To the generation of revolutionaries which emerged from the resurgence of class struggles at the end of the 1960s, it was difficult enough to recognise the proletarian character of the October 1917 insurrection and the Bolshevik party which provided its political leadership. The trauma of the Stalinist counter-revolution had produced, in reaction, a flight towards the councilist vision of Bolshevism as the protagonist of a purely bourgeois revolution in Russia. And even when, after many hard debates, a number of groups and elements came round to the view that October really had been red, there persisted a strong tendency to place severe constrictions on the political magnitude of the event; “thus far, and no further: the Bolsheviks were proletarian, but we can learn mainly from their shortcomings”. The caricature of such haughty judgements of our own past was that of the Communist Workers’ Organisation, who in 1975 insisted that after 1921 and the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, not only was the Russian revolution dead and all the parties of the Communist International agents of capitalism – but also that all those groups who today did not share this deadline were themselves counter-revolutionaries1. Nor was this kind of approach absent among the groups who formed the ICC in the same period. The section in Britain, World Revolution, had rejected its original position that the Bolsheviks were agents of a state capitalist counter-revolution, but when it came to the history of the Bolshevik party after 1921 we can find the following view expressed in World Revolution n°2: “…Trotskyism no less than Stalinism was a product of the defeat of the proletarian revolution in Russia. The Left Opposition was not formed until 1923 and long before that Trotsky had been one of the most ruthless supporters and executors of the Bolsheviks’ anti-working class policies (the crushing of the Petrograd strike movement and the Kronstadt uprising, the militarisation of labour, the abolition of the workers’ militias, etc). His disputes with other factions of the bureaucracy were disputes about the best means of exploiting the Russian workers and of extending the state capitalist ‘Soviet’ model to other parts of the world”.
It was therefore hardly an accident that, at that time, very little serious study was made of the period between 1921 and the definitive victory of Stalinism in the late 20s. But the revolutionary movement, and the ICC in particular, has come a long way since then; and if we now dedicate a good deal of space to examining the debates that rent the Bolshevik party during this period, it is because we have come to understand that, far from being the expression of an inter-bourgeois feud, these political conflicts expressed the heroic resistance of the proletarian currents within the Bolshevik party against the attempts of the counter-revolution to capture it completely. It is a thus a period which has bequeathed to us some of the most precious lessons about the tasks of a communist fraction - that political organ whose first task is to combat the degeneration of a proletarian revolution and its most vital political instruments.
The New Economic Policy, introduced at the 10th Congress of the party in 1921, had been defined by Lenin as a strategic retreat necessitated by the isolation and weakness of the Russian proletariat. Within Russia, this meant the isolation of the proletariat from the peasantry, who had been ready to support the Bolsheviks against the old land-owners during the civil war, but who were now demanding some material compensation for this support. The Bolshevik leadership had in fact seen the Kronstadt rebellion as the warning signal of an impending peasant counter-revolution, and for this reason had suppressed it without mercy (see International Review n°100). But they also knew that the “proletarian state” - of which the Bolsheviks saw themselves as the guardians - could not rule by force alone. Concessions would have to be made to the peasants on the economic front in order to keep the existing political regime intact. These concessions, codified in the NEP, involved the abolition of the forcible grain requisitions which had characterised the War Communism period, and their replacement by a “tax in kind”; private trade would now be permitted to the mass of middle peasants; a “mixed economy” would be established, in which state industries would function side by side with private capitalist enterprises, and even in competition with them.
The real isolation of the Russian proletariat, however, was the result of the international situation. At its Third Congress in 1921, the Communist International had recognised that the utter failure of the March Action in Germany signified the ebbing of the revolutionary tide which had risen in 1917. Faced with the need to reconstruct a ruined and starving Russia, the Bolsheviks realised that they could not count on the immediate assistance of the world proletariat; and by the same token, if the political power they had helped to create was to play a role in the expected future revival of the world revolution, this power would have to take the economic measures necessary for its survival.
Lenin’s speech begins on this last theme. He talks about the preparations for the Genoa conference to which Soviet Russia was sending a delegation, charged with the task of restoring trade relations between Russia and the capitalist world. Lenin’s approach to this was quite matter of fact: “Needless to say, we are going to Genoa not as Communists, but as merchants. We must trade, and they must trade. We want the trade to benefit us; they want it to benefit them. The course of the issue will be determined, if only to a small degree, by the skill of our diplomats” (Speech to the 11th Congress of the RCP(B), Collected Works, vol. 33. P 264). And indeed Lenin was quite right to make this distinction between communist activity and the requirements of the state. There can be no objection in principle to a proletarian power exchanging its goods for those of a capitalist state as long as it is recognised that this can only be a temporary and contingent measure which cannot call genuine principles into question. Nothing can be gained from gestures of heroic self-immolation, as the debate around the Brest-Litovsk treaty had already demonstrated. The problem here was that the Soviet state’s overtures to the capitalist world were beginning to involve the trading of principles. The failure to come to an agreement with the Entente powers at Genoa led the two outcast states of the day, Russia and Germany, to conclude the Rapallo Treaty in the same year. This treaty contained a number of vital secret clauses, among them the stipulation that the Soviet state would supply arms to the German Reichswehr. This was in stark contrast to the Bolsheviks’ commitment to do away with all secret diplomacy in 1918; it was the first real military alliance between the Soviet state and an imperialist power.
To this military alliance there corresponded a growing political alliance with the bourgeoisie. The “tactic” of the United Front, launched around this period, shackled the Communist parties to the forces of social democracy which had been denounced as agents of the ruling class in 1919. With the emphasis more and more on finding powerful allies for the Russian state abroad, this policy flowed effortlessly into the heinous theory that it was even permissible to forge fronts with the rightwing nationalists in Germany, the prototypes of Nazism. These political regressions were to have a devastating effect on the workers’ movement in Germany in the events of 1923 - and the abortive uprising which took place in that year (see the preceding article in this issue, and International Review n°s98 and 99) was in part suppressed by the Reichswehr with weapons supplied by the Red Army. These were ominous steps in the degeneration of the Communist parties and the integration of the Russian state into the concert of world capitalism.
This downward slide was the product, not of the Bolsheviks’ ill-will, but of profound objective factors, even if subjective errors certainly played their part in accelerating the decline. Lenin’s speech expresses this graphically. He was under no illusions about the economic nature of the NEP: he insisted that it was a form of state capitalism. We have seen (International Review n°99) that in 1918 Lenin was already arguing that state capitalism, being a more concentrated and developed form of bourgeois economy, would be a step forward, a step towards socialism for the backward Russian economy with its semi-mediaeval vestiges. In the 1922 Congress speech, he returned to the same theme, insisting that there was a fundamental distinction to be made between state capitalism under the rule of the reactionary bourgeoisie, and state capitalism administered by the proletarian state: “…we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society. Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism, but has not yet got on new rails. The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat. We refuse to understand that when we say ‘state’ we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the workers, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We are the state” (ibid, p 278).
This “we are the state” was already a forgetting of Lenin’s own words in the 1921 trade union debate, in which he had warned against completely identifying proletarian interests with those of the state (see IR 100); equally evident is that Lenin has begun to lose the distinction between the proletariat and the vanguard party. But in any case Lenin himself was acutely aware of the real limits of this “proletarian control of state capitalism”, because this is the moment when he made his famous comparison between the Soviet state, this “heap” as he called it, still profoundly marked by the tares of the old order, and a car which refuses to obey the hands of its driver:
“Never before in history has there been a situation in which the proletariat, the revolutionary vanguard, possessed sufficient political power and had state capitalism existing alongside it. The whole question turns on our understanding that this is the capitalism that we can and must permit, that we can and must confine within certain bounds; for this capitalism is essential for the broad masses of the peasantry and for private capital, which must trade in such a way as to satisfy the needs of the peasantry. We must organise things in such a way as to make possible the customary operation of capitalist economy and capitalist exchange, because this is essential for the people. Without it, existence is impossible…You communists, you workers, you, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which undertook to administer the state, must arrange it so that the state, which you have taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to. Well, we have lived through a year, the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in this past year? No. But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both. Be that as it may, the car is not going quite in the direction the man at the wheel imagines, and often it goes in an altogether different direction” (Ibid, p 279).
In short, the communists were not directing the new state - they were being directed by it. Moreover, Lenin was perfectly lucid about the direction spontaneously being followed by this car: it led towards a bourgeois restoration, which could easily take the form of a peaceful integration of the Soviet state into the capitalist world order. Thus he acknowledges the “class honesty” of a bourgeois political trend like the Russian émigrés around Smena Vekh who had already begun to support the Soviet state because it could envisage the Bolshevik Party becoming the most capable overseer of Russian capitalism.
And yet the profundity of Lenin’s intuitions about the nature and scale of the problem facing the Bolsheviks was not at all matched by the solutions he put forward in the same speech. For him there was no question of confronting the process of bureaucratisation with its proletarian antidote - the revival of political life in the soviets and other unitary organs of the class. The reaction of the Bolshevik leadership to the Kronstadt revolt had already shown its loss of conviction in going down that road. Neither did Lenin call for any let up in the virtual state of siege applied to the party’s own inner life after Kronstadt. In that same year the Workers’ Opposition came under renewed fire after its attempt to appeal to the 4th Congress of the Comintern about the inner party regime in Russia; and Miasnikov was expelled from the party after Lenin had failed to convince him to desist from his calls for freedom of speech.
For Lenin the primary problem was identified as being the “lack of culture” of the communist state managers - their inability to be better administrators than the old Tsarist bureaucrats, or better salesmen and money-makers than the “NEPmen” who were springing up everywhere now that the economy had been liberalised. As an example of the terrible bureaucratic inertia hampering the new administration he cited the absurd story of how a foreign capitalist offered to sell cans of meat to starving Russia, and how the decision to buy the cans was avoided throughout the entire state and party apparatus until the very highest echelons of the party were involved.
No doubt such bureaucratic excesses could have been reduced here and there by making the bureaucrats more “cultured”, but it would do nothing to change the overall direction of the car of state. The power that was really imposing this direction was more than just the NEPman or the private capitalist - it was the vast impersonal power of world capital that was inexorably determining the course of the Russian economy and of the Soviet state. Even in the best of conditions, an isolated workers’ fortress would not have been able to resist this power for very long. In the Russia of 1922, after civil war, famine, economic collapse, the disappearance of proletarian democracy and even of large segments of the proletariat itself, it was entirely utopian to hope that a more effective mode of administration by the communist minority could reverse this overwhelming tide. On the contrary, Lenin was soon compelled to admit more and more that the rot infesting the state machine was not simply limited to its “uncultured” lower strata, but had penetrated the very highest rungs of the party ladder, to the “Old Guard” of Bolshevism itself, giving birth to a veritable bureaucratic faction personified above all by Josef Stalin.
As Trotsky observed in his article ‘On Lenin’s Testament’ written in 1932, “it would be no exaggeration say that the last half year of Lenin’s political life, between his convalescence and his second illness, was filled with a sharpening struggle against Stalin. Let us recall once more the principal dates. In September 1922, Lenin opened fire against the national policy of Stalin. In the first part of December, he attacked Stalin on the question of the monopoly of foreign trade. On December 25, he wrote the first part of his testament. On December 30, he wrote his letter on the national question (the ‘bombshell’). On January 4, 1923, he added a postscript to his testament on the necessity of removing Stalin from his position as general secretary. On January 23, he drew up against Stalin a heavy battery: the project of a Control Commission. In an article on March 2, he dealt Stalin a double blow, both as organiser of the inspectorate and as general secretary. On March 5, he wrote me on the subject of his memorandum on the national question: ‘If you would agree to undertake its defence, I could be at rest’. On that same day, he for the first time openly joined forces with the irrreconcilable Georgian enemies of Stalin, informing them in a special note that he was backing their cause ‘with all my heart’ and was preparing for them documents against Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky”.
Despite being gripped by the illness that would shortly end his life, Lenin put all his political energy into this last-ditch struggle against the rise of Stalinism, and proposed to Trotsky that together they form a bloc against bureaucratism in general and Stalin in particular. Thus having first rung the alarm bells about the general course of the revolution, Lenin was already laying the foundations for - if necessary - passing on to an oppositional stance. But when we read the articles that Lenin wrote at that time (“How we should reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection”, and in particular the March 2nd article Trotsky refers to, “Better fewer but better”), we can see the limitations still being imposed by his position at the very head of the state machine. As in his April speech, the solutions are still entirely administrative: reduce the number of bureaucrats, re-organise Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate), fusion of Rabkrin and the party’s Control Commission... or else, as at the end of “Better fewer but better”, Lenin begins to place his hopes for salvation less on the workers’ revolution in the West than on the rising of the “revolutionary and nationalist East”. Either way, there is a definite loss of perspective. Lenin had seen the danger in part, but had not yet drawn the necessary conclusions. Had he lived longer, no doubt he would have gone much deeper in identifying the causes of the problem, and thus into the policy to be followed. But now the process of clarification had to pass into the hands of others.
Lenin’s removal from political life was one of the factors which precipitated an open crisis in the Bolshevik party. On the one hand, the bureaucratic faction consolidated its grip on the party, initially in the form of the “triumvirate” formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, an unstable bloc whose main cement was the desire to isolate Trotsky. The latter, meanwhile, although with considerable hesitation, was compelled to move towards an overtly oppositional stance within the party.
At the same time, the Bolshevik regime was faced with new difficulties on the economic and social front. In the summer of 1923, the so-called “scissors crisis” called into question the application of the NEP under the triumvirate. The scissors in question were made up of falling agricultural prices on the one hand, and rising industrial prices on the other; in effect it threatened the balance of the entire economy and was the first clear crisis of the “market economy” installed by the NEP. Just as the NEP had been introduced to counter the excessive state centralisation of war communism, which had resulted in the crisis of 1921, so now it became evident that the liberalisation of the economy had exposed Russia to some of the more classic difficulties of capitalist production. These economic difficulties, and above all the government’s response to them – a policy of wage and job-cuts, like in any “normal” capitalist state – in turn aggravated the condition of the working class, which was already at the limits of impoverishment. By August-September 1923 a rash of spontaneous strikes had begun to spread through the main industrial centres.
The triumvirate, which was above all interested in preserving the status quo, had begun to see the NEP as the royal road to socialism in Russia; this view was theorised especially by Bukharin, who had moved from the extreme left to the right wing of the party, and who preceded Stalin in working out a theory of socialism in one country, albeit “at a snail’s pace” thanks to the development of a “socialist” market economy. Trotsky on the other hand had already begun to call for more state centralisation and planning in response to the country’s economic difficulties. But the first definite statement of opposition from within the leading circles of the party was the Platform of the 46, submitted to the Politburo in October 1923. The 46 was made up both of those who were close to Trotsky, such as Piatakov and Preobrazhensky, and elements of the Democratic Centralism group like Sapranov, V Smirnov and Ossinski. It is not insignificant that Trotsky’s signature was not on the document: the fear of being considered part of a faction under the conditions of the ban on factions in 1921 certainly played a part in this. Nevertheless, his open letter to the Central Committee, published in Pravda in December 1923, and his pamphlet The New Course, expressed very similar concerns, and definitively placed him in the opposition’s ranks.
The Platform of the 46 was initially a response to the economic problems facing the regime. It took up the cudgels for greater state planning against the pragmatism of the dominant apparatus and its tendency to elevate the NEP into an immutable principle. This was to be a constant theme of the left opposition around Trotsky - and as we shall see, not one of its strengths. More important was the urgent warning it issued about the stifling of the party’s internal life:
“Members of the party who are dissatisfied with this or that decision of the central committee, who have this or that doubt on their minds, who privately note this or that error, irregularity or disorder, are afraid to speak about it at party meetings, and are even afraid to talk about it in conversation… Nowadays it is not the party, not its broad masses, who promote and choose members of the provincial committees and of the central committee of the RCP. On the contrary the secretarial hierarchy of the party to an ever greater extent recruits the membership of conferences and congresses which are becoming to an ever greater extent the executive assemblies of this hierarchy… The position which has been created is explained by the fact that the regime is the dictatorship of a faction inside the party… The factional regime must be abolished, and this must be done in the first instance by those who have created it; it must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and internal party democracy” (cited in EH Carr, The Interregnum, p 368-70).
At the same time, the Platform distanced itself from what it referred to as “morbid” opposition groups, even if it saw the latter as expressions of the crisis within the party. This was undoubtedly a reference to currents like the Workers’ Group around Miasnikov and Bogdanov’s Workers’ Truth which had emerged around the same time. Shortly afterwards, Trotsky took a similar view: a rejection of their analyses as too extreme, while at the same time seeing them as manifestations of the unhealthy state of the party. Trotsky was also unwilling to collaborate in the methods of repression aimed at eliminating these groups.
In fact, these groups can by no means be dismissed as “morbid” phenomena. It is true that the Workers’ Truth group expressed a certain trend towards defeatism and even Menshevism: as with most of the currents within the German and Dutch left, its insights into the rise of state capitalism in Russia were weakened by a tendency to put into question the October revolution itself, seeing it as a more or less progressive bourgeois revolution (see the article on the communist left in Russia in International Review n°9).
This was not the case at all with the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), led by long-standing worker-Bolsheviks like Miasnikov, Kuznetsov and Moiseev. The group first came to prominence by distributing its Manifesto in April-May 1923, just after the 13th Congress of the Bolshevik party. An examination of this text confirms the seriousness of the group, its political depth and perceptiveness.
The text is not devoid of weaknesses. In particular, it is drawn towards the theory of the offensive, which failed to see the retreat in the international revolution and the consequent necessity for a defensive struggle by the working class; this was the reverse of the coin to the analysis of the Communist International, which saw the retreat in 1921 but which drew largely opportunist conclusions from it. By the same token, the Manifesto adopts the erroneous view that in the epoch of the proletarian revolution, struggles for higher wages no longer have any positive role.
Despite this, the strengths of the document far outweigh its weaknesses:
its resolute internationalism. In contrast to Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition group, there is not a trace of Russian localism in its analysis. The whole introductory part of the manifesto deals with the international situation, clearly locating the difficulties of the Russian revolution in the delay of the world revolution, and insisting that the only salvation for the former lies in the revival of the latter: “The Russian worker has learned to see himself as a soldier in the world army of the international proletariat and to see his class organisations as the regiments of this army. Every time the disquieting question of the destiny of the October revolution is raised, he turns his gaze beyond the frontiers of Russia, to where the conditions for revolution are ripe, but where the revolution does not come”.
its searing critique of the opportunist policy of the United Front and the slogan of the Workers’ Government; the priority accorded to this question is a further confirmation of the group’s internationalism, since this was above all a critique of the politics of the Communist International. Nor was the group’s position tainted with sectarianism: it affirmed the need for revolutionary unity between the different communist organisations (such as the KPD and the KAPD in Germany), but completely rejected the CI’s call for a bloc with the social democratic traitors, its spurious new argument that the Russian revolution had succeeded precisely though the Bolsheviks’ clever use of the United Front tactic: “…the tactic that will lead the insurgent proletariat to victory is not that of the United Front, but the bloody, uncompromising fight against these bourgeois fractions with their confused socialist terminology. Only this combat can lead to victory: the Russian proletariat won not by allying with the Socialist Revolutionaries, the populists and the Mensheviks, but by struggling against them. It is necessary to abandon the tactic of the United Front and warn the proletariat that these bourgeois fractions – in today’s period, the parties of the Second International – will at the decisive moment take up arms for the defence of the capitalist system”;
its interpretation of the dangers facing the Soviet state - the threat of “the replacement of the proletarian dictatorship by a capitalist oligarchy”. The Manifesto charts the rise of a bureaucratic elite and the political disenfranchisement of the working class, and demands the restoration of the factory committees and above all of the soviets to take over the direction of the economy and the state2. For the Workers’ Group, the revival of workers’ democracy was the only means to counter the rise of the bureaucracy, and it explicitly rejected Lenin’s idea that the way forward lay through a shake-out of the Workers’ Inspection, since this was merely an attempt to control the bureaucracy through bureaucratic means;
its profound sense of responsibility. In contrast to the critical notes appended by the KAPD when it published the Manifesto in Germany (Berlin 1924), and which expressed the German left’s premature pronunciation of the death of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, the Workers’ Group is very cautious about proclaiming the definite triumph of the counter-revolution in Russia or the final death of the International. During the Curzon crisis of 1923, when it seemed that Britain might declare war on Russia, the members of the Workers’ Group committed themselves to defending the Soviet republic in event of war; and above all, there is not the least hint of any repudiation of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik experience. In fact, the group’s stated attitude to its own role corresponds very closely to the notion of the left fraction as later elaborated by the Italian Left in exile. It recognised the necessity to organise itself independently and even clandestinely, but both the group’s title (Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party - Bolshevik), and the content of its Manifesto, demonstrate that it saw itself as being in full continuity with the programme and statutes of the Bolshevik party. It therefore appealed to all healthy elements within the party, both in the leadership and in the different opposition groupings like the Workers’ Truth, the Workers’ Opposition, and the Democratic Centralists, to regroup and wage a determined struggle for the regeneration for the party and of the revolution. And in many ways this was a far more realistic policy than the hope of the ‘46’ that the factional regime in the party would be abolished “in the first instance” by the dominant faction itself.
In sum, there was nothing morbid in the project of the Workers’ Group, nor was this a mere sect with no influence in the class. Estimates put its membership in Moscow at 200 or so, and it was thoroughly consistent in its advocacy of taking the side of the proletariat in its struggle against the bureaucracy. It thus sought to make an active political intervention in the wildcat strikes of summer-autumn 1923. Indeed it was for this very reason, coupled with the growing political influence of the group within the ranks of the party, that the apparatus unleashed the full force of repression against it. As he had predicted, there was even an attempt to shoot Miasnikov “while trying to escape”. Miasnikov survived and though imprisoned and then forced into exile after his escape from prison, continued his revolutionary activity abroad for two decades. The group in Russia was more or less crippled by mass arrests, although it is clear from The Russian Enigma, Anton Ciliga’s precious account of the opposition groups in prison in the late 20s, that it by no means disappeared completely and continued to influence the “extreme left” of the opposition movement. Nonetheless, this initial repression was a truly ominous moment: it was the first time that an avowedly communist group had suffered direct state violence under the Bolshevik regime.
The fact that Leon Trotsky openly threw in his lot with the left opposition in 1923 was of capital importance. Trotsky’s international reputation as a leader of the Russian revolution was second only to Lenin’s. His criticisms of the regime in the party, and of its political orientations, sent a clear signal around the world that all was not well in the land of the Soviets; and those who had already begun to feel uneasy about the direction being taken not only by the Soviet state, but above all by the Communist parties outside Russia, had a figure around whom they could rally their forces, a figure who indisputably stood for the tradition of the October revolution and of proletarian internationalism. This was particularly the case for the Italian Left in the mid-20s.
And yet from the beginning, it is evident that the oppositional policies adopted by Trotsky were less coherent and above all less resolute than those defended by the communist left as such, in particular the Miasnikov current. Indeed, Trotsky largely failed to carry through the struggle against Stalinism even in the limited terms envisaged by Lenin in his last writings.
To give the most important examples: At the 12th Congress of the party in April 1923, Trotsky failed to deliver the “bombshell” that Lenin had prepared against Stalin concerning the national question, his role in Rabkrin, his disloyalty, even though Trotsky at this stage was still very much at the center of the party and enjoyed widespread support. On the eve of the 13th Congress, at the meeting of the central committee on May 22 1924, where Lenin’s testament and his call for Stalin’s removal were debated and Stalin’s political survival hung in the balance, Trotsky remained silent; he voted for the non-publication of the testament, against the express wishes of Lenin’s wife Krupskaya; in 1925 Trotsky even dissociated himself from his American sympathiser, Max Eastman, who had described and quoted from the testament in his book Since Lenin Died. Trotsky was persuaded by the Politburo to sign a statement denouncing Eastman’s efforts to bring the testament to light as “pure slander…which can only serve the ends of the enemies incarnate of communism and the revolution”. When he finally changed his mind and decided to publicise the testament, it was too late: Stalin’s grip over the party apparatus had become virtually unbreakable. Furthermore, during the period between the dissolution of the 1923 left opposition and the formation of the United Opposition with the Zinovievists, Trotsky frequently absented himself from the affairs of the central committee, focussing more on cultural or technical matters, and, when physically present, often took no real part in the proceedings.
A number of different factors can be involved to explain Trotsky’s hesitations. Although all are fundamentally political in nature, some of them are also connected to certain of Trotsky’s individual characteristics. Thus, when Trotsky’s comrade Yoffe wrote his last message to Trotsky before taking his own life, he made a number of criticisms of Trotsky’s shortcomings: “I have always thought that you have not enough in yourself of that ability which Lenin had to stand alone and remain alone on the road which he considered to be the right road…You have often renounced your own correct attitude for the sake of an agreement or a compromise, the value of which you have overrated” (quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, OUP 1959, p382). In effect, these are accurate descriptions of a tendency which had been quite marked in Trotsky prior to going over to the Bolshevik party – a tendency towards centrism, the incapacity to take clear and incisive positions, the tendency to sacrifice political principles in favour of organisational unity. This hesitant approach was further reinforced by Trotsky’s own fears of being seen to be involved in a vulgar struggle for personal power, for Lenin’s crown. This is in fact Trotsky’s own principal explanation for his vacillations during this period: “I have no doubt that if I had come forward on the eve of the 12th Congress in the spirit of a ‘bloc of Lenin and Trotsky’ against the Stalin bureaucracy, I should have been victorious… In 1922-3… it was still possible to capture the commanding position by an open attack on the faction… of the epigones of Bolshevism…”. However, “Independent action on my part would have been interpreted, or to be more exact, represented as my personal fight for Lenin’s place in the party and the state. The very thought of this made me shudder” (Trotsky, My Life, p 481). There is certainly some truth in this: as one of the oppositionists remarked to Ciliga, Trotsky was too “chivalrous a man”. Faced with the ruthless and unprincipled manoeuvring of Stalin in particular, Trotsky was loath to descend to the same level, and thus found himself outmanoeuvred at virtually every turn.
But Trotsky’s hesitations must also be examined in the light of a number of more general political and theoretical weaknesses, all closely inter-linked, which prevented him from taking an uncompromising stance against the rising counter-revolution:
the inability to recognise clearly that Stalinism was indeed the bourgeois counter-revolution in Russia. Despite Trotsky’s famous description of Stalin as “the gravedigger of the revolution”, Trotsky and his followers had their eyes fixed on the danger of a “capitalist restoration” in the old sense of a return to private capitalism. This is why he saw the main danger within the party incarnated in Bukharin’s right wing faction, and why his watchword remained: “a bloc with Stalin against the right perhaps; but a bloc with the right against Stalin, never”. Stalinism was seen as a form of centrism, inevitably fragile and bound to be pulled either towards the right or the left. As we will see in the next article in this series, this inability to appreciate the real danger represented by Stalinism was linked to Trotsky’s erroneous economic theories, which identified state-controlled industrialisation as a form of socialism, and which never understood the real meaning of state capitalism. This profound political weakness was to lead Trotsky into increasingly grave mistakes in the last ten years of his life;
part of the reason why Trotsky was unable to see that the regime in Russia was being reabsorbed into the capitalist camp was his own close involvement in many of the errors that had accelerated this degeneration, not least the policies of militarisation of labour and repression of workers’ discontent, along with the opportunist tactics adopted by the Comintern in the early twenties, particularly the ‘United Front’. Partly because he was still tangled up in the higher branches of the bureaucratic tree, Trotsky never came to question these errors and consistently failed to take his opposition to the point where he was standing with the proletariat and against the regime. Indeed it was not until 1926-7 that Trotsky’s opposition really took its case even to the rank and file of the party; it was hardly able to contemplate agitating among the mass of the workers. For this reason many workers did indeed see the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin as no more than a distant clash between the “great ones”, between equally distant bureaucrats.
Trotsky’s inability to break from an attitude of “no one can be right against the party” (a term he publicly defended at the 13th Congress) was severely criticised by the Italian Left in its reflections on the defeat of the Russian revolution, and the meaning of the Moscow Trials in particular: “The tragedy of Zinoviev and the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ is the same: their desire to reform the party, their subjection to a fetishism of the party which personifies the October revolution and which has pushed them at the last trial to sacrifice their lives.
We find these same concerns in the attitude of Trotsky when, in 1925, he allowed himself to be chased out of the Commissariat of War, even when he still had the support of the army, above all in Moscow. It wasn’t until 7 November 1927 that he came out openly against the party; but it was too late and he failed pitifully. This attachment to the party and the fear of becoming an instrument of the counter-revolution in Russia has prevented him from taking his critique of Russian centrism to its extreme but logical consequences, even after his expulsion” (Bilan n°34, “La Boucherie de Moscou”, August-September 1936).
Faced with an advancing counter-revolution that was strangling the very breath out of the party, the only way to save anything from the wreckage would have been to have formed an independent fraction, which while trying to win over the healthy elements within the party, did not flinch at the necessity of carrying out illegal and clandestine work amongst the class as whole. This, as we have seen, was the task which Miasnikov’s group set itself in 1923, only to be thwarted by the action of the secret police. Trotsky, by contrast, found himself hamstrung by his own loyalty to the ban on factions which he himself had supported at the 1921 party congress. Both in 1923, and then in the final battle in 1927, the apparatus made full use of this ban to confuse and demoralise the oppositions around Trotsky, giving them the choice between dissolving their groupings or taking the leap into illegal activity. On both occasions the first course was favoured in the vain hope of preserving the unity of the party; on neither occasion did it preserve the oppositionists from the wrath of the Stalinist machine.
***
The next article in this series will examine the process that culminated in the final victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia.
CDW
1 The CWO subsequently rejected this approach, particularly when it became more acquainted with the political method of the Italian communist left.
2 However, the Manifesto seems also to argue that the trade unions should become organs for the centralisation of economic management – the old position of the Workers’ Opposition which Miasnikov had criticised in 1921 (see the previous article in this series, International Review n°100).
Anti-fascism is a tough nut. With the campaign for the extradition of Pinochet in full swing, the "democratic" sections of the ruling class (in other words almost all of them) unleashed a new campaign on the anti-fascist theme, this time against the arrival in the Austrian government of Georg Haider’s FPÖ. During the European Union summit in Lisbon on 23rd March, the heads of state and government of fourteen countries agreed on the sanctions to be applied to Austria, as long as the representatives of Haider’s party remained in the government. Everybody was out to win the prize for most vigorous denouncer of the "xenophobic, anti-democratic, fascist danger". We had the French President Chirac, the leader of the French right, vigorously condemning what was going on in Austria, at the same time as the publication of an opinion poll showing that half the population of France is xenophobic. Not to be left out, all the organisations of the left, starting with the Trotskyists, warned loudly about the "fascist menace" which is supposed to be a serious threat to the working class, and organised endless demonstrations against the "Haider scandal".
Whatever the specific reasons that led the Austrian bourgeoisie to bring the "fascists" into the government, the event has proved an excellent opportunity for all their European and even North American colleagues to breathe new life into a mystification, which has already proved very effective against the working class. In recent years, the campaigns against the "fascist danger" have had nothing more nourishing than the electoral success of the Front National in France, or attacks on immigrants by skinhead gangs. Even the Pinochet show failed to draw the crowds, since the old dictator had gone into retirement. Obviously, the arrival of a "fascist" party in a European government is an altogether more filling dish for this kind of campaign.
When the comrades of Bilan (the French language publication of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party) published the text that we are reprinting below, fascist governments were in power in several European countries; Hitler had been in power in Germany since 1933. But they didn’t lose their heads, and let themselves get dragged into the frenzy of "anti-fascism" which gripped not only the socialist and Stalinist parties, but also currents which had opposed the degeneration of the Communist International during the 1920s, in particular the Trotskyists. Bilan was able to give a warning, clear and firm, against the dangers of anti-fascism – which, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War turned out to be prophetic. In Spain, the fascist fraction of the bourgeoisie was only able to repress the proletariat because, although the workers had armed themselves spontaneously during the Franco putsch of 18th July 1936, they let themselves be drawn off their class terrain, the terrain of intransigent struggle against the bourgeois republic, in the name of the priority of the anti-fascist struggle, and the need to form a front of all anti-fascist forces.
The situation today is not that of the 1930s, when the working class had just suffered the most terrible defeat in its history, at the hands not of fascism, but of the "democratic" bourgeoisie. It was precisely this defeat that made it possible for fascism to come to power in certain European countries. This is why we can say today that fascism is not a political necessity for capitalism today. Only by completely ignoring the differences between the situation today and that of the 1930s can currents which claim to belong to the working class, or even to be in favour of revolution like the Trotskyists, justify their participation in the campaigns about the "fascist threat". In this sense, Bilan was absolutely right to insist that revolutionaries had to analyse events within their historic context, taking account especially of the balance of class forces. During the 1930s, Bilan developed its arguments against the Trotskyists in particular (described in the text as the "Bolshevik-Leninists", as the Trotskyists described themselves during the 1930s). At the time, the Trotskyists were still part of the working class, but their opportunism was to lead them into the bourgeois camp during World War II. And it was precisely in the name of anti-fascism that the Trotskyists were to give their support to Allied imperialism during the war, trampling on one of the most fundamental principles of the workers’ movement: internationalism. That being said, Bilan’s arguments against the anti-fascist campaigns, its denunciation of the danger that fascism represents for the working class, remain perfectly valid today: the historic situation has changed, but the lies used against the working class, to draw it off its class terrain and under the sway of the democratic bourgeoisie, remain fundamentally the same. The reader will have no difficulty in recognising the "arguments" attacked by Bilan: they are exactly the same as those we from the anti-fascists today, and especially from those who claim to be revolutionaries. We can cite just two passages from Bilan’s text as examples:
"…isn’t the position of our opponents, who want the proletariat to choose the least bad organisational form of the capitalist state, the same as that of Bernstein, who called on the proletariat to achieve the best form of capitalist state?".
"…if the proletariat is really strong enough to impose a governmental solution on the bourgeoisie, then why should it stop at this objective, rather than posing its own central demands for the destruction of the capitalist state? By contrast, if the proletariat is not yet strong enough to launch the insurrection, then doesn’t pushing it towards a democratic government mean in effect spurring it down a path that will make the enemy’s victory possible?".
Finally, to all those who claimed that anti-fascism was a means for "regrouping the workers", Bilan replied that the only terrain on which the proletariat could regroup was that of the defence of its class interests, which remains the same no matter what the balance of class forces: "since it cannot pose the problem of power, the proletariat has to regroup for more limited, but still class objectives, in partial struggles (…) Instead of engaging in large-scale changes to the workers’ demands, the imperative duty of communists is to determine the regroupment of the working class around its class demands and within its class organisations: the unions".
At the time, unlike the Dutch-German Left, the Italian Communist Left had not yet clarified the union question. Ever since World War I, the unions had become, irrevocably, organs of the capitalist state. This in no way invalidates the position defended by Bilan calling on the workers to regroup around their class demands. This position remains perfectly valid today, when every fraction of the bourgeoisie is inviting the working class to defend that precious commodity, democracy – whether against fascism, or against any attempt to undertake a new revolution which could only lead to a return to the same totalitarianism that collapsed ten years ago in the so-called "socialist" countries.
In this sense Bilan’s article, published below, adopts the same approach in denouncing the democratic lie as did our publication of Lenin’s theses "On bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship" in the previous issue of the International Review.
Bilan no.7, May 1934, "Anti-fascism: a formula for confusion"
In the ebb of the revolution, the present situation is very likely to be more confused than any before it. This is the result, on the one hand, of the counter-revolutionary development of all the bases that the proletariat conquered in bitter struggle after the war (the Russian state, the IIIrd International), and on the other, of the workers’ inability to oppose this development with an ideological and revolutionary front of resistance. The workers have reacted through struggle, and sometimes with magnificent battles (Austria) to the combination of this phenomenon and the brutal offensive of capitalism, oriented towards the formation of alliances for war. But these battles have failed to shake the power of centrism, the only mass political organisation, and one which has henceforth gone over to the forces of the world counter-revolution.
In such a moment of defeat, confusion is only a result obtained by capitalism, incorporating the workers’ state and centrism for the needs of its own preservation, orienting them onto the same terrain occupied since 1914 by the insidious forces of the social-democracy, the principal agent of the disintegration of the masses’ consciousness and spokesman for the slogans of proletarian defeat and capitalist victory.
In this article, we will examine a typical confusionist formula: something that is called – even amongst workers who consider themselves on the left – "anti-fascism".
Our aim here is not to analyse the situation in countries like France or Belgium (where the problem is posed especially acutely), to determine whether or not a fascist attack is imminent; nor will we examine the idea that a perspective is opening of a spread of fascism to every country. Moreover, we will not consider here the theoretical problems linked to the significance of fascism, or to the attitude that the proletariat should adopt towards democratic institutions in the event of a fascist attack. We will study all these questions in later articles. For the purposes of clarity, we will limit ourselves here to one problem: anti-fascism and the struggle front that it is supposedly possible to create around this slogan.
Ithoma">It is elementary – or rather it used to be – to say that before engaging in a class battle, it is necessary to establish the goals we are aiming for, the methods to use, and the class forces which can intervene in our favour. There is nothing "theoretical" about these considerations, and by that we mean that they are not open to facile criticism by all those elements, indifferent to "theory", whose rule is to ignore all theoretical clarity and to get into bed with anybody, in any movement, on the basis of any programme, as long as there is "action". Obviously, we are amongst those who think that action springs not from outbursts of anger, or the goodwill of individuals, but from the situation itself. Moreover, for action, theoretical work is vital in order to guard the working class against new defeats. And we need to understand the significance of the contempt that so many militants show for theoretical work, for in reality this always comes down to replacing proletarian positions – without saying so – with the principles of the enemy social-democracy, amongst those revolutionary milieus while at the same time calling for action at all costs in the "race" against fascism.
As far as the problem of anti-fascism is concerned, its numerous supporters are guided not only by a contempt for theoretical work, but by the stupid mania for creating and spreading the confusion necessary to build a broad front of resistance. There must be no demarcation which might put off a single ally, or lose any opportunity for struggle: this is the slogan of anti-fascism. Here we can see that for the latter confusion is idealised and considered as an element of victory. Here we should remember that more than half a century ago Marx said to Weitling that ignorance has never done any service to the workers’ movement.
Today, instead of establishing the aim of the struggle, the methods to use, and the necessary programme, the quintessence of marxist strategy (which Marx would have described as ignorance) is presented thus: adopt an adjective – the most common today being "Leninist" of course – and talk endlessly, and completely out of context, about the situation in Russia in 1917, and Kornilov’s September offensive. Alas! there used to be a time when revolutionaries had heads on their shoulders and analysed historical experience. Then, before trying to make an analogy between the situations of their own epoch and these experiences, they tried first to determine whether it was possible to draw a political parallel between past and present; but those times are gone, especially if we look just at the usual phraseology of proletarian groups.
We are told that there is no point in establishing a comparison between the situation of the class struggle in Russia in 1917, and that today in other countries; likewise, there is no point in trying to determine whether the balance of class forces then bore certain similarities to that of today. The victory of October 1917 is a historical fact, so all we need to do is copy the tactics of the Russian Bolsheviks, and above all to make a very poor copy which varies depending on the different milieus that interpret events on the basis of radically opposing conceptions.
Those who call themselves "Leninists" today are not in the least bothered by the fact that in Russia in 1917 capitalism was undergoing its first experience of state power, whereas fascism on the contrary has emerged from a capitalism that has been in power for decades, and that the volcanic revolutionary situation in Russia 1917 was the opposite of today’s reactionary one. On the contrary, their marvellous serenity cannot be so much as ruffled by a comparison of the 1917 events with those of today, based on a serious examination of the Italian and German experience. Kornilov is the answer to everything. The victories of Mussolini and Hitler are supposedly due solely to deviations by the communist parties from the classic tactics of the Bolsheviks in 1917, thanks to political acrobatics that assimilate two opposing situations: the revolutionary and the reactionary.
***
As far as anti-fascism is concerned, political considerations don’t come into it. Its aim is to regroup all those threatened by fascist attack into a sort of "trade union of the threatened".
The social-democrats tell the radical-socialists to look to their own security, and to take immediate defensive measures against the fascist threat, since Herriot and Daladier could also fall victim to a fascist victory. Léon Blum goes even further, solemnly warning Doumergue that unless he watches out for fascism, he can expect the same fate as Brüning. Centrism addresses "the socialist rank and file", or alternatively the SFIO addresses centrism, in order to create a united front, since both socialists and communists are threatened by fascism. Finally there are the Bolshevik-Leninists who get their hackles up to proclaim grandiloquently to all and sundry that they are ready to create a struggle front devoid of any political consideration, on the basis of a permanent solidarity amongst all the "working class" (?) formations, against the activity of the fascists.
The idea underlying all these speculations is certainly very simple – too simple to be true: bring together all those under threat, driven by the same desire to avoid death, into a common anti-fascist front. But even the most superficial analysis will show that the idyllic simplicity of this proposal in reality hides a complete abandonment of the fundamental positions of marxism, the negation of past events and of the significance of events today. Of course, it is easy enough to proclaim that Herriot was wrong to join the government that came out of the "riot" of 6th February, and that he should remember that Amendola, a member of the government that handed over power to the fascists, was assassinated by the latter. It is equally easy to assert that the radical socialist party in Clermont-Ferrand has behaved suicidally in agreeing to a "truce of parties", since the Gquot;, since the German experience shows that Brüning’s "truce" admirably served the purposes of fascism, and that fascism on the other hand didn’t spare the democratic parties. And finally, with the same nonchalance, to conclude by declaring that the French and Belgian socialists should learn from the events in Germany and Austria and adopt a revolutionary policy in order to save themselves from certain death. The centrists in turn – still according to the same bible – should learn, from the fate of Thälmann and the concentration camps, the need for an "honest" United Front tactic instead of instead of one aimed not to help the working class struggle but to "destroy the socialist party": this is the demand of the right-wing social-democratophile Doriot, who uses the support of the workers of Saint-Denis to channel their desire for struggle and their reaction against centrism, into the dead-end of confusion.
But all these sermons about what the radicals, socialists, and centrists ought to do in order to save their own skins and their institutions will change nothing in the course of events, since the real problem comes down to this: how is it possible to transform radicals, socialists, and centrists into communists, since the struggle against fascism can only be based on a front of struggle for the proletarian revolution. And no matter how many sermons are preached, the Belgian social democracy will still launch its plans for the preservation of capitalism, will not hesitate to torpedo every class conflict, in a word will not hesitate to hand the unions over to capitalism. Doumergue will copy Brüning, Blum will follow in the steps of Bauer, and Cachin in those of Thälmann.
We repeat, our aim in this article is not to determine whether the situation in France or Belgium can be compared to the circumstances which allowed the rise to power of fascism in Italy and Germany. Our analogy is concerned above all with the fact that Doumergue is a copy of Brüning, from the point of view of their function in two quite different capitalist countries, and that this function is – as it is for Blum and Cachin – to immobilise the proletariat, to disintegrate its class consciousness, and to make it possible to adapt the state apparatus to the new circumstances of inter-imperialist struggle. There is good reason to think that in France especially, the experience of Thiers, Clémenceau and Poincaré will be repeated under Doumergue, and that we will see a concentration of capitalism around its right-wing forces, without that meaning the strangulation of the bourgeoisie’s socialist and radical-socialist forces. Moreover, it is profoundly wrong to base proletarian tactics on political positions derived from a mere perspective.
The problem is not therefore that fascism threatens, so we should set up a united anti-fascist front". On the contrary, it is necessary to determine the positions around which the proletariat will gather for its struggle against capitalism. Posing the problem this way means excluding the anti-fascist forces from the front for the struggle against capitalism. It means – paradoxical though this may seem – that if capitalism should turn definitively towards fascism, then the condition for success is the inalterability of the programme and the workers’ class demands, whereas the condition for certain defeat is the dissolution of the proletariat in the anti-fascist swamp.
***
The action of individuals and social forces is not determined by laws of preservation of individuals or forces, outside any class considerations: Brüning and Matteoti could not have acted in considee acted in consideration of their own personal interests, or the ideas they defended, by taking the road to proletarian revolution which alone could have saved them from fascism. The action of an individual or force is a function of the class they belong to. This explains why the present actors of French politics are merely following in the footsteps of their predecessors, and will continue to do so even should French capitalism move towards fascism.
The basic formula of anti-fascism (the "union of the threatened") is thus revealed to be completely inconsistent. Moreover, if we examine the ideas of anti-fascism (at least as far as its programme is concerned) we find that they derive from a dissociation of fascism and capitalism. True, if we question a socialist, a centrist, or a Bolshevik-Leninist on the subject, they will all declare that fascism is indeed capitalism. But the socialist will say: " we need to defend the Constitution and the Republic in order to prepare for socialism"; the centrist will declare that it is much easier to unite the working class struggle around anti-fascism than around the struggle against capitalism; while according to the Bolshevik-Leninist, there is no better basis for unity and struggle than the defence of the democratic institutions which capitalism can no longer accord the working class. It thus turns out that the general assertion that "fascism is capitalism" can lead to political conclusions which can only stem from the dissociation of capitalism and fascism.
Experience has shown – and this annihilates the possibility of any distinction between fascism and capitalism, that capitalism’s conversion to fascism does not depend on the will of certain groups within the bourgeois class, but on the necessities of a whole historical period, and the specificities of states which are less able to resist the crisis and the death-agony of the bourgeois regime. Insofar as it is possible to establish a complete separation, the experience of Italy and Germany shows us that when capitalism is forced to move towards a fascist organisation of society, the fascist battalions provide the shock troops that are directed against the class organisations of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie’s democratic political formations then declare their opposition to fascism, with the aim of persuading the proletariat to confide the defence of these institutions to democratic laws and the Constitution. The social-democracy, which acts along the same lines as the liberal and democratic forces, also calls the proletariat to make its central demand that the state should force the fascist forces to respect the law, disarm them, or even outlaw them. The line of action of these three political forces is in complete solidarity: their origin lies in the necessity for capitalism to arrive at the triumph of fascism, wherever the capitalist state aims to raise fascism to the new form of capitalist social organisation.
Since fascism corresponds to the fundamental needs of capitalism, we have to find a possibility of struggle against it on a radically different front. It is true that, today, we often find our opponents falsifying our positions because they do not want to combat them politically. For example, we only have to oppose the anti-fascist slogan (which has no political basis), because experience proves that the anti-fascist forces are just as necessary to the victory of fascism as the fascist forces themselves, to be told: "we don’t care about analysing the political and programmatic substance of anti-fascism, what matters is that Daladier is preferable to Doumergue, and that the latter is preferable to Maurras, and that consequently it is in our interest to defend Daladier against Doumergue or Doumergue against Maurras. Or, according to circumstances, to defend either Daladier or Doumergue because they are an obstacle to the victory of Maurras, and our duty is "to use the slightest fault-line in order to win a stronger position for the proletariat". Obviously, the events in Germany – where the "fault-lines" first of the Prussian, than of the Hindenburg-Von Schleicher governments, were nothing but so many stepping stones to the rise of fascism – are mere bagatelles which can be ignored. Our interventions will of course be denounced as anti-Leninist or anti-marxist: we will be told that we are indifferent to whether the government is right, left, or fascist. As far as this is concerned, we would like once and for all to pose the following problem: taking account of the modification in the post-war situation, isn’t the position of our opponents, who want the proletariat to choose the least bad organisational form of the capitalist state, the same as that of Bernstein, who called on the proletariat to achieve the best form of capitalist state? We will be told, perhaps, that the idea is not to demand that the proletariat espouse the cause of the government considered to be the best form of domination… from the proletarian viewpoint, but that the aim is simply to strengthen the positions of the proletariat to the point where it can impose a democratic form of government on capitalism. In this case, we need only change the words, the meaning remains the same. After all, if the proletariat is really strong enough to impose a governmental solution on the bourgeoisie, then why should it stop at this objective, rather than posing its own central demands for the destruction of the capitalist state? By contrast, if the proletariat is not yet strong enough to launch the insurrection, then doesn’t pushing it towards a democratic government mean in effect spurring it down a path that will make the enemy’s victory possible?
The problem is certainly not the one posed by the partisans of the "best choice": the proletariat has its own solution to the problem of the state, and has no influence on the solutions that capitalism adopts to the problems of its own power. Logically, it is obvious that it would be to its advantage to have very weak bourgeois governments that allowed the evolution of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle; but it is equally obvious that capitalism will only form left or far-left governments if these latter are its best line of defence in a given situation. In 1917-21, the social-democracy came to power to defend the bourgeois regime, and was the only form of government that madovernment that made it possible to crush the proletarian revolution. Given that a right-wing government would have pushed the working masses towards insurrection, should the marxists have recommended a reactionary government? We put forward this hypothesis to show that there is no such thing as a governmental form which is in general better or worse for the proletariat. These notions exist only for capitalism, and depend on the situation. By contrast, the working class has an absolute duty to regroup around its class positions to fight capitalism in whatever concrete form it may take: fascist, democratic, or social-democratic.
The first essential consideration in today’s situation is to say openly that the problem of power is not immediately posed to the working class, and that one of the cruellest expressions of this situation is the unleashing of the fascist attack, or the movement of democracy towards emergency powers. Hence we need to determine the basis on which the working class could regroup. And here a really curious conception separates the marxists from all the confusionists and enemy agents at work within the working class. For us, the workers’ regroupment is a problem of quantity: since it cannot pose the problem of power, the proletariat has to regroup for ms to regroup for more limited, but still class objectives, in partial struggles. The others, whose extremism is a mere bluff, alter the proletariat’s class substance to say that it can struggle for power in any period. Unable to pose the problem on a class – i.e. proletarian – basis, they emasculate it by posing the problem of an anti-fascist government. We would add that the partisans of dissolving the proletariat in the anti-fascist swamp are of course the same who prevent the formation of a proletarian class front to fight for its economic demands.
In France, the last few months have seen an extraordinary flowering of anti-fascist programmes, plans, and organisms. This has absolutely not prevented Doumergue from carrying through a massive reduction in pay and pensions, a signal for the wage reductions which French capitalism has absolutely the intention of generalising. If only a hundredth of the energy spent on anti-fascism had been directed towards the formation of a solid working class front for a general strike in defence of immediate economic demands, it is absolutely certain that on the one hand the threat of repression would not have been carried out and on the other that the proletariat, once regrouped, would have recovered its self-confidence. This would in turn haveould in turn have created a changed situation where the problem of power could once again be posed in the only form it can take for the working class: the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It follows from all these elementary considerations, that the only justification of anti-fascism would be the existence of an anti-fascist class: an anti-fascist programme would follow on from the programme inherent to such a class. Our inability to reach such a conclusion is not due only to the simplest formulations of marxism, but to the elements of the situation in France. In the immediate, we are posed with the problem of how far to the right anti-fascism stops: with Doumergue, who is there to defend the Republic? with Herriot, who takes part in the "truce" to save France from fascism, or with Marquet who claims to represent the "eye of socialism" in the National Union, or with the Young Turks of the Radical Party, or just with the socialists? Or with the devil himself, provided only that hell is paved over with anti-fascism? Posing the problem concretely proves that the slogan of anti-fascism only serves the interests of confusion and prepares the certain defeat of the working class.
Instead of engaging in large-scale changes to the workers’ demands, the imperative duty of communists is to determine the regroupment of the working class around its class demands and within its class organisations: the unions. As far as the CGT is concerned (the CGTU having altogether ceased to be a union since it became a mere appendage of centrism), it is in the process – and this is another characteristic expression of the disintegration of the proletarian class – of a fundamental change, to become just another political party with the aim of modifying society on an inter-classist basis. We can thus see that anti-fascist ideology is leading to the disappearance of the union, the very organ which could have regrouped the proletariat in the present situation, where only its immediate demands could rebuild the working class’ unity in struggle. To conclude, we would also say that the necessity of relying on the union organisations is the result of a historical fact which cannot be denied simply on the grounds of the weakness of the unions’ influence in France. We are not basing ourselves on the formal idea of the trade union, but on the fundamental consideration – as we have already said – that since the problem of power is not posed today, it is necessary to aim for more limited objectives, but which are still class objectives for the struggle against capitalism. And anti-fascism is creating the conditions where not only will the least of the working class’ political and economic demands be drowned, but where its chances of revolutionary struggle will be compromised, and it will find itself exposed to becoming a prey to capitalist war, before it can recover its ability to wage the revolutionary battle to build the society of tomorrow.
Wars on every continent, poverty and hunger everywhere, disasters of every description – the world is in a catastrophic state.
"A year after the Kosovo war began, vengeance killings, increasing crime, political infighting, intimidation, and corruption in that territory make an unpleasant picture (...). Kosovo is a mess" (The Guardian, 17/03/00). The hatred and warfare in the Balkans has got worse since the war and NATO occupation in Kosovo. NATO occupation in Kosovo. The war in Chechnya continues to cause thousands of casualties, most of them civilians, while hundreds of thousands of refugees starve in the camps. As in Kosovo, as in Bosnia before it, awful atrocities are committed. The capital Grozny has been obliterated. American generals boast that NATO bombing has put Serbia back 50 years. The Russian generals have achieved a still better performance in Chechnya: "This small Caucasian republic has been set back a century, as far as development is concerned" (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2000). The fighting that has devastated the country is still going on, and will continue for a long time.
Hot spots of military tension are proliferating. They are particularly dangerous and numerous in South-East Asia. "In no other region do so many critical issues converge so dramatically" (Bill Clinton, cited in the International Herald Tribune, 20/03/00).
"Half of all the people in the world are poor" (International Herald Tribune, 17/03/00). All the talk about prosperity is given the lie by the terriblthe lie by the terrible situation of billions of men, women, and children. "The world’s production of basic foodstuffs covers 110% of human needs, and yet 30 million people continue to die of hunger every year, and more than 800 million are undernourished" (Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1999).
The situation in the peripheral countries, once called the "Third World", now described as "emerging", or "developing" is one of absolute pauperisation. "The number of hungry people remains high in a world of food surpluses. In the developing world, there are 150 million underweight children, nearly one in three" (International Herald Tribune, 9/3/00).
Today, we are told over and over that the Asian crisis of 1997 has passed, that the "Asian tigers" are back, that the recession has been much weaker than expected in Latin America, and that growth rates are positive again. And yet, "2.2 billion people [live] on less than $2 per day in Asia and Latin America" (International Herald Tribune, 14/07/00, quoting James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank). With inflation under control, the rise in produtrol, the rise in production in Russia is "a minor miracle, if we just consider the macro-economic indicators" (Le Monde, 24/03/00). As in the countries of Asia and Latin America, this improvement in the "economic fundamentals" has been achieved at the expense of the population, and at a cost of growing poverty. Russia "remains a country in virtual bankruptcy, undermined by a foreign debt of $170 billion dollars (…) Living standards have fallen since 1990, and average monthly income is now equivalent to $60 per month, the average wage is $63 per month, and the pension $18. In August 1998, at the moment of the crash, 48% of the population lived below the poverty line (fixed at about $50); by the end of the year this had risen to 54%, and today it stands at almost 60%" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 14/03/00).
The idea that the industrialised countries are an oasis of prosperity no longer stands up to even the most superficial examination, still less to the actual experience of hundreds of millions of men and women, mostly workers whether employed or unemployed. As we pointed out in our previous issue, 18% of the US population – at lepulation – at least 36 million people – lives below the poverty line. There are 8 million in the same situation in Britain, 6 million in France. Unemployment has fallen, but only at the cost of an increasing flexibility and precariousness of labour, and a drastic drop in wages. Along with Britain and the USA, Holland is often cited as an example of economic success. Le Monde poses the question: how can we explain the fall in Dutch rates of unemployment from 10% in 1983 to less than 3% in 1999? "Several themes have already been considered: (…) The development of part-time work [which accounted in 1997 for] 38.4% of total employment, and extensive retirement from economic activity (very particular to Holland), by people considered invalids (almost 11% of the working population in 1997). [Finally], the wage restraint negotiated during the 1980s could be the cause of the marked fall in unemployment" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 14/03/00). The mystery is solved: in one of the world’s most developed countries, 1 out of 10 adults is an invalid! It’s hardly a laughing matter. The secret of the Dutch success is insecure, part-time jobs, and fraudulent figures for the economy and health, along with a drastic drop in wages. That is the recipe, and the same one is being applied everywhere.
And these data are only a part of the social and economic reality in the industrialised countries: we should not forget the enormous public and private debt in the US, the growing trade deficit, and the huge speculative bubble hanging over Wall Street, and all the world’s stock exchanges with it. America’s uninterrupted period of growth during the 1990s, whose benefits we are told so much about, is being financed by the rest of the world, massive debt, and the ferocious exploitation of the working class. Japan, the world’s second industrialised power, is still suffering an apparently endless officially recognised recession, despite a gigantic state debt which had risen "to $3.3 trillion at the end of 1999, making it the biggest in the world (…) Japan has overtaken the US as the world’s most indebted country" (Le Monde, 4/03/00).
The reality of the world economy is a long way from the idyllic picture we are presented with.
Ecological and "natural" disasters are proliferating. The are proliferating. The lethal flooding in Venezuela and Mozambique comes after that in China, and has left thousands of dead and missing, hundreds of thousands of hungry homeless. At the same time, a less spectacular drought is ravaging Africa, even in countries which on other occasions have been hit by flooding. The thousands buried alive in the ruins of their shanty-towns, built on the slopes of the mountains surrounding Caracas, are not the victims of a natural disaster, but of the anarchy and the living conditions imposed on them by capitalism. Nor are the rich countries spared by disaster, even if the results are less dramatic in the immediate. Accidents in nuclear power stations are becoming more and more frequent, as is oil pollution caused by shipwrecks among the world’s ageing fleet of tankers, rail and air accidents. The pollution of the Danube by a massive discharge of mercury from a Romanian gold mine is another example. Water itself is increasingly polluted and rare: "About one billion people have no access to safe, clean water, mainly because they are poor" (International Herald Tribune, 17/3/00). In town and countryside, the air is poisoned. There is a widespread re-emergence of diseases that had once disappeared: "This year, 3 million people will die of tuberculosis, and 8 million people will develop the diseasel develop the disease, almost all in poor countries (...). Tuberculosis is not just a medical crisis. It is a political and social problem that could have incalculable consequences for generations to come" (Médecins sans Frontières, quoted in International Herald Tribune, 24/03/00).
The deterioration of living conditions, on both the general and the economic level, is accompanied by an explosion of corruption, Mafia activity, and extreme delinquency. Whole countries are rotten with drug-addiction, gangsterism, and prostitution. The Yeltsin family’s embezzlement of billions of dollars of IMF funds allotted to Russia is only a caricature of the universal corruption developing throughout the world.
Millions of children are living in a terrible hell: "The list of activities where children are transformed into commodities is a long one (…) Children are not only sold on the international adoption market, far from it. They are used much more for their labour power (…) The sex industry – the prostitution of both adults and children – has become so l – has become so lucrative that it now represents almost 15% of certain Asian countries’ GDP (Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia). Throughout the world, the victims are not only increasingly young, but also increasingly helpless, especially when they fall ill, and are thrown onto the street or sent back to their villages, where they are rejected by their families and abandoned by everybody" (Claire Brisset, Information Director for the French UNICEF committee, quoted in Le Monde, 21/03/00).
Equally horrible is the development of prostitution among young girls. One consequence of the war in Kosovo was to throw thousands of adolescents into the refugee camps. While the young men were enrolled in the UCK Mafia, drug trafficking and criminal gangs, the girls "were bought or kidnapped in the refugee camps to be sent either abroad or to the bars for soldiers in Pristina (…) Most of them suffered aggression, especially rape, before being forced into prostitution: at first (explained a French police officer), I didn’t believe in the existence of veritable concentration camps where girls are raped and prepared for prostitution" (Le Monde, 15/03/00).
At every level – wars, economic crisis, poverty, ecological and social disintegration – the situation is catastrophic.
Where is capitalism taking the world?
Is this a period of transition – a terrible one certainly – towards a better world of peace and prosperity? Or is it an inexorable descent into hell? Is this society going through torment in order to emerge into a period of extraordinary development thanks to the new technologies? Or are we faced with capitalism’s irreversible decomposition? What are the fundamental tendencies underlying every aspect of the capitalist world?
Despite the speeches, despite the ecologists in government, capitalism’s destruction of the planet can only get worse. Whenever the scientists are allowed to carry out an objective study – and to publish the results – their predictions are dire.
In the words of a specialist in water use: "We are heading for disaster (…) The worst scenario would be to carry on as we are today; it would mean certain crisis (…) In 2025, the majority of the planet’s population will live in conditions of scarcity, or extreme scarcity, of water" (cited in Le Monde, 14/03/00). This scientist draws the conclusion that "A change in policy world-wide is vital".
There is no need here to mention, again, the hole in the ozone layer, or the global warming that is melting the ice-caps and causing the sea level to rise. Air in most of the world’s great cities has become unbreathable, and the associated diseases – asthma, chronic bronchitis, cancer, etc – are on the rise. Nor is it just the cities or industrial areas that are affected. A cloud of pollution produced by Chinese and Indian industry – a cloud the size of the United States – hung for weeks over the Indian Ocean. What is capitalism’s response? A proposal to stop, or at least to reduce pollution? Absolutely not! On the contrary, the answer is to appropriate the air, and sell it: "For the first time, the universal resource of air is going to become a commodity (…) The principle of a market in emission rights [ie in the right to pollute] is simple (…) A country which produces more CO2 than it is allowed can buy the right to pollute more fro pollute more from a state that produces less" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 21/03/00). Just as it does with water. As it does with children. As it does with the proletarians. Instead of stopping, or even slowing down, the destruction of the environment, capitalism – by transforming everything it touches into a commodity – is accelerating its destruction.
Since the beginning of the century, despite all the enormous quantitative progress in the development of the productive forces, the living conditions of the whole world population, including the working class in the industrialised countries, have declined considerably, even without counting the sacrifices and misery of the two world wars. As the Communist International said in 1919, the period of capitalism’s decadence was opened (see the article in this issue on the legacy of the 20th Century).
The 1970s saw bankruptcy in Africa and rising debt in Latin America. The 1980s saw bankruptcy in Latin America and rising debt in Eastern Europe. The 1990s saw bankruptcy in Eastern Europe and rising debt, quickly followed by bankruptcy, in South East Asia. Whetheth East Asia. Whether in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe or Asia, the situation has deteriorated dramatically throughout the late 20th Century. At the beginning of the 1970s, the poor numbered 200 million (according to the World Bank definition, disposing of less than $1 per day). By the beginning of the 1990s, the number had risen to 2 billion.
When Stalinist state capitalism collapsed in the Eastern bloc, Western pseudo-prosperity was promised to all. "But instead of [the countries of the ex-Russian bloc] converging with the wage levels and living conditions of Western Europe, the region’s relative decline accelerated after 1989. Even in the most developed countries, GDP fell by 20%. Ten years after the transition began, only Poland has exceeded the GDP of 1989, while Hungary only began to reach that level at the end of the 1990s" (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2000).
In Asia, where we are told that the crisis of summer 1997 is over, "many banks are still saddled with frightful debts, which despite the improving economic climate, have no chance of ever being repaid" (cited from the Economist in Courrier International). Certainly, the bour Certainly, the bourgeoisie has lately been expressing its delight at the Asian economies’ powers of recovery. "According to the vice-president of the World Bank for East Asia and the Pacific, the recovery of the region’s economies is ‘remarkable’". He goes on to say that "poverty is no longer rising, exchange rates are stable, there are substantial reserves, exports are rising, foreign investment is recovering and inflation is low" (Le Monde, 24/03/00). If "poverty is no longer rising", it is because the "good fundamentals" have already been achieved thanks to the destruction of whole sectors of the Asian economies and the massive pauperisation of the population. It is thanks to an increase in private and state debt that "there are substantial reserves", and a devalued currency encourages exports and investment. But even in the case of South Korea, the world’s 10th industrial power prior to the crisis of 1997, specialist opinion is divided, and there are many who refuse to get carried away by the demands of the propaganda machine.
"Hilton Root, an economist, former Wharton School professor and senior fellow at Milken, painted a worrisome picture of a Korean recovery more skin-deep than deeply rooted. South Korea's powerful chaebols - powerful conglomerates - are still digging out from mammoth debt, the country has too few families owning much too much wealth, and corruption continues to despoil the nation's political and legal system. Mr. Root doubts that the Korean recovery is sustainable even if Mr. Kim emerges stronger than ever. Yet many people worry that, without such a mandate, South Korea would quickly slip into reverse" (International Herald Tribune, 18/3/00). Our economist’s explanations are far from complete, but it is clear enough that the situation is far from being as bright as the bourgeoisie’s specialists would have us believe.
For the countries of the capitalist periphery, in other words for the great majority of the world’s population, the economic perspective is one of ruin, poverty, and hunger.
Towards rising unemployment and job insecurity in the rich countries
How can we say that capitalism is bankrupt in the face of today’s apparent economic growth? Are we blind? Won’t the "new economy" re-launch the machine and ensure a continuednd ensure a continued prosperity? Aren’t we heading for the "full employment" that the governments tell us about? Reality or illusion? A possibility or a lie?
The economic forecasts in the media are pure propaganda. Their purpose is to hide the general bankruptcy. The politicians, the specialists, the journalists, support their arguments with manipulated and deceptive figures. A return to "full employment" is supposed to be just on the horizon, thanks to the "new economy". How are they going to manage it? By job insecurity, forced part-time working and cheating: "As times change, so do landmarks. For years, it was agreed that full employment should be defined as a rate of unemployment no higher than 3%. Lately, the experts concluded that the same result would be reached with 6% of unemployed. Today, some are even raising the figure to 8.5%" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 21/03/00). This revision in the criteria demonstrates that there will be no return to "full employment" in the statistics, and shows just how much confidence they have in their forecasts. Unemployment and job insecurity will get worse, and weigh more heavily on the living and working conditions of the world working class.
The same is true of the figures for growth. It is normal enough for an eminent Japanese politician to refuse to admit that an open recession exists in his country: "even if the GDP has fallen for two quarters running, we do not think that the economy is in recession" (quoted in Le Monde, 14/03/00). And why should he not? Since the figures are massaged to appear in the most favourable light: "In the past, [a growth rate of 1-1.5% for the world economy] would have been considered as a recession. During the last three world ‘recessions’ – 1975, 1982, and 1991 – it is probable that world production never really fell" (The Economist, translated in Courrier International). In these conditions, we cannot take seriously the triumphant declarations on the return to growth in the industrialised countries.
In fact, one of the bourgeoisie’s main aims in the present situation is to hide from the world population – and especially from the working class in the industrialised countries – the economic bankruptcy of capitalism. One of the most crying expressions of this bankruptcy is the fall in production, recession, with all its terrible and violent consequencnd violent consequences. All the hymns of praise to American growth – whose "artificial" conditions and cost to the population we have already examined – aim to hide the world recession. The occasional mention of the "serious recession in most Third World countries" (The Economist) and in the countries of Eastern Europe, is drowned in the flood of praise for the American example.
Despite all the cheating, the bourgeoisie nonetheless has to try to get a clear picture itself, if only to try to control the process of decline. Whence today’s interest in a "soft landing". The "Asian" crisis, which ravaged Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe in the summer of 1997, was contained in North America and Western Europe. The cost to the latter, especially the US, was an increase in private and public debt, accompanied by inflation, an overheating economy, and a still more gigantic and "irrational" stock exchange speculation.
The most serious financial authorities and economic specialists give the lie to the paeans of praise to the economy’s good heconomy’s good health and the revolutionary boom of the Internet and the "new economy"; in fact, they have only one concern: that the world economy should manage a "soft landing". They recognise that in reality, the economy is already in decline. "One thing is certain: US expansion will slow down (…) will the slowdown be brutal enough to cause a worldwide recession? This is very unlikely, but the danger cannot be dismissed. [Nonetheless] this situation has two alarming consequences. Firstly, a substantial slowdown will be necessary to prevent a return to inflation in the US during 2000 (…) If the new economy is a mirage, or at least much less real than is claimed, then today’s stock market valuations of American companies cannot be justified. As soon as the necessity for a moderation in world demand is combined with a stock market that is both over-valued and unprepared for disappointment, including the most serious, then all the conditions will be united for a much less successful landing" (The Economist, translated in Courrier International).
Doubt is setting in. will the bourgeoisie manage to keep control of the decline, and avoid a brutal collapse as in 1929? The issue is not one of bankruptcy or not. The bankruptcy not. The bankruptcy is already here. Unemployment and job insecurity, or full employment? The unemployment is already here. No, the real question is: will the bourgeoisie continue to control the decline, as it is still able to do today? Will the collapse be controlled, or uncontrolled? Doubt is present in another article in the same publication. "If it succeeds a soft landing, [the USA] will have pulled off a miracle every bit as remarkable as the sustained growth that it has known in recent years" (idem). Heavens! Two miracles in succession! What blind faith. And what confidence in the virtues of the capitalist economy. Like the first, this second miracle will be performed not by the market, but by authoritarian state intervention – especially by the USA – in the economy, by political decisions by governments and "technical" decisions by central banks, which will once again cheat with the law of value, not to save the economy but to "land" it as softly as possible.
As we have seen, peace will not return to Chechnya. Nor to the Balkans. The hotspots are numerous. Amongst the multitude of local antagonisms, the permanent tension between China and Taiwan,een China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan (and therefore India and China), all except Taiwan being armed with nuclear weapons, is full of danger. At the same time, the partly hidden antagonism amongst the great industrial powers is sharpening. These rivalries are either a direct cause – as in Yugoslavia – or an exacerbating factor in local conflicts. The disagreements over Kosovo and NATO’s use of occupying forces are an expression of this.
Renewed local conflicts, sharpening antagonisms between the great imperialist powers, this is where capitalism is taking us, day by day.
At the level of local imperialist antagonisms, the present period of decomposition has provoked a situation of chaos on most continents. "Almost everywhere, in the Southern countries, the state is disintegrating. There is a development of lawless regions, ungovernable chaotic entities untouched by any form of legality are plunging back into a state of barbarism, where the only law is imposed by the gangs of looters that hold the population to ransom" (Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1999). Abandoned Africa is the clearest illustration. Immense regions of central Asia have gone down the same path; though to a lesser exugh to a lesser extent, Latin America is also affected as we can see from the Colombian example.
As on the economic and ecological levels, capitalism’s irreversible tendency towards decomposition is dragging humanity into chaos and catastrophe. "This empire [Russia], falling apart into autonomous regions, this incoherent, lawless grouping, this flamboyant universe where the most enormous wealth lives alongside the most terrible violence, is a shining metaphor of this new Middle Ages into which the whole planet could plunge if globalisation is not brought under control" (Jacques Attali, one-time adviser to French President Mitterand, in the French weekly L’Express, 23/03/00).
The state of the world today is catastrophic and frightening. The perspectives that capitalism has to offer humanity are as apocalyptic as they are inevitable. Inevitable, that it, unless we have done with the cause of these ills: capitalism itself.
"The myth persists that hunger results from a scarcity of food (...). The common thread that runs through nearlyt runs through nearly all hunger, in rich and poor nations alike, is poverty" (International Herald Tribune, 09/03/00). Capitalism has developed sufficient productive forces to feed the entire world, even despite the immense destruction of wealth and productive forces throughout the 20th century. Abundance and an end to poverty are possible for all humanity. With them, a mastery of the productive forces and the social distribution of goods. The end of the exploitation of man by man. An end to wars and massacres. An end to the wanton destruction of the environment. Economically and technically, the question has been settled since the beginning of the 20th century. It only remains to pose the question of the destruction of capitalism.
Against this, the ruling class reminds us endlessly that any revolutionary project is inevitably doomed to bloody failure; that communism is the same thing as its negation, Stalinism. It uses its "opposition" forces to put forward democratic campaigns against Pinochet, against the far right in Austria, against the hold over society of the great financial powers, against the WTO during the great anti-summit media show in Seattle, for the Tobin tax via associations like ATTAC patronised by Le Monde Diplomatique. These campaigns have extensions adapted to the situation in each country: the Dutroux affair in Belgium, the struggle against ETA terrorism in Spain, the Mafia scandals in Italy, anti-racism in France. Their main theme is that the population, and in the first place the working class, should regroup as "citizens" behind the state in order to support it, or, even more radically, to force it to defend democracy.
The aim of these campaigns and democratic mystifications is clear. To substitute the struggle of all classes and interests of the citizens, for the working class struggle; support for the state, for the struggle against capitalism, and the state as its supreme defender. The working class has everything to lose in an inter-classist mass of citizens or "the people". It has everything to lose in lining up behind the capitalist state. The bourgeoisie is trumpeting that the class struggle is over and that the working class has disappeared. And yet the very existence of these campaigns, their – often international – extent and orchestration, reveals that for the bourgeoisie the working class remains a real danger.
This is all the more true in that today, the working class struggle is making an appearance – dispersed certainly, controlled and defeated by the unions and the political forces of the left, but nonetheless indicative of a growing discontent at the attacks the class is subjected to. In Germany, Britain, and France, significant movements have taken place, even though they remain hesitant and largely controlled by the unions. The movement and demonstrations by the New York subway workers (see Internationalism n°111, our publication in the USA) was doubtless one of the main expressions of the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the working class today: on the one hand combativeness, a refusal to accept sacrifices without fighting back, a readiness to gather and discuss the needs and means of the struggle, and a certain distrust for the union’s manoeuvres; on the other, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of determination in overcoming the obstacles set up by the unions, to engage the struggle openly and to spread it to other sectors.
All the lies about the economy’s good health are intended to delay as far as possible the development of a consciousness throughout the working class, not of the attacks and the deterioration of its living and working conditions – that is daily common knowledgly common knowledge already – but of the bankruptcy of capitalism. And on the ideological and political level, the incessant, systematic campaigns on the need to defend and strengthen democracy are at the centre of the bourgeoisie’s political offensive against the proletariat in the present period.
Historically, the stakes are high. For capitalism, it is necessary to delay the development of massive and united struggles, and to prevent the workers developing their self-confidence. It is necessary to exhaust, disperse, and eventually to defeat the inevitable proletarian counter-attack. It will be a disaster for all humanity if the proletariat is defeated in the decisive battles to come!
RL, 26/03/2000
In International Review n°s 98 and 99 we dealt with the defeat of the German revolution as a sign of the defeat of the world revolution; we now return to this question through the debates and srough the debates and struggles that took place within the Communist International at the time. The German question and the defeat suffered by the workers’ movement in Germany in 1923 were key questions of the day for the international working class. The eclecticism and tactical oscillations of the CI produced a disaster in Germany. This put an end to the revolutionary wave of the 20s and prepared the ground for the defeats that followed: in China (a situation we have already examined in this Review) and in Britain (the Anglo-Russian Committee and the General Strike). In the end it led to the irrecoverable loss of the International when it adopted the thesis of ‘socialism in one country’ and to the crisis of the Communist Parties which were sucked into the counter-revolution and the second imperialist war.
Our aim here isn’t to deal exhaustively with these important debates in the CI, but simply to contribute to the dossier on the German revolution with this correspondence, which gives us an idea about the political positions and clarity of judgement of these two great revolutionaries at the time of the events themselves.
1923 marked a definite break in the period that followed the first imperialist war. imperialist war. It was the end of the revolutionary wave, which had been inaugurated by the October revolution in Russia. It also marked a break in the Communist International, which no longer had any clear analysis of the political situation.
It was in 1923, at the third plenum of the CI’s Executive, that Radek fell into "national Bolshevism". He saw Germany as "a great industrial nation which has been reduced to the level of a colony". He made an amalgam between a country which, although occupied militarily, remained one of the main imperialist states in the world, and a colonised country. He thus led the KPD and the CI onto the terrain of nationalism; and the CI was already widely infected by opportunism and centrism.
Thus, according to the declaration of the CI’s Executive, "the fact of insisting strongly on the national element in Germany is just as revolutionary as insisting on the national element in the colonies". Radek went even further: "what is called German nationalism is not just nationalism: it is a broad national movement with a huge revolutionary significance". And Zinoviev was only too happy to point out in his conclusion to this conclusion to the work of the plenum that a bourgeois paper had recognised the "national Bolshevik" character assumed by the KPD.
Then, suddenly, in mid-1923, the CI made an about-turn, from a wait-and-see, possibilist attitude – "the revolution was not on the agenda"(as Radek put it in his report on the capitalist offensive to the IVth Congress of the CI) – to frenetic optimism less than one year later: "The revolution is knocking at the door of Germany. It’s a matter of a few months". Consequently, in the presence of the general staff of the KPD, it was decided in Moscow to rush ahead with preparations for the seizure of power, and even to fix the date. On October 1 Zinoviev declared to Brandler, the secretary of the German party, that he saw "the decisive moment coming in four, five or six weeks". In Germany however, the slogans raised were contradictory: the call for insurrection was coupled with the call for a "workers’ government" alongside social democracy. The same social democracy which had done the most to crush the revolution of 1919 and murder the best working class militants and revolutionaries, including Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogisches.
It was the first major crisis of the CI. In parallel with these dramatic events, where the movement in Germany entered a descending curve, a crisis erupted in the leadership of the Bolshevik party. The Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were now in open conflict with Trotsky and the Opposition.
It was in 1923 that the CI adopted a sudden "leftist" turn, which stole the thunder of those who were criticising the CI from the left. From 1924, Zinoviev sought to use the defeat of the German revolution against the Opposition.
Later on Trotsky returned to the question of the German revolution and in his letter from Alma Atma to the VIth Congress of the CI, dated 12 July 1928, he wrote: "the second half of 1923 was a period of tense expectation for the revolution in Germany. The situation was approached too late and too hesitantly…. the Vth Congress (of the CI, in 1924) began moving towards insurrection at a moment of reflux".
Only the Italian communist left was able to draw the first clear lessons from this crisis in the CI, even if they were still quite incey were still quite incomplete. At the IVth Congress of the CI in 1922 it had already sounded the alarm, notably against the tactic of the United Front and the growth of opportunism in the International. In 1923 Bordiga was in prison but, as the divergences became more and more significant, he wrote a manifesto "To all comrades of the Communist Party of Italy" which would have resulted in a break with the CI if it had been supported by the other members of the party’s executive committee. Then in 1924 Bordiga developed his own critique of the Vth Congress.
The letters published below are from the "Perrone Archives" (1). They were written during the VIth Plenum of the CI’s Executive, when Bordiga confronted Stalin on a whole number of issues, including the Russian question (2). Bordiga asks Trotsky for some clarifications on the German question. Trotsky, contrary to the assertions of Stalin, replies that the favourable moment for insurrection had already passed in October 1923 and that he had never supported Brandler’s policies during this period.
On 28 October 1926, Bordiga wrote to Karl Korsch that he was "satisfied with Trotsky’s positions on the German revolution&quoan revolution". However, while Trotsky’s criticisms were in accord with Bordiga’s on this event, as on the necessity to discuss the Russian question and the situation of the CI, Trotsky’s political positions were not as trenchant and well-argued as those of Bordiga when it came to essentials. Bordiga had a much clearer critique of the opportunist tendencies in the CI, marked in particular at the IVth Congress with the adoption of the United Front tactic, which was a concession to social democracy and a way of opening the CPs to the centrists (notably the "Terzini", who were allowed to enter the CP of Italy against Bordiga’s objections).
Moscow, 2 March 1926
Dear comrade Trotsky,
At the current enlarged Executive, during a meeting of the delegation of the Italian section with comrade Stalin, certain questions were posed about your preface to the book The Lessons of October and about your criticisms of the October 1923 events in Germany. Comrade Stalin argued that there was a contradiction in your attitude to this po attitude to this point.
To avoid the risk of quoting comrade Stalin’s words with the slightest inaccuracy, I will refer to the formulation of this same observation which is contained in a written text, i.e. the article by comrade Kusinen published in the French edition of International Correspondence, no 82, 17 December 1924. This article was published in Italian during the discussion for our IIIrd Congress (Unita, 31 August 1925). Here it is argued that:
before October 1923 you supported the Brandler group and you accepted the line decided on by the leading organs of the CI for the action in Germany;
in January 1924, in the theses drawn up with comrade Radek, you affirmed that the German party should not have launched the struggle in October;
it was only in September 1924 that you formulated your criticism of the errors of the KPD and the CI, which resulted in a failure to seize the most favourable moment for the struggle in Germany.
With regard to these supposed contradictions, I polemicised wittions, I polemicised with comrade Kusinen in an article which appeared in Unita in October, basing myself on the elements that were known to me. But you alone can throw full light on the question, and I ask you to do this through a brief note of information that I will use for personal instruction. It would only be with the authorisation of the party organs that I would in the future use this to examine the problem in the press.
With communist greetings,
Amadeo Bordiga
2.3.26
Dear comrade Bordiga
The exposition of the facts that you have provided is no doubt based on some obvious misunderstandings, which, once we have the documents to hand, can be dissipated without difficulty.
During the course of autumn 1923, I openly criticised the Central Committee led by comrade Brandler. On several occasions I had to officially express my concern that the CC would be un that the CC would be unable to lead the German proletariat to the conquest of power. This affirmation was noted in an official document of the party. Several times, I had the occasion – in speaking with or about Brandler – to say that he had not understood the specific character of the revolutionary situation, to say that he was mixing up the revolution with an armed insurrection, that he was waiting fatalistically for the development of events rather than going to meet them, etc etc…
It is true that I opposed being mandated to work together with Brandler and Ruth Fischer because in such a period of struggle within the Central Committee this could have led to a complete defeat, all the more so because, in the essentials, i.e. with regard to the revolution and its stages, Ruth Fischer’s position was full of the same social democratic fatalism. She had not understood that in such a period, a few weeks can be decisive for several years, and even for decades. I considered it necessary to support the existing Central Committee, to exert pressure on it, to insist that the comrades taking part in it act with the firmness demanded by their mandate, etc. No one at that time thought that it was necessary to replace Brandler and I did not make this proposal.
When in June 1924 Brandler came to Moscow and said that he was more optimistic about the development of the situation than during the events of the previous autumn, it became even clearer for me that Brandler had not understood this particular combination of conditions which creates a revolutionary situation. I said to him that he did not know how to distinguish the future of a revolution from its end. "Last autumn, the revolution was staring you in the face; you let the moment pass. Now, the revolution has turned its back on you, but you think that it’s coming towards you". While I was fully convinced that in the autumn of 1923 the German party had let the decisive moment pass – as has been verified in reality – after June 1924, I was not in favour of the left carrying out a policy based on the assumption that the insurrection was still on the agenda. I explained this in a series of articles and speeches in which I tried to demonstrate that the revolutionary situation had already passed, that there would inevitably be a reflux in the revolution, that in the immediate future the Communist Party would inevitably lose influence, that the bourgeoisie would use the reflux to strengthen itself economically, that American capital would exploit this strengthening of the bourgeois regime through a wide-scale intervention in Europe around the slogans of ‘normalisation’, ‘peace’, etc. In such periods, I underlined, the general revolutionary perspective is a strategic and not a tactical one.
I gave my support to comrade Radek’s June theses by telephone. I did not take part in drawing up these theses: I was ill. I gave my signature because they contained the affirmation that the German party had let the revolutionary situation pass it by, and that in Germany we were entering a phase not of immediate offensive but of defence and preparation. For me this was the decisive element.
The affirmation that I claimed that the German party would not lead the proletariat to the insurrection is false from start to finish. My main accusation against Brandler’s CC was that he was unable to keep up with events by placing the party at the head of the popular masses for the armed insurrection in the period August-October.
I said and wrote that since the party had, through its fatalism, lost the rhythm of the events, it was too late to give the signal for the armed insurrection: thd insurrection: the military had used the time lost to the revolution to occupy the important positions, and, above all, it was clear that the mass movement was in retreat. It is here that we see the specific and original character of the revolutionary situation, which can change radically in the space of one or two months. Lenin did not say in vain in September/October 1917 that it was "now or never", i.e. "the same revolutionary situation never repeats itself".
If in January 1924, for reasons of illness, I did not take part in the work of the Comintern, it’s quite true that I did oppose what was put forward by Brandler in the Central Committee. It was my opinion that Brandler had paid dearly for the practical experience so necessary for a revolutionary leader. In this sense, I would certainly have defended the opinion that Brandler should stay in the CC had I not been outside Moscow at the time. Furthermore, I had little confidence in Maslow. On the basis of discussions I had with him, I considered that he shared all the faults of Brandler’s positions with regard to the problems of the revolution, without having Brandler’s good qualities, i.e. his serious and conscientious spirit. Independently of whether or not I was mistaken in th I was mistaken in this evaluation of Maslow, in indirect relation with the evaluation of the revolutionary situation in autumn 1923…..(translator’s note: my version of the French text has a series of question marks here and the sentence ends with the phrase du mouvement advenu en novembre-decembre de la meme annee, but this doesn’t seem to make sense. Is the text incomplete?).
One of the main experiences of the German insurrection was the fact that at the decisive moment, upon which, as I have said, the long-term outcome of the revolution depended, and in all the Communist Parties, a social democratic regression was, to a greater or lesser extent, inevitable. In our revolution, thanks to the whole past of the party and to the exemplary role played by Lenin, this regression was kept to a minimum; and this despite the fact that at certain moments the success of the party in the struggle was put into danger. It seemed to me, and seems all the more so now, that these social democratic regressions are unavoidable at decisive moments in the European Communist Parties, which are younger and less tempered. This point of view should enable us to evaluate the work of the party, its experience, its offensive, its retreats in all stages of the preparation for the seizure ofon for the seizure of power. By basing ourselves on this experience the leading cadres of the party can be selected.
L Trotsky
Perrone – Vercesi – was the main animator of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s
Cf the proceedings of the CI and Programme Communiste’s collection of Bordiga’s speeches and statements. See also the IBRP’s Internationalist Communist Review no. 14, "Bordiga’s last fight in the Communist International, 1926"
Following the collapse of the USSR, various individuals and small groups have emerged within Russia since 1990 to question the world bourgeoisie's lying equation that Stalinism equalled communism.
In International Review 92 (1st Quarter 1998) we reported on two Moscow conferences, called by some of these elements, on the question of the heritage of Leon Trotsky. During the proceedings of these conferences a certain number of the participants wanted to look at other, more radical, analyses of the degeneration of the October Revolution made by other members of the left opposition in the twenties and thirties. They also wanted to gain knowledge of the contribution of the Communist Left to this question and the attendance of the ICC at the conferences aided these enquiries.
Alongside this report we published a thorough critique of Trotsky's book 'The Revolution Betrayed' by one of the conference animators.
Since then, the ICC has been corresponding with elements in Russia and here we want to publish some extracts from one of these correspondents in order to help enrich the international debate about the nature of communist positions and organisation for the future world proletarian revolution.
As our readers will see the stance adopted by our correspondent - V, from the south of Russia - is sympathetic to the tradition of the communist left. He demmunist left. He defends the Bolshevik Party on the one hand and on the other recognises the capitalist and imperialist nature of the Stalinist regime. In particular he takes up an internationalist position on the 2nd Imperialist World War, unlike the Trotskyists who justified participation in it on the basis of the defence of the USSR and its supposed proletarian gains.
However the treatment by our correspondent of 2 main questions, firstly on the possibility of the world revolution in 1917-23 and secondly on the possibility of national liberation after 1914 and thus on the possibility of any progressive capitalist development during this century, shows a disagreement on the methodological framework within which to understand these revolutionary, internationalist principles.
We have taken the liberty of making extracts from some of the comrade's letters in order to save space and get to the heart of the matter. We have also corrected some of the English, not out of love for good grammar, but to facilitate its translation into the different languages of the International Review:
"... The Bolsheviks were mistaken theoretically about the possibiliti about the possibilities of a world socialist revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. Such possibilities have appeared only today, at the end of the 20th century. But they were absolutely correct in action, and if we, by some wonder, could be transferred to 1917, we would be with the Bolsheviks and against all their enemies, including the 'left'. We understand that it is an unusual and contradictory position, but it is a dialectical contradiction. The actors of history aren't pupils in a classroom, who give correct or mistaken answers to the questions of the teacher. The most banal example is Columbus, who thought that he had discovered the path to India, but had actually discovered America. Many learned scholars didn't make such a mistake, but they didn't discover America!
"Were the heroes of peasant wars and early bourgeois uprisings correct - Wat Tyler, John Ball, Thomas Munzer, Arnold of Brescia, Cola di Rienza etc in their struggle against feudalism when the conditions for the victory of capitalism were still immature? Of course they were correct: 1) the class struggle of the oppressed, even when defeated, speeds up the development of the existing order of exploitation and because of this it hastens the downfall of this order. After defeats the oppressed can become capablsed can become capable of victory. Rosa Luxemburg wrote excellently about this in her polemics with Bernstein in 'Social Reform or Revolution'.
"If the necessity of revolution exists, revolutionaries must act, even if their successors will understand that it was not socialist revolution. The conditions for socialist revolution were not yet mature. The illusions of the Bolsheviks about the possibility of world socialist revolution in 1917-23 were necessary illusions, inevitable illusions like the illusions of John Ball or Gracchus Babeuf....Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades with their illusions did an enormous progressive work and have left for us a precious experience of proletarian, though defeated, revolution. The Mensheviks with their theories failed to lead even a bourgeois revolution and ended as the left tails of the bourgeois landlord counter-revolution.........
"If we want to be Marxists, we must understand the objective causes of the defeats of the proletarian revolutions of the 20th century. What objective causes will make the world socialist revolution possible in the 21st century? Subjective explanations like Trotsky's 'treachery of social democrats and Stalinism or your weakness or weakness of class consciousness at an international level is not enough. Yes, the level of class-consciousness of the proletariat was and is low, but what are the objective causes of it? Yes, the social democrats and Stalinists were and are traitors, but why did these traitors always win against the revolutionaries? Why did Ebert and Noske win against Liebnecht and Luxemburg, Stalin against Trotsky, Togliatti against Bordiga? Why did the Communist International, created as a decisive split with the opportunism of the degenerated 2nd International, itself degenerate into opportunism three times quicker than the 2nd? We must understand all this.
"Your understanding of this period only as the decadent stage of capitalism, only as some monstrosity. (for example in an article from Internationalisme on the collapse of Stalinism), doesn't answer the question of why the period was progressive, capitalist of course, in the Stalinist USSR and other red flag countries.
"Concerning your pamphlet 'Nation or Class. We agror Class. We agree with your conclusions, but don't agree with part of the motivation and historical analysis. We agree, that today, at the end of the 20th century, the slogan the right of nations to self-determination has lost any revolutionary character. It is a bourgeois-democratic slogan. When the epoch of bourgeois revolutions is closed this slogan too is closed for proletarian revolutionaries. But we think that the epoch of bourgeois revolutions closed at the end of the 20th century not at its beginning. In 1915 Lenin was generally correct against Luxemburg, in 1952 Bordiga was generally correct on this question against Damen, but today the situation is reversed. And we consider your position to be completely mistaken that different non-proletarian revolutionary movements of the third world, that had not an iota of socialism but were objectively revolutionary movements, were only tools of Moscow, as you wrote about Vietnam for example, rather than objectively progressive bourgeois movements.
"It seems you make the same mistake as Trotsky who understood the crisis of capitalism as an absolute impasse not as a long and torturous process of degeneration and degradation when the reactionary and negative elements of capitalism more and more outweighed its progressive elementts progressive elements. Was there progress in the Soviet Union? Yes, of course. Was it socialist progress? Of course not. It was a transition from a semi-feudal agrarian country to an industrial capitalist country, i.e. bourgeois progress, in blood and mud, like all bourgeois progress. And the revolutions in China, Cuba, Yugoslavia etc: were they progressive ? of course antagonistically-progressive transformations in many other countries. We can and we must speak about the halfway, antagonistic character of all these bourgeois revolutions, but they were bourgeois revolutions. The objective conditions for proletarian revolution in China today are more mature, than they were in the twenties due to the bourgeois revolution in the forties."
If there's a common thread running through these extracts it is the idea that the 'objective conditions' for the proletarian revolution have not existed on a world scale for the greater part of the twentieth century, contrary to what the ICC, following the 1st Congress of the Communist International, believes. Thus the October Revolution was premature and consequently, at least until the end of the century, some form of progressive capitalist development was possible in the peripheries of the world system, and thus national liberation.
A clear understanding of objective conditions in society, that is the economic development of society at a given historic period, is a fundamental need for Marxists, since they, unlike the anarchists, recognise that socialism, instead of merely desirable, is a new mode of production whose possibility and necessity is conditioned by the economic exhaustion of capitalist society. This is the cornerstone of historical materialism as we are sure the comrade agrees.
Likewise there can be little argument that Marx saw the objective conditions for socialism as essentially twofold: "A social formation never perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never take its place before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." (Preface..)
Considering that world capitalism was not yet ready economically to perish in 1917 the comrade draws the conclusion that the immense upheaval in Russia could only lead to a bourgeois revolution at the economic level. At the political level it was a proletarlevel it was a proletarian revolution that was destined to fail owing to the fact that its communist aims didn't correspond to the real material needs of society at the time. The Bolshevik Party and the Communist International could thus only be heroic failures that misread the objective conditions just as John Ball, Thomas Munzer and Gracchus Babeuf thought a new equal society was possible when the conditions for it were not there.
The comrade says that this position on the nature of October is contradictory in the dialectical sense. But it contradicts one of the basic concepts of historical and therefore dialectical materialism that "Humanity only sets itself such tasks as it can solve: indeed, on closer examination, it will always be found that the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation" (Preface).
The consciousness of social classes, their aims and problems tends to correspond to their material interests and their position in the relations of production and exchange. It is only on this basis that the class struggle evolves. For an exploited class like the proletariat, self-consciousness can only develop aftss can only develop after a protracted struggle to free itself of the hold of the consciousness of the bourgeoisie. The difficulties, incomprehensions, mistakes, confusions in this effort reflect the lagging of consciousness behind the development of material conditions - another aspect of historical materialism that sees social life as essentially practical - concerned with furnishing food, clothing shelter - and therefore preceding the attempts of man to explain the world. But the comrade has the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat ripening on a world scale for a task that didn't exist yet. He turns Marxism on its head and has millions of proletarians mobilising themselves for a life or death struggle for a bourgeois revolution by mistake. And to do so he has them led by general ahistorical figures - the revolutionaries - who are motivated not so much by the class they are fighting for but by a general desire for revolution.
Does revolutionary consciousness ripen in a class by mistake?
Is there a historical trend for revolutionary consciousness to mature before its time? If we look a little closer at the historical circumstances of, say, the Peasants Revolt in the England of 1381 (John Ball), or the Peasant War in Germany easant War in Germany in 1525 (Thomas Munzer) we can see that this isn't the case: the consciousness of these movements tends to reflect the interests of the protagonists and the material circumstances of the time.
The latter were at root a desperate response to the increasingly onerous conditions imposed on the peasantry by the decaying feudal class. In these revolts as in all movements of the exploited throughout history there developed a desire for a new society without exploitation and misery. But the peasantry has never been and can never be a revolutionary class in the real meaning of the term since, as essentially a strata of small property holders, they are not the bearers of new relations of production, i.e. a new society. The peasantry in revolt was not destined to be the vehicle for the new bourgeois mode of production emerging out of the towns of Europe during the decadence of feudalism. (As Engels points out the peasantry was destined to be ruined by the victorious capitalist revolutions). Moreover the variation in the size of their property works against the necessary common identity of a revolutionary class.
In the bourgeois revolutions themselves, (in Germany, Britain and France between the 16th and 18th the 16th and 18th centuries) the peasantry and artisans played an active but auxiliary role, not for their own interests. To the extent to which proletarian interests emerge in a distinct way at this time they violently clash with even the most radical wing of the bourgeoisie, witness the fight between the Levellers and Cromwell in the English Revolution of 1649 or Babeufs Conspiracy of Equals versus the Montagnards in 1793.
The peasantry didn't have the cohesion or conscious goals of a revolutionary class, it couldn't develop its own world view and evolve a real strategy for the overthrow of the ruling class. It had to borrow its revolutionary theory from the exploiters since its vision of the future was still shrouded in a religious, i.e. conservative form. If its goals and heroic battles inspire us today and appear out of their time its because the last millennium (and the previous four) has had on important common characteristic: the exploitation of one part of society by another: that's why the names of its leaders have lasted through the centuries in the memory of the exploited.
It was only at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth that the socialist idea appears for the first time s for the first time with real force behind it. And this period coincides, not accidentally, with the development of the proletariat in embryo.
The proletarians are the ancestors of peasants and artisans robbed of their land and means of production by the bourgeoisie. They have nothing left to tie them to the old society and no new form of exploitation to bring about. Having only their labour power to sell and working in association they have no need for internal divisions. They are an exploited class, but, unlike the peasantry have a material interest in not only ending all forms of private property but in creating a world society where the means of production and exchange are held in common: communism.
The working class, growing up with the development of large scale capitalist industrial production has enormous potential economic power in its hands and, being concentrated in millions in and around the major cities of the world, linked by modern means of transport and communication, it has the means to mobilise itself for a successful assault on the bastions of cat on the bastions of capitalist political power.
The class consciousness of the proletariat, unlike the consciousness of the peasantry is not tied to the past but is forced to look to the future without any utopian or adventurist illusions. It must soberly draw all the consequences, however gigantic of overthrowing existing society and constructing a new one.
Marxism, the highest expression of this consciousness, can give the proletariat a true picture of its conditions and objectives at each stage of its struggle and of its final goals, because it is able to uncover the laws of historical change . This revolutionary theory emerged in the 1840s and over the next few decades eliminated the vestiges of utopianism in the socialist ideas held by the working class. By 1914 Marxism was already triumphant in a working class movement that had 70 years of fighting for its interests under its belt. A period that included the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the experience of the 1st and 2nd Internationals.
And at this point Marxism showed itself able to criticise its own mistakes and political analyses and positions that had become sitions that had become obsolete with the march of events. The Marxist left, that the comrade identifies with, in all the major parties of the Second International, recognised the new period opened by the 1st World War and the end of the period of peaceful capitalist expansion. The same Marxist left came to lead the revolutionary insurrections that broke out at the end of the war. But its just here that the comrade, who would have done what the Bolsheviks did in October 1917 as a stepping stone to the world revolution, repeats the pseudo-Marxist arguments about the immaturity of the objective conditions that all the opportunists and centrists of Social Democracy - Karl Kautsky in particular - used to justify the isolation and strangulation of the Russian Revolution.
If the revolutionary wave failed it wasn't an inevitable subjective reflection of the insufficiency of objective conditions, but a result of the fact that this maturation wasn't quick and profound enough to take hold of the world proletariat in the relatively short 'window of opportunity' that opened up after the 1914-18 war and the contingent difficulties that resulted, without mentioning the specific difficulties of the proletarian revolution in comparison with the revolutions of previous revolutionary classes. ses.
For historical materialism the epoch of social revolution that results from the maturation of the elements of the new society is heralded by the development of 'ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out'.
The Communist International was not a precocious aberration as the comrade seems to be saying - in fact it only just caught up with events. It was the expression of a search for a solution to capitalism in the face of a maturation of objective conditions. To make its failure inevitable is to make historical materialism a fatalistic and mechanical recipe rather than a theory in which 'men make history'.
1917-1923 World capitalism deserves to perish
In 1914 the elements of the new society had matured in the old. But had all the productive forces for which the old society had room been developed? Had socialism become a historic necessity? The comrade answers in the negative and his evidence is the progressive development of capitalism in Stalinist Russia, China, Vietnam and other countries. The Bolsheviks thought they were making the world ere making the world revolution but were leading a bourgeois revolution instead.
For the comrade, the proof is the industrialisation of Russia and its transition from feudalism to capitalism after 1917, and the existence of 'progressive elements' in a period of increasing decline.
But for historical materialism every mode of production has distinct epochs of ascendancy and decline. Capitalism, being a world system unlike the feudal, ancient and Asiatic modes of production before it, has to be judged ripe for revolution on the basis of its international condition, not on the basis of this or that country, that taken by itself might give the illusions of a progressive development.
If one isolates certain periods or certain countries in the period of the decadence of capitalism since 1914 it is possible to be dazzled by the apparent growth of the system particularly when it occurs in some of the under-developed countries as the result of the coming to power of a state capitalist clique.
Capitalism's decline, again unlike previous societies, is characterised by over-production. While the decline of Rome or the decay of feudal Europe meant a stagnation and even a regression and decline in production, decadent capitalism continues to expand production (even at a slower average rate: about 50% less than in its ascendant period) while stifling and destroying the productive forces of society. So we don't see, like Trotsky, an absolute halt to the growth of capitalist production in its descendent phase.
Capitalism can only expand the productive forces if it is able to realise the surplus value contained in the ever increasing mass of commodities that it throws on the world market.
" The more capitalist production develops, the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with immediate demand, but depends on a constant extension of the world market...Ricardo does not see that the commodity must necessarily be transformed into money. The demand from workers cannot suffice for this, since profit comes precisely from the fact that workers demand is less than the value of what they produce, and is all the greater when this demand is relatively smaller. The demand of capitalists for each others' goods is not enough either...To say that in the end the cap in the end the capitalists only have to exchange and consume commodities amongst themselves is to forget the nature of capitalist production and that the point is to transform capital into value." (Marx, Capital Book IV, Vol. LL and Book lll, Vol l)
While capitalism expands the productive forces tremendously - labour power, means of production and consumption - the latter only exist to be bought and sold because they have a dual nature as use values and exchange values. Capitalism must monetise the fruits of production . Thus the benefit of the development of the productive forces in capitalism remains, for the mass of the population largely a potential, a shining promise that always seems out of reach, because of their restricted purchasing power. This contradiction, which explains capitalism's tendency to overproduction that only leads to periodic crises in the ascendant period of capitalism, results in a series of catastrophes once capitalism can no longer compensate for it by the continuous conquest of pre-capitalist markets.
The opening up of the imperialist epoch and in particular the generalised imperialist war of 1914-18, showed that capitalism reaches its limits before it has completely eliminated all vestigeliminated all vestiges of previous societies in each country, long before it has been able to turn every producer into a wage labourer and introduce large scale production to every branch of industry. In Russia agriculture was still run on pre-capitalist lines and the majority of the population were peasants, and the political form of the regime had yet to take a bourgeois democratic form in place of feudal absolutism. Nevertheless the world market already dominated the Russian economy and in St Petersburg and Moscow and other major cities were concentrated huge numbers of proletarians in some of the biggest industrial plants in Europe.
The backwardness of the regime, and of the agrarian economy didn't prevent Russia from being completely integrated into the web of imperialist powers with its own predatory interests and objectives. And the coming to political power of the bourgeoisie in the provisional government after February 1917, didn't lead to any deviation from the imperialist policy.
Thus the Bolshevik objective of spring boarding from the Russian revolution to the world revolution was entirely realistic. Capitalism had reached the limits of national development. The relative backwardness of Russia was not dness of Russia was not the cause of the failure of this transition but the failure of the German Revolution.
Nor was the failure of the early Soviet regime to take socialist economic measures a specific product of Russian backwardness. The transition to the socialist mode of production can only begin in earnest when the capitalist world market has been destroyed by world revolution.
If we agree that socialism in one country is impossible and that nationalism is not a step towards socialism, there is nevertheless the illusion that after the victory of Stalinism, industrialisation represented a progressive capitalist step.
Isn't the comrade forgetting that this industrialisation served fundamentally the war economy and the imperialist preparations for World War 2 and that the elimination of the peasantry led to the gulags with their multi-millioned population? In a word that the fantastic growth rates of Russian industry were only achieved by cheating the law of value, by depriving temporarily the sanction of the world market and evolving an artificial pricing policy?
The development state capitalism, exemplified in an aberrant form in Russia, has however been the characteristic means in capitalist decadence for each bourgeoisie to face up to its present and future imperialist rivals. In the decadent epoch the average share of state expenditure in the national economy is around 50% compared with a little over 10% during capitalism's ascent.
In capitalist decadence, there is no catching up with the advanced countries by the less developed countries and so the gaining of political independence from the major powers by the supposed bourgeois revolutions claimed by the comrade remains largely a fiction. While by the end of the 19th century the growth of Gross National Product of the less developed countries was one sixth of the advanced capitalisms, in decadence this disparity has grown to one sixteenth. Consequently the integration of the population into wage labour faster than population growth itself, which is a characteristic of the genuine bourgeois revolutions of the past, just doesn't happen in the less developed world in decadence. On the contrary the mass of the population is more and more expelled from the production process altogether.
The capitalist world as a whole under world as a whole undergoes periodic fluctuations in growth in the 20th century that put the crises of the 19th century into the shade. The world wars of this epoch, instead of being the means to renew growth like the relative skirmishes of the 19th century, are so destructive that they lead to the economic ruin of both the victors and vanquished.
Our rejection then of the possibility of capitalism's progressive development throughout the 20th century has nothing to do with any squeamishness about the 'blood and muck' of bourgeois revolutions, but is derived from the objective economic exhaustion of the capitalism mode of production.
In Lenin's aphorism the period of 'horrors without end' is replaced after 1914 by 'the end, full of horrors'.
The cycles of crisis, war, reconstruction and new crisis of capitalism this century confirms that all the productive forces that this mode of production has room in it for have developed and it deserves to perish. Its certainly true that at the end of the 20th century capitalism's decadence is far more advanced than at the beginning: in fact it has entered into a phase of decomposition. But the comrade giv But the comrade gives us no evidence for saying that capitalist decadence has begun at the end of the century and no arguments for placing such an immense qualitative change at the end rather than at the beginning of over two cycles of capitalism's permanent crisis.
If one denies that the decline of capitalism applies to a whole period, beginning with the First World War and thus extends to the mode of production as a whole, then one is arguing for the revolutionary struggle of the working class on sentiment rather than on historical necessity.
Denying the objective necessity for world revolution between 1917-23 and making its defeat inevitable is indeed a bizarre position. But it has dangerous consequences, since it removes the imperious need to draw all the lessons of the defeat of the revolutionary wave at the political and theoretical level. While the comrade identifies with the Communist Left he doesn't draw on all its work of subjecting the revolutionary experience to a fundamental critique in particular concerning the national question. Even if the comrade denies today any possibility of national liberation it is only on a contingent not ay on a contingent not a historical basis. If one can still see progressive developments in counter-revolutionary imperialist movements like Maoist China, Stalinist Vietnam or Cuba then the danger of abandoning consistent internationalist positions remains.
Como
1) So, history, contrary to what the comrade says, has never shown one class carrying out the historic destiny of another, precisely because revolutions in the mode of production only occur when all the possibilities of the old one and its ruling class have been exhausted and when the revolutionary class bearing the germ of the new society has undergone a long period of gestation in the old society. See the ICC pamphlet 'Russia 1917, start of the world revolution' in particular the refutation of the theory of the double revolution. Life is difficult enough without having to make someone else's revolution. And in a time when it is no longer relevant.
2) See the ICC pamphlet 'The Decadence of Capitalism' and International Review 54.
Recent publications of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, and discussions between the ICC and the CWO at the latter’s public meetings, have confirmed that the way debate between proletarian organisations is carried out has btions is carried out has become a political issue in itself.
The IBRP have themselves raised this issue in Internationalist Communist no. 18, since they accuse the ICC of displaying a "penchant for slander by allusion" when we levelled the charge of empiricism against some of their analyses in our article ‘The marxist method and the ICC’s appeal over the war in ex-Yugoslavia’ in International Review n°99.
We will not answer this particular accusation, except to refer readers to the text in question, which in our opinion contains no slanders but makes an entirely political argument for this characterisation. We want to pose the question in a more general way, although this will necessitate giving some very specific examples of the problem we are raising.
The ICC has always taken the question of polemics and debate between revolutionary organisations very seriously indeed; this is the direct reflection of the importance we have always ascribed to the existence and development of the proletarian political milieu itself. This is why we have from our inception made polemical articles a regular featureticles a regular feature of our press, consistently attended the meetings of other groups, supported or initiated numerous attempts to reinforce the unity and solidarity of the revolutionary movement (conferences, joint meetings, etc). In our own internal life, we systematically read and discuss the publications of other proletarian currents and make regular reports on the proletarian milieu. In our published polemics with other groups we have always tried to make it clear where we agree with them as well as where we disagree; and when dealing with disagreements, to pose them as clearly and accurately as possible, referring in some detail to the published texts of other groups. This concern has also been based on the understanding that sectarianism, the constant stressing of differences above what unites the movement, has been a real problem for the milieu since the end of the period of counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s. The clearest example of this danger is provided by Bordigism, which in its attempt to erect an impenetrable barrier against the encroaching counter-revolution, came to the conclusion - for the first time in the history of the workers’ movement – that communist politics could only be embodied in one monolithic current.
In the past few years, recognising that ars, recognising that the need to defend the essential unity of the proletarian camp against the attacks of the ruling class has grown more acute than ever, we have made an even more concerted effort to root out any vestiges of sectarianism in our own polemics. We have made sure that our polemics are carefully planned and centralised on an international scale; that they avoid exaggerations, any spirit of petty rivalry, any ‘tit-for-tat’ answers on secondary points. We have also rectified certain erroneous formulations that have caused misunderstandings between ourselves and other groups (see for example the article on "100 issues of the International Review"in IR 100). Our readers can only judge for themselves whether this effort has borne fruit. But they can refer to all of our recent polemics with the IBRP in the IR, for example, on the 6th congress of Battaglia Comunista in IR 90, on the origins of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in IR n°s 91 and 92, or most recently, our critique of the IBRP’s "Theses On The Tasks Of Communists In The Capitalist Periphery", in IR 100. We offer such articles as examples of how we think a serious debate ought to be conducted: one which does not shy away from very sharp criticism of what we consider errors and even influencers and even influences of bourgeois ideology, but which is always based on the actual theory and practise of other proletarian groups.
We must speak frankly and say that the polemics of the IBRP in the recent period do not measure up to these standards. We will give the most serious example first. It is contained in the IBRP’s official statement "Revolutionaries faced with the prospect of war and the current situation of the working class" in Internationalist Communist n°18, a balance sheet of the meaning and historic significance of the recent war in the Balkans. Without entering into a more detailed discussion about the many important general questions raised in this text, we want to focus on the IBRP’s conclusions about the response of the rest of the proletarian milieu to the war: "Other political elements in this arena, although not falling into the tragic mistake of supporting one of the warring parties, have, in the name of a fake anti-imperialism or because of historically and economically impossible progressive visions, equally distanced themselves from the methods and perspectives of work which lead to regroupment in the future revolutionary party. They are beyond saving and are victims of their own idealist or mechanistic frameworks, incapable of recognising the peculiarities of the explosion of the perennial economic contradictions of modern capitalism".
Two fundamental points are raised here. First, if indeed the organised groups of the proletarian milieu are "beyond saving", this has very serious implications for the future of this milieu. Apart from anything else, it implies that the future world party – unlike any class party formed in the past – will be formed around a single current in the marxist movement. At the same time, it would have the gravest consequences for the militant energies that are presently trapped in the organisations that are themselves "beyond saving", and it would be the responsibility of the IBRP to set about recuperating what it could from the wreckage - a task that the IBRP does not even consider in this text. But to return to the problem of the method of debate: despite the gravity of its assertions, not once does the IBRP make it explicit whom it is referring to. We are left to guess, on the basis of previous IBRP polemics, that the "idealists" are the ICC, the "mechanists" the Bordigists…but we cannot be sure. This is political irresponsibility of the worst sort, completely outside the best traditions of the workers’ movement. It was never the style, for example, of Lenin, who always made it absolutely clear whom he was directing his polemical fire against, or of the Italian left in the 1930s, who were extremely precise in their assessment of the potential or otherwise of the different currents who made up the proletarian milieu of their day. If the IBRP thinks that the ICC and the Bordigist groups are beyond saving, let them argue it openly, and on the basis of the real positions, analyses and intervention of these groups. We emphasise the latter point because while mentioning names is vital, it is not enough. To recognise this we only have to look at the other polemic in this issue of Internationalist Communist, "Idealism or marxism: once more on the fatal flaws of the ICC", written by an IBRP sympathiser who left the ICC in very unclear circumstances a few years ago. This text, which is offered up as an interim answer to our article on the IBRP in IR 99, is a "model" of bad polemic, making any number of assertions about the ICC’s political methodology without once troubling to quote any texts of the ICC.
The second example is provided by the "Correspondence with the ICC" in the publication of the Communist Worn of the Communist Workers’ Organisation, Revolutionary Perspectives (n°16). This correspondence deals mainly with our respective organisations’ analysis of the recent electricians’ strike in Britain. The circumstances of this letter are as follows: we wrote to the CWO in November to provide them with a copy of a pamphlet by J MacIver entitled "Escaping a paranoid cult", which was produced in conjunction with the expulsion of the ICC from the "No War but the Class War" discussion meetings in London (see World Revolution n°229). For us this document was an example of a classic parasitic attack, not only on the ICC but also the IBRP and other proletarian groups. The CWO chose not to publish this part of the letter, or their response to it. At the end of our letter we also asked the question which was published in Revolutionary Perspectives, concerning the class nature of the electricians’ strike committee. Since to our knowledge this was based entirely on the shop steward organisations, we took the position that it was a radical trade union organ rather than a real expression of the electricians’ struggle. However, the CWO in their article in RP n°15 seemed to see something much more positive in this body. Since we respect their opinions, we wanted to know from them whether they hadthem whether they had any information that could throw a different light on the question, since it can sometimes be very hard to tell the difference between a real organ of workers’ struggle and a very radical expression of the unions. The CWO’s reply, while not actually supplying us with any of the concrete information we hoped for, did raise many political issues, not least about the nature of the trade unions and rank-and-fileism. But this is not the place to enter that discussion. Again, we wish to draw attention to the method of the CWO’s polemic, above all when it comes to describing the actual positions of the ICC. We are told:
"You still have a perspective that the working class is really, ‘subterraneanly’ conscious of the need to smash capitalism. The only ‘mystification’ which holds the struggle back is that put about by the trades unions. If only the working class was ‘demystified’ of its trades unionism then they would take the revolutionary path. This is one of the examples of your semi-religious idealism. The marxist method knows that the working class will become revolutionary through its practical experience and the revolutionary programme which we defend will most closely match the needs of a class that grows in consciousness. It will not be a question of 1. ‘demystifying’ the workers, 2. then go into struggle. The demystification, the struggle and the reacquisition of its own programme will all occur simultaneously as a part of the movement against capitalism".
We agree that it would be idealist to argue that the workers will first be ‘demystified’ of trade unionism and then enter into struggle. But we defy them to point to any text by the ICC which defends this conception. Rather than making accusations of this type, or arguing as they do in the same letter that we "do not say anything positive about the actual workers’ struggle", we would ask them to actually relate to the many texts we have published on the present period of the class struggle, texts which attempt to place the current difficulties of the class – but also its forward steps – in their general context since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Those texts would also have made it clear how important we think it is for the workers to go through the daily, practical confrontation with the unions in order to lay the ground for a an eventual break with them. The CWO may have many disagreements with our analyses, but at least the debate would be clear for the rest of the proletarian movement.
The passage we have quoted contains another problem: the tendency to attack as some kind of ICC shibboleth positions which are not at all our invention but which, at the very least, represent our attempt to develop the authentic traditions of the marxist movement. This is the case with the notion of subterranean maturation, which the CWO use almost as a term of ridicule, but which has a long pedigree going back via Trotsky to Marx – who coined the immortal phrase "well grubbed old mole" in describing the class struggle. In fact we argued this point in a polemic with the CWO in IR 43, back in the mid-80s, an article which has never elicited a reply. But if the CWO don’t like our interpretations of such concepts, let them go to the sources in the marxist classics (such as Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution) and argue against them directly.
The most recent public debate between the ICC and the CWO – at a CWO meeting in London – again showed this tendency on the latter’s part. The theme of the meeting was communism and how to get there, and in many ways the discussion that followed was a very positive one. The ICC saluted the presentation, which defended the marxist vision of communism and the class struggle against all the current campaigns of the ruling class about the "death of communism"; we had no hesitation in saying that we agreed with virtually all of it. Quite naturally as well, there was a discussion about the differences between the ICC and the CWO on the question of the state in the period of transition, and this was also positive in that it there seemed to be a real will on the part of the majority of CWO comrades there to understand what the ICC was saying about this. We argued, in response to the CWO, that while Lenin’s State and Revolution is a fundamental point of departure for posing the question of the state in the marxist framework, the views he defended in 1917 have to be deepened and to some degree revised in the light of the actual experience of proletarian power in Russia. Basing ourselves on the debates that took place within the Bolshevik party in this period, and in particular on the conclusions drawn by the Italian Left in the 1930s, the ICC considers that the proletarian dictatorship cannot simply be identified with the inevitable transitional state. Again, without going into all the ins and outs of this problem, we want to take issue with a statement made by one CWO comrade, which for us is another very clear example of how revolutionaries should not conduct a debate. According to this comrade, this position was no more than an invention of one member of the Left Fraction, Mitchell: "he just made it up". This assertion is factually incorrect – Mitchell’s own series of articles published in Bilan ("Problems of the period of transition") took as their starting point a previous series of studies of the state also published in Bilan ("The problem of the state"), and many other fundamental articles by the Italian and Belgian Fractions as collective bodies, as well as by other individual comrades, take the same position. But above all this kind of assertion shows a real contempt for the work of the Fraction, which after all is the common political ancestor of the ICC and the IBRP. At the meeting we already appealed to the CWO to read the article "The proletariat and the transitional state" in IR 100, which provides clear evidence that Bilan’s position on the state was based on the actual debates in the Bolshevik party, in particular the 1921 trade union debate (not to mention the tragedy of Kronstadt). We further call on the CWO to make a serious and collective effort to study the work of Bilan on this question, and are ready to supply them with the relevant texts (we intend in any case to republish the Mitchell series in the not too distant future).The comrades of the CWO are fully at liberty to reject the Fraction’s arguments, but let it be on the basis of a considered study and reflection.
In sum, we think that the issues facing the revolutionary movement today – whether the analysis of contemporary events, such as wars and class movements, or more historical experiences such as the Russian revolution, are too important to be diverted into false debates or to be cheapened by unsubstantiated assertions and accusations. We call on the IBRP to raise the level of their polemics as part of an effort towards improving the tone and the content of debate throughout the whole milieu. The presentation at the London CWO meeting said quite rightly that marxism is the advanced point in humanity’s attempt to demystify the world. In some ways therefore the milieu of marxist organisations can be compared to an international scientific community which is struggling to advance its understanding of fundamental questions such as the origins of the cosmos. Debate about such questions by genuine scientists demands a high level of rigour and accuracy, and if the marxists are to advance their understanding of the universe of the class struggle, they cannot afford to fall below this level themselves.
Amos
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/russian-communist-left
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/lenin
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/gabriel-miasnikov
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/leon-trotsky
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1966/bogdanov
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1967/kuznetsov
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1968/moiseev
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/21/united-front
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-fascismracism
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/17/stalinism-eastern-bloc
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/318/2000s-marxism-and-opportunism
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party