The sudden collapse of the Eastern bloc automatically gave a new lease of life to its old Western rival's propaganda. For decades, the world has lived in the shadow of a double lie: the lie of the existence of communism in the East, identified with a merciless Stalinist dictatorship and opposed to the reign of democratic freedom in the West. This ideological combat was the expression, at the level of propaganda, of the imperialist rivalries between East and West, and it was the 'democratic' illusion which emerged the victor. Already, the camp of liberal democracy has proven victorious in the two world wars which have ravaged the planet since the beginning of the century, and in each case this has further strengthened the democratic ideology.

This is not mere coincidence. The countries which could lay the best claim to embody the democratic ideal were the first to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution, and to set up purely capitalist states: in particular, Great Britain, France, and the United States of America. Because they came first, they were best served at the economic level. This economic superiority was concretized on both the military and the ideological level. During the conflicts which ravaged the planet since the beginning of the century, the strength of the liberal democracies has always been to convince the workers, who served as cannon fodder, that in fighting for 'democracy' they were defending, not the interests of one capitalist fraction against another, but an ideal of liberty against barbaric dictatorships. During World War I, the French, British and American workers were sent to the slaughter in the name of the struggle against Prussian militarism; during World War II, the brutality of the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships served to justify democratic militarism. After World War II, the ideological combat between the Eastern and Western blocs was assimilated to the struggle between 'democracy' and 'Communist dictatorship'. The Western democracies have always claimed to be fighting against a fundamentally different system: against 'dictatorship'.

Today, the Western democratic model is presented as an ideal of progress transcending economic systems and classes. Citizens are all 'equal' and 'free' to elect political representatives, and therefore the economic system that they want. In a 'democracy' everyone is 'free' to express his or her opinions. If the voters want socialism, or even communism, they need only vote for parties which claim to embody those aims. Parliament reflects 'the will of the people'. Every citizen can appeal to the law against the state. 'Human rights' are respected, etc.

This naive and idyllic vision of democracy is a myth, something that has never existed. Democracy is the ideology which masks the dictatorship of capital in its most developed regions. There is no fundamental difference between the various models that capitalist propaganda presents as opposing each other. All the supposedly different systems which democratic propaganda has presented as its opponents since the beginning of the century are expressions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of capital. They may differ in form, but not in kind. The naked totalitarianism of the Nazi or Stalinist regimes is not the expression of different economic systems, but the result of the development of the state totalitarianism characteristic of decadent capitalism, and of the universal development of state capitalism which marks the 20th century. In fact the superiority of the old Western democracies lies essentially in their greater ability to hide the signs of state totalitarianism.

Myths have a long life. But the economic crisis which is deepening daily in the most dramatic fashion is uncovering all the lies. Thus the illusion of Western prosperity, which was presented as being eternal at the point when the former Eastern bloc collapsed, died the death some time ago. The lie of democracy is of a different ilk, because it is not based on such immediate fluctuations. However, dozens of years of crisis have led to increasing tensions within the ruling class both internationally and internally within each national capital. As a result, the bourgeoisie has had to maneuver in all areas of its activity, to a far greater extent than ever before. There are more and more examples of how little the bourgeoisie adheres to its democratic ideals. All over the world, the 'responsible' political parties, from right to left, all of whom have followed the same policies of austerity against the working class when they have been in office, are suffering from a general loss of credibility. This loss of credibility, which affects the whole of the state apparatus, is the product of the growing divorce between the state which imposes all the misery and civil society which has to put up with it. But this state of affairs has been still further strengthened in recent years by the process of decomposition which affects the entire capitalist world. In all countries, the hidden rivalries between the various clans who inhabit the state apparatus have come to the surface in the form of endless scandals that expose how rotten the ruling class has become. Corruption and prevarication have become a gangrene throughout the state apparatus, politicians work hand in hand with all kinds of gangsters and swindlers, and all of this goes on in the secret corridors of power, unbeknownst to the public. Little by little the sordid reality of the totalitarian state of decadent capitalism is piercing the veil of democratic appearances. But this does not mean that the whole mystification has vanished. The ruling class knows how to use its own decay to reinforce its propaganda, using the scandals as a justification for a new struggle for democratic purity. Even though the crisis continually saps the bases of the bourgeoisie's domination and undermines its ideological grip on the exploited, the ruling class only becomes more determined to use all the means at its disposal to hold on to power. The democratic lie was born with capitalism; it will only disappear with it.

The 19th Century: bourgeois democracy, but just for the bourgeoisie

The dominant fractions of the world bourgeoisie can claim to be democratic because this corresponds to their own history. The bourgeoisie carried out its revolution and overthrew feudalism in the name of democracy and liberty. The bourgeoisie organized its political system in accord with its own economic needs. It abolished serfdom in the name of individual liberty, to allow the creation of a vast proletariat composed of wage laborers ready to sell their labor power individually. Parliament was the arena where the different parties representing the multiple interests existing within the bourgeoisie, and the different sectors of capital, could confront each other to decide the composition and orientations of the government in charge of the executive. For the ruling class, parliament was then a real place for debate and decision-taking. This is the historic model which our 'democracies' claim to represent today, the form of political organization adopted by the dictatorship of capital in its youthful period. This is the model that was adopted by the bourgeois revolution in Britain, France and the USA.

However, we should note that this classic model was never absolutely universal. Democratic rules were often seriously bent for the bourgeoisie to carry through its revolution, and to accelerate the social upheaval necessary to establish its system. We need only consider, amongst others, the French Revolution and the Jacobin terror, followed by the Napoleonic Empire, and the way the bourgeoisie brushed aside its democratic ideal when circumstances required. Moreover, bourgeois democracy was in some ways akin to Athenian democracy, within which all the citizens could take part in elections, except of course the slaves and foreigners who were not citizens.

In the democratic system first set up by the bourgeoisie, only property-holders could vote: for the workers, there was no right of free speech, nor freedom of organization. It took years of bitter struggle before the working class won the right to organize in trades unions, and to impose the principal of universal suffrage. The active participation of the workers in democratic institutions in order to win reforms, or to support the most progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie, was hardly part of the bourgeois revolution's program. Indeed, whenever the workers' struggle succeeded in winning new democratic rights, the bourgeoisie did its best to limit their effects. For example, when a new electoral law was adopted in Italy in 1882, a friend of Depretis, then head of the government, described his attitude as follows: "He feared that the participation of new social strata in public life would have as a logical consequence profound upheavals in the state institutions. From then on, he did everything he could to build solid dikes against the flood-tide he so feared" (F Martin, cited by Sergio Romano in Histoire de L'Italie du Risorgimento a nos jours, Le Seuil, Paris 1977). This sums up perfectly the ruling class' attitude, and its conception of democracy and parliament during the 19th century. Fundamentally, the workers were excluded from it. Democracy was not made for them, but so that capitalism could be well managed. Whenever the clearest fractions of the bourgeoisie supported certain reforms and proclaimed their approval for a greater participation of the workers in the functioning of 'democracy', through universal suffrage or the right of union organization, it was done the better to control the working class and to avoid social upheavals in production. It is no accident that the first bosses to organize themselves against the pressure of workers' struggles and at the same time the most in favor of reforms were those of big industry. In big industry the capitalists, confronted with the massive strength of the many proletarians that they employed, were fully conscious of the necessity both to control the explosive potential of the working class by allowing parliamentary and union activity, and to permit reforms (limitation of the working day, outlawing child labor) which would improve the health of the labor force and thus its productivity.

However, while the exploited were fundamentally excluded, the parliamentary democracy of the 19th Century was the way the bourgeoisie functioned. The legislative dominated the executive; the parliamentary system and democratic representation were social realities.

The 20th Century: 'Democracy' without content

By the beginning of the 20th century capitalism had conquered the world, and reached the limits of its geographic expansion. It had also reached the objective limit of the markets required for its production. The capitalist relations of production were transformed into fetters on the development of the productive forces. Capitalism as a whole entered into a period of world crises and world wars.

This decisive upheaval in the life of capital led to a profound modification in the political mode of life of the bourgeoisie and the functioning of its state apparatus.

The bourgeois state is in essence the representative of the global interests of the national capital. Everything to do with global economic difficulties, the threats of crisis and the means of overcoming them, and with the organization of imperialist war, is the business of the state. With the entrance of capitalism into its decadent period the role of the state thus becomes preponderant because it alone is capable of maintaining a minimum of order in a capitalist society torn apart by its own contradictions. "The state is the proof that society is caught in an insoluble contradiction with itself" said Engels. The development of an octopus-like state which controls all the aspects of economic, political and social life is the fundamental characteristic of the mode of organization of capitalism in its decadent phase. It is the totalitarian response of capitalist society in crisis. "State capitalism is the form capitalism tends to take in its phase of decline" (ICC Platform).

As a result power in bourgeois society is concentrated in the hands of the executive at the expense of the legislative. This phenomenon was particularly clear during the First World War when the needs of war and the interests of the national capital did not permit democratic debate in parliament and imposed an absolute discipline on all the fractions of the national bourgeoisie. But afterwards it was maintained and reinforced. The bourgeois parliament became an empty shell which no longer played any decisive role.

The Third International recognized this reality at its 2nd Congress when it proclaimed that "the center of gravity of political life today has completely and definitively left parliament", that "parliament cannot in any case, at the present time, be the theatre of a struggle for reforms and for the improvement of the situation of the working class, as it could at certain moments in the previous epoch". Not only could capitalism in crisis no longer grant durable reforms, but the bourgeoisie had definitively lost its economically and socially progressive historic role. All its fractions had become equally reactionary.

In this process the political parties of the bourgeoisie lost their primary function, that of representing different interest groups, different economic sectors of capital within the 'democratic' life of the bourgeoisie in parliament. They became instruments of the state responsible for making the different sectors of society accept the state's policy. From representatives of civil society in the state, the parties became instruments of the state to control civil society. The global interests of the national capital, which were represented by the state, tended to make the political parties of the bourgeoisie fractions of the state totalitarian party. This tendency toward the single party is expressed clearly in Fascist, Nazi or Stalinist regimes. But even when the fiction of pluralism was retained, in situations of sharp crisis such as imperialist war, the reality of a hegemonic party or the domination of a single party was imposed. This was the case at the end of the thirties and during the war which followed, with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party or, in Great Britain during the Second World War with the 'state of emergency', with Churchill and the war cabinet. "In the context of state capitalism, the differences which separate the bourgeois parties are nothing in comparison with what they have in common.  All share a general premise according to which the interests of the national capital are superior to all the others. This premise means that different fractions of the national capital are capable of working very closely together, above all behind the closed doors of parliamentary commissions and in the highest echelons of the state apparatus." ('Notes on the consciousness of the decadent bourgeoisie', International Review 31). The leaders of the parties and  members of parliament have in reality become state functionaries.

Thus all parliamentary activity loses any real connection with the decisions which the state takes in the name of the higher interest of the nation. Parliament only serves to mask the development of the totalitarian grip of the state on the whole of society. The 'democratic' functioning of the dominant class, even within the limits of the 19th century, no longer exists. It has become a pure mystification, a lie.

'Democratic' totalitarianism against the working class

Why then maintain such a costly and complicated 'democratic' apparatus if it no longer corresponded to the needs of capital? In fact, this whole organization retained an essential function at a moment when the permanent crisis was pushing the working class toward struggles for the defense of its living conditions and towards revolutionary consciousness. That function consisted of diverting the proletariat from its class terrain, of tangling it up in the 'democratic' game. In this task the state benefited from the support of the so-called Socialist parties after 1914 and the 'Communist' parties after the mid-thirties when they betrayed the class which gave birth to them. These parties are part of the bourgeois apparatus of control and mystification which tries to lend credit to the democratic lie in the eyes of the working class. In the 19th century the proletariat had to struggle to gain the right to vote. In the 20th century in the advanced metropoles, an intensive propaganda campaign is waged by the 'democratic' state to corral the working class onto the electoral terrain. In some countries, Belgium and Italy for example, the vote is even obligatory.

Moreover, when the struggle for reforms has lost any meaning, the unions, which corresponded to the need of the proletariat to better its situation in the framework of capitalist society, lost their utility for the working class. But they did not disappear - the state took hold of them in order to better control the exploited class. The unions complete the apparatus of 'democratic' coercion by the ruling class.

But then one may legitimately ask the following question: if the apparatus of democratic mystification is so useful to the dominant class, to its state, why isn't this mode of controlling society imposed everywhere, in all countries? It is interesting to note in this respect that the two regimes which most clearly symbolize state totalitarianism  of the 20th century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, were built on the crushing of the proletariat following the defeat of the revolutionary attempts which marked the entry of capitalism into decadence. Faced with a proletariat profoundly weakened by defeat, decimated by repression, the question of its control was posed differently for the bourgeoisie. In these conditions the democratic mystification is hardly useful and totalitarian state capitalism can appear without a mask. Moreover, precisely because, from the strict point of view of the functioning of the state machine, the 'democratic' apparatus inherited from the 19th century became superfluous at the beginning of the century, certain sectors of the bourgeoisie, recognizing this state of affairs, theorized its redundancy. Fascism is an expression of this tendency. The maintenance of a heavy 'democratic' machine is not only dispensable, but also demands an adequate economy to make it credible and a ruling class sufficiently experienced to manage it subtly. In the underdeveloped countries these factors are mostly unavailable and the weakness of the local proletariat doesn't encourage the bourgeoisie to put such a system in place. Consequently, military dictatorships are common in these countries. In these countries the weakness of the economy is expressed in the weakness of the local bourgeoisie, and here the army is the best fraction of the bourgeois state to represent the overall interest of the national capital and to provide the skeleton of the state apparatus. This role can also be played by militarized parties inspired by the Stalinist model, as in China.

Far from being the expression of a sort of perversion of the democratic purity of capitalism, the different dictatorships and openly totalitarian States which mark the whole history of the 20th century are on the contrary the manifestation of the general tendency towards state capitalism's totalitarian hold over all the economic, social and political aspects of life. They show the reality of state totalitarianism in decadent capitalism and show what is hidden behind the democratic veil of the ruling class in the developed countries. There is no qualitative difference in the functioning of those states which pretend to be democratic. The reality is simply better hidden.

In France in the thirties the same parliamentary assembly which had been elected with the Popular Front voted full powers to Marshall Petain. This was not an aberration, but, on the contrary, the clear expression of the inanity of democratic pretensions and the whole parliamentary game in capitalist decadence. Furthermore, after the war, the state which was installed by the Liberation was basically in continuity with the one which collaborated with Nazi Germany. The police, the judiciary, the economic and even political oligarchies who had been distinguished by their collaborationist zeal remained in place, except for some rare exceptions used as expiatory victims. It was the same in Italy where, like in France, some 90% of state functionaries retained their posts after the fall of the Fascist regime.

On top of this it is easy to show that our 'democracies' are never embarrassed to support or use this or that 'dictatorship' when it corresponds to their strategic needs, or even to install such 'dictatorships'. Examples aren't lacking: the USA in Latin America, or France in most of the its ex-African colonies.

The cleverness of the old Western 'democracies' consists in using the most caricatural forms of the barbarism and brutality of state capitalism to mask the fact that they themselves are no exception to this absolute rule of decadent capitalism - the development of state totalitarianism. In fact, only the most developed capitalist countries have the means to maintain the credibility of a sophisticated 'democratic' apparatus, to wield it for the purpose of mystifying and controlling the working class. In the underdeveloped capitalist world the regimes with a 'democratic' appearance are the exception and in general more the product of an effective support from a 'democratic' imperialist power than the expression of the local bourgeoisie. Their existence is more often provisional, subject to the fluctuations of the international situation. It takes all the power and experience of the oldest and most experienced fractions of the world bourgeoisie to maintain the credibility of the great lie about the democratic functioning of the bourgeois state.

In the most sophisticated form of capitalist dictatorship, that of 'democracy', the capitalist state must maintain the belief that the greatest liberty reigns. Brutal coercion, ferocious repression, must, whenever possible, be replaced by subtle manipulation to give the same result without the victim seeing it. It is not an easy task and only the most experienced fractions of the world bourgeoisie can do it effectively. To do so the state must control all the institutions of civil society. It must develop tentacles everywhere.

The democratic state has not only organized a whole visible and official system of control and surveillance of society but has woven a web of hidden threads which allow it to control and survey the parts of society which it pretends are outside of its competence. This is true for all sectors of society. A caricatural example is that of information. One of the great principles which the democratic state boasts of is the freedom of the press. It is true that in the 'democratic' countries there are many newspapers and often a multitude of different television channels. But close up things are not so idyllic. A whole administrative-juridical system allows the state to corrupt this 'liberty' and in fact the media are completely dependent on the good will of the state which has all the means to suppress a press headline. As for the main television companies, their authorization to broadcast is dependent on the agreement of the state. Nearly everywhere the essential means of information are in the hands of a few magnates who usually have a seat reserved for them in the ante-chambers of the ministries. One can imagine that if they benefit from this enviable position, it is because they have been mandated by the state to play this role. The big press agencies are very often the direct mouthpieces of the state's policies. The Gulf War illustrated this perfectly. The whole of the Western 'free press' was given the responsibility of relaying the great lies of war propaganda, filtering the news, and manipulating opinion to best serve the needs of imperialism. At this time there was hardly any difference between the 'democratic' conception of the media and the Stalinist one that is vilified so much, or Saddam Hussein's for that matter. They all churned out the most vile propaganda, and the loyal Western journalists, standing to attention, servilely checked their information with the army before publishing it - no doubt because of their concern for objectivity.

This gigantic democratic state apparatus finds its justification in the developed countries in the vital need for the ruling class to control the greatest proletarian concentrations of the planet. Although the democratic mystification is an essential aspect of imperialist propaganda for the great Western powers, it is on the social level, as an instrument for the control of the proletariat and of the population in general, that it finds its principle reason for existence. It is the need to lock society in a strait-jacket that compels the democratic state to carry out its large-scale maneuvers, using all the resources of propaganda and manipulation. One of the main occasions when the state maneuvers the heavy apparatus of democracy is the great electoral circus in which the citizens are periodically invited to participate. Elections, though they have lost any meaning as regards the actual operations of the totalitarian state, remain a powerful weapon to atomize the working class in an individualized vote, to divert its discontent onto a sterile terrain, and give credibility to the existence of democracy. It is no accident if the democratic states carry on a vigorous struggle against abstentionism and disaffection, because the participation of workers in the elections is essential to the perpetuation of the democratic illusion. However, even if parliamentary representation no longer has any importance for the functioning of the state, it is nonetheless essential that the results of the elections conform to the needs of the dominant class, so that it can make best use of the mystifying game of the parties and prevent them from being used up too quickly. Notably, the so-called 'left' parties have the specific role of controlling the working class; their position vis-a-vis governmental responsibilities determines their capacity to spread their mystifications and thus effectively control the working class. For example, it is clear that when austerity is on the agenda, as a result of the accelerating crisis, having the left in power threatens its credibility as a force claiming to defend the interest of the working class and leaves it badly placed to control the working class at the level of its struggles. It is thus extremely important for the state to manipulate the result of elections. To achieve this, the state puts in place a whole system for the selection of candidates, with rules designed to avoid surprises. But this is not the essential aspect. The servile press orients the choice through intense ideological campaigns. The subtle game of alliances between parties, with candidates manipulated for the needs of the cause, usually makes it possible to obtain the desired result and the intended governmental majority. It is a banality today that whatever the electoral results the same anti-working class policy remains. The democratic state conducts its policies independently of the elections, which are being organized at an accelerated pace. Elections are a pure charade.

Outside of elections, which are the touchstone of the state's 'democratic' self-justification, there are many other occasions where the latter maneuvers its apparatus to ensure its control. Against strikes for example. In each struggle carried out by the working class on its own terrain it comes up against all the forces of the state: press, unions, political parties, the forces of repression, provocations by the police or other less official organisms, etc.

What basically distinguishes the 'democratic' state from the 'dictatorships', is not in the end the means employed, which are all based on the totalitarian grip of the state on civil society, but the subtlety and efficiency with which they are employed. That is particularly true on the electoral level. Often the 'dictatorships' also look for legitimacy in elections or referenda, but the poverty of their means leads to a parody of what goes on in the rich industrialized countries. But there is no fundamental difference. The parody only shows the underlying general truth. Bourgeois democracy is only the 'democratic' dictatorship of capital.

Behind the decor of the 'democratic' state

While during the ascendant period of capitalism the bourgeoisie could base its class rule on the reality of the progress that its system brought to humanity, in the decadent period not only has this basis disappeared, but all capitalism can now offer is the misery of a permanent economic crisis and the murderous barbarism of endless imperialist conflicts. The ruling class can only maintain its rule and the survival of its system through terror and lies. This development has led to deep changes in the internal life of the ruling class, crystallized in the activity of the state apparatus.

What enables the state to cope with this new situation is its capacity to impose its repressive and military force, to make lies believable, and to preserve its secrets.

In these conditions, the sectors of the bourgeoisie most able to rise up in the state hierarchy are naturally those who specialize in the use of force, in lying propaganda, in secret activity and in all kinds of sordid maneuvers. That means the army, the police, the secret services, clans and secret societies, and mafia-type gangsters.

The first two sectors have always played an important, indeed indispensable role in the state. A number of generals made their mark on the political life of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century. But in this period, they usually reached the center of the state power only in exceptional situations, in particularly difficult moments for the national capital, as for example during the Civil War in the USA. This militaristic tendency was not the main one in bourgeois political life, as the example of Louis Napoleon showed. Today, however, it is highly characteristic that a considerable proportion of heads of state in the underdeveloped countries are military men, and even in the western 'democracies' we've had such figures as Eisenhower and Haig in the USA, or De Gaulle in France.

The accession to power of high-ranking members of the secret services, however, is a typical phenomenon of the period of decadence, one which clearly expresses the current concerns of the bourgeoisie and the internal functioning of the highest spheres of the state. Once again, this fact is particularly visible in the peripheries of capitalism, in the underdeveloped world. Most often the generals who take on the role of President were former heads of the army's secret services; and, very frequently, when a civilian figure becomes head of state, his previous career was in the 'civilian' secret services or in the political police.

But this state of affairs is not restricted to the underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia or Latin America. In the USSR, Andropov was the boss of the KGB, Gorbachev was high up in it as well, and the current President of Georgia, Shevardnadze, is a former KGB general. Particularly significant is the example of Bush in the USA, 'the most democratic country in the world'. He was a former director of the CIA. And these are only the best-known examples. We do not have the means to make a complete list, nor is this our aim here, but it would be interesting to note the impressive number of politicians, ministers and parliamentarians who, before taking up these 'honorable' functions, gained their education in one or other branch of the secret services.

The multiplication of parallel police, of services each more secret than the other, of hidden agencies of all kinds, is a highly salient feature of social life in today's pseudo-democracies. This reveals the real nature of the needs and nature of the state's activities. It is obvious on the imperialist level: spying, provocation, threats, assassination, all kinds of manipulations - all this has become common coin in the defense of national imperialist interests on the world arena. But these are just the more 'patriotic' and 'admissible' aspects of the activities of the secret services. The occult activity of the state is even more developed on the internal level. Systematic filing of information on the population, surveillance of individuals, 'official' and secret phone-tapping, all kinds of provocations aimed at manipulating public opinion, infiltration of all sectors of civil society, hidden financing, etc - the list is a long one, and the state has recruited the manpower to do it all in secret, precisely in order to keep up the myth of the 'democratic' state. To carry out these tasks the state has recruited the dregs of society; the services of the mafia have been much appreciated and the distinction between gangster and secret agent has become increasingly vague, because these specialists in crime are quite capable of selling their skills to the highest bidder. For many years, the state has made use of the various networks of influence that existed in society - secret societies, mafia, sects - integrating them into its national and international policies, even raising them up to the higher spheres of the state. In fact the 'democratic' state does exactly what it denounces the 'dictatorships' for, but more discretely. Their secret services are not only at the heart of the state; they are also its antennae within civil society.

Parallel to this process, which has led to the ascent of fractions of the bourgeoisie whose way of life is based on secrecy, the entire functioning of the state has become more and more hidden. Behind the appearance of government, the real centers of decision have become invisible. Numerous ministers have no real power and are there to play to the gallery. This tendency reached its most cynical level with President Reagan, whose rather paltry acting talents allowed him to parade in front of the media, but who had no role at all in defining political orientations. For this there are other centers of decision, most of them unknown to the public. In a world where the ideological propaganda of the media has become increasingly important, the most essential quality for a politician is to know how to talk, to 'come across well' on the TV. Sometimes this is enough to make a career. But behind the political stage-sets erected to give the state a human face lurk a whole plethora of committees, agencies, lobbies animated by grey figures, most of them unknown to the general public, but ensuring the continuity of state policy, and thus the reality of power, without regard to the fluctuations of government.

This increasingly hidden operation of the state does not at all mean that disagreements and opposing interests have disappeared within the ruling class. On the contrary, with the deepening of the world economic crisis, divisions within each national bourgeoisie are sharpened. It's very clear that fractions crystallize around the choice of which imperialist alliances to make. But this isn't the only factor of division within the bourgeois class. Economic choices, the question of what attitude to adopt towards the working class, are other issues which give rise to debates and disagreements; also, the sordid scramble for power and influence as a means to amassing wealth is a permanent source of conflict between different clans of the ruling class, quite apart from real differences in orientation. These differences within the ruling class find their expression not so much through divisions into political parties, i.e. at the visible level, as through the formation of cliques which inhabit all echelons of the state and whose existence is hidden from ordinary mortals. The clan warfare to gain influence within the state is very severe, and yet it seldom sees the light of day. Here again, there is little to choose between the 'dictatorships' and the 'democracies'. Fundamentally, the war for power is waged outside the ken of the great majority.

The present situation of deep economic crisis, of the overturning of alliances following the collapse of the eastern bloc, has sharpened the rivalries and conflicts between the capitalist clans within the state. The various scandals, the 'suicides' of politicians and businessmen that we hear more and more about these days, are the visible manifestation of this shadowy war between the clans of the bourgeoisie. The proliferation of 'affairs' provides us with the opportunity to glimpse the real way the state operates behind the democratic smokescreen. In this respect the situation in Italy is particularly revealing. The P2 Lodge Affair, the Gladio Affair, the mafia scandals and all the scandals about corrupt politicians are an exemplary illustration of the totalitarian reality of the 'democratic' state which we have tried to deal with in this article. The concrete example of Italy will thus constitute the backbone of the second part of this article.

JJ

Reference articles: ICC pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism; International Review no 31: 'Machiavellianism, the consciousness and unity of the bourgeoisie; International Review no 66: 'The massacres and crimes of the 'great democracies').

The "peace" between Israel and the PLO in the Middle East shows itself to be just another prolongation of the unending war in this part of the world. Since the First World War the Middle East has been a major battle-ground for conflicting imperialist interests and it will remain so as long as capitalism exists. In this respect it is no different from all the other regions of the world where war has been continuous in open or latent form.

In Yugoslavia the war continues. Now battles are even taking place within the various camps; between Serbs, between Croats and between Muslims! These most recent conflicts give the lie in a very tragic way to the "ethnic" explanation for this war. And on this question the media has fallen silent! Under the cover of the "peoples'" "right to independence" ex-Yugoslavia has become a sinister experiment for the new confrontations between the great powers, produced by the disappearance of the old imperialist blocs. Here too there can be no turning back; capitalism has a free hand to carry out its war diplomacy in the name of "humanitarian" aid.

In Russia the situation just gets worse and worse. The shipwrecked economy has declined dramatically and the political instability that has already dragged whole areas of the ex-USSR into bloody war is more and more gnawing at the very heart of Russia. The danger that the kind of chaos existing in Yugoslavia will spread is a very real one. Here too capitalism has no perspective other than war.

Wars and crisis, social decomposition; this is the "future" that capitalism offers humanity for the last decade of the century.

In the "developed" countries which form the nerve center of this world capitalist system of terror, death and misery, workers' struggles have erupted over the last few months after four years of reflux and passivity. These struggles show that workers are beginning to mobilize against the austerity plans that are of a brutality unknown seen since the Second World War. They also contain in embryo the only possible response to the decadence and decomposition of the capitalist mode of production. In spite of all their limitations they already constitute a step towards the battle of class against class, a massive and international struggle of the proletariat. This is the only way to check the attacks against living conditions, the misery and wars that today stalk the planet.

The development of the class struggle

For several months now strikes and demonstrations have been on the increase in the main countries of Western Europe. The social calm that had reigned for nearly four years has been definitively broken.

The brutality of the redundancies and wage cuts and all the other austerity measures accompanying them, has provoked a growing discontent. On several occasions this has led to a renewed combativity, and a clear determination not to give up in the face of threatened attacks against all the living conditions of the working class.

The firm control of the movement everywhere by the trades unions does not reduce the importance of this development in the class struggle. In every country, the unions' calls for demonstrations and strikes are symptomatic of the growth in combativity within the ranks of the workers. Because of the place they occupy in the capitalist state as guardians of social order on behalf of the national capital, the unions see clearly that the working class isn't ready to passively accept the attacks against its living conditions. So they take the lead. The unions adopt a strategy that aims to prevent the development of the class struggle. They do so by misdirecting workers' demands and imprisoning them in corporatism and nationalism and by derailing the will to struggle into dead-ends. But the fact that they are adopting such a strategy is an indication that a real resurgence of class struggle is now taking place at an international level.

The resurgence of workers' combativity

The end of 1993 has been marked by strikes and demonstrations in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Britain, France and Spain.

The strikes and demonstrations in Germany[1] at the beginning of autumn set the tone. Every sector was affected by a strong wave of discontent. This forced the unions to orchestrate wide-spread maneuvers in the main industrial sectors. In particular a demonstration of building workers in Bonn on the 28th October in which 120,000 participated, and in the car industry, the "negotiation" of the 4 day working week accompanied by wage reductions at Volkswagen.

The first indications of the resurgence of international class struggle emerged in Italy in September 1992 when there was a large mobilization against the measures of the Amato government and against the official unions who had agreed to the measures. Since September 1993 strikes and demonstrations have increased there. As the large main unions have been severely discredited in the eyes of the workers, the rank-and-file union structures have taken up the baton. On 25th September 200,000 people demonstrated in response to an appeal from the "co-ordinations of the factory councils". On 28th October 700,000 people participated in demonstrations organized throughout the country and 14 million joined the 4 hour strike organized for the same day. On 16th November there was a demonstration of 500,000 workers in the building sector. On the 10th December demonstrations of metal workers at Fiat took place in Turin, Milan and Rome.

In Belgium on 29th October 60,000 demonstrators marched in Brussels in response to the appeal of the FGTB, the socialist union. On 15th November staggered strikes were organized in the public transport sector. On 26th November, which the bourgeois press named "Red Friday", a general strike against the prime minister's "global plan" was called by the two big unions, the FGTB and the Christian union, the CSC. This was the largest strike since 1936 and it paralyzed the whole country.

In France in October there was the strike of the Air France ground staff followed by a whole series of demonstrations and local strikes, including in particular the public transport strike on 26th November. In Britain 250,000 civil servants went on strike on 5th November. In Spain on 17th November 30,000 metalworkers assembled in Barcelona against planned redundancies at the SEAT car factory. On 25th November a big day of union demonstrations was organized throughout the country against the government's "social pact", which includes reductions in wages, pensions and unemployment benefits. Tens of thousands of people participated in Madrid, Barcelona and throughout the country.

The black-out

In every country the media propaganda; press, radio, television tries as much as possible to keep quiet about events concerning the working class.

In particular workers' movements in other countries are practically never "covered". And although some papers sometimes mention strikes and demonstrations very briefly, in the "popular" press and on the television there's almost a total black-out. For example, practically nothing of the strikes and demonstrations in Germany filtered through into the media in other countries. When the reality of "social unrest" cannot be kept hidden because the events are taking place within the country, or because it concerns maneuvers of the bourgeoisie which are useful for propaganda purposes, or because what is happening is sufficiently important to force its way into the news, the media systematically present only what is specific to each situation. It's the problem of this or that particular enterprise or it's the problem of this or that particular sector or it's the problem of this or that specific country. It's always the most corporatist and nationalist of the unions' demands that are presented. Or else it's spectacular and fruitless acts that are publicized such as minority confrontations with the agents of law enforcement (in France during the conflict at Air France, in Belgium during "Red Friday").

But behind the black-out and the misrepresentation of reality, the situation is basically the same in all of the developed countries and in Western Europe in particular; the class struggle has returned. The increase in strikes and demonstrations in itself already marks a resurgence of workers' combativity, a growing discontent with the lowering of the "standard of living" which is daily spreading to every strata of the working population, and with mass unemployment.

This development in the class struggle is only the beginning and it's coming up against difficulties produced by the conditions of the current historic period.

The difficulties of the working class in confronting the strategy of the union and the state's political apparatus

The working class is beginning to rediscover the path of struggle following an important period of reflux in workers' combats which has lasted almost four years.

The lie that Stalinism=communism still weighs heavy

Firstly the working class has been disoriented by the ideological campaigns on the "end of communism" and the "end of the class struggle" which has been hammered home since the Berlin wall went down in 1989. By presenting the death of Stalinism as the "end of communism", these campaigns have directly attacked the latent consciousness in the working class of the need and the possibility to fight for a different kind of society. By using and abusing the grossest lie of the century - the identification of the Stalinist form of state capitalism with "communism" - the propaganda of the bourgeoisie has greatly disoriented the working class. The majority have understood the collapse of Stalinism as a demonstration that it's impossible to create a system other than capitalism. Rather than making the consciousness of the class clearer about the capitalist nature of Stalinism, the end of the latter has made the lie about the "socialist" nature of the USSR and the eastern countries more credible. This has generated a deep reflux in the consciousness of the working class which was gradually escaping the clutches of this lie in the struggles that developed after the end of the 60s. This is mainly why the level of workers' demonstrations and strikes is the lowest known in Western Europe since the second world war.

The confusion about its own perspective - that of communism - which has been so nefariously identified with Stalinism's bloody, capitalist counter-revolution, has reigned in the working class for decades and persists today. It is still maintained by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie; those factions who denounce "communism" in order to laud the merits of liberal or socialist "democracy" as well as those factions who defend the "socialist gains" such as the communist parties and the Trotskyist organizations[2].

The bourgeois media take every opportunity to maintain this confusion. During the confrontation in Moscow in October 1993 between Yeltsin's government and the "parliamentary insurgents", their propaganda relentlessly presented the "conservative" deputies as the "real communists" (insisting that the "communists" could only come to an agreement with "fascists" of course). Thus they again increased the ideological smoke-screen about "communism" and once more used the corpse of Stalinism to drive home their message against the working class. As for the communist parties and Trotskyist organizations, disillusioned by the ravages made by the crisis in the USSR and the ex-"socialist" countries, they're gradually finding their voices again to defend the idea that the "socialist gains"[3] were a boon... before the "return of capitalism".

The bourgeoisie will go on maintaining the lie that Stalinism is identical to communism, a lie which hides the real communist perspective. The working class can only rid itself of this obstacle to the development of its consciousness by laying bare the counter-revolutionary role of the left organizations of capital - whether social-democracy, Stalinism and its "destalinised" variations, or trades unionism. This it can only do through practice, through its struggle.

The weight of trade unionism

The promise of a "new world order" which was to open up a "new era of peace and prosperity" under the banner of "democratic" capitalism has also contributed to a reflux in class struggle, in the capacity of the working class to respond to the attacks on its living conditions.

The Gulf war in 1991 gave the lie to the promises of "peace" and acted upon consciousness as a factor clarifying just what this "peace" resulting from the "triumph" of capitalism really means. But at the same time it produced a feeling of powerlessness that brought combativity to an end.

Today the economic crisis and the generalised attack on living conditions that comes in its wake, is pushing the proletariat to emerge slowly from its past passivity. The fact that combativity is returning is an indication that all the promises of "prosperity" have solved nothing. The facts are these. Capitalism can offer nothing but misery. Sacrifices made are the prelude to more sacrifices demanded. The capitalist economy is sick and the workers have to pay for it.

The present resurgence of class struggle is marked therefore by a confusion that continues to exist in the working class about the general perspective of its struggles historically - the real communist perspective of which it is the bearer. But at the same time it's also marked by an awakening consciousness of the need the fight against capitalism.

This is why what mainly characterizes this resurgence is the hold the unions have over the current struggles, the almost total absence of autonomous initiatives on the part of the workers, the fact that the rejection of unionism is very weak. If the consciousness, however vague, of the possibility of overthrowing capitalism is lacking, combativity is caught in a trap. Restricted to formulating demands within the capitalist framework, it finds itself on the home ground of unionism. This is why at present the unions manage to drag workers off their own class terrain:

- by formulating demands within a corporatist framework, within that of defending the national economy, to the detriment of demands that are common to all workers;

- by "organizing" "actions" aimed at dissipating the discontent, at making the working class believe that through such actions it is fighting for its own demands when it is really being dragged into dead-ends, diverted into isolated actions. That's when it's not simply being trotted out into inoffensive processions for the state.

The bourgeoisie is preparing for the confrontation...

With a few recent exceptions such as at the beginning of the movement of the miners in the Ruhr (Germany) in September, all the movements that have developed have been encapsulated and "organized" by the unions. All of them, including the more radical actions of base unionism, have taken place under the vigilant eye of the main unions and their leadership, when the latter haven't directly inspired them[4]. They are able to maneuver in this way because of the low level of consciousness in the working class of the real role the unions play in sabotaging their struggles. It's also because the bourgeoisie has prepared its strategy against the "social consequences of austerity", in other words against the danger of the class struggle.

The working class may have difficulty recognizing its class nature, becoming conscious of what it is but the bourgeoisie has no difficulty understanding that workers' struggles, strikes and demonstrations are dangerous. The ruling class knows that the class struggle is a danger for capitalism both from its general experience throughout its history and from the specific experience of the waves of struggles that it has had to contain, encapsulate and confront in the course of the last twenty five years[5]. With the particularly brutal measures required by the present economic mess, they are forced to plan the attacks and also the angry reactions that they are bound to provoke.

It is not therefore surprising that the bourgeoisie chose the timing of the explosion of workers' struggles in Italy in September 1992 to allow the anger of the proletariat in this country to erupt prematurely in order to prevent it contaminating other European countries[6]. Similarly most of today's movements more or less follow a timing decided by the unions. The "days of action" and also the publicity given to certain "examples" like Air France or "Red Friday" in Belgium is on the whole programmed by the political and union apparatus of the dominant class with the aim of allowing the working class to "let off steam". And they do so in unison with their "partners" in other countries.

Massive anti-working class measures, the ideological and political disorientation of the working class, illusions in the unions and a bourgeoisie that plans its strategy with great care: this is why the workers' combativity has not really checked the attacks against them. What's more the proletariat also suffers from the pressure of social decomposition. The general mood of "everyone for himself" is a drag on the need to develop solidarity and the collective struggle and facilitates the divisive maneuvers of unionism. Moreover the bourgeoisie uses the consequences of its own decomposition to hinder the working class in the development of its consciousness.

...and uses decomposition

Decomposition eats away at the flesh of bourgeois society. Lies and plots reign supreme in the battle for a slice of the cake getting visibly smaller, and this pushes the members of the bourgeois class into a corrupting attitude of looking out for number one.

The scandals and the various goings-on in the world of politics, finance, industry, sport or royalty, according to country, aren't just a masquerade. They correspond to the sharpening of rivalries within the dominant class. Nevertheless the one thing that anyone who is anyone is agreed upon is the need to publicize these goings-on to the hilt in order to occupy the media terrain.

In Italy, we have the example of the "clean hands" operation. The official explanation is that it aims to make politicians behave more morally and decently. In reality it's the settling of accounts between different factions of the bourgeoisie, between the different clans within the political apparatus. Basically this means between the pro-US tendencies (for 40 years the Christian Democratic Party were the US's zealous servants) and the tendencies that lean towards the Franco-German alliance[7]. In the same way in France the Tapie scandal and other media political soap operas are systematically given pride of place on the "news". To tell the truth no-one gives a damn but that's one of the results it's aiming for. They give as little information as possible and the message between the lines - "politics is dirty" - is very useful at a time when workers are trying to deal with political questions. In Britain it's the soap opera around the royal family that plays this role of monopolizing the "news".

The "humanitarian" campaigns to "take in a foreigner" in Germany or "get a child out of Sarejevo" in Britain, and the inflated coverage of murders committed by children in Britain and France also illustrate how decomposition is used by bourgeois ideology to maintain a feeling of powerlessness and fear. It is also used to turn attention from the real problems - economic, political and social.

To cap it all there's the systematic use of images of war, from the Middle East or Yugoslavia for example. The images are transmitted to hide the underlying imperialist interests and to create a sense of guilt amongst workers in the countries at "peace" to persuade them to accept their conditions of exploitation.

The perspectives for the class struggle

All these difficulties for the class struggle don't mean that the battle is already lost and that the workers can expect nothing. On the contrary. Although it obstructs the struggle, the very fact that the international bourgeoisie is mounting this concerted strategy against the working class shows that there is a real tendency towards mobilization, combativity and reflection on what is at stake in the present situation.

Workers have returned to the unions more "by default" than out of profound conviction. The situation is different to that in the thirties when the historic defeat of the working class was signified by tens of millions joining the unions. It's also more "by default" than out of a conviction in bourgeois politics that the proletariat still tends to follow the left wing parties of capitalism that pretend to be "workers' parties. This too is unlike the 30s when workers were enthusiastic about the "national fronts" (with their corollary of submission to "national socialism" and "Stalinism").

Social decomposition and the use the bourgeoisie makes of it combine with the maneuvers of the unions and their rank-and-file extensions to poison combativity and confuse the development of consciousness in the working class. However the economic crisis and the attacks on living conditions act as a powerful antidote. This is the terrain on which the proletariat has begun to respond. This is only the beginning of a long period of struggles. Repeated failures of economic demands are painful. But they also give rise to a deep reflection on the ends and means of the struggle. The mobilization of the workers is already leading to such a reflection. The bourgeoisie is not making a mistake when they publish a widely publicized "critique of capitalism" from... the pope. Suddenly intellectuals are publishing articles in "defense of Marxism". This kind of maneuver is designed to combat the danger of an early reflection that is taking place in the working class.

In spite of all the difficulties, present historic conditions trace a path towards class confrontations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Today's resurgence in combativity is only the first step towards them.

The job of revolutionary organizations is to actively participate in this reflection and in the development of working class actions. In the struggles we must relentlessly denounce the bourgeoisie's strategy of division and dispersion. We must reject corporatist, categorical, sectional and nationalist demands, oppose the unions' methods of "struggle" which are just maneuvers to damp down the fire. We must defend the perspective of the general struggle of the working class, the perspective of communism. We must call to mind the workers' past experiences in learning how to control the struggle through its general assemblies and with delegates elected and revocable by those assemblies. Where possible we must fight for the extension of struggles beyond sectoral divisions. We must encourage and animate discussion circles and struggle committees in which all workers can discuss and clarify the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the nature of their combat that offers a perspective for the development of broader class confrontations in the years ahead.

OF, 12th December 1993

[1] See International Review no. 75.

[2] As for anarchism which sees Stalinism as the consequence of "Marxism", in spite of its "radicalism" it's condemned to rally to the side of the bourgeoisie. In its anarcho-syndicalist variation it attaches itself directly to the bourgeois state through its unionism. In its political variation it's the expression of the petite-bourgeoisie and makes its stand in the bourgeois camp as do the social strata that it represents. This is what it did in Spain in 1936.

[3] In France the Trotskyist group, Lutte Ouvriere, has mounted an enormous fly-posting campaign throughout France to denounce the "return of capitalism" in the USSR and calling for the defense of the famous "workers gains".

[4] This includes the demonstration in Italy called by the "co-ordinations..." and the brawls on the airport runways in Paris during the Air France strike.

[5] What's more, the generation of men who were twenty years old in 1968 now runs the capitalist state. This is a generation that is particularly experienced on the "social" question. Let's bear in mind that in France Mitterand is surrounded by old leftists from May 68. Also that the first great service that Chirac performed for his class was in May 68 when he organized secret meetings between the Pompidou government (of which Balladur was part...) and the Stalinist union, the CGT. These meetings prepared the agreements that were to bury the movement.

[6] On the struggles in Italy, 1992 see International Reviews no.72 and 71 (supplement).

[7] For more on Italy see International Review no.73.

Since the beginning of the decade, the world economy has been sunk into recession. The multiplication of lay-offs; the brutal growth of unemployment which has reached levels unknown since the 1930s; increasing insecurity for those lucky enough to keep their jobs; a generalized decline in living standards, which have been amputated by endless austerity plans; increasing pauperization, particularly through the marginalization of a whole sector of the population deprived of income and even of a roof over their heads. The working class of the big industrial cities is feeling the full force of such phenomena. Today, the exploited are facing the biggest ever attack on their living conditions. Behind all the abstruse statistics and abstract figures, this reality demonstrates in a terribly concrete way the truth of the economic crisis of the entire capitalist system. And yet, the flatterers of capital never tire of announcing that the recovery is coming ... next year. Up till now, these hopes have foundered every time. But at the end of 1993 this hasn't prevented the media from shouting more loudly than ever about the coming 'recovery'.

What is this new optimism based on? Essentially on the fact that in the USA, after several years of recession, there has been a return to positive national growth rates. Are these figures really significant? Do they herald a bright new capitalist tomorrow? If the workers were to believe that, they would be falling for the worst kind of illusions.

The deafening noise of the media barrage about the end of the recession actually expresses the need of the ruling class to counter-act the growing feeling within the proletariat, which is faced with a day-to-day reality which has been getting worse and worse for many years, that the managers of capital have no solution to the crisis of their system. Over the years, the ideological themes and discourse put forward by the ruling class have varied in form, from Reagan and Thatcher's 'less state' to the reconsideration of the social role of the state by Clinton; governments of left and right have come and gone, but reality has gone on moving in the same direction: the deepening of the world crisis and the generalized deterioration of living conditions for the exploited. All sorts of recipes and bitter medicines have been tried. New hopes have been raised again and again, but all in vain.

In the last few months, capitalist propaganda has found a new theme of mystification: the GATT negotiations. According to this, it's protectionism that has been holding back the development of the economic recovery. Consequently, the opening up of the market, respecting the rules of free competition will be the panacea which will make it possible to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. The USA is the main mouthpiece of this view. But all this is just ideological froth, a smokescreen which is less and less able to hide the ferocious free-for-all between the world's main economic powers in their effort to hold onto their part of an ever-shrinking world market. Under the cover of the GATT negotiations, each fraction of the bourgeoisie is trying to mobilize the proletariat behind the banners of defending the national economy. The GATT agreements are nothing but a moment in the sharpening trade war, and the working class has absolutely nothing to gain from them. The outcome of these negotiations make no difference at all to the trend towards frenzied competition which has been developing for years, and which has taken the form of massive lay-offs and draconian social plans aimed at restoring the competitive edge of enterprises - of attempts to balance the books by imposing drastic economies paid for by the working class. In the future, the capitalists will have yet another argument for justifying lay-offs, wage cuts, immiseration: "it's the GATT's fault", in the same way as we've already heard that it's all down to the EEC or NAFTA[1]. All these false arguments have only one function: to hide the reality that all this misery is the product of an economic system drowning in its own insoluble contradictions.

A recession without end

At the least flicker of the indices for growth, the leaders of capitalism are encouraged to see the signs of a recovery, and thus the justification of the austerity plans they have carried out. This has especially been the case in France and Germany recently. However, the growth figures in the main economic powers over the past few months show that there's very little for them to get happy about.

Thus, for the whole of the European Union (to give the new title of the former EEC), 'growth' was still a tiny +1% in 1992 before falling to -0.6% in 1993. In the last two years it has gone from +1.6% to -2.2% in Germany (not including the eastern part), from +1.4% to -0.9% in France, and from +0.9% to -0.3% in Italy. All the countries of the European Union have seen a fall in their Gross National Product with one exception: Britain, whose GNP has climbed from -0.5% to +1.9%[2].

Behind the required facade of optimism displayed by the politicians when they announce a recovery in 1994, the various specialized institutes, which address themselves to a more select audience, that of the economic 'decision-makers', are much more cautious. Thus, the Nomura Research Institute, having estimated that Japan's GNP would slip by 1.1% in the fiscal year from April 93 to April 94, envisages a further fall of 0.4% in the ensuing period, i.e. up till April 95. In its report it even says that "the present recession threatens to be the worst since the 1930s", and adds "it is important to note that Japan is about to go from a real recession to a full scale deflation"[3]. After a fall in GNP estimated at 0.5% in 1993[4], the planet's second economic power is not seeing any recovery on the horizon.

Apparently the climate is very different in the USA. With a growth in GNP estimated at 2.8% in 1993[5], the USA (along with Britain and Canada) seems to be an exception among the great powers. The country which has always claimed to symbolize liberal capitalism, which has been the latter's ideological champion, has another occasion to raise high the banner of triumphant capitalism. In the current atmosphere of pessimism, the USA presents itself as the spearhead of faith in the virtues of capitalism and in its ability to overcome all the crises it faces; in similar vein, it poses as the incarnation of 'democracy', an ideal which marks the crowning point of human achievement. Unfortunately for our apostles of eternal capitalism, this endlessly repeated ideological verbiage has very little to do with the nasty reality unfolding on the world scene, including in the USA. All this discourse is above all aimed at preventing the working class becoming conscious of the real situation by encouraging false hopes; it also serves as an ideological vector for America's imperialist interests in the face of its European and Japanese rivals. The highly publicized farce of the GATT shows this clearly.

The myth of the fall in unemployment in the USA

To back up its propaganda about the 'recovery', the USA bases itself on an indicator which has a much greater echo in the working class than the abstractions of GNP: the rate of unemployment. Here again, the USA and Canada seem to be an exception. Among the developed countries, they are the only ones who can claim that the number of unemployed has fallen, whereas everywhere else it has risen faster and faster:

Growth in unemployment (percentage rate)[6]

Is the situation of the workers different in the USA from that of other developed countries? Not a day passes without one of the great enterprises which occupy center stage on the world economy announcing a new train of redundancies. We won't repeat here the lugubrious list of lay-offs announced in recent months - that would take pages and pages. The situation is the same all over the world and the USA really is no exception. Thus, 550,000 jobs were eliminated in 1991, 400,000 in 1992 and 600,000 in 1993. From 1987 to 1992, enterprises of more than 500 employees 'slimmed down' their workforce by 2.3 million. It has not been the big enterprises that have created jobs in the USA, but the small ones. Thus, during the period under consideration, enterprises with less than 20 wage-earners saw a 12% growth in their workforce, those of between 20 and 100 a 4.6% growth[7]. What does this mean for the working class? Quite simply that millions of stable and well-paid jobs have been destroyed and that the new jobs are precarious, unstable, and usually badly paid. Behind the triumphalist employment figures of the US administration lurks all the savagery of a brutal attack on the living conditions of the working class. Such a situation has been made possible by the fact that in the USA, in the name of ‘liberalism' and the sacrosanct law of the market, the rules regulating the labor market is practically non-existent, contrary to the situation that prevails in Europe.

This is the model that the European and Japanese leaders are looking at with envy, in the hope of dismantling what they call the 'rigidity' of the labor market, i.e. the whole system of 'social protection' which has stood for decades and which, depending on the country, takes the form of a minimum wage, protection against redundancy in certain sectors (public service in Europe, large enterprises in Japan), precise rules about redundancy pay, unemployment benefit and so on. In fact, behind the slogans, now being voiced in all the industrial countries, about the need for a greater 'mobility' of the workforce, for a more 'flexible' labor market, lies one of the biggest ever attacks against the living conditions of the working class. This is the 'model' proposed by the USA. Behind the appearances contained in the figures, the diminution of unemployment in the USA does not mean good news for the workers. It corresponds to a huge degradation of proletarian living conditions.

What's true for the unemployment figures is also true for the growth figures. They only have a very distant connection to reality. The return to prosperity is no more than a dream for a capitalist economy that has been in open crisis for 25 years. One example that helps put the euphoric claims of American capitalism in perspective: during the 1980s, under President Reagan, we also had the same assertions about 'recovery' repeated over and over again, a recovery that was supposed to lay the specter of capitalist crisis once and for all. In the end, history took its revenge, and the open recession which followed consigned all this guff to oblivion. In fact the 1980s were years of crisis and the 'recovery' was no more than a hidden recession in which, in contrast to all the ideology, the living conditions of the working class got worse and worse. The present situation is worse still. The least that can be said is that the American 'recovery' is particularly wheezy and has very little significance. It has far more to do with reassuring propaganda than with reality.

A headlong flight into credit

As the GATT debates hotted up, an interesting figure was published in the press: the USA, the European Union, Japan and Canada account for 80% of world exports. This gives an idea of the preponderant weight of these countries on the world market. But it also shows that the economy of the planet is based on three poles: North America, Western Europe and Japan in Asia. And two of these poles, who represent nearly 60% of the total production of these countries, are still deep in recession. Despite all the speechifying of Clinton, who at this level is the continuator of his predecessors Reagan and Bush, the recovery of the world economy is not around the corner - far from it. In these conditions, what then is the significance of the American 'recovery'? Will the USA, Canada and Britain, who were the first to officially plunge into the recession, be the first to climb out of it? Are the positive figures they are boasting about the signs of an imminent revival of the world economy?

Let's take a closer look at this famous American 'recovery'. What's going on? Has Clinton made all the ills of the American economy disappear with the wave of a magic wand? Has he overcome its lack of competivity at the level of exports and thus the vast trade deficit, the colossal budget deficit which translated itself into such a level of debt that the problem of paying it back, and thus of the solvency of the American economy, poses a dire threat to the international financial edifice? None of this has disappeared; rather the opposite has happened. On all levels the situation is worse.

The annual deficit of the USA's trade balance, which in 1987 reached the record level of 159 billion dollars, was only partially reabsorbed, falling to a 'mere' 73.8 billion in 1991. But since then it has grown and grown; it was estimated at 131 billion in 1993[8]. As for the budget deficit, it was estimated at between 260 and 280 billion dollars in 1993. In brief, Clinton has done nothing new; he has continued along the same road as his predecessors, the road of massive indebtedness. Problems are put off till tomorrow and their real aggravation in the present is hidden. The fall in interest rates which has meant that today the Federal Bank lends at a rate of 3%, i.e. a rate equivalent to the official inflation level (and thus lower than the real inflation level) has no other goal than to allow enterprises, individuals, and the state to lighten the burden of debt and to provide a staggering economy with an internal market artificially maintained by 'free' credit. An example: after two years of quasi-stagnation, household consumption has started growing again in the last few months; in the third quarter of 1993 it went up by 4.4%. The essential reason for this is that individuals have been able to renegotiate their loans at a rate of 6.5% instead of 9.5%, 10% or more, thus increasing their disposable income and reviving their taste for living on credit. Thus, the amount of consumer credit jumped by 8% in August, 9.7% in September, and 12.7% in October[9]. The rediscovered confidence of the American economy is above all a new headlong flight into credit.

The USA certainly isn't alone in this massive resort to credit. It's a generalized situation.

Evolution of the net public debt (% age of nominal GNP)[10]

With the exception of Japan, which is using its well-lined pockets to keep its economy afloat and is already in its fifth recovery plan, with no great results, all the major countries are resorting to the drug of credit to avoid an even more dramatic recession. However, although according to the OECD's figures the American state's debt is not the biggest, it remains the case that the USA is the country which has resorted most massively to debt at all levels of its economic activity - state, enterprises, individuals. Thus, according to other sources, the gross deficit of the state represents 130% of GNP, that of enterprises and individuals 170%. The scale of the overall debt of the USA - more than 12,000 billion dollars, although other sources put it much higher - weighs heavily on the world economic situation. This situation means that while the idea of a dynamic towards recovery might sow illusions for a short time and find some provisional confirmation outside the US, basically it's destined to fizzle out.

America's counter-offensive

What for any other country would be seen as a catastrophic situation that would stir the IMF to anger is, in the USA's case, constantly being minimized by all the world leaders. The present 'recovery', like the one in the second half of the 80s, under Reagan, which was activated in a totally artificial manner by the drug of credit, is being claimed as proof of the dynamism of American capitalism, and by extension, of capitalism in general. The reason for this paradoxical situation is not only that all the economies of the world are closely dependent on the American market for their exports, and thus have an interest in sustaining it; it's also that the credibility of the USA is not only defined by the strength of its economy. The USA has other assets: above all, its status as the world's premier imperialist power for decades, its position as head of the western bloc from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the eastern bloc, enabled it to organize the world market in line with its needs. One example of this situation: the dollar is the reigning currency on the world market. Three quarters of international trade takes place in dollars. Even if the western bloc is now finished since the disappearance of the Russian ogre made it lose its cement, even if, as a result, the USA's main economic rivals - Europe and Japan, who used to obey the discipline of the bloc, including on the economic level - are now trying to spread their wings, it remains the case that the whole organization of the world market is inherited from the previous period. As a result, the USA will try to draw the maximum benefit from this in the present situation of exacerbated competition and trade war. The free-for-all around the GATT negotiations is a striking illustration of this situation.

The USA has stated its aims very clearly. The President has announced that the USA wants to raise its annual exports from 638 to 1,000 billion dollars. Which means that the US is seeking to redress its economic situation by restoring a favorable trade balance. An ambitious objective which can only be attained at the expense of other economic powers. The first plank of this policy is the revival of investment; Clinton sees a growing role for the state at this level. It is highly significant that in the USA the gross formation of fixed capital (investment) has risen from +6.2% in 1992 to +9.8% in 1993, whereas in 1993 it fell by 2.3% in Japan, 3.3% in Germany, 5.5% in France , and 7.7% in Italy; in Britain it has only gone up by +1.8%. The USA is armor-plating its economy in order to make it more competitive and to redouble its assault on the world market. But in the conditions of sharpening competition now prevailing, this purely economic policy is not enough. There is a second plank in the policy, consisting of using all the resources of American power to open up to US exports those markets guarded by protectionist barriers.

It's in this framework as well that we have to understand the NAFTA accords, the recent Seattle conference of Pacific seaboard nations, as well as the disputes which have dominated the GATT agreements. Imperialist motivations are clearly not absent from these economic negotiations. After the disappearance of their bloc, the USA must reconstitute and restructure its zones of influence. In the same way that they ensure that their economy benefits from their imperialist strength, they are also using their economic strength to further their imperialist interests. This is not new, but before, the USA's main economic rivals were tied by the discipline of the bloc and so used to grin and bear it. They paid the bill in the name of western solidarity. This is no longer the case.

France's defiant attitude towards the USA was not as isolated as media propaganda would have us believe. It had the support of the majority of European countries, notably Germany. Japan, meanwhile, has also been visibly defending its own interests. The negotiations were thus very hard and had all the appearance of a psycho-drama because, faced with American demands, Europe and Japan defended their own economic interests with a determination they have never shown before. But that's not the only reason. All the great powers, which are also the main exporting countries, have an interest in an agreement to limit protectionism. Even if France is the world's second biggest exporter of agricultural products, the French arguments about the Blair House pre-agreement, which only affected a very small part of its exports, were essentially a publicity-seeking pretext to draw attention away from the discrete and difficult negotiations about much more economically important issues. The dramatization of these negotiations was also based on the intensifying imperialist rivalries between the USA on the one hand, and the Franco-German alliance at the heart of Europe, and Japan, on the other.

France and most of the European countries have to mark their differences because behind these economic negotiations we are also seeing the development of the ideological themes that will serve the future imperialist alignments. It is thus particularly significant that there has been no agreement on audio-visual products. The famous "cultural exception", which France in particular has talked about so much, actually masks the need for those challenging US domination to block American control over the media, which are indispensable for any independent imperialist policy.

The argument that the GATT accord is going to help re-launch the world economy has been churned out in abundance. It has been based largely on a study done by a team of OECD researchers who predicted that the GATT accord would lead to a 213 billion dollar growth in annual world revenue, though they didn't lay too much emphasis on the fact that this prediction is for next century! By then of course, knowing how often the specialists of the day have been proved wrong, these handy predictions will have been forgotten. The real significance of these accords is the exacerbation of the trade war, the aggravation of competition, and thus, in the short term, the further decline of the world economy. They will not change the dynamic of the crisis. On the contrary they are a focus for the tensions and rivalries between the great powers of the world.

Beyond all the illusions that the ruling class is trying to sell today, the storm clouds are gathering over the world economy. Financial crisis, an even deeper slide into recession, the return of inflation is the specters looming on the horizon. For the working class they bring the threat of an increasingly tragic deterioration in its living conditions. But they also announce the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult for the ruling class to make people believe in its system. The crisis pushes the proletariat to struggle in defense of its living conditions, while at the same time opening its eyes to the lies of capitalism. Despite the suffering it brings, the crisis remains the main ally of the revolutionary class.

JJ, 16.12.93

[1] NAFTA: North American Free Trade Agreement, encompassing Canada, the USA and Mexico.

[2] Source: European Commission

[3] Deflation: reference to the crisis of 1929 during which the fall in production and employment was accompanied by a fall in prices.

[4] Source: OECD

[5] idem

[6] idem, except for Italy, which in the meantime has changed its methods of calculation; the source here is the European Commission

[7] idem

[8] idem

[9] Source: Federal Reserve

[10] Source: OECD

In the first part of this chapter (IR 75), we began to examine the historical context in which Marx dealt with capitalist society: as the last in a series of systems of exploitation and alienation, as a form of social organization no less transient than Roman slavery or mediaeval feudalism. We noted that, in this framework, the drama of human history could be considered in the light of the dialectic between the original social ties of humanity, and the growth of commodity relations which has both dissolved these ties and prepared the ground for a more advanced form of human community. In the section that follows we concentrate on the mature Marx's analysis of capital itself - of its inner nature, its insoluble contradictions, and of the communist society destined to supplant it.

Piercing the Commodity's Veil

It is surely impossible for anyone to approach Marx's Capital, its various drafts and annexes from the Grundrisse to Theories of Surplus Value, without a considerable degree of trepidation. This gigantic intellectual accomplishment, this work "for which I have sacrificed health, happiness and family" (Marx to Meyer, April 30, 1867), delves into the most extraordinary detail about the historic origins of bourgeois society, examines in all their concreteness the day-to-day operations of capital from the factory floor to the credit system, 'descends' to the most general and abstract questions about human history and the characteristics of the human species, only to 'ascend' again to the concrete, to the harsh and naked reality of capitalist exploitation. But although this is a work which demands considerable concentration and mental effort from its readers, it is never an academic work, never a mere description, or an exercise in scholarly learning for its own sake. As Marx so often insisted, it is both a description and a critique of bourgeois political economy. Its aim was not simply to classify, categorize or define the features of capital, but to point the way to its revolutionary destruction. As Marx put it in his usual colorful language, Capital is "assuredly the most frightening missile which has ever been launched at the heads of the bourgeoisie" (letter to Becker, April 17, 1867).

Our aim in this article is not, and could not be, to examine Capital and its surrounding works on political economy in any great detail. It is simply to draw out what seem to us to be its central themes, in order to emphasize their revolutionary and thus communist content. We begin as Marx began, with the commodity.

In the first part of this article we recalled that in Marx's view, man's history is not only the chronicle of the development of his productive capacities, but also the chronicle of his growing self-estrangement, of an alienation that has reached its peak in capitalism and the wage labor system. In Capital this alienation is dealt with from various angles, but perhaps its most significant application is contained in the concept of the fetishism of commodities; and to a very large extent, Capital itself is an attempt to see through, expose, and overturn this fetishism.

According to Marx in the opening chapter of Capital, the commodity appears to mankind as a "mysterious thing" (Vol One, chap 1) as soon as it is considered as more than an immediate article of consumption - i.e., when it is considered from the point of view, not of its mere use value, but of its exchange value. The more the production of material objects is subordinated to the needs of the market, to buying and selling, the more mankind has lost sight of the real aims and motives of production. The commodity has cast a spell on the producers, and never has this spell been so powerful, never has this "enchanted and perverted world" developed so much (see Vol Three, chap XLVIII), as in the society of universal commodity production, capitalism - the first society in history where market relations have penetrated to the very heart of the productive system, so that labor power itself has become a commodity. This is how Marx describes the process whereby commodity relations have come to bewitch the minds of the producers:

"... in the act of seeing, there is at all events an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relations between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities" (ibid).

For Marx, uncovering and overthrowing the commodity-fetish was crucial at two levels. First, because the confusion that commodity relations sowed in men's minds made it extremely difficult to grasp the real workings of bourgeois society, even for the most learned and acute theoreticians of the ruling class. And second, because a society which was ruled by the commodity was necessarily a society condemned to escape the control of the producers; not only in an abstract and static sense, but also in the sense that such a social order would eventually pull the whole of humanity towards catastrophe unless it was replaced by a society which had banished exchange value in favor of production for use.

The secret of surplus value

Bourgeois political economists had of course recognized that capitalism was a society based on production for profit; some of them had recognized the existence of class antagonisms and social injustices within this society. But none of them had been able to discern the real origins of capitalist profit in the exploitation of the proletariat. The fetishism of commodities again: in contrast to oriental despotism, or classical slavery, or feudalism, there is no institutionalized exploitation in capitalism, no corvee, no legal ownership of one human being by another, no days fixed for working on the lord's estate. In the straightforward, commonsense view of bourgeois thought, the capitalist buys the workers' 'labor' and gives him, in return, a 'fair day's pay'. If a profit arises from this exchange, or from capitalist production in general, its function is simply to cover the cost and effort expended by the capitalist, which seems fair enough as well. This profit might be produced by the capitalist 'buying cheap and selling dear', i.e. on the marketplace, or through the 'abstinence' of the capitalist himself, or, as in Senior's theory, in the "last hour of labor".

What Marx demonstrated, however, through his analysis of the commodity, was that the origin of capitalist profit lies in a real form of slavery, in the unpaid labor-time extracted from the worker. This is why Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the origins of value, explaining that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor-time embodied in its production. Thus far Marx was in continuity with classical bourgeois political economy (though modern economic 'experts' will tell us that the labor theory of value is no more than a charming antique - which is an expression of the utter degeneracy of bourgeois economic 'science' in this epoch). But Marx's achievement was his capacity to go deeper into the exploration of the peculiar commodity labor power (not labor in the abstract, as the bourgeoisie always approached it, but the worker's capacity to labor, which is what the capitalist actually purchases). This commodity, like any other, was 'worth' the amount of labor-time needed to reproduce it - in this case, to fulfill the worker's basic needs, such as food, clothing shelter, etc. But living labor power, in contrast to the machines that it set in motion, had the unique characteristic of being able to create more value in the working day than was required to reproduce it. The worker who works an 8-hour day may thus spend no more than 4 hours working for himself - the rest is given 'free' to the capitalist. This surplus value, when realized on the market, is the real source of capitalist profit. The fact that capitalist production is precisely the extraction, realization and accumulation of this stolen surplus labor makes it by definition, by nature, a system of class exploitation in full continuity with slavery and feudalism. It's not a question of whether the worker works for 8, 10 or 18 hours a day, whether his working environment is pleasant or hellish, whether his wages are high or low. These factors influence the rate of exploitation but not the fact of exploitation. Exploitation is not an accidental by-product of capitalist society, the product of individual greedy bosses. It is the fundamental mechanism of capitalist production and the latter could not be conceived without it.

The implications of this are immediately revolutionary. In the marxist framework, all the sufferings, material and spiritual, imposed on the working class, are the logical and inevitable product of this system of exploitation. Capital is without doubt a powerful moral indictment of the misery and degradation that bourgeois society heaps upon the vast majority of its members. Volume One in particular shows in great detail how capitalism was born "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Vol 1, XXXI); how, in its phase of primitive accumulation, nascent capital ruthlessly expropriated the peasants and punished the vagabonds that it had itself created with the whip and the axe; how, both in the early phase of manufacturing, the phase of capital's "formal domination", and in the industrial system proper, the phase of "real domination", the capitalists' "werewolf greed" for surplus value led with the objective force of a machine in motion to the horrors of child labor, the 18-hour day and all the rest. In the same work Marx also denounces the inner impoverishment, the alienation of the worker reduced to a cog in this vast machine, reduced by repetitive drudgery to a mere fragment of his real human potential. But he does all this not with the aim of appealing for a more humane form of capitalism, but of scientifically demonstrating that the very system of wage labor must lead to these 'excesses'; that the proletariat cannot mitigate its sufferings by relying on the good will and charitable impulses of its exploiters, but only by offering a dogged, organized resistance against the day-to-day effects of exploitation; that this inevitably increasing "mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation" can only be done away with through "the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production" (chap XXXII). In short, the theory of surplus value proves the necessity, the absolute unavoidability, of the struggle between capital and labor, classes with objectively irreconcilable interests. This is the granite foundation for every analysis of capitalist economics, politics and social life, which can only be understood clearly and lucidly from the point of view of the exploited class, since the latter alone has a material interest in piercing the veil of mystification with which capital covers itself.

The insoluble contradictions of capital

As we showed in the first part of this article, historical materialism, the marxist analysis of history, is synonymous with the view that each class society has moved through an epoch of ascendance, in which its social relations provide a framework for the progressive development of the productive forces, and an epoch of decadence, in which the same relations have become of growing fetter on further development, necessitating the emergence of new relations of production. Capitalism, in Marx's view, was no exception to this - on the contrary, Capital, indeed Marx's entire work, can justly be described as the necrology of capital, a study of the processes leading to its demise and disappearance. This is why the crescendo to Volume One is the passage where Marx predicts a time when "the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" (Chap XXXII).

The first volume of Capital, however, is mainly a critical study of "The process of production of capital". Its principal aim is to lay bare the nature of capitalist exploitation, and thus largely restricts itself to analyzing the direct relationship between the proletariat and the capitalist class, keeping to an abstract model where other classes and forms of production are of no importance. It is in the subsequent volumes, particularly Volume Three and the Theories of Surplus Value (part two), as well as in the Grundrisse, that Marx embarks upon the next phase of his missile attack upon bourgeois society: demonstrating that the fall of capital will be the result of contradictions rooted in the very heart of the system, in the production of surplus value itself.

Already in the 1840s, and especially in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had identified the periodic crises of overproduction as the harbingers of the eventual demise of capitalist society. In Capital and the Grundrisse, Marx devotes considerable space to polemicizing against the bourgeois political economists who tried to argue that capitalism was essentially a harmonious economic system in which every product could, all being well, find a purchaser - i.e. that the capitalist market could absorb all the commodities churned out in the capitalist production process. If crises of overproduction did take place, went the arguments of economists like Say, Mill and Ricardo, they were the result of a purely contingent imbalance between supply and demand, some unfortunate 'disproportionality' between one sector and another; or perhaps they were simply the result of wages being too low. Partial overproduction was possible, but not general overproduction. And any idea that the crises of overproduction sprang from insoluble contradictions built into the very system itself could not be admitted, because that meant admitting the limited and transient nature of the capitalist mode of production itself:

"The apologetic phrases used to deny crises are important are so far as they always prove the opposite of what they are meant to prove. In order to deny crises, they assert unity where there is conflict and contradiction. They are therefore important in so far as one can say they prove that there would be no crises if the contradictions which they have erased in their imagination, did not exist in fact. But in reality crises exist because these contradictions exist. Every reason which they put forward against crisis is an exorcised contradiction, and therefore, a real contradiction, which can cause crises. The desire to convince oneself of the non-existence of contradictions is at the same time the expression of a pious wish that the contradictions, which are really present should not exist" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII).

And in the ensuing paragraphs, Marx shows that the very existence of the wage labor system and of surplus value contains within itself the crises of overproduction:

"What the workers in fact produce is surplus value. So long as they produce it, they are able to consume. As soon as they cease to produce it, their consumption ceases, because their production ceases. But that they are able to consume is by no means due to their having produced an equivalent for their consumption ... By reducing these relations to those of consumer and producer, one leaves out of account that the wage-laborer who produces and the capitalist who produces are two producers of a completely different kind, quite apart from the fact that some consumers do not produce at all. Once again, a contradiction is denied, by abstracting from a contradiction which really exists in production. The mere relationship of wage laborer and capitalist implies:

1. that the majority of the producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production and the raw material;

2. that the majority of the producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus value or surplus product. They must always be overproducers, producers over and above their needs, in order to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII).

In short, because the capitalist extracts surplus value from the worker, the worker always produces more than he can buy back. Of course, this is not a problem from the point of view of the individual capitalist, because he can always find a market with some other capitalist's workers; and the bourgeois political economist is likewise prevented by his class blinkers from seeing the problem from the point of view of the total social capital. But as soon as it is grasped from this standpoint (which only a proletarian theorist can do), then the problem indeed becomes a fundamental one. Marx explains this in the Grundrisse:

" ... the relation of one capitalist to the workers of another capitalist is none of our concern here. It only shows every capitalist's illusion, but alters nothing in the relation of capital in general to labor. Every capitalist knows this about his worker that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer and he therefore wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity. But the relation of every capitalist to his own workers is the relation as such of capital and labor, the essential relation. But this is just how the illusion arises - true for the individual capitalist as distinct from all the others - that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money spender, and not as worker. It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, 'the very existence of a profit upon any commodity presupposes a demand exterior to that of the laborer who has produced it', and hence the demand of the laborer himself can never be an adequate demand. Since one production sets the other into motion and hence creates consumers for itself in the alien capital's workers, it seems to each individual capital that the demand of the working class posited by production itself is an 'adequate demand'. On one side, this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the laborer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs" (The Chapter on Capital, notebook IV).

If the working class, taken as a whole, cannot provide an adequate market for capitalist production, neither can the problem be solved by the capitalists selling each other their products: "If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it" (Capital, vol III, chap XV). Because the aim of capital is the expansion of value, reproduction of value on an ever-extending scale, it requires a constantly expanding market, an "expansion of the outlying fields of production" (ibid), which is why in its ascendant period capitalism was driven to conquer the globe and subject more and more of it to its laws. But Marx was quite aware that this process of expansion could not go on indefinitely: eventually capitalist production would encounter the limits of the market both in the geographic and the social sense, and then what Ricardo and the others refused to admit would become manifest: "that the bourgeois mode of production contains within itself a barrier to the free development of the productive forces, a barrier which comes to the surface in crises and, in particular, in overproduction - the basic phenomenon in crises" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII, section 14).

Just as the bourgeois economists were compelled to deny the reality of overproduction, they were no less troubled by another basic contradiction contained in capitalist production: the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Marx located the origins of this tendency in the imperious necessity for capitals to compete, to constantly revolutionize the means of production, i.e. to increase the organic composition of capital, the relation between the dead labour embodied in machines, which produce no new value, and the living labor of the proletariat. The contradictory consequences of such 'progress' are summarized as follows:

" ... proceeding from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved a logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of the employed living labor is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialized labor set in motion by it, i.e. to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of labor, unpaid and congealed in surplus value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall" (Capital, Vol Three, chap XIII). What worried the more serious bourgeois political economists like Ricardo about this phenomenon was again its inescapable nature, the fact that "the rate of profit, the stimulating principle of capitalist production, the fundamental premise and driving force of accumulation, should be endangered by the development of production itself", because this again implies that capitalist production "has its barrier, that it is relative, that it is not an absolute, but only a historical mode of production corresponding to a definite limited epoch in the development of the material requirements of production" (Vol Three, chap XV).

Marx's unfinished work

Capital is necessarily an unfinished work. Not only because Marx did not live long enough to complete it, but also because it was written in a historical period in which capitalist social relations had not yet become a definitive barrier to the development of the productive forces. And it is surely not unconnected to this that when Marx comes to define the basic element in the capitalist crisis, he sometimes emphasizes the problem of overproduction and sometimes the falling rate of profit, although there is never a mechanical and rigid separation made between the two: for example, the chapter in Volume Three devoted to the consequences of the falling rate of profit (Chap. XV, 'Internal contradictions of the law') also contain some of the most elucidating passages about the problem of the market. Nevertheless this apparent gap or inconsistency in Marx's theory of crisis has led, in the actual epoch of capitalism's decline, to the emergence within the revolutionary movement of different theories about the origins of this decline. Not surprisingly, they fall under two main headings: those based on Rosa Luxemburg's work, stressing the problem of realization, and those deriving from the work of Grossman and Mattick, emphasizing the falling rate of profit.

This is not the place for a detailed examination of these theories, a task we have at least initiated elsewhere (see in particular 'Marxism and crisis theory', IR 13). At this point we simply want to reiterate why for us Luxemburg's approach is the most coherent.

'Negatively', it's because the Grossman-Mattick theory, which denies the fundamental character of the realization problem, seems to regress to the bourgeois political economists denounced by Marx for claiming that capitalist production created a sufficient market for itself. At the same time, the adherents of the Grossman-Mattick theory often resort to the arguments of revisionist economists like Otto Bauer, whom Luxemburg ridiculed in her Anti-critique for arguing that the abstract mathematical schemas on expanded reproduction that Marx constructed in Capital Vol Two 'solved' the problem of realization and that Rosa Luxemburg's whole approach was a simple misunderstanding, the raising of a non-problem.

In a more positive sense, Rosa Luxemburg's approach provides an explanation for the historically concrete conditions determining the onset of the permanent crisis of the system: the more capitalism integrated the remaining non-capitalist areas of economy into itself, the more it created a world in its own image, the less it could constantly extend the market and find new outlets for the realization of that portion of surplus value which could be realized neither by the capitalists nor the proletariat. The inability of the system to go on expanding in the old way brought about the new epoch of imperialism and inter-imperialist wars, signaling the end of capitalism's progressive historical mission and threatening humanity with a relapse into barbarism. All this, as we have seen, was fully in line with the 'problem' of the market as posed by Marx in his critique of political economy.

At the same time, while the Grossman-Mattick approach, at least in its pure form, simply denies this whole question, Luxemburg's method allows us to see how the problem of the falling rate of profit becomes increasingly acute once the world market no longer has a field of expansion around it: if the market is glutted, there is no longer the possibility of compensating for the fall in the rate of profit, i.e. the decreasing amount of value contained in each commodity, by a rise in the mass of profit, i.e. by producing and selling more commodities; on the contrary, the attempt to do so only exacerbates the problem of overproduction. Here it becomes evident that the two essential contradictions uncovered by Marx act on each other and aggravate each other, deepening the crisis and making it ever more explosive.

"In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed" (Theories of Surplus Value, part two, chap XVII). This is certainly true of the economic disaster that has ravaged the capitalist world over the past quarter century. Despite all the mechanisms that capitalism has installed to delay the crisis, indeed to cheat the consequences of its own laws (mountains of debt, state intervention, the organization of world-wide fiscal and trade organisms, etc), this crisis has all the hallmarks of the crisis of overproduction, revealing as never before the true absurdity and irrationality of the bourgeoisie's economic system.

In this crisis we are faced, to a far greater degree than in the past, with the insane contrast between the vast potential for wealth and enjoyment promised by the development of the productive forces, and the actual misery and suffering induced by the social relations of production. Technically speaking, the whole world could be provided with adequate food and shelter: instead millions starve while food is dumped in the ocean, farmers are paid not to farm, and unimaginable scientific and financial resources are cast into the abyss of military production and war; millions go homeless while building workers are thrown onto the dole; millions are forced to work more and more intensively, for longer and longer hours, in order to meet the needs of capitalist competition, while millions more are ejected from work into the idleness and poverty of unemployment. And all because there is this crazy epidemic of overproduction. Not, as Marx pointed out, overproduction in relation to need, but overproduction in relation to the capacity to pay. "There are not too many necessities of life produced, in proportion to the existing population. Quite the reverse. Too little is produced to decently and humanely satisfy the wants of the great mass ... On the other hand, too many means of labor and necessities of life are produced at times to permit of their serving as means for the exploitation of laborers at a certain rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced to permit of a realization and conversion into new capital of the value and surplus value contained in them under the conditions of distribution and consumption peculiar to capitalist production ... Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms" (Capital, Vol Three, chap XV).

In short, the crisis of overproduction, which can no longer be attenuated by a new expansion of the market, exposes the fact that the productive forces are no longer compatible with their "capitalist integument", and that this integument must be "burst asunder". The fetishism of commodities, the tyranny of the market, must be overthrown by the revolutionary working class, the only social force capable of taking hold of the existing productive forces and orienting them towards the satisfaction of human needs.

Communism: a society without exchange

The definitions of communism in Marx's 'mature' theoretical work operate at two connected levels. The first derives logically from the critique of commodity fetishism, of a society ruled by mysterious, non-human forces, and caught up in the terrible consequences of its inner contradictions. It is, in fact, Marx's attempt to concretize a project already announced in The Jewish Question in 1843: that human emancipation requires man to recognize and organize his own social powers instead of being dominated by them. He thus outlines the solution to the insoluble contradictions of commodity production: an essentially simple form of social organization where the divisions based on private property have been superseded, where production is carried on for need, not profit, and where calculations of labor time, instead of being applied as a wrack for each individual worker and the working class as a whole, are directed solely towards working out how much social labor should be expended on the production of such and such necessities:

"The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip itself of its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan" (Capital, Vol One, Chap I).

"Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of a change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor-power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson's labor are here repeated, but with the difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labor, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as a means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organization of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labor-time. Labor-time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of common labor borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labor and its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but to distribution" (ibid).[1]

For all that these features seem transparently simple, even obvious, it has time and again been necessary for marxists to insist on this minimal definition of a communist society against all the false 'socialisms' that have plagued the workers' movement for so long. In the Grundrisse, for example, there is a long polemic against Proudhonist fantasies about a socialism based on fair exchange, a system where the worker is paid in full for the value of his product, and money is replaced by a kind of non-money to measure this exchange. Against this, Marx insists both that "it is impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products" (Chapter on Money), and that in a real communist society, "the labor of the individual is posited from the outset as social labor. Thus, whatever the particular material form of the product he creates or helps to create, what he has bought with his labor is not a specific and particular product, but rather a specific share of the communal production. He therefore has no particular product to exchange. His product is not an exchange value" (ibid).

In Marx's day, when he criticized "the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists" (Grundrisse, Chapter on capital, notebook V), he was referring to confused elements in the workers' movement. But in the period of capitalist decay such ideas are not simply wrong; they have become part of the arsenal of the counter-revolution. One of the distinguishing features of the entire left wing of capital from the Labor Party through the Stalinists to the most radical Trotskyists, is that all of them identify socialism as a capitalist society without private capitalists, a system where capital has been nationalized and wage labor statified, and where commodity production still reigns supreme, if not within each national unit then on world scale, as a relation between the various 'socialist nations'. Naturally, as we saw with the Stalinist system in the old eastern bloc, such a system in no way avoids the fundamental contradictions of capital and is just as doomed to collapse as the more classical variants of bourgeois society.

The realm of freedom

Thus far, Marx has described the material underpinnings of communist freedom, its basic prerequisites:

"Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis." (Capital, Volume Three, chap XLVIII).

The true goal of communism, therefore, is not merely a negative freedom from the domination of arbitrary economic laws, but the positive freedom to develop human potential to its utmost, and for its own sake. As we have noted before, this far-reaching project was announced by Marx in his early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and he never deviated from it at any stage in his later work.

The passage just cited is preceded by the statement that "the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production". This is true insofar as the enormous development of labor productivity under capitalism, the automation of production (which is clearly glimpsed by Marx in a number of passages in the Grundrisse), make it possible to reduce to a minimum the amount of time and energy spent on repetitive and unrewarding tasks. But when Marx actually begins to examine the content of the free activity characteristic of a communist humanity, he recognizes that such an activity will overcome any rigid separation between free time and working time:

"It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labor time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labor cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labor requires practical use of hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise" (Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital, notebook VII).

Thus, if Marx criticizes Fourier for thinking that labor can become "mere fun, mere amusement" (a misunderstanding kept alive by the successors of Fourier who abound on the margins of the revolutionary movement, such as the Situationists), he offers instead not a greyer, more mundane goal, but one far more epic in scope, pointing out that "the overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity - and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits - hence as self-realisation, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely labor" (Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital, notebook VI). And again: "Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion" (ibid).

The worldview of the first laboring class to be a revolutionary class, and thus one which recognizes labor to be the specifically human form of activity, marxism cannot envisage human beings finding real satisfaction in mere 'leisure' conceived in abstract opposition to work; it thus affirms that humanity will find its true fulfillment in a form of active creation, an inspired fusion of labor, science and art.

**********

In the next part of this series, we will follow Marx's 'return' from the abstract world of economic studies to the practical world of politics, in the period that culminated with the first proletarian revolution in history, the Paris Commune. In so doing, we will trace the development of the marxist understanding of the political problem par excellence: the problem of the state, and how to get rid of it.

CDW

[1] We will return in another article to the question of labor-time as a measure of individual consumption. But let's note that here labor-time no longer dominates the worker or society; society uses it consciously, as a means of planning the rational production and distribution of use-values. And, as Marx points out in the Grundrisse, it certainly no longer measures its real wealth in terms of labor-time, but in terms of disposable time. 

IR76, 1st Qtr 1994

As a new recovery in proletarian combativity develops across the world, the need for greater unity within the revolutionary milieu is posed more sharply than ever. Consequently, it is important that revolutionary organisations should show themselves capable of drawing up a balance sheet of what has been achieved in this domain during the last few years, and of learning its lessons for the future.

This article aims to contribute to this effort. It is concerned in particular with a critique of the experience of the IBRP, in a spirit not of “competition”, but of a sincere and fraternal confrontation of positions. Our aim is not to criticise the IBRP’s practice for its own sake, but to illustrate the mistakes to be avoided, through this organisation’s experience.

During the last two years, something has begun to change within the international proletarian milieu: an awareness is beginning to emerge, fitfully and with many hesitations it is true, that revolutionaries must stand together if they are to live up to their responsibilities.

The ICC’s Appeal

In 1991, the ICC’s 9th International Congress published an “Appeal to the Proletarian Milieu”. It called upon the milieu to combat the sectarianism that weighs on it, and urged it to regard this combat as a vital matter for the working class. It expressed the first stirrings of a change in the atmosphere within the proletarian political movement.

“Instead of a total sectarian isolation, we find today in the different groups a greater will to air their reciprocal critiques in the press or in public meetings. Furthermore there is and explicit appeal from the comrades of Battaglia Comunista (BC) to overcome the present dispersion: an appeal whose arguments and aims we largely share. Finally there exists - and this must be encouraged to the full - a ‘push from below’ against sectarian isolation, which comes from a new generation of young elements that the earthquake of these last two years has pushed towards communist positions and who remain baffled by this politically unexplained dispersion (...)

“The threat today posed to the working class by capitalism in decomposition is the destruction of the proletariat’s class unity in a thousand fratricidal confrontations, from the sands of the Gulf to the frontiers of Yugoslavia. It is for this reason that the defence of its unity is a question of life or death for our class. But what hope can the proletariat have to maintain this unity, if even its conscious vanguard renounces the fight for its unification? Don’t anyone tell us that this is an appeal to “Kiss and make up”, an “opportunistic avoiding of divergences”. Remember that it was precisely their participation at Zimmerwald which allowed the Bolsheviks to unify the left at Zimmerwald, embryo of the Communist International, and make the definitive separation with Social Democracy” (International Review no 67).

The Appeal continued:

“It’s not a question of hiding divergences in order to rush into “marriages” between groups, but of beginning to discuss openly the divergences which are at the origins of the existence of different groups.”

The point of departure is to systematise the reciprocal critique of positions in the press.

“Another step which can be taken immediately is to systematise the presence and intervention at public meetings of other groups. A more important step is the confrontation of positions in jointly convoked public meetings...”.

Small Steps Forward

Our Appeal has not met with any explicitly favourable response from the other proletarian organisations. Nonetheless, some positive steps have continued to be taken:

 - the Bordigist group which publishes Il Comunista and Le Prolétaire has engaged in open polemics with other Bordigist organisations and with BC;

 - the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO, from GB) has opened its pages to other groups, has taken part with other groups in a discussion circle in the north of England, and recently took the unusual step of inviting the ICC to participate in a “readers’ meeting” in London;

 - for the last two years, the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP: formed by the CWO and BC in 1984) has made space for the ICC’s publications on their stand at the annual “Fête de Lutte Ouvrière” in Paris [1] [20];

 - BC has published BC Inform, a newsletter designed to circulate information among the proletarian groups internationally;

 - several proletarian groups in Milan (including the ICC, BC, and Programa Comunista) took part in a joint demonstration against the visit by Ligachev (one-time member of the USSR’s Politburo) to that city at the invitation of the local stalinists. Although there are some serious criticisms to be levelled at this action, it nonetheless expressed a desire to break with isolation; a desire which was concretised again shortly afterwards by the same groups’ participation in a day of debates and sale of the internationalist press.

These initiatives are certainly a step in the right direction. But are they enough for us to say that the proletariat’s political organisations are really living up to their responsibilities, at the level demanded by the gravity of the present situation? We do not think so.

In fact, while we may welcome the newfound “openness” of the proletarian groups, we are forced to conclude that it is more an empirical response to the new situation than based on any deeply considered reappraisal.

The need for method

The regroupment of revolutionary militants cannot be left to chance. It demands a consistent method, based on openness to debate combined with a rigorous defence of principle.

Such a method must avoid two dangers: on the one hand, that of falling into “debate for debate’s sake”, mere academic chatter in which everyone says what they like without any concern to establish a dynamic towards common action; on the other hand, the illusion that it is possible to engage in “common work”, on a “technical” basis, without first being clear on principles - principles which can only be determined by open debate.

A lack of method may be excused in new groups who lack experience in revolutionary work: on the part of organisations which lay claim to the heritage of the Italian Left and the Communist International, it cannot. When we look at the history of the IBRP we can only conclude: first that no solid method exists for developing a work of revolutionary regroupment; second, that lack of any method has led to the complete sterility of their efforts.

If we criticise the IBRP’s failure, let it be said straight away that we take no satisfaction from it. We have had our own share of difficulties during the 1980’s. Moreover, we are only too well aware of the terrible fragility of the revolutionary movement as a whole today, especially if we compare this weakness with the enormous responsibilities confronting the working class and its political organisations in the present period. The object of studying the movement’s failings, past and present, is to overcome them and so better to prepare ourselves to confront the future. Revolutionaries study the history of their class, not slavishly in search of “recipes” or “formulae”, but in order to benefit from their class’ historical experience in confronting the problems of the present. They may sometimes forget, however, that they themselves are part of that history. After all, Battaglia Comunista has existed since 1952, while the ICC is the longest-lived fully international centralised political organisation in working class history. The International Conferences held at the turn of the 70’s have their place in the proletariat’s history, as much as those of Zimmerwald and Kienthal. The history of the proletarian milieu since the Conferences is not just a matter of “archaeological interest” as BC would have it (Workers’ Voice no.62): it has been the testing ground for the different conceptions of intervention and regroupment that were expressed by the different groups at the Conferences.

The proletariat has a historic task to accomplish: the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of communist society. In carrying out this task, it has only two weapons: its consciousness, and its unity. The revolutionary organisations therefore have a dual responsibility: to intervene in the working class, in order to defend the communist program, and to work for the regroupment of revolutionaries as an expression of the unity of the class.

We should be in no doubt about the eventual purpose of this regroupment: the formation of the world Communist Party, the last International, without which a successful communist revolution is an impossibility.

The work of regroupment has several facets, related but distinct:

 - the integration of individual militants into communist organisations, since the very principle of proletarian activity is that of organised collective action on the basis of a common commitment to the communist cause;

 - the organisations of the capitalist heartlands, where the proletariat’s historical experience is the greatest, have a special responsibility to the groups emerging in the capitalist periphery in the most difficult conditions of material deprivation and political isolation. These groups can only survive, and play their role in the worldwide unification of the working class, if they can break out of their isolation and become part of a wider movement;

 - finally, all the communist organisations, and above all what we may term the “historic groups” (i.e. those with a direct historical affiliation to the working-class organisations of the past) have a responsibility to show their class that there is a fundamental difference, a class line, drawn between all those groups and organisations which stand firm on the defence of internationalist principles, and those “Socialist” or “Communist” parties whose sole purpose is to strengthen the bourgeois hold over the oppressed. In other words, the communists must clearly delimit and defend a proletarian political milieu.

In the basis of an abandonment of the lack of method, opportunistic attitudes, and sectarianism that the IBRP has demonstrated ever since its formation in 1984.

The International Conferences of the Communist Left

This article is not the place for a detailed history of the International Conferences [2] [21] but we do need to recall some aspects of them. The first Conference, called by BC [3] [22], met in Milan in 1977; the second in Paris, in November 1978; the third also met in Paris in 1980. Apart from BC, the CWO and the ICC, a number of other groups that stood on the terrain of the Communist Left took part [4] [23]. The criteria for participation in these Conferences, as defined and clarified during the first two Conferences, were as follows:

“ - Recognition of the October revolution as a proletarian revolution;

 - Recognition of the break with Social-Democracy carried out by the First and Second Congresses of the Communist International;

 - Rejection without reservations of state capitalism and self-management;

 - Rejection of all communist and socialist parties as bourgeois parties;

 - Orientation towards a revolutionary organisation that takes marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat;

 - Recognition of the refusal of the proletariat’s enrolment, in any form whatever, under the banners of the bourgeoisie” [5] [24]

The ICC stood foursquare behind the Conferences, as they were proposed in BC’s initial circular letter:

“In the kind of situation we are living today, where the dynamic of things progresses much more quickly than the dynamic of the world of men, it is the duty of the revolutionary forces to intervene in events with a will to achieve something on the terrain which gave birth to them, and is now in a state to receive them. But the Communist Left would fail in the task if it did not provide itself with effective weapons from the viewpoint of theory and political practice. This means:

a) above all, leaving the state of impotence and inferiority into which they have been led by a provincialism fostered by cultural factors marked with dilettantism, by an incoherent self-satisfaction which has taken the place of revolutionary modesty, and especially the weakening of the concept of militantism understood as a hard and disinterested self-sacrifice;

b) establishing a historically valid programmatic base; for our party, this is the theoretical and practical experience of the October Revolution, and on the international level the critical acceptance of the theses of the Communist International’s 2nd Congress;

c) recognising that it is impossible to arrive either at class positions, or at the creation of a world party of the revolution, still less at a revolutionary strategy, without first resolving the need to set in motion a permanent international centre of liaison and information, which will be the anticipation and the synthesis of what will be the future International, just as Zimmerwald, and above all Kienthal, were prefigurations of the IIIrd International” (Proceedings of the 1st International Conference).

“The Conference should also indicate how and when to open a debate on problems such as the trades unions, the party and so many others which today divide the international Communist Left, if we want the Conference to have a positive conclusion, and be a step towards a broader objective, towards the formation of an international front of groups of the Communist Left which will be as homogeneous as possible, so that we can finally leave the political and ideological tower of Babel and avoid a dismemberment of the existing groups” (2nd Letter from BC, ibid).

There was a further objective to the Conference: “the gravity of the situation (...) demands the taking up of precise and responsible positions, based on a unified vision of the various currents of the international communist left” (BC’s 1st Letter).

During the Conferences, however, it can hardly be said that BC shone by its coherence. Far from “taking up precise and responsible positions”, BC consistently refused the slightest common position: “We are opposed in principle to common declarations, for they do not express a political accord” (BC intervention at the 2nd Conference); “it is not the greater or lesser number of groups signing the resolution [on the international situation, proposed by the ICC] which will give it a greater or lesser weight in the class” (BC intervention at the 3rd Conference).

It is worth remembering that the 3rd Conference was held just after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and that all the groups present agreed on the imperialist nature of the USSR, the inevitability of war under capitalism, and the responsibility of the proletariat in holding back the march to war - which was certainly enough to set the Communist Left apart from the Trotskysists, Stalinists, Socialists, and democrats who were all urging the workers to support one side or another in the confrontation between the imperialist blocs of the USA and the USSR in Afghanistan [6] [25].

Following the Conferences’ demise, BC could write, in 1983: “The Conferences have accomplished their essential task which was to create a climate of confrontation and debate at an international level within the proletarian camp”; “we consider them as instruments of classification and political selection within the revolutionary camp” (BC’s reply to the address launched by the ICC’s 5th International Congress in 1983). Whatever happened to the “permanent international centre of liaison and information”? Where is “the international front of groups of the Communist Left”?

The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party

Of course, anybody can change their minds, even a “serious leading force”, as BC likes to call itself. Having defined a “revolutionary camp” of serious groups (which in fact boiled down to... themselves!), within the “proletarian camp” (which includes the ICC amongst others, thank you very much!), BC and the CWO set about calling a 4th International Conference, and founding the IBRP.

As BC said in one of their last interventions at the 3rd and final Conference: “We want to undertake a 4th Conference which is a place for work and not merely for discussion... To work together requires common ground. For example, common work can only be undertaken with groups which recognise the need to create vanguard workers’ groups, organised on a revolutionary platform”. In Revolutionary Perspectives no.18, the CWO also announced their intention “to develop discussions and joint work with a view to the CWO regrouping with the PCInt. This does not mean that the process is near an end, nor does it mean that issues will be pushed aside or forgotten, but our recent cooperation at the Third Conference gives us the optimism that a positive conclusion can be realised”. A 4th International Conference was declared necessary which “does not reproduce the limitations of its predecessors but which is the preliminary condition for possible common political work on an international scale”.

By the time the IBRP was formed, the 4th “Conference” had been and gone: it was a complete fiasco [7] [26], and the experiment has not been repeated since. Nevertheless, the first issue of the IBRP’s Communist Review could still state, “In the Conferences groups and organisations belonging to the proletarian political camp meet, converge, and confront each other”. The Bureau’s platform, meanwhile, was supposed to represent “a moment in the synthesis of the groups’ platforms at the national level”.

Nine years later, what is the situation? The International Conferences have remained a dead letter. There has been no regroupment between BC and the CWO: indeed, as far as we can tell from their press there have not even been any discussions between them to resolve their differences, for example on the parliamentary or trades union questions. The French comrades, who in 1984 had “the intention of laying the foundations for an organisational recovery of the revolutionary movement on the organic positions now put forward by the IBRP” have disappeared without a trace. The only other group to join the IBRP - Lal Pataka in India - has foundered in a welter of sectarian anti-IBRP diatribe, and likewise disappeared.

The thirteen years since the 3rd Conference have sorely tried the proletarian milieu: militant forces that the working class can ill afford to lose have gone down with all hands. Just look at the fate of the groups which took part in the Conferences, even if only by correspondence: PIC (France), Forbundet Arbetarmakt (Sweden), Eveil Internationaliste (France), Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste d’Algérie, have all disappeared. The GCI has moved towards leftism with its support for Sendero Luminoso; the NCI in its various permutations has gone over completely to the bourgeoisie by supporting Iraq during the Gulf War. The Fermento Obrero Revolucionario is foundering in complete stagnation.

Certainly, the disappearance of some of these groups was due to a necessary decantation. Nor is there any point in trying to remake history with “ifs”. Nonetheless, we can say that the failure of the Conferences as a place where the Communist Left could define itself and affirm its revolutionary nature against the 57 varieties of leftism, has deprived new groups searching for coherence, of any kind of solid anchorage in the ideological storms of decomposing capitalism. As it is, emerging groups which cannot identify completely with the positions of an existing organisation within the Communist Left are condemned to isolation, with all that that entails in terms of political stagnation, demoralisation and opening to the infiltration of bourgeois ideology.

And the IBRP has failed to provide any kind of substitute. Their alternatives have remained nothing but proposals. Thirteen years after the CWO announced the perspective of a regroupment with BC, none has taken place.

The IBRP in India

To understand why the IBRP has been unable to conduct any solid regroupment, it is useful to look at the attempt to integrate the Indian Lal Pataka group into the IBRP.

For one thing, the IBRP has constantly deluded itself as to the potential for regroupment of groups whose origins lie in the enemy camp, especially in leftism. These delusions are themselves tied to an ambiguous attitude to mass movements on a non-proletarian terrain, which Battaglia at least has never overcome. At the 2nd International Conference, BC could say that the task of communists is to “lead the movements of national liberation” and to “work in the direction of a class cleavage within the movement, not by judging it from outside”. These positions were repeated in the “Draft Theses on the Tasks of Communists in Capitalism’s Periphery”, which went on to conclude that “Capital’s domination in these countries [ie of the periphery] is not yet total over society, it has not subjected the entire collectivity to the laws of the ideology of capital as it has in the metropolitan countries. In the peripheral countries the political and ideological integration of individuals into capitalist society is not the mass phenomenon of the metropolitan countries because the exploited individual, poverty-stricken and oppressed, is not yet the citizen-individual of the original capitalist formations. This difference with the metropolitan countries makes mass communist organisations a possibility in the periphery (...) Such ‘better’ conditions imply the possibility of organising masses of proletarians around the proletarian party” (Communist Review no. 3).

We have said, over and over again, that it is a fatal mistake to think that communists can somehow “take over the leadership” of national liberation struggles, national revolutionary struggles, or whatever else one may want to call these struggles between “nations”. Such struggles are in fact a direct attack on proletarian consciousness, because they drown the only revoutionary class in the mass of “the people” - a danger which is especially great in the peripheral countries, where the proletariat is already heavily outnumbered by the peasantry and the masses of the landless poor.

We know this, not just from theory but from practice. The ICC’s oldest section, in Venezuela, was formed in direct opposition to all the Guevarist “national liberation” ideologies prevalent in the left at the time. More recently, our experience in forming our section in Mexico has confirmed - if that were necessary - that a solid communist presence can only be established by confronting all the varieties of leftism head-on, and by establishing a totally rigorous class line between bourgeois leftism, however radical, and proletarian positions.

The IBRP has consistently failed to establish this clear separation, from the “4th International Conference” held with Iranian CP supporters, to the fraternal correspondence with the “Marxist-Leninist” Revolutionary Proletarian Platform (RPP) group in India. Not surprisingly, the leftists themselves are often clearer about the real divisions between themselves and the communists than is the IBRP. Thus the Indian RPP: “... on the question of participation in reactionary trade unions and bourgeois parliaments it is difficult for us to be in agreement with you or any other trend who rejects such participation outright. Even though we recognise that your position on trade unions (...) is much saner in comparison with the ICC (who consider trade unions to have been integrated into the bourgeois state and hence need only to be smashed), we feel that in essence it remains a critique of the Bolshevik Leninist approach to the question from an extremely ‘left wing’ standpoint, since it starts from the same theoretical premise as that of the ICC and similar trends” (letter from RPP to the IBRP in Communist Review no. 3).

Ironically, the CWO now seems to have arrived at our own position as to the impossibility of groups (as opposed to individuals) moving from the bourgeois to the proletarian camp: “The politics of these [Trotskyist] organisations are without doubt within the left wing of capitalism and it would be a massive error to imagine that any such organisation could move back into the camp of Internationalist Communism” (Workers’ Voice no 65).

But neither the CWO, BC, or the IBRP, proved capable of understanding this in their attitude towards the supporters of the Iranian CP in exile (SUCM), or to the Indian Maoist organisation RPP (and it’s worth pointing out that, unlike Trotskyism, Maoism never belonged to the proletarian camp). On the contrary, just as the exclusion of the ICC from the 3rd International Conference was followed by the fiasco of the 4th, held with the former group as sole “visiting team”, so the IBRP was quite happy to team up with RPP in India in “the political battle against [the ICC’s] supporters” (Communist Review no 3), and to accept RPP’s Bengali section and newspaper moving bodily “into the camp of Internationalist Communism”.

In Communist Review no. 11, the “Statement on Lal Pataka” remarks that “Some cynical spirits might assume that we had too readily accepted this comrade into the Bureau”. We are not among such “cynical spirits”. The problem lies, not in the IBRP’s “haste” in “accepting” Lal Pataka, but in the congenital weaknesses of the IBRP itself. Given its own ambiguities on questions like trade unionism, and its own inability to draw a red line between communists and leftists, how can it help others to overcome their own confusions and to break completely with bourgeois ideology? Given the inability of BC and the CWO to carry their own discussions to the point of regroupment, how can the IBRP provide a solid international reference point for those coming towards communist politics?

The IBRP’s opportunist flirts with leftism are only matched by their sectarian attitude to groups not immediately within their “sphere of influence”. Communist Review no. 3 (1985), which deals to a large extent with groups in India, makes no mention of the Communist Internationalist group, nor of the group which was later to publish Kamunist Kranti, although both were known to the CWO at least. By 1991, Lal Pataka has disappeared from the pages of Workers’ Voice, to be replaced by Kamunist Kranti: “we hope that fruitful relations will be established between the International Bureau and Kamunist Kranti in the future”. Two years later, nothing much has come of this, since Communist Review no. 11 tells us that “it is a tragedy that, despite the existence of promising elements no solid nucleus of Indian communists yet exists”. There are only “sparks of consciousness in the midst of this turmoil”. In the meantime, the nucleus of the Communist Internationalist group has become an integral part of the ICC.... The IBRP would contribute more to the difficult process of revolutionary regroupment if it were prepared to recognise the existence of other groups in the movement.

The IBRP in the ex-Eastern bloc

After the failures with the Iranian SUCM, and the Indian RPP, one might have thought that the IBRP would have learnt something about the line dividing bourgeois organisations from the working class. The account of the IBRP’s intervention, with the Austrian Gruppe Internazionalistische Kommunisten (GIK), in the Eastern bloc leads us to doubt this.

While we salute the IBRP’s effort to defend communist positions within the turmoil of the ex-Eastern bloc (and wasn’t this a situation crying out for an "international front of the communist left” to use BC’s words?), it is nevertheless disturbing to see BC’s apparent illusions in the possibility of something positive emerging from the old CP’s. “Our comrades therefore decided to go and see the remnants of the Czechoslovak “Communist” Party. It might have been dangerous to go to communicate to the Stalinists all our hatred for their state capitalist régime of exploitation of our class, but it would be worth it if there were any residue of their working class base present, disorientated and witnessing the last breaths of the Party”. At another meeting, “there was no lack of discussion (including an exchange of ideas with foreign representatives of the IVth International)” (Workers’ Voice no 53, Sept 1990).

How can there be an “exchange of ideas” between those whose one aim is to prop up the putrid corpse of stalinism, and the Left Communists determined to bury it forever? The GIK’s report (in Workers’ Voice no 55) echoes this idea that there can somehow be a “mixture” of proletarian marxism and bourgeois ideology in the East: “There is a broader knowledge of Marxist ideas among the population, some elements of a Marxist materialist analysis are not unknown even if distorted in a bourgeois manner and mixed with a bourgeois content”. But is there anything to choose, in terms of working class consciousness, between a worker in Western Europe who has never heard of “proletarian internationalism”, and one in the East who thinks that it means the Russian invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan? Worse still, the GIK seems to prefer fishing amongst the defrocked Stalinists to intervening in the class itself:

“More important than our street interventions was our single intervention in the new KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) which was reformed in January 1990. It is not homogeneous and the common element of its founders is that they want to maintain “communist ideals” (...) Many of the KPD (...) defend the GDR as a “socialist system with mistakes”. Others are divided between pure Stalinism and those who support the anti-Stalinist left oppositions (both Trotskyist and Communist Left)” (Workers’ Voice no 55, our emphasis). Once again, the distinction is blurred between Trotskyism and Left Communism, as if both could belong to some kind of “anti-Stalinist” common front. This is hardly the kind of intervention which is likely to contribute to a clear-cut break with Stalinism and its Trotskyist defenders.

A New Beginning... or more of the same?

As far as we can tell, nothing has come of the IBRP’s attempts to extend its presence in the nine years of its existence, or of the regroupment between BC and the CWO announced in 1980. The “first serious selection of forces” that BC spoke of after the break-up of the International Conferences has remained... very selective. In summer 1991, the CWO announces: “The historical alternative in our time is either the present capitalist barbarism which will ultimately end in the extinction of human life, or the establishment of socialism by the proletariat (...) To assist in this process requires a greater concentration of forces than we ourselves (or indeed any other group of the proletarian political camp) presently possess. We are therefore trying to find a new and principled means to hold a political dialogue with all who consider themselves to be fighting for the same goals as ourselves”. Thirteen years after BC and the CWO “assumed the responsibility that one has a right to expect from a serious leading force” and broke up the International Conferences, we have come full circle. But as Marx said, history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, and the CWO’s “New Beginning” has not so far led to anything but a semi-regroupment with the CBG. But aren’t the CBG precisely the kind of people of whom BC wrote (in April 1992): “The political importance of a division which is sometimes necessary for precise theoretical interpretation and definition of strategy, has given way, in a certain political milieu and amongst certain personalities, to an exasperating practice of splitting for splitting’s sake, of the individual rejection of any centralisation, any organisational discipline, or any “inconvenient” responsibility in collective party work”?

How can the CWO, which never misses an opportunity to denounce the ICC’s “spontaneism” and “idealism” propose to fuse with the CBG, which insofar as it has any principles at all (i.e. not far) is supposed to defend the ICC’s platform? This unprincipled mish-mash is destined to go the same way as the rest of the IBRP’s efforts [8] [27].

Which way forward?

Twenty years of experience - with its successes and its setbacks - in building an international organisation present on three continents and in twelve countries has taught us one thing at least: there are no short cuts in the work of regroupment. The lack of mutual understanding, the ignorance of each others’ positions, the downright distrust that are the legacy of the thirteen years since the Conferences broke up - none of this will disappear overnight. If we are to rebuild any unity in the proletarian camp, then we must first have a return to “revolutionary modesty” as BC have termed it, and take the very limited steps outlined in the ICC’s “Appeal”: regular polemics, presence at each others’ meetings, common public meetings etc. And when a return to the spirit of the International Conferences does become possible, then it must be on the basis of the lessons of the past:

“There will be other Conferences. We will be there, and we hope to encounter, if their sectarianism hasn’t killed them by then, those groups which have not yet understood the Conferences’ importance, including your’s. And whether or not they be considered as continuators of the three Conferences we have just been through (...), they will profit from their gains:

 - importance of these Conferences for the revolutionary milieu and the whole class;

 - the necessity of criteria for selection;

 - the necessity of taking position

 - rejection of any haste;

 - necessity of deeper discussion on the crucial questions confronting the proletariat.

To build a healthy body, the future World Party, demands a healthy method. These Conferences, in their strong as well as their weak poionts, will have taught those revolutionaries who “have not forgotten how to learn” as Rosa Luxemburg said, what such a method is” [9] [28].

Sven