IR-51, 4th qtr 1987
The proletarian political milieu, with all its strengths and weaknesses, springs from the life of the working class. Its dynamic and its characteristics tend to express the proletariat’s developing awareness of its own nature as a revolutionary class, and of its ability to give reality to the communist perspective. However, the political milieu does not merely reflect the class. It has an active role to play in the process of the class’ coming to consciousness, and in its struggle. The political milieu’s own dynamic is thus also determined by its own self-awareness, and by the active part played within it by its clearest fractions.
This is why the question of the political milieu, its present state, the perspectives for its development, and the ICC’s role within this process, were included in the agenda of the ICC’s 7th Congress.
Concern with strengthening the organised proletarian milieu, and work for its regroupment are constant lynch-pins for revolutionaries’ activity and intervention. As the major pole of reference, and therefore of regroupment, within the international revolutionary milieu, the ICC bears a special responsibility in the process that leads to the formation of the proletarian party, without which the communist revolution is impossible. The ICC intends to live up fully to this responsibility; and this is the substance of the resolution on the political milieu that the ICC’s 7th Congress adopted, and which we are publishing below.
The present development of the proletarian political milieu, marked by the appearance of new groups, bears witness to the growing echo of revolutionary positions within the world working class. Products of the international recovery of the class struggle, these new political groups put into still sharper relief the responsibility of those older organisations which have survived the political decantation of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Today’s development in the proletarian milieu will only become a source of greater political and organisational strength if the older groups are capable of disengaging themselves from the dead-weight of sectarianism, and take the necessary steps towards the political clarification that is vital to any process of regroupment.
The collapse of the 3rd International, and the years of counter-revolution that followed, when revolutionaries were reduced to a tiny minority, still weigh heavily on today’s movement. Despite a real development since the proletariat’s historic recovery in the late 60’s, the political milieu remains very weak. This is an expression, not only of the weight of the organic separation from the communist fractions of the past, but also of today’s milieu’s own difficulty in resolutely setting about the critical reappropriation of the workers’ movement’s political gains. This inadequate reappropriation of political continuity appears on the organisational level in particular, in the milieu’s dispersal, scattered amongst a multitude of organisations, in its incomprehension of the need to work with determination and clarity towards the process of regrouping the revolutionary milieu. It is certainly no accident that it is the question of organisation – and so of regroupment -- that most clearly crystallises the political movement’s weakness, since this question concretises in activity all the other revolutionary positions. It poses the need to reappropriate the gains of the past, not only on the theoretical but on the practical level, and this is where the break in organisational continuity weighs most heavily. The movement’s dispersal, and accompanying sectarianism (the complete opposite to previous communist organisations’ ideas), are a terrible factor of confusion for new elements who emerge in search of a revolutionary coherence. Today’s political milieu is a veritable labyrinth, which for new groups makes the labour of reappropriating the political continuity vital to their survival all the more difficult.
The political milieu is a whole. Defending its identity against the forces of the counter-revolution, rejecting all non-proletarian practice within it, are essential aspects of the life of any revolutionary organisation. However, the milieu is not a homogeneous whole, far from it. Not all its constituent organisations express the same dynamic towards the clarification and organisational regroupment which absolutely must take place for the formation of tomorrow’s communist party to be possible.
To make revolutionary intervention effective, and work clearly towards clarification and regroupment, it is important to make a distinction between:
-- newly emerging groups, which despite the confusions inherent to their youth and their lack of historical continuity with past revolutionary organisations, express a positive will towards clarification and integration into the proletarian revolutionary movement, and which are signs of the developing echo for revolutionaries within the working class;
-- organisations which, because of their origins, constitute the historic and political poles of the proletarian milieu, and whose prime responsibility is to work determinedly to reinforce the new groups’ political maturity, and to engage clearly the vital process of regroupment; these are the ICC and the IBRP, in particular Battaglia Comunista;
-- organisations which express more sharply the weight of sectarianism, and whose existence is based on a sectarian isolation, or on premature splits which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the questions of organisation and revolutionary regroupment. By separating themselves artificially from the major poles of coherence of the political milieu, these groups can only crystallise a loss of political direction which, whether through academicism or activism, opens the door to the abandonment of class positions, and so hinders the process of clarification necessary to regroupment. A clear example of this political parasitism is the EFICC, which incoherently theorises its separation from the ICC, while still standing on the same platform.
Time and tide wait for no man, and the acceleration of the historical process imposes its own demands: the appearance of new groups, the developing echo of revolutionary ideas as the class struggle develops, pose in the medium term the need for new Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left, in order to struggle against the revolutionary milieu’s dispersal, and to accelerate the process of clarification and political decantation that are the precondition for any regroupment. Those organisations that are unable to participate positively in this absolutely necessary process are historically condemned; this is amply demonstrated by the itinerary of the Bordigist PCI (Communist Program), which obstinately refused any contact with the other organisations of the proletarian movement, refused to take any part in the Conferences of the Communist Left at the end of the 70’s, and which finally paid with its existence for its sectarian involution (which prevented it from undertaking its political redressment).
The ICC, far from having any immediatist illusions as to the possibility of a rapid regroupment, and fully aware of its responsibilities, is determined to pave the way for a new round of Conferences, in a framework of political rigour and clarity.
Although the preconditions for a new round of Conferences have yet to be met, it is extremely important that all the organisations making up the proletarian political milieu should be clearly aware of the absolute necessity of working towards making this perspective a reality. To do so, the revolutionary organisations, and above all the major historical poles of reference, must develop the links amongst themselves, against all sectarianism but with the political rigour and firmness necessary to all clarification, by publishing clear polemics which make it possible to highlight the points of agreement and disagreement, and by using all possible occasions, notably public meetings, to confront clearly their points of view.
The future of the class struggle depends on the proletarian milieu’s ability to assume this responsibility, to move towards the convening of new Conferences, and to pose the perspective of regroupment. The outcome of the future is being decided now.
JJ
1) The evolution of the proletarian political milieu over the last two years has been especially marked by:
-- its emergence, under the impulse especially of the 3rd wave of struggles since the historic recovery of the late 60’s, from the crisis in which it had been plunged in the early 80’s;
-- the appearance, under the same impulse, of new groups, especially at capitalism’s periphery;
-- the degeneration of some existing groups: for example, the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste) towards anarchism, and the OCI (Organizzazione Comunista Internazionalista) towards Trotskyism.
2) This evolution highlights still further the growing responsibility of those organisations that have been capable of keeping to a consistent marxist terrain, and which have a real international presence and experience.
In this sense, the development of the ICC’s effort towards the clarification, decantation, and eventually the regroupment of this milieu cannot but continue.
3) In this effort, the ICC’s method remains fundamentally the same as in the past: putting forward the priority of political rigour and clarity against all adventures bringing groups together through activist shortcuts, which can only open the door to superficiality and opportunism.
4) In the framework of this evolution and effort, a new round of Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left is a perspective to be prepared. Despite the inconsistencies of many of the replies, the echo encountered by the “Emancipation Obrera” group’s initiative (an echo to which the ICC contributed by making it known in seven languages and more than ten countries) expresses a greater concern within the movement to combat its present dispersed situation.
However, although the need for such Conferences is making itself more and more urgently felt, the conditions for calling them are not yet sufficiently ripe:
-- on the one hand, because many of the “old groups” still maintain an attitude of sectarian isolation (the enthusiasm for contacts with a group on the other side of the world should not hide the fact that this is often accompanied by a – sometimes theorised – refusal to so much as attend public meetings held in the same country by other revolutionary organisations);
-- on the other, because the “new” groups, precisely because of their youth, are not yet capable of successfully taking to its conclusion the political responsibility of this kind of work.
5) In the short term, the ICC’s intervention in the proletarian political milieu must follow two fundamental lines:
a) towards the new groups, the organisation must continue its work of discussion, pushing for decantation and political clarification; putting forward the need for the new groups to integrate themselves into the international milieu, and to attach themselves to the political continuity of the Communist Left, without however neglecting the tasks of defining themselves more clearly and intervening in the class;
b) as far as the “old” groups are concerned, apart from denouncing the degeneration of some and the parasitic [1] [1] nature of others, priority must be given to tightening our links with the movement’s other historic pole of reference: the current of the IBRP (continuing and improving our public and international debate, presence at their public meetings, proposals for common public meetings, direct contacts as often as possible).
[1] [2] i.e., artificially maintaining a separate existence, with a political platform virtually identical to that of other groups, and of the ICC in particular
The current world situation is at one and the same time presenting us with the war-like events in the Middle East, and with the workers' struggles in South Africa and South Korea. These two antagonistic aspects of the world situation - both based on the deepening crisis of capitalism - illustrate what we mean by the ‘acceleration of history'. They show that the ‘historic course', the balance of forces between the two perspectives of war and revolution, is the axis around which present and future historical events are unfolding. And though up till now the class struggle has managed to prevent humanity from embarking on an irreversible slide towards war, the acceleration of history underlines the vital necessity if it is to take its struggles forward, for the working class to develop its awareness of what's at stake in the world situation, and of its historic mission to transform society.
'The war of the embassies' in Europe, the bloody events in Mecca, the 'Irangate' scandal in the USA, UN resolutions. Behind all this, the western imperialist bloc, under the supreme command of the USA, has prepared and concealed the greatest military buildup since the Second World War. These events are on such a grand scale that they have had to be prepared very carefully, above all at the level of what is known as ‘public opinion'. This has been done. At the centre of all these detailed preparations, the recent events reveal the true significance of the Irangate scandal and of all the campaigns around it: to justify a major shift in US policy towards Iran.
Just as the ‘Watergate' scandal in 1973-74, which led to the resignation of President Nixon, corresponded to a change in international policy ( US withdrawal from Vietnam, rapprochement with China ), Irangate also corresponds to a change in the orientation of international politics. What has come out of this scandal except the ‘proof' that negotiation with the Iranian ‘terrorists' is impossible, that only force, the language of arms, can make them listen to reason?
For those who still think that this military intervention in the Persian Gulf, which has involved 40 of America's most sophisticated warships including two aircraft carriers, not to mention the air-naval forces, one half of the French fleet including one aircraft carrier, the most up-to-date war-ships of the British navy and tens of thousands of men - for those who think that all this isn't so important and who, lulled by the bourgeoisie's refrain about the ‘desire for peace' are content to doze off after expressing the view that this is really only an adventure in far-off lands without any major consequences or implications for Europe, we should simply like to recall that the First World War, which covered all Europe in blood, also began out of such ‘far-away' wars - the two Balkan wars, in a region close to the Middle East and playing an analogous strategic role: yesterday the confrontation between the great powers over access to the ‘warm seas'; today the main focus for east-west confrontation since this was symbolically declared at Yalta in 1945.
From all points of view the working class is concerned by such military engagements. How could it be otherwise when, just from the economic and social point of view, two thirds of humanity are suffering from hunger and unemployment is spreading a shadow of misery over a major part of the working class in the industrialized countries, and when at the same time as all this the present military intervention in the Gulf is officially costing the USA the astronomical sum of a million dollars a day, just for transportation costs? As for France, which is present on two fronts, Africa and the Middle East, no figures have been supplied, and no wonder.
"Fanaticism and terrorism" against "peace and civilization"
The policies of the USA are neither ‘chaotic' nor ‘incoherent', nor improvised on the spur of the moment as many commentators claim. Despite detours and contours that aren't always immediately comprehensible, the American strategy in the Middle East - a strategy of offensive aimed at strangling the Russian bloc - is based on an iron logic.
For seven years the states of the world have been happy enough simply to see the continuation of the Iran-Iraq war. Today the situation has qualitatively changed. After having ‘regulated' the situation in Lebanon, and completed Iran's isolation in the Middle East, the USA has decided to finish with the Iranian question once and for all. The USA is determined to re-establish Iran as the military fortress it was around 10 years ago. Because of its geographical position, the extent of its territory and its demographic density, no other country can take Iran's place in the region.
Faced with these undeniable realities, what is being said to justify intervention in the Persian Gulf? That the fanaticism of the Iranian population, which is subjugated by religious maniacs, is the cause of instability in the Gulf and of many other evils. The whole effort of western countries and of their bandleader the USA is by this token aimed at containing, ‘by force if necessary', this surge of religious fundamentalism, at achieving peace between Iran and Iraq and, of course, at ensuring the interests of the western countries through the free circulation of oil shipments in the Persian Gulf.
Thus the chancelleries both of the western world and of the Arab countries point to religious fanaticism in Iran as a dangerous source of trouble, a grave threat to peace in the Gulf.
First of all we don't accept that the population of Iran which, like that of Iraq, has been through seven years of a particularly murderous war, costing something like a million deaths, is greatly enthusiastic about waging a ‘holy war' against all the powers of the Arab world and, on top of that, against all the powers of the west.
All wars are atrocious, but this one is particularly so. As well as the power of modern weaponry, it has also involved chemical warfare. Neither side has rejected using any barbarity, either on the battle front or against urban concentrations.
How can we forget that over the past seven years, because of the shortage of combatants whom the war is cutting down in their thousands, 10 year old boys have been sent out by force to the front? And how can you measure the sacrifices demanded to pay for these years of war - even when you don't lose your life, or that of your children, or end up crippled? In these conditions, we are not mistaken in affirming that a very wide anti-war sentiment exists among the Iranian and Iraqi populations. You can't go through seven years of war without being cured of fanaticism. Despite the fact that the bourgeoisie understandably allows very little information about these things to get through, we know that there is real opposition to the war both in Iraq, and Iran:
"The population's hostility to the conflict is in close relation with the privations suffered in particular by the poor...In 1985, agitation which was habitually provoked by the economic situation was for the first time superseded by veritable demonstrations against the war." (International Institute for Strategic Studies, ‘Iraq-Iran: the Paralyzed War').
It's already quite staggering to hear the whole chorus of pacifist declarations which accompanies the deployment of this vast armada in the Gulf. But the duplicity of it all is even more striking when you bear in mind that this war, which they're now talking about bringing to an end, was begun, kept up, and nourished for seven years by those who are now shouting loudest about ‘peace'. It's no secret that the essential aim of the Iran-Iraq war was to destroy the religious regime in Tehran, the cost in human lives counting for little or nothing.
All the countries which, goaded by the USA, were in at the beginning of the conflict, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, thought that the shock of the war in a country which had already been plunged into indescribable chaos after the fall of the Shah would rapidly result in the collapse of the Islamic regime. This perspective has not been verified, on the contrary. This war was supposed to be a short one but it's still very much with us. The Khomeini faction, far from collapsing, has fed on the war and has strengthened its grip on Iranian society through pitiless repression. The fact that a more ‘adaptable', less anachronistic faction than the Mullahs hasn't been installed in Iran shows the depth of social decomposition that has taken place since the Shah's time.
In any case, since the objective of getting rid of the Mullahs had momentarily failed, Iran and Iraq could only get sucked further into the war. A war kept going by all the international powers who, for seven years, have been supplying arms and all kinds of modern military material to the belligerents. Without all these arms, it would have been impossible to continue the conflict.
Realizing they could no longer hope for a rapid solution to the Iranian problem, particularly as long as the question of Syria and Lebanon was not ‘stabilized', and as long as Iran's isolation wasn't complete, the western world, the Arab countries and Israel adapted very nicely to the war.
So for years the whole fine imperialist world has drawn profit from the situation, above all through arms sales. At the head of the queue you will find France, which has sold Iraq modern weapons amounting to $7 billion worth (see ‘Iraq- Iran: the Paralyzed War'). The state of Israel, whose links to the USA can't be denied by anyone, has been the main supplier of arms to Iran during the war:
"Although Tehran denies any link of this kind, Iran has received deliveries of arms from Israel since the beginning of the war...at the time, the sum of these transactions could be estimated at nearly $100 million...In 1983 alone, arms deliveries to Iran reached $100 million." (ibid).
On other levels, apart from the arms sales which fed the carnage for the profit of a large number of nations, China and the USSR included, there has been a very broad consensus about this war. The Arab nations couldn't help viewing with satisfaction that this war kept their turbulent Iranian neighbor well occupied, and that two of the main oil producing countries in the Gulf were drastically cutting production at a time of over- production and falling oil prices. As for Israel, as long as Iran has been the soft underbelly in the defense of western interests in the Middle East, it could claim to be the sole occupant of the post of gendarme for the west, and draw all the advantages from this.
And then comes Russia which, although having no hope or possibility of gaining any real influence in Iran, would much rather see Iran at war than as a reliable US stronghold on the borders with Afghanistan which is under the occupation of Russian troops.
As long as the US was unable to get rid of the religious clique in Tehran, it permitted and encouraged the continuation of the war, sagely controlling the dosage of arms delivered to Baghdad and Tehran. The trick was to permit neither a decisive victory for Iran, which would have further strengthened the existing regime, or a crushing defeat that would have led to its complete collapse and prevented any possibility of reconstructing this military fortress of the western bloc.
From this standpoint, the continuation of the war and of tensions in the Gulf offered the USA the not inconsiderable advantage of the Arab countries being more dependent on America:
"The Gulf states were thus condemned to give financial support to Baghdad and to strengthen their own systems of civil and military defense against Tehran. Their implicit dependence on American guarantees, as well as the political weight of this de facto alliance, was brutally increased." (ibid).
These are the realities of imperialism's danse macabre in the Persian Gulf. And we have only traced its broad outlines.
At a general level this escalation is not a disordered sequence of actions and efforts, without any coherent goal and whose consequences are limited geographically to the Middle East. The present situation in the Persian Gulf is the continuation of an overall strategy which, even if it doesn't directly set US and Russian imperialism against each other, is fully part of the global logic of this confrontation.
When the USA has succeeded in ‘settling' the Iranian question, ie when it once again has made Iran a bastion of its military positions in the Middle East, this settlement will in the final analysis mark up another notch in militarism's planetary advance. After establishing the peace of the grave, the western bloc won't be able to rely simply on its economic power - which is already in a bad enough state in the metropoles ‑ to maintain ‘order' in such an unstable region, where economic decomposition has already reached a very advanced point. It will become obligatory to install a permanent military order at the very frontiers of Russia, thus marking a heightened degree in world imperialist tensions.
The development of military tension and the historic stakes
Let's move our attention for a moment away from the Middle East. The flames of the class struggle are burning in South Africa. In South Korea, a massive movement of the working class has, by its pugnacity, its intransigence and its courage, shattered into a thousand pieces the shop-window display of an Asian proletariat made up of docile slaves. And these are only the most recent expressions of a powerful, world-wide flood of insubordination to the laws of capital in crisis.
The whole world situation is contained in this contradiction, in the opposition between the two perspectives which derive from the decadence of capitalism: war or revolution.
Up till now the struggles of the international working class has pushed back the bourgeois perspective of war. By refusing to sacrifice itself for the survival of the bourgeois economy, it has pushed back the perspective of a supreme sacrifice on the altar of imperialism. All honor is due to the class for having, through its struggles, through its resistance to exploitation, forged a spirit alien to the servile conceptions of fatalism.
But as the world situation as a whole shows us, history is accelerating and in doing so becomes more demanding. It is demanding the proletariat becomes conscious of what it has already done, and, by developing this consciousness, that it pushes it to its logical conclusion. From being a de facto international movement, the workers' struggle can and must become an internationalist movement.
History can often be thankless but it never demands the impossible. Along with historical necessity, the conditions for its realization are also developed. Through the development of the economic crisis, that veritable scourge of society and of the barbarism it brings about; through the international development of the proletarian struggle itself, the working class is now compelled to take its combat onto a higher level. The experience accumulated through its repeated assaults on the fortress of capitalism will give it the strength and the means to do so.
If it is to become conscious of its historic mission, the proletariat can't wait to be submerged in barbarism, otherwise it will be too late. On the terrain of the economy itself, the struggle between labor and capital is already a barricade in the way of the march towards the third world war, and today the workers' struggles can and must point to the proletariat's own perspective. Destroying frontiers, exploitation, and the profit economy is the only way to sweep away, once and for all, the threat of disaster which capitalism suspends over humanity.
Prenat, 5.9. 87.
International class struggle: Workers' struggles in South Korea and South Africa
The world proletariat's increasing mobilization
Contrary to the propaganda of the ruling class, the recent workers' struggles in South Korea and South Africa are not essentially different from those waged by workers in other countries and particularly in the most industrialized countries. Despite their specificities - military dictatorship in South Korea, ‘apartheid' regime in South Africa - these are moments in one and the same combat in the struggle of the world working class against capitalist exploitation.
South Korea, a country whose ‘exceptional' economic performance has been made so much of by the ‘experts', a country which has been pointed to as a model for the less developed world, has during the summer been through its greatest social explosions since the war. Its ten million proletarians, on whose back the national capital, but also Japanese and American capital, have built the ‘Korean miracle' by imposing on them some of the worst working conditions in the world, have given a masterful slap in the face to the myth of the ‘passive', ‘resigned' Asian workers, who are exploited to death and ‘happy' to be so. Through an unprecedented movement of strikes which, beginning from the main working class concentrations - coal mines, shipyards, car plants - spread like wildfire to all sectors of the class, the Korean workers have shown that in Japanese capital's sphere of influence, as in the rest of the world, the working class is learning to constitute itself into a social force, the only one capable of confronting decadent capitalism in crisis and opening up a real perspective. In the long run, these battles prefigure the mobilization of the Japanese proletariat.
South Africa has also been through the biggest class mobilization in its history. More than a quarter of a million miners were on strike for three weeks. At the same time 10,000 postal workers were out; 60,000 workers in the metallurgical sector have been involved in strike movements since July; 15,000 petrochemical workers are threatening to come out.
We can't here go into all the aspects of these struggles. We refer readers to the various organs of our territorial press for further coverage.
The most important thing to do here is to denounce the ideology which seeks to enclose these struggles in a framework which emasculates their class content, which hides what unites them to the combat of the entire world working class.
The bourgeoisie always resorts to the same strategy: it emphasizes what is specific about the conditions of the workers' struggle in a particular enterprise, sector, or country in order to isolate it, to derail it onto a false terrain and smother it. One of the most spectacular examples of this was Poland 1980, where the workers' struggle against exploitation was presented to the whole world as a struggle for the right to go to mass, while more locally it was imprisoned in the struggle for the Solidarnosc trade union's right to exist.
In South Korea capitalist barbarism has taken the form of a particularly violent military dictatorship; in South Africa, the form of racism and apartheid. The American bourgeoisie is currently engaged in getting rid of the most anachronistic elements of these regimes, not in order to lighten the living conditions of the working class, but on the contrary in order to create institutions capable of containing and controlling the class struggle developing in these countries, as in the rest of the world, under the effects of the world economic crisis.
The workers' strikes in South Korea didn't break out with the aim of installing a western-style ‘democratic' bourgeois regime, any more than the South African workers have been struggling for a form of capitalism less cruel towards the black proletarians. These struggles emerged from the start as direct reactions against capitalist exploitation, for wages increases, for the general improvement of living and working conditions. If it had been otherwise, they wouldn't have taken the form of strikes for class demands, but would have remained in the suicidal, inter-classist framework of petitions and demonstrations organized by the so-called ‘democratic' parties of the bourgeois ‘opposition'.
This doesn't mean these struggles haven't attacked the dictatorial and racist forms of capitalist exploitation. On the contrary, they are the only struggles which can impose limits on the barbarism of the local ruling class.
All factions of the bourgeoisie, with the liberals and democrats at the forefront, have said how shocked they are by these strikes, and have called on the proletarians of these countries to be careful not to put their ‘egoistic' class interests above the interests of the ‘nation'.
Kim Young Sam, one of the main Korean democratic opposition leaders again and again called on workers to "show moderation in their demands so as not to threaten the success of the South Korean economy." In South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the NUM, the new ‘democratic' union which has just sabotaged the miners' strike, explained his call for a return to work by referring to the need to respect the legality of the nation.
These appeals, these maneuvers are in reality nothing but a means to disarm the exploited class, to destroy its struggles by derailing them onto the terrain of its exploiters.
No, the struggles of the proletarians in South Korea and South Africa are not examples of cooperation between the exploited and the exploiters for a utopian ‘humanization' of capitalist barbarism. They are moments in the world-wide combat of the working class against capital and its world-wide barbarism. And this is because:
* The causes which have provoked these struggles are the same: the economic crisis of world capitalism leads to an intensification in the peripheries as anywhere else; if there is a difference it's only because in these countries the aggravation of the crisis generally takes on an even more violent character;
* the very forms these struggles take - their tendency to extend to different sectors of the working class, across the barriers of profession, sector or race - are the same which have manifested themselves in all the important workers' struggles in western Europe over the last few years;
* finally because like the struggles of other workers all over the world, they have to be fought on two fronts: against their declared enemies - the governments and their armed military and police apparati, but also against those enemies disguised as ‘friends', the unions and the so-called ‘opposition' parties who work to sabotage the struggle from the inside.
The main danger for the workers of these countries is to become prisoners of the confusion created by all the ‘democratic' propaganda, which is all the more dangerous in that it is aimed at a proletariat which is only beginning to gain experience of the policing role of these ‘democratic' institutions.
All this underlines the responsibility of workers in countries with a long ‘democratic' tradition, workers who are seeing through these institutions more and more clearly, are deserting them - the parties and above all the trade unions - in their millions, and who are more and more learning to fight not only outside them, but against them, as has been shown in the last few years by the workers of Belgium, France, and, most recently, Italy.
RV 5.9.87.
International debate
Bourgeois trade unions, Working class organizations and the intervention of revolutionaries (Reply to "Battaglia Comunista")
After years of silence, Battaglia Comunista[1] has at last resumed its written polemic with the positions of the ICC. Not without difficulty: first BC started discussing with and answering groups in the capitalist periphery (Mexico, India) that knew of, or shared, the ICC's positions; then BC undertook to publish these replies in its press; and now, finally, BC has taken the opportunity, via a reply to a group of our sympathizers in Spain, to engage a direct polemic with the ICC.
Since we have already answered BC elsewhere[2] on the question of the historic course and the evaluation of the present stage of the class struggle, in this article we will deal with "the ICC's abstract positions on the unions and parliament", (Battaglia Comunista no 2, February 1987), concentrating on the question of the unions and revolutionary intervention in workers' struggles. We intend to stick to our method of getting to the roots of the disagreement by taking account of all BC's texts on the question, rather than picking out one or two sentences in a particular article.
Battaglia's article starts from the assumption that, as long as it is merely a matter of "the general theoretical problem (the trade unions' nature and function)", then no great effort is needed to give a clear reply. "The political problem is quite different, and can be posed as follows: given this nature and function of trades unions, how is it possible to "go beyond" them in a revolutionary manner?". And according to BC, the ICC is incapable of answering this question "because of its organic inability...to act politically."
In this reply, we intend first and foremost to demonstrate that even at the "genera1 theoretical" level, there are certain points BC would do well to clarify. Then, we will look at Battaglia's specific proposals for the organization of revolutionaries in the struggle: the "internationalist factory groups." Finally, we will analyze the links between the shortcomings in BC's intervention, and their difficulty in recognizing the reality of the class struggle, in particular the as yet confused and embryonic attempts through which the class itself is beginning to pose the problem of tomorrow's unitary organizations.
Precisely these questions were at the heart of the debates during the first series of International Conferences of the Communist Left, broken off in 1980 by Battaglia and the Communist Workers Organization. It is through the renewal of this debate, on a wider and clearer basis, that the whole international proletarian political milieu will best be able to contribute to resolving the problems posed by the class's preparation for its decisive confrontations with capitalism.
The trade unions: Organs of the bourgeois state
On what solid reference points does BC anchor its present-day understanding of the unions? Essentially, there are three of them:
1) "The union is not and never has been an organ of the revolutionary struggle for the proletariat's emancipation";
2) the union "has been led, as an organ of economic negotiation, to oppose the revolutionary thrust to the abolition of capitalism";
3) "the revolution will be made over the trade union's dead body".
These solid reference points seem rather shaky to us: above all because they do not go to the roots of the problem posed by the Spanish comrades. These comrades want to know why Battaglia still considers it possible today to work within counter-revolutionary organizations like the unions. They will certainly be pleased to hear that the unions are not revolutionary, but this does not take the question forward one jot.
There is no doubt, that even in the 19th century, the unions were not revolutionary organizations, and that their negotiating function always pushed their leaders in a conformist and non-revolutionary direction. However, it is equally true that in the 19th century, marxists fought to the utmost to strengthen the unions. How is it possible, on this identical basis, for the comrades of Battaglia to come to the opposite conclusion that the revolution will have to be made "over the trades unions' dead body"?
Obviously, we will get nowhere like this. It is necessary to put our ideas in order before continuing.
In our opinion, the essential guide lines of the communist position on the unions are the following:
1) the unions were the typical proletarian unitary organization during capitalism's ascendant phase when, since the worldwide proletarian revolution was not yet a possibility, the working-class struggle was essentially in defense of its living conditions and unity within capitalism;
2) with capital's entry into its decadent phase marked by the outbreak of World War I, the proletariat can no longer benefit from the conquest of real reforms; consequently, all the arms created for this struggle (unions, parliamentary parties, etc...) became redundant as far as the proletariat is concerned;
3) the dominant tendency within decadent capitalism is towards state capitalism, one of whose major characteristics is the integration into the state, with an anti-working class function, of organizations that are no longer of any use to the proletariat: the unions have thus become organs of the bourgeois state, to control the workers, and the revolution will destroy them as such.
As we can see, the essential point is that yesterday the unions were working class organizations, while today they belong to the enemy: what is important is what has changed, not what has remained the same.
Since Battaglia says nothing about this in their reply to the Spanish comrades, let us look back at their October 1986 document devoted to the union question ("Il sindacato nel 3 ciclo di accumulazione del capitale"). Here, indeed, we learn that something has changed. But what? and when?
According to BC, what has changed is that, in Marx's day wage increases did indeed decrease the bosses' profits, and the trade union struggle, although limited, was therefore antagonistic to capital. In its monopolistic form, capital has supposedly gained the ability to control the market through monopolies, and therefore to compensate for the effects of wage increases through increased prices; as a result, "with the lessening, or rather the dulling, of the conflict in immediate interests, a whole inter-classist ideology has been able to develop, and strike a chord within the working class itself, especially in the trades unions (...) the institutionalized union is the inevitable conclusion to this process"[3].
In one sentence, BC has turned the world upside down: its decadence no longer means that capitalism has become historically incapable of granting reforms to the working class, but that "the unions are confronted with employers who sometimes even take the lead in conceding wage rises rendered possible, precisely, by the super-profits that a large company can make thanks to its ability to influence the price-fixing process".
Here, Battaglia mistakes effects for the cause: the fact that the bourgeoisie is forced to regulate every stage of the economic cycle (production and market quotas, monetary balance etc...) demonstrates, not that monopoly capital can do what it likes, but on the contrary that ,it is forced to walk on tiptoe through a minefield, because it would collapse into chaos in a matter of months if left to the "free play" of its own laws. And the trades unions, organizations originally formed to negotiate improvements within capitalism, have been integrated into the state because winning lasting reforms has become impossible, not because it has become too easy.
Moreover, if the ease of distributing the crumbs of capital's "super-profits" were really the reason for the unions' integration into the state, then the crisis which, as BC says, has "drastically reduced the possibility (...) of distributing crumbs from these super-profits", should by the same token have eliminated the cause of this integration, and opened the way to the reconstitution of the "glorious red trades unions" in the classic conception of the various Bordigist groups.
The reverse is true, and Battaglia is the first to recognize that with the crisis, the union "has progressively increased its integration into the state apparatus".
There is only one way out of this mesh of contradictions: the recognition that the unions' integration into the bourgeois state has nothing to do with "super-profits", but is based on two complementary historical necessities:
1) capitalism's decadence has made the struggle for lasting reforms impossible,
2) it has also made it vital for capitalism to strengthen its instrument of social cohesion -- the state -- especially by integrating originally working class structures like the trades unions, and transforming them into organs aimed at controlling the working class.
When were the unions integrated into the bourgeois state?
Without this coherence, Battaglia can only flounder in ever more inextricable contradictions, especially when it tries to answer the question: when did the unions pass over to the ruling class?
There should be no room for doubt here: in "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", Lenin, writing in 1916, describes the transition to capital's monopoly form as something that has already taken place. The unions' integration into the bourgeois state, which according to BC depends on this transition, is thus situated at about the period of the First World War. And this is confirmed by the authoritative voice of the Imperial German Government:
"nothing can be done without the union leaders, much less against them; their influence is based on the actions that they have conducted successfully for years to improve the workers' conditions... we could not possibly keep afloat were this not the case"[4].
This definitive integration is only the conclusion of a process begun years before; and it is no accident that the appearance in 1905 of new mass organizations -- the workers' councils of the Russo-Polish revolution, which were later to become the protagonists of the revolutionary wave unleashed by Red October -coincides with the growing inadequacy of the union form for the needs of the workers' struggle.
Given these basic facts, it comes as a great surprise to read in the pamphlet that today's trades unions are the same "as those of 30 - 40 years ago" (ie, 1947-57), and that "the definitive transition, in Italy at least, occurred during World War II". In other words, the transition occurred about the end of the 1940's -- a leap of more than 30 years. To what do we owe this veritable historical earthquake? Probably, to the fact that, in the discussion that developed during the 1920's, the Italian Left took the same line as the Bolsheviks, in favor of reconquering the trades unions (Rome Theses, 1922), against the German and Butch Lefts, who considered the unions' integration into the state as irreversible. That the Italian Left should make this mistake in the 1920's is perfectly comprehensible; what is incomprehensible, is that today BC should try to rewrite history in order to deny the obvious: that on this question the Dutch and Germans' intuition was swifter and deeper than the Russians' and Italians'[5].
This has nothing to do with the method that the Italian Left has bequeathed us: already during the 1930's, the Italian Left's Fractions abroad, far from taking refuge in the out-and-out defense of the Rome Theses' formulations, were doggedly working to "emphasize the stages of the unions' progressive incorporation into the state"[6]. While some argued that only a new revolutionary situation could make it possible to clarify the question definitively, others considered it already resolved, and fought for an end to all activity within the unions:
"Today, the question is not whether or not it is possible for marxists to develop a healthy activity inside the trades unions; it is one of understanding that these organizations have passed definitively into the enemy camp, and that it is impossible to transform them". (Luciano Stefanini: "Contribute alla discussione sul rapport Verresi", in "I1 Seme Comunista" n° 5 of February 1938, quoted in the ICC's pamphlet "La Gauche Communiste d'Italie)
In fact, the only reason for placing the definitive turning-point at the end of the 1940's is that... it is only after the split with the Bordigists of "Programma Comunista" at the beginning of the 1950's that Battaglia decided to give up definitively any plans to reconquer the unions.
BC's pamphlet tries to mask this fact by reminding us that "all the premises of our later and current position" were already to be found in the Theses on the union question presented at the PCInt's December 1945 Turin Congress. This is true. These Theses, presented by Luciano Stefanini, were clearly anti-union, and from this standpoint fairly close to the positions of the Gauche Communiste de France which we consider as our predecessor; and this is precisely why they were rejected by a large majority of the Congress, which went on to adopt the objective of "conquering the unions' leading organs"!
If the comrades of Battaglia consider it useful to cite episodes of their party's history, they should at least try to be complete....
How did Battaglia change its conception of its "Internationalist Factory Groups"?
Now that we have at last determined the "unions' nature and function", we can consider how revolutionaries should develop their organized intervention.
Although the letter to the Mexican and Spanish comrades does not talk about it (why not?), we knew that, for Battaglia, revolutionaries organize their intervention through "factory groups". Let's see then, what is the "nature and function" of these factory groups, and how this notion has evolved in time.
1922: the Partito Comunista d'Italia''s Rome Theses assign to the communist factory groups, made up of party militants, the task of reconquering and taking over the political leadership of the unions, seen as transmission belts from party to class.
1952: the perspective of reconquering the unions being abandoned, the groups are kept alive by giving them "two hats, one of the intermediary between party and class, the other of a political organization". In other words, since the trade's union transmission belt no longer exists, the factory groups themselves are to take their place, replacing, one might say, the class' own unitary organizations. It is no accident that these groups are no longer called communist as in 1922, but union factory groups, coordinated in a Union Fraction on the basis of a specific Trade Union Platform.
1977-80: BC limits its reaction to the discussions on this question during the International Conference of the Communist Left, to changing the name to "Internationalist Factory Groups", without touching anything else.
1982: Battaglia's 2nd Congress throws overboard the whole framework of the Union Fraction, Platform and so on... but continues to ascribe to these groups the role of "sole real transmission belt between party and class"[7].
1986: Battaglia's new pamphlet on the unions declares clearly that, while the factory group retains its role as a party organism, "we ran no longer consider it as an intermediary organ" "situated half-way between party and class". Terms like "intermediary organisms" and "transmission belts" are eliminated, as being "worn-out and out-of-date".
The most incredible thing today is that the comrades of Battaglia seem to be unaware how important these last changes are. To grasp this, and above all to make it clear to all the new comrades present on the international scene today, we must go back to the International Conferences held between 1977 and 1980.
At the time, the central discussion was undoubtedly: how should revolutionaries intervene? The debate ended up polarizing around on the one hand, BC and the CWO, defending the factory groups and maintaining that "their role is to act as "transmission belts" or "intermediaries" between party and class"[8], and on the other the ICC, declaring on the contrary that instead of deceiving themselves as to their ability to organize the class' most combative sectors in "their own" groups, communists should be intervening in those organisms that the class movement itself tends to create (today: mass assemblies, committees, coordinations; tomorrow: the workers' councils). Battaglia Comunista summed up the debate at the 3rd Conference as follows:
"the development of the discussion has made it possible to highlight two opposing positions: 1) the party plays a secondary role in the class struggle, rejecting its "raison d'être" in the organization of the struggle itself; 2) without the party as its leading and organizing organism, the proletariat cannot carry out its historical task"[9] (our emphasis).
As we can see, for BC the party's organisms must not only provide a political leadership, but also organize the class; whoever rejects this role denies "the party's reason for existing". It was on this basis that BC and the CWO sabotaged the Conferences, declaring that it was impossible to go on talking to the "spontaneists" of the ICC, who maintained that the only correct term was that of "political orientation" or "political leadership", and who proposed a formulation according to which the party is the "indispensable organ for the political orientation of the revolutionary class and its political power, a power taken and held by the whole class organized in Councils". Battaglia, who declared at the Conference that this formulation was "unacceptable, because the Conference must eliminate spontaneism" (ie, the ICC), now calmly declare that "the dialectical unity of class and party is achieved through the Party's political leadership (strategy and tactics of the Revolution) in the proletariat's mass organs (the living force and subject of the Revolution)". The subject of the revolution is thus the class as a whole, regrouped in its mass organizations (the councils), and it is within these organizations that the Party must play its role as a political leadership. Perhaps the comrades of BC would be kind enough to explain to us why these formulations are "completely opposed" to the ICC's "unacceptable" ones? For a decade, whenever we asked how it was possible for the factory groups to be at one and the same time organs of the party, and intermediaries between the party and the class, we were told that we "didn't understand anything about dialectics". And today, Battaglia blithely announces that to have placed these groups "half-way between class and party" was clearly "equivocal" and "ambiguous".
Two things should be clear right from the start. Firstly, that we are perfectly aware that despite this change, BC's positions remain very different from ours; secondly, that despite this we welcome enthusiastically this step forward by Battaglia. But a third thing should also be clear: however big or small this step may be, it will be useless unless it is made coherently. In our opinion, abandoning a position which has been the basis for a decision as important as breaking off the International Conferences, without in the least wondering about the validity of this decision, is neither serious nor coherent.
Can communists work in state organisms like the unions?
BC's reply to the Spanish comrades can be summed up as follows:
1) the ICC comrades, because they go no further than abstract schematism and verbal extremism, limit themselves to being "revolutionaries of declamations and fine gestures, setting their consciences at ease, speaking learnedly to themselves for lack of any possibility of making themselves heard, much less of seeing their "indications" concretized in an organizational class struggle praxis";
2) in reality, what is decisive is not so much where as how one intervenes. In this sense, "the problem of being outside or inside the union is a false one, or rather one that is tied to the concrete possibilities and opportunities offered by the contingent situation";
3) the correctness of BC's position is confirmed by the fact that "the ICC has for some time been developing an intense activity of intervention, and has corrected some of its idealist rigidities by blurring them".
Let's try to set things straight. The ICC is so "abstract" in its principal of anti-unionism that not only does it intervene in any demonstration or mass meeting called by the unions, where there is a real working class presence, it also explicitly allows its militants working in closed shops to join a union. But this legal or quasi-legal obligation, similar to paying taxes, has nothing to do with choosing to join a union in order to carry out anti-union activity. And let us note in passing that already in the 1930's, unlike the Trotskyists, the comrades of the Italian Left ruled out any work inside the fascist unions either in Italy or Germany. The discussion was automatically settled on this point, since it was taken for granted that no communist action was possible inside an organ of the state, and there could be no doubt that the fascist unions were state organs. The comrades of Battaglia affirm, by contrast, that the unions are integrated into the state and that it is nonetheless possible to work within them: they are free to do so, but not to call on the Communist Left to support this affirmation.
Two ways of intervening in the class struggle
Faced with this amusing idea that the ICC has changed position by throwing itself into "an intense activity of intervention" in the struggle, it is necessary to return once again to the discussions in the International Conferences.
The debate was not between those in favor of intervention and those against it. It was a confrontation between on the one hand, the ICC maintaining that revolutionaries should intervene in the struggle, and in the attempts at self-organization that were developing at the time (hospital workers in Italy in 1978, steelworkers in Britain and the Lorraine in 1979, the Rotterdam dockers, etc...), and on the other, Battaglia and the CWO, according to whom revolutionaries should be dedicating themselves to building factory groups, which were to organize the combative sectors of the proletariat, and make real mass movements of the class possible. The ICC proposed a resolution, whose starting point was the recognition of the fact that "the historic recovery of the workers' struggles accompanied by the development within the class of groups, circles, nuclei of proletarians, which although not fully formed and menaced by all kinds of dangers, by activism, workerism„ or new-style trades unionism, are a real sign of life in the class". This resolution therefore emphasized the need to intervene within these organisms, to combat such dangers and so to contribute to the process of the class' coming to consciousness.
Battaglia and the CWO rejected the resolution and were so blinded by the weaknesses of these first attempts that they went so far as to call their class nature into question, seeing them essentially as "maneuvers of one or another political group". Even the 5th Congress' 1982 Theses still insist on this characterization, and when they admit the possible appearance, in the very distant future, of "workers' circles", the only perspective that these are given is to turn into to factory groups, transmission belts between Battaglia and the class.
Today, BC's pamphlet on the unions insists that the organisms formed by the workers' spontaneity (assemblies, coordinations, councils), must be able to find "in the workplace, clearly defined reference points capable of taking on the political leadership of these mass organs". When we insisted, between 1977 and 1980, that the role of communists was to fight to give a class orientation within the organisms that the workers' spontaneity will increasingly generate, we were accused of being "spontaneists" with whom it was impossible to discuss seriously. What should we accuse Battaglia of today?
Two interventions and the test of reality
But abandoning the idea that it is up to communists to create the framework destined to organize the proletariat's most militant sectors does not solve all the problems, nor does it settle all the disagreements between us and BC. Firstly, although BC today recognizes the reality of the process by which autonomous mass organizations are appearing, here and there (mass meetings, strike committees...), it has no position on the tendency towards minority organizations, bringing together small groups of militant workers, and whose purpose is to push the struggle forward, and to analyze its lessons. In the 1992 Theses, these minority organisms are still considered, to all intents and purposes, as "emanations of the class' political organizations". Does BC recognize today, that the tendency towards the formation of such groups is "a real sign of life in the class"? And secondly, understanding the necessity to ensure a political leadership in these mass organizations is one thing, having the ability to do so is another.
And from this point of view, Battaglia's record is hardly positive. In the two recent episodes where mass proletarian organizations have appeared outside the trades unions -- the rail workers' struggle in France and the school workers struggle in Italy - neither the French section of the IBRP linked to Battaglia, nor Battaglia itself intervened in the movement. All that they managed to do was to wait till the end of the struggle to write a text in which they...denounced its limitations! This is especially disconcerting in the case of Battaglia, which has an organized group of militants amongst the teachers, with a long tradition of intervention and which could and should have played the role of a spur and political leadership in the movement. But to lead a movement, one must at least intervene in it, and not limit oneself to "learnedly" expressing one's opinion. Battaglia however, prefers to explain to us that the 1987 rail workers' movement was more corporatist than the steelworkers' in 1979, and that this proves, contrary to what the ICC says, that the class does not learn from its own experience. This kind of affirmation only proves that BC had nothing to do either with the steelworkers in 1979 or with the railwaymen in 1987. In 1979, the French steelworkers' struggle, for all its radicalism and combativity, remained under the control of the Longwy "Intersyndicale", ie a rank-and-file trade union organism. In 1987, the rail workers started and spread their movement outside and against the unions; they formed strike committees based on their own mass assemblies, and began to create regional and national coordinations, which is a considerable step forward. As for the Italian school workers, they were organized nationally outside and against the unions.
Of course, there was corporatism everywhere, rank-and-file unionism even more so; but there was also a maturation within the working class, a greater openness to the intervention of revolutionaries which appeared in the fact, not only that the ICC was able to intervene in the movement, as it had done in 1979, but that its militants encountered a far greater echo, and in the case of the Italian school workers' assemblies, were even elected as delegates to the national coordinations[10].
Certainly, we have made mistakes during these years; we have even paid dearly for some of them. But at least we have learnt by acting in the heart of the workers' struggles. Can Battaglia draw the same conclusion from its famous factory groups, with all their twists and turns?
The renewal of the class struggle has put unfinished discussions back on the agenda
After sabotaging the International Conferences, Battaglia Comunista for years neglected to answer our polemical articles. When we asked the comrades why, they replied that their paper was read in the factories and that the workers were not interested in reading pages of polemics with the ICC, which comes down to saying that the discussions among revolutionaries are just so much hot air, and that the "concrete" workers have got no time for them.
Today, however, BC regularly devotes pages and pages to polemics with the ICC, the OCI, and even with an extra-parliamentary bourgeois group like Lotta Comunista. What has happened? Have BC's working class readers decided to "cultivate" themselves. Or is this not rather the confirmation of what we said when BC decided to interrupt the Conferences: "one thing must be clear: the questions that you are refusing to discuss today will be on the agenda in the struggle tomorrow". And it is indeed the renewal of the international class struggle which is today renewing the debate which up to now had been limited to Europe, and widening it as far as Mexico, Argentina, and India.
To repeat what we said in our 1980 open letter to Battaglia: "if the Conference, are dead, through your action, the idea of the Conferences is not. On the contrary, the renewal of the proletarian struggle will push revolutionaries to emerge from their isolation, and to organize a public discussion on the questions that the class is confronting"[11].
This is the objective that all revolutionaries should aim at, Battaglia included.
Beyle
[1] Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista): CP1753, 20101 Milano, Italy. The PCInt, along with the Communist Workers' Organization (Britain), and comrades in France and India, is part of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), which can be contacted at the same address.
[2] See "On the Course of History" in the International Review no. 50, 3rd quarter 1987.
[3] "The trade unions in the 3rd cycle of the accumulation of capital" - available from BC - the different quotes can be found on pages: 9, 8, 11, 13, 3, 10, 15, and 16.
[4] Quoted in "La Sinistra Tedesca" by Barrot, published by La Salamandia.
[5] The fact that this intuition, by its very precocity, was expressed in formulation that were still incomplete and immature, and which still did not bar the way to back-sliding in the form of a radical "revolutionary" unionism, in no way diminishes the merit of the German and Dutch Lefts in being the first to pose the problem of the unions' destruction.
[6] This work has been described in detail in the ICC's pamphlet "La Gauche Communiste Italianne, 1927-1952", especially in Chapter 7.
[7] The Theses of the Trade Unions from BC's 5th Congress are reprinted as an appendix to the 1986 pamphlet.
[8] Preparatory Bulletin no. 2 of Texts for the 3rd Conference of Groups of the Communist Left.
[9] Proceedings of the 3rd Conference of Groups of the Communist Left (May 1980), available from the ICC. The various quotations can be found in Part 7.
[10] A detailed article criticizing BC's absence from the school workers' movement will be published in no. 31 of the ICC's press in Italy: "Rivoluzione Internazionale".
[11] Letter from the ICC to the PCInt (BC) after the 3rd Conference, published as an appendix to the Proceedings.
The "Ten days that shook the world" were seventy years ago. The world media is celebrating the anniversary. Once more they are going to talk about the Russian Revolution. In their fashion that is, of the ruling class, with its lies, its deformations and with its stale old refrains: "the communist revolution can only lead to the Gulag or to suicide".
In defence of the true nature of what still remains the greatest revolutionary experience of the world proletariat, the ICC has just brought out a pamphlet dedicated to the Russian Revolution.
Here is the introduction.
"The most indubitable feature of revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business - kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol.1, Preface.)
The very term REVOLUTION often inspires fear. "The ruling ideology" said Marx "is always the ideology of the ruling class". And what the ruling classes, the exploiting classes, fear the most, in the very depth of their being, is that the masses they exploit will get it into their heads to put into question the existing order of things by making a "forcible entrance ... into the realm of rulership over their own destiny."
The Russian Revolution was first and foremost that: a grandiose action by the exploited masses to try to destroy the order which reduces them to the state of beasts of burden in an economic machine and cannon fodder for the wars between the capitalist powers. An action where millions of proletarians, bringing behind them all the other exploited layers of society, manage to tear down their atomisation by consciously unifying, by giving themselves the means to act collectively as a single force. An action to make them masters of their own destinies, to begin the construction of another society, a society without exploitation, without wars, without classes, without nations, without poverty: a communist society.
The Russian Revolution died, swamped, isolated, because of the defeat of the revolutionary attempts in the rest of Europe, in particular in Germany. The Stalinist bureaucracy was its hypocritical and pitiless executioners. But that doesn't in any way change the grandeur of this intrepid "assault on the heavens" which the Russian Revolution was. October 1917 wasn't just one revolutionary attempt amongst others. The Russian Revolution constitutes and remains - from the past to the present day - the most important revolutionary experience of the world working class.
By its length, by the number of workers who participated in it, by the degree of consciousness reached by these workers, by the fact that they represented the most advanced point of an international movement of workers' struggles, by the extent and the depth of the changes that they tried to put in place, the Russian Revolution constitutes the most transcendent revolutionary experience of the world working class. And as such it is the richest source of lessons for the coming revolutionary struggles of the class.
But in order to be able to draw the lessons of a historic experience, you have to recognise from the start what kind of experience you are talking about. Was the Russian Revolution a workers' revolution? Or was it a coup d'Etat, fermented by a bourgeois party particularly adept at manipulating the masses? Was Stalinism the normal, ‘natural' product of this revolution or was it its executioner? Obviously the lessons you draw will be radically opposed according to the answers given to these questions.
Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is not content to militarily crush or stamp out the proletarian revolutions of the past. It has also systematically deformed their memory by giving them deformed and distorted versions: just as it completely adulterated the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 -that first great proletarian attempt to destroy the bourgeois state - by presenting it in its history books as a nationalist, patriotic, anti-Prussian movement; so it has totally disfigured the memory of the Russian Revolution.
The Stalinist ideologies ‘recognise' a proletarian character (although they prefer in general to call it ‘popular') to the October Revolution. But the totally disfigured version that they give the revolution has no other aim than to make people forget the dreadful repression which Stalinism unleashed against the workers and Bolsheviks who had been the revolution's protagonists; in order to try to justify what has become one of the biggest lies in history: the assimilation of state capitalism, this decadent and militarised form of capitalist exploitation, as a synonym for ‘communism'.
The Trotskyists also speak of a ‘Workers' October', but for them the Stalinist regimes still have something proletarian in them which must be defended in the name of the march towards ‘communism'.
The other forms of bourgeois ideology distort the Russian Revolution in a no less repugnant manner. Some are happy to describe it as having been a nationalist movement whose aim was to modernise Russian capitalism which hadn't, at the beginning of this century, shaken off its feudal trappings: in sum, it was a bourgeois revolution like in France in 1789, but more than a century late and ending up in a fascist-type dictatorship Others speak of October ‘17 as a workers' revolution and agree with the Stalinists in describing Russia as a ‘communist' country, but do so simply to better describe the horrors of Stalinism and then to deduce that revolutionary movements in our epoch can only lead to this. Thus they intone the beliefs of all ruling classes: the revolts of the exploited can only lead either to suicide or to regimes worse than those they are claiming to fight against.
In brief, bourgeois ideologies have completed the work of the murderers of the Russian Revolution by setting out to destroy the very memory of what was the greatest revolutionary proletarian attempt up till now.
Unhappily, in the revolutionary camp, amongst the proletarian political currents whose task should be to draw the lessons of past experiences in order to transform them into weapons for future battles, you also find aberrant theories on the nature of the Russian Revolution.- even if clearly their political aims are different. Thus the ‘councilists', coming from the German Left currents, came to consider October and the Bolsheviks as bourgeois. Also, from within the Italian Left, the Bordigists developed the theory of the ‘dual nature' (bourgeois and proletarian) of the Russian Revolution.
These theories were the products of the defeat of the revolutionary wave in the twenties, of the confusion created in peoples' minds by the fact that the Russian Revolution didn't die like the Paris Commune, quickly and openly crushed by bourgeois reaction, but degenerated through a long, painful and complex process, ending up in the power of the bureaucracy which claimed to be the continuator of October 1917.
But even if the origin of these aberrations can be understood, they remain nonetheless a major obstacle to the reappropriation by the revolutionary class of the lessons of its key historic experience. And as such they must be combatted. This is the objective of this pamphlet which consists of two articles that appeared in the International Review of the ICC (nos 12 & 13, the former brought out at the end of 1977, the latter at the beginning of 1978 [17]). One article is a critique of ‘councilist' theories, and the other is a critique of ‘Bordigist' theories.
For a long time is has been necessary for the world proletariat to shake off the ideological muck with which the bourgeoisie has covered up the greatest revolutionary experience. Probably it will only get to the point of reappropriating all the richness of %he lessons of this experience in the midst of the revolutionary struggle itself, when it will be confronted with the same practical questions.
It will be when the proletariat is confronted by the immediate necessity to organise itself as a united force, capable of fighting against the bourgeois state and putting forward a new form of social organisation, that it will relearn the true meaning of the Russian word ‘soviet'. It will be when workers are confronted with the task of collectively organising an armed insurrection that they will massively feel the need to possess the lessons of October 1917. And it will only be when they are confronted by such questions as knowing who exercises power, or what must be the relationship between the proletariat in arms and the state institutions which will emerge the day after the first victorious insurrections, or still more, how to react in the face of divergences between important sectors of the proletariat, that they will understand the real mistakes committed by the Bolsheviks (particularly in the tragedy of Kronstadt).
The failure of the Russian Revolution was in reality that of the international revolutionary wave - it was merely its most advanced point - and it confirmed that the proletarian revolution has no country except the proletarians themselves. But despite its failure, the Russian Revolution posed in practice the crucial problems which future revolutionary movements will inevitably be confronted with. In this sense, whether today they are conscious of it or not, the proletarians of tomorrow's battles will have to reappropriate its lessons.
But in order to do that they have to start by recognising this experience as THEIR experience. In order to affirm the continuity of the proletarian revolutionary movement, they will also have to carry out ‘the negation of the negation' - to reject all those theories which deny the proletarian nature of their greatest past experience.
As for the revolutionary political organisations of the class, the recognition of October is already crucial: their capacity to enrich the immediate struggles of the proletariat depends in effect on first of all understanding the historic dynamic which has for more than two centuries led to the present struggles. And this understanding will be impossible without a clear recognition of the true nature of the October Revolution.
We want to contribute to this search for an indispensable clarity by publishing this pamphlet.
ICC, October 1987.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/051_resn_on_ppm.html#_ftn1
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/051_resn_on_ppm.html#_ftnref1
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/316/1980s-how-form-international-organisation
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/persian-gulf
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/south-korea
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/south-africa
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/intervention
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/international-debate
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/012/october1917
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/408/russia-1917
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution