerned. It's not until the proletarian struggle hits the econ­omic and political heart of capital ... (that the struggle will) give the signal for the world rev­olutionary conflagration ... For centuries, hist­ory has placed the heart and head of the capital­ist world in western Europe .., the epicenter of the coming revolutionary earthquake will be in the industrial heart of western Europe, where the best conditions exist for the development of rev­olutionary consciousness and a revolutionary struggle. The proletariat of this zone will be in the vanguard of the world proletariat."

Obviously, the CWO with its coffee-bar dialectic can only have contempt for such a perspective: "The CWO also argued that, though the proletarian revolution cannot succeed in any country taken in isolation, the early outbreaks of the working class could come from the semi-developed count­ries just as from the advanced ones, and that communists should prepare for both possibilities." (WV 17)

In 1981, the CWO was certainly ready for all possibilities, even the revolution in Poland. What this ‘argument' shows convincingly is the inadequacy of its framework of analysis. The ICC's view, on the other hand, not only allowed it to understand the reflux in struggle and the defeat for the proletariat in ‘81, but also all­owed it to measure the relative nature of the defeat suffered in Poland and thus of the reflux that was to follow:

"However cruel, the defeat the proletariat has been through in Poland is only a partial one. ... the main body of the army, based in the huge con­centrations of the west, and notably in Germany, has not yet entered into the fray." (IR 29, ‘After the Repression in Poland ...')

Similarly, among the elements which led us to recognize all the importance of the public sector strike in Belgium in September ‘83 as announcing a new wave of struggle and as "the most import­ant movement of workers' struggles since the combats in Poland ‘80", we pointed in partic­ular to:

"- the fact that the movement involved one of the world's oldest industrialized countries, one of its oldest national capitals, situated in the heart of the enormous proletarian concentrations of' western Europe;

"- the dynamic that appeared at the movement's outset: a spontaneous upsurge of struggles which took the unions by surprise and got beyond them; a tendency to extend the struggle; overcoming regional and linguistic divisions ...

"- the fact that the movement took place in an international context of sporadic but significant workers' combativity." (IR 36, ‘The Acceleration of History')

But this presentation of analyses that are indispensable to an understanding of the present period would be incomplete if it didn't talk about one of the essential questions the prolet­ariat is confronted with today.

The bourgeois strategy of the left in opposition

For the CWO, our analysis of this question is "pure scholasticism, like all the others, giving an illusion of clarification and deflecting the organization's attention from the real issues of revolutionary politics." (WV 17)

For its part, Volonte Communiste shudders at the very idea that the bourgeoisie can have a strat­egy against the working class:

"Wallowing in blood, the bourgeoisie gives more and more proof of its historical blindness and can only attempt to plug the breeches opened in its system by the contradictions which have be­come insurmountable since the entry into decad­ence. Impotent and unstable, it is, in contrast to the 19th century, plunged into permanent con­vulsions; hence, apart from the institutional heavy-handedness of this or that state, its only real mode of government is a headlong flight and total empiricism at all levels." (Revolution Sociale, 16, ‘Critique of the ICC')

But if these two groups, and many others, had understood this question, they would have been able:

- to understand the effectiveness of this new card played by the bourgeoisie at the end of the ‘70s which was to a large extent responsible for the disorientation of the proletariat at the beginning of the ‘80s, both in Poland and in the west; it would have helped them avoid saying a number of stupid things about the potential of the struggle in 1981-82;

- to foresee that once the element of surprise contained in this card had passed, its effectiveness would begin to diminish, which would allow for the resurgence of struggles in mid-‘83 - something they didn't see or only saw very late;

- to avoid being blinded by one of the main comp­onents of the card of the ‘left in opposition': the omnipresence of the unions in the present struggles (which makes them underestimate their importance) since:

"In the advanced countries of the west, and not­ably in western Europe, the proletariat will only be able to fully deploy the mass strike after a whole series of struggles, of violent explosions, of advances and retreats, during the course of which it will progressively unmask all the lies of the left in opposition, of unionism, and rank and filism." (‘Resolution on the International Situation', 5th ICC Congress, IR 35)

As Marx put it "It's in practice that man proves the truth, that is to say the reality and power of his thinking" (Theses on Feuerbach).

Unfortunately, revolutionary groups often under­stand this phrase the wrong way round entirely: when reality is obstinate enough to contradict their analyses, they don't feel at all concerned and continue, as though nothing had happened, to maintain their errors and confusions, making great efforts in ‘dialectics' to force the facts into a framework where they just don't fit.

On the other hand, when it suits them, they give Marx's phrase a meaning that he would have vig­orously and contemptuously rejected: the glorifi­cation of empiricism. For, behind all the CWO's phrases against "scholastic debates" or the mul­tiple hypotheses of Battaglia, is none other than empiricism, the same empiricism which Lenin - from whom these organizations loudly claim des­cent - castigated amongst the economists at the beginning of the century:

"What a pretentious attitude, what an ‘exaggera­tion of the conscious element': to theoretically resolve questions in advance, in order to then convince the organization, the party and the mass of the well-foundedness of this solution." (What is to be Done?)

The CWO and Battaglia never stop repeating that they are the vanguard and guide of the proletar­iat. This is something that has to be proved in practice, not in words. But to do this, they will have to swap their empiricism for the marxist method, If not, ‘if they don't know how to apprec­iate the balance of class forces and to identify the weapons of the enemy, they will only be able to ‘guide' the proletariat towards defeat.

FM          

3.3.85

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[1] Battaglia Comunista (paper of the Internation­alist Communist Party): Casella Postale 1753, 20100, MILANO, Italy.

[2] CWO, PO Box 145, Head Post Office, Glasgow, UK.

[3] L'Association pour la Communaute Humaine Mondiale, BP 30316, 75767, Paris Cedex 16, France.

[4] These same elements cried ‘defeatism' when we pointed out the reflux of struggles in ‘81 and '82.

 

Presentation (1985)

The KAPD's Theses on the Party were written in July 1921 to be discussed not only in the party but within the Communist International, of which it had been a sympathising member since December 1920.

The authors of the Theses were animated by a dual concern:

- on the one hand, to demarcate the KAPD from the official section of the CI, the KPD, which had become a typically centrist party after the ex­pulsion of the left in October 1919. Born in action, in April 1920, in the midst of armed battles between the workers of the Ruhr and the Reichswehr, the KAPD expressed a revolutionary orientation in the face of the KPD which, through the mouth of its leader Levi, proclaimed its "loyal opposition" to the social democratic gov­ernment. The KAPD, like Bordiga's CP in Italy later on, was a prototype of the revolutionary party in the period of decadence: a ‘narrow' party-nucleus in contrast to the mass parties ad­vocated, by the CI whose model was to be the VKPD after the fusion with the Independents in Decem­ber 1920;

- on the other hand, against the anti-party, ‘councilist' tendencies incarnated by Ruhle and the AAUD-E, to affirm the indispensable role of the party in the revolution as a centralised, disciplined, unitary body in programme and in action.

The Theses of the KAPD, whose English transla­tion is reprinted[1] from Revolutionary Perspec­tives 2 (now the journal of the CWO), are partic­ularly relevant to today, despite their weakness. Reading them demolishes the legend of the ‘infan­tile' and ‘anti-party' KAPD which has been kept up by the ‘Bordigist' currents. On the contrary, unlike the Ruhle tendency which was moving to­wards anarchism, the KAPD was an integral part of the international communist left which fought ag­ainst the degeneration of the CI.

It's thus a nonsense, an absolute contradiction, when today's councilist groups or elements claim descent from the KAPD. The Theses of the KAPD are without any ambiguity a condemnation of council­ist ideas.

a) The nature of the proletarian revolution

- against the anarchistic elements of the German left, the KAPD affirmed that the question of the political power of the proletariat was not posed locally, in each factory seen as the ‘bastion of the revolution', but on a world scale. It meant the destruction of the state and thus the concen­trated violence of the proletariat;

- against the factoryism of Ruhle and the AAUD-E, who saw the proletarian revolution simply as an economic question of the management of the fac­tories, the KAPD underlined the unitary aspect of the proletarian revolution, as a process both political (the seizure of power) and economic.

b) The role and function of the party

It is striking to see the same definition of the party as in Bordiga: a programmatic body (consc­iousness) and a will to action. Similarly, the party is not identical to the class: it is its most conscious, most selected part. The party is not in the service of the class because, in def­ending the overall interests of the revolutionary class, it might be "momentarily apparently in opposition to the masses". The party does not tail-end the class - it is the avant-garde of the class.

This insistence on the political role of the party was in opposition to the ‘councilist' tend­encies which developed in the German proletariat after the defeat of 1919, especially in the form of a certain revolutionary-syndicalist a-politic­ism in the movement of the ‘Unions', which at the time regrouped hundreds of thousands of workers. Against this tendency to retreat to the factory or a particular industrial sector, the KAPD aff­irmed the necessity for an intransigent political combat. This view of the party had nothing to do with that of Pannekoek in the 1930s who consid­ered that a ‘party' could only be a work group or study circle. For the KAPD, as for the ICC today, the party is a militant organisation of the work­ing class. It is an active factor - a ‘party of action' - in the class struggle, its function being to develop the class consciousness of the proletariat which goes through phases of hesita­tion and oscillation.

The struggle against oscillations and hesitations is a constant political combat, both within the party and within the class as a whole:

- within the party, against centrist tendencies towards conciliation with the bourgeoisie or with petty-bourgeois anarchism. Thus, the KAPD had to expel the ‘national-Bolshevik' tendency in Ham­burg around Wollfheim and Laufenberg who, along­side pro-Soviet Russia German nationalists, call­ed for a ‘revolutionary war' against the Entente powers. Also expelled was the Ruhle tendency in Saxony, which denied any necessity for a polit­ical party of the proletariat;

- within the class, the party has to put itself at the head of struggles, keeping a firm grip on the compass of its programme, guided by a revolu­tionary will to action. If the party is incapable of clearly judging a revolutionary situation and of orienting it through the clarity of its slog­ans at a time when the class is in a state of ferment, it risks ending up like the Spartakus­bund in January 1919 in Berlin, unable to give the workers a clear perspective. At such decis­ive moments, the party plays a fundamental role, either in pushing for an offensive if the situat­ion is ripe, or in calling for a retreat (as the Bolshevik party did in July 1917) even at the cost of being "apparently in opposition" to the most advanced fractions of the class when they are isolated from the rest of the proletarian mass.

In order to be the "head and weapon of the revol­ution" at the crucial moments of the revolutionary struggle, the KAPD was compelled to grasp the profound changes in the structure of the party brought about by the period of capitalist decadence.

c) Structure and function of the party

In underlining the necessity for a "solid commun­ist nucleus", the KAPD clearly understood the im­possibility of mass revolutionary parties. In the epoch of wars and revolutions, the party can only regroup a small minority of the class, those who are most determined and most conscious of the need for revolution. It was no longer, as in the 19th century, a party of reforms regrouping and organising broad layers of the class but a party forged in the heat of the revolution. The condi­tions of decadence (state totalitarianism, semi-legality and illegality) demanded a rigorous selection of communist militants.

For this reason, but also because the party undergoes a very rapid numerical growth in rev­olutionary periods, when it begins to attract masses of people who were previously not politicised or who were involved with the parties of the capitalist left (Stalinism, leftism, etc.), it is vital that the party "should never allow its membership to expand faster than is made possible by the power of absorption of the solid communist nucleus". This view of the party is very close to that of Bordiga in 1921. Similarly the insistence on the need for party discipline destroys the legend put about by the PCI (Programme Communiste) of the ‘anarchistic', anti-centralist KAPD. Thesis 7 affirms that the communist party "must be organised and disciplined in its entirety from below, as a unified will."

d) Intervention in economic struggles

The question of intervention was clearly posed by the KAPD. The response was the opposite of that given by Invariance - and afterwards by the modernist milieu in general - whose translation of the Theses contains a revealing inversion of meaning. Invariance adds a negative (ne pas) where the KAPD affirms that the party "must also intervene in the movement of the workers caused by economic needs." Certainly, later on (in 1922) Gorter and Schroder (a KAPD leader) were to split advocating non-participation in the economic struggles of the class except "on an individual basis" (sic). It goes without saying that a rev­olutionary party participates politically in the defensive struggle. What distinguishes it from the modernists is the affirmation that the prol­etariat forges itself as a class through partial struggles, this being a precondition for the movement towards the global political struggle for power. At the same time, what distinguishes a real revolutionary party from the ‘councilist' tendencies - who see only the economic struggle and play at being outraged virgins when the str­uggle is politicised and goes in the direction indicated by the slogans of the revolutionary party - is its political activity. Going against the politicisation of the struggle, as the ‘coun­cilists' do, can only "strengthen the spirit of opportunism" (Thesis 11) by separating defensive struggles and revolutionary struggles. In the third place, what distinguishes it from the ‘Bordigist' tendencies is that it doesn't set itself up as the organiser and technical director of the struggle; the party must "attempt to spiritually clarify such movements and develop them, by encouraging appeals for active solidar­ity so that the struggles are extended, and take on revolutionary and, where possible, political forms."

Even if the terms employed here show a certain confusion of language - "spiritual" has an idea­list ring and the revolutionary struggle seems to precede the political struggle - the underlying concern to be an active factor in the struggle appears clearly in the Theses. The party is a factor of will and of consciousness.

This spirit is also that of the ICC. The party that will emerge tomorrow can be neither a circle of timid phrasemongers nor the self-proclaimed leadership of the class. In order to be an active factor, the party first has to be the product of class consciousness, which crystallises itself in the revolutionary will of significant minorities of the class.

In republishing these Theses, we do not intend to pass in silence over the weaknesses and shortcom­ings that appear here and there and which mean that we have to reappropriate the programme of the KAPD in a critical manner. These weaknesses weren't just a result of the hasty editing of the Theses (in preparation for the Third Congress of the CI) which sometimes makes them rather obscure. They derive from more profound confusions in the KAPD which finally explain its disappearance as a current.

Some weaknesses of the Theses of the KAPD

a) Dual organisation

The fact that the Unions (AAUD) emerged before the KAPD was formed, and that they had close pol­itical positions, explains why the KAPD saw itself both as the product of and ‘spiritual leadership' of the AAU. The Theses contain a pyramidal conception in which the party creates and directs the Unions, ‘and the latter create the workers' councils. This substitutionist concep­tion coexisted in a confused way with an ‘educ­ationist' theory ("revolutionary education of the widest numbers"). In the confusion engendered by a series of dec­isive defeats for the German proletariat, it was not so clear that the revolutionary factory organ­isations, the Unions, were in fact the debris of the workers' councils. But factory committees can only become permanent when the revolutionary str­uggle is in the ascendant - they either disappear when it is defeated or become the motor force of the councils in the forward-march of the revol­ution.

By maintaining these committees after the revol­utionary wave in a mass, permanent manner - mem­bership being open to those who recognised the theses of the party (dictatorship of the prolet­ariat, anti-parliamentarism, destruction of the unions) - the KAPD ended up being absorbed by, the AAU, leading to the final disintegration of' the party in 1929.

The error of dual organisation can also be seen in the functioning of the KAPD, since alongside it there was a youth organisation (KAJ), auton­omous from the party.

b) Fraction and opposition

In contrast to the Italian Fraction later on, the KAPD saw itself as an ‘opposition' in the Inter­national and not as an organised body having an organic continuity with the old party. Its expul­sion from the CI in September 1921 did not allow it to link up with the most significant lefts, like that of Bordiga. The existence of groups in Holland, Bulgaria and Britain on the KAPD's pos­itions gave rise to illusions amongst a minority and, under Gorter's influence, to the artificial proclamation of a Communist Workers' Internation­al(KAI). This led to a split in the KAPD in March 1922 and hastened the numerical disinteg­ration of the party. After that the ‘official' KAPD (the Berlin tendency as opposed to the Essen tendency which followed Gorter) was to survive until 1933. In opposition to Gorter, it showed that a new International could only emerge when the objective and subjective conditions had mat­ured. But the real contributions on the question of the Fraction and the International were those of the Italian Left after 1933.

The weaknesses and shortcomings in the Theses of the KAPD should not make us lose sight of their positive acquisitions which, along with those of the Italian Left and in part those of the Dutch Left, are our acquisitions as well. Faced with the councilist danger in the class tomorrow, faced with centrist vacillations, these Theses show the necessity for the party, its indispens­able role in the triumph of the world revolution. It must be clear that the victory of the revolution will depend on the maturity of revolutionary minorities and their capacity to avoid being left behind by revolutionary movements. The history of the KAPD shows a contrario that the outcome of the revolution depends to a large ex­tent on the capacity of revolutionaries to form the international party not during, but before, the outbreak of the revolution. The 1980s are the years of truth for the revolutionary milieu, particularly for the ICC which must remain vigil­ant against any councilist underestimation of the necessity for the party, and which must be the most active element in posing the bases for its future constitution.

Ch.

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Theses on the role of the Party in the Proletarian Revolution (KAPD, 1921)

1. It is the historical task of the prolet­arian revolution to bring the disposal of the wealth of the earth into the hands of the work­ing masses, to put an end to the private owner­ship of the means of production, thus rendering impossible the existence of a separate, exploiting, ruling class. This task involves freeing the economy of society from all fetters of political power and is, of course, posed on a world scale.

2. The ending of the capitalist mode of produc­tion, the taking over of this production, and putting it in the hands of the working class, the ending of all class divisions and withering of political institutions, and building of a commun­ist society is a historical process whose indiv­idual moments cannot be exactly predicted. But, as regards this question, the role which polit­ical violence will play in this process is nev­ertheless settled on some points.

3. The proletarian revolution is at the same time a political and economic process. Neither as a political, nor as an economic process can it be solved on a national scale; the building of the world commune is absolutely necessary for its survival. Therefore it follows that until the final destruction of the power of capital on a world scale, the victorious part of the revol­utionary proletariat still needs political viol­ence to defend, and if possible attack, the political violence of the counter-revolution.

4. In addition to these reasons which make pol­itical violence necessary for the victorious part of the proletariat, there are additional reasons relating to the internal development of the rev­olution. The revolution - looked on as a politic­al process - has indeed a decisive moment, the taking of political power. The revolution, viewed as an economic process, has no such decisive mom­ent, long work will be necessary to take over the direction of the economy on the part of the prol­etariat, to eradicate the profit motive, and to replace it by an economy of needs. It is self-evident that during this period the bourgeoisie will not remain idle, but will try to regain pow­er for the purpose of defending their profits. It follows that in the countries with a developed democratic ideology - that is, in the advanced industrial countries - they will seek to mislead the proletariat with democratic slogans. It is thus essential that the workers wield a strong, unwavering political violence till they have tak­en over, in concrete terms, the control of the economy and broken the grip of the bourgeoisie. This period is the dictatorship of the prolet­ariat.

5. The necessity for the proletariat to hold political power after the political victory of the revolution confirms, as a consequence, the necessity for a political organisation of the proletariat just as much after as before the seizure of power.

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

7. The historically determined form of organ­isation which groups together the most conscious and prepared proletarian fighters is the Party. Since the historical task of the proletarian rev­olution is communism, this party, in its prog­ramme and in its ideology, can only be a commun­ist party. The communist party must have a thor­oughly worked out programmatic basis and must be organised and disciplined in its entirety from below, as a unified will. It must be the head and weapon of the revolution.

8. The main task of the communist party, just as much before as after the seizure of power, is, in the confusion and fluctuations of the prolet­arian revolution, to be the one clear and unflinching compass towards communism. The commun­ist party must show the masses the way in all situations, not only in words but also in deeds. In all the issues of the political struggle be­fore the seizure of power, it must bring out in the clearest way the difference between reforms and revolution, must brand every deviation to re­formism as a betrayal of the revolution, and of the working class, and as giving new lease of life to the old system of profit. Just as there can be no community of interest between exploiter and exploited, so can there be no unity between reform and revolution. Social democratic reform­ism - whatever mask it might choose to wear - is today the greatest obstacle to the revolution, and the last hope of the ruling class.

9. The communist party must, therefore, un­flinchingly oppose every manifestation of re­formism and opportunism with equal determination in its programme, its press, its tactics and activities. Especially it should never allow its membership to expand faster than is made possible by the power of absorption of the solid communist nucleus.

10. Not only in its entirety, but in its indiv­idual moments, the revolution is a dialectical process; in the course of the revolution the masses make inevitable vacillations. The commun­ist party, as the organisation of the most con­scious elements, must itself strive not to succ­umb to these vacillations, but to put them right. Through the clarity and the principled nature of their slogans, their unity of words and deeds, their position at the head of the struggle, the correctness of their predictions, they must help the proletariat to quickly and completely over­come each vacillation. Through its entire activ­ity the communist party must develop the class consciousness of the proletariat, even at the cost of being momentarily apparently in oppos­ition to the masses. Only thus will the party, in the course of the revolutionary struggle, win the trust of the masses, and accomplish a revolution­ary education of the widest numbers.

11. The communist party naturally must not lose contact with the masses. This means, aside from the obvious duty of indefatigable propaganda, that it must also intervene in the movement of the workers caused by economic needs and attempt to spiritually clarify such movements and develop them, by encouraging appeals for active solidar­ity so that the struggles are extended and take on revolutionary and, where possible, political forms. But the communist party cannot strengthen the spirit of opportunism by raising partial re­formist demands in the name of the party.

12. The most important practical performance of the communists in the economic struggle of the workers lies in the organisation of those means of struggle which, in the revolutionary epoch in all the highly developed countries, are the only weapons suitable for such struggle. This means that the communists must therefore seek to unite the revolutionary workers (not only the members of the communist party) to come together in the factories, and to build up the factory organisations (Betriebsorganizationen) which will unite into Unions and which will prepare for the tak­ing over of production by the working class.

13. The revolutionary factory organisations (Unions) are the soil from which action committ­ees will emerge in the struggle, the framework for partial economic demands and for the workers fighting for themselves. They are forerunners and foundation of the revolutionary workers' councils.

14. In creating these wide class organisations of the revolutionary proletariat, the communists prove the strength of a programmatically rounded and unified body. And in the Unions they give an example of communist theory in practice, seeking the victory of the proletarian revolution and subsequently the achievement of a communist soc­iety.

15. The role of the party after the political victory of the revolution is dependent on the international situation and on the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat. As long as the dictatorship of the proletariat (the political violence of the victorious working class) is necessary, the communist party must do all it can to push events in a communist direc­tion. To this end, in all the industrialised countries it is absolutely necessary that the widest possible amount of revolutionary workers, under the influence of the spirit of the party, are actively involved in the taking over and transformation of the economy. Being organised in factories and Unions, schooled in individual con­flicts, forming committees of action, are the necessary preparations which will be undertaken by the advanced guard of the working class itself and prepare them for the development of the rev­olutionary struggle.

16. In as much as the Unions, as the class organisation of the proletariat, strengthen themsel­ves after the victory of the revolution and be­come capable of consolidating the economic found­ations of the dictatorship in the form of the system of councils, they will increase in import­ance in relation to the party. Later on, in as much as the dictatorship of the proletariat is assured thanks to being rooted in the conscious­ness of the broad masses, the party loses its importance against the workers' councils. Finally, to the extent that the safeguarding of the revol­ution by political violence becomes unnecessary, in as much as the masses finally change their dictatorship into a communist society, the party ceases to exist.

From Proletarian, July 1921.

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[1] We have made some corrections to RP's version (RP didn't cite the source of their translation) in order to bring it into line with the version published in the French edition of this International Review, which is in turn a corrected version of a translation by Invariance no. 8, October - December, 1969.