We have already presented the Alptraum Communist Collective of Mexico in this Review (International Review No 40). We published the theses with which the comrades of the ACC situated themselves and presented themselves to the revolutionary milieu and the international proletariat. The ACC isn't yet a constituted political group, but a ‘collective' in evolution and political clarification. The positions presented in these theses undoubtedly place them within the revolutionary camp. In particular, the comrades reject all nationalism and all national liberation movements.
Here's to Comunismo! It's with joy and enthusiasm that we wish to present here the first number of the half-yearly review of the Alptraum Communist Collective of Mexico: Comunismo.
Comunismo appears at a crucial moment in history: the accentuation of the economic crisis and the existence of a third wave of struggles by an international proletariat which doesn't accept the poverty and growing barbarism of capitalism.
The publication of Comunismo with articles on the class struggle both in Mexico and on the international level are the proof of a militant concern to intervene in the class struggle. It is the proof of the growing understanding; of the ACC comrades of the active role of revolutionaries in the development of the class struggle and the perspective of the proletarian revolution.
Comunismo No. 1 and the emergence of a small revolutionary milieu in Mexico is also the proof that the period is not one of the dispersion and disappearance of revolutionary energies as in the years of the counter-revolution, but on the contrary, of the emergence and regroupment of new forces everywhere in the world in the framework of the historic course towards the development of class struggles and class confrontations, faced with the historic alternative imposed on us by capitalism: socialism or barbarism. The appearance of a new proletarian voice in Latin America is an important step for the international proletariat. Historically, economically, politically and geographically, Mexico holds a central place on the American continent; and the proletariat there is called on to play a great and difficult role in the generalization and unification of class battles between the proletariat of the USA and that of Latin America.
The political will to intervene in the class struggle by the ACC comrades is accompanied by an effort of historical reappropriation and of debate with the international revolutionary milieu. It is to the credit of the comrades to have taken the name of the publication in the ‘30s of the Marxist Workers Group of Mexico, some of whose texts we have already published in this Review (Nos 10, 19 and 20) . Let's remember that the MWG was in contact with the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left. Comunismo No l contains a text of 1940 denouncing the imperialist and anti-fascist war; the ACC comrades publish a series of discussion texts with the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) and promise us their response to our critique of their theses in the next issue.
Some criticisms
It is thus a positive balance-sheet that we draw of the evolution and the discussions carried out by the comrades of the ACC for 4 years with the international revolutionary milieu. The reader will perhaps be surprised to see us now address some criticisms to the comrades after so many eulogies. But revolutionary activity depends on discussion, contradiction and criticism in order to develop. In the sense that our critiques are situated within the framework of a positive evolution and dynamic, as much on the part of the comrades as on the part of the present historic situation, they may in turn be an active and dynamic factor in the discussion and political clarification.
As a group in evolution, the ACC doesn't yet have clearly defined and finished political positions. It's thus not surprising to find contradictory positions in different articles, and even in the same article. We wish to raise two here. Two which relate to questions of the upmost importance. We are not going to develop our positions here. We simply want to alert the comrades to the contradictions and dangers which, in our view, may lie in store for them if they don't watch out.
1) The comrades remain vague on the entry of capitalism into decadence. They consider that "the system finds itself in decadence" and we can situate the "beginning of the global decadence of the capitalist system after 1858." At least an original assertion, which we have briefly criticized in IR 40 on the ‘economic' level.
We want to underline here the contradiction which the comrades risk getting trapped in. Their affirmation of ‘1858' is abstract and without historical reference. But as soon as they have to support the political positions they defend, as soon as they are obliged to defend in the discussions their correct position on the historic course and the development of class struggle (see the response to the IBRP in Comunismo) they stop referring to 1858 and turn instead to the historic rupture of 1914 and the first world war which marks the passage of capitalism into its decadent phase "by its irreproducible and unique situation in history..." in the ACC's own words.
Don't think that this question only concerns pedantic historians, or that it is only a theoretical question in itself without practical implications for revolutionaries. The recognition and comprehension of the end of the progressive, historical period of capitalism and its entry into decline was the basis of the formation of the 3rd International on the ruins of the 2nd International which died in 1914.It underpins the coherence of all the class positions which the comrades share with the ICC. And in particular the denunciation of the unions as organs of the capitalist state in the 20th century and the movements of national liberation as moments in today's inter-imperialist antagonisms.
2) The second point that we want to raise is on the contradictions of the comrades in their efforts to clarify the question of organizations and political parties of the proletariat. The comrades think that "the question of the organization of revolutionaries and the constitution of the political party of the proletariat are central aspects of all theoretical-political reflection which tries to situate itself in a communist perspective." We agree.
But from here, the comrades - at least in this number of Comunismo - have the tendency to take up the theses and texts of the Communist International and of Bordiga without a critical spirit, and without reference to the differences between the fractions of the left on this question. Comrades of the ACC, you are in danger of falling into the errors of Bordigism:
-- in wrongly affirming the invariance of the communist program (cf International Review No 32) . We are happy to reaffirm the unity and historic continuity of the communist program. What doesn't change, what is invariable, is the goal: the destruction of capitalism and the emergence of communism. The means and the immediate implications however vary and are enriched by the very experience of the class struggle of the proletariat. To give only two examples of these enrichments:
* the impossibility for the proletariat to conquer the bourgeois state and use it for its revolutionary ends, and the necessity to destroy it in order to impose its class dictatorship, is the principle lesson which Marx and Engels drew from the Paris Commune, contrary to what they said before;
* the impossibility of the proletariat using the trade unions in the decadent period, contrary to the 19th century. It is Bordiga and his ‘inheritors' who developed in the ‘40s and ‘50s, against the idea that Marxism had been superseded, the notion pushed to its logical absurdity that the communist program had been invariant since 1848, since the first edition of the Communist manifesto in fact! On the contrary, one of the strengths of the Italian Fraction - which was related to and in agreement with the MWG of Mexico which is now reclaimed by the comrades of ACC - was precisely that it made a critique of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the positions of the 3rd International;
-- in even taking up the citation of Bordiga (I1 Soviet, 21 September, 1919) which said: "....like bourgeois power, the organ of the revolution is the party; after the liquidation of bourgeois power, it is the network of the workers' councils." Here Bordiga committed an error in confusing the political organizations of the proletariat whose role will without doubt be more important after the taking of power by the proletariat, with the unitary organizations of the class which are the workers councils existing on the base of assemblies regrouping all workers; and these "soviets (councils) are the organs of preparation of the masses for insurrection and, after victory, the organs of power," (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution)
Comrades of the ACC, this vision of Bordiga and of Bordigism, of an invariant program, and of a party substituting itself for the working class leads today to sclerosis, to the void, to the counter-revolution as illustrated recently by the ‘Bordigist' current.
The regroupment of revolutionaries
The publication of Comunismo and the development of a small revolutionary milieu around the ACC, as weak as it is, confirms the possibility of the appearance and regroupment of revolutionary elements in the entire world, including the countries of the ‘third world'. But for this, revolutionary elements must break clearly, sharply and without hesitation with ‘third-worldism', with all kinds of nationalism and leftism. This is the price for developing a real political clarification and a real revolutionary activity. This is the force of ‘Comunismo'.
The political organizations of the proletariat already existing; (principally in Europe) must be very firm on this indispensable break with all nationalism if they want to assume the task of a pole of reference and regroupment, if they want to aid and participate in the emergence of elements and revolutionary groups. It is one of the essential tasks of the ICC has always given itself, which it has tried to fulfill with its meager resources: "concentrate the weak, dispersed, revolutionary forces in the world, in this period of general crisis pregnant with convulsions and social torment; this is today one of the most urgent and arduous tasks which confronts revolutionaries," (International Review No l, April ‘75) .
It is in this sense that the ICC will help all it can the comrades of the ACC in their militant effort of intervention in the class struggle and in their will to debate in the revolutionary milieu. The fulfillment of these tasks by Comunismo will permit the development of a revolutionary milieu in Mexico and above all in time - and this is the most important ‑ a real political presence in the proletariat. For that, Comunismo is the indispensable instrument for the proletariat in Mexico.
Long live Comunismo!
ICC
Introduction
At the beginning of November, the International Communist Current held its 6th Congress. A Congress is the highest authority of a communist organization. It's at the congress that the whole organization draws up a balance-sheet of its activities over the entire period since its previous congress that it pronounces upon the validity of the orientations defined by the latter, at the level both of the analysis of the international situation and of the perspectives for the organization's activities that derive from this. This balance-sheet in turn makes it possible to draw up perspectives at both these levels for the period up until the next congress. It's clear that it's not only at the congress that the organization is concerned with and discusses the evolution of the international situation and of its own activities. This work has to be done on a permanent basis, so that it is capable at each moment of assuming its responsibilities in the class struggle. But what distinguishes the work of the congress from any other regular meetings within the organization is on this occasion it's the entire organization which pronounces in a collective and directly unified manner on the general and essential orientations which constitute the framework within which all its activities can be developed and articulated. In other words, what distinguishes the congress is that it must confront what is primordially at stake for the whole life of the organization.
What is at stake in this Congress
The revolutionary organization doesn't exist by itself or for itself. As a secretion of the revolutionary class, it can only exist as an active factor in the development of the struggle and the consciousness of that class. In this sense, what was at stake for the ICC in this Congress was directly linked to what is at stake in the present evolution of the class struggle? And what is at stake at this level is a great deal indeed. Faced with a capitalist system which is inexorably sinking more and more into its mortal crisis, a crisis whose only outcome on the terrain of the system can be a third world war which will destroy humanity, the struggle of the proletariat, its capacity to mobilize on its own class terrain, constitutes the only obstacle to such an outcome, as we have often pointed out and as we reiterate in the editorial of this issue of the IR. If the crisis of capitalism has not led today to a generalized holocaust, this is due fundamentally to the historic resurgence of class struggle since the end of the 1960s, a resurgence which, despite all the moments of retreat and of provisional disorientation in the class, has not let up. Thus, while one of the major tasks of the 5th Congress of the ICC was to understand and analyze the world-wide reflux which permitted and followed on from the proletariat's defeat in Poland in 1981, the 6th congress by contrast was held two years after the beginning of a new wave of struggles which has hit most of the industrialized countries, and particularly those of western Europe. This wave of struggles (the third since ‘68) is taking place at a crucial moment in the life of society.
It is taking place in the middle of a decade whose gravity our organization has frequently demonstrated, a decade in which "the reality of the present world will be revealed in all its nakedness", in which "to a great extent the future of humanity will be decided" (International Review 20, ‘The 1980s, Years of Truth'). This shows the whole importance of the central question which our 6th Congress had to deal with: how to arm our organization in the face of the third wave of struggles since the historic resurgence of 1968, which is taking place in the middle of such a decisive decade; how to ensure that the ICC is not just an observer, even a well-informed one, or even just an enthusiastic 'supporter' of the combats waged by the class, but, as its responsibilities demand, an actor in the historic drama which is taking place, an integral part of these combats?
While they were in the first place determined by the world situation and in particular by the evolution of the class struggle, the stakes of the 6th Congress of the ICC were also a result of the particular situation which our organization has been in these last few years. The communist organization is a historical product of the movement of the revolutionary class towards self-consciousness; it is not a mechanical or immediate product of the class movement. The class provides itself with communist organizations in order to respond to a need: to participate actively in the elaboration and deepening of revolutionary theory and positions, and in their dissemination throughout the class, to put forward in a clear manner the ultimate goals of the movement and the means to attain them; to wage a permanent and uncompromising combat against all facets of the ruling ideology, which weighs constantly on the whole of the class and which has the effect of paralyzing its struggles. This is the mandate which the class confers on its revolutionary organizations, but it is not an a priori given that they will be able to carry out this mandate in the best possible way and at each moment of their existence. Just like the class of which they are a part, revolutionary organizations, and their militants, are subjected to the permanent pressure of the ideology of the ruling class, and although they are better armed to resist it than the rest of the proletariat, there is always the danger that this resistance will weaken and that in the end they will be unable to carry out the tasks for which the class has engendered them. Thus, the gravity of what's at stake in the 1980s represents a considerable challenge for all the organizations of the revolutionary milieu - a challenge which this milieu has shown great difficulties in taking up. The ‘years of truth' apply both to society as a whole and to the revolutionary organizations, and the convulsions which have marked the world situation since the beginning of the decade, at the level both of imperialist conflicts (such as Afghanistan) and of the class struggle (as in Poland) have had their echo in major convulsions in the revolutionary milieu which developed out of the historic resurgence of class struggle at the end of the ‘60s . This crisis of the revolutionary milieu, which we have pointed to and analyzed in this Review (see especially nos.28, 32 and 36) did not spare the ICC itself, as we have shown. The ICC's extraordinary conference in January ‘82 was an important moment in the redressment of our organization, and its 5th Congress (in July ‘83) could correctly draw "a positive balance-sheet of the way the ICC faced up to this crisis" (presentation of the 5th Congress, in IR 35). But, as we noted later on (see in particular the article in IR 42 ‘Centrist Slidings Towards Councilism'), while this redressment was a "real" one, it was still "incomplete". This is noted in the balance-sheet section of the activities resolution adopted by the 6th Congress:
"1. The 5th Congress of the ICC in July ‘83... correctly reaffirmed the validity of the general framework of organizational and political redressment assumed by the extraordinary conference in 1982 in response to the crisis which shook the ICC at the beginning of the 1980's, along with the whole revolutionary movement, faced with the stakes of the ‘years of truth'.
However, the 5th Congress allowed a lack of clarity to remain in our understanding of the international situation, in particular the immediate perspectives for the, class struggle (the long proletarian reflux, waiting for the qualitative leap) and did not, in the activities resolution, give an orientation for our intervention in the workers' struggles that could be anticipated in the face of the sharpening attacks of the bourgeoisie.
The slogan ‘less but better'[1], instead of being clearly posed and understood as the consolidation and preparation of the organization for the inevitable explosion of class struggle in the two years following the Congress, was conceived of and understood as a continuation of the same 'orderly retreat' of the 1982 Extraordinary Conference. The ICC thus remained, in part, turned towards the period of the disorientation of the proletariat, when, in fact, a grasp of the general characteristics of the class struggle in decadence, of the analysis of the current conditions, implied a recognition of the emergence from this disorientation and the recovery in workers' struggles. This was confirmed scarcely three months after the 5th Congress with the eruption of the strikes in Belgium in September ‘85.
2. During the last two years, the ICC has had to overcome this weakness, readjusting the orientation of the 5th Congress, to raise its activity to "the level demanded of revolutionaries by the movement of the acceleration of history at every level, which conditions society's evolution towards decisive class confrontations" (activities resolution for the 5th Congress of RI , July 1984), and in particular, to ensure a consistent intervention in the general resurgence of class combats. Faced with the delay in understanding of, or wrong positions about, the events after the Congress..., the ICC... began to readjust its orientations, emphasizing the more rapid rhythm of the evolution of the international situation, drawing out the idea of the acceleration of history and explaining the meaning of events in the face of the delays in our analyses, and rejecting the incorrect conceptions that tended to diminish the origination's responsibilities."
The 6th Congress of the ICC, in order to raise the organization to the level of the responsibilities posed by the present moment, thus had to consolidate all the acquisitions that we had made in the previous years on the various levels evoked in the activities resolution. In particular it had to turn its back resolutely on all the hesitations, evasions and conservative tendencies which have appeared in response to the organization's efforts to arrive at these acquisitions, and which found their most acute, not to say caricatural expression in the minority which formed itself into a tendency in January ‘85. In this sense it had to pronounce clearly not only on the perspectives for the international situation, for the class struggle and for the intervention that we have to make within it, but also on the essential questions which have been debated at length in the organization throughout this effort, a debate which we have made public in the columns of the IR (cf. nos.40, 41, 42 and 43), and which was focused mainly on:
-- the recognition of centrist slidings towards councilism within the ICC
-- the importance of the danger of councilism for the class and its revolutionary organizations in the present period and the period ahead
-- the threat posed to revolutionary organizations, both today and in the past, by opportunism and particularly its centrist variety.
These were the stakes, the exigencies, of the 6th Congress of the ICC. To what extent did it manage to respond to them?
The discussions and texts of the 6th Congress
The analysis of the international situation
The readers of our Review will know that the ICC examines the international situation in a permanent manner. Thus the task of the 6th Congress was not to deal with all aspects of the international situation but to concentrate on those which are the most important, the most recent, and which determine most directly the tasks of our organization. In particular it had to point out the essential issues of the period, notably in the face of a whole series of ideological campaigns through which the bourgeoisie is trying to ‘prove':
-- that the capitalist economy is getting better, that it is ‘convalescing'
-- that thanks to the wisdom of the leaders of the great powers, the tensions between these powers are lessening
-- that the working class is struggling less and less, that it has ‘understood' the necessity to be ‘reasonable' so that the crisis can be overcome.
The resolution adopted by the congress, and which we're publishing in this issue, like the reports presented to the congress on which it's based, refutes these different lies. Recognizing what's at stake in the present period means, in particular, pointing out:
-- the total impasse in which the capitalist economy finds itself, the barbarism into which it is plunging the whole of society (points 2-5)
-- the ineluctable aggravation of imperialist tensions and the lying character of all the speeches about peace (points 6-8)
-- that "the key to the whole historical situation is in the hands of the working class" (point 9); that "the present situation has an enormous potential for giving rise to proletarian movements" and that "revolutionaries have to be particularly vigilant about the potentialities of the present period and take great care not to underestimate this potential" (point 15) .
Pointing out what's at stake in the class struggle requires, in the first place, a capacity to refute all the lies about the "passivity" of the working (points 9, 10 and above all 11 are devoted to this), but it also requires an ability to analyze the present characteristics of the development of this struggle (see points 10 and 13 in particular) and of the many traps laid by the bourgeoisie, especially its unions, in order to paralyze it (points 13 and 13). Finally, it demands a clear analysis of the phenomenon of unemployment which is acting as an important spur to the class struggle.
Examining the development of the class struggle took up a major part of the discussions on the international situation (half of the resolution is devoted to it). This translated the whole importance which the ICC accords to this question, with the aim of intervening in the struggle as effectively as possible, despite our very limited resources, and thus of drawing out all the potential contained within it.
The intervention of the ICC
The necessity for the intervention of revolutionaries impregnates the resolution on the international situation which terminates on this point:
"It's through intervention in particular, by putting forward proposals for action that correspond to the needs of the class, that revolutionaries will be able to prove concretely to the workers the necessity for a revolutionary organization, thus laying the foundations for the future party of the communist revolution." (point 15)
But above all it's at the centre of the activities resolution adopted by the Congress:
"Intervention in the class struggle, based on class demands, must be the ICC's priority. The organization's political presence through its intervention on a class terrain, that, is to say on the terrain of the defense of the workers' immediate interests in the face of capital's attacks, using the working class' own method of struggle (strikes, demonstrations, meetings, assemblies, workers' groups, unemployed committees), is not only possible but necessary, and has an influence amongst the workers, whether or not it is the unions that call formally for the movement, whether the workers be present in small or large numbers. This is the precondition for the organization fulfilling the task for which it exists in the working class, for it being capable of denouncing the union caricatures of struggle and their strategy of demobilization (media operations, commando ‘actions', union delegations and petitions, corporatist and nationalist demands), for it being capable of putting concrete propositions for action, to encourage the class' reflection, unity and collective action, wherever and whenever the workers' interests are defended...
This mastery (of the organizational framework for intervention) presupposes the conviction that the two years to come will see upsurges and explosions of class struggle, laid down in today's conditions. We know that these will happen, just as the astronomers were able to determine the existence of Pluto without being able to see it. We also know that we do not have all the answers ready-made for the new problems that will arise, but that firmness on what we have already gained is a precondition for living up to the situation. The organization must be prepared at all times for a possible flare-up in the class struggle, which implies participating in every moment that class heralds, prepares and takes the class towards the large-scale movements that it needs to fulfill its historic mission."
Thus the Congress was particularly determined in reaffirming and strengthening the organization's commitment to an increasingly active intervention in workers' struggles, an intervention appropriate to the importance of these struggles. It confirmed this orientation by adopting a special resolution on the ICC press which insisted that:
"The press remains the main instrument for the intervention of the organization and is thus at the centre of our efforts to develop the mean to participate actively in the combats of the class. Even though intervention through leaflets and public speaking have become an integral part of the regular work of the organization, this in no way diminishes the importance of the press ‑ on the contrary. The press embodies the continuity of our intervention and represents an indispensable tool for placing each intervention in a broader framework, for showing the world historic dimension of each combat."
Finally, like the 5th Congress which adopted an ‘Address to Proletarian Political Groups' (IR 35), the 6th Congress again dealt with this question, emphasizing in particular that:
"the present orientation towards accelerating and strengthening the ICC's intervention in the class struggle is also valid for, and must, be applied rigorously to, our intervention towards the milieu."
The resolution adopted on this question affirms that:
"The ICC, for its part, must make the fullest use of the present class struggle's positive dynamic in order to push the milieu forward, to insist on the need for a clear and determined intervention of revolutionaries in these struggles. In order to make the most of this potential, which in turn is simply a concretization of the fact that the period of the fight for the formation of the class party is open, it is necessary to mobilize the forces of the whole ICC in defense of the political milieu, which involves... a determined attitude in taking part in the regroupment and unity of revolutionaries."
If the importance and the modalities of the ICC's intervention in workers' struggles mobilized a great deal of attention and effort at the 6th Congress, the political capacities of the organization, which precondition this intervention, were also a central preoccupation. Thus the danger represented by councilism for the whole of the class and for its political organizations was clearly put forward, both in the resolution on the international situation (point 15) and in the resolution on activities which states that:
"This danger, which calls into question the capacity of the organization to be an active factor in the daily struggles of the class, can only be fought if the organization constantly develops and strengthens its political clarity and militant will."
But this concern to arm the organization politically did not stop there. It gave rise to a discussion of a particular resolution on ‘Opportunism and Centrism in the Period of Decadence' and of a counter-resolution presented by a minority of the ICC on ‘Centrism and the Political Organizations of the Proletariat', both of which are published in this IR.
Opportunism and Centrism
The recognition of the permanence of the historic phenomenon of opportunism in the decadent period of capitalism is an integral part of the heritage of the communist left which fought against the degeneration of the Communist International, precisely under the banner of the struggle against opportunism and centrism.
At its inception the ICC had some difficulties in reappropriating this acquisition. But things were already made clearer at its 2nd Congress, which adopted a ‘Resolution on Proletarian Political Groups' (IR 11). The calling into question of this acquisition by certain comrades of the minority which went on to form a ‘tendency' thus represented a clear regression, which the ICC combated in a long discussion which has found its echo in this Review, especially nos. 42 and 43. The richness of these debates, the deepening of our acquisitions which they made possible and which have strengthened our organization against the permanent danger of opportunism and centrism, had their logical conclusion at the Congress in the adoption of the ‘Resolution on Opportunism and Centrism in the Period of Decadence' and the rejection of the counter-resolution. This latter text essentially repeats the arguments contained in the article ‘The Concept of Centrism: the Road to the Abandonment of Class Positions' published in IR 43 and to which the ICC has already replied in the same issue (‘The Rejection of the Concept of Centrism: The Open Door to the Abandonment of Class Positions'). This is why it's not necessary to return here to the critique of these arguments except to underline that the conceptions put forward by this resolution lead both to a total sectarianism (‘outside organizations defending an intransigent marxism on all points, there is only the bourgeoisie') and at the same time, even if it denies it to weakening the organization's vigilance against the main forms of the penetration of bourgeois ideology.
The adoption of the resolution by the Congress was accompanied by the adoption of a short resolution indicating the necessity for the ICC to rectify its platform. The clarity which emerged out of these debates, and which is summarized in the resolution, had shown the need for a rectification on the question of the conditions in which the former workers' parties (SPs and CPs) passed into the bourgeois camp. Such a rectification was on the agenda of the Congress and amendments had been prepared some months before. But while the debates at the Congress showed a considerable degree of clarity on the issue of the resolution itself, they also showed that there was an incomplete maturity on the formulations that were to be inserted in the platform. Recognizing this, and conscious of the fact that on the primordial question of opportunism and centrism - which has immediate implications for the life of the organization - the ICC had solidly armed itself with the resolution, the Congress decided to put off the rectification of the platform until the next Congress.
On the other hand, the Congress adopted several amendments to the statutes, in the same spirit as the statutes as a whole and as expressed in the ‘Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Organization of Revolutionaries' (IR 33), which made it possible to be more precise on certain points and, in particular, to close the door to any idea that the organization can function on the basis of ‘working groups' as was the case in the Dutch Left. This precision was made necessary because, led astray by their councilist slidings, the minority comrades were moving towards such a conception, without recognizing it.
These comrades' disorientation over organizational questions was also expressed at the Congress by their departure from the Congress and from the organization.
The desertion of the ‘tendency'
In the article in IR 43 in response to the article by the ‘tendency', we warned the comrades of the danger of being "crushed under the wheels of the centrist approach they have adopted." Their attitude at the Congress showed that this was no idle warning. Faced with affirmations by certain members of the ‘tendency' that they were about to leave the organization, the Congress straight-away asked the comrades of the ‘tendency' about their militant commitment to the organization. It is perfectly conceivable that a minority (or a majority) of an organization can present itself at a Congress announcing the necessity for a split and demanding that the crucial issues be immediately put to the vote: this is how the majority of the SFIO acted at the Tours Congress in1920 and the minority of the PSI at the Livorno Congress of 1921, vis-a-vis the question of joining the Communist International. But this wasn't the attitude of the ‘tendency', which, in order to cover up the disagreements within it between those who wanted to retire and those who wanted to remain militants of the ICC, preferred to evade the question posed to it. This is how, in a resolution unanimously adopted by the delegates present, the Congress took up a position on the attitude of the ‘tendency':
"Considering that:
-- the tendency presented itself to the 6th Congress posing an unacceptable ultimatum, according to which it would put into question its adherence to the organization if the Congress adopted the orientations presented by the retiring central organ
-- the tendency refused to answer the question posed by the Congress that it clearly pronounce on its militant commitment to the organization after the Congress, the Congress asked the tendency to withdraw in order to think, prepare and provide a response at the following session.
Instead, the tendency and two comrades of the organization, while sending a declaration to the presidium claiming that they had been excluded from the Congress but affirming that they continue to be part of the organization, definitively left the Congress without even informing the organization of this departure.
Despite the fact that the Congress adopted a resolution requiring their return and communicated this resolution to them on the telephone, the tendency and the two comrades refused to come back and explain themselves to the Congress, contenting themselves with a false declaration presenting their attitude as an "exclusion of the tendency from the works of the Congress".
Facing this, the Congress considers that the attitude of the tendency and of the two comrades:
-- firstly, expresses a contempt vis-a-vis the Congress and its character as a moment, of militant action of the organization,
-- secondly, constitutes a real desertion from the responsibilities which are those of any militant in the organization."
After the Congress, the ICC received from the comrades of the ‘tendency' a declaration in which it repeats the lie that it was excluded from the Congress. In the terms of the declaration, this so-called "exclusion" marked "the degeneration of the internal life of the ICC in an irrevocable manner," and consequently the ‘tendency' had decided to "constitute itself into a fraction outside the organizational framework of the ICC" in order to "represent the programmatic and organic continuity with the pole of regroupment which the ICC used to be, with its platform and statutes which it has ceased to defend."
Thus, the proletarian political milieu, already heavily marked by sectarianism and dispersion, is going to be ‘enriched' by a new group based on the same platform as that of the ICC. The lamentable trajectory of this ‘tendency', which has achieved a ‘historical first' by constituting itself into a ‘fraction' (which means ‘a part of') after leaving the organization from which it originated, which has to resort to the most barefaced lies to justify its contortions, clearly demonstrates the danger of constituting a ‘tendency' on an inconsistent basis, as we pointed out in IR 42:
"For its part, the ICC does not consider that this is a true tendency presenting a positive alternative orientation to the organization, but an agglomeration of comrades whose real cement is neither the coherence of their positions, nor a profound conviction in these positions, but an attitude of being ‘agains' the orientations of the ICC in its combat against councilism."
The real dedication, the sincere militant commitment of a certain number of the comrades of the ‘tendency' was to no avail: as soon as they allowed themselves to get caught up in the aberrant dynamic of the ‘tendency', they ended up trailing behind those elements who were tired of militant life and were looking for the slightest pretext, even the most fallacious, to disengage from it while at the same time ‘saving face.'
For as long as communist organizations have existed, they have had to face losing militants. At certain moments of history, as in the most terrible years of the counter-revolution, from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, this loss represented a tragic phenomenon which threatened the very life of the organizations themselves. Today the situation is very different and the departure of the comrades of the ‘tendency' will not compromise the capacity of the ICC to take up its responsibilities, any more than it prevented our Sixth Congress from carrying out its tasks.
In conclusion...
After several days of intense debates, in which the delegations from all the territorial sections of the ICC expressed themselves, in which the different reports, resolutions and amendments were examined, discussed, and voted on, we thus consider that overall the 6th Congress of the ICC attained the objectives it had fixed for itself, that it has valuably armed the organization to face up to what is at stake in the present period. The years to come will judge the validity of this appreciation. In particular they will show whether the ICC's analysis of the international situation, and especially of the evolution of the class struggle, is in accordance with reality - something contested by most other revolutionary groups. But right now, the resolutions which we are publishing in this issue of the International Review prove that the ICC is going in a very precise direction, leaving as little as possible room for ambiguity (as is not unfortunately the case for many of these groups); a direction which, on the basis of the analyses of the enormous potential for struggle maturing and developing in the class, expresses the firm will to be equal to the demands of these struggles, to be an integral part of them and to contribute actively to orienting them towards a revolutionary outcome.
FM
Resolution on the international situation
1) On the eve of the 1980s, the ICC designated these years as the ‘years of truth', in which the formidable extent of what was at stake in the whole life of society would be clearly revealed. Half-way through this decade, the evolution of the international situation has fully confirmed this analysis:
-- through a new aggravation of the convulsions of the world economy which were manifested from the very beginning of the ‘80s in the most important recession since the 1930s;
-- through an intensification of tensions between the imperialist blocs, expressed both through a considerable jump in military expenditure and by the development of deafening; campaigns of war ideology conducted by Reagan, the chief of the most powerful bloc;
-- through the resurgence, in the second part of 1983, of class combats after their momentary retreat in 81-83, preceding and following the repression of the workers in Poland. This resurgence has been characterized particularly by an unprecedented simultaneity of struggles, especially in the vital centers of capitalism and of the working class in Western Europe.
But, at the very time when the whole gravity of what's at stake in the period is becoming clear, when all the potential it contains is being revealed, the bourgeoisie is launching a whole series of ideological campaigns which have the aim of:
-- accrediting the myth of an amelioration in the situation of world capitalism, incarnated in the ‘success' of the American recovery in ‘83 and ‘84 (higher growth rates, fall in inflation and unemployment);
-- making people believe that there is an attenuation of imperialist tensions: Reagan's speeches in ‘84 were presented as being more moderate, as ‘holding out a hand' to negotiations with the USSR, and this had its equivalent in the line of diplomatic seduction being pushed by the newcomer Gorbachev;
-- pushing into workers' heads the idea that the proletariat isn't struggling, that it has given up defending its class interests, that it's no longer an actor on the international political stage.
In reality, these are nothing but smokescreens aimed at hiding from the workers the importance of what's at stake today at the very time when a new wave of class struggles is gaining in depth. What is revealed by an examination of world reality is a striking confirmation of the fundamental tendencies of the present historic period, tendencies which have been manifesting themselves since the beginning of the decade.
The economic crisis
2) The myth of an amelioration in the situation of the world economy burst like a soap bubble when you look at the terrible reality of what's happening in the peripheral countries of capitalism. The gigantic debts (900 billion dollars) owed by the countries which by a sinister irony are referred to as being ‘on the road to development', the flagrant failure of the extremely bitter potions prepared ‘for their own good' by the ‘experts' of the IMF (a 50% fall in buying power in two years in Mexico, 20% in 6 months in Argentina, etc...); the incredible rates of inflation (400% in Brazil, the 'model country' of the ‘70s, 10,000% in Bolivia...), the complete failure of the countries previously vaunted for their miraculous growth (Hong Kong, Singapore); the dreadful poverty of the populations of all the third world countries which, through the malnutrition, famines and epidemics that it provokes, is responsible every day for the death of 40,000 people and which makes daily life for billions of human beings a permanent hell - all this frightful reality, which the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries doesn't hesitate to put on display when it wants to portray the economy and workers' living conditions in the industrialized regions as something to be ‘envied', just shows one thing: the total impasse facing the world economy, the definitive incapacity of the capitalist mode of production to overcome its mortal contradictions, for which the peripheral countries are the first to pay the consequences.
Similarly, the permanent inability of the so-called socialist countries to realize national plans which are in any case less and less ambitious, the total and permanent shortage of consumer goods, the decline in production in Czechoslovakia and Poland (the latter country has now regressed to the I974 level), the 150% inflation in Poland over the last 2 years, the lowering of life expectancy in the USSR (66 years in 1964 but only 62 years in I984) - all these characteristics not only clearly unmask the lies about their ‘socialist' nature but mark a definitive end for the ‘theories' which have existed even within the revolutionary milieu about the capacity of state capitalism to overcome the contradictions of classical capitalism, to free itself from the constraints of the law of value. They show that if these countries are no less capitalist than others, it is a poorly developed and uncompetitive capitalism which reigns there, a capitalism which in many ways is similar to that in the third world countries (as in the predominance of raw materials in their exports) and which is thus particularly fragile in the face of the hammer blows of the crisis.
3) The myth of the convalescence of capitalism also comes up against the harsh reality of the situation in the oldest bourgeois countries - those of Western Europe, which contains the most powerful industrial concentration in the world. In this zone, the few improvements which could be seen in recent years in certain of these countries in terms of inflation rates and growth of GNP cannot mask the following realities:
-- despite a certain drop, the result of repeated attacks on workers' living conditions, the present level of inflation for these countries as a whole (7.2%) still represents more than twice that of 1967 (3.3%);
-- the level of industrial production was no higher in I984 than in I981;
-- whole major sectors of the industrial apparatus have been eliminated (in steel, ship building, mines, cars, etc) in the name of ‘health measures' which look like repeated amputations on a body ridden with gangrene;
-- the scourge of unemployment hasn't ceased to develop hitting 25 million workers or over 11% of the working population (between ‘81 and ‘84 the numbers of unemployed grew more than over the previous 20 years); the daily reality of these countries is the extension, on a scale not seen for decades, of soup kitchens and absolute pauperization.
These facts, since they relate to one of the vital centers of world capitalism, show how all the blather about ‘recovery' and ‘improvement' is indeed nothing but a smokescreen.
4) Similarly, all the discourses about the ‘health' of the American economy are shown to be pure lies when you examine the real content of the ‘Reaganomics' which is supposed to have worked such miracles. In fact, what lies behind the ‘dazzling' 6.8% increase in its GNP in 1984 (the only notable increase in any of the major countries apart from Japan, whose great competitiveness has up to now spared it from the hardest blows of the crisis), behind the fall in unemployment and in inflation rates, is, respectively:
-- a relaunching of production through major Federal budget deficits (up to 379 billion dollars in ‘83 and ‘84), which is in total contradiction to the principles touted by Reagan when he arrived at the head of state;
-- the continuation of the elimination of whole chunks of the industrial sector (a process which has now begun to affect even the ‘hi-tech; industries which were supposed to create a marvelous quantity of new jobs); the new jobs which have lowered unemployment have been essentially located in the service sector which can only worsen the competitiveness of the American economy as a whole;
-- the fall in the price of imports due to the considerable increase in the exchange rate of the dollar based on the huge borrowings made by the Federal State to meet its deficits.
As the resolution of the 5th ICC Congress showed, explaining the recession of ‘80-‘82:
"The ‘monetarist' policies orchestrated by Reagan and followed by all the leaders of the advanced countries register the failure of the neo-Keynesian policies and allow the underlying cause of the capitalist crisis to come to the surface: generalized overproduction, and its ineluctable consequences - the fall in production, the elimination of excess capital, the throwing of millions of workers into unemployment, the massive deterioration in the living standards of the whole proletariat." (International Review 35).
The ‘recovery' of the American economy was permitted by the momentary abandoning of this policy, the aim of which was to prevent: "the astronomical rise in debts upon which the world economy is sitting today from leading to the death of the patient through an apocalyptic rush of the inflationary spiral and the explosion of the international financial system." (ibid).
Thus, the limits of the US ‘recovery', which we can already see today, are contained in the same reality which in 1980 obliged the government of that country to put its foot hard on the brake, plunging the whole world into the brutal recession of ‘80-‘82: faced with the inevitable and growing engorgement of solvent markets, capital's only perspective can be to reduce production, profits, the labor power it exploits and the wages it pays for it. Because of this, the only ‘recovery' can be a headlong flight into debt, that is to say the accumulation of contradictions on a scale never seen before and growing all the time, turning the world economy into a veritable powder-keg.
5) In reality, since the world economy entered its phase of open crisis in the mid-‘60s, it has had no alternative but to oscillate more and more savagely between recession (directly translating the cause of the crisis - the saturation of the world market) and inflation (which merely expresses the abuse of credit and of printing money through which the states and the capitalists have tried to get round this saturation). Each one of the ‘recoveries' the world economy has been through after the recessions of ‘71, ‘74-75, and ‘80-82 has been based on a new outburst of indebtedness:
-- it was mainly the phenomenal indebtedness of the third world in the second half of the ‘70s - an indebtedness fed by loans from the western banks as a way of ‘recycling' the ‘petrodollars' - which allowed the industrial powers to temporarily boost their sales and relaunch production;
-- after 1982, it was the even more major debts of the USA, both external (which would soon make it the biggest debtor in the world) and internal (more than 6,000 billion dollars in 1984, or the equivalent of the total production of west Germany over 10 years), which allowed that country to reach record growth rates in ‘84, just as it was its enormous commercial deficits which momentarily benefited the exports of a few other countries (such as west Germany) and thus the production levels.
In the final analysis, just as the astronomical indebtedness of the third world countries could only result in a catastrophic rebound shock, in the form of unprecedented austerity and recession, the even more considerable indebtedness of the American economy can only lead, under the threat of an explosion of its financial system (its vulnerability to which can be measured by the uninterrupted succession of bank collapses), to a new recession both of this economy and the other economies whose external markets will be subject to a severe shrinkage.
The only perspective facing the world, its most industrialized countries, and including, for the first time in an explicit way the 2nd and 3rd industrial powers of the western bloc, Japan and west Germany, is thus:
-- a new dive in production resulting in a terrible aggravation of unemployment;
-- the intensification of the attack on workers' living; conditions in the form of falling wages, reduction in social security and an unprecedented aggravation in the rhythm and conditions of work.
What lies behind all the talk of ‘recovery' and economic ‘health' is a new process in absolute impoverishment, not only in the backward countries but also in the great metropoles of capital. Thus the ‘years of truth' are confirming one of the great teachings of marxism, which all sorts of ‘experts' claimed were ‘false' or ‘out of date': this system leads not only to the relative impoverishment of the exploited class; the latter is now more and more experiencing an absolute impoverishment which is going to reach, notably with the development of mass unemployment in the great metropoles of capital, levels which for more than three decades have been reserved for the backward countries.
The truth that these years are revealing in a sinister and striking manner is the whole barbarism into which decadent capitalism has plunged the whole of society.
Imperialist conflicts
6) This barbarism of decadent capitalism also reveals itself in the shadows behind the speeches about peace which are currently at the centre of the stage. Reagan's change of tone, leaving aside his talk about the ‘Evil Empire' and extending a hand to the chief of the opposing bloc; Gorbachev's ‘good little boy' diplomatic offensive; the forthcoming meeting between the two leaders - all this cannot hide the pursuit of war preparations by the two blocs or hide the development of imperialist tensions between them.
In fact, a simple examination of the efforts made by both blocs at the level of armaments exposes the emptiness of all the speeches about ‘détente'. Thus, during the year 1984 alone, the industrial states spent 1,000 billion dollars on arms: that is, more than the whole of the debt accumulated by the third world countries The countries of the western bloc are about to join those of the eastern bloc in the complete subordination of the productive apparatus to the needs of armaments:
-- right now, two-thirds of American research laboratories work directly for the army;
-- in all the highly technical sectors (aeronautics, electronics, telecommunications, robotics, computers, etc) the effort towards research and innovation are directly determined by military needs into which the best scientific and technical talents are being channeled. This is strikingly illustrated by the American ‘Star Wars' project and its west European appendage ‘Eureka'.
On a world scale, while humanity sinks into an increasingly unbearable poverty and misery in the form of famines and ‘natural' catastrophes whose murderous effects are perfectly avoidable, more than 10% of production is not only sterilized in arms but participates directly or indirectly through the destruction caused by these weapons, in aggravating and multiplying these calamities (as for example in Ethiopia and Mozambique where the terrible famines are much less the result of climatic conditions than of the wars which permanently devastate these areas).
The growth of armaments in both blocs isn't the only thing which reveals the present scale and intensity of imperialist tensions. This intensity corresponds to what is at stake in all the local conflicts which ravage the planet. This scale corresponds to the breadth and objectives of the present offensive of the US bloc.
7) This offensive has the objective of completing the encirclement of the USSR, of depriving this country of all the positions it has been able to maintain outside its direct area of domination. It has as a priority the definitive expulsion of the USSR from the Middle East, through the disciplining of Iran and the reinsertion of this country into the US bloc as an important pawn in its global strategy. It has the ambition of going on to recuperate Indochina. In the final analysis, its aim is to completely strangle the USSR, to strip it of its status as a world power.
The present phase of this offensive, which began right after the invasion of Afghanistan by the armies of the USSR, (which was a major advance by the latter towards the ‘warm seas'), has already achieved some major successes:
-- the winning of complete control over the Near East where Syria, previously linked to the Russian bloc and, along with the PLO, was the main loser from the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in ‘82, has now become one of the pawns of US strategy, sharing with Israel the role of ‘gendarme' in this region and where the resistance of recalcitrant bourgeois factions (PLO etc) has been progressively broken;
-- the alignment of India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984;
-- the growing exhaustion of Iran (which is the condition for its complete return to the US fold) due to the terrible war with Iraq, which is supported by the US bloc via France;
-- a greater integration of China into its strategy towards the USSR and Indo-China.
One of the main characteristics of this offensive is the western bloc's more and more massive use of its military power, notably through the sending of expeditionary corps from the US or other central countries (France, UK, Italy) to the battle zones (as was particularly the case with the Lebanon, to ‘convince' Syria of the necessity to align itself with the US bloc, and in Chad in order to put an end to Libya's pretensions to independence). This corresponds to the fact that the economic card so abundantly used in the past to grab hold of the enemy's position is no longer sufficient:
-- because of the present ambitions of the US bloc;
-- because of the aggravation of the world crisis itself, which creates a situation of internal instability in the third world countries that the US bloc used to rely on.
The present offensive of the US bloc is not in contradiction with the fact that, in the period of the decadence of capitalism, it is the bloc which has done worst out of the division of the world which, in the last resort, pushes the whole of society into generalized war (the ‘central' powers in 1914, the ‘Axis' in 1939). Certainly, the present situation differs from the one which preceded the Second World War in that now it is the better placed bloc which is on the offensive:
-- because it enjoys an enormous military superiority, particularly at the technological level;
-- to the extent that, since today's crisis is much more prolonged than that of the 30s without being able to break out into a generalized conflict, there are much more prolonged and extensive preparations for this conflict; obviously the economically stronger bloc is best equipped to carry out these preparations.
However, for the USSR, the stakes involved are considerable: the US offensive means in the end a matter of life or death for Russia, as can be seen by the stubbornness with which it tried, via Syria, to maintain a toe-hold in the Middle East. And if this offensive finally achieves its ultimate objectives (which presupposes that it isn't held back by the class struggle), the USSR will have no alternative but to play the desperate card of a thrust into the European heartlands - the real prize of the inter-imperialist conflict: in other words to resort to the terrible means of generalized war.
8) The present aggravation of imperialist tensions, the threat they pose to the very life of humanity, is the direct expression of the impasse faced by the capitalist economy, of the total bankruptcy of the system.
In the ‘years of truth' therefore, what's being revealed with a hideous clarity is that with the aggravation of the convulsions in society's economic infrastructure, economic war necessarily leads on to armed war, that economic means give way to military means. While in the past military force served as a support and guarantee to economic positions that had been or were to be acquired, today the economy more and more serves as an auxiliary to the needs of military strategy. The whole of economic activity is geared towards supporting military power; the world economy is sinking into the insatiable maws of arms production. Militarism, which contrary to Luxemburg's assertions has never constituted a real field of accumulation, has on the contrary become the terrain upon which the collapse of capitalist production, and of capitalism as a historic system, is being made a reality.
This is in no way an abandonment of marxism, which considers that in the last instance it is the economic base which determines the whole life of society. Capitalism's entry into its decadent period is determined by economic causes, and the history of decadence has seen the capitalist economy getting more and more stuck in a dead-end. Similarly, it is clear that it is the present aggravation of the crisis which is accentuating the pressures towards generalized war - a pressure which has been a permanent fact of life for society since decadence began.
But the important thing to underline is that in the decadence of capitalism, war - even if it is determined by the economic situation - has lost all economic rationality, in contrast to last century when, despite the costs and massacres involved, it was a means for pushing forward the development of the productive forces of capitalism, which in a manner of speaking made it ‘profitable' for the system as a whole.
What has been shown by the first two world wars is the purely destructive nature of war in the period of decadence. The fact that the victorious countries (with the exception of the USA whose territory was kept out of the battle zones) came out of the wars considerably weakened by them, has today reached its fulfillment in the obvious fact that a third world war would have no economic advantage either for capitalism as a whole or for any of its national fractions. And if this doesn't prevent the bourgeoisie from still preparing for it, this only expresses the reality that in the period of decadence the process leading to war is a mechanism completely outside the control of the bourgeoisie. What we can see today is the full development of a tendency which has existed since the beginning of the century and not a ‘new' phenomenon. However, by reaching its extreme point, this tendency has introduced a new element: the threat of the total destruction of humanity, which only the struggle of the proletariat can prevent.
Never in history has the alternative between socialism and barbarism been posed with such terrible clarity. Never has the proletariat had such an immense responsibility as it has in the present period.
The class struggle
9) The key to the whole historical situation is in the hands of the working class. This is precisely what the bourgeoisie is trying to hide from it by seeking to convince it that it is powerless, that its great battles against capitalism belong to a past that is definitely over. This is also something not seen by many revolutionary groups who are incapable of understanding; the historic course and spend their time lamenting the ‘weakness of workers' struggles', thus demonstrating that they themselves are victims of the bourgeoisie's campaigns.
The recognition of the aggravation of imperialist tensions and of a certain number of defeats like that in Poland in 1981 should not lead us to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie has a free hand to impose its own response to the crisis of the system: generalized imperialist war. The analysis of the historic course developed by the ICC takes into account the following elements:
a) by definition, a historic course is something which applies to a whole historical period. It is not conditioned by conjunctural or secondary events. Only major events in the life of society are able to put it into question:
-- the long opportunist degeneration of the llnd International, the complete disorientation of the proletariat that it expressed and aggravated, was the condition for the opening up of the course towards the first world war;
-- three years of generalized imperialist war, involving massacres and sufferings on a scale never before known, was the price to be paid for a new change of course in favor of the proletariat;
-- the long series of defeats of the proletariat from Germany in 1919 to China in 1927, defeats aggravated by the degeneration of the revolution in Russia and of the Communist International, and also by the momentary re-establishment of the capitalist economy between 1923 and 1929, were necessary for the bourgeoisie to free itself of the proletarian obstacle to its logic;
-- the appearance of new workers' generations who haven't been through defeat or world war, the wearing-out of the myth of the USSR as the ‘socialist fatherland' and of the anti-fascist mystification, capitalism's entry into a new open crisis, have been the conditions necessary for the re-establishment of a course towards class confrontations.
b) The present historic course can't be put into question by the partial defeats which, though rarely, have hit the proletariat in secondary or peripheral countries, like Poland ‘81. Only a succession of defeats following decisive struggles by the proletariat in the central countries, and notably those of Western Europe, would suffice to open the door to a course towards war.
c) the existence of a course towards class confrontations in no way implies the disappearance of imperialist antagonisms, conflicts between the blocs, the aggravation of these conflicts, or military preparations for a third world war. In particular, in the present period, only struggles of an exceptional breadth, like those in Poland 1980, can have an immediate impact on the tensions between east and west. Within this framework provided by the historic course, the bourgeoisie continues to have a certain margin for maneuver. What's at stake today is therefore not the capacity of this or that outburst of class struggle to push back arms production or silence this or that conflict between the blocs; it's the fact that the reserves of combativity that these struggles express prevent these imperialist conflicts from reaching their extreme conclusion: a worldwide conflagration.
d) The existence of a historic course towards class confrontations in no way implies that the proletariat is developing its struggles in a continuous way, that class combats reach, month after month, year after year, an overgrowing breadth and depth. Such a view would be totally at odds with the whole historical experience of the proletariat; it would contradict what Marx put forward in The 18th Brumaire and which Luxembourg and other great revolutionaries analyzed later on: the movement of the class struggle through advances and retreats in its progress towards decisive confrontations with capitalism. It would also contradict the fact that, in the period of decadence, such a phenomenon, far from disappearing, can only become more pronounced, which means that within a course towards class confrontations (itself an expression of this phenomenon on a grand scale) there is a succession of waves of struggle, of repeated assaults against the capitalist fortress, broken up by moments of partial defeats, disarray and demoralization.
10) The thesis about the ‘passivity' of the working class, which bourgeois propaganda has got certain revolutionaries to swallow, if it could have some appearance of reality at certain moments in the past such as at the time of defeat for the proletariat in Poland ‘81, is today totally contradicted by the facts. In particular it is given the lie too by the formidable development of workers' struggles from the second half of 1983, the characteristics and conditions of which were analyzed by the ICC as early as January ‘84:
"The present wave of struggles has already announced that it is going to be broader and more important than the two waves which preceded it since the historic upsurge of struggle at the end of the ‘60s: that of 1968-74 and 1978-80...The present wave has its source in the wearing out of the factors which led to the post-Poland retreat:
-- the vestiges of illusions from the 1970s which have been swept away by the very deep recession of 1980-82;
-- the momentary disarray provoked by the move of the left into opposition and by the defeat in Poland;
It is emerging:
-- after a long period of austerity and mounting unemployment, of an intensification of economic attacks against the working class in the central countries;
-- following several years of using the card of the left in opposition and all the mystifications associated with it.
For these reasons, it is going to carry on with increasingly powerful and determined battles by the proletariat of the metropoles of capital, the culminating point of which will be at a higher level than either of the first two waves.
The characteristics of the present wave, as have already been manifested and which will become more and more discernable are as follows:
-- a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one county, thus posing the basis for the geographical extension of the struggle;
-- a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions;
-- the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the world generalization of struggles in the future;
-- a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists;
-- the slow rhythm of the development of struggles in the central countries and notably of their capacity for self-organization, a phenomenon which results from the deployment by the bourgeoisie of these countries of a whole arsenal of traps and mystifications." (International Review 37, ‘Theses on the Present Upsurge in Class Struggle').
11) Today this analysis remains perfectly valid. It has been confirmed by the unprecedented extent and simultaneity of this third wave of struggle. This simultaneity has been most marked in Western Europe, epicenter of the proletarian revolution. It has been accompanied by massive struggles in the third world. This analysis is not contradicted by the low number of strike days in a certain number of countries (such as France and Italy) over the past year, a point which the bourgeois media have seized upon to prove the ‘passivity' of the working class, its resigned acceptance of its lot. In particular, there is no basis for saying that the third wave of struggles is already exhausted, that we have entered into a situation similar to the one which followed Poland:
-- you cannot judge the whole international situation in an immediate way, on the basis of short-term facts, especially because, as we have shown, the present wave is distinguished by the slow rhythm of its development: when revolutionaries fall into such a short-term view, as is the case for some of them today, they are getting this not from marxism but from bourgeois ideology, and are only reflecting passively the hesitations which affect the whole class:
-- for the last two years the proletariat has been engaged in a long-term combat. Such a combat inevitably goes through moments of respite, of maturation, of reflection. But in contrast to the post-Poland situation where a short but real reflux was opened up by an international defeat for the proletariat and acted like a leaden weight pressing for two years on all the main countries of western Europe, the present moments of respite (reflected in the diminution of strike days in this or that country) which the class may go through are limited in time and space; and although the bourgeoisie does everything it can to turn the workers' expectations, their efforts at reflection into passivity, the situation remains characterized by an accumulation of discontent and of potential combativity which can explode at any moment, as can be seen from recent events in France (Dunkirk, SNCF, etc);
-- the fact that in countries where the working class is traditionally combative, like France and especially Italy, there has been a particularly low numerical level of strikes, should not obscure the significance for the whole class of the development of a very strong combativity in the class movement in countries used to ‘social peace', especially in the Scandinavian countries;
-- statistics on strike days, even if they are an element which revolutionaries must study and take into consideration, do not on their own give a precise indication of the level of discontent, combativity and consciousness within the class. In particular, there is a much more significant indicator of the proletariat's state of mind and fighting potential: the pore and more massive distrust towards the unions, expressed notably in an accelerated decline in membership.
12) If the present phenomenon of de-unionization is so important, it's because of the specific role of trade unionism today as the spearhead of the bourgeois ploy of the left in opposition.
While the political parties of the left naturally have a central role in the strategy of the left in power or as a candidate for power (as in the mid-‘70s), the strategy of the left in opposition is characterized by a language and a practice which claims to directly express the workers' demands and preoccupations, and therefore bases itself principally on the bourgeois institutions closest to the daily life of the workers and present in the workplace: the unions.
Faced with the two vital necessities of the workers' struggle, extension and self-organization, it's the task of the unions:
-- to disorient the workers, to develop among them a feeling of powerlessness through the division between different union federations or between the ‘base' and the ‘leadership';
-- to imprison and isolate struggles on the corporatist, sectoral or localist terrain;
-- to put forward, against the danger of a real extension, a false extension which aims to drown the most combative nuclei, as was done in Belgium in September ‘83, or which presents extension as something limited to a particular industrial branch (miners' strike in GB) or even to the different factories of one enterprise (Renault in October ‘85);
-- to prevent any spontaneous outbreak of struggle, any tendency towards self-organization, by acting in advance to call for demobilizing forms of ‘action' and by putting themselves at the head of movements as soon as they arise. This tactic of the bourgeoisie, which aims at occupying the workers' terrain and is the essential component of the strategy of the left in opposition, has been widely used in 1985. At the present time it constitutes a real political offensive of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The proletariat cannot avoid this political battle being imposed upon it. It cannot and must not allow the left parties and unions to maneuver freely on the terrain of the defense of its living standards, but must resolutely and systematically oppose and confront these maneuvers. Revolutionaries must put themselves in the front ranks of this political combat, imposing their presence on the workers' terrain by putting forward the necessity for extension and self-organization and by denouncing the obstacles and maneuvers of the unions.
It's through the proletariat repeatedly confronting these maneuvers, notably in the metropoles where the most experienced sector of the proletariat confronts the most experienced sectors of the bourgeoisie, the ones capable of putting forward the most sophisticated traps, that the class will be able to develop the weapon of the mass strike, to extend and generalize its combats on an international scale and to launch the decisive confrontations with capitalism, the battles of the revolutionary period.
13) For all these reasons the present development of distrust for the unions is an essential element in the balance of forces between the classes and thus of the whole historic situation. However this distrust is itself partly responsible for the reduction in the number of struggles in different countries, particularly where the unions have been most discredited (as in France following the accidental arrival in power of the left in 1981). When the workers have for decades clung to the illusion that they can only wage the struggle in the framework of the trade unions and with their support, the loss of confidence in these organs leads them to resort to passivity in answer to the so-called ‘calls for struggle' coming from the unions. This is precisely the game the unions are playing more and more: incapable of any long-term mobilization of the workers behind their banners and slogans, they are skillfully using the passivity and skepticism with which their appeals are met with the aim of transforming this passivity into demoralization - of participating, in their own way, in the campaign about the ‘disappearance of the class struggle' which seeks to undermine the proletariat's confidence in itself (even though the unions, of course, claim to be the real defenders of this struggle). In this sense, the passivity many workers, including the more combative ones, display towards the ‘actions' called by the unions (strikes and demonstrations), while perfectly explicable and expressing a necessary loss of illusions in trade unionism, should not be seen as being positive in itself, since this response is exactly what the bourgeoisie wants to get from the workers at this time. The only way workers can spring this trap - and revolutionaries must encourage them in this - is not to turn away from these kind of actions but on the contrary use every opportunity for workers to assemble together around issues affecting their class interests, even when they derive from union maneuvers, participating in them as actively and as massively as possible in order to transform them into places expressing the unity of the class beyond sectoral divisions, the combativity and determination of the proletariat, as was the case for example with the May 1st demonstrations in Hamburg. Just as there is no principle that revolutionaries should refuse to call workers to movements ‘launched' by the unions, calling for workers to be present in such movements is not a recipe that can be applied in all circumstances, but has to be evaluated according to the immediate possibilities for transforming these actions, recognizing that the conditions for doing this are coming together more and more.
Because of the enormous discontent developing in the class which can only grow as a new round of capitalist attacks is unleashed in response to the coming recession; because of the considerable fighting potential accumulating; at a profound level, whose strength could be seen recently in the railway strikes in France; because the extension of struggles is being felt as an imperious necessity by a growing mass of workers - any manifestation of real workers combativity, any determined attempt to extend the struggle is, and will be more and more, pregnant with very wide-scale class movements. And it's principally in the face of the obstacles the unions put in the path of such movements, and of their search for extension, that the necessity for self-organization is being imposed more and more on the workers in the great capitalist metropoles, notably in Western Europe.
14) The question of the extension of struggles, of going beyond sectoral and professional barriers, is therefore at the centre of the perspective for the class struggle in the present period. And it's through the generalization of the capitalist attack to all sectors of the class that the conditions for a response to this question are developing. The present growth in the number of unemployed, on a scale unknown for half a century, and which is the most striking result of this generalized attack, is a powerful factor in the maturation of these conditions, to the degree that:
-- it's the whole working class, and not just the unemployed workers, which is hit by unemployment, notably by a drop in living standards brought to many working class families when they have to support one or more unemployed members;
-- unemployment does away with sectoral divisions simply because the workers are ejected from the place of production, and this also has the consequence of a lesser degree of containment by the union apparatus;
-- through the absolute impoverishment that it represents, unemployment indicates the future that lies in store for the whole working class and thus raises the perspective of a struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.
In fact, just like the dizzying ascent of militarism, but in a way that is much more directly grasped by the workers, the irreversible growth of unemployment is an irrefutable indication that capitalism has become an aberration, which plunges the masses into misery not because it produces too little but because it produces...too much. More generally, the ejection from wage labor of a growing; mass of workers demonstrates the total bankruptcy of a mode of production whose historic role was precisely to extend wage labor.
For all these reasons, unemployment will more and more constitute an essential factor in the development of consciousness throughout the class of what's really at stake in the struggles it is waging, of the fact that it has the historic task of abolishing a system that leads to such aberrations.
In this sense, unemployment is going to play, more slowly but in a much more profound manner, the same role as the war did in the emergence of the revolution in Russia and Germany in 1917-18. Furthermore, the unemployed workers will more and more tend to be at the front line of the class struggle, playing a role comparable to that of the soldiers in the Russian revolution of 1917. Against therefore what is claimed by the bourgeoisie and by certain particularly myopic revolutionaries, and even if it can initially create a certain disarray in the class, unemployment is in no way a factor that attenuates the class struggle. On the contrary, it will be an essential element in its development right up to the revolutionary period.
15) The ultimate perspective contained within the workers' struggles of today is the revolutionary confrontation with capitalism. The present situation has an enormous potential for giving rise to proletarian movements.
The total bankruptcy of capitalism revealed by the years of truth, just as it leads to an acceleration of history at the level of inter‑imperialist antagonisms, also does so at the level of the class struggle. This is expressed in particular by the fact that the moments of retreat in the struggle (as in ‘81-82) are getting shorter and shorter, whereas the culminating point of each wave of combats is situated at a higher level than the previous one. And this accumulation of the experience of struggle by the proletariat, as well as the proximity between each experience, is an essential element in the coming to consciousness of the whole class about what's really at stake in its struggles. This is why revolutionaries have to be particularly vigilant about the potentialities of the present period and take great care not to underestimate this potential.
However, this does not mean that we have already entered into the phase of combats leading directly to the revolutionary period. This is still a long way ahead of us. This is because of the slow rhythm of the realization of the irreversible collapse of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie's formidable capacity for political resistance in the decisive centers of the world-historic situation - the great metropoles of capitalism, especially Western Europe.
But these aren't the only elements. In order to understand the present situation, and the one which is to come, we also have to take into account the characteristics of the proletariat that is waging the struggle today:
-- it's composed of workers' generations who haven't gone through a defeat, unlike those who reached their maturity in the ‘30s and during World War 2; because the bourgeoisie hasn't managed to inflict a decisive defeat on them, their reserves of combativity are still intact;
-- these generations have the benefit of an irreversible wearing-out of the great mystifications which in the past have made it possible to mobilize the proletariat for imperialist war (fatherland, civilization, democracy, anti-fascism, defense of the USSR, etc) .
These two essential characteristics explain why the present historic course is towards class confrontations and not towards imperialist war. However, that which makes for the present strength of the proletariat also makes for its weakness: precisely because this generation hasn't known defeat and is able to re-discover the road of class struggle, there exists between these generations and those which fought the last decisive combats in the ‘20s, an enormous gulf for which the proletariat today is paying a heavy price:
-- a considerable ignorance of its own past and lessons;
-- the absence of a revolutionary party.
These characteristics explain in particular the highly uneven course of the present workers' struggles. They make it possible to understand the moments when the proletariat loses confidence in itself, unaware of the force it can muster against the bourgeoisie. They also show how long the path in front of the proletariat is; it can't make the revolution if it hasn't consciously integrated the experience of the past and acquired its class party.
The historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the ‘60s put the formation of the party on the agenda, but this could not be realized owing to:
-- the half-century gap separating us from the previous revolutionary parties;
-- the disappearance or atrophy of the left fractions which came out of them;
-- the distrust many workers have towards any political organization, whether proletarian or bourgeois, which is an expression of the danger of councillism as identified by the ICC, a translation of a historic weakness of the proletariat faced with the necessity to politicize its combat.
It is up to the revolutionary groups who exist today to actively prepare the conditions for the party, not by proclaiming themselves to be The Party or offering the working masses no other perspective than rallying to their banners, as the Bordigists like to do, but by developing a systematic work for the regroupment of revolutionary forces and for intervention in the class. It's through intervention in particular, by putting forward proposals for action that correspond to the needs of the class that revolutionaries will be able to prove concretely to the workers the necessity for a revolutionary organization, thus laying the foundations for the future party of the communist revolution.
Resolution adopted on
Opportunism and centrism in the period of decadence
1) There is a fundamental difference between the evolution of the parties of the bourgeoisie and the evolution of the parties of the working class. The first, because they are the political organs of a ruling class, are able to act within the working class and some of them indeed do this because they are part of the division of labor amongst the political forces of the bourgeoisie, having been given the particular task of mystifying the proletariat, of controlling and derailing its struggle from the inside. To this end, the bourgeoisie prefers to use former organizations of the working class which have gone over to the bourgeois camp.
On the other hand, the inverse situation of a proletarian organization acting inside the camp of the bourgeoisie can never exist. This is the case for the proletariat, as for any oppressed class, because of the place it occupies in history as an exploited class which can never be an exploiting class.
This reality can therefore be summarized in the following succinct affirmations:
-- there can, must, and will always be bourgeois political organizations acting within the proletariat;
-- there can never exist, as the whole historical experience shows, proletarian political parties acting inside the bourgeois camp.
2) This is not only true for structured political parties. It's also true for the divergent political currents which may arise from within these parties. While members of existing political parties can go from one camp to another and this in both directions (from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat), this can only be on an individual basis. By contrast, the collective passage of a political organism that is already structured or in formation in the existing parties can necessarily only take place in one direction: from parties of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, and never in the opposite direction: from bourgeois parties to the proletariat. That is to say those in no case can a collection of elements deriving from a bourgeois organization evolve towards class positions without a clear break with any idea of maintaining a continuity with their previous collective activity in the camp of the counter-revolution. In other words: within organizations of the proletariat, there can be formed and can develop tendencies which are moving towards the political positions of the bourgeoisie and which spread bourgeois ideology within the working class. But this is absolutely excluded in organizations of the bourgeoisie.
3) The explanation of the above points resides in the essential fact that the class which is economically dominant in society is also dominant on the political and ideological level. This fact also explains:
-- the influence exerted by the ideology of the bourgeoisie on the immense majority of the working class, an ideology from which, up until the revolution, the majority can only disengage itself in a very partial manner;
-- the vicissitudes and difficulties of the process whereby the class as a whole becomes aware of its interests and above all of its historic being, resulting in the constant movement of its struggles through partial victories and defeats which are expressed in advances and retreats in the extension of its coming to consciousness;
-- the obligatory and ineluctable fact that it is only a small minority of the class which is able to disengage itself sufficiently (but not totally) from the grip of the ruling bourgeois ideology to undertake the systematic and coherent theoretical work, to elaborate the political foundations needed to fertilize the process through which the class becomes conscious, and the development of the immediate and historical struggle of the class;
-- the indispensable and irreplaceable function given to the minorities which the class secretes, a function which cannot be performed by individuals or by little intellectual clubs, but only by elements who have raised themselves to an understanding of the tasks for which the class, in the development of its struggle, has produced them. Only by giving itself a structure, by giving birth to a centralized political organization with a militant activity in the workers' struggle, can this minority, produced by the class, carry out its function of being an active factor, a crucible in which and with which the class forges the weapons it needs for its ultimate victory;
-- the reason why opportunist and centrist currents can manifest themselves within the exploited, revolutionary class and in the organizations of this class, and only in this class and its organizations. In this sense, to talk about opportunism and centrism (in relation to the proletariat) in the bourgeoisie makes no sense, because a ruling class will never willingly renounce its privileges in favor of the class it exploits (this is precisely what makes it a ruling class).
4) There are two sources underlying the appearance of opportunist and centrist tendencies in the working class: the pressure and influence of bourgeois ideology and the difficult process of the maturation of consciousness in the proletariat. This is expressed in particular by the main characteristic of opportunism, which consists of isolating, separating the final goals of the proletarian movement from the means which lead to them, ending up opposing one to another, whereas in fact any calling into question of the means results in a denial of the final goal, just as a any calling into question of the final goal tends to compromise the proletarian character of the means used to attain it. Since these are permanent elements in the historic confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it's clear that opportunism and centrism are dangers which threaten the class in a permanent way, both in the decadent period and the ascendant period. However, just as these two sources are linked together, they are also linked in the way they affect the movement of the class, to the general evolution of capitalism and the development of its internal contradictions. Because of this, the historic phenomena of opportunism and centrism express themselves in a different manner, with greater or lesser degrees of seriousness, according to moments of this evolution and this development.
5) While the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase, directly posing the necessity of the revolution, is a favorable condition that facilitates the maturation of consciousness in the working class, this maturation is not at all something automatic, mechanical, fated.
The period of the decadence of capitalism sees, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie concentrating all of its power of repression and perfecting its methods for imposing its ideology on the class; on the other hand, the consciousness of the proletariat goes through an important, urgent development, seeing that the historic alternative between socialism or barbarism is posed in an immediate manner, in all its gravity: history does not leave the proletariat an unlimited time. The period of decadence, posing the choice between imperialist war and proletarian revolution, socialism or barbarism, not only does not make opportunism and centrism disappear, but makes the struggle of the revolutionary currents against these tendencies even more sharp and bitter, in keeping with what's at stake in the situation.
6) As history has shown, the open opportunist current, because it situates itself on extreme, clear-cut positions, ends up, at decisive moments, passing definitively and irrevocably into the camp of the bourgeoisie. As for the current which situates itself between the revolutionary left and the opportunist right, a heterogeneous current constantly moving between the two and seeking to reconcile them in the name of an impossible organizational unity, it evolves according to the circumstances and vicissitudes of the struggle of the proletariat.
At the time of the oven betrayal of the opportunist current, if it coincides with a resurgence and upward movement of the class struggle, centrism can at the beginning represent a moment of passage by the working masses towards revolutionary positions. Centrism, as a structured current, organized in the form of a party, is, in favorable circumstances, destined to explode, its majority or a large part of it going over to the newly constituted organization of the revolutionary left, as occurred with the French Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Italy, and the USPD in Germany in 1920-21, after the first world war and the victorious revolution in Russia.
By contrast, in a situation where the proletariat has gone through a series of major defeats, opening a course towards war, centrism is ineluctably condemned to be caught up in the spokes of the bourgeoisie and to go over to the enemy camp just like the open opportunist current.
With all the necessary firmness, the revolutionary party must be able to understand these two possible directions followed by centrism in different circumstances in order to be able to take up an adequate political attitude towards it. Not to recognize this reality leads to the same aberration as proclaiming the impossibility of the existence of opportunism and centrism within the working class in the period of the decadence of capitalism.
7) Concerning this last ‘theory', the whole history of the 3rd International and the Communist Parties is there to show its inanity, to demonstrate how absurd it is. Not only did opportunism and centrism appear within the revolutionary organization, but, strengthened by the defeats and retreat of the proletariat, centrism succeeded in dominating these parties and, after a merciless struggle over a period of years to beat down the oppositions and fractions of the communist left, in expelling the latter from all the Communist Parties. Having emptied these Parties of any class substance, it turned each one of them into organs of their respective national bourgeoisies.
The ‘theory' of the impossibility of opportunist and centrist currents existing within the proletariat in the period of decadence presupposes, in reality, that there is such a thing as a pure proletariat and pure revolutionary parties, absolutely and forever immunized and protected against any penetrations of bourgeois ideology. Such a ‘theory' is not only an aberration but is based on an abstract, idealist vision of the class and its organizations. It resembles the ‘Coue' method (consoling oneself by saying ‘I'm getting better every day') and resolutely turns its back on marxism. Far from strengthening the revolutionary current, it weakens it by obscuring this real danger which threatens it, by turning its attention away from the indispensable vigilance against this danger.
The ICC must fight with all its energy against such ‘theories' in general, and within its own ranks in particular, because they only permit centrism to camouflage itself behind a radical phraseology, which, by vaunting its programmatic ‘purity', can only isolate revolutionary organizations from the real movement of the struggle of their class.
Rejected resolution on
Centrism and proletarian political organizations
1) Academic debate on the question of centrism is impossible. As a concept, centrism was born and has developed in the workers' movement in the face of the necessity to demarcate the political forces present in the class struggle, in particular with a view to the constitution of class parties in the present epoch of wars and revolutions. It is no accident if this question is today posed, once again, in the ICC, in a period where decisive class confrontations are on the horizon, and so also the perspective of a new class party: on the reply to this question will depend the nature of the party tomorrow, and the attitude of revolutionary groups today in preparing this perspective. The practical experience of the 3rd International's tragic collapse, followed by the fiasco of the so-called ‘4th International', the theoretical framework of the nature of the working class, the decadence of capitalism, and state capitalism as capitalism's mode of existence in the present period, provide the proletariat with all the necessary material for criticizing the concept of centrism and its implications.
2) Because of its condition within capitalism as an exploited and revolutionary class that bears within it capitalism's destruction, the proletariat is constantly subjected to two contradictory tendencies:
-- its own movement towards consciousness of its situation and of its historical destiny;
-- the ideological pressure of the dominant bourgeoisie, which tends to destroy its consciousness.
These two irreconcilable tendencies determine the uneven character of the class struggle, which goes through successive advances or revolutionary attempts, and retreats or counterrevolutions, and in which there appear vanguard minorities organized in groups, fractions or parties, called on to catalyze the class' movement towards its consciousness.
The proletariat can only have one consciousness: a revolutionary consciousness; but, because it is born in bourgeois society, and can only liberate itself when it disappears as a class, its consciousness is a developing process, never completed in capitalism, permanently confronting the bourgeois ideology that impregnates the whole of society.
This situation determines the dynamic of the proletariat's political organizations: either they fulfill their function of developing class consciousness against bourgeois ideology, and are situated practically in the proletarian camp, or they succumb to bourgeois ideology, and are integrated practically into the bourgeois camp.
3) The demarcation of camps among political organizations is itself a developing historical process, determined by the objective conditions of the development of capitalism and of the proletariat within it. Since the beginning of the workers' movement, a process of decantation has occurred this has progressively shrunk and demarcated the proletarian terrain.
At the time of the 1st international, the development of capitalism was still characterized, even in the heart of Europe, by the introduction of large scale industrial production and the formation of the industrial proletariat from the declining artisans and the dispossessed peasantry. At this stage of the development of the proletariat and of its consciousness, the frontiers of the workers' movement could still contain such dissimilar currents as Bakuninist anarchism and Proudhonism, issued from the petty bourgeois and peasant past, Blanquism, anchored in the Jacobin intelligentsia, Mazzinism with its program of radical republicanism, and marxism, the developed expression of the revolutionary proletariat.
At the time of the 2nd International, the end of the period of national revolutions and of the childhood of the industrial proletariat had considerably reduced the frontiers of the workers' movement, by obliging the proletariat to constitute itself as a distinct political party, in opposition to all the bourgeois and petty bourgeois currents. But the necessity of struggling for reforms within ascendant capitalism, the coexistence of the ‘minimum' and ‘maximum' programs during this period, allowed certain currents like an anarcho-syndicalism, centrism and opportunism to exist in the proletarian political camp alongside revolutionary marxism.
In the present epoch of capitalist decadence, in the era of state capitalism, of the integration of the mass parties and trade unions into the cogs of the state capitalist machine, of the impossibility of reforms in a situation of permanent crisis and of the objective necessity of the communist revolution - an epoch opened by the first world war - the proletarian political camp is definitively limited to revolutionary marxism. The different opportunist and centrist tendencies, with their program of parliamentarism and legalism, with their strategy of attrition, based on the mass parties and trade unions, have passed irrevocably into the capitalist camp. The same is true of any organization that abandons in any way the terrain of the world revolution, as was to be the case for the 3rd International with the adoption of ‘socialism in one country', and for Trotskyism with its ‘critical' support for the second world war.
4) The question that revolutionary marxism must ask itself, faced with the historical phenomenon of opportunism and centrism, is not whether or not proletarian organizations are threatened by the penetration of bourgeois ideology, but how to understand the particular conditions in which the latter could give rise to the existence of currents distinct both from revolutionary marxism and from the bourgeoisie. The workings class and its organizations - however clear they are - are by their very nature always penetrated by bourgeois ideology. This penetration takes on the most varied forms, and it would be seriously underestimating it to search out only one of its forms. The outcome of the combat between class consciousness and bourgeois ideology in an organization is either the development of the former against the latter, or the destruction of the former by the latter. In the epoch of capitalist decadence, when class antagonisms are expressed in a clear-cut manner, this means: either the development of the revolutionary program or capitulation to the bourgeoisie.
The possibility of a ‘third path' during ascendant capitalism - ie the existence of' currents and positions that were neither truly bourgeois nor truly revolutionary within the workers' movement - was the result of the room left by an expanding capitalism for the proletariat's permanent struggle to improve its living conditions within the system, without it putting the latter into danger. Opportunism - the policy that sought immediate success to the detriment of principles, ie the preconditions of the final success - and centrism - a variation of opportunism, trying to reconcile the latter with a reference to marxism - developed as political forms of the reformist disease that gangrened the workers' movement during this epoch. Their objective basis lay, not in any fundamental differentiation of economic interests within the proletariat, as Lenin's theory of the ‘workers aristocracy' put it, but in the permanent apparatuses of the trade unions and mass parties, which were tending to become institutions within the framework of the system, integrated into the capitalist state, and separated from the class struggle. When capitalism entered its period of decadence, these organizations moved definitively into the capitalist camp, and with them went the reformist, opportunist and centrist currents.
Henceforth, the immediate alternative posed for the working class is revolution or counter-revolution, socialism or barbarism. Reformism, opportunism and centrism have lost all objective reality inside the workers' movement, since their material base - the winning of reforms and immediate successes without any struggle for the revolution, and the corresponding mass organizations - no longer exists. All policies that aim at immediate success while distancing themselves from the revolution have become, from the proletarian point of view, an illusion and not an objective reality, they represent a direct capitulation to the bourgeoisie, a counter-revolutionary policy. All the historical examples of such policies in the epoch of decadence, such as the Communist International's ‘going to the masses', show that, far from leading to immediate success, they lead to complete failure, the betrayal of organizations and the defeat of the revolution in the case of the CI. This does not mean that any proletarian organization that degenerates passes over immediately as such to the bourgeoisie; outside the crucial moments of war and revolution, capitulation to the bourgeoisie may be partial and progressive, as the history of Bordigism shows. But this does not change the general characteristic of the process, the permanent contradiction between revolution and counter-revolution, the denaturation of the first into the second, without passing by ideologies of an intermediary type, as were opportunism and centrism.
5) The thesis developed by Trotsky in the 1930s, and taken up again today by the ICC, according to which opportunism and centrism represent in their essence the penetration of bourgeois ideology, defined simply in terms of ‘political behavior' (lack of firmness in principles, hesitation, attempts to reconcile antagonistic positions), within the organizations of the proletariat, is a radical departure from marxism's historical materialist method:
-- from materialism, because it stands reality on its head by considering political currents as the result of behavior, instead of considering behavior the result of political currents, defined by their relationship to the class struggle;
-- from history, because it replaces the whole general evolution of the proletariat and its organizations by fixed categories of particular types of behavior, which are unable to explain this historical evolution.
Its consequences are disastrous for a whole series of essential aspects of the revolutionary program:
(1) By placing the origins of the weaknesses of the proletarian organizations in a hesitating behavior, it opposes to this another behavior - will to action - and so bases its perspective on determination, a deviation typical of Trotskyism in the 1930s.
(2) Applied to the epoch of capitalist decadence, it leads to the rehabilitation into the proletarian camp, of the ‘centrist' current, and thereby of the Social-Democracy after its participation in WW1 and the crushing of the post-war revolution, of Stalinism after the adoption of ‘socialism in one country', and of Trotskyism after its participation in WW2; in other words, to the abandoning of the objective criterion of internationalism, of participation in war or revolution to demarcate the proletarian and the bourgeois camps; to the recognition of nationalist positions - such as ‘socialism in one country' for Stalinism, or the Trotskyist ‘critical support' for imperialist war - as expressions of the proletariat.
(3) As a result, it alters, amongst other things, all the lessons drawn from the revolutionary wave, and justifies, however critically, the policy of opening the 3rd International to the counter-revolutionary elements and parties of the Social-Democracy, thereby constituting a serious danger for the revolution and the party of tomorrow.
(4) In the final analysis, it implies a calling into question of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat and of its consciousness, since, if centrism designates all cohabitation of contradictory positions, then the proletariat and its organizations are always and by nature centrist, since the proletariat necessarily drags with it the marks of the society in which it exists, of bourgeois ideology, while at the same time affirming its revolutionary project.
6) The truth of a theory lies in practice. The application of the concept of centrism by the 3rd International in the formation of the communist parties of Europe, and by the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the formation of the so-called ‘4th International', provides the definitive historical demonstration of its bankruptcy in the epoch of capitalist decadence. Its lack of clarity on the henceforward bourgeois nature of ‘centrism' led the CI into a policy of compromise with the counter-revolutionary Social-Democratic tendencies and parties, by opening the doors of the International to them, as was the case in Germany where the KPD had to amalgamate with the USPD, or in France, where the PCF was formed with the SFIO which had participated in the ‘Sacred Union' during the war. In the same way, Trotsky's conception of centrism dragged him into a voluntarist policy of building a new International and of entryism into the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy. In both cases, these policies accelerated the deaths of the CI and of Trotskyism in a spectacular way.
The fact that the communist lefts continued to use the term ‘centrism' and ‘opportunism' is in no way a proof of their adequacy, but an expression of the Left's difficulty in immediately drawing all the theoretical lessons of the experience they had just been through. The Lefts were at least clear on the main point, ie the counter-revolutionary function assumed by the currents described as ‘centrist', but their analysis was weakened by their resort to concepts applicable to the degeneration of the 2nd International. As witnesses, we can call the untenable positions of Bilan on the duality between Stalinism's (proletarian) ‘nature' and (counter-revolutionary) ‘function' after 1927, and on the description of the USSR as a ‘proletarian state' right up to WW2.
7) An organization's class nature is determined by the historical function that it fulfils in the class struggle, for an organization does not emerge as a passive reflection of a class, but as one of its active organs. Any criterion based solely on the presence of workers (as for Trotskyism) or of revolutionaries (as for the ICC today) within an organization, to determine its class nature, is derived from idealist subjectivism and not from historical materialism. The passage of a proletarian organization into the camp of the bourgeoisie is essentially an objective phenomenon, independent of the consciousness that revolutionaries may have of it at the time, because it means that the organization confronts the proletariat as part of the objective, adverse conditions of capitalist society, and that it thus escapes from the subjective action of the proletariat. The continued presence of workers, and even sometimes temporarily of revolutionary fractions within it, is in no way contradictory with this fact, since the function that it then fulfils for the bourgeoisie is precisely that of controlling the proletariat.
There exist decisive historical criteria that mark the passage of an organization into the capitalist camp: the abandonment of internationalism, the participation in war or counterrevolution. For the Social Democracy, and the trade unions, this passage took place during WW1, for the CI with the adoption of ‘socialism in one country', for the Trotskyist current during WW2. Once this passage has taken place, the organization is definitively dead for the proletariat, since henceforward, the principle that Marx put forward against the capitalist state, of which it is now a part, must be applied to it: it cannot be conquered, it must be destroyed.
The death of an International means the simultaneous betrayal of all or the majority of the parties of which it is comprised, through the abandoning of internationalism and the adoption of a nationalist policy. But because these parties are each integrated into a national capitalist state, exceptions may exist, determined by specific national conditions, as was the case in the 2nd International. These exceptions, which were not repeated during the collapse of the 3rd International with the unanimous adoption by the CPs of Stalinist nationalism, in no way disprove the general rule, nor the necessity for these parties to break completely with the policies of their one-time ‘fraternal' parties. For a certain time, there may continue to exist within the latter revolutionary currents or fractions which have not managed to understand immediately the change in situation, and which are led later on to break with the party that has gone over to the counter-revolution: this was the case with the Spartakists in Germany, first in the SPD and then in the USPP. This process has nothing in common with the impossible birth of a proletarian organization from a bourgeois organization: these parties break organizationally with the party that has gone over to the bourgeoisie, but represent the programmatic continuity of the old party from which they were born. This expresses the general phenomenon of the lag of consciousness behind objective reality, which appears even when these fractions have left the party: thus, even though all the left fractions had been excluded from the CI by 1927, the Italian fraction continued to analyze the CI and the CPs as proletarian until 1933 and 1935 respectively, and a large minority within it continued to defend the reference to the CP after the analysis of the latter's death in 1935.
8) The subjectivist method that takes the continued presence of revolutionaries within an organization as a criterion of its class nature completely disarms revolutionaries in the formation of the party. For revolutionaries fight to the end to keep a party for the proletariat, and if their mere presence within it is enough to save the party for the proletariat, this means there can be no reason for them to break with an organization until they are excluded. This circular reasoning boils down to leaving the initiative to the enemy. On the one hand, it encourages the over-hasty condemnation of a party in the case of an early exclusion, but on the other, it paralyses revolutionaries in the opposite case where a party that has gone over to the bourgeoisie is ready to keep revolutionaries within it as a warranty of its ‘working class' appearance, as was the case with the USPD and a whole series of Social Democratic parties in the revolutionary movement at the beginning of the century. By suppressing the objective criteria of parties' class nature, it also suppresses the objective necessity of the formation of the revolutionary party. And so the circle is closed: the theory of centrism produces the ‘centrism' that it claims to describe and combat, and thereby engenders itself in a vicious circle which can only lead to the conclusion that the working class and its consciousness are centrist by nature.
9) When it arrives at these conclusions, the theory of centrism as a permanent disease within the workers' movement appears for what it is: a capitulation to the bourgeois ideology that it claims to combat, a refusal to draw the lessons of historical experience, an alteration of the revolutionary program. The rejection of this theory, the continuation of the marxist analysis of the lessons of the past and the conditions of the class struggle in the present epoch on the basis of the work of the communist lefts, and the recognition of the impossibility of centrism in this epoch, is the opposite of a disarmament of the revolutionary organization faced with bourgeois ideology; it is its indispensable armament for combating this ideology in all its forms, and for preparing the formation of a real revolutionary party.
[1] ‘Less better but better' was a term figuring in the activities resolution of the 5th Congress of ICC (cf IR 35).
Everywhere, from the developed to the underdeveloped countries, in every branch of industry, capitalism in crisis is imposing; its austerity on the workers. In Europe, the rate of unemployment has reached 11%. Even in countries like Holland, Sweden or Britain where the ‘Welfare State' is a well-established tradition, spending on health and social services has been drastically cut. Everywhere, the proletariat is under attack. And everywhere, it is forced to defend itself: to defend itself as massively as possible, with increasing violence, more and more against governments, police and the sabotage of the struggle by the unions and those left parties without any governmental responsibilities.
Simultaneous Struggles and the Tendency Towards Extension
Faced with the bourgeoisie's attack throughout the class, the workers are reacting in every branch of industry: in the state sector as in private industry, in traditional and high-tech branches, in manufacturing and services and in every country. The simultaneity of the struggles is continuing, especially in Europe, at the heart of the world's greatest concentration of proletarians. And the bourgeoisie wants at all costs to hide this simultaneity from the workers, to try and prevent them:
-- from becoming aware that they are not alone, that at the other end of the country, on the other side of the border, their class brothers are confronting the same problems and are fighting as well;
-- from gaining confidence in their own strength;
-- from unifying their struggles.
The simultaneity of the struggle noses concretely the possibility of its extension. The tendency to extend the struggle has made a vigorous appearance on several occasions, within one industrial branch, but also in a number of large-scale conflicts where several sectors have entered the fray, as in Brazil and Greece. Today's struggles are all the more significant and indicative of the class' present combativity, in that under the difficult conditions of the crisis - the threat of unemployment and increasing state repression, the unions' strategy of division and demobilisation - going on strike is an altogether more difficult decision than in previous periods of struggle. Even if the number of strike-days lost is less than it was at the beginnings of the ‘70s, nonetheless over the last few months millions of workers have been involved in movements of struggle.
The Need for a Mass Struggle
Alongside a strict censorship of news on the social situation, a continuous propaganda campaign is being conducted around the theme of ‘it's useless to struggle'. The images of workers' defeats are spread before us ad nauseam: gloomy ends to strikes, impotence in the face of repression, division amongst the workers, etc. The aim of all this propaganda is to hold back the open expression of discontent, to profit from the growing loss of illusions in the unions, to transform all this into passivity, to induce a feeling; of defeat, of demoralization, of individual atomization.
Just like the supposed ‘passivity' of the workers, the so-called ‘uselessness' of the struggle is a lie. The present level of class struggle does not prevent the growing attacks on the working class' living conditions, but it does limit the ruling class' room for maneuver in its offensive and acts as a brake on the attacks. This is not expressed as such in the results of each conflict; the attack is hampered at the level of the working class as a whole. Even if there are no lasting gains from each conflict, every expression of workers' discontent and resistance is part of the resistance of the whole working class, which has its effect. The more the working class resists the bourgeoisie's attacks, the more it limits the latter's room for maneuver, and the more difficult it makes the planning of these attacks. The very extent of the present campaign to belittle the workers' struggles reveals the anxiety of the ruling class. For the working class, abandoning the struggle would mean leaving the bourgeoisie's hands free to attack still more strongly on the economic level, to keep the class in a state of impotence and isolation.
The Need for Self-Organization, Against and Outside the Unions
On the economic level, the results of the struggle can only be temporary and extremely limited; far more important are its results on the development of the workers' self-confidence and consciousness. The first victory is the struggle itself, the workers' will to hold their heads high against the attacks, the humiliations, and the repression of the bourgeoisie. Anything that demonstrates the workers' will to struggle by their own means, through strikes, meetings or demonstrations, is an encouragement for the whole working class. The proliferation of conflicts breaks down the wall of silence, the feeling of isolation, develops the proletariat's awareness of its own strength, and reinforces the idea that to confront the bourgeoisie, the workers must struggle massively, that to do so the struggle must be spread, and that this is not only necessary but possible.
By fighting back, the workers force the bourgeoisie to show itself, to unveil its weapons, and especially the most dangerous of them all: the unions and the parties of the left, because they are the ones who claim to defend the workers' interests.
In Sweden, France, Greece and Spain, the Socialist Parties in power impose the same austerity measures as the right-wing governments in Britain, Germany or the USA, as the Communist Parties in the Eastern Bloc, or as the French CP between 1981 and 1984.
Everywhere, workers employed and unemployed confront the same attacks, and everywhere the left parties and trade unions, even when they are not in government directly promoting; austerity - when they are in ‘opposition' - are the spear-head of the sabotage of the workers' struggles. Because they claim to belong to the working class, because they act within it and in its name, the unions have been and are the bourgeoisie's 5th column at the heart of the workers' struggles.
During the strikes at Renault in France, in the mines at Limburg in Belgium, the division between unions has been cleverly used to divide the workers, break up their action and bring the strikes to an end. The recent TUC Congress in Britain was a clear demonstration of the organized and coordinated division between different trade unions (in particular in the mines, with the split in the NUM that broke the strike in 1984 and in the engineering industry), in order to struggle more effectively against the tendency amongst the workers towards solidarity and unity.
Faced with the unions, who are putting all their energy into keeping the class struggle within the confines of the factory, trade or branch of industry, a growing suspicion is developing within the working class: this is revealed by the tendency towards spontaneous movements that begin without instructions from the unions, towards wildcat strikes: on the railways and the Paris metro in France; on the railways and in the postal services in Belgium; in practically all the more than 200 strikes in Sweden over the last 2 years, including strikes by child-care workers and by cleaning workers at the Borlauge steel factory at the end of 1985.
In all the conflicts that start without any union instructions, the bourgeoisie rapidly puts its emergency measures into action: media campaigns, police repression and intimidation, interplay of political parties to allow the unions to retrieve control of the situation, to lead the workers' mobilization to defeat.
The radicalization of the trade unions, in particular in the form of ‘rank-and-file' or ‘fighting' unionism, which polishes up the union's image by trying to make workers believe in the possibility of a ‘real', ‘good' unionism, plays a very pernicious role. In the Tyneside shipyard strike (Britain, October ‘85), the shop-stewards supported by the leftists, diverted a strike that began spontaneously into a struggle for ‘union democracy'. In the Limburg mining industry, the leftists diverted solidarity and extension into the idea that all the mines should come out on strike before seeking solidarity in other sectors; they matched words with action by physically preventing the ICC from intervening in the strike.
The proletariat is confronting the ruling class' most sophisticated mystifications, the unions in particular. Against this, suspicion is not enough; the working class must adopt the methods necessary to control its own struggle, to take charge of itself, to break down its isolation, and through the extension of the struggle create a real balance of forces in its favor against the bourgeoisie.
The awareness of the necessity for self-organization in order to achieve a real extension of the struggle is ripening within the proletariat; revolutionary organizations must take an active part in this. In these conditions, how is the struggle to be conducted? Here again, the workers' struggles in recent months have already provided the beginnings of a reply:
-- in every factory, every workplace, impose the principal of the sovereign mass assembly, whose sole representative is the strike committee with delegates responsible to the assembly and constantly recallable by it;
-- keep the coordination between the different workplaces, different struggles, entirely in the hands of revocable committees of delegates
-- refuse to delegate decisions and actions to the unions.
The development of the class struggle is only at the beginning of an international wave; it is slow and coming up against the crucial question of the role of trade-unionism. The deteriorating economic situation will increasingly push the working class to give expression to its potential combativity. The outcome of the proletariat's struggle to emancipate itself from the barbarism of capital will depend on its ability to struggle on its own terrain, to gain confidence in itself, not to give in to the massive doses of the bourgeoisie's propaganda campaigns, and to overcome the obstacle of trade unionism.
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If the deepening crisis pushes the working class to struggle, it also thrusts the bourgeoisie towards its ‘solution': generalized world war. The Reagan-Gorbachev meeting at the end of 1985 bears witness to this.
Reagan- Gorbachev
The arms race: The lie of a ‘peaceful' capitalism
This meeting provided the opportunity for an intense ideological barrage on both sides of the ‘iron curtain', which claimed to show that both Russia and the USA are ‘responsible' imperialist powers, that ‘want peace', and that the Geneva summit was a step forward ‘towards peace'.
After the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, the two great powers returned to the threatening diatribes of the cold war: in menacing speeches, Reagan denounced the opposing Russian bloc as the ‘Evil Empire', while no sooner did Gorbachev come to power than he announced that "the tension has never been so great since the 1930s". After these successive war-mongering, aggressive campaigns, marking the return of the fear of war to the heart of the capitalist system, justifying the accelerating race towards ever more perfect instruments of death and destruction, it is hardly surprising that the words of ‘peace' of the two leaders, over a cup of coffee, broadcast by the media of the entire world, should find a favorable echo amongst populations alarmed by the Damoclean sword of nuclear holocaust hanging over their heads.
For decades, history has demonstrated that when the bourgeoisie starts preaching peace, it is only the better to prepare war. There is no shortage of examples: the 1938 Munich agreements which preceded the outbreak of WW2; the 1939 Russo-German pact, broken 2 years later by the German army's invasion of the Ukraine; the 1945 Yalta agreements, which have been followed by 40 years of rivalry between the imperialist blocs and constant war on the capitalist periphery; closer to home are the 1975 Helsinki agreements on ‘human rights' whose inanity is plain to see, and the Carter-Brezhnev summit, which was followed by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
What has determined the ‘peace' propaganda around the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting? On the Russian side, it was essentially the changes in the ruling group. Paralyzed by the succession crisis, the Russian bourgeoisie's foreign policy had been remarkable for its passivity and an uneasy turning in on itself. The Gorbachev team's arrival in power revealed a greater dynamism in Russian policy towards the west, trying to break the isolation in which it has been kept by the pressure of the western bloc. Faced with Gorbachev's repeated ‘propositions for disarmament', American propaganda could not remain indifferent, at the risk of appearing the warmonger. Reagan's belligerent campaigns denouncing the ‘Evil Empire' were the ideological cover for a western military offensive, characterized by the launching of a gigantic arms program (whose orientation had been decided under Carter), which has swallowed up increasingly fabulous sums of money (US military budget: $230 billion in 1985; $300 billion forecast in 1986) , and by the increasingly frequent foreign interventions of western troops. This process is now under way.
Another aspect of propaganda is now being set in motion, based on the words of ‘peace'. To mobilize workers for the war effort, to gain their adherence to the military defense of the national capital, it is essential that they should not consider their own government as responsible for the thrust towards war. It is necessary that ‘the other side' should appear in the role of aggressor. All the fine words of Reagan and Gorbachev today have no other aim than to make them seem ‘peace-loving', to lull the suspicion of ‘their' workers, to make the other bloc appear as the aggressor.
In capitalism, peace is a lie. War is prevented, not by the responsibility of heads of state, but by the proletariat's refusal to go to war.
To make war, the ruling class does not only need weapons; war is waged with men; men must produce its instruments of destruction. The only real barrier to war is not the ‘balance of terror' which each bloc is trying to disrupt in a never-ending arms race (the most recent example being the US ‘Star Wars' program). It is the proletariat's ability to resist the austerity programs imposed by the needs of the war economy and arms production.
The struggle of the workers in Poland from 1980 to 1981, which for months disrupted the entire Russian military apparatus, has demonstrated that without the commitment of the population, and especially of the working; class, to the defense of national capital, it cannot be enrolled for war. What bars the bourgeoisie's road to war is the proletariat's refusal to accept sacrifices in its living conditions. Even if the present level of class struggle does not prevent the increase in imperialist tensions, it does not leave the bourgeoisie's hands free to impose its ‘solution' to the crisis: the destruction of humanity.
The working class must spread, generalize and unite the combats that it has undertaken, and which are still held back by the left and the unions, towards an open political confrontation with the bourgeoisie.
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The workers' struggles throughout the world: Some examples
BRAZIL: Since the installation of the ‘new democracy', more than 400 strikes against the austerity program; October I985, the transport system is paralyzed by a general strike; in November, 500,000 workers in Sao Paulo strike for higher wages.
GREECE: Following the SP's electoral victory, on November 6th 100,000 state and private industry workers strike against a 2-year wage freeze; the 14th November, 1.5 million workers take part in a ‘day of action' called by the left-wing of the Greek unions; a general atmosphere of social instability, confrontations and riots erupting around the university of Athens.
JAPAN: November ‘85, rail strike against threatened layoffs.
SWEDEN: Against the austerity imposed by a newly re-elected Social-Democratic government, strikes in the abattoirs, in railway yards throughout the country, with mass assemblies, the tendency towards self-organization and extension culminates in a movement of childcare workers, the 23rd November, several thousand workers take part in some 150 demonstrations throughout the country, openly directed against the state and the unions.
HOLLAND: Walk-outs in several Philips factories, against wage reductions; October 1985, strike by Amsterdam train drivers and firemen, 23rd October, wildcat stoppages in the port of Rotterdam; the dockers protest against the recently signed union/management agreement on work speeds and wage reductions.
FRANCE: September 1985, strikes in the shipyards; at Dunkirk, the workers continue the strike against the advice of the unions; 30th September, 2 days after a very meager participation in a union ‘day of action', a wildcat walk out on the railways spreads throughout the network in 48 hours; November, strikes at the AFP press agency and at the Banque de France; 22 November, virtually all the miners of Lorraine are out on strike against announced redundancies.
BELGIUM: On the railways, 11,000 jobs have been cut in 3 years; in October 1985, the bourgeoisie tries to impose new taxes on night-work bonuses, to be applied retroactively from 1982; faced with the speed and determination of a strike throughout the rail network, the measures are put off for later. The unions present this as a victory, to prevent the workers profiting from the balance of forces in their favor to gain their complete withdrawal, and above all to prevent the strike spreading to other sectors as in September ‘83. In this context, 3,500 workers in Limburg came out on strike against the threat of 4,000 redundancies within a week they had been joined by 18,000 miners. It needed the contribution of the leftist rank-and-file unionists to exhaust the most determined workers and prevent the search for solidarity in other sectors.
UNITED STATES: Autumn ‘85, a three-month strike paralyses the steel industry in Wheeling; Pittsburgh; in the automobile industry, a 6-day wage strike at Chrysler; on the construction site of the Seabrooke nuclear power station near Boston, 2,500 workers of all trades strike together in spite of the inter-trade barriers set up by the unions; at the country's largest food-storage centre, at Watsonville, California, workers' combativity appears in the refusal of mass assemblies to accept the agreement signed by the unions.
The first stirrings of the proletariat against the First World War
Some lessons for the regroupment of revolutionaries
Who today remembers Zimmerwald, that small Swiss village which in September 1915 was the scene of the first international socialist conference since the beginning of the First World War? And yet the name gave hope to millions of workers flung into the horrors o imperialist war. Having been mobilized for war by the workers' parties it had given birth to through the course of decades of capitalism's peaceful evolution, the international working class, now literally betrayed, and forced to massacre itself for the interests of the imperialist powers, was plunged into the most profound crisis, the most violent trauma it had ever been subjected to.
Zimmerwald was the first response of the proletariat on an international scale to the carnage on the battlefields, to the foul killing which capital had forced them to take part in. It symbolized the protest of all the exploited against the barbarism of' war. It prepared the proletariat's revolutionary response to the war in Russia and in Germany. Zimmerwald rehoisted the flag of internationalism which had been dropped into the mud of the Union Sacree. It constituted the first stage of regroupment of revolutionaries for the Third International. It is for this reason that Zimmerwald is part of our heritage. It is still very rich in lessons for the proletariat, lessons which have to be reappropriated in order to prepare the revolution of tomorrow.
The first reactions
The First World War provoked the most profound crisis the workers' movement had ever known. This crisis cut the socialist parties in two: one part passed directly to the bourgeoisie by adhering to the Union Sacree; another part refused to march into the imperialist war. The war posed the question of the break-up of these parties and of a split. The question of the formation of new revolutionary parties and of a new International excluding the fractions which had passed over to the enemy, had been posed since the outbreak of the war.
The Second International died on August 4th 1914, the day the French and German socialist parties, the very ones which had a leading role to play in the struggle against the war, voted for the war credits. The leadership of these and others such as the Belgian and British parties bears the direct responsibility for the recruitment of workers behind the banners of the national capital. It was this leadership which caused the involvement of millions of workers in the first massive world butchery in the name of ‘the defense of the endangered fatherland' and of the ‘Union Sacree against the enemy'. The resolutions against war adopted by preceding congresses of the International at Stuttgart and Basle were trampled underfoot; the flag of the International was spattered with the blood of workers sent to the front. The slogan ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite' became ‘Proletarians of all countries, tear each others' throats out' in the mouths of the social‑patriots.
Never was the face of such an infamous treason raised with such impudence. Vandervelde, the president of the International became a minister in the Belgian government overnight. Jules Guesde, the head of the socialist party in France also became a minister. The leadership of the British Socialist Party (BSP) went as far as organizing the military recruitment campaign on behalf of the government.
The betrayal of the leadership of these parties did not follow from a betrayal by the International. The latter had collapsed and broken up into autonomous national parties which supported their respective bourgeoisie instead of applying the decisions of the congresses against the war. By ceasing to be an instrument in the hands of the entire international proletariat, it was nothing more than a corpse. Its collapse was the culminating point of a whole process in which reformism and opportunism triumphed in the larger parties.
The betrayal of the leaders was the ultimate event in a long evolution which the left tendencies in the International had not been able to prevent. Nevertheless, the betrayal of August 4th did not signify the betrayal of all the parties, nor even of the entirety of some parties - like the German social democracy - which from the very beginning had been confronted by the intransigence of the left tendencies.
There at first limited resistance of some parties to the Union Sacree, but also the resistance within the big parties whose leaders had become social-patriots, posed the real question of a split. Some courageous parties were capable of going against the current of nationalist fury and made a clear break with the chauvinist current. From the beginning of the war the small Serbian socialist Party had voted against the military credits, and had rejected any notion of a ‘national defensive' war for small nations. As one of its leaders affirmed:
"The most decisive factor... for us was that the war between Serbia and Austria was, only a small part of a whole, nothing more a prologue ‘to a universal European war; and we were profoundly convinced that this war could have nothing other than a clearly pronounced imperialist character."[1]
Another magnificent attitude was that of Rosa Luxemburg's SDKPIL which, from the very onset of the war called for a strike and rejected any notion of a war or of ‘national liberation'.
But the best known case of intransigent internationalism is that of the Bolshevik Party whose Duma deputies, along with the Menshevik deputies, voted against the war credits and were soon exiled to Siberia. Theirs was the most resolute opposition to the war from the outset. In a situation of complete demoralization of all the revolutionary fractions they were the only ones to proclaim the necessity of "transforming the imperialist war into a civil war".[2] Theirs was the only opposition which, right from the beginning pointed to the perspective of the revolution and also to a regrounment of all internationalists in a new International: "The Second International is dead. Its conqueror was opportunism... Down with opportunism and long live the third International purged not only of turncoats but also of opportunism... The third International has to organize the proletarian forces for the revolutionary assault on the capitalist governments, for the civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries, for political power, for the victory of socialism." (Lenin, 1 November 1914)
But no party, not even the Bolsheviks were able to avoid a profound crisis in the workers' movement caused by the shock of the war. In Paris, a minority of the Bolshevik section joined the French army under the influence of Antonov Ovseenko, the future head of the Red Guard in 1917.
Other revolutionary organizations, less well known, than the Bolsheviks, tried to swim against the current at the price of a more or less serious crisis and succeeded in maintaining an internationalist attitude. In Germany:
-- the group Die Internationale, constituted in August 1914 around Luxemburg and Liebknecht;
-- the group Lichtstrahlen (Rays of Light), or International Socialists of Borchardt constituted in 1913;
-- the Bremen Left (Bremerlinke) of Johann Knief, influenced by Pannekoek and the Bolsheviks.
The existence of these three groups shows that the resistance to the betrayal had been very strong within the social democratic party in Germany right from the very beginning.
Apart from Germany and Russia, Poland and Serbia, one can mention because of their future importance:
-- Trotsky's group, which, to begin with concentrated itself around Martov's publication Golos; later it had its own publication Nashe Slovo among the Russian immigrants in France, influencing a part of French revolutionary syndicalism (Monatte and Rosmer), and also the Romanian social democratic party of Rakovsky, in a revolutionary sense;
-- Gorter and Pannekoek's Tribunist Party in Holland which from the beginning adhered to the Bolsheviks' theses and led a vigorous campaign against the war and for a new International.
A third current which emerged from the crisis of the whole socialist movement developed alongside the social-chauvinists and the intransigent revolutionaries. This current, which can be described as centrist[3], was characterized by an attitude of hesitations and oscillation: sometimes radical in phraseology, sometimes opportunist, maintaining the illusion of a party unity which led them to try to renew relations with the social-chauvinist traitors. The Mensheviks, Martov's group in Paris were riddled with hesitations, wavering between an attitude of calling for the revolution and a pacifist position. The Socialist Party of Italy had a typical attitude of trying from September 1914 to renew the international links broken by the war and by voting against the war credits in May 1915. Yet they claimed to be ‘neutral' in the war with the slogan "Neither support nor sabotage". In Germany the best revolutionary elements like Liebknecht still marked their break with the ‘Burgfriede' (social peace) with pacifist slogans "for a rapid peace and one which humiliates no one, a peace without conquests".[4]
The revolutionary movement, itself weighed down by hesitations, developed slowly and painfully. It was confronted by a centre - the ‘swamp' - which was still situated in the proletarian camp. The groups which emerged from the centre and through the confrontation with it were able to develop a struggle against the war. The international regrounment of revolutionaries came about following the break with social-patriotism and through a confrontation with the centrists and other hesitating elements with a view to forming a new International.
This was the profound meaning of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences: firstly to raise the flag of the International by the rejection of the imperialist war through the inevitable break with the socialist parties, and to prepare the subjective conditions for the revolution which alone could put an end to the war.
The International Socialist Conference at Zimmerwald
In the midst of the turmoil of the imperialist war, involving the death of millions of workers and faced with a terrible misery amongst an overexploited working class which was more and more reduced to famine, the Zimmerwald conference was to be the rallying point of the exploited victims of capitalist barbarism. By becoming the beacon of internationalism beyond all frontiers, beyond the military fronts, Zimmerwald symbolized the reawakening of the international proletariat which up until then had been traumatized by the shock of war; it stimulated the nroletariat's consciousness which, once freed from the noxious vapors of chauvinism, passed on progressively from a will to return to peace to an awareness of its revolutionary goals. Despite all the confusions which reigned within it, the Zimmerwald movement was to be the decisive step on the path leading to the Russian revolution and the foundation of the Third International.
Originally, the idea of a resumption of international relations between the parties of the Second International which had rejected the war was born in the ‘neutral' countries. On 27 September1914 a conference of the Italian and Swiss socialist parties in Lugano (Switzerland) took place which proposed to "fight by all possible means the further extension of the war to other countries". Another conference of ‘neutral' parties was held in Copenhagen on 17-18 January 1915 with delegates from the Scandinavian and Dutch social democratic parties (the Dutch party being the same one which had excluded the Tribunist revolutionaries in 1909). The two conferences, which had no echo in the workers' movement, proposed the re-affirmation of the "principles of the International", of an International which was definitively dead. But while the reformist-dominated Scandinavians and Dutch called on the International Socialist Bureau to hold a peace conference between parties adhering to social-chauvinism, the Italian and Swiss parties were making the first timid steps towards a break. Thus in January 1915 the Swiss socialist party decided it was no longer to turn over its dues to the late (Second) International. But it was a very timid break, for in May of the same year the joint conference of the Italian and Swiss socialist parties which was held in Zurich called in a resolution "to forget the weaknesses (!) and the mistakes (!) of the brother parties in other countries"[5], and used slogans such as "general disarmament" in the middle of a military carnage and "no violent annexations" (sic) in the full heat of war!
In reality it was the birth of the class struggle in the belligerent countries and the reawakening of minorities hostile to the war in the social-chauvinist parties which went on to impulse the Zimmerwald movement. In February 1915 the first big strikes of the war began in the Clyde Valley in Great Britain. At the same time there were the first food riots in Germany, riots by workers' wives protesting against rationing. The oppositional movement to the war became more and more determined. On March 20, 1915, Otto Ruhle - the future theoretician of ‘councilism' and a Reichstag deputy - who up until then had voted for the war credits out of party discipline voted against with Liebknecht, while 30 social democratic deputies abstained by leaving the parliament house. Even more significant was the development of the revolutionary forces. Besides the International Socialists who published Lichtstrahlen (Rays of Light) and who were close to the Bolsheviks and the Bremen ‘Radicals', Rosa Luxemburg's group distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets against the war and published the review Die Internationale. Such was the revolutionary activity which gave the basis for an international regroupment. Even in France where chauvinism was particularly strong, the anti-war reactions, contrary to Germany, were first and foremost the work of revolutionary syndicalists around Monatte who were influenced by Trotsky and his group Nashe Slovo. A majority developed against the Union Sacree in the federations of Isere, Rhone, among the engineering workers and the teachers. There were significant fractions within the socialist parties themselves - like the federation of Upper Vienna[6] which followed a similar path. Such were the premises of Zimmerwald. A gradual split took place on the question of the war and by consequence on support for the class struggle which inevitably became the beginnings of the revolution. The question of the break with social-chauvinism was posed. It was posed by the two international conferences which were held in Berne in the spring of 1915. The first, that of the Women Socialists, from 25-27 March negatively; for although it declared "war on war", the conference refused in fact to condemn the social patriots and to envisage the necessity of a new International. For this reason the Bolshevik delegates refused to support any ambiguous attitude and left the conference. The second conference, that of the socialist international youth posed the question in a more positive way; it decided to establish an international bureau of autonomous youth and to publish a review International Youth, to fight against the Second International. In a very clear and unambiguous Manifesto the delegates affirmed "their support for all revolutionary actions and for the class struggle":
"It's s a hundred times better to die in prison as a victim of the revolutionary struggle than to fall on the field of battle against our comrades of other countries for the sake of our profit-thirsty enemies."[7]
The first internationalist conference was called for September 1915 on the initiative of Italian and Swiss socialist Party leaders like Grimm and Platten. Braving the police, social-chauvinist lies and nationalist hysteria, 38 delegates from 12 different countries met in a little village near Berne. The location of the conference had been kept secret to avoid the spies sent by the different imperialist powers. It is significant that the numerically strongest delegations were those of Russian immigrants, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and of Germany, the two key countries to the world revolution.
This conference bore a decisive historic significance for the evolution of the class struggle and the formation of an international communist left.
In fact the conference produced a "common declaration" of French and German socialists and syndicalists, signed by the French syndicalists Meerheim and Bourderon and the German deputies Ledebour and Hoffmann. The declaration had a considerable effect both in France and Germany by the fact that it called for an "end to the killing" and by affirming that ‘this war is not our war'. Its effects went beyond the intentions of the signatories who were by no means revolutionaries but merely timid elements from the centre. Ledebour, for example, despite Lenin's very firm appeals, refused to vote against the war credits, preferring to ‘abstain' instead. Also, because the declaration emanated from socialists of the belligerent countries it rapidly appeared as an incitement to fraternization between the soldiers of both sides in the war.
Finally, the Manifesto, written by Trotsky and Grimm and addressed to the proletarians in Europe, because it was unanimously adopted by the sociallists of 12 countries, went on to have a considerable effect on the workers and soldiers. Translated and distributed into several languages mostly in clandestine leaflet or pamphlet form, the Manifesto appeared as a living protestation by the internationalists against barbarism:
"Europe has become a gigantic human slaughter house. The whole of civilization, the product of the work of many generations has collapsed. The most savage barbarism is today triumphing over what used to be the pride of humanity."
It denounced the representatives of the parties who "had placed themselves at the service of their government and have tried via the press and their emissaries to win the neutral countries over to their government's policies", and the International Socialist Bureau which had "completely failed in its task". "Beyond frontiers, beyond frontiers, beyond battlefields, beyond devastated towns and countryside, proletarians of all countries, unite!"[8]
Faced with the gravity of the situation the ambiguities contained in the Manifesto became secondary in the minds of workers who saw in it the first signs of internationalism. The Manifesto was in fact the fruit of a compromise between the different tendencies at Zimmerwald who wanted to app ear as a united movement in the face of the imperialist powers.
Bolsheviks criticized with revolutionary intransigence the Manifesto's pacifist tone - "drawing the working class into a struggle for peace" - and the absence of the perspective of the revolu ion: "The manifesto doesn't give any clear indication of the means of combating the war".[9]
It is significant, however, that the left, without abandoning its critiques, voted for the Manifesto. Lenin quite correctly justified this attitude of the left as follows:
"Should our central committee have signed this inconsequent and timid manifesto? We think it should. We haven't abandoned any of our opinions, of our slogans, of our tactics... It is certain that this manifesto constitutes a step forward (underlined by Lenin) towards the real struggle against opportunism, towards rupture and scission. One would have to be a sectarian to refuse to take this step forward with the minority of the Germans, the French, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Swiss, seeing as we retain our full freedom of movement and are entirely free to criticize the present half-heartedness in working towards greater results."[10]
The left, regrouping seven to eight delegates, a tiny minority, was conscious of this step forward. The international bourgeoisie in fact wasn't mistaken on the meaning of Zimmerwald. Either it used the most infamous calumnies in order to present the revolutionaries as ‘enemy agents', and it was backed up in this by the social-chauvinists, or else, as much as possible, it censored any article dealing with the results of the conference. It wasn't for nothing that the bourgeoisie of both camps were afraid. The establishment of an International Socialist Commission, to which the most part of the Zimmerwald movement subsequently adhered, was a step forward in the break with the Second International, even if its initiators declared that they didn't want to "substitute itself for the International Secretariat", and intended "to dissolve itself as soon as the latter begins again to fulfill its mission". In France, the creation by the readers of La Vie Ouvriere and Nashe Slovo in November 1915 of a Committee for the Re-establishment of International Relations, was a direct, positive consequence of the conference.
The development of the Zimmerwald Left
The conference was an important indicator of the forces present:
-- a right wing represented by the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, the German syndicalists and stewards, the Italians and the Swiss, all ready to make any concession to social chauvinism. It expressed a right-wing centrism which in the ensuing years revealed, on the question of the revolution and no longer that of ‘peace', its counter-revolutionary character (in 1917 and 1919) ;
-- a centre, oriented towards the left, and pushed towards conciliation by its indecision and lack of firmness on principles. Trotsky, the delegates of the group Die Internationale, and the Balkan and Polish parties expressed the hesitations of this centre;
-- the Zimmerwald Left, regrouped around the Bolsheviks, the Scandinavians, Radek, Winter (representing a Latvian group linked to the Bolsheviks), affirmed clearly and without hesitation the necessity of the struggle for the revolution, becoming more and more conscious that the revolution and not the struggle against the war would be the dividing line:
"Civil war, not the ‘Union Sacree', that is our slogan... It is the duty of the socialist parties and of the oppositional minorities within the parties which have become social-patriots, to call the working masses for a revolutionary struggle against the imperialist governments for the conquest of political power, with a view towards the socialist organization of society."[11]
The unwavering struggle of the left to create a cleavage in the centrists' ranks is very significant. It shows that the struggle of revolutionaries leads inevitably to a process of selection. That the forces in operation are not congealed. Under the pressure of the class struggle and of the marxist avant-garde, a crisis is triggered off which draws a part of the hesitators onto the revolutionary road. Political combat, like will, is a conscious historical force which imposes a pitiless process of selection. At moments when historic choices have to be made, it is impossible to remain for long in the swamp.
For the left, the task of the hour, while adhering to the Zimmerwald movement, was that of maintai ing its autonomy of action and of regrouping itself in an organ which, while participating in the International Socialist Commission, symbolized the flag of the future International: the ‘Permanent Bureau of the Zimmerwald Left', composed of Lenin, Zinoviev and Radek, charged with pursuing its own work at the international level.
The attitude of the Zimmerwald Left is full of lessons for revolutionaries today. For the left, while pitilessly denouncing centrist oscillations, the task was not that of artificially proclaiming the new International, but of preparing it. This preparation required a clear break with social-patriotism, and thus the establishment of criteria for conferences excluding this current which had gone over to the bourgeoisie.
Secondly, this presupposed an absolute condemnation of any kind of pacifism professed by the centrists, who were attempting nothing less than a reconciliation with social-chauvinism and a return to the nre-1914 Second International. The road to revolution could not but pass over the dead body of pacifism. As Gorter affirmed in October1914 in his pamphlet Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy:
"The pacifist movement is the attempt being made by the bourgeoisie, the reformists and the radicals, at a moment when the proletariat finds itself confronted by the choice between imperialism and socialism, to push it towards imperialism. The pacifist movement is the imperialist striving of the bourgeoisie against the socialism of the proletariat."
And so the sole alternative was not war or peace but war or revolution. Only the revolution could put a stop to the war, as was shown in 1917 in Russia and 1918 in Germany.
Thirdly, at the practical level, the point was to construct marxist parties independent of centrism, on a truly revolutionary basis. As the Arbeiter-politik group (Bremen Left), supported by the Bolsheviks, affirmed: "The split (at the national and international level) is not only inevitable, but a pre-condition for a real construction of the International, for a new growth of the proletarian workers' movement." (‘Unity or Split in the Party?', Arbeiterpolitik nos. 4-8 and 10, 1916) .
This struggle of the Zimmerwald Left could not be denied its fruits. At the beginning of a powerful resurgence of the international class struggle, the conference of Kienthal (in March 1916) oriented itself more clearly towards the left. Already the circular letter of invitation from the International Socialist Commission (ISC) affirmed in February 1916 a clear break with the Second International:
"Any attempt to revive the International through a reciprocal amnesty of the compromised socialist chiefs who persist in their attitude of solidarity with the governments and the capitalist classes can only in reality be something directed against socialism and would put a brake on the revolutionary awakening of the working class."[12]
Finally, the resolution of the same ISC at Kienthal in April 1916 marked a clear rupture with the pacifist ideology; it was a matter now "of' absorbing the discontent and the protests of the masses, enlightening them in a revolutionary socialist direction, so that the sparks and rumbles of revolt grow to a powerful flame of active protestation of the masses, and so that the international proletariat, in conformity with its historical mission, accelerates the accomplishment of its task of toppling capitalism, which alone can liberate the peoples."[13]
To be sure there was still, despite the growth of the left which had more delegates than at Zimwmerwald, a large right wing in the Zimmerwald movement. But it still represented a great step forward towards the new International. As Zinoviev stressed just after Kienthal:
"The second conference of Zimmerwald represented indisputably an advance, a step forward. The influence of the left has been much stronger than at the first Zimmerwald meeting. The prejudices against the left have been weakened...at present there is a greater chance than after Zimmerwald that things will develop advantageously for revolutionaries, for socialism." (Against the Current). "No illusions" concluded Zinoviev, however.
Towards the IIIrd International
"Let's finish off any illusions!" "The main enemy is in our own country" (Liebknecht). This slogan found its practical echo in the development of the class struggle in 1917, in the main imperialist countries: in Germany, with gigantic strikes throughout the Reich; in Italy, where in Turin the workers confronted the army arms in hand; and above all in Russia, where the outbreak of the revolution heralded the world revolution. It was the question of the revolution which provoked the splitting of the parties. In Spring 1917 the party of the independents (USPD) was formed in Germany, within which the Spartakist League constituted a fraction[14]. In Italy the fraction of Bordiga was formed. In Russia, the revolution pushed the Zimmerwald ‘centrists' - the official Mensheviks and right Social-Revolutionaries (with the exception of Martov's group and the Left SRs) - into the camp of the counter-revolution. In France, where the crudest nationalist ideology had triumphed, the minority - itself composed mainly by centrist partisans of Longuet (‘Longuettistes'), and by a small revolutionary minority ‑ was at the point of becoming the majority in the face of the social-patriotic leadership in 1918.
The rupture with the centrist elements posed itself clearly as the condition for the birth of the Third International. If this rupture was theoretically valid, its realization necessitated several years and was achieved through a necessary break-up of this current. No revolutionary, in the heat of the Russian revolution, could have imagined that this process would take such a long time, given the tasks of the hour. That's why the Bolsheviks, and above all Lenin, the Bremen Linksradikalen and the partisans of Gorter, were led to accelerate the liquidation of the Zimmerwald movement.
"The principal sin of the (Zimmerwald) International, the cause of its bankruptcy (since it was already morally and politically bankrupt) lies in its vagueness, in its indecision on the essential question which determines practically all the others, that of the rupture with the old social-chauvinist International... It is necessary to break without delay with this International. We shouldn't stay in Zimmerwald except for information purposes." (Lenin, ‘The Objectives of the Proletariat in Our Revolution', 10 April 1917)
The position of Lenin is explained in fact by the orientation of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionary centrists towards the capitalist camp. Moreover, the centrist majority of Zimmerwald was prepared to give in to the social-patriotic sirens who planned a conference in Stockholm in Spring 1917 with the goal of drawing revolutionary Russia into the war. In reality, a conference did take place at Stockholm, from 5-7 September 1917, but this was the Third (and last) Zimmerwald conference. The Bolsheviks, the Menshevik Internationalists (the Mensheviks withdrew before the end), the Independents and the Spartakists sent their delegates. Contrary to the expectations of the Bolsheviks, the left was in the majority at this conference. The latter published a manifesto calling for an international strike against the war and in support of the Russian revolution. It concluded strikingly with these words: "Either the revolution will slay the war, or the war will slay the revolution."[15]
The presence of the Bolsheviks at this last conference went in fact against the position of Lenin in April 1917, which was to leave - as he put it - "the rotten organization of Zimmerwald" in order to found the Third International. The thesis of Lenin was rejected at the end of 1917 by the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, on the initiative of Zinoviev. It had to be noted thit ungortunately Lenin's thesis on rapidly founding new parties and the International, as correct as it was, was still premature, in the absence of a revolution in Germany and of the formation of real, independent communist parties which had broken from the centrist current.
It was necessary to wait one and a half more years, on account of the slow maturation of the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat, one and a half years of revolutionary battles, before being able to found the Communist International (March 1919). Zimmerwald no longer had a reason for being and was officially dissolved by the Congress. The necessary selection, having gone through a process of splits, was achieved: one part of the Zimmerwaldists adhered to the CI. The rest - a part of the Independents and the centrists - joined up with the social-patriots "using the banner of Zimmerwald in the interests of the reaction". The declaration of the participants of the left (Zinoviev, Lenin, Trotsky, Platten and Rakovsky) could conclude:
"The conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal had their importance at a time when it was necessary to unite all the proletarian elements who had decided, in one form or another, to protest against the imperialist butchery. But pacifist and hesitant ‘centrist' elements penetrated the ranks of Zimmerwald alongside the clearly communist elements. The communist current has been reinforced in a whole series of countries, and the struggle against the centrist elements who prevent the development of the socialist revolution has now become one of the most, urgent tasks of the revolutionary proletariat. The Zimmerwald groupment has passed its time. All that was truly revolutionary in the Zimmerwald groupment comes over to the Communist International."[16]
Thus, despite its weaknesses, the Zimmerwald movement acquired a decisive importance in the history of the revolutionary movement. The symbol of internationalism, the banner of the proletariat in its struggle against the war and for the revolution, it was the indispensable bridge between the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. It posed, without being able to resolve, the question of the regroupment of revolutionary forces dispersed by the war.
Today, 70 years afterwards, the lessons of Zimmerwald still remain fundamentally valid for the revolutionary movement. This is true to the extent that revolutionaries understand the historical difference between today and 1915:
a) Since imperialist war is a permanent given in the decadence of capitalism, under its generalized or localized form, the lessons of Zimmerwald remain truly alive today. In local-wars, which permanently afflict the countries of the third world - for example the present Iran-Iraq war ‑ the revolutionaries of the areas like those of the whole world must engage themselves energetically in a struggle against the imperialist war. Like their predecessors of the Zimmerwald movement, they must appeal for the fraternization of the soldiers of the two camps, and work, within the working class, for the transformation of the imperialist war into a class war. Their activity is inseparable from the class struggle of the proletariat of the big imperialist countries for the world revolution.
b) Like at Zimmerwald, the regroupment of revolutionary minorities is posed acutely today. But happily it is posed under different circumstances: the present course is not towards generalized war. The course of the class struggle in the main industrial countries leads towards decisive class confrontations, in which the march towards revolution and the overthrow of capitalism are at stake. Faced with the present stakes, the historic responsibility of revolutionary groups is posed. Their responsibility is to engage in the formation of the world party of tomorrow, whose absence can be cruelly felt today. The regroupment of revolutionaries cannot be an agglomeration of diverse tendencies. It is an organic process, on the basis of the acquisitions of the Communist Left, the outcome of which is necessarily the formation of the party. The recognition of the necessity of the party is the precondition of a real regroupment. This recognition has nothing platonic about it, as is the fashion among the diverse ‘Bordigist' sects, but is based above all on a real militant engagement in the present class struggle.
c) On the basis of the recognition of the necessity of the party and of a militant commitment, the international conferences of groups and organizations claiming inheritance from the Communist Left are decisive stages in the regroupment of revolutionaries. The failure of the first attempt at conferences (1977-80)[17] does not invalidate the necessity of such places of confrontation. This failure is a relative one: it is the product of political immaturity, of sectarianism and of the irresponsibility of a part of the revolutionary milieu which is still suffering the weight of the long period of counter-revolution. The past conferences have been and remain an important moment in the history of the present revolutionary movement. They constitute a first step, however limited, towards regroupment. Tomorrow, new conferences of groups descending from the Left will be held: they will refer themselves to the previous conferences of 1977-80, but also in a more general manner to the conferences or congresses which have determined the existence of the revolutionary movement. Without being a "new Zimmerwald"[18], the future international conferences will work in a ‘Zimmerwaldian' spirit, the spirit of the Left. Such a conference is not an affair for gas bags but something to be engaged in a militant fashion, by taking up positions, by issuing manifestos and resolutions of the groups present.
d) The whole history of the proletarian movement eveal.s a profound heterogeneity. It is necessarily divided into different tendencies on account of its immaturity, but also of the pressure of the dominant ideology.
The centre current (‘centrism') is less than any other a homogeneous political current. It oscillates constantly between communist positions and a greater or lesser opportunism. The present groups which suffer these oscillations, either finding themselves in an anarchistic swamp, or contaminated by leftist positions, are not bourgeois groups. These groups, though each one according to its history is more or less a far cry from the most coherent revolutionary pole, are not part of the camp of capital. Despite their hesitations, their confusions, their opportunism, they are not fatally lost for the revolution. The theoretical and political firmness of revolutionary groups of the avant-garde - in particular the ICC today - is absolutely crucial for the development of the whole proletarian milieu. There is no fatal evolution, no absolute determinism. As Zimmerwald showed, revolutionary groups which suffered oscillations (those of Trotsky and of Rosa Luxemburg, for example) were subsequently able to fully engage in a revolutionary regroupment, under the pressure of the most clear and intransigent avant-garde.
To the extent that history accelerates towards decisive conclusions, the elements or groups which wallow in the swamp are obliged to choose their camp, at the price of breaking up or of going over to the enemy camp. In this respect, the history of the Mensheviks and the Independents in 1917 and 1919 is rich in lessons.
For the present revolutionary movement, Zimmerwald is not a simple commemoration date. It is today as yesterday the flag of the internationalists. But in different conditions from those of 1915, the communist militants are today engaged in rising class struggle, in which the conditions for the triumph of the revolution cannot but be posed. The regroupment of revolutionaries is inscribed in the only possible perspective - that of transforming the world crisis into a struggle for the world revolution. This is the overriding condition for preventing the possibility of a third world war, the result of which could only be the destruction of humanity and thus of the perspective of communism.
CH
[1] Quoted by Rosmer, The Workers' Movement During the War, 1936.
[2] See Against the Current, Coll. Maspero, 1970
[3] On the question of centrism see the articles in the International Review no. 43
[4] See Liebknecht, Militarism, War and Revolution, Maspero, 1970.
[5] See Humbert-Droz, The Origin of the Communist International (from Zimmerwald to Moscow), Coll. La Baconniere, 1968.
[6] See Rosmer, opcit.
[7] See Humbert-Droz, opcit.
[8] Texts by Rosner and Humbert-Droz.
[9] Cf. Humbert-Droz.
[10] Lenin, Zinoviev, Against the Current.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Quoted by Humbert-Droz.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Afterwards, Franz Mehring, one of the principal Spartakist leaders, came to recognition along with other militants, that joining the USPD had been an error: "We were wrong on just one point: to have rallied the organization to the party of Independents after its foundation (while of course holding into the autonomy of our positions) in the hope of making progress. We have had to give up these hopes." (‘Open Letter to the Bolsheviks', 3 June 1918, quoted in Documente und Materialen zur Geschichte der Deutchen Arbeiterbewegung, vol II, Berlin, 1958.
[15] Quoted by Humbert-Droz.
[16] See Premier Congress de L'Internationale Comuniste, EDI, 1974.
[17] The proceedings and texts of these conferences have been published by the "Technical Committee" and are available (ICC-WR and RI, PCI-Battaglia, CWO)
[18] In 1976 Battaglia Comunista wanted to call for a second Zimmerwald ... against the Eurocommunism of the CPs which were supposedly moving towards ‘social-democratization'; one way of transforming a revolutionary symbol into a farce!
The International Situation
Extracts from the report to the 6th Congress of the ICC (August 1985)
A generalized crisis of over-production
The accelerating tendency towards absolute pauperazation
Today, in 1985, 40,000 human beings die of hunger each day, and the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) predicts that by the year 2000, 200,000,000 men women and children will have died from malnutrition. Still, according to the FAO, a third of the Third World's population does not even dispose of the recognized minimum for physical subsistence; 835 million inhabitants of the planet have a yearly income of less than $75.
In Brazil, a country once presented as an example of development, the health minister has admitted that almost half the population (55 million people) is ill: tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria, schisostamiosis, and other parasitic diseases; 18 million suffer from mental illness. In Brazil's seven north-eastern states, more than half the children die before the age of five. Millions of others are blind (protein deficiency) underfed, diseased. The Brazilian government estimates the number of abandoned children at 15 million. The Brazilian miracle has been forgotten.
Africa's 450 million inhabitants have the world's lowest life expectancy: on average, 42 years. Africa has the highest rate of infant mortality: 137 deaths during the first year per 1,000 births. From Morocco to Ethionia, famine is raging throughout the Sahel: in 1984, 300,000 died of hunger in Ethiopia, 100,000 in Mozambique. Since 1982, in Bangladesh, 800,000 have lost their sight through protein deficiency.
For more than two-thirds of the planet's population, every day and night is a never-ending Calvary.
The 1980s, which have witnessed the constant increase in misery throughout the world, to a point unknown in humanity's history, which has never before seen such a world-wide extension of famine, have definitively put an end to the illusions in any kind of development in the under-developed countries. The gap between developed countries and the constantly under-developed countries is growing unceasingly. Today, 30% of the world's population lives in the industrialized countries of Europe (USSR included), North America, Australia and Japan, representing 82% of world production, and 91% of all exports.
It is certainly not the least of paradoxes to see the bourgeoisie using the misery for which its system of exploitation is responsible to make the proletarians of the industrialized world, who produce the major part of the planet's wealth, think that they are privileged, and would be wrong to complain. The aim of the incessant media campaigns on the famine, far from easing the suffering of the hungry, in which they have long since shown themselves totally ineffective, is to create a feeling of guilt in this determining fraction of the world proletariat at the heart of the industrialized metropoles, to make it accept its own worsening misery without reacting.
The first half of the ‘80s has been marked by a brutal drop in living standards in the developed countries. In this respect, the evolution of unemployment is particularly significant; thus, for the European countries of the OECD, it has gone from 2.9% in 1968 to 6.2% in 1979, and 11.1% at the beginning of 1985, reaching 21.6% in Spain, and 13.3% in the world's oldest industry ial country: Great Britain. Even then, these official (OECD) figures are profoundly underestimated. 25 million workers are unemployed in Western Europe and are seeing their and their families' living conditions getting worse as state benefits drop. But unemployment is only an inadequate indication of the developing poverty in the industrialized countries. Thus, in France, while unemployment hits 2.5 million people, there are some 5 to 6 million who survive on 50 Francs (about $5) a day.
In the United States, the richest country in the world, hunger is gaining ground. Whereas in 1978 there were 24 million Americans living below the poverty level, today there are 35 millions.
As for the USSR, unemployment figures certainly won't give us an indication as to the degradation in the population's living conditions. Just one figure gives an idea of the growing; misery; life expectancy has fallen from 66 years in 1964 to 62 years in 1984.
‘New Poor', the ‘Fourth World' - the expressions have flourished to describe this misery that was thought to be reserved for the under-developed countries. The tendency towards absolute pauperization appears today as a sinister reality throughout the world, not only in the death rows of the third world's slums and countryside, but also at the heart of the industrial metropoles of ‘developed' capitalism. The economic catastrophe is world-wide, and the last illusions about the supposed ‘islands of prosperity' of the industrialized countries in contrast to the rest of the world's under-development are disappearing with the generalization of misery from the periphery to the centre of capitalism.
Even more than the dramatic growth in the misery at capitalism's periphery, it is the proletariat of the industrialized countries plunge into poverty under the blows of the bourgeoisie's austerity programs that is significant of the quantitative and qualitative deepening of the crisis at the beginning of the 1980s. The crisis has undermined and reduced the bourgeoisie's room for maneuver; transferring the crisis' major effects onto the weaker countries is no longer enough to avoid a frontal attack on the living conditions of the world working class' decisive fractions in the developed countries, which produces 4/5ths of the world's wealth, which has the greatest historical experience, and which is the most concentrated. If the bourgeoisie is today attacking the strongest bastions of its historic enemy, the working class, this is because it cannot do otherwise. In the middle of the 1980s, the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy is obvious not only in the misery of under-development - it is lived out daily by the working class everywhere, in the dole queues, the penniless ends of the month, the accentuation of exploitation at work, day to day worries and problems, the anxiety for tomorrow. Over and above the figures, this is the balance sheet of the capitalist crisis, of a bankrupt system that has nothing left to offer.
Faced with this truth appearing more and more clearly, the bourgeoisie has nothing but lies to offer. Ever since the beginning of the open crisis of its economy at the end of the ‘60s, the bourgeoisie has constantly proclaimed that it has the remedies to the crisis, that tomorrow everything will be fine, and yet the situation has constantly degenerated. Today, Reagan and the American bourgeoisie are once again serving up the shameless propaganda in the form of ‘Reaganomics', accompanied by a ‘new technological revolution' sauce, and to prove these affirmations, we are presented with the recovery of the American economy. What exactly is this famous recovery that we are so often told about? What is the state of the world economy?
In spite of all the bourgeoisie' talk, claiming daily to have felled the monster of the crisis, the recovery of the American economy has been the tree that has hidden the forest of the world recession. The planetary economy has not emerged from the recession begun with the opening of the 198Os. Thus, while in 1984 grew in value by 6.5% and 6.1%, for imports and exports respectively, this was only after three continuous years of recession. The recovery has not been enough to get back to the level of 1980. Relative to 1980, the industrialized countries' exports and imports have fallen by 2% and 4.5%, respectively. This decline is even greater for the countries of the third world, whose exports and imports have fallen in the same period by 13.7%, and 12.5%.
A generalized crisis of overproduction
Mounting stocks of minerals and closing mines, farm produce heaped up in the silos and refrigerators while crops are destroyed wholesale, closing factories and masses of workers unemployed - all this expresses one thing: the generalized crisis of overproduction.
Let's take just one example: oil, a symbol in itself! Despite the paralysis of production in war-locked Iran and Iraq, both big exporters during the 1970s, overproduction is raging. The scarcity which supposedly threatened the world economy in 1974 has been definitively forgotten. OPEC is on the verge of breaking up. Stocks are piling up on land and sea, supertankers are rotting in the Norwegian fjords, or sent to the breaker's yard, the shipyards' order books are empty, the oil companies have cash-flow problems and the bankers who have lent them money are biting their nails. The black gold is incapable of extracating Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela or Indonesia from their underdevelopment and misery, while even ‘rich' countries like Saudi Arabia are announcing balance of payments deficits. The overproduction of oil affects the whole world economy, and resonates with the overproduction in other sectors.
The generalized crisis of overproduction is a crying demonstration of capitalism's contradictions. American farmers are pulling the bankers who lent to them down into bankruptcy, while cereals rot in the silos for lack of a solvent market, and famine ravages the world. And today, this intolerable contrast has erupted in the ‘rich' countries, where a mere shop window separates the unemployed and the ‘new poor' from the ‘riches' which can no longer be sold, and pile up until they rot.
The infernal cycle of overproduction is getting worse. In a saturated market, competition intensifies; production costs must be lowered, and therefore so must wares. Therefore the number of wage earners which turn reduces the solvent market and intensifies competition ... Thus each country tries to reduce its imports and increase its exports, and the market continues inexorably to contract.
The end of American recovery
Already 1985 mark the slowdown of the American economy which is showing signs of running out of steam. The enormous budget deficit is more and more inadequate in maintaining US economic activity: the growth rate has fallen from 6.8% in 1984 to a feeble 1.6%, for the first 6 months of 1985. American industry is suffering from the dollar's high exchange rate, which is hitting its exports and its competivity against its Japanese and European rivals, who are cutting; themselves large shares out of the world market, and even in the US home market. Between May 1984 and May 1985, US exports fell by 3.1%.
Reflecting the slowdown in growth, the net income of the 543 major US companies fell by 11.3%, during the first quarter of 1985, and by 14%, during the second. The three major US car manufacturers recorded a drop in profits of 26.4% while the decline in the hi-tech sector, with a 15% drop in IBM's profits, and losses for Wang, Apple and Texas Instruments (3.9 million dollars for the latter, at the second quarter of 1985), have blown to pieces the myth of the supposed technological revolution that was to have given capitalism a second wind.
Whereas a whole series of important sectors of the American economy, such as the oil and steel industries, and agriculture (US farm debt today exceeds that of Brazil and Mexico together), have never emerged from the doldrums, today new crucial sectors are joining them in the crisis - construction, electronics, the computer and car industries.
In this situation, to maintain a minimum of health in the economies of the industrialized countries, the American state will have to allow the balance of payments and budget deficits to grow ever more enormous. Even the world's greatest economic power cannot permit itself this luxury, which would mean in the end that its debt would reach the limits of the finance available on the world market.
The perspective of a new dive into recession
After hardly two years, the famous victorious recovery of the American economy, so dear to Reagan, is showing signs of exhaustion. This illustrates clearly the world economy's constant tendency towards shorter recoveries, of more limited effects, while at the same time the periods of recession become longer and deeper. This demonstrates the acceleration of the crisis and the increasing damage that its effects wreak on the world economy.
With the slowdown of the American economy, the perspective of a still-deeper plunge into recession looms on the horizon. No bourgeois economists dare to forecast the effects of a lasting recession on the world economy. The recession of 1981-82 was the worst since 1929, and the one to come, because it expresses the impotence and exhaustion of the recipes adopted by the Reagan administration since then, can only be still deeper and longer lasting in the developed countries, since the under-developed countries have never emerged from the recession begun at the opening of the 1980s.
The plunge into recession implies:
-- A new decline in world trade, following the contraction of the solvement market, when in 1984 it had still not returned to the level of 1980;
-- A fall in production, which will hit the heart of the industrialized countries still harder than in 1981-82, while the production of the under-developed countries has not stopped falling since 1981;
-- More company bankruptcies, more factory closures; millions more laid-off workers will join the ranks of the unemployed, which have not stopped swelling in every country except the USA, despite the ‘recovery';
-- And, in the end, an increased fragility of the international monetary system, which is likely to culminate in monetary storms and a return to high rates of inflation.
It is understandable that the bourgeoisie, faced with such a perspective, should want to hold back as long as possible this plunge into the crisis, for behind the collapse of capital looms a developing instability on every level: economic, political, military and above all, social. Its room for maneuver is more and more limited as the crisis deepens, and now that they have witnessed the bankruptcy of all their theories, the irresistible exhaustion of all the measures they have recommended, the wise economists of the ruling class are anxiously scanning the future, what they themselves call the "economy's unexplored zones", thereby admitting their own ignorance and impotence.
The bourgeoisie no longer has any economic policies to propose; more and more, day to day measures are forced on it. The bourgeoisie is flying without instruments to try and put off a catastrophe. However, the fact that its room for maneuver is diminishing does not mean it no longer exists; and from a certain standpoint, the very restriction of the room for maneuver pushes the ruling class to do so more intelligently. However, all the measures adopted, while they make it possible to put off the deadline, and to slow down the crisis' devastating effects, contribute to making the deadlines more catastrophic, accumulating capitalism's contradictions, pushing the tension daily closer to its breaking point.
The international monetary system is a good example of this situation, and of the contradictions in which the theoreticians and managers of capital are caught. While the policy adopted during the ‘70s, of easy credit and a cheap dollar, made it possible, by absorbing part of the surplus product, to put off the deadlines at the same time as it ensured the supremacy of the dollar, it is expressed today in a mountain of debt all over the world, which, with the recession of the 1980s, states, companies, and individuals are less and less able to repay. The breath of panic that blew through the world's financial markets in the winter of 81-82 due to the inability of third world countries to pay back a debt of 300 billion dollars, could only be calmed by the intervention of the great international lending organisms such as the world Bank and the IMF, which imposed draconian austerity programs on the indebted countries as a condition for according new credits. While they did not make possible the repayment of the overall debt, these credits at least allowed the maintenance of interest payments to give the banks a breathing space while awaiting the results of the hastily erected austerity plans.
However, while a crisis was avoided, the international monetary system's fragility has nonetheless continued to grow. The bankruptcy of the Continental Illinois in 1983, whose debts were the least weak, forced the American state to intervene rapidly to mobilize $8 billion aimed at plugging the hole and avoiding a chain reaction in the US banking system, which, once again, could have led to a major crisis. Despite the American recovery, these last years have seen a record number of bank failures in the US, and some 100 more bankruptcies were forecast for 1985 as a result of the slowdown in the American economy.
But if the third world's debts are large, they are nothing compared with the $6000 billion of debt accumulated by state, companies and individuals in the USA. In such conditions it's easy to see that Volker, head of the Federal Reserve, can say that: "debt is a pistol aimed at the American economy."
The crisis of the American farming, industry, whose competivity has been wiped out by the rise of the US dollar, is directly expressed in a series of bankruptcies of farm savings banks; for the first time since 1929, anxious depositors are to be seen queuing up at the doors of closed banks. Federal intervention has made it possible to stave off a worse panic, but today the Federal Farm loan organization (the Farmer Bank) is itself on the verge of bankruptcy, with a deficit of more than $10 billion that the state will have to fill in. The mere slowdown of the US economy in the first half of 1985 has been transformed, for Bank America, the USA's second largest bank, into enormous losses for the second quarter of 1985: $338 billion. At this rate, the federal state is likely to have more and more difficulty in filling in the gaping holes that opening in the accounts of American banks. This situation contains the germ of the bankruptcy of the whole international monetary system, with the dollar at the heart of the bankruptcy. The speculation which has taken the dollar to the heights is likely to turn against it, and still further accentuate the yo-yo movement that, in six months (March to August 1985) has taken it from ff10.60 to ff8.50 and severely disturbed the equilibrium of the international banking system.
In these conditions, it is easy to understand the anxiety that is gripping the capitalists, with the slowdown of the American economy and the worsening world-wide recession looming on the horizon, and which means a dramatic aggravation of their difficulties, as millions of workers are laid off, thousands of companies go into liquidation, and new states are unable to continue paying their debts. Capital's contradictions on the financial level will become explosive, and are likely to take on the form of panic crisis of speculatory capital on the world financial markets; and, because the international banking system is indissolubly tied to the international monetary system centered around the dollar, by monetary storms that will reveal a return to large-scale inflation.
Even though diminished, inflation has certainly not disappeared, and if we consider that the inflation of the ‘70s was reduced essentially thanks to the fall in the prices of raw materials which, apart from oil, have dropped by 28% between 1980 and 1985, and thanks to falling production costs due to the attack on wages and redundancies, then even its low level during the first half of the ‘80s is a demonstration ‘a contrario' of the increased inflationary pressures linked to the gigantic debt, to the weight of unproductive sectors (especially army and police), and to the load of the bankrupt but strategic sectors that the state has to finance. Thus, even as far as inflation is concerned, in reality the situation is far from having improved, and inflationary pressures are far stronger now than they ever were during the ‘70s; this means that the return of inflation will become, much more quickly than in the past, a tendency towards hyper-inflation.
While the 1970s demonstrated the bourgeoisie's ability to transfer the effects of the crisis on to capitalism's periphery, the 1980s show that this is no longer enough to allow the most developed economies to escape from stagnation and recession. Increasingly, capitalism's contradictions tend to reveal themselves at the centre to polarize around king dollar and the American economy that supports him, and on which the whole world economy is more and more dependent. This is why capitalists throughout the world are keeping their eyes riveted on the day to day results of the US economy; the whole world's economic and monetary stability depends on its health.
This is why, as soon as the first signs of an economic slowdown appeared, Washington sounded the call to arms, to soak the budget deficit, reduce the state's indebtedness, and diminish the balance of payments deficit by restoring the American economy's competivity. But this policy can only be carried out at the expense of the exports of European and Japanese industry which have profited from the US recovery and the balance of payments deficit of the world's biggest market, so reviving the trade war between the most developed countries. However, the US, through its economic and military power, and because it controls the dollar, has the means to turn the laws of the market to its advantage, to impose its diktats, and can also use the blackmail of protectionism.
The 20% drop in the dollar in recent months aimed firstly to restore the American economy's competivity, which had suffered badly (falling by 40% since 1980) from the previous rises in order to correct its balance of payments. However, such a measure can only have two results:
-- on the one hand, to plunge Europe and Japan into recession by closing the US market to them, and through the competition with their products in the rest of the world;
-- on the other hand, a return to inflation, to the extent that the fall of the dollar is in fact a devaluation, which will raise the prices of imports to the American market.
For American capitalists, the temptation is extremely strong to allow the dollar to fall and inflation to rise, since this is the best means for them to pay back their debts in "funny money" after having harvested the capitals of the whole world. It is vitally necessary to keep the US economy afloat to avoid a world-wide economic disaster. But this can only be done at the expense of the USA's main allies.
However, given that Europe and Japan are essential pieces of the imperialist puzzle of the western bloc, and faced with the social instability that can only develop in Europe, primary proletarian concentration on the planet whose working class has, since autumn ‘83, been at the heart of the international recovery in the class struggle which continues to develop, the bourgeoisie can only be extremely cautious and try to slow down as much as possible the effects of the recession in order to keep the situation under control. This is why Reagan is talking about a "soft landing" for the American economy, and at the same time as he demands economic concessions from the capitalists of Europe and Japan (opening of their markets, limitations of their exports to the US, internationalization of the Yen in order to support the dollar and weaken the competivity of Japanese industry by revaluing its currency), he invites them to apply the same policies as those adopted in the US in recent years, ie budget deficits and rising debts, in order to counter the negative effects on their economic activity of their falling exports. But Europe and Japan are not the United States, and they cannot adopt such a policy without a rapidly increasing inflation: that is to say that Washington today is preaching exactly the opposite policy to the one imposed 5 years ago. However even if the bourgeoisie is managing to slow down the movement, this will be less and less effective; the ‘80s are marked firstly by an acceleration of the crisis, and by increasingly serious shocks to the world economy.
Whereas the first half of the ‘80s was marked by descent into the recession and stagnation, with a fall in inflation, the second half of the decade will be marked by both a renewed plunge into recession, which will hit the most developed economies head-on, and a sharp rise in the inflation that the bourgeoisie thought had been throttled in a situation of growing monetary and economic instability which will culminate in acute crisis characteristic of the acceleration of the crisis' devastating effects.
The 1980s are the years of truth, because they lay bare for all to see the catastrophic bankruptcy of the capitalist economy.
JJ
Introduction
This article is the first part of' a chapter dealing with the Dutch Tribunist current up to the First World War. The chapter in question is part of a critical study of the whole current of the German-Dutch Communist Left.
The Dutch Left is not at all well known. Described as anarchist by the avowed defenders of Russian or Chinese state capitalism, or as ‘illuminist' and ‘idealist' by the Bordigists who are more ‘Leninist' than the king, it has been no better treated by its councilist admirers. The latter have ‘forgotten' that it waged its fight inside the 2nd and the 3rd International that it was a marxist current and not an anarchist sect; that it was for organization and not anti-organization; that it was part of an international current and that it refused to be a local ouvrierist sect or a kind of club for propaganda and study.
Certainly there are historical reasons for the Dutch Left remaining less well-known than the Italian Left. Unlike the Italian Fraction of the ‘30s it didn't go through a phase of emigration enabling it to spread out into several countries. Despite its close links to the German Left in the ‘20s and ‘30s, it tended to wilt in the atrophied framework of little Holland. The majority of its contributions, often written in Dutch, didn't have such a large audience as those of the Italian and German Left. Only the texts of Pannekoek, written in German and thus more easily translated into French, English, Spanish and Italian, can give an idea of the theoretical contribution of this fraction of the international communist left.
The first part proposes to show the difficulties in the development of a marxist current in a country which still remained dominated by commercial capital, in a parasitic capitalism relying on the exploitation of its colonies. The growth of the proletariat was a long process, which didn't become marked until after the Second World War and decolonization. For a very long time the proletariat lived in an artisans environment and was fairly isolated in a still agricultural population. Hence the strength of anarchist ideas and currents over a long period. This historical backwardness is however in contrast to the development of a vigorous marxist current represented by the Left and which - like the Bolsheviks in peasant Russia - made clear theoretical advances within the International, being a direct influence on the KAPD in Germany, which always considered Pannekoek and Gorter as its theoreticians. The Dutch Left, despite its weakness on the numerical level, after the 1909 split, had an enormous international weight on the theoretical level (the question of the state, of class consciousness, of the mass strike). Alongside Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks it was in the front line of the struggle against revisionism. It would be one of the essential foundation stones of the future international communist left.
To make a balance sheet of the strengths and weaknesses of the Dutch Left is to contribute to the development of proletarian class consciousness, which is inseparably linked to a critical memory of its entire revolutionary past.
The backwardness of Dutch capitalism
The political weight of Holland in the international workers' movement before and after the First World War seems out of proportion to the industrial under-development of the country and the crushing domination of agriculture. A classic country of the bourgeois revolution in the 17th century, the Kingdom of Holland had its greatest expansion in the form of commercial capital based on the colonies. The golden age of the East Indies Company (Ost-Indische Kompagnie), which saw to the exploitation of Indonesia, corresponded to the grip of the state (1800) over its fruitful commerce, with the king obtaining for the state the commercial monopoly for the exploitation of this colony.
Pushed away from the profits from the colonies by the king, who didn't invest in the industrial sector but in speculation, the Dutch bourgeoisie, despite its long history, was still playing a secondary role up to the end of the 19th century, both on the economic and political levels. This is what explains its verbal ‘radicalism' during this period when it was vegetating under the shadows of the state, the enthusiasm among some of its number for marxism. This enthusiasm quickly disappeared with the first class confrontations at the beginning of the century. As in Russia, where the liberal bourgeoisie was still weak, the Netherlands produced its local versions of people like Struve, liberals disguised as ‘legal' marxists. But unlike Russia, the Dutch Struves ended up inside the social-democratic workers' party[1].
The decline of the commercial bourgeoisie from the end of the 17th century, its inability to develop an industrial capital, its search for speculative investments in the soil, all these factors explain the economic backwardness of the Netherlands in the middle of the 19th century. Thus in 1849, 90%, of the Dutch national product came from agriculture. While 75%, of the population lived in towns, the majority vegetated in a state of permanent unemployment and lived off the alms provided by the wealthy and the churches. In 1840, in Haarlem, a town of 20,000 inhabitants, 8,000 ‘poor' were registered, a figure well below the real situation. The physical degeneration of this sub-proletariat was such that, in order to build the first railways, the Dutch capitalists had to call upon the English workforce. In her study Kapitaal en Arbeid in Nederland[2], the socialist theoretician Roland-Holst noted that:
"Since the second half of the 18th century our country has been in a state of decline, then of stagnation and abnormally slow, defective development. In the space of a few generations, our proletariat has degenerated physically and spiritually."
And Engels analyzed the Holland of the 19th century as: "a country in which the bourgeoisie feeds off its past grandeur and in which the proletariat has dried up."[3]
These historical characteristics explain the slow development of the workers and revolutionary movement in Holland. The workers' movement was at the beginning a movement of artisans and of workers from small, artisan-type enterprises, with an important role being played by cigar workers and diamond workers (who formed a Jewish proletariat in Amsterdam). The ‘Dutch' working class properly speaking - ie those coming from rural origins - was still extremely small in the mid-19th century. The proletariat was to a large extent either of Jewish or German origin. This particularly explains its great openness to marxism. But the tardy character of its industrial development, which kept alive the archaic traits of artisan labor, at the same time made Holland for several decades a chosen land for anarchism.
Up until 1848, the social movements remained very limited, taking the form of explosions of revolt which could not in themselves take up a conscious goal. The demonstrations of the unemployed in Amsterdam and the hunger march in the Hague, in 1847, were not yet clear expressions of a working class consciousness, owing to the absence of a developed and concentrated proletariat. During the 1848 revolution, the demonstrations and looting which took place in Amsterdam were the expression of a true lumpen-proletariat, whose desperate actions were foreign to a proletariat which has become conscious and thus organized.
The first forms of proletarian organization in Holland immediately expressed the international nature of the emerging workers' movement. In 1847, German workers created a communist club which carried out its activities in the Dutch-speaking proletariat[4]. One year later, the Communist League, which had several sections in Holland, illegally introduced copies of the first edition of the Communist Manifesto, which had just come back from the printers. But for 20 years, these first steps of the marxist movement weren't followed up, since there was no real industrial development until the 1870s. The section of the International Workingmen's Association remained under the influence of anarchist and trade unionist ideas (the Workers' League of Holland was formed in 1871). In 1872, at the Hague Congress, the Dutch delegates rallied to the positions of Bakunin.
It was the growing industrialization facilitated by an influx of German capital after Prussia's victory over France which finally allowed the Dutch socialist movement to develop. In 1878 the Social Democratic Association was formed in Amsterdam (Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging) which soon led to the local appearance of groups (The Hague, Rotterdam, Haarlem) who saw their task as leading the class struggle. The regroupment of these workers' associations took the name Social Democratic Union (Sociaal-Democatische Verbond). The term ‘Union' already displayed all the ambiguity of an organization which would oscillate between marxism and anarchist anti-centralism.
The ‘Sociaal Democratische Bond'
The personality which was to make its mark on the Dutch workers' movement from the beginning was that of Domela Nieuwenhuis, a former pastor converted to socialism. At the time Nieuwenhuis wasn't yet an anarchist and led big campaigns for universal suffrage. The activity of his movement consisted of leading economic strikes and helping to set up trade unions. The foundation in 1879 of the review Recht voor Alle - organ of the Sociaal-Democratische Bond - gave rise to a considerable ferment amongst groups of workers. Its activities were multifarious: distribution of leaflets in the factories and barracks, the education of the proletariat through courses on marxism, demonstrations and meetings against the army, the churches, the monarchy, alcoholism and class justice.
Very soon, repression descended on the young workers' movement. Not only was Nieuwenhuis arrested and condemned to a year of prison; for the first time in its history, the police began to arm, and would be helped by the intervention of the army ‘in case of a conflict'. The police had the right to be present in public meetings, to dissolve them and arrest socialist speakers.
Considering himself to be a disciple of Marx and Engels, Nieuwenhuis for a long time kept up a written correspondence with the theoreticians of scientific socialism. The latter, though following sympathetically the development of the socialist movement in Holland, had many reservations about the immediately ‘revolutionist' conceptions of Domela Nieuwenhuis. Marx warned against doctrinaire views which sought to draw up plans for "a program of action for the first day after the revolution"[5]. The overturning of society could not be a "dream about the world to come." On the contrary,
"The scientific notion of the inevitable and constant decomposition of the existing order, the increasing exasperation of the masses with governments which embody the specter of the past, and on the other hand the positive development of the means of production, all this guarantees that at the moment when the true proletarian revolution breaks out modus operandi all the conditions ,for its immediate progress. (not in an idyllic way, of course), will have been created."[6]
In the 1880s, Nieuwenhuis and the SDB did not spend time dreaming of the ‘Great Day' like the anarchists of that time, who completely ignored the real conditions for the maturation of the revolution. Like the other socialists of his time, Nieuwenhuis was convinced of the correctness of the parliamentary tactic, as a tribune for the emerging workers' movement. Very popular among the workers, but also among the small peasants in the north of Holland, he was elected deputy in 1889. For two years, he made proposals for reforms: social security, independence for the colonies, suppression of the wages in kind for workers. These reforms were part of the social democratic ‘minimum program'.
But quite soon Domela Nieuwenhuis began to reject parliamentarism and became the only antiparliamentary social-democratic leader within the newly-created 2nd International. This rejection of parliamentarism led him unknowingly towards anarchist positions. This evolution can be explained by the upsurge of class struggle during the ‘90s, both in Holland and other countries, leading to the numerical growth of the organized workers' movement. Under the pressure of a cyclical crisis, which manifested itself through the development of unemployment, troubles were breaking out. In Holland the workers confronted the police, who had been supporting the gangs of thugs attacking SDB locals. In this climate, which gave rise to hones that the ‘final struggle' was near, Nieuwenhuis and the militants of the SDB began to doubt the parliamentary tactic.
False responses to opportunism
This calling into question of parliamentarism wasn't restricted to the Dutch party. The ‘90s saw the development both of an anarcho-syndicalist opposition and of an opposition within international social-democracy which rejected any kind of parliamentary activity. The domination over the party by the parliamentary fraction, as in the German social-democracy, the growth of opportunist tendencies which this encouraged, explains the revolt against the party leadership by some of its new adherents. Those who called themselves the ‘Young' (Jungen) in Germany, and whose example was followed in other countries like Sweden and Denmark, were to be at the head of an often ambiguous kind of contestation which denounced the reformist tendencies gangrening the parliamentary leadership, but progressively made concessions to anarchistic, anti-organization tendencies[7].
In fact, the question was whether or not the period was a revolutionary one, or one of the growth of capitalism implying an immediate activity within the unions and parliament. On this question, Nieuwenhuis, the Jungen in Germany, and the anarchists crystallized a petty-bourgeois impatience, all the more vigorous because it was nourished by a healthy opposition to the reformist tendencies.
In Holland itself, the debate on the tactic to be used by the workers' movement was complicated by the fact that the opposition to Nieuwenhuis was taken up in the SDB not only by avowed reformists like Troelstra, but also by marxists like Van der Goes who remained firmly revolutionary.
In a resolution of 1892 the majority of the SDB decided not to participate in elections. A parliamentarist opposition was formed around the future revisionist leaders of social-democracy (Troelstra, Van Kool, Vliegen) and some young intellectuals who had just joined the party. With the sole aim of participating in the elections, which had been modified by a law abolishing the census system, and without trying to convince the majority, the minority split. Thus, in the worst of confusion, and with many electoralist prejudices, the Dutch social-democratic Party, the SDAP, was formed in 1894.
This split was not only confused but premature. In fact, the majority of the SDB gradually went over to the tactic of participation in elections it showed this in practice by presenting candidates to the 1897 elections. This new orientation rendered obsolete the separate existence of the SDB, whose 200 members decided in 1899 to fuse their party with Troelstra's. This fusion had the consequence that Nieuwenhuis and Cornelissen left the organization.
The latter, along with Nieuwenhuis, represented the anarchist tendency within the SDB. It was on his instigation that the NAS, whose orientation was more revolutionary syndicalist than anarchist was created in 1893. This small radical union was to play a great role in the workers' movement: not only did it represent a militant attitude in the class struggle, in contrast to the social-democratic union NVV created by the SDAP, which was to play a role of sabotaging strikes, but it would also constitute more and more the trade union organization of the Tribunists, then of the Communist Party[8].
The evolution of Nieuwenhuis towards anarchist positions does not alter the fact that he was a great figure of the international workers' movement. Though he became an anarchist, he didn't betray the working class, unlike anarchist leaders like Kropotkin who advocated participation in the imperialist war. He was one of the rare anarchists to remain an internationalist[9].
Even so, it's necessary to see all the limitations of the contribution of Nieuwenhuis, because for many he has become the symbol of the impossibility of staying inside the 2nd International, which is seen as bourgeois from the beginning[10]. It's thus important to evaluate the criticisms that Nieuwenhuis made of German social-democracy. They were valid to the extent that they went along with what Engels said in the same period, and with what the left said later on. In his book Socialism in Danger published in 1897 at the time of his departure from the SDB, he correctly denounced a certain number of faults in the social-democratic leadership, which would be crystallized in Bernstein's revisionist theory:
-- the penetration of petty-bourgeois elements into the party, endangering its proletarian character, and manifesting itself in ideological concessions, particularly during elections;
-- the theory of state socialism, which saw the revolution as no more than the reformist takeover of the state by the workers' movement: "...the social-democrats are just reformers who want to transform today's society along the lines of state socialism."[11].
But the scope of Nieuwenhuis' critique remained limited. He represented a Tolstoyan, religious, anarchist tendency which was very marked in the Dutch workers' movement and which existed up until the First World War, when it formed the main body of the pacifist current. By denying; the necessity for class violence in the seizure of power by the proletariat, of a dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, Nieuwenhuis definitively broke.with the marxism which he had helped to introduce into Holland, and evolved towards Tolstoyan pacifism:
"...the anarchist communists call for the abolition of political authority, ie the state, since they deny the right of one class or one individual to rule over another class or individual. Tolstoy has expressed this perfectly and there's nothing to be added to his words."
Those who - like the anarchists and their present-day descendants - refer themselves to Nieuwenhuis in order to proclaim the 2nd International ‘bourgeois' from the beginning, deny some very obvious things:
-- the 2nd International was the place where the developed proletariat of the great industrial concentrations was educated and tempered, leaving behind the artisan characteristics which it still had at the time of the 1st International, and which explain the weight of individualist anarchism within it. It's through this International, which had not yet failed, that the socialist proletariat developed numerically but also qualitatively, both within Europe and outside it;
-- it was within the International that the resistance against revisionism and opportunism was developed. It was because the International - before 1914 - was still proletarian that the left was able to develop within it and combat the Right and the Centre. It was within the International that arxism was enriched by the contributions of Luxemburg, Pannekoek, etc. From a bourgeois body no proletarian organism can emerge;
-- it was federalism, not centralism which ended up undermining the International, to the point of transforming it into a simple addition of national sections. This was the basis on which developed the exorbitant power of the parliamentary cliques who finally came to dominate the party. In fact, from the beginning, in 1889, it was affirmed in a resolution that "in no case and under no pressure" could there be a question of "violating the autonomy of national groupings these being the best judges of the tactics to use in their own country."[12]
It was thus that the left - in the countries where it arose - always fought for the strictest centralism and for the national parties to respect international discipline, against the tendency for the chiefs organized in parliamentary fractions to become autonomous from the organization. Like the Bolsheviks, like Bordiga later on, like the German and Polish Lefts, the Dutch Left waged this battle for respecting the principles of a centralized International.
The beginnings of the Dutch Left
That Dutch social-democracy was not ‘bourgeois' from the beginning is proved by the fact that after 1897 it was joined by a whole constellation of marxists whose contribution to the international revolutionary movement was to be considerable.
This marxist Left had the particularity of being composed of artists and scientists who were of no small importance in the history of Holland. Gorter, the most well-known, was certainly Holland's greatest poet. Born in 1864, the son of a pastor and writer, and after writing a thesis on Aeschylus, he became known as the poet of ‘May' - his most celebrated poem (1889). After a spiritual crisis which led him towards a kind of pantheism - inspired by Spinoza's Ethics, which he translated from Latin into Dutch - Gorter went on to study Marx, and joined the SDAP in 1897. Very dynamic and a remarkable orator, Gorter was above all a good popularizer of marxism, which he presented in a very lively manner that was comprehensible to the great majority of workers[13].
Less practically, but more theoretically, Pannekoek inscribed himself in the movement of the international marxist left, and was the least ‘Dutch' of all. An astronomer of some reputation, he joined the socialist movement in 1899. Born in 1873 the son of a director of an enterprise, "he was able to detach himself from his bourgeois surroundings and devote himself unreservedly to the proletarian cause. With his rigorous mind, his scientific and philosophical formation, Pannekoek was one of the main theoreticians of the Left; in many areas and theoretical debates - like the one on the meaning of the mass strike - he showed himself, by the depth of his thinking, to be the equal of Luxemburg, and he influenced Lenin in his book State and Revolution. He was one of the first marxists to wage the fight against the tide of revisionism. In his study Kant's Philosophy and Marxism, published in 1901, he attacked the neo-Kantian vision of the revisionists which made scientific socialism not a weapon of combat but a simple bourgeois ethic. However, since he was more of a theoretician than an organization man, his influence was exerted mainly at the level of ideas, without him being able to be an active force in the organizational battle against the opportunist majority of the SDAP[14].
Other, less well-known intellectuals of the Left still had an enormous weight, but often their confusions helped to distort the image of the Left. The poetess Roland-Holst, though making a strong contribution to marxist theory and the history of the workers' movement[15], symbolized both a certain religiosity that still clung to the emerging socialist movement, and also ‘centrist' hesitations at the time when important decisions had to be taken on the organizational level. Apart from her, militants like Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn stood out as real organizers of the Tribunist movement. Oscillating between a verbal radicalism and a practice which was in the long term to prove an opportunist one, they often held back the expansion of the Dutch Left, which gave the appearance of being more a sum of brilliant theoreticians than a real body.
The drama of the Dutch Left at its inception was that marxist theoreticians like Gorter and Pannekoek, who were recognized internationally and who displayed great strength and revolutionary conviction, were not deeply involved in the organizational life of their party. In this they differed from Luxemburg and Lenin who were both theoreticians and party organizers. Gorter was constantly torn between his activity as a poet - to which he sometimes devoted himself totally - and his militant activity as a party propagandist and orator. Thus his truncated, episodic activity which sometimes led him to disappear from party congresses[16]. Pannekoek, dedicated both to his astronomical research and his activity as a marxist theoretician, never felt himself to be an organization man[17]. He did not give himself fully to the socialist movement until 1909 when, until 1914, he worked as a paid teacher in the party school of German social-democracy. Thus he was absent from Holland at the most crucial moment, when things were heading towards a split in the SDAP.
In this period of the development of the workers' movement, the weight of personalities, of brilliant individuals, was still considerable. It was all the more negative in that the party chiefs were avowed revisionists who used their personality to crush the party's life. Such was Troelstra, a lawyer who had been a Frisian Poet in his spare time. Constantly elected not by workers' sectors, but by the backward peasants of Frisia, he had a tendency to identify himself with the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie. Close to Bernstein, he defined himself as a revisionist, even a bourgeois ‘liberal', to the point of declaring in 1912 that "social-democracy has the role today that the Liberal party played in 1848"[18]. But he was sufficiently skilful to situate himself close to Kautsky's Centre at the congresses of the International, in order to maintain a free hand in his own national territory. Very concerned to keep his post as an SDAP chief and parliamentarian, he was ready to use any maneuver to eliminate all criticism of his opportunist activities. From the standpoint of Troelstra and other revisionists like Vliegen and Van Kol, all such criticisms were just anarchism or purely ‘personal' attacks. The weight of these leaders in a new party which had come out of an ambiguous split was to be a major obstacle which the whole of the Left had to confront.
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The struggle of the Left began as soon as new, young elements like Gorter, Pannekoek, Roland-Holst, Wijnkoop and Van Raveseyn joined the party. Grouped around the review Nieuwe Tijd (New Times), which sought to rival Kautsky's theoretical review Neue Zeit, they began to wage the fight for the defense of marxist principles, which were being stamped upon by a growing reformist practice. Their combat would be all the more intransigent for the fact that militants like Gorter and Pannekoek had had friendly relations with Kautsky and he had believed that they could count on his support in the struggle against revisionism within the Second International.[19]
To be continued.
Chardi
[1] Peter Struve was one of those Russian bourgeois liberals who at the end of the 19th century developed a ‘passion' for marxism, which they saw as no more than a theory about the peaceful transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Their brand of ‘marxism', known as ‘legal' because it was tolerated and even encouraged by the Tsarist censorship, was an apology for capitalism. Struve soon became one of the leaders of the Cadet liberal party and was soon in the front ranks of the bourgeois counter-revolution in 1917.
[2] This book was published in 1932. The quote is from MC Wiessing Die Hollandische Schule des Marxismus (The Dutch School of Marxism) VSA Verlag, Hamburg, 1980.
[3] Marx-Engels, Werke, Vol 23, pp 335-336.
[4] Cf Wiessing opcit.
[5]Letter from Nieuwenhuis to Marx, 28 March 1882, cited by Wiessing, p. 19.
[6] Letter to Nieuwenhuis, 22 February, 1881, MEW, Vol 35, p. 159
[7] Engels' criticisms of the ‘Young' can be found in the collection of texts by Marx and Engels on German Social-Democracy, 10/18, Paris ‘75
[8] cf. R. de Jong, ‘Le Mouvement Libertaire aux Pays-Bas', Le Mouvement Sociale 83, April-June,1973.
[9] During the war, Nieuwenhuis distributed pamphlets by Gorter.
[10] The councilists of Daad en Gedacht (Thought and Action), in Holland, argued in their February ‘84 issue that "in reality social democracy didn't become a party of bourgeois reforms; it was that from the beginning..." A group with Bordigist inclinations like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI) takes up the anarchist and councilist theses when it says exactly the same thing: "...it was these bourgeois tendencies denounced by Marx who entirely dominated social democracy and this from the very beginning of the International." Abundantly citing the author of the preface to the Payot re-edition of Nieuwenhuis - Beriou, one of the ‘theoreticians' of modernism which sees the proletariat as a ‘class for capital' - the GCI thus joins up with the political constellation of the modernists and councilists. See their article ‘Theories de la decadence, decadence de la theorie' in Le Communiste 23, November ‘85.
[11] All these quotes come from Nieuwenhuis' book.
[12] cf the book by G. Haupt: La Deuxieme Internationale, Etude Critique des Sources. Essai Bibliographique, Mouton, Paris-Hague, 1964. A great deal on the lack of centralization.
[13] cf. H De Liagre Bohl: Herman Gorter SUN, Nijmegen, 1973. The only existing biography of Gorter, written in Dutch.
[14] On Pannokoek, there's an introduction by the former council communist BA Sijes, who published the ‘memoires' of the theoretician of the workers councils, written in 1944: Herinnevingen, Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1982.
[15] Roland-Holst's contributions on the mass strike are still waiting to be republished and translated into languages other than Dutch. cf De Revolutionaire Massa-aktie. Een Studie, Rotterdam, 1918.
[16] In 1903, Gorter published his Versen, which were individually inspired. After that he tried to write poems of a ‘socialist' inspiration, which were far from the poetical strength and value of his first inspiration. Een Klein Heldendicht - ‘A Little Epic' - told of the evolution of a young proletarian towards a conviction in socialism. Pan (1912), composed after the 1909 split, was a poem that was less ideological and more inspired by a poetical vision of the emancipation of men and women. Without ever losing his inspiration, Gorter was cut in half between his propagandist activity and his poetic creativity, oscillating between personal lyricism and didactic socialist epic.
[17] Pannekoek wrote to Kautsky that in general he prefered "only to bring theoretical clarification". He added: "You know that ...I only allow myself to get dragged into practical struggles when I am constrained and forced to do so." (cited by Sijes, op cit, p. 15). This is very far from the attitudes of the leaders of the current of the international left who - like Lenin and Luxemburg - didn't hesitate, even while carrying out their theoretical work, to ‘get dragged', to plunge themselves into daily struggles.
[18] Cited by Sam de Wolff - a Jewish social-democrat who ended up as a Zionist: Voor het Land van Belofk Een Terublik op mijn Leven (Before the Promised Land. A Backward Glance at My Life). SUN, Nijmegen, 1978.
[19] cf De Liagre Bohl, op cit, p 23-25. As with Rosa Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek's friendship with Kautsky didn't stop them waging the theoretical battle against the ‘centrist' positions of the ‘Pope of Marxism'. The revolutionary truth, for them, came before personal feelings of friendship.
After the crisis which shook the revolutionary milieu at the beginning of the '80 (see IR 32), the political vanguard of the proletariat is again showing signs of a new strength. One of the most obvious signs is the appearance of a number of new groups moving towards a communist coherence. Some examples:
-- in Belgium, the appearance of RAIA in a process of breaking with anarchism (see Internationalisme 105);
-- in Austria, the appearance of a circle of comrades breaking with the Kommunistische Politik group for its academicism and evolving towards revolutionary positions;
-- in Argentina, the development of groups such as Emancipacion Obrera and Militancia Clasista Revolucionaria, who seem to be close to Groupe Communiste Internationaliste but have also been in contact with other groups of the milieu (see Le Communiste 23);
-- in Mexico, development of the Alptraum Communist Collective and the publication of the first issue of its review Communismo (see IR 44) .
But perhaps the most dramatic developments are those which have recently taken place in India. The aim of this article is to present an outline of the origins and trajectory of the milieu there, based on their publications, on correspondence, and on a recent, visit, of an ICC delegation to India.
The emergence of revolutionaries in the peripheries of capitalism
Before discussing the specific groups of the Indian milieu, it is necessary to make some remarks about the fact that the majority of these new groups have appeared in the peripheral countries of capitalism. In the next issue of the IR we will criticize the position of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, who hold that the conditions in these regions, where democratic and trade unionist institutions have less hold over social life, are ‘better' for the ‘massification' of communist organizations. A similar preference for the exotic is expressed by the GCI who ceaselessly denounce what it refers to as the ‘so-called revolutionary milieu' for ignoring the appearance of revolutionaries in the peripheries (a blatant untruth, as will be seen from the content of this article).
The emergence of revolutionary groups in India and Latin America is certainly an expression of the international scope of the present resurgence of class struggle and confirms - against all leftist theories about the need for ‘democratic' revolutions in the ‘dominated' countries - the unity of the communist tasks confronting the proletariat. But it does not prove that communist consciousness is deeper or more extensive in the peripheries than the metropoles, and that consequently (whether or not this is stated openly) the revolution is closer at hand in the former.
To begin with, we must remember that the views of the IBRP and others are distorted by their inability to distinguish the appearance of genuine revolutionary groups from the radicalization of leftism, as demonstrated by their unfortunate alliance with the ‘Communist Party of Iran' and ‘Revolutionary Proletarian Platform' in India. Secondly, the revamped version of Lenin's theory of the weakest link is based on a very narrow empiricism which fixates on the immediate facts and fails to situate the emergence of these groups in the historical context of the general resurgence of class struggle which began in 1968, and which provides the background to the various wave-movements of struggle which characterize this period. Once this context is grasped, it becomes clear that these groups are appearing between one and two decades later than the groups in the metropoles, most of which came out of the first international wave of class combats from 1968-74. And of a break, thirdly, while there is an important element of spontaneity in the engendering of elements looking for class positions, we should not have tell groups like the IBRP that this spontaneity is insufficient, that there would be little chance these groups finding a solid communist coherence if it were not for the intervention of the groups centered in western Europe, who have a more direct connection to the traditions of the communist left. It will become obvious from this article that the more the Indian groups have opened up towards the international political milieu, the more thoroughly they have been able to develop a communist practice.
It is extremely dangerous to underestimate the difficulties facing revolutionaries in the backward capitalisms. As well as the ‘physical' problems posed by geographical isolation from the main foci of the revolutionary movement, by language barriers (including illiteracy), by material Poverty (things which revolutionaries in the West take for granted today as tools for their intervention - typewriters, telephones, duplicators, cars, etc - are far less accessible to groups in a country like India), there are the profound political problems created precisely by the overt domination of imperialism and the absence of ‘democratic' norms, which makes the working class more vulnerable, in the final analysis, than workers in the West to the mythology of national liberation, democratization, etc. This in turn makes it even harder for revolutionaries in the peripheries to fight these illusions, both within the class as a whole and within their own ranks. Neither should the dead weight of the more ‘traditional' ideologies in such countries be underplayed: in India, for example, it is extremely difficult at this stage for women to enter into revolutionary politics. All this is of course connected to and compounded by the weakness or lack of a historical left communist tradition in most of these countries, in opposition to the prevailing leftist perversions, particularly Stalinism/Maoism, which is capable of dressing itself in very radical colors in these areas. To forget all this will not help the evolution of the comrades who are now beginning revolutionary work in spite of and against these problems.
The milieu in India: the difficult process of breaking with leftism
Communist Internationalist
"A revolutionary organization is always indispensable, even amidst deepest defeat of the class. Of course, the changing role and impact of a revolutionary organization, in a period of defeat of the class and of deepening class struggle, can only be understood through the concepts of fraction and party. Today, in a period of accelerating world-wide crisis and collapse of capital and rising class revolts tending towards confrontation with the state and opening up towards revolution, the role of revolutionaries is becoming increasingly important and decisive. It is calling for the international regroupment of revolutionaries and the formation of the revolutionary party." (Letter from the Faridabad circle to the ICC, 11.1. ‘85)
Most of the elements making up today's element of proletarian milieu in India have emerged out of a break, more or less clear, with radical leftism, facilitated by the direct intervention of the groups of the international milieu, in particular the ICC and IBRP. But as the ICC has always stressed, the future of a group which has emerged in this way depends to a great extent on the clarity of this break, the degree to which the elements involve are aware of where they have come from and how much further they have to go. The group in India which is making the most thoroughgoing rupture with leftism is the one which in its positions and political attitude is closest to the ICC: Communist Internationalist.
As we wrote in IR 42, a number of the comrades of CI were formerly involved in radical leftist politics, most recently in Faridabad Workers' News, an activist, trade unionist paper in Faridabad, an important industrial centre near Delhi.
In India, as in many ‘underdeveloped' countries, the trade unions usually behave in such an openly anti-working class manner (blatant corruption, beating up militant workers, etc) that workers often have a deep hostility towards them as well as towards the left parties with which they are linked (CPI, CPIM, etc). An anecdote illustrates this: while travelling by train from Delhi to West Bengal, the comrades of the ICC and CI got into a discussion with some railway workers who had saved us from missing the train by inviting us into their work-carriage. After a few minutes of general conversation, and without any prompting from us, these workers (who had participated in the great rail strike of 1974) began to say that all the left parties were bourgeois, all the unions were thieves, and that only the revolution would change things for the workers. Such attitudes, which are fairly widespread in India today, don't mean that revolution is imminent, because the workers have great difficulty in seeing how to turn their disillusion into an active struggle against capital. But they do indicate the extent of the workers' antipathy to the unions and left parties.
This accounts for the whole importance, in India, of very radical forms of leftism, which are quite capable of denouncing the unions and the left as agents of capital - in order to trap workers in a more extreme variety of the same thing. In Faridabad itself there had been a whole series of struggles in which, following the exposure of one union/party apparatus, another, more left-sounding one had stepped in to fill the breach, circle had gone through several turns until it came to the point that the ‘Faridabad Workers Group' had been on the verge of forming an ultra-radical union in certain plants; but the ‘arrival' of ICC literature on the union question allowed them to escape this vicious circle. And since this was coupled with a process of clarification of the national question, which is a life-or-death issue for any emerging proletarian group in the peripheries, the comrades were able to embark on the painful path of breaking with their leftist past.
From the collapse of the Faridabad Workers Group a discussion circle was formed which very quickly found itself agreeing with what it understood of the positions and analyses of the ICC. The comrades then faced the question of how to organize. They recognized that the discussion with the ICC had not been sufficiently homogeneous to consider the possibility of a rapid integration into the Current; but the need to intervene in the resurgent class struggle, to defend revolutionary positions, impelled the comrades to form themselves into a group which while still engaged in clarifying basic positions and analyses, could take up the tasks of intervention through publishing a magazine, leaflets, etc. Thus Communist Internationalist was born.
In our discussions with CI, we expressed our support for the decision to move from discussion circle to political group, while stressing that the first priority of the comrades is theoretical deepening and homogenization, which means that the group as a whole must acquaint itself more fully not only with ICC positions but with the history of the workers' movement and the positions of other groups in the revolutionary milieu. But in today's period, revolutionaries, even when their understanding of class positions is only at an initial stage, cannot remain silent. CI will thus continue to intervene, through leaflets through a physical presence, in important moments of class struggle; t will maintain publication of Communist Internationalist in Hindi and - in order to make its work more accessible both to the milieu in India (where English is a more universal medium than Hindi) and, more importantly, to the international milieu - it will produce and English language supplement to CI.
The overall perspective for CI is towards integration into the ICC. But both CI and the Current are fully aware of the problems involved in this process. For a solid and lasting regroupment to take place, a whole work of political and organizational education needs to be carried out; incomprehensions or possible divergences confronted. There is nothing predestined or automatic about this. But we are confident that CI's growing convergence with the ICC's positions, especially those on the nature of leftism, on the proletarian milieu and the dangers it faces, provide a firm and reliable basis for the group to complete its break from the leftist past and assume the enormous responsibilities it faces both in India and internationally.
As is often the case, the step that the Faridabad circle took in forming CI was not taken without a price: a split with a comrade who had played a leading role in the initial break with leftism and has subsequently formed a small circle of his own. The reasons for this split were for a long time obscured by ‘personal' issues but through its intervention into the situation, aimed at healing an unjustified split or at least bringing out the real differences, the ICC now considers that the essential question was this: the CI, for all its weaknesses and immaturity, understood that it could not do without a collective framework for homogenizing the group, and that it must at least begin the tasks of a political intervention in the class. The conceptions of the seceding comrade, however, expressed a greater difficulty in breaking from leftist attitudes.
His argument that CI wasn't a political group because there wasn't sufficient homogeneity within it was actually based, on the one hand, on a classical leftist elitism which judges individual comrades to be fixed forever at a greater or lesser level of understanding and fails to see how consciousness can advance through a process of collective discussion; and, on the other hand, as frequently happens with comrades reacting against a past in leftist activism, on an academic approach which does not grasp the relationship between theoretical deepening and practical intervention. This was expressed, for example, in a tendency to fixate on Luxemburg's theory of decadence without seeing its militant implications for revolutionaries today.
Academicism today generally appears as an aspect of the weight of councilist ideology, of the underestimation of the need for an organization of political combat within the class. Had CI followed the orientations of the seceding comrade it would have postponed indefinitely its work of intervention. We regret this development because these comrades could have made an important contribution to CI's work. But we think that these comrades will have to go through a bitter process of political failure before they can understand the mistake they are making.
It is no accident that the question of collective work should have been so central in this split. We consider that CI, because of its movement towards a clear conception of organization, intervention, and the political milieu, is going to play a key role within this milieu, through its defense not only of general communist positions but also of a rigorous approach to the process of discussion and clarification. This was expressed, after many days of discussion with the ICC delegation, by one of the CI comrades who had been involved with Maoist politics for many years. For him, one of the most evident proofs that there is no common ground whatever between leftist and revolutionary politics was precisely the contrast between the phony ‘discussions' that take place in a leftist group, based on the old bourgeois division of labor between thinkers and doers, and the truly collective effort of clarification where all comrades are called upon to take a position and develop their political and organizational capacities in a context of clearly defined, centralized responsibilities. The defense of this view of organization against both the hierarchical notions inherited from leftism, and the anti-organizational neuroses of councilism, will be a primary task for revolutionary groups in India.
Lal Pataka
The ICC may be the clearest international pole of reference for revolutionaries, but it is not the only one. Since the collapse of the ICP (Communist Programme) the IBRP, whose positions tend to be half way between the ICC and Bordigism, has developed its international presence, albeit in a manner strongly marked by opportunism.
In India, at about the same time that CI was being formed, a split took place in the radical leftist group Revolutionary Proletarian Platform, which had been exposed to the positions both of the ICC and the IBRP. The comrade responsible for producing RPP's Bengali paper, Lal Pataka (Red Flag) was pushed out of the organization after calling for RPP to restructure itself along the lines of the basic positions of the IBRP.
Before describing the discussions between the ICC and the Lal Pataka comrade, we want to make clear our position on RPP.
When we first received the English language publications of RPP, we were not entirely clear whether this was an attempt to break from leftism or another radical Stalinist group like the ‘CP of Iran'. These uncertainties persisted in the article on the Indian milieu in World Revolution 77, which while being more clear on the bourgeois nature of RPP, still makes certain concessions to the notion of a ‘movement away from leftism' by this group. But our own internal discussions on opportunism and centrism[1] and a further acquaintance with the history and positions of RPP (thanks largely to the work of the CI comrades), enabled us to close the door finally on any notion that leftist groups as such can pass from one camp to the other. As it states in the resolution on opportunism and centrism from the 6th ICC Congress (see IR 44):
"The collective passages of a political organism that is already structured or in formation in the existing parties can necessarily only take place in one direction: from parties of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, and never in the opposite direction: from bourgeois parties to the proletariat."
A brief survey of RPP's pre-history makes it clear that this group was always a "structured political organism" of the bourgeoisie. At the beginning of World War 2, the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India was formed, in rupture with the Indian Communist Party, but not at all on a proletarian basis: on the contrary, the policy of the RSP was to fight for the ‘national liberation' of India by allying itself with Britain's enemies - German and Japanese imperialism. The overt integration of the RSP into left front governments in ‘independent' India led to a split in 1969, giving rise to the RSPI (ML), which was characterized by some very radical-sounding positions (denouncing Russia, China, the CPs, and even the unions as capitalist), but which never criticized the nationalist origins of the RSP. RPP was formed at the beginning of the ‘80s from a split in RSPI (ML): again, not to defend class positions, but in reaction against the RSPI (ML)'s: "ultra-leftist deviations" (to quote RPP in Proletarian Emancipation, December ‘85). In particular, RPP defined itself from the beginning as a staunch defender of the trade unions as basic workers' organizations, and has never wavered from this: significantly, the union question was at the heart of the split with Lal Pataka. Neither did RPP ever put into question the nationalist ancestry of the group, or the dogma of the ‘right of nations to self-determination'. The whole trajectory of RPP and its forbearers thus contains moments in the radicalization of leftism, but never a qualitative break from its bourgeois starting point.
RPP's encounter with groups from the proletarian camp has not shifted this trajectory. While the IBRP, repeating the errors it made with Iranian leftism, has persisted in relating to RPP as though it were a confused proletarian group, RPP itself is in a way more conscious that it has nothing to do with the communist movement. Despite the IBRP's protestations that RPP shouldn't mix them up with the ICC, RPP has now publically denounced both these revolutionary organizations as ‘petty bourgeois anarchists', and has identified itself with the CP of Iran and the American ‘ex'-Maoists of the Organization for a Marxist-Leninist Workers' Party. Moreover, the picture painted in the IBRP's Communist Review (No 3) of RPP ‘disintegrating' under the impact of the Bureau's positions, seems to be completely false. It's true that Lal Pataka (which, significantly enough, existed before joining RPP and always had a certain autonomy within it) has left to defend proletarian positions, but the departure of a small number of elements has not resulted in the collapse of RPP, which as far as we can ascertain still has several hundred members and a certain implantation in the union apparatus (another small split which took place at the same time as Lal Pataka's, in Nagpur, was entirely on a leftist basis, as their elements want to defend the CP of Iran's position on the ‘democratic revolution' and are openly opposed to the positions of the communist left, as we discovered by meeting them).
In our discussions with the Lal Pataka comrade in December ‘85, it became clear that he had already advanced beyond the positions of the IBRP and his own former position expressed in Lal Pataka's final text within RPP (published in CR 3), which is where he calls for RPP to adopt the platform of the IBRP. We pointed to the ambiguity of this text, and of the fact that the comrade had not himself formally left RPP, but had been ‘suspended' by them on the basis of various trumped-up organizational charges. We emphasized the need for a clearer statement in the next issue of the paper, denouncing RPP as leftist (as he now characterized it) and proclaiming his break from it. We also argued that the name of the paper be changed in order to indicate this total break in continuity.
One of the positive outcomes of our discussions with Lal Pataka was expressed in a letter to the ICC following our visit:
"We are preparing a statement about our present positions in Bengali for Lal Pataka which will clearly define our total break from leftism; we have no confusion that the rump of the RPP is a left-capitalist group ... Although an eclectic group in political transition, the RPP had at least one positive point in its attitude when it stated itself to be a draft platform which ‘... may be suitably changed and improved through discussions and analyses of the objective material conditions prevailing in India and the world at large ...' However in reality the majority faction of the CC of RPP has refused to face up to the political and organizational implication of completing the break with the counter-revolution ... Thus the rump of the RPP remains a faction of the capitalist left, the inevitable result of which is the splintering of the organization itself. Lal Pataka leaves behind its prehistory - the history of left-capitalism." (28.12. '85)
In our reply to Lai Pataka we welcomed the intention to publish a statement defining RPP as a "left capitalist group." On the other hand, as we pointed out in our reply, Lal Pataka's formulations retain a number of confusions:
"When you say "although an eclectic grouping in political transition, the RPP at least had one positive point in its attitude, etc ... you avoid the issue of the bourgeois nature of this group from the beginning. RPP did not begin its life as a break, however confused, however eclectic, from leftism ... As a well-structured leftist group with a certain implantation in the union apparatus, it could not, by definition, be ‘in evolution' towards anything except a more radical form of leftism.
By talking about the ‘rump' of the RPP, you give the impression that it is only now that the RPP can be clearly defined as leftist. In fact what is left after your departure is not a rump but ... the RPP." (4.2. '86)
Nevertheless, this discussion is a fruitful one because it poses a vital question facing the entire revolutionary movement: the need for a coherent method for grasping the relationship and distinction between bourgeois and proletarian organizations.
The discussions between Lal Pataka, CI and ICC in West Bengal were held in a very fraternal atmosphere, and we were able to talk constructively about the proposed conference of emerging revolutionary elements, in the preparations for which Lal Pataka has played a galvanizing role. We think that these discussions indicate the possibility of overcoming sectarianism, of confronting divergences in a context of fundamental class solidarity. We do not for a moment water-down our criticism of opportunism and confusionism wherever it appears in the proletarian camp, but neither must we forget the underlying unity of interests between the different components of the revolutionary movement, because at root this unity expresses the indivisibility of the interests of the proletariat as a whole.
Majdoor Mukti
Through Lal Pataka we entered into contact with another group, based in Calcutta: Majdoor Mukti (Workers' Emancipation), which has appeared recently in a somewhat ‘spontaneous' manner, breaking with the leftist milieu essentially on the question of the party and class consciousness. In a political environment dominated by the leftist version of ‘Leninist' views on organization, it is significant indeed that a group should arise which, in its founding statement, contains positions such as:
"Against attempts at replacing the role of the working class in its own emancipation by various self-styled liberating agents the communists must consistently advocate that the emancipation of the working class or the building of socialism is impossible without the self-conscious activity of the proletarian masses from below."
or again:
"Against usurpation and monopolization of political power by so-called communist parties and designating that power as proletarian power the communists should bluntly declare that party power is not and can never be synonymous to workers' power..."
In fact, of the seven basic principles elaborated in the statement, at least five of them are criticisms of substitutionist conceptions. While showing a healthy preoccupation with the need for workers' self-organization, this is still an imbalance which demonstrates - in a country lacking any councilist traditions - the immense pressure of councilism on today's proletarian movement. Furthermore, councilist fixations do not represent a bulwark against leftism, on the contrary. From the group's statement and our discussions with them, it is clear that the group doesn't see the dividing line between leftism and the proletarian movement, a difficulty compounded by its confusions between substitutionism (an error within the proletarian camp) and the anti-proletarian behavior of the capitalist left; that, although it insists that "socialism has not yet been achieved in any part of the world whatsoever," it has hesitations in defining Russia, China, etc, as capitalist states; that, having no clear conception of decadence, it is extremely fuzzy on the nature of unions, reformism, etc.
For these and other reasons, it is obvious that the group's break with leftism is far from complete. But we could hardly expect anything else from a group which initially arose without any direct reference to the existing communist forces. What permits us to hope that this group can throw off its leftist and councilist influences is its confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the working class; its rejection of nationalism and emphasis on the international tasks of the proletariat; its defense of the need for communist organizations, and a communist party, to intervene actively in all the struggles of the class; and, last but not least, its open attitude, its willingness to discuss with and learn from the groups of the revolutionary milieu.
Conferences of revolutionaries
The appearance of these groupings in India expresses a real ferment in the proletariat's avant-garde. It is absolutely essential that the relationships between the components of this milieu be established on a serious and organized basis, to permit the necessary confrontation of ideas, to allow for practical cooperation and solidarity. We thus wholeheartedly support the proposal of Lal Pataka to organize conferences for these emerging elements. Though unable to attend the initial meeting, the ICC sought to make its political presence felt by sending a declaration to the conference:
-- stressing the importance of the conference by situating it in today's period of accelerating crisis and class struggle;
-- supporting the choice of its essential theme, ‘the foundations and implications of capitalist decadence', ie in that an understanding; of decadence is indispensable in the elaboration of the class frontiers which separate the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. At the same time, we emphasized the need to avoid academic debates and to apply the concept of decadence to the present unfolding of reality and the resulting tasks of revolutionaries (in conjunction with CI, the ICC submitted to the conferences three of its published texts on crisis theory, the proletarian struggle in decadence, and the present international situation);
-- calling on the conferences to adopt criteria for future participation ‘broad' enough to keep it open to all emerging proletarian elements, but ‘narrow' enough to exclude radical leftists;
-- insisting on the need for the conference not to be ‘dumb' but to take positions through joint resolutions, to clearly define areas of agreement and disagreement;
-- defending the need for the conference to open up to the international revolutionary milieu, particularly by publishing its results in English;
-- pointing out the link between this conference and the need for an international forum for debate between revolutionaries. As the declaration puts it:
"Although the 1976-80 conferences collared under the weight of the prevailing sectarianism in the milieu, we think that the resurgence of class struggle and the appearance of new revolutionary groups in a number of countries (India, Austria, Mexico, Argentina...) is again confirming the need for an organized international framework for discussions and activities within the proletarian milieu. Even if a new cycle of international conferences is not yet an immediate possibility, the meetings in India, by breaking out of fragmentation and sectarianism, can play their part in the development of new and more fruitful conferences at the international level in the future."
The development of the revolutionary movement in India can thus be a factor in vitalizing the whole international milieu, It is a confirmation of the profound promise contained within today's period; an encouragement to revolutionaries everywhere; a clear indication of the need for the revolutionary organizations in the heartlands to live up to their international responsibilities. For its part, the ICC has no doubt that it must do everything it can to support and stimulate the work of all our comrades in the ‘Indian section' of the world proletarian movement.
MU
[1] See IR 43, ‘Discussion: Opportunism and Centrism in the Working Class and its Organizations'; IR 44 ‘Resolution Adopted on Opportunism and Centrism in the Period of Decadence' and rejected resolution on ‘Centrism and the Political Organizations of the Proletariat'.
A year particularly difficult combats, confronting a more and more skilful, but also more and more frightened bourgeoisie. The perspective for these combats: their unification, through a long process of experienced and confrontation
As always at the beginning of a new year, the ruling class has drawn up a ‘social balance sheet' of the previous year. To hear them, they all agree on one point: 1985 has been marked by a generalized retreat in the workers' struggle.
Page after page is filled with statistics showing the fall in the number of strikes, and the number of ‘strike days lost'. Then they explain: in these times of crisis, the workers have at last understood that their interests are not in contradiction to those of the companies that employ them. And so they refrain from striking, the better to defend their jobs.
Far from sharpening class antagonisms, the economic crisis is supposed to have reduced them. The crisis is supposed to have demonstrated the truth of the old song that the exploiters sing to the exploited when business is bad: ‘we're all in the same boat'.
Even the majority of the groups within the proletarian political movement line up behind the analysis of a retreat in the class struggle. To all intents and purposes, only the ICC develops the opposite vision, recognizing an international recovery in the class struggle since the end of 1983. This recovery (the third following the waves of 1968-74 and 1978-80) is worldwide: obvious in the under-developed countries, it also appears clearly in the developed countries - especially in Western Europe - as long as we consider the reality of the class struggle, and place it within its historical and international dynamic.
Paradoxically, the bourgeoisie, with all its governments and its political apparatus (parties and trade unions) is well aware of the situation, and is constantly developing and deploying a whole arsenal of political, economic and ideological weapons to ward off, to confront the proletariat's combativity. The bourgeoisie reveals in practice its fear of the working class threat, while the revolutionary groups indulge in pitiful lamentations because their class' movement is not faster, more spectacular, or more immediately revolutionary.
***********
In this article, we intend:
1) To demonstrate that the reality of the class struggle in 1985 totally disproves this idea that the world proletariat is passively submitting to the demands of capitalism in crisis;
2) To draw out the resulting perspectives for the proletariat's worldwide combat.
How to look at the facts
A few preliminary remarks are absolutely necessary before drawing up a chronology of workers' struggles throughout the world during 1985.
Generally speaking, it is true that in the West European countries the official statistics reveal a low level of strikes and strike days lost during 1985, compared to those reached at the end of the ‘60s or during the ‘70s. But this is not enough to determine the direction of the dynamic of the workers' struggle ... still less to conclude that the workers are rallying to the necessities of the capitalist economic logic.
Firstly, strike statistics (inasmuch as they are not faked by governments always anxious to demonstrate their ability to maintain ‘social peace') are generally swollen by long strikes, confined to a single sector (like the British miners' strike). Now one of the major characteristics of the evolution of workers' struggle in recent years, strongly confirmed in 1985, is the tendency to abandon this kind of action - which is a trade union specialty - whose uselessness is appearing more and more clearly- to European workers.
As we will see, the short, explosive kind of struggle, usually unofficial at first, and quickly trying to spread, such as the strikes in Belgium during October or the Paris metro strike in December I985, is much more significant and characteristic of the coming period, and appears very little (or not at all) in the official strike statistics.
From this standpoint, the low statistics of the number of strike days does not mechanically express a retreat in the working class' struggle, but rather a maturation in its consciousness.
Secondly, going on strike in 1985 is not at all the same thing as going on strike in 1970. The threat of unemployment hanging over every worker like the sword of Damocles on the one hand, the combined action of all the forces of the bourgeoisie - with the unions in the forefront - to prevent any mobilization of the class on the other, means that in the mid-‘80s, it is much more difficult for the workers to launch themselves into struggle than during the ‘70s or at the end of the ‘60s.
A quantitative comparison, that puts a ‘strike day' today on the same level as one a decade ago, completely ignores the gravity of the historical evolution of the last 15 years. In this sense, we can say that a strike in the mid-‘80s is more significant than a strike in the ‘60s or ‘70s.
Thirdly, no strike statistics can take account of another crucial aspect of workers' actions in our epoch: the struggle of the unemployed. Even at its first steps, the beginnings of the organization of unemployed committees in Germany, Italy, Britain and France represent an important element - and one that is completely ignored by the statistics - of workers' combativity today.
1985: The world working class refuses to bow the knee to the logic of capital in crisis
The ruling class may dream that the crisis will push the workers to adopt the logic of capitalist profitability. But throughout the world, reality daily disproves its lying propaganda.
Taking account of the forgoing remarks on the significance of today's workers' struggles in the most developed countries, a rapid survey, month by month, of the major struggles that have marked the year 1985 is enough to reduce to ridicule such assertions.
Obviously, the list that follows cannot claim to include all the important struggles of the year. The bourgeoisie has a conscious and systematic policy of blacking out all the news concerning the workers' struggles. This is already true within one country: it is all the more true at an international level. Therefore, for example, we cannot cite examples from the so-called ‘communist' countries, even though we know the working class is fighting there, as it is in the West.
Even if January was marked by the decline of the British miners' strike, already in February when it was drawing to a close, a new wave of workers' struggles was beginning in Spain, and was to last until March, hitting, amongst others, shipyards, the car industry (especially Ford-Valencia), the Barcelona postal workers (a spontaneous struggle which remained for a long time under the sole control of the strikers' assembly), and the farm laborers of the Levant region.
The month of April began with the explosion of workers' struggles in Denmark - another ‘paradise of Scandanavian socialism' - with a general strike mobilizing more than half a million workers. During the same month, in Latin America, in the country of the ‘Brazilian miracle' and in the midst of its ‘transition to democracy', 400,000 went out on strike and paralyzed the very modern suburbs of Sao Paulo, the major industrial concentration on the American sub-continent (despite the appeals of the new unions, the workers refused to call a halt to the struggle at the death of the new ‘democratic' president).
The month of May witnessed the outbreak of the first large-scale struggles of the South African miners.
The month of June began with the strike of 14,000 New York hotel workers who themselves organized the extension of the struggle with mass flying pickets. The myth of the USA as a country reduced to the muscle-bound social peace of Ronald Reagan was once again disproved. Still during June, and once again in response to government austerity measures, strikes proliferated in Columbia, to the point where, on the 20th, the unions were forced to organize a general strike.
The month of July began with the outbreak, in the USA, of the Wheeling Pittsburg engineering workers' strike: the steel industry is hard-hit in the US. Their struggle - in one of the major industrial regions of the world's most powerful country - was to last until October.
In Britain, where strikes had been breaking out continuously ever since the end of the miners' strike, a large and unofficial strike began on the railways and spread rapidly; in Wales, railwaymen's strike pickets broke down trade barriers to help the pickets from a striking steel works. In France, the largest shipyards in the country went out on strike, and twice, in Lille and Dunkirk, the workers broke out of union control to confront the police for several hours. In Israel, still during July, workers reacted immediately to the ‘socialist' Peres government's announcement of a whole series of austerity measures (price rises of up to 100%, wage cuts between 12% and 40%, 10,000 government workers laid off): the union (tied to the ruling party) had to organize a 24 hour general strike (followed by 90% of the working population). But when the moment came to go back, whole sectors stayed out, while the union bosses talked of "a real risk of things getting out of control".
During August, in ‘socialist' Yugoslavia, a stream of austerity measures unleashed a wave of strikes that hit several regions: the most important strikes mobilized the miners and the dock workers.
In the month of September, particularly draconian austerity measures (food prices multiplied by 10, bread prices by 4, household gas by 20, at the same time as a 4-month wage freeze for all state employees) were announced in Bolivia, one of the world's poorest countries, but with a rich tradition of class struggle, especially in the mining industry, provoking a generalized reaction from the workers. The COB (principal union) called for a 48-hour general strike, the widely followed. The movement was violently repressed. The workers immediately prolonged the general strike for another 16 days. In France, at the end of September, an unofficial strike broke out on the railways - the biggest since the end of the ‘60s. It spread rapidly, forcing the government to withdraw - temporarily the new measures of control that had provoked the movement.
In October, in Belgium, strikes break out in the post office, the railways, the Brussels underground, the Limburg mines, which all go through the same stages: starting unofficially, rapidly spreading to other workers in the same sector, followed by a temporary ‘withdrawal' by the government, for fear of further extension. At the same time, Holland is hit by a similar wave of strikes affecting essentially the firemen, lorry drivers, and various branches in the port of Rotterdam.
On the 6th of November, just as the Limburg miners were going back to work, in Greece 100,000 state and private sector workers came out on strike against the ‘socialist' government's austerity measures. During the same month, Brazil was once again hit by a wave of strikes (500,000 workers). In Argentina, where the new ‘democratic' government imposed, in 1985, wage cuts of up to 45%, a period of agitation and workers' struggles began, which had to continue until January ‘86. Still in November, Sweden ‑ another socialist ‘paradise' - went through the largest strike wave since the end of the ‘60s: slaughter-house workers in the north, locomotive repairmen throughout the country, industrial cleaners at Borlange and above all the strike of the child-minders, who organized their struggle themselves throughout the country, against the state and the unions, culminating on November 23rd with a simultaneous demonstration in 150 different towns. In one demonstration, the workers chanted: "The support of the unions is our death." In Japan, well-known for its lack of workers' struggles, a strike breaks out against the threat of massive lay-offs on the railways. The month of December - to close this brief survey of 1985 - is marked by renewed struggles in Spain: the hospital and health services in Barcelona; in the Asturian mines (against an unprecedented upsurge in industrial accidents); the region of Vigo in Galicia, but above all Bilbao, are hit by strikes in various sectors - once again in the shipyards, but also among; the unemployed taken on by the town council. In France, the Paris metro drivers walk out after disciplinary measures were taken against several of their comrades, and paralyzed the capital in a few hours. In Lebanon, torn apart by wars between rival factions of the local bourgeoisie and by international antagonisms, a 100% price rise provoked a general strike, and calls from workers from the Muslim sector to those of the Christian sector, saying: "famine doesn't recognize political colors; it hits everybody except the ruling minority".
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We have intentionally presented this glimpse of the major movements of the workers struggles ‘in bulk', simply according to their chronological order.
Whatever the differences between the proletarian combats in the peripheries and those of the central countries, they are all elements of one and the same struggle, one and the same response to the same attack of world capital in crisis. It was first of all necessary to demonstrate clearly the worldwide aspect of workers' resistance to disprove the absurd idea that the economic crisis has calmed down the class struggle. It is necessary to point out this unity, the better to bring out, taking the differences between the workers' struggles as a starting point, their global dynamic.
The differences between the workers' struggles in the central industrialized nations and in the periphery
An overall look at the workers' struggles throughout the world today highlights the fact that, whereas in the under-developed countries they tend rapidly to assume a unified form, even if this is still behind union leadership, in the industrialized countries, the struggles have tended to be less massive at the end of the year than at the beginning: after movements like those of the British miners or the workers in Denmark, today we are witnessing a multitude of shorter, more explosive, more simultaneous, but also more isolated struggles.
This is essentially due to different degrees of economic development, and to the different strategies adopted by the ruling class according to the socio-political conditions confronting it.
In all the under-developed countries, whose economy is totally bankrupt, the ‘austerity' measures that capital is forced to take against the workers are inevitably far more massive, direct, and violent. Capital has no economic room for maneuver. Sky-high price rises on basic consumer goods, real wage cuts of 30% to 40%, immediate and massive redundancies such as those in Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil during 1985, are attacks that hit all workers immediately and simultaneously.
This creates the basis for large-scale movements very quickly capable of bringing together millions of workers.
Generally, the local bourgeoisie has no other means of confronting such movements than to use the most vicious and merciless repression. A repression that is made possible by the local Proletariat's numerical and historical weakness, and by the ruling class' ability to recruit its forces of repression amongst a vast mass of the population, jobless and marginalised for generations.
But such methods are increasingly inadequate, and run the risk of a total social destabilization (as we have seen in Bolivia, where this time, repression only exacerbated the workers' struggle). This is why today we are witnessing a sham ‘democratization' of regimes in under-developed countries, often under the pressure of the imperialist powers (eg the pressure applied by the US and its European allies on the governments of South Africa, Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines) whose sole aim is to create union and political apparatuses capable of controlling the workers' struggles (far more dangerous than the hunger riots that have become chronic in some of these countries) and lead them into a nationalist dead-end.
These new control apparatuses benefit from the strength they draw from the workers' lack of experience in bourgeois ‘democracy' in these countries, and their illusions in them - at least at first - after years of civilian or military dictatorship.
In the developed countries, and especially in Western Europe, the situation is very different. On the economic level, the bourgeoisie still has room for maneuver - even though the system's crisis is reducing it day by day - which allows the ruling class to spread out and plan its attacks in order to avoid taking measures that hit violently and immediately too many workers at once. Its attacks are increasingly heavy and massive, but it works to disperse their effects, so that they appear to each sector of the working class as a particular, specific attack. At this level, if we compare 1984 to 1985, we can see clearly that this is a conscious policy on the bourgeoisie's part.
The policies of ‘privatization' of the economy's state sector and the development of so-called economic liberalism at the level of firms' operation is part and parcel of this strategy[1]. The layoffs due to ‘industrial restructuration' thus look like a specific question of job creation in new private companies that ‘come to the rescue' of the old bankrupt ones. The number of lay-offs remains the same, but they appear scattered in so many different companies, so many ‘individual cases'.
On this level, the world bourgeoisie seems to have learnt the lesson they were given by the big scare of Poland 1980: in the peripheral countries they understand that brutal repression is no longer enough, that it is absolutely necessary to create local ‘Solidarnoscs' capable of sabotaging the social movements from the inside; in the most industrialized countries, they know that too obvious economic attacks (like the one that unleashed the explosion in the Baltic towns in August 1980) are too great a risk for the stability of their social order.
Western Europe: the battleground of the most decisive confrontations
As we have shown on many occasions - in particular in drawing the lessons of Poland 1980 - it is in Western Europe, the world's oldest and largest industrial concentrations that the most decisive confrontations of the world working class struggle will be played out[2]. This is where the proletariat is most concentrated and most experienced. But it is also in Europe that reigns the bourgeoisie with the greatest experience of the class struggle.
This policy of dispersing workers' struggles through an apparent dispersal of the economic attack is in reality only an aspect of the complex arsenal systematically developed by the bourgeoisie in this part of the world in order to confront the workers' struggle.
During; 1985, the European bourgeoisie has used all these methods, and has developed them in a more and more concerted manner. At one and the same time, it has had recourse to:
1) A division of labor between different union and political forces,
2) Ideological campaigns,
3) Repression.
The division of labor between, on the one hand the governments, which, whether right or left, have systematically enforced policies of ‘rigor' (ie increased exploitation), and on the other the forces of the ‘left' (both parties and unions) whose job it is to keep control of the workers, which have radicalized their language the better to channel the workers' reaction into dead-ends, or more simply to sabotage any mass mobilization on a class terrain.
During 1985, this movement to ‘radicalize' the left wing of the capitalist political apparatus has appeared first and foremost in the development and increasingly frequent use of ‘rank-and-file unionism', ie union tendencies (usually under the impulse of the leftists) which criticize the union leaderships and apparatus, the better to defend the union terrain. Especially active in Belgium (in the Limburg mining industry), they have played an important part in the strikes in Britain (support for the shop stewards), in Spain, in the USA, in Sweden....
The big unions themselves have radicalized their language. The CGT in France is notorious for this. It has tried to make workers forget its mentor the French CP's 3-year participation in government; for LO in Sweden, the union tied to the Socialist government, which has increasingly been overtaken by the struggles at the end of the year; for the UGT in Spain, which because it relied too heavily on the PSOE in power, is more and more taken for a scab union.
But this radical language has only served to hide a systematic work of demobilization.
Unlike the ‘60s and ‘70s, when they could still organize massive street demonstrations with impunity, in order to polish up their image as the ‘workers' champions', the European unions don't take such risks today. They know that the workers' growing suspicion of them (concretized in a massive desertion of the unions) is only matched by the suppressed anger rumbling in the ranks of the exploited. They know that any large workers demonstration on a terrain of the defense of their class demands[3] runs the risk of getting out of control. This is why the union strategy in most European countries is either to call demonstrations where the time and place are only announced at the last minute and as discretely as possible, so as to try and make sure that only solid union sympathizers take part, or to call many different demonstrations, but in different parts of the same town, taking care to avoid any meeting between groups of marchers (in Spain, France and Britain, the unions have become past masters at this game of dispersing proletarian combativity).
Ideological campaigns. Here again, the bourgeoisie's activity has been particularly fertile. European workers have been daily hammered over the head with campaigns on:
-- The uselessness of struggle in times of crisis - above all after the defeat of the British miners' strike;
-- How lucky we are to live in ‘democratic' countries - especially during the struggles in South Africa;
-- Terrorism, trying to identify all struggle against the state with terrorism; in Belgium, this campaign has taken on gigantic proportions, to the point where, among other things, the government could decide to put crack troops at the gates of certain factories ... the better to protect them against terrorism!
-- The defense of the region, branch of industry, or even of the company, trying to make workers believe that the defense of their living conditions is the same as that of the instrument of their exploitation (‘defend the nation's coal' -Limburg, Britain, the Asturias); (‘defend the region' - the Basque country in Spain, the Lorraine in France, Wallonia in Belgium, etc).
Repression. Along with its economic, political, and ideological weapons, the European bourgeoisie has constantly developed its weapons of police repression. 1985 has been marked, in particular, by the examples of Belgium, which we have already mentioned, and above all of Great Britain where the bourgeoisie, in the wake of the miners' strike and the riots in Brixton and Birmingham has carried out a reinforcement unprecedented in the nation's history of the forces and methods aimed at the repression of social struggles.
Perspective for the class struggle
But if the world bourgeoisie - and especially the West European bourgeoisie - has been driven to such a development of the weapons for the defense of its system, it is because they are frightened. And they are quite right to be frightened. The third international wave of workers' struggle is only at its beginning, and its slow development is an expression of the depth of the upheaval to come.
In Western Europe - which will determine the future of the world workers' struggle - the workers' tendency to abandon forms of struggle that consist of long isolated strikes in symbolic fortresses expresses, even if it is in a form that is still too dispersed, an assimilation of years of experience and defeats, of which the British miners' strike is one of the most spectacular recent examples. In this sense, 1985 has marked a step forward.
As for this dispersal, the basis for the present strategy of scattering workers' struggles in Western Europe is condemned to wear out more and more rapidly under the effects of the worsening economic crisis and the accumulated experience of the confrontation between the workers' combativity and the union jail.
The limited room for maneuver that the bourgeoisie still possesses in the industrialized countries can only go on diminishing, as its system's internal contradictions sharpen, and its palliatives for the crisis - all based on putting off the day of reckoning thanks to credit - are exhausted. On this level, the under-developed countries show the way for the industrialized regions.
As for the unions' and the ‘left' fractions' surviving ability to sabotage the workers' struggle, the permanent contradiction, the constant clash between the thrust of proletarian forces everywhere, and the practical and ideological barriers raised by these institutions, is leading; slowly but inexorably to the creation of the conditions for the flourishing of a truly autonomous workers struggle. The desertion of the union barracks by an ever-growing number of workers throughout Europe, the proliferation of struggles that start and try to spread without any official union support, bear unequivocal witness to this.
The working class can only become conscious of its strength, and of how to develop it, through the combat itself, a combat that will confront it, not only with the government and the bosses, but also with the union and the left forces of capital.
The perspective of the class struggle is the struggle's continuation. And the continuation of the struggle is and will be more and more the combat against dispersal, for its unification.
And at the end of today's process of a developing international movement, lies the internationalization of the workers' struggle.
RV
One and the same struggle throughout history
Strikes yesterday and today
For almost two centuries, the working class has used the strike to resist and combat capital's exploitation, to which it is subjected more directly than any other exploited class. However, it is obvious that a strike's significance is determined by the historical context in which it is placed. Like those of the 19th century, the workers' struggles of our epoch express the same antagonism between the exploited class which is the bearer of communism, and the exploiting class which profits from, defends, and ensures the continuation of the established social order. But unlike those of the 19th century, today's workers' struggles are not confronting a capitalism in the height of its youth, conquering the world, and pushing to make unprecedented progress in every domain. The strikes of the 1980s are fighting the reality of a senile, decadent system, which has twice plunged humanity into the horrors of world war, and which after 20 years of prosperity from the ‘50s onwards, thanks to the reconstruction of what it had destroyed previously and to the development of weapons capable of destroying the planet several times over, has been floundering in an unprecedented economic crisis since the end of the ‘60s.
Today's workers' struggles, because they are the only real, effective resistance to the totalitarian barbarism of decadent capital, are the only hope for a humanity subjected to an endless terror.
But capitalism's mortal wound, the fact that its laws have become historically obsolete, does not make it any more conciliatory towards its slaves. On the contrary. Today, the working class confronts a bourgeoisie that is cynical, adroit, experienced, capable of acting together nationally and internationally (Poland 1980) to confront the workers' struggle.
Because historically there is more at stake, because the difficulties encountered are greater, every sign of workers' resistance takes on a far greater importance today. Those who, today, in the name of a merely verbal ‘radicalism' consider strike after strike, struggle after struggle, with the same ‘transcendental disdain', because they are not yet ‘revolutionary enough' only express the impatience of those who understand nothing about the revolution and the complex process that prepares it. To ‘forget' the elementary necessity of placing today's workers' struggles in their context, their historical dynamic, makes it impossible to understand them at all[4].
RV
[1] On the economic level, the weight of the state has never been greater than it is today ... and it is constantly increasing. We need only consider the ever-growing share of national income that, in one form or another passes through the state's hands. On a strictly economic level, the only used of this so-called ‘liberal' policy is to accelerate the concentration of capital thanks to a more rapid elimination of unprofitable branches and companies, to the benefit of big capital.
[2] See ‘The West European Proletariat at the Heart of the Class Struggle', in IR 31.
[3] Obviously, the forces of the Left are still ready to mobilize the workers, but on inter-classist or ambiguous terrain: for example, the present anti-NATO campaign in Spain, or the campaigns for ‘democratic right' to strike in Germany.
[4] See ‘Understanding the Struggle: Marxist Method Against Empiricism' in IR 41 (2nd Quarter, 1985), and ‘What Method For Understanding the Recovery in Workers' Struggles' in IR 39 (4th Quarter, 1984).
The proletarian political milieu, already strongly marked by the weight of sectarianism, as the ICC has often shown and deplored, has just been ‘enriched' by a new sect. There is a new publication entitled Internationalist Perspectives, organ of the ‘External Fraction of the ICC' (EFICC) that "claims a continuity with the programmatic framework developed by the ICC". This group is composed of comrades who belonged to the ‘tendency' formed in our organisation and who left it at its Sixth Congress[1] to "defend the ICC's platform". We've already met many forms of sectarianism among revolutionaries today, but the creation of an ICC-bis with the same programmatic positions of the ICC constitutes a never - before -attained peak in this domain. They have also reached a peak in the amount of mud thrown at the ICC: only the Communist Bulletin (also formed of ex-ICC members) has gone so far. From its creation, this new group thus places itself on a terrain that only political gangsters (who distinguished themselves by stealing material and funds from the ICC) have exploited with such fervour. Even if the members of the ‘Fraction' have in no way been involved in such acts of gansterism, we can say that its sectarianism and predilection for gratuitous insults don't augur well for the future evolution of this group and its capacity to make a contribution to the proletariat's efforts to develop its consciousness. In fact, the little games of the EFICC express one thing: a total irresponsibility towards the tasks facing revolutionaries today, a desertion of militant combat.
In the main text in IP devoted to the ICC, we read, "This text does not seek to settle accounts nor to fall into a shallow polemic". We might ask what the text would have been like if this were the case. For in this article, amongst other compliments, we read that over the last two years the ICC has shown "an intolerable contempt for revolutionary principles, which have been dragged in the mud by its tactical volte-faces", that it has developed a "completely Stalinist vision of organisation", that it has "sunk into corruption", that it has tried to "sow fear, to try to terrorise and paralyse the militants with low insinuations" in order to "justify its new orientation, its 180 degree turn". At the same time, against the comrades who would go on to form the EFICC it "set the steamroller in motion to crush any resistance", using an impressive array of exactions: "sordid organisational practices", "personal attacks of all sorts, slander, suspicion, tactics of division and demoralisation, disciplinary measures, censure". These are just a few glimpses of what can be found in this article. One might well ask, who is it that has been engaging in "hysterical incantations", the ICC, as the EFICC claim, or the EFICC itself?
One might be tempted to dismiss these calumnies with a wave of the wrist; but they are of such a breadth and quantity that it is reasonable to suppose that they could impress the reader who is poorly-informed about the reality of the ICC; that, because they emanate from an organisation which claims to defend the platform of the ICC (a point which should be a mark of seriousness), they could give rise to the reaction that ‘there's no smoke without fire'. Thus, even if we can't reply to all the EFICC's accusations (which would take up the whole of this Review), we are obliged to refute at least some of the lies contained in the pages- of IP.
These lies are of an incalculable number and take numerous forms, starting with small, ridiculous falsifications and going on to odiously malicious accusations.
Thus, the article on ‘The Decline of the ICC' begins with a ‘small lie'. The first phrase asserts that "most of the comrades who have constituted the External Fraction of the International Communist Current were at the very basis of the constitution of the ICC in 1975". This is false: of the eleven comrades who left the ICC to form the EFICC only three were in the organisation at the foundation of the ICC in January 1975.
The article in IP is rife with these kinds of ludicrous ‘small lies'. It repeats, for example, the old dada of the ‘tendency' that the ICC's present analysis on opportunism and centrism represents a turn away from our classic positions. In International Review n°42 we showed, supporting this with quotations, that in reality it was the analysis of the tendency that represented a revision of the positions of the ICC and the communist left. Here we don't want to quarrel with them for making this revision. But we should point out that this attitude of attributing to others what itself was doing was quite symptomatic of the behaviour of the tendency and is today being carried on by the EFICC and boils down to obscuring the real questions posed, through contortions and bad faith.
This same propensity for attributing to another (in this case the ICC) what it itself is doing is shown when IP accuses the ICC of a "lack of fraternal spirit". Here again, the world is turned upside down! We are not going to bore the reader with all the examples that show that it was the comrades of the ‘tendency' who exhibited this "lack of fraternal spirit". It's enough to read the collection of odious insults, animated by spite and a spirit of revenge, in the ‘Decline of the ICC' article to see on what side this "lack of fraternal spirit" is situated.
We could go on refuting the small lies but we'd get lost in details. It is better to show the big lies used by the EFICC to justify its thesis of the degeneration of the ICC.
The first of these exceeds all the rest: that the comrades of the ‘tendency' were excluded from the ICC. Finding it hard to support such an assertion, the EFICC is careful to say in certain phrases that this was a ‘de facto' exclusion. We have to say it clearly once again: this is completely false. These comrades were not expelled, neither formally nor ‘de facto'. In the previous issue of the International Review we explained the circumstances in which these comrades departed. In particular we drew attention to a resolution unanimously adopted by the Sixth Congress clearly showing that the departure of these comrades was entirely their own responsibility. Without going into detail, let's recall here:
To claim after all this that the ‘tendency' was excluded from the ICC, or even the Congress, is a lie as odious as it is ridiculous because the proceedings prove the exact opposite. What's more these comrades know perfectly well that when they left they had not been excluded from the organisation because in the declaration they handed in at the time they left they affirmed that they remained "as a tendency and as minority comrades within the ICC".
Another equally big and equally odious lie contained in International Review n° is that the ICC ‘stifled' the debates, including through the use of disciplinary measures, and censored the public expression of the positions of the ‘tendency'. Once again, a world in reverse! In January ‘84 the central organ had to insist that the comrades who had expressed ‘reserves' should write explaining their vote to the whole organisation. A year later it was the same central organ that requested, "any contributions should be seen in terms of opening the debate to the outside". Frankly, to affirm that the ICC, or its central organ, ‘stifled' the debate - that it has evolved towards monolithism as the EFICC claims - is to mock reality. In a period of over a year the internal bulletins of the organisation published around 120 texts on this discussion, or about 700 pages. All the texts of the minority comrades were published without exception in these bulletins.
Far from falling into ‘monolithism', the organisation permanently insisted on the need for clarity, the necessity for the different positions within it to be expressed as precisely as possible.
The same goes for the external publication of internal debates. It is a gross and stupid calumny to assert that the ICC "allowed practically none of this to filter through during the last two years", that it created a "wall of silence" around itself. Any reader knows that the last five issues of our Review have given a great deal of space to this debate (a total of 40 pages with three texts by the ‘tendency' and four texts defending the positions of the ICC). An equal calumny is the assertion that the ICC "systematically censored texts where we tried to discuss the general meaning of the debate". What does this ‘systematic censorship' amount to? In fact only two texts were not published. One was submitted to the territorial press in Britain, but because it dealt with so many questions, it was more suitable for the International Review. This was proposed to the tendency but rejected by it. The other was the ‘Declaration on the Formation of a Tendency' published in IP. On this text, the central organ of the ICC adopted a resolution which said that "the ‘Declaration' contains a certain number of affirmations or insinuations which denigrate the organisation" (the list of passages concerned follows). The resolution goes on: "(the central organ) considers that, in the interests of the dignity of the public debate, and thus of the credibility of the organisation, such formulations cannot appear in the next issue of the Review" and "thus asks the comrades who have signed this ‘Declaration' either to remove them from the text to be published, or to provide arguments for them, so that the public debate can evolve in a clear way and avoid using gratuitous insults". This is interpreted by the EFICC as, "the ICC simply gave itself the right to dictate to a minority what it could (and couldn't) write and think."
This is how history is rewritten!
If the ‘tendency' had really wanted the totality of its criticisms to be known about, all it had to do was take the trouble to provide some arguments for points that, in the text, look like no more than gratuitous insults. But this wasn't its concern. It clothed itself in its outraged dignity and "categorically refused to enter this game of compromises", as though explaining a disagreement or a criticism was a "compromise".
This is another point to be made about the approach of the ‘tendency': it did everything to convince the rest of the ICC of its own lack of seriousness, and in this, it has been a great success.
When a minority appears in an organisation to try to convince it that it's on the wrong road, its behaviour is at least as important in attaining this goal as its political arguments. IP gives an example of the seriousness of its efforts to ‘redress' an ICC facing the danger of degeneration: the minority comrades "had always carried on their struggle openly, in a militant and responsible way, without any harm to the general functioning of the organisation, with the goal of convincing the ICC of its errors."
In the previous issues of the International Review n° we pointed out the inconsistency of the political arguments of the ‘tendency'. The behaviour of these comrades both in the debate and the organisational life of the ICC was a faithful reflection of this. How can they say that they did no "harm to the general functioning of the organisation" when, for example:
We could give many other examples of the lack of seriousness of the minority comrades in the conduct of the debate. They themselves were conscious of this when, at the end of ‘84, they wrote (in a text justifying the regular holding of separate meetings) that there had been a "lack in (their) contribution to the ongoing debate". This is very far from the self-satisfied assertions one reads in IP about the minority's ‘tireless' pushing forward of the debate against the ICC's efforts to "shut the door to discussion".
Here we will give just two examples of the admirable seriousness of the minority:
A question is posed: how can it be that such longstanding members of the organisation, with such experience and such undeniable political capacities, half of them members of the central organ of the ICC, could have allowed themselves to fall into such a regression, leading them to behave in an increasingly irresponsible way, to the point of splitting and unleashing such a torrent of hateful and ridiculous lies against the organisation? While keeping a sense of proportion, we are seeing today a very similar phenomenon to what happened during and after the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, and which resulted in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Leading the Mensheviks there were also long-standing militants whose political capacities were widely recognised, and who for years had contributed a great deal to the cause of the socialist revolution, notably on the editorial board of the old Iskra (1900-1903).
And it was these elements (notably Martov, then followed by Plekhanov) that were to be at the head of an opportunist current in the RSDLP, a current that progressively moved towards the betrayal of the class.
In order to characterise the phenomenon of Menshevism at its beginnings and to analyse its causes, let's hand over to Lenin, the leading element of the revolutionary marxist wing of the RSDLP:
"... the political nuance which played an important role at the Congress, and which distinguished itself precisely by its flabbiness, its pettiness, its lack of any clear positions by its perpetual oscillations between the two clearly opposed positions, by the fear of openly exposing its credo, in a word by its floundering in the ‘swamp'. There are those in our party who, when they hear this word, are seized with horror and cry out about polemics shorn of any comradely spirit ... But hardly any political party which has gone through an internal struggle has failed to use this term, which still serves to describe the unstable elements who oscillate between the combatants. And the Germans, who know how to carry on the internal struggle in a suitable framework, don't get formalistic about this word ‘versumpft' (swamp), aren't seized with horror, don't show such an official and ridiculous prudery." (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.7)
"But the most dangerous thing isn't that Martov has fallen into the swamp. It's that, having fallen into it fortuitously, far from seeking to get out of it, he's sunk deeper and deeper into it." (Lenin, ibid)
Here, with a gap of eighty years, we have a clear characterisation of the attitude adopted by the comrades of the minority. On the basis of real councilist weaknesses a certain number of comrades happen to have fallen into a centrist approach towards councilism. Some of them managed to turn back from this but with others the same thing happened as happened with Martov: refusing to admit that they could be victims of centrism (on hearing this word they were ‘seized with horror and cried out about polemics shorn of any comradely spirit'), they sank deeper and deeper into it. This is what we pointed out in our article replying to the ‘tendency' in International Review n° 43 (‘The Rejection of the Notion of Centrism, the Open Door to the Abandonment of Class Positions'). These comrades found it hard to put up with the idea that they could be criticised. They interpreted a text and a resolution whose aim was to put the organisation on guard against the danger of centrism, and which illustrated this danger by, amongst other things, exposing their conciliatory attitude towards councilism, as a personal insult. This is not at all a ‘subjectivist' interpretation of their approach. Lenin explained the attitude of the Mensheviks in very similar terms:
"When I consider the behaviour of Martov's friends after the Congress, their refusal to collaborate ... their refusal to work for the Central Committee ... I can only say that this is a senseless attitude, unworthy of members of the Party ... And why? Solely because they are unhappy about the composition of the central organs, because, objectively, this is the only question that separates us. The subjective explanations (offence, insult, expulsion, being pushed aside, stigmatised, etc) are no more than the fruit, of an injured amour propre and a sick imagination." (Lenin, ibid)
We should also add that even the attitude of certain minority comrades towards the central organs is similar to that of the Mensheviks because on several occasions they boycotted them (by refusing to take part in their meetings or to take up the responsibilities that the central organ wanted to confer on them), while at the same time complaining about what IP calls "‘relieving' minority comrades of certain functions that they had, under the pretext that the divergences prevented their fulfilment".
Why were these comrades led to adopt this approach? Here again, the example of the Mensheviks is significant: "Under the name of ‘minority' there has been a grouping together within the Party of heterogeneous elements united by the desire, conscious or not, to maintain circle relationships, the previous form of Party organisation.
Certain eminent militants in the most influential of the former circles, not being used to restrictions on the organisational level, restrictions required by Party discipline, are inclined to identify the general interests of the Party with their interests as a circle which, in the period of circles, could indeed coincide." (Lenin, ibid)
When one examines the behaviour of the comrades who formed the ‘tendency', then the EFICC, the similarity with what Lenin describes is again striking.
Fundamentally, the ‘tendency' was formed by comrades who had known each other for a long time (even before the formation of the ICC in some cases) and who had established between them an artificial solidarity based essentially on their old ties of friendship and not on a political homogeneity. In the International Review n° we have already pointed to the lack of homogeneity of the ‘tendency', composed as it was of comrades who, at the beginning, had totally divergent positions, whether on the question of class consciousness, the danger of councilism, the definition of centrism, or the importance of our intervention at the present moment. This heterogeneity was still apparent at the Sixth Congress of the ICC, between those who wanted to leave the organisation, and those who wanted to stay in it. It is revealed again in IP when you compare the hysterical tone of the article ‘The Decline of the ICC' and the article ‘Critique of the ICC's Intervention', which is incomparably more fraternal. The only thing which cemented the ‘tendency', apart from and as a result of this ‘circle spirit' bequeathed by the comrades' past, was a common difficulty in putting up with the discipline of the organisation, which led them into numerous organisational lapses.
But the similarity between the Mensheviks of 1903 and the comrades of the ‘tendency' doesn't end there: "The bulk of the opposition was formed by the intellectual elements of our Party. Compared to the proletarians, the intellectuals are always more individualistic, if only because of their basic condition of existence and work, which prevent them from grouping together spontaneously in large numbers, from directly acquiring an education in organised collective work. Thus it is more difficult for the intellectual elements to adapt to the discipline of Party life, and those who are unable to do so, naturally raise the banner of revolt against the indispensable restrictions imposed on them by the organisation, and they elevate their spontaneous, anarchism into a principle of the struggle, wrongly qualifying this anarchism as a demand in favour of ‘tolerance', etc." (Lenin, ibid)
Here again, the resemblance is striking: if we had wanted to enrage the comrades of the ‘tendency', we would have called it the ‘tendency of teachers, academics and higher functionaries'. It's also clear that such ‘individualities' are much more susceptible to vanity of various kinds, since in their daily life they are much more accustomed than are the workers to being listened to in a respectful manner.
We could look at other resemblances between the ‘tendency-fraction' and the Menshevik current of 1903. We will, limit ourselves to two others:
I. Sectarianism
On a number of occasions, Lenin denounced the sectarianism of the Mensheviks, who for him were entirely responsible for the split. He on the other hand considered that:
"The differences of principle between Vperiod (the Bolshevik paper) and the new Iskra (Menshevik) are essentially those which existed between the old Iskra and Robotchie Dielo (the ‘Economists'). We consider these differences to be important, but we do not consider that they constitute in themselves an obstacle to joint work within a single party..." (Lenin, ibid)
The ICC also considers that the political divergences it had with the ‘tendency', notably on class consciousness and the danger of centrism, are important. If the positions of the ‘tendency' had won over the whole organisation, this would have represented a danger for it. But we always insisted that these divergences were perfectly compatible with being in the same organisation and should not be an obstacle to working together. This isn't the conception of the ‘Fraction' which, like the Mensheviks, wants to make us responsible for the organisational separation. When the serious proletarian political milieu becomes aware of the basic questions which, according to the ‘Fraction', prevent joint work, it will only be able to ask what has got into these comrades' heads. Similarly, what will workers in general think when they are given two leaflets or papers which, on the essential questions they confront - the nature of the crisis, the bourgeoisie's attacks, the role of the left and the unions, the need to extend, unify and organise their struggles, the perspective for the struggle - say the same things? They could only conclude that revolutionaries (or some of them) aren't very serious people.
Sectarianism is the corollary of the ‘circle spirit', of individualism, of the idea that ‘a man's home is his castle'. The comrades of the ‘tendency' learned all this inside the ICC through the numerous battles we have fought against the sectarianism that weighs so heavily on the present proletarian milieu.
It's in order to mask their fundamental sectarianism - because the comrades who refer to the ‘old ICC' well know that their present divergences have never been for us a reason for organisational separation - that they have invented all these fables, all this abracadabra, all these hateful and imbecilic lies against our organisation.
The ‘Fraction' accuses the ICC of ‘monolithism'. Nothing is more absurd. In reality it is the ‘Fraction' which is monolithic, like all sects: from the moment when one considers that any divergence arising in the organisation can only lead to a split, you deny that such divergences can exist inside the organisation. This is the essence of monolithism. Furthermore, this monolithism can already be seen in IP: none of the articles are signed, as if there couldn't be the slightest nuance within it (whereas we know that quite the opposite is true).
2. Lack of a sense of responsibility in the face of the demands of the class struggle
The Mensheviks carried out their splitting activities on the eve of the first revolution in Russia. The RSDLP was thus badly equipped to deal with it when it broke out. Lenin never ceased to denounce the harm done by the Mensheviks' irresponsible actions to revolutionary ideas and the confidence that the workers could have in the Party. It's also at this crucial moment in the class struggle that the comrades of the ‘tendency' have chosen to disperse the existing revolutionary forces. They can say all they like in IP about the ‘decisive importance of the intervention of revolutionaries at the present time'; their actions give the lie to their words. What they are proving in reality is that for them their interests as a circle and sect take precedence over the general interests of the working class. Faced with the demands that the present period is making on revolutionaries, they are displaying a much greater irresponsibility than that which the ICC has always denounced in other groups.
Marx observed in the l8th Brumaire that if history repeats itself, the first time is as tragedy, the second as farce. The events of 1903 in the RSDLP were a tragedy for the workers' movement. The adventures of the ‘tendency' look much more like a farce, if only because of the extreme numerical weakness of this formation. There are so many resemblances between the approaches of the ‘tendency' and that of the Mensheviks that one can't avoid saying that we are looking at a permanent danger in the workers' movement. But at the same time there's not much danger that the ‘Fraction' will one day play a role comparable to that of the Mensheviks: transform itself into the last rampart of the bourgeoisie during the course of the revolution, ally itself with the White Armies. It's very likely that at the moment of the revolution, the ‘Fraction' will have disappeared, that its militants will have long since dispersed in demoralisation or that having understood their errors, some of them will have returned to responsible revolutionary activity (as was the case with Trotsky who in 1903 had lined up with. the Mensheviks). But in the meantime, the ‘Fraction' will play an essentially pernicious role in front of the class.
On the one hand, because of its sectarianism, it will tend to reinforce the very strong distrust towards revolutionary organisations that exists within the working class, including its most combative elements.
On the other hand, in pretending to defend the ICC platform, it will do real harm to the ideas in this platform. A sectarian and irresponsible defence of clear and coherent revolutionary principles is much worse that a consistent defence of revolutionary positions that are less coherent or elaborated. It can only put off from this clarity and coherence elements moving towards revolutionary positions, who will become disgusted by the irresponsible behaviour of those who claim to be the representatives of revolutionary clarity. Furthermore, experience shows that sooner or later an irresponsible defence of principles always has repercussions on the principles themselves, as was the case with the Mensheviks who progressively turned their back on the programme they had adopted before their split with the Bolsheviks.
Finally, the comparisons the EFICC makes between itself and the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy can only serve to discredit the enormous contribution this organism made to the workers' movement. Up until the Second World War, Bilan, Prometeo and Communisme were an example of firmness in revolutionary principles faced with the successive betrayals of other proletarian organisations under the pressure of the counterrevolution. They were thus an example of seriousness and of a sense of responsibility at the highest possible level. The ICC has always tried to develop its militant activity on the same basis, and by following their example. The Left Fraction fought to the bitter end within the degenerating Communist Party in the attempt to redress it. It did not leave it but was expelled, like the great majority of revolutionary fractions in history. In particular, it made an inestimable contribution on the question of the struggle, the role of a communist fraction. It's precisely these fundamental teachings that the EFICC is throwing out the window in the way it has left the ICC. It has usurped the term ‘fraction', creating this historical novelty of an ‘external fraction' (fraction means part of something) without ever having developed the work of an internal fraction or even of a real tendency. We have often written in our Review that the caricature of a party represented by the PCI - Programma made the very idea of a party look ridiculous. The EFICC's caricature of a fraction makes the very idea of a fraction look ridiculous.
From the standpoint of the interests of the working class, the EFICC has no reason for existence. On the contrary. Concerning the ‘Communist Bulletin Group', which left the ICC in 1981 and kept some of its funds, we wrote: "What does (the CBG) represent in the proletariat? A provincial version of the ICC platform minus the coherence and plus the stealing." (International Review n° 36)
For the EFICC, the stealing isn't there, but there is all the weight of sectarianism and irresponsibility. What we said about the CBG goes for the EFICC: "Another group whose existence is politically parasitical" (ibid) - The best thing we could hope for, both for the working class and the comrades who comprise it, is that the EFICC disappears as quickly as possible.
FM
[1] International Review n°44, in the article devoted to the Sixth Congress of the ICC, deals with the departure of these comrades and their constitution of a ‘Fraction'. The reader can refer to this, as well as to the articles published in International Review n°s 40-43 reflecting the evolution of the debate within the ICC.
The text which follows is composed of extracts from the section on the economic crisis of the report on the international situation to the 6th Congress of the ICC. This report was written in mid-1985; the most recent figures it contains thus date from then. However, the analyses and orientations which it defends have been amply confirmed since that time.
In the last few months, the world market has suffered a number of jolts:
-- The fall of the dollar has accelerated and one year after reaching records heights (10.61 Francs on 28.2. ‘85), King dollar has now gone back to its October I977 level (6.19 Francs and 2.20 DM on 28.2. ‘86);
-- Since the beginning of 1986 the price of oil has plunged downwards, the price of a barrel going from $28 to $14, is a reduction by half in the price of black gold;
-- The prices of raw materials in general have fallen and since autumn the London Metal Exchange has been shaken by the collapse in tin prices, which went down in 24.10. 85 without recovering since;
-- Stock exchange speculation has become increasingly acute and everywhere indices have risen: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc ... but this situation is fragile and in January the New York stock exchange sounded a serious alarm when the Dow Jones index went through its most marked downward trend since Black Thursday of 1929.
This list, which could be extended, illustrates the increasingly powerful ravages which the crisis of generalised overproduction is bringing to the world economy; it, expresses the acceleration of the crisis and the growing instability of the world market.
But despite all this, the ruling class keeps telling us that ‘all is well!': politicians of all stripes arc still promising that things will get better tomorrow, and the technocrats try to reassure us that they're in control of the situation. The workers can rest easy: despite the record-breaking levels of unemployment in Europe, despite the poverty spreading over the world, we shouldn't worry because our governments have got the situation in hand!
1n fact, the destabilization of the world economy is producing a growing anxiety, and the empty speeches of the bourgeoisie are no more than a litany with which it tries to convince itself. The fall in the dollar is presented as a way of ‘reviving' the world economy, the fall in oil prices as no more than a ‘hitch'. The reality, however, is much more disturbing, because behind all this the recession is looming up. It's this perspective, whose consequences no one in the ruling class is able to calculate, which is giving rise to such anxiety in the bourgeoisie.
********
The fall of the dollar after the first meeting of the Group of Five (USA, Japan, Germany, Britain, France) might have given the impression that the great powers have a perfect mastery of currency exchanges. In fact this fall expressed an imperious necessity for the American economy ‑ the need to regain competivity on the world market. It expressed the failure and abandonment of the Reagan government's policy of ‘recovery'. The bourgeoisie's mastery is capable only of provisionally limiting the effects of the crisis. It may be able to slow down the deterioration of the world economy - but it can't stop it. The decline goes on ineluctably.
The consequences of the decline of the dollar are catastrophic for Europe and Japan who are seeing their own competivity being undermined and are facing the specter of recession. In the face of such a situation the second meeting of the Group of Five had the aim of posing the need for a concerted reduction in interest rates in order to relaunch production and domestic markets. This meeting was presented as a failure, because a too-strong and rapid reduction in the American rate of interest would have been too risky for the dollar, resulting in:
-- a crisis of confidence among speculators all over the world
-- an accelerated revival of inflation.
However, it's certainly no accident that right after this meeting there was a brutal fall in oil prices. This fall isn't in itself decided by the bourgeoisie: it is first and foremost the expression of the crisis of overproduction. However, it comes at a moment when it can give a shot of oxygen to the most developed countries. Not only does it make it possible to lower inflation, but above all, it makes it possible to reduce by half the first import of the main developed countries, to make substantial, savings, especially in Europe and Japan. Here are the funds to finance a mini-recovery!
The bourgeoisie of the Western bloc has had a conjunctural interest in accelerating the fall of oil prices. But this ‘policy' expresses the fact that; the bourgeoisie's margin for maneuver is shrinking all the time, since it is now reduced to such expedients to gain a few months respite. In fact, the fall in oil prices signifies a further contraction of the world market, which will be expressed in a new fall in trade, and thus a fall in the exports of the industrial countries, and thus, in turn, of their production. In other words, the recession.
Whatever the reasoning of capitalist propaganda, however much the bourgeoisie maneuver, the crisis is there, it's becoming more and more acute, and all the so-called economic successes only express the growing incapacity of the ruling class to cope with it. Irresistibly, the recession is on the horizon, and the present shivers on the world market herald the future storms which await it.
JJ 23 February, 1986
Presentation
We have just received from Argentina an "International Proposal" addressed to revolutionary groups and elements. It calls for discussion between, and the regroupment of, revolutionary forces which are today weak and dispersed throughout the world. This proposal, which we present here without our reply, is clearly unequivocally proletarian: it denounces bourgeois democracy, all kinds of ‘anti-fascist' frontism and nationalism. It defends and affirms the necessity of proletarian internationalism against imperialist war.
We salute the spirit and concern of the comrades in their document: the necessity of open discussion, of ‘polemic', of the confrontation of different political positions, of the fraternal political struggle, in order to constitute an international pole of political reference. A pole of reference capable of regroupment and helping the emergence of revolutionary groups and elements. How can we not support the spirit and preoccupation of the comrades when we ourselves affirmed at the constitution of the ICC, in the first issue of our International Review April 1975, our own objective: "to concentrate the weak revolutionary forces dispersed throughout the world is today, in this period of general crisis, pregnant with social convulsions, one of the most urgent and arduous tasks confronting revolutionaries. This task can only be accomplished when placed from the very beginning on the international level. This concern is at the centre of the preoccupations of our Current. It is to this concern that our Review replies, and in launching it we intend to make it an instrument, a pole for the international regroupment of revolutionaries." Even if the results have so far been modest, our intentions remain, and it is in this spirit that we are publishing this ‘International Proposal' signed by two groups: "Workers' Emancipation" and "Revolutionary Class Militant".[1]
The latter group is not known to us. However we know that ‘Workers' Emancipation' is a group which emerged after the Falklands War. It is not linked to any existing group. This group constituted itself little by little throughout the terrible years of the ‘70s in Argentina. It had to confront the repression of the bourgeois state in all its forms:
-- the official: democracy, Peronist, unionist, and of course the police and military;
-- the semi-official, para-state: on one side, that of the infamous commandos of the extreme right, AAA, and on the other side, that of... trotskyism[2] when our comrades denounced the support and participation of the latter in the Falklands War and defended a policy of ‘revolutionary defeatism'.
It was in 1978 that the repression reached its apex at the time of the World Cup in Argentina. It was in 1978 that our comrades decided: "to begin a work of ideological struggle and publish clandestinely ... It's this activity which, when the military government invaded the Falklands, permitted the distribution of leaflets in the streets, opposing the war from its second day. It was in this way that old and new acquaintances regrouped in the struggle against nationalism and the inter-bourgeois war. During these two months, some small groups emerged with an internationalist activity." (‘Workers Emancipation'). After the war, these groups united and "decided to pursue the process of political struggle and discuss the future: product of the discussion, is a document on the future elections and this document is signed: "Workers' Emancipation"."
It's with emotion and joy that we salute these comrades and present here their "International Proposal". In a country where the proletariat has suffered a ferocious repression, the appearance of a proletarian voice is a promise, after Mexico, after India, for the victory in the gigantic class confrontations to come.
It's also the promise for the work and responsibility of the groups already in the international revolutionary milieu. For its part, the ICC will try to fill as well as possible the task it has given itself.
ICC
"International Proposal" to the partisans of the world proletarian revolution
On February 22 and 23 1986, a group of militants from certain countries (especially Argentina and Uruguay) met in Uruguay to discuss the present world situation and the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat.
There was a general agreement between them that in the face of the world-wide attacks of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and the present state of weakness, dispersion and isolation of the small revolutionary class forces, it is necessary to work together to reverse this situation in combating the sectarianism and nationalism which is implicit in certain conceptions of international work. In an attempt to change this situation, the comrades present put forward the following ideas and propositions.
Some preliminary considerations and fundamentals
It might seem strange that here, some groups and a small number of militants, who are certainly generally unknown, suddenly launch an appeal, a proposition to all those who throughout the world uphold with greater or lesser strength, with greater or lesser clarity, the flag of proletarian internationalism, of the world proletarian revolution
But it's not just "here" or "all of a sudden" that once again the anguished cry of revolutionary minorities is raised, trying to break the chains imposed by capital, helplessly witnessing the terrifying blows which the bourgeoisie inflicts on the proletariat and themselves. Whether in periods of rising class struggle or the most violent moments of counter-revolution, these revolutionary minorities discover, one by one, the meaning of isolation, the weakness of their small forces. A weakness which is not only numerical but fundamentally political, since it is impossible to resolve locally or nationally the problems with which revolutionaries are presently posed.
We are convinced that in different places groups are arising which don't identify with the traditional left (Stalinist, Trotskyist and their different varieties), with politics aimed at helping the bourgeoisie to solve its problems, with the position of changing the state form of bourgeois domination or supporting its wars, but who instead try to elaborate a distinctive politics calling for the autonomy of the working class against the bourgeoisie and the struggle to destroy its domination and its state without preliminary (democratic) phases or stages. And we know what it means to swim against the current, without being able to count on any help, without the immediate possibility of reappropriating the historical experience of the revolutionary proletariat, without fundamental theoretical-political texts, and in a dangerous atmosphere of repression.
If, for some, certain definitions or positions are "ABC" which we don't write or talk about sufficiently clearly, for each of us to be able to describe the struggle requires a long process of struggles, of ruptures, of fear and uncertainties.
In the schools here they teach us a saying of a famous man of the last century: "ideas cannot be killed." However, we have learnt that one kills those who have certain ideas (or positions) and that the dominant class can over a long period prevent the reappropriation, the awareness of the link with and the development of experience, of ideas and positions which the revolutionary proletariat lives and builds up in different parts of the world. Thus, paradoxically, it took a monstrous repression (with a subsequent state of exile) and the (Falklands) war to make known here the existence of diverse radical currents and groups throughout the world. To make known - and that still little enough - the experience of Germany and elsewhere after World War One. To get to know other positions in the Spanish Civil War, which were neither Francoist nor Republican. And there is another history closer to us (which we hardly know at all).
Departing from this we have had confirmation that groups currently exist which don't belong to the ‘traditional' political currents, many of whom we didn't know before, and others of whom we don't know when and how they broke with capital and its fractions, but which express to different degrees different moments of rupture with the politics of capital.
But if today we are aware that they exist, this doesn't mean that the present situation of isolation and of weakness has changed. On the contrary, we don't even hear enough about what's going on, not only in far away countries, but not even in a nearby city or in a neighboring quarter. And this shouldn't be understood as a curiosity or as a journalistic question: in Argentina for example, there are continually days when several million workers are in struggle without there being any coordination between them, so they sometimes don't even know that there is a struggle which is going on everywhere. And if this is the case for relatively massive movements, it's even worse with the contact and the awareness of the existence of avant-gardes appearing during these struggles or under their influence.
And we are convinced that in the countries we live in, as elsewhere in the world, groups of workers and militants are being thrown up, trying to break with the politics of conciliation, of subordination to the bourgeoisie, but which, in the absence of an international reference, and with the strong presence of the bourgeoisie in the workers' movement, end up being absorbed by some fraction of capital or simply disintegrating, disappearing.
Few are those who manage to survive the first blows, and those who do so have an uncertain perspective or political isolation ahead of them. Having surmounted different stages and having to double back, they find themselves in an impasse, starting from scratch on new subjects. Something which is transformed into a daily reality, a helplessness which saps those limited forces which already have been politically and economically hammered. Isn't there an alternative to this? Must the preparation of a revolutionary internationalist politics, or at least an attempt at it, proceed step by step, group by group, city by city, nation by nation, generation by generation? Does each one have to go through the same stages, confront the same problems, receive the same blows, decipher the same letters, elaborate the same words, in order after some time and a long hard road, having become strong and "party-like", to join up with ones "equals", or, in their absence, to "spread" to other nations?
We don't believe that this is the only option. We don't even believe that this can lead to anything positive.
On the contrary, we think that the only alternative we must work towards is the international one. Just as it's a mystification to talk about a communist society as long as there still exists even one capitalist country, the same goes for talking about internationalism if it is only conceived of as solidarity with workers' struggles throughout the world or as pompous phrases now and again against war, militarism or imperialism.
For us, proletarian internationalism has a different meaning, and implies making the effort to go beyond general solidarity, since the international dimensions of the proletarian revolution demand the interaction and unification of efforts to work out a unique strategy at the world level and its political corollary in the tasks confronting us in the different zones and countries.
Naturally this can't be resolved through voluntarism or from one day to the next. It will not be the fruit of a long, prolonged "educational" or "scientific" work such as was conceived by the Second International (and not only it), through an "accumulation of forces" ("winning militants one by one" and "elaborating the theory" and structuring the leadership which will be recognized when its time comes) for a far distant future confrontation, whereas every day we see the resistance and the struggle of the proletariat against capital (which in reality, for these "political currents", must be controlled, covered, isolated in such a way that they are adapted for the incessant "task" of supporting some fraction of the bourgeoisie against another, supposedly worse one) .
If the party of the working class is not one of these political groups calling itself such in one or more countries, if one can't agree with "the party for the working class" and the call for "the working class organized as a class, in other words as a party", this is not a simple game of words. If we reject the social-democratic ideas (Stalinists, Trotskyists etc) of the party as an apparatus (intellectuals, workers, etc) carrying the truth, which voluntarily constitutes itself within one nation and awaits recognition from the uncultivated masses, and the international as a federation of parties (or a party which spreads to other nations), this implies a break with these conceptions and practices which are totally opposed to proletarian internationalism and which in fact are just a way of manifesting and defending nationalist ideas.
Among the latter, the most evident is that which conceives of the development of its own group (or their own groups) as a local or national question, with the aim of developing a decisive force for later on, which dedicates itself to making contacts with other groups in other countries in order to absorb them or generally expose them through discussions and declarations.
The international contacts are considered as "private property", with a bilateral practice predominating, something which can include periods of ‘getting together' over so many years, finally coming together in the "United Nations" of "Revolutionaries." The practice of the Second International is a good example of this. We consider that this path can only lead to new frustrations and new mystifications, which is why it is necessary to struggle against all the interests, conceptions and the sectarianism which produce and reproduce the divisions created by the bourgeoisie in the defense of its internal markets, of its states, of "its" proletarians, in other words, of the surplus value it extracts.
On certain accusations
We don't know if the above is sufficient to present this proposition and justify it, or if it requires greater development. However, we believe it necessary to add precisions regarding certain accusations.
To be sure, many will ask themselves: "With whom, to what point and how does one place oneself within a proletarian internationalist perspective? How to determine this? Who is to do so?" It's evident that nobody would think of working with, or even making a leaflet with someone in the enemy camp. Regarding the class enemy there can be neither conciliation nor entryism. But not everybody is an enemy. It cannot be denied that among the groups and persons not belonging to the latter there is often intolerance, static visions and sectarianism. There is a practice of divergence, a dispute over "customers" in common, a nationalism and a "defense of one's own back garden" disguised as intransigence.
We cannot escape this problem in an international proposition. It's natural that nobody would think of working in a common perspective with a group of the Fourth International or with a third world Maoist. But if the character of the enemy class is evident in certain cases, in others it's much more subtle, which makes it difficult to draw up a line of demarcation, all the more so when we are seeking to take a step forward in the present situation of weakness, isolation and dispersion.
We believe that it is impossible to elaborate an ensemble of "programmatic" points, which would only be the proof of opportunism, unless they are so worked out and profound that perhaps only the group itself could agree, if at all.
One shouldn't pretend either that groups and isolated individuals in each country of the world can ripen in the same way as in other zones or that we can take this or that definition which, as widespread as it may be in certain places, is not the product of a shared history, of which as we have already pointed out, little or nothing is known in other zones.
Conversely, the almost one year long strike of the British miners didn't give rise to any serious attempt at coordinating a common response of the different groups and militants scattered across the globe, something which points not only to a weakness and a hesitation, but to sectarianism, to conceptions of the class struggle and of the party like those of social democracy. And in the face of the Iran-Iraq war? And of South Africa and Bolivia and elsewhere where the proletariat in struggle has received the hardest blows? What reply, however minimal, has been attempted at the international level?
How to resolve this? How are the criteria for our recognition to be decided in order that from the outset the proposition to overcome the present situation isn't still-born (either being ambiguous enough to lead to a free for all, or else being so strict that the only ones ‘admitted' are already working together?).
For us, the criteria for our recognition are in practice. And that what the second part of the Proposition deals with, even if the latter, no more than anything else, can evade the essential, unique "guarantee": the struggle.
International Proposition
With the objective of:
-- contributing to the modification of the present state of weakness of the tiny revolutionary and class forces scattered throughout the world, in order to raise its possibilities of action in the class struggle;
-- consolidating and enlarging today's sporadic coming together, in the perspective of organizing and centralizing a proletarian internationalist tendency which exists today, with all its limits and errors, we propose the following:
1) A coordinated response in the face of certain attacks of capital (eg. on the question of the British miners, of the workers of South Africa, Iran-Iraq, etc): joint leaflets and campaigns, political information, moments of practical relations and orientations affecting the world proletariat.
2) International Information:
a) about workers' struggles, in order to make propaganda as much as possible on the most important struggles taking place in each region or country in order to spread their echo and to reinforce the reality of proletarian internationalism and proletarian fraternity;
b) about different political groups, not only participants in the proposal, but also enemies, since this is a necessary element for the political struggle against them;
c) about historical experience, texts and documents produced in the long struggle of the proletariat against capital and all exploitation.
3) Theoretical-political polemic with a view towards taking up joint positions and as a contribution to the development of revolutionary politics.
For those who not only agree on a whole series of points but are in agreement on praxis, and who put forward all the points of this proposition, in particular point 1 (common action), it is vital to organize the discussion. And solely for those, we propose two things:
4) The international organization of correspondence, implying the creation of a fluid network of exchange and of communication, which should be one of the material bases of point 7.
5) An International Review, which should not be conceived of as an ensemble of the political positions of the different groups brought together under a "collective" cover. On the contrary, it should be an instrument to consolidate the realized common activity, to propagate and argue shared positions and, to be sure, to develop the necessary public discussion on the vital questions concerning the tasks of the moment, the proposed activity and the "open" themes, given a common agreement on the necessity to include them.
6) To the degree that there is the necessary agreement, to stimulate the participation of other groups in the press and vice versa and the spreading of texts of intervening groups.
7) Move towards creating a common "internal" discussion: in other words, not limit oneself to the "official and public" polemic between groups, but also the discussion of communists in the face of "open" problems.
All the activities and all the decisions which the participating groups take will be through general agreement, in other words, unanimously.
To whom do we make this proposition?
1. Anyone in the world waging struggle against the attacks of capital, against all imperialist or inter-bourgeois wars, against all bourgeois states (regardless of shade or color) with the aim of the working class imposing its dictatorship against the bourgeoisie, its social system and all forms of exploitation.
2. All those who don't support any fraction of the bourgeoisie against another, but who struggle against them all. Those who don't defend inter-classist fronts, neither adhering to nor participating in them.
3. Those who practically accept that "the workers have no country," this fundamental phrase which doesn't just say that the workers can't defend what they don't have, but that they "can" and "must" intervene in the struggles and tasks posed in the different countries of the world, despite the fact that, from the bourgeois point of view, this would be considered as an interference and against "the right of nations to self-determination." A right which is called for each time the revolutionary proletariat or its avant-garde reinforces its international links in the face of its class enemy, a right which is trampled on each time it comes to putting down and massacring revolutionary movements.
4. Precisely for this reason, those who fight against the politics of "defense of the national economy", of economic recovery, of "sacrifices to resolve crisis", to those who don't swallow the policies of expansion of their own bourgeoisie even when the latter is economically, politically or militarily attacked; to those who always struggle against the entire bourgeoisie, both local and foreign.
5. To those who combat the forces and the ideologies which set out to chain the proletarians to the economy and to the politics of the nation state, disarming them under the pretext of "realism" and the "lesser evil".
6. To those who don't propose to "recuperate" or "reconquer" the unions. On the contrary, to those who characterize the latter as instruments and institutions of the bourgeoisie and of its state. In no way can the unions defend to the end the immediate interests of the proletariat. In no way can they serve the revolutionary interests of the proletariat.
7. Those who agree that one of the tasks on this terrain is to battle to the end against the political line of class collaboration supported by the unions, and who contribute to making the rupture of the class from the unions irreversible.
8. To those who do all they can to contribute to reinforcing all the attempts at unification of the proletariat, in order to confront capital, even partially, all the attempts at extension, generalization and deepening of the struggles of resistance against capital.
9. To those who defend the struggles against all varieties of capitalist repression, whether those exercised by the official (state) military forces of law and order, or that of its civilian colleagues of the left and right of capital. To those who, as best they can, collaborate with groups who suffer the blows of repression.
10. To those avant-gardes who, in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state, pitilessly combat those who limit themselves to criticizing one of the forms which the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie takes on (the most violent, military one in fact) and defend democracy or struggle for its development.
11. In this sense, in the face of the bourgeoisie's false alternative of fascism/anti-fascism, to those who denounce the bourgeois class character of anti-fascist fronts and of democracy, and pose the necessity of struggling for the destruction of the bourgeois state, in whatever form it presents itself, with the objective of abolishing the system of wage labor and the world-wide elimination of class society and all forms of exploitation.
12. To those for whom proletarian internationalism implies, first of all, the struggle against one's own bourgeoisie, revolutionary defeatism in case of any war which is not the class war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and for the world proletarian revolution.
13. To those who, with whatever different theorizations on the party, agree on the fact that they are international from birth onwards, or they are nothing.
14. Finally, to those who, in accordance with their strength and their situation have defined their tasks against the bourgeoisie, oriented towards two fundamental aspects:
a) push the development of the class autonomy of the proletariat;
b) contribute to the construction and development of the politics of proletarian internationalism and the world party.
In other words, whereas the means, the tasks and priorities can be adapted in different ways depending on a given situation, all of this must be in relation to one sole perspective: the constitution of the working class as a world-wide force for the destruction of the capitalist system.
Final clarification
We believe that the above formulations can and should be improved, corrected, completed. We aren't going to defend every last dot and comma of this Proposition, but its general sense.
In the first discussions we have had on the present situation and on how to begin to change it, there have been comrades who have expressed a certain pessimism on the reception it will receive and on the possibilities of its realization. We believe that in the face of the terrible blows which the bourgeoisie delivers against a proletariat searching, sometimes desperately, to resolve its problems, in the face of the possibility (and the realities) of inter-bourgeois war, in the face of massacres of the workers, of children and the old, which are repeated in different parts of the world, and in the face of the ever-growing mountain of tasks imposed on revolutionaries at present, the politics of the sect, of greediness, of "leaving things till later" and the implicit or explicit defense of the present "status quo" don't match up.
The recognition of the present situation should be translated through a political initiative capable of recuperating the lost ground and of overcoming grave weaknesses. In this sense, the common engagement must be the struggle for a radical change in the international relations between revolutionaries. In other words, going beyond a simple exchange of positions (sometimes not even that) to a joint taking of positions in the face of the attack of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, to an indispensable coordination orienting the reflection and the debate on questions which consolidate the common perspective.
Among the objections which could be raised in relation to the viability of this proposition, are ones on how to concretize it.
Here we find in point 5, if one agrees with it at all, the means for studying how to organize its realization. We don't pretend to give a reply here to each question and problem, but to manifest an engagement to struggle for its concretization.
It is evident that the rapid execution of certain things requires physical meetings. We don't believe that this is absolutely necessary, that is to say, at present it seems to us to be very difficult to achieve, at least for those of us who live in this part of the world.
At present, we don't see the conditions allowing for the organization of a really international meeting: a trip abroad is (economically) forbidden to us. A trip of 8,000km, the equivalent of more than 15 months wages (more than 20 if we take the minimum defined by the government). That's why we believe that to begin with the relations and discussions, at least between the non-Europeans and the Europeans, should be through correspondence. This will take more time and make the task more difficult, but it's not impossible, far from it (a letter from Europe, for example, if there isn't a strike, takes 15 to 20 days).
Security conditions (those who have confidence in legality are not only childish but a danger for revolutionaries) also pose obstacles, but they can and will be resolved.
Language also creates inconveniences. For our part, and up till now, the only one we have been able to write is Spanish. Some of us can read Italian, Portuguese, and English with difficulty. With a bit of imagination, someone might manage to understand a little French, but there is nothing to be done with German. The other languages "don't exist." Taking this into account, what's in Castillan won't have the same circulation and rapidity as the other languages in the established order.
To conclude, the initiative which we are presenting has been put forward in its fundamentals. Those who show an interest or agree with it will receive a part entitled "More On Organization". In other words, how we see its realization and concretization .
We guarantee that all those who write to us will get a copy of all the replies received. The future organization of the correspondence, discussions, etc, will be with those who agree and will depend on the way they agree among themselves.
For those who agree with the spirit of the proposition, we will ask them to spread it and to give us details (if possible with their address) of groups which have received this convocation. Uruguay, February 1986.
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ICC note: we are not publishing a ‘clarifying note' which appeared as a post-script, due to lack of space. This note was written after the meeting in March ‘86. The comrades make some precisions about the ‘technical' aspects of their proposal and about the assigning of articles. They propose that the review be divided into three parts: "one common to all the intervening groups based on a common agreement which would explain and/or show the bases for the positions shared. A second part, where the subject would be chosen jointly but on which the positions would be individual ones. And a third part where the subject would be freely chosen by each participant, where they could push forward the discussion of themes they thought important and which they did not consider had been correctly approached by the others. Or a ‘new' subject or a particular argumentation. We consider as fundamental the inclusion of three parts in this international proposal". (Emancipation Obrera and Militancia Clasista Revolucionaria).
ICC Reply
Dear Comrades,
We have just seen your pamphlet: "International Proposal to all partisans of the World Proletarian Revolution"[3].
After a first reading and discussion, we salute, before anything else, the spirit which animates your ‘proposal' which we support with determination.
We can only agree that the revolutionary movement not only finds itself today in a position of extreme weakness - numerically, politically and moreover organizationally - but above all suffers from immense dispersal and the isolation of the weak groups which identify with it. Like you, we think that one of the first tasks - indeed the first task today - of each group really situating itself on the revolutionary terrain of the proletariat is to use all its power to put an end to this deplorable situation, to react vigorously against the dispersion and isolation, against the sectarian and shopkeeper spirit, for the development of links, contacts, discussions of regroupments and common action between groups, on the international and national level. Those who, among these groups, don't feel this necessity - and they unfortunately exist - show their incomprehension of our present situation, and thus their tendency to sclerosis.
That a group in Argentina, uncovers in turn, this urgent necessity - which is all to its credit - doesn't surprise us: 1) because the fact that it appreciates this necessity proves its revolutionary vitality and 2) because we have found this same preoccupation in the other groups emerging recently such as the ‘Alptraum' group in Mexico or that of the ‘Internationalist Communist' in India.
Why the awareness of this necessity precisely today? To understand this it's not sufficient to say that the anxious cry of revolutionaries trying to break the ‘cordon sanitaire' of capital, yet again, isn't emerging all at once; it's not sufficient to say that in periods of rising class struggle as much as in moments of the most violent counter-revolution, these minorities "discover, one after the other, what this isolation means, the weakness of their small forces, a numerical if not fundamentally political weakness..." If it is true that revolutionaries always try to break the ‘cordon sanitaire' of the bourgeoisie looking to disperse them and isolate them from their class, one cannot put "periods of heightened class struggle" and "the most violent moments of counterrevolution" on the same level.
Without falling into fatalism, the historical experience of the class struggle teaches us that a period of reflux and of profound defeats of the proletariat leads inevitably to a dispersion of revolutionary forces and the tendency to isolation. The task then imposed on revolutionary groups is that of trying to limit as much as possible the avalanche of the enemy class in order to prevent the latter pushing them into the void. In a sense, isolation in such a situation is not only inevitable but necessary to better resist the temporary force of the current and the risk of being carried along with it. This was the case, for example, in the political attitude of Marx and Engels dissolving the Communist League in the aftermath of the violent defeats suffered by the proletariat during the social turmoil of 1848-51, dissolving the First International after the bloody crushing of the Paris Commune, like the policy of Lenin and Luxemburg at the time of the bankruptcy of the Second International at the outbreak of World War One. One can also cite as an example the constitution and activity of the Fraction of the Italian Left after the collapse of the Third International under Stalinist leadership.
It's quite different for the activity of revolutionary groups in a period of rising class struggle. If, in a period of reflux, revolutionary groups swim against the stream, and therefore on the sides and in small units, in a period of flux it is their duty to be with the stream, as massively and internationally organized as possible. The revolutionary groups who don't understand this, who don't act in this sense, whether because they don't understand the situation, the period in which the class struggle finds itself and its dynamic, or whether having survived the period of reflux and dispersal with difficulty, they have become more of less sclerotic, find themselves incapable of assuming the function for which the class gave rise to them.
The sectarianism which you rightly denounce with so much force, is at root nothing other than the survival of a tendency to close in on oneself, corresponding to a period of reflux. Raising this tendency to the level of theory and practice, to a shopkeeper spirit, above all in a period of flux, is the sign of an extremely dangerous process of sclerosis and eventually death for any revolutionary group.
Only an analysis and a true comprehension of the period opened up at the end of the ‘60s with the outbreak of the world crisis of decadent capitalism and the resurgence of class struggle by a new undefeated generation of the proletariat maintaining all its potentiality and combativity permits an understanding of the imperious necessity posed today to existing revolutionary groups in the world and emerging in different countries; that of consciously engaging in the search for contact, information, discussion, clarification, confrontation of political positions, the taking of positions and common action among the groups resolutely engaged in a process of decantation and regroupment. This work is the only one which leads to the perspective of the organization of the future world party of the proletariat. This understanding of the period and its needs is also the major condition to effectively combat sectarianism and its manifestations which still rage today in the revolutionary milieu.
We have dwelt on this question not to criticize but to support your ‘proposal' with an argumentation which we think reinforces it. The struggle against dispersion and isolation, the struggle against sectarianism has always been and remains a major preoccupation of the ICC since its constitution. We are delighted to find this preoccupation today coming from a group as isolated as yours, reinforcing our conviction in its validity. That's why we are proposing to translate and publish your text without delay in the next issue of our International Review in French and English (and probably later in the International Reviews in Spanish and Italian). We are convinced you won't object to this publication (of course, we will not, for security reasons, give your address without an explicit authorization from you).
This preoccupation with the necessity to break with the dispersion and isolation of revolutionary groups, and the conviction of its validity, were at the basis of the three international conferences of revolutionary groups initiated by us and Battaglia Communista from 1977 to 1980. These conferences which could have become a meeting place and pole of reference and of regroupment for new groups emerging in different countries came to grief in the face of the sectarianism of groups like Battaglia Communista for whom these conferences ought to remain silent, to be a place uniquely for the confrontation of groups fishing for recruits. On our insistence, the reports of these conferences have been published in French, English and Italian. We will send these to you quickly.
The urgent need to break with dispersal and isolation is certainly not an easy task and cannot be accomplished the day after tomorrow. However, that is not a reason to give up but, on the contrary, this difficulty must itself stimulate the efforts of each revolutionary group worthy of the name to do it.
We cannot, in this letter, make a detailed examination of each paragraph let alone each formulation. As you say yourselves, this text doesn't pretend to be complete or definitive. There will be time to discuss this or that formulation, or such and such an argument. For the moment, what matters is the principle, the main concern of the ‘proposal'. It's that which we agree with. However, two fundamental questions raised by this 'proposal' must be looked at:
1) To whom is such a ‘Proposal' addressed?
In response, it's clear we're looking for the largest possible participation of authentic revolutionary groups, even if divergences on particular but secondary points exist amongst these groups. However, it's not a question of linking up with anybody, like a lonely-hearts' club, which would be a negative perspective, a trap, and not a reinforcement of the revolutionary movement. With the dispersion and different degrees of maturity of existing groups in the present movement, there are no selective criteria which can guarantee, all at once, in an absolute way, such a selection. But there are - and they must be formulated - minimum criteria for a general framework in which the groups can adhere while maintaining their own positions which are nevertheless compatible with this framework.
We must reject monolithism as well as the gathering of fundamentally heterogeneous forces on the basis of vague and incoherent political positions.
In your section: "To whom do we make this Proposal?" you try to give a reply by enumerating at length (perhaps at too much length) certain positions to serve as criteria. Whatever improvement in formulations could be made, these positions or critiques of mistaken positions are at root absolutely correct, in our opinion. However, it's the lack of a clear and explicit position on some very important questions which is worrying. We will mention some of them:
-- the rejection of all participation in electoral campaigns in the present period of decadent capitalism;
-- the necessity to conceive and situate oneself in the continuity of the history of the workers' movement, of its theoretical and political acquisitions (not a passive continuity and simple repetition, but a dynamic continuity and surpassing strictly linked to the experiences and evolution of all the contradictions of the capitalist system, putting on the agenda the objective necessity for its destruction). That implies the recognition of Marxism as the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, the identification with the successive contributions of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Internationals and the left communists who came out of them;
-- the unambiguous recognition of the proletarian nature of the Bolshevik Party (before its bankruptcy and its definitive passage into the camp of the counter-revolution) and of the October Revolution.
It is surprising not to find, in your text, any reference to these questions, nor to the recognition of the Workers' Councils, the "finally found form" of the unitary organization of the class in respect of the concrete realization of the proletarian revolution. We are equally astonished not to find any mention of the question of guerilla terrorism (urban or not) and on the categorical rejection of these types of actions (particular to the desperate layers of the petit-bourgeoisie, to nationalism, and which are effectively maintained and manipulated by the fulfilled, this point of the ‘proposal' seems to state), not in the name of pacifism which is only the other side of the same coin, but in the name of its ineffectiveness and of its pretension, at best, to arouse, and at worst, to substitute itself for the only adequate violence - the class violence of the open, massive and generalized struggle of the great masses of the working class. Your silence is all the more surprising since you live and struggle in a continent and a country where these types of adventurist actions of the tupamaros and other guevarist guerillas are infamous.
2) The second question relates to your concrete proposals for the realization of this great project, notably to the publication of a common review of the supporting groups and its mode of functioning. Beginning on this last point you propose unanimity as a rule of all activity and decision. Such a rule doesn't seem to us to be the most appropriate. It carries the risk either of constant agreement - and thus of monolithism - or the paralysis of the participating groups each time one of them finds itself in disagreement. Point 5 of your proposal is on the eventuality of a common publication. It isn't useful to open a discussion on the structure of such a publication (division into 3 parts, etc..) since the very project of such a publication immediately, seems to us, in all respects, largely premature. A common publication of numerous groups presupposes two conditions:
a) a more profound knowledge of the political trajectory of the different groups and of their present positions, an effective integration of these positions in the framework of elaborated criteria and their tendency to converge in the more or less long-term;
b) and on this basis, a serious advance in the experience of a common activity allowing these groups to participate on the organizational level before being able to really confront the inherent difficulties of such a publication (political and technical questions of the nomination of a responsible editorship, question of the languages in which such a review must be published, and finally, questions of administration and financial resources).
Neither of these two conditions being actually is unrealizable for the present nor, consequently, it would be wrong to make it a central point. It would be more prudent and advantageous to content ourselves, for the moment, with the realizable task of assuring the circulation of discussion texts between supporting groups on important themes and as much as possible, agreed in common.
The proposal of reciprocal information, exchange of publications, reciprocal distribution of the different supporting groups, the possibility of publishing articles of other groups in the press and eventually the taking of common positions on important events and thus a common public intervention, remains. This part of your general proposal can be realized in a relatively brief period, always in the spirit of breaking isolation, tightening up contact between existing and emerging revolutionary groups, of developing discussions and favourising a process of decantation and regroupment of revolutionaries.
In a word, better to start prudently and reach the destination than to set off at a gallop only to run out of breath and stop half-way.
With communist greetings,
ICC
[1] We have not published the address of these groups: for all contact readers can write to the postbox of Revolution Internationale in France who will pass it on.
[2] "Workers Emancipation" has suffered the repression and violence of the MAS, a trotskyist group which called for participation in the Falklands War, supporting the generals.
[3] This pamphlet didn't reach us directly (why?) but through our section in Venezuela.
The massive workers' struggles which almost paralyzed not only Scandinavia, but above all Belgium, this spring, announce the opening of a new period of the class struggle. A period where two tendencies will more and more develop at the same time. On the one hand the bourgeoisie's increasingly frontal and massive attacks, and on the other at the level of workers' consciousness, the concretizations of lessons learnt in the course of numerous but dispersed struggles, which have characterized the preceding period above all in Western Europe.[1]
The greater the decomposition of a decadent society, the more the truth, the daily social reality, becomes contradictory to the dominant ideology. The ideology which defends and ,justifies the existence of a social and economic order which is rotten to its core, which is provoking the greatest famines in the history of humanity, which threatens to bring about the self-destruction of the species, which relies on the most insidious political totalitarianism, such an ideology can only rest on lies, for the truth is its negation.
The workers' struggles are the bearers of this simple truth which says that the capitalist mode of production must and can be destroyed if humanity is to survive and pursue its development.
This is why, with detailed scientific planning, the international bourgeoisie organizes a black-out on workers' struggles, in particular on an international level.
How many workers in the world know that in mythical Scandinavia, this homeland of ‘western socialism', the working class is suffering an economic attack without precedent, and that, in response, the workers of Denmark (Spring ‘85) , Sweden (Winter, ‘85) , then those of Finland and Norway (Spring ‘86) have just fought their most important combats since before the second world war?
How many workers know that Belgium, in the months of April and May 1986, saw the development of a ferment of workers' struggles which repeatedly, practically calls blocked the economic life of the country? That in this small country at the heart of industrialized Europe, in the middle of the largest concentration of workers in the world, the workers have multiplied their spontaneous strikes, breaking out of union directives, to respond to the acceleration and threat of new economic attacks from the government; that they have begun to try to unify the struggles, acting collectively without waiting; for the unions, by sending massive delegations - such as the 300 Limburg miners who went to the public service workers' assembly in Brussels - in order to demand the unification of the fight.
The newspapers, the media, say not a word outside of the country concerned; instead they stir up nauseating ideological campaigns, internationally orchestrated, on ‘anti-terrorism', on the need for the strengthening of ‘law and order' (the calls for more ‘security') or on the impotence of poor starving human beings faced with the ‘fatality' of the economic crisis. On the international workers' struggle, the silence is organized. Only some short notes here and there, mainly to announce the end of such and such a strike.
The bourgeoisie fears reality; and the blusterings and braggings of the Reagans express a growing anxiety, not the serenity, of a class sure of its power and its future. And for good reason.
Struggles which show the way
The major characteristic of the struggles this Spring is their massive character: in Norway there were up to 120,000 workers affected by strikes, including lock-outs (10% of the active population); in Finland 250,000 strikers together confronted the state; in Belgium, it's also in hundreds and thousands that we must count the number of workers who, at the time of writing, have already taken part in struggles against the acceleration of the economic attack of capital.
It's no longer a question of a series of isolated, dispersed struggles, enclosed in bankrupt factories. These are massive mobilizations which paralyze a large part of the economy.
From the oil rigs of the North Sea off Norway to the mines of Limburg, from the Finnish Post to the national and local railways in Belgium, the proletariat has shown in a few weeks, in some of the most industrialized countries, a power and a force which announces the opening of a new stage in the class struggle.
Whether through objective economic conditions (the need of the bourgeoisie to make more and more massive and frontal attacks), or whether through the subjective conditions which characterize them (maturation of workers' consciousness, the tendency towards unification), these struggles express the debut of a new acceleration of class struggle: the opening of a new phase in the historic combat of the world proletariat for its emancipation.
I. The objective conditions: the European bourgeoisie can less and less disperse its attack
In the previous issue of the International Review we showed how, during 1985, the bourgeoisie of the industrialized countries of the western bloc conducted a conscious policy of the dispersal of its economic attack (planned and timed sackings, sector by sector attacks, etc) , so as to prevent frontal, unified reactions from the proletariat.
We insisted that the bourgeoisie drew the lessons of experiences such as those of Poland 1980 or the combats which marked the opening of what we call "the third international wave of struggle" since 1968 (after those of 1968-74 and 1978-80), ie the public sector strikes in Belgium and Holland, Autumn ‘83.
But we also underlined that this plan, conducted in close cooperation through governments, political parties and trade unions, by and large was grounded in the economic margin of maneuver given to Europe by the American mini-recovery.
But this ‘margin' is rapidly reducing today under the pressure of the slowing down of the US economy, and under the pressure of the weakening in the competitivity of European exports against US products (see the article ‘Where is the economic crisis?'). The ‘new American plan', of which the sharp decline of the dollar is only the most spectacular aspect, is not a gift for Europe but a declaration of commercial war at the level of the planet. Whatever economies the European countries can make in the short term through the ‘oil factor' they are more than ever forced to lower their expenses and production costs, which means in the first place a more violent attack on the income of the exploited.
What's more, this attack implies - above all in Europe - drastic reductions in the ‘social' expenditure of the state (in Western Europe, above all the northern countries, public administration costs are equivalent to half the national product!). This means taking measures which immediately and simultaneously hit all the workers:
-- the unemployed because their only source of income, when they have one, is government allocations;
-- all wage-earners because it is the ‘social' part of the wage which is under attack (social security, family allowances, education, etc);
-- state employees because thousands of their jobs are being cut.
It's this global reality which is the basis of the world economic attacks which provoked the struggles in Scandinavia and Belgium. The specific economic weaknesses of these countries are not ‘exceptional cases'; these are among the first in Europe to carry out such attacks[2]. The impossibility of continuing to organize the dispersal of economic attacks, the recourse to more and more massive frontal attacks against the working class - such is the future for all the European governments.
II. The subjective conditions: the maturation of class consciousness
In the same way as the governmental plans which have provoked the struggles this Spring are an indication of the future for all capitalist governments, so these struggles, in particular those in Belgium, show the way to the rest of the world proletariat.
The will to fight
All of the struggles confirm the tendency to an international simultaneous development of class combats. Sweden, Britain, Spain, to talk only of Europe, have seen a development of workers' struggles at the same time. We've seen it with the British oil rig workers who joined the strike with their Norwegian colleagues[3]. Internationally there exists, not a mood of resignation but a profound discontent, a combativity which daily belies the official propaganda which says that -with the crisis - the workers have at last understood that their interests are the same as those of ‘their' national capital.
In practice, these struggles are a living negation of the capitalist economic laws based on the profit of the market place, where misery is responded to with more misery (lowering of wages, of benefits, increase in unemployment, etc) , and by the destruction of the means of combating this misery ( factory closures, destruction of stocks, production of armaments and military costs, etc), all at the expense of the exploited.
This will to fight shows that for the workers, it is more and more clear that the question of their means to subsistence is posed in simple terms: either capital's life or theirs. There is no possible conciliation between the interests of decadent capital and those of the exploited. It's in this first of all that the struggles of this Spring announce the future.
Beginning struggles when combativity demands it and not when the unions decide
One of the main weapons used by the state through its union apparatus is the power to decide the moment of combat. The force of the working class lies in the first place in its unity, its capacity to strike together. The unions, by deciding to open the struggles in a dispersed way, staggered in time, by avoiding simultaneity which is the source of unity, by preventing the fight breaking out when anger is most generalized, have a great power for dividing and weakening the movement. A power which they rarely hesitate to use.
In Belgium the unions haven't ceased to try to do this. It's in this way, among many other examples, that they called the public service workers to strike on the 6th May; the teachers on the 7th; the shipyard workers three days later, etc. Systematically, carefully, they tried to organize... the dispersal of the movement.
The response of the workers has been - as is more and more the case in all countries - the ‘spontaneous' strike. That is to say, outside of union directives.
In this way the strike of 16,000 Limburg miners, which marked the beginning of a whole period of strikes which were to follow, broke out spontaneously in mid-April, against the advice of the unions who considered any strike "premature". It's the same for most of the movements which since then, in the railways, post, telecommunications, teaching, local transport, ministries, hospitals, naval dockyards, parts of the private sector, etc, started or stopped, to restart a short time after, spontaneously, outside - sometimes against - the unions' commands.
From May, the unions organized, under pressure from the workers, days of ‘general strike' (6, 16 and then 21 May) in order to take a more efficient control of events. But these ‘days of action' , although they've seen important mobilizations, remain particular moments in a general ferment, which - often in a clumsy and jerky way - is seeking to take things into its own hands.
The Belgian bourgeoisie isn't mistaken about the risks such actions pose to its power. As a union official of the FGTB (J.C. Wardermeeren) declared in the newspaper Le Soir, 23 May:
"The government can impose its will by force... up to the moment when the discontent provoke explosion which will no longer be controlled by the union movement. And which will be more and more difficult to get hold of through sitting down together. You see all the difference between precise negotiations, conducted on the basis of a list of demands, and those which follow from spontaneous actions. And you can calculate the risk." (our emphasis).
The unions know better than anyone ‘the risks' of allowing the strength of proletarian life to escape from the union prison. Professionals in controlling and sabotaging struggles, they are masters in the art of keeping ahead of movements. Faced with spontaneous explosions, they know very well how to radicalize their language as much as necessary, in order to regain control over the direction and organization of the movement as quickly as possible. In this they are aided and abetted by the ‘base unionists' whose criticisms of the union leadership are the last knot tying the workers to the trade union logic.
The proletariat in Belgium has not yet managed to rid itself of all the union shackles (we will come back to this). But the dynamic of the actions it has undertaken is going in the right direction.
The necessity and possibility of launching struggles without waiting for the green light from the union bureaucracies - this is the first lesson about the means to struggle confirmed by the combats in Belgium. We say ‘confirmed' because the tendency towards the proliferation of spontaneous strikes has been manifest for three years, from the very beginning of the third wave.
Looking for extension and unity
But probably the main lessons coming out of the struggles in Belgium this Spring lie at the level of the practical means of building workers' unity. The struggles in Belgium clearly show:
1) that this unity can only be built through the struggle. Capital divides the workers; its political and trade union apparatus organizes the dispersal of the workers' forces. The proletarians can only build their unity by combating those who divide them, by combating capital and its representatives;
2) that this unity doesn't fall from the sky, nor from the unions who are its main saboteurs. It must be built practically, deliberately, consciously. The search for this unity must constitute a permanent objective, by sending massive delegations to seek active solidarity, the extension and unification of struggles, breaking through sectoral, linguistic or professional barriers. This is what the Limburg miners did when, from the beginning of the struggle, they sent massive delegations, from one to several hundred strong, to other sectors of the class: the big Ford-Genk factory (10,000 workers), the postal workers, the railway workers of the SNCB, the high school students as the unemployed of the future - calling them out on strike. The same was done by the workers of the Boel shipyards, near Antwerp, who sent delegations to the miners and joined the struggle. After the outbreak of the struggle itself, this is the first practical step in response to the necessity for the proletarians to constitute themselves into a class, a force capable of acting on the direction of society;
3) that ‘the street' , demonstrations, rallies, play an essential role in the constitution of this class unity. It's not enough for struggles to start up; it's not enough that sectors in struggle meet up through mass delegations. It's also necessary for all the forces in the struggle to recognize each other in common actions, for them to feel and measure their power. In Belgium, it was in the street that the unemployed recognized their class; in the street, the miners and the teachers, the steelworkers and the public transport drivers sought to act as a single class. In the street there is a coming together of all the energies born out of struggles in a thousands workplaces. If the movement has sufficient force, if it is able to neutralize the efforts at divisions of the bourgeoisie, these energies can then return, even stronger, to the workplaces[4].
Through the search for unity, the struggles in Belgium have been drawing the lessons from past defeats, the defeat of the British miners in 84-85 and of many other small or big strikes which died through isolation. A collective memory exists in classes which have an historic mission. There is a progression in collective consciousness, a maturation, sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, which links up the principal moments in the collective action of the class. ‘Don't let what happened in ‘83 happen again!' In this phrase, heard so often in discussions amongst strikers in Belgium (referring to the isolation of the public sector strikes in September ‘83), there is an explicit posing of the problem of the search for extension and unity as a priority to be assumed consciously if there is to be any chance of going further than in the past.
Thus the collective experience and consciousness of the revolutionary class moves forward. The practical responses the Belgian workers have made to these questions concern the entire world working class; their present struggles will have consequences that go well beyond Belgium. Here again, they reveal the future.
Seeking self-organization: the struggle to master one's own forces
By launching its strikes, by uniting its struggles, by taking to the streets, the proletariat creates a gigantic, redoubtable force. But what use is this force if it isn't in control of it? Without a minimum of self-mastery, of control over the course of events, this force will soon crumble, first and foremost under the impact of the systematic and demoralizing maneuvers of the unions.
If the workers of Belgium have been able to show such strength, it's not thanks to the unions but despite or against them. This isn't an exaggerated interpretation of the facts. The principal figure of the forces of political and union containment in Belgium, the leader of the Socialist Party (which controls the country's biggest union, the FGTB) recognized this clearly on 30 May, in an in interview with Le Soir:
"The movement has come from people and not from the union apparatuses. People want Martens scalp. Those who believe that the union premeditated the events or that the parties are controlling the actions are making a monumental error. In many places the workers don't follow union slogans. They don't want to go back to work."
This is clear.
However, while it's true that "in many places the workers don' t follow union slogans", at the time of writing at least, the workers haven't created centralized forms of organization regrouping delegates of strike committees elected by assemblies, capable of giving orientations for all the forces of the struggle, of allowing the movement to effectively master its own strength.
The workers in Belgium haven't yet reached this stage of the struggle. But they have advanced in this direction. They have developed their capacity to unmask the demobilizing maneuvers of the unions by launching struggles without waiting for union directives; they've been able to limit the damage done by the unions' efforts to disperse struggles in time; by taking charge of organizing extension through delegations without relying on union structures, they've limited the effects of the unions' efforts to disperse struggles in space. By making the assemblies the real centers of decision in the struggle, they have been able to expose the union maneuvers to get them back to work[5].
And this again is a rich source of lessons for the coming struggle of the world proletariat.
The confrontation with the state is also the confrontation with the unions
The Belgian workers face a bourgeoisie which has been preparing this attack for a long time, which has entered the battle with its left forces, the ‘working class' forces of the bourgeoisie, not in government (where the obligation to take violently anti-working class measures would dangerously expose them) but in opposition, in the midst of the workers in struggle, in order to sabotage the movement from within. The ‘Socialists' have no intention of abandoning their state function of policing the workers. This can be seen clearly through their practice in the streets: "The imposing procession marched calmly and serenely", said an article in Le Soir (23 May) describing a demonstration of 10,000 in Charleroi (the unions had only expected 5,000). "Among the demonstrators close to the Socialist milieu, there was an unease about the ‘tepidity' of the speeches and the absence of top SP leaders. Many see this as a sign that the SP ‘doesn't want power'".
The bourgeoisie needs its left in opposition and will continue to give itself the means to ensure this. The policy of dispersing struggles, as we analyzed in the previous issue of this Review has been based on the one hand on concerted action between the state and ‘private' employers who disperse the attacks, and on the other hand on the divisive actions of the left and the unions. The growing impossibility of the state and the bosses carrying on with the dispersal of the economic attack means that it will be more and more up to the unions and left parties to prevent the unification and strengthening of proletarian resistance.
The Belgian workers have, throughout their struggle, confronted in their own ranks the three faces of trade unionism: ‘moderate' (the Christian union), ‘militant' (the Socialists) and base unionism (the Maoists - particularly in the Limburg mines). Here again the struggles in Belgium reveal the future.
The workers of Belgium, like those in the rest of the world, still have a long process of combat to go through before they can really throw off the union shackles and have a real mastery over their own forces. But this mastery will be the result of the present battles.
* * *
The class movement in Belgium is a political movement, not because it denies economic objectives but because it is assuming the political aspects of this combat. The workers aren't fighting the proprietor of a small provincial enterprise, but against the state and, through that, against the whole ruling class. The proletariat is fighting against the economic policies of the exploiting class. The movement is political because it is confronting the state in all its forms: the government, the police in numerous confrontations in the streets, and finally, the trade unions.
"...the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and effect here continuously change places; and thus the economic and the political factor in the period of the mass strike, now widely removed, completely separated or even mutually exclusive, as the theoretical plan would have them, merely form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle..." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike).
This is a characteristic of workers' struggles which has been particularly strengthened in decadent capitalism where the working class must confront a capitalism stratified to the extreme.
***
The Belgian state has unleashed a particularly powerful attack on the working class in the last few years. It has imposed economic sacrifices as well as organizing a gigantic strengthening of repression under the pretext of ‘anti-terrorism'.
The bourgeoisie has closely followed the unfolding of this attack: certain papers have even talked about the ‘Belgian test': how would the working class respond? The class has given its response and in doing so has shown the way forward to the rest of its class brothers and sisters.
* * *
At the time we are finishing this article the wave of struggles in Belgium seems to be far from exhausting itself. But right now and whatever the latter development of events, we can say that the class combats which have shaken this country are the most important since Poland 1980.
Their significance is crucial. After the struggles which swept through Norway and Finland, they confirm that in Western Europe and the rest of the world, the class struggle is entering a new phase.
RV
30 May 1986
Readers will find more detailed information and analysis of the struggles in Belgium in our monthly territorial publications: Internationalisme (Belgium), Revolution Internationale (France), World Revolution (Britain).
[1] See International Review no.46, ‘Workers' struggles in 1985: balance sheet and perspectives'.
[2] Norwegian capital, which derives a good part of its profits from the export of oil, has suffered violently from the consequences of overproduction and the world fall in the price of black oil (a 70% fall in its oil revenues). The bourgeoisie has not been slow in making these losses felt through an unprecedented attack on the working class. As for the Belgian economy (certainly one of the most sensitive to the international economic conjuncture because it imports 70% of what it consumes and70% of what it produces!), it's been hit hard by the economic crisis since the beginning of the ‘80s: the industrial sectors which had been Belgium's strength (steel, textiles, coal) are among the most affected by world overproduction; the rate of unemployment (14%) is one of the highest in Europe; the public administration deficit reached 10% of the GNP in 1985 - a rate only surpassed in Europe by Italy (13.4%), Ireland (12.3%) and Greece (11.6%) . Belgian capital is also one of the most indebted countries in the world, since its debt is equivalent to 100% of its annual GNP! The Martens government has pushed 'special powers' through the Assembly, decreeing a new plan for draconian austerity, in order to make the exploitation of labor power more cost effective: massive lay-offs, in particular in the public services, the mines and shipyards; drastic reduction in all social benefits, particularly the suppression of unemployment benefit for the under-21s, etc.
[3] The Swedish bourgeoisie, certainly aware of the danger of contagion, applied an almost total black-out of news about the strikes in neighboring Norway and Finland. When the need is felt, the very ‘modern' democratic European governments know how to behave like the Duvaliers of this world.
Equipping themselves with the means to inform the rest of the world proletariat is an objective which the next mass movements must set for themselves straight away.
[4] The unions know what they are doing when, in each demonstration - and with an attention to detail and material means worthy of a better cause -they organize a careful control and separation of each category into whatever divisions are possible (by factory, region, sector, union organization...).
[5] It was the railway workers' assembly in Charleroi which on the evening of 22 May was able to say no to the Christian union's appeal to end the strike; no to the FGTB's proposal to organize a vote because it considered that the ‘cowardice' of the union bosses meant a terrible weakening of the movement. A few days later, in La Louviere, near Charleroi, a local of the Christian union felt the full force of the anger of a workers' demonstration as it went past. This wasn't the only example of a brutal confrontation between workers and union forces in Belgium.
In no. 9 of its theoretical publication Prometeo, Battaglia Comunista published ‘Proposed theses on the tactics of communists in the peripheral countries', which appeared in English in the third edition of the Communist Review, publication of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), in the hope of persuading, the IBRP to adopt these theses[1].
The ICC can but greet with delight this attempt to give a well defined guideline for intervention in a sector of the class which is so important, a sector where the absence of clear guidelines led to a precipitate flirtation on the part of Battaglia Comunista (BC) with bourgeois groups such as the UCM from Iran[2] or the RPP in India.
The proposed resolution deals with three kinds of problem. Firstly, the reaffirmation of BC's general positions on these countries; on the whole these positions are the same as ours (end of the period of capitalist development, counter-revolutionary nature of the so-called struggles for nation al liberation, etc). Secondly a definition of the approach to adopt towards groups in these countries who say they are concerned to have a coherence on a class basis. We have already commented many times on the basic opportunism of this approach and we shall not be afraid to return to it in a more systematic way. Thirdly, and this the specific object of these theses, what tactics must communists adopt in these countries which are on the peripheries of capitalism. Our critique is concerned with this last point specifically, not only to point to this or that particular error, but to show up the opportunism inherent in the attempt to get immediate results, which runs through the theses and poisons them.
In fact, many groups, including BC, have turned to work towards the peripheries of capitalism after the failure of the International Conferences of the Communist Left[3] at the beginning of the ‘80s. As they thought it a "waste of time" to engage in "unending discussion" within the Communist Left, they found it more gratifying and more exciting to have hundreds, or even thousands of followers. At this time, rather than contributing to the spread of communist ideas throughout the peripheral countries, they have been party to the penetration of the ideas of the bourgeois groups from the peripheries, such as the UCM-Komala, within the revolutionary milieu of the metropoles.
But the working class is international, as is the resurgence of its struggles, and in the long run, the effects of this resurgence will be felt even where the proletariat is dispersed and small in number. They can't sell us the peripheral countries anymore, only versions improved by the nationalists and third-worldists, but there is also the young voice of tiny groups who move towards a coherence on a class basis in spite of a thousand difficulties. And this voice is a critical voice which asks the communist organizations of the metropoles for clarity above all, for clarity on their own positions and on the real differences between them and other groups.
The debate between the revolutionary groups, which has been interrupted for several years in Europe, today returns to the agenda with force, because of these comrades in the peripheries, in whose name the debate between the groups of the Communist Left was pronounced dead and buried.
The international communists of the metropoles have no reason to be satisfied with the advantage that history and the experience of the proletariat of which they are an expression, has given them in comparison with the comrades in periphery. On the contrary, they should reflect on their lateness in forming a common pole of clarification to serve as a reference point for comrades in all countries. this is the task we set ourselves, the comrades of the IBRP and the whole of the proletarian political milieu. It is a shame that it can't be realized immediately.
The indispensable unity between "program" and "tactics"
"Objectives which are partial, contingent, simply tactical, can never be assimilated to the programmatic objectives of the Communist Party. This means that they can never and should never be a part of the communist program.
To make this thesis clearer by giving an example, we will refer to the question of the base organizations of the proletariat. What is part of the communist program is the centralized nature of the workers' councils at a national and international level, on the basis of units of production and territorial units (...) On the other hand, what isn't part of the communist program, but is certainly part of communist tactics - is the freeing of the proletariat from the prison of unionism in the struggle against capitalism through its autonomous organizations in the general assemblies in the factories, which are coordinated and centralized through elected and revocable delegates" (Preamble). The reason behind this distinction is that "if the movement of the proletariat attains this objective ("tactical") independently of a global strategy of attacks against the bourgeois power, it would be rapidly recuperated (by the bourgeoisie". (ibid)
It's true that any partial victory of the workers can be recuperated by the bourgeoisie, but this can happen whatever its objective is, even if it is what the proposed resolution identifies as the essence of the program: "the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of socialism". In fact, if "the dictatorship of the proletariat" remains isolated in one country alone, it can be - and it even must be - recuperated by capitalism, as the experience of the Russian revolution has shown us.
But our fundamental objection to BC's arguments is that as communists "we do not present ourselves to the world as doctrinaires with a new principle: here is the truth, down on your knees! We do not say to the workers: give up your struggles because they are foolish (...) All we do is to show the world why it is actually struggling..." (Marx). To limit what is said in the program to the need for the centralization of the workers' councils, is to present to the workers a sort of ideal which it would be nice to achieve but which has nothing to do with the struggles they are already involved in. The role of communists is rather that which Marx described - to show that the final objective of the international centralization of the workers' councils is nothing other than the end point of the process which is already taking shape in today's, as yet sporadic attempts at the self-organization of strikes on the level of one factory, or in the efforts to extend the struggles from one sector to another. The fact that the vast majority of workers are not yet aware of the real stakes of their struggles simply confirms the need for communists to put forward before the class as clearly as possible, "why they are actually struggling, and that consciousness is something they must develop, even though they reject it" (Marx, Letter to Ruge).
The program therefore does not consist solely of "the point where we want to arrive", but also "why it's possible and how it's possible to get there". To exclude this essential component from the program and to relegate it to the non-essential as a "communist tactic" which is more flexible, "is one of the historic paradoxes of certain political formations" like Battaglia Comunista, who correctly assert that the distinction between a "maximum program" and a "minimum program" is no longer applicable; who stress the need to eliminate any ambiguities remaining on this question from the Communist International - and then manage to forget the most important one. This is the ambiguity: BC rejects the old out-dated distinction but then reintroduces a new version that takes the form of a growing insistence on a distinction between the program, the bastion of principles, and tactics where you are more free to "maneuver" for the final victory of those principles.
Various groups of the Communist Left came out against this conception, particularly the Italian Left who, through Bordiga, reaffirmed the fact that tactics are simply the concrete application of strategy; that is, of the program. In fact, the intention of the CI's leadership in emphasizing this distinction was two-fold: on the one hand to give itself some margin for maneuver in the realm of tactics, and on the other to insure that momentary and sudden changes of tactics did not contaminate the essence and therefore the purity of the program. Of course, this distinction between tactics and the program existed only in the heads of the leaders of the International: opportunism came in through the back door of tactics, infiltrated the program more and more, and finally opened wide the front door to the Stalinist counter-revolution.
Apparently, the comrades of BC also have illusions, expressed in their belief that it's enough to say specific tactics for the peripheral countries have no place in the program. In this way they run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. They want to believe that the "little" tactical concessions needed to more firmly catch hold of groups and elements from the peripheral countries do not have any effect on the program; in this way the program remains pure, it will be easy to correct the contingent deviations that occur at a tactical level. The Communist International too thought this was easy...and we can see how it ended up. If BC - and the IBRP - do not back-track quickly they will run the risk of taking a path from which there is no return.
Illusion on "democratic rights"
Now let's see where the concrete application of this subtle distinction between program and tactics leads:
"The domination of capital in the peripheral countries is maintained through the use of violent repression and the absence of the most basic freedom of speech, of the press, to organize (...) Marxists know how to make a distinction between social movements for such freedoms and for democracy, and liberal-democratic political forces which make use of these movements to preserve capitalism (...) It is not the policy of communists to condemn the whole of the material and social movement and its demands in condemning this political leadership (...) just as it is not up to communists to ignore the immediate, economic demands of the proletariat in the metropoles, because in themselves they do not negate the capitalist mode of production." (Thesis 11)
The enormous differences existing in the social and political conditions of the peripheral countries compared to those of the metropoles are so obvious that no-one can deny them. The question is: what has "freedom and democracy" been doing over here? What does it mean to say that "It is the domination of capitalism - liberal and democratic in the metropoles - which denies freedom and democracy in the peripheral regions"? What capitalism denies, or rather, what it is incapable of guaranteeing, is a minimal development, in capitalist terms, of these areas, which would at least ensure the physical survival of their populations. Capitalism is not "democratic" anywhere in the world, least of all in the metropoles. What does still exist in the metropoles - although to a lesser and lesser extent - is a standard of living that is high enough to feed democratic illusions within the working class. Alternatively, if you want to talk about the fact that in the metropoles there is more freedom to organize, of the press, etc, than there is in the peripheries, you shouldn't forget the part played in this state of affairs by the existence of a balance of forces which is more favorable to the proletariat because of its strength and concentration. To raise the slogan of "democratic rights" in the areas where the proletariat is not strong enough to realize them and where capitalism is not strong enough to grant them; this is to dangle before the eyes of the masses, not a miserable carrot, but the illusion of a miserable carrot.
The distinction between social movements for democracy and their political direction is even more opportunist. As the Theses themselves admit, the "desire for freedom and democracy which is present in all strata of the population" (Thesis 11) is shared by the bourgeoisie as well. The picture, then, is not that of a vague "social movement" which is taken over parasitically by a bourgeois leadership basically alien to it. On the contrary, the movement against apartheid in South Africa (to use the example given in the Theses) is an inter-classist movement in which black workers have to march at the side of black bourgeois, under the direction of black bourgeois and under slogans which defend the interests of the black bourgeoisie in particular and of capitalism in general. The fact that these demands "arise naturally from social life in these countries", in marxist terms is a banality robbed "of all meaning. The demand for "reform of the superstructure" also arises "naturally" in Italy and in other industrialized countries; communists do not refuse to fight it and denounce it with all their strength because of that. In an effort to make "critical" support for these movements more acceptable, the Theses try hard to emphasize their "real", "natural", "material" nature and so on. Rather like the bourgeois philosophers of the 18th Century who thought that "everything that is real is natural" (ie. bourgeois), BC seems to think that everything that is material is proletarian, or at least not anti-proletarian. We are sorry to have to dampen this facile enthusiasm, but phenomena such as nationalism, unionism, racism (or anti-racism) are real forces, which exert a material weight in a very precise way and which arise quite naturally in defense of the existence of capitalism. The parallel with "immediate" proletarian demands, which is supposed to justify marxism in supporting these movements, simply shows how BC is forced to confuse the issue so as to get back on its feet. Immediate demands of the workers are one thing (higher wages, less working hours.); although these are limited, they are in the spirit of the defense of class interests and must therefore be supported by communists. The demand for "free elections", or for more power for its own "oppressed" bourgeoisie is another thing; in the short term as well as in terms of a perspective, these only serve to divert the workers' struggles into a dead-end. In the first instance, communists are in the forefront of the struggle; in the second they are still in the forefront but in warning the workers against the traps laid by the bourgeoisie.
This is the main point: Battaglia Comunista has a clear conscience because it rejects "the inclusion in the communist program of democratic political objectives which push back the real content to the communist program". At the same time it uses these objectives "in defining tactical lines, slogans for the immediate struggle (...) firmly linked to the demands, tactical lines and agitational slogans of the economic struggle, in a way which makes it practical at a material level for the penetration of the real communist program into the heart of the proletarian and dispossessed masses". The catch is that these democratic political (ie. bourgeois) objectives simply "push back" the communist program; they deny it and destroys it from top to bottom! To hold the view that the practical application of these objectives enables "the penetration of the real communist program into the heart of the masses", is to think that to teach someone to swim, you must start by tying his hands together and throwing him into the water.
When they say that these democratic objectives must go hand in hand with economic demands, the comrades of BC are deliberately turning their backs on reality. The experience of proletarian movements in the periphery of capitalism shows that exactly the opposite happens; submitting to nonsense about democracy results in renouncing proletarian political demands. We will again use the example of South Africa: in the Spring of 1985 black miners decided to strike for a large wage increase. The unions and black parties decided that the demands must be "widened" to include political aims such as the abolition of apartheid. Then the economic demands were eliminated - "so as not to ask too much all at once". In the meantime the strike was put off from week to week, giving the bosses time to prepare. The result was that the strike, emptied of all proletarian direction from that moment, was defeated the very day it started and as a result the workers were brainwashed into thinking that, ‘the struggle doesn't pay, only free elections can change things'.
The most worrying thing is that this insistence that the pursuit of democratic objectives can lead the masses towards communist positions, is dangerously close to the well-known and reactionary thesis of the Trotskyists who think that the proletariat isn't ready for class positions and must be brought to them bit by bit through intermediate aims, which are laid out in a lovely manual called "The Transitional Program". To be sure, BC does not share these counterrevolutionary positions and fights them within the western proletariat. But it is not equally firm in excluding the possibility of a tactic that is similar in many ways for the proletariat of the peripheral countries.
Such ambiguity does not even open one tiny window to communist positions in the peripheries: on the contrary, it runs the risk of opening wide the doors to the infiltration of opportunism everywhere.
The conditions of the struggle and of the communist program in the peripheral countries
"... The capitalist mode of production in the peripheral countries was imposed by overturning the old equilibrium and its preservation is based on and translated into the growing wretchedness of the ever increasing masses of proletarians and disposed, political oppression and repression are thus necessary to ensure that the masses submit to this situation. All this means that in the peripheral countries the potential is greater for the radicalization of consciousness than in the social formations of the metropoles." (...)
"Contrary to the countries of the metropoles, this makes possible the existence and activity of mass communist organizations." (Thesis 5)
"The possibility of "mass" organizations controlled by communists (...) must not mean that the communist parties themselves become mass parties."
"Basically the same problem appears in the advanced countries and it is this problem that our current is answering in the theses on "communist factory groups" which regroup the vanguard workers around the party cadres, these workers take their orientation from the party and are under its direct influence. The specificity of the peripheral countries lies in the fact that these conditions do not exist only in the factories and in a very limited way (for the moment) in the field of action of the revolutionary minority, in periods of social calm, but also on a larger scale on the ground, in the towns and in the country. In these countries, then, for the reasons we have given, the organization of communist groups at a territorial level is becoming a possibility." (Thesis 6)
As you can see, BC puts forward two closely linked theses on the "specificities" of the peripheral countries.
The first thesis is that because capitalism is implanted so weakly in these countries, the contradictions are laid bare, which makes "the circulation of the program within the masses" easier.
The second thesis is that this greater openness to revolutionary propaganda makes the formation of mass organizations under the direct influence of the party possible now.
Two theses, two errors. First of all, the thesis that because the contradictions in the peripheral countries are particularly acute they offer the best conditions for revolutionary activity is not an idea unique to BC. It comes from an idea defended by Lenin, known as the theory of "the weak link of capitalism", which sought to make a generalization of the fact that the revolution was victorious in a peripheral country, ie. Tsarist Russia. The ICC has made a detailed critique of this theory, but there is no room to take up the whole of this critique again here[4]. Suffice it to say simply that the international system of bourgeois domination does not consist of so many independent links which can be taken separately. When one of the weakest links is under stress (Poland in 1980, for example), the whole international bourgeoisie intervenes to support this national bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In these countries, the process of a proletarian revolt, confronting only its ‘own' bourgeoisie, would certainly have great possibilities for extension and radicalization. But in the face of a united front of the world bourgeoisie opposing it, these possibilities are very rapidly diminished.
Consequently, the circulation of the communist program in these countries is by no means easier, in spite of the high degree of radicalism and violence often reached in the struggles. Anyone who has had contact with the comrades of these countries can bear witness to this, and the comrades who work in these countries above all can bear witness to it. The daily reality that you have to deal with in a country like Iran, for example, is the enormous influence of Islamic radicalism on the semi-proletarian and dispossessed masses. The reality that you are confronted with every day in India is the existence even within the proletariat of tribal sectarianism which exists between the thousands of ethnic groupings in the country; the reality of the separation of individuals through the caste system.
If you can talk of the ease with which the communist program is circulated in countries where a day's wage is insufficient to buy even one issue of a revolutionary newspaper, in countries where the workers cannot read in the evening after ten hours in the factory because electricity is only supplied for a few hours a day, you are talking cheap humanism - or quite simply, you've never set foot in these countries.
The reality of the situation is exactly the opposite. Very small groups of comrades begin to work in the peripheral countries of capitalism and have to conquer the streets inch by inch, fighting tooth and nail against unbelievable difficulties. In order that they do not collapse under the weight of all these difficulties surrounding them, these comrades need all the support and all the strength of the communist organizations in the metropoles, rather than speeches about how easy their work is.
The practical conclusion that BC draws from the so-called ease of communist propaganda is the possibility of forming mass organizations directed by communists. We can see in this a typical example of bourgeois ideology entering through chinks left by a persistent weakness in revolutionary positions. In the circumstances, it is a case of the meeting of the shameless lies of the nationalists of the CP of Iran (on the existence of "mass communist organizations" in the mountains of Kurdistan and throughout Iran) with BC's hopeless desire to believe these lies which seem to give a breath of life to its old fixation on "communist factory groups". For some years now the ICC has polemicised with BC about its pretence of forming factory groups at the workplace, which regroup workers influenced politically by the party as well as party militants themselves.
BC's chimera: ‘communist factory groups'
In response to our criticisms and warnings on the danger of opportunist slidings, the comrades of BC have always insisted that the "communist factory groups" do not divert the direction of the party and that therefore their existence is not based on a watering-down of the program.
Now this is precisely the issue. While the factory groups are such as they are today, that is, simply initiatives of the party with a few rare sympathizers as well, and at least a little programmatic coherence, they cannot effectively give rise to any great problem, at least at the moment, because only something that has a real existence can really give rise to advantages or problems. It is a different question if we suppose the growth of these groups, a supposition which in fact is not realistic. As the crisis deepens, a growing number of proletarians will be pushed into the search for an alternative to the phony workers' parties and to all their so-called "intermediaries" (workers' groups, factory groups, etc), and we will see the influx of a large number of these elements. Once these factory groups have a real existence, they will consist of a certain number of proletarians who are disgusted by the false workers' parties but who are still partly tied to them ideologically; also a few, rare militants who have a programmatic coherence. This perspective is like the "Promised Land" for the militants of BC: finally the programmatic coherence of the party will be able to influence a greater number of workers! This they understand perfectly. On the other hand, what they can't get into their heads is that it is in the nature of things that all exchanges are made in both directions. This means that if factory groups offer common organizational ground for programmatic coherence and for the illusions which still weigh on the workers, it is not only the illusions which give way to revolutionary positions, but also revolutionary positions must make some small concessions to the workers' illusions if they are to maintain a common area of agreement.
If to the usual surrounding pressure of dominant ideology you add the internal pressure of the tendencies towards activism, localism and ouvrierism of dozens of workers recently awakened to the need to ‘do something'; where will the factory groups end up? The meeting point between coherence and confusion will of necessity tend to be situated closer to the side of confusion, contaminating even the revolutionary militants present in these groups.
BC's reply to these warnings can easily be inferred from the insistence made in the proposed theses on the fact that "the best qualities, the best cadres of the revolutionary proletariat and the best prepared are concentrated in the organs of the party" (Thesis 6).
In short, the guarantee that factory groups or territorial groups will not deviate lies in the existence of a homogeneous and selective party, which ensures the correct political direction. In fact BC is once more prey to the illusion that it is possible to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, in imagining there to be divisions into watertight compartments which do not exist in reality.
We have already seen how, at the level of political positions, the more you leave the coast clear for "agitational slogans" and a margin for maneuver for the "communist tactic", the more you cling to illusions in the possibility of saving your soul by declaring that all that "must not in any way become part of the communist program" (Preamble). It's the same at the organizational level: the more you throw open the doors of the so-called "communist" organs to the mass of proletarians who are only half-convinced, the more you think to save your soul by declaring that only "suitable" elements can enter the party, the real party. What does this correlation mean?
In the first place that these famous mass territorial organs are no more than the organizational concretization of the opportunist division between tactics and program (the practice of the groups is tactical while the party concerns itself with preserving the program).
Secondly, this means that just as an opportunist tactic ends up by sullying the program which was supposed to have inspired it, so every oscillation of the mass of partly conscious elements within the groups necessarily has repercussions on the revolutionary organization which is politically and organizationally responsible for these groups.
In the final analysis, all this talk about tactics and "mass" organizations leads not to the "penetration of the real communist program into the heart of the proletarian and dispossessed masses" (Thesis 11), but more mundanely to the penetration of bourgeois ideology into the rare and precious communist organizations.
The limitations of the amendment: a welcome but inadequate reaction
Any attempt to adapt communist positions to specific conditions in different countries (backwardness, etc) carries a great risk of an opportunist deviation. This is an old acquisition of the Communist Left. The accentuation of opportunist connotations that we see in every line of the proposed resolution was therefore very predictable; even a reaction against this accentuation within the IBRP could have been predicted. At the Bureau's last meeting a "formal amendment" was passed, which replaced "mass communist organizations" with "mass organizations directed by communists". And so, we read: "no concession, not even a formal one, to the mass communist political organizations, but a serious study of the various possibilities for the work of communists in the peripheral countries" (Battaglia Comunista no.l, 1986). In fact, for the comrades of BC, "The subsequent formulation left no room for doubt". Changing a term is more than enough to clarify everything. Perhaps this is true. But let's begin with the observation that these groups were intended to have one adjective too many attached to them: for 30 years, BC called them "trade union factory groups", and it was only after the initial polemics with us that they rechristened them "internationalist factory groups". We therefore made the remark: "If the elimination of the word ‘trade union' were enough to eliminate the ambiguity on the unions, all would be well..." (polemic with the CWO in International Review no.39, p.16). Having said this, in this instance, it isn't a matter of just one adjective too many: the Theses don't just call these territorial groups ‘communist'. They also take pains to say precisely that they are "communist because they are directed by and dependent on communist principles, because they are animated and guided by the party cadres and organs" (Thesis 6). If you were to take these assertions seriously, you would throw overboard, in one single sentence, the whole political-organizational tradition of the Italian Left, by passing off a mass organ composed of non-communists and inevitably subject to the oscillations of the proletarians who compose it, as a communist organization.
The logic of the liquidation of the party which lies behind these organizations cannot be got rid of by simply eliminating an adjective. By setting down these particularly opportunist formulations, those who drew up the proposed theses only developed logically and to its ultimate conclusion what the comrades of BC have always said: that factory groups are communist organs, are party organs, even if they contain workers who are not members of the party. The present supposition of the mass entry of non--communists, non-party militants into these party organisms simply makes apparent, on a larger scale, a contradiction which already existed. If BC wants as usual to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, they must say precisely that an organ can be communist even if the vast majority of its militants are not (it's enough that its leadership is communist). If so it is impossible to understand the need for the agreed amendment. Otherwise they must admit that it isn't a matter of party organs, but semi-political organs, intermediaries between the class and the party, which BC has always denied. And even if they admitted this, it would not be a great step forward: in fact they would be abandoning one of their particular confusions only to sink into the general confusion existing in the proletarian milieu on the question of ‘intermediate organs' or ‘transmission belts'.
In both cases the attempt to develop specific proposals for the comrades of the peripheral countries at a political-organizational level runs aground on the principles on which they are constituted. The comrades of the IBRP should think about this. Very seriously.
Beyle
[1] The IBRP was formed through an initiative of Battaglia Comunista and the Communist Workers' Organization (CWO).
[2] See ‘Address to proletarian political groups - in answer to the replies', in International Review no. 36
[3] See the pamphlets containing the proceedings of these conferences.
[4] See ‘The proletariat of western Europe at the heart of the class struggle', and ‘On the critique of the theory of the weak link' in International Review nos. 31 & 37.
In this issue of the International Review we are publishing the continuation of the history of the Dutch Left. This part of the article deals with the period from 1903 to 1907. The history of the Dutch Left is little known by people in general and for this reason, the work which we are publishing provides a documentation which should be of great value to our readers.
The history of the Dutch Left necessarily contains many specificities. Nevertheless, in order to understand it fully, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is an integral part of a general movement, that of the international working class. It is also necessary to situate it in the context of the period that is at a specific moment in the history of the workers' movement.
Two main points can be drawn out of this article: 1) the great difficulty the working class has in organizing itself as a distinct class and in creating its own organizations; 2) the fragility of these organizations, wracked as they are by crises periodically.
The first point is related to the very nature of the working class, which is what distinguishes it from every other class which has been called upon at certain moments in history to play a revolutionary role for the transformation of society. The political power of every other class has been based on their previously having won economic power. This is not at all the case for the proletariat which has no economic power other than that of being completely dispossessed obliged to sell its labor power and to submit to exploitation for the benefit of others. As a class that is both revolutionary and exploited, the working class can only create its organizations on the basis of its consciousness of its immediate and historic interests spurred on by the oppression it suffers at the hands of the exploiting class.
The second point is related to the fact that its organizations, because they reflect the evolution of the balance of class forces in the struggle, suffer constantly from the pressure of the ideology predominant in society, an ideology which is always that of the dominant class.
The appearance of revolutionary tendencies within the organizations of the working class has its source in the reaction to the inevitable penetration of bourgeois ideology into the class. The search for an organization for ever immune against this penetration, the search for a pure revolutionary organization, is as utopian as the search for a humanity that is totally invulnerable to the germs in the atmosphere. These are the politics of the ostrich which hides its head in the sand so that it doesn't see the danger which is lying in wait for it. Revolutionaries shouldn't have any illusions about the existence of "perfect and infallible organizations." They know that only the struggle - a struggle that must be unceasing and intransigent against the influence of the bourgeoisie - is the sole guarantee that the organizations secreted by the class remain instruments on the road to revolution.
The extract printed here bears witness to this fierce struggle waged by the international revolutionary current of the proletariat at a given historic moment in a specific country.
A) The struggle against opportunism
As so often in the history of the workers' movement, the struggle for the defense of revolutionary principles was engaged at first on a practical terrain. The struggle against opportunism in the Dutch party centered around two problems which today, with historical hindsight, might seem of little importance: the peasant question, and the school question.
The importance of the peasant question was obvious in a country like Holland, whose commercial capital invested in the colonies was accompanied by archaic social structures in the countryside. Apart from its stockbreeding sector, and although beginning to develop, Dutch agriculture remained backward, with a still large mass of equally backward peasants, especially in Frisia, Troestra's ‘fief'. Alongside the peasants, a mass of landless farm workers hired out their labor power to peasants, landlords and farmers. To attract the peasant vote, which sent a substantial proportion of the SDAP's deputies to parliament, in 1901 a modification was proposed to replace the abolition of the existing order through the socialization of the land, and therefore the abolition of private property, by a regulation of the "farm contract". Worse still, from the standpoint of the socialist program, was the point devoted to the agricultural workers. Instead of linking up their struggle to that of the workers in the cities and emphasizing their common interests with the rest of the proletariat, the program proposed nothing less than to transform them into peasant freeholders:
"2. The provision of land and agricultural equipment at a fixed price for landless farm workers, to ensure them an autonomous existence."
These slogans launched by the Troelstra leadership were a clear affirmation of reformism, which proposed not to abolish, but to ameliorate capitalist society. As the Left of the party pointed out: "these two slogans are in contradiction with society's development in a socialist direction".
However, at the Hague Congress of 1905, under the pressure of the Left, and with the support of Kautsky who at the time held to a left-wing position on the agrarian question, these two points were struck from the Party's agrarian program. "It was marxism's first conflict, and its first victory. But also its only victory".
The struggle against reformism was indeed only beginning, and entered a new stage with the debates in the Dutch parliament on the subsidies to be accorded to church schools. For obvious ideological reasons, the lay government wanted the state to support the church schools financially. The marxist struggle against this maneuver of the liberal bourgeoisie had nothing in common with the anti-clericalism of the contemporary French radicals and socialists, which was above all a diversion. The support given to the various religious denominations in the Netherlands was essentially due to the rise of the class struggle, which provoked an ideological reaction from the liberal bourgeoisie in power[1]. Following the classic reasoning of the workers' movement of the time, the Left pointed out that: "with the upsurge of the proletarian class struggle, the liberals, always and everywhere, look on religion as a necessary rampart for capitalism, and little by little abandon their resistance to religious schools".
Imagine the surprise of the marxists, grouped around the review Nieuwe Tijd, to see the revisionists come out openly in Parliament in favor of a vote for state support for the religious schools. Worse still, the social-democracy's Groningen Congress (1902) clearly abandoned the whole marxist combat against the grip of religious ideology. In a country, where for historical reasons religion weighed heavily in its triple form of Catholicism, Calvinism and Judaism, this was a veritable capitulation:
"The Congress...notes that the major part of the laboring class in the Netherlands demands a religious education for its children, and considers it undesirable to oppose this, since it is not for the social-democracy to break - because of theological disagreements - the economic unity of the working class against both religious and non-religious capitalists."
The argument used here - the unity of religious and non-religious workers - presupposed the acceptance of the existing ideological and economic order. Thus, "with this resolution, the party (took) the first step on the road to reformism; it (meant) a break with the revolutionary program, whose demand for the separation of church and state certainly does not mean state money for religious schools". It is interesting to note that the Dutch Left had no intention of glorifying the ‘lay' school, whose pretended ‘neutrality' it denounced. It did not base its position on a choice, false from the marxist viewpoint, between ‘religious' and ‘lay' schools. Its aim was to stand resolutely on the terrain of the class struggle; this meant rejecting any collaboration, under any pretext, with any fraction of the bourgeoisie. The marxists' misgivings about the Party's revisionist orientation were to prove well-founded in the heat of the workers' struggle.
B) The 1903 transport strike
This strike was the most important social movement to stir the Dutch working class before WWI. It was to leave a deep mark on the proletariat, which felt betrayed by social democracy, and whose most militant fractions turned still more towards revolutionary syndicalism. From 1903 onwards, the split between marxism and revisionism was underway, with no possibility of turning back. In this sense, the 1903 strike marks the real beginning of the ‘Tribunist' movement as a revolutionary movement.
The transport strike was first of all a protest against conditions of exploitation that are hard to imagine today. The railwayman's living conditions were worthy of the period of capitalism's primitive accumulation during the 19th century[2]. In 1900, they worked 361 days a year. Moreover, a strong feeling of corporatism reduced the possibilities of a unified struggle, due to the divisions between different trades. The mechanics, engine drivers and permanent way workers all had their own unions. Each union could start strikes, without any of the others joining the struggle. The unions' careful protection of each other's trade specificity rose as a barrier against the mass unity of the workers over and above differences in qualification[3].
Against these conditions, there broke out on 31 January 1901 a wildcat strike, starting from the rank and file of the railwaymen, and not from the trade unions. It appeared as a mass strike: not only did it hit all the transport trades, it spread throughout the country. It was also a mass strike in starting, not on the basis of specific demands, but in solidarity with the workers of Amsterdam harbor who were out on strike. The transport workers refused to act as strike-breakers, and so blocked the bosses' attempts to move their goods by rail. This movement of solidarity, characteristic of mass strikes, then snowballed: the bakers and rolling stock engineers gave their support. but there is no doubt that the originality of the movement - which did not succeed in spreading to other sectors of the Dutch proletariat - lay in the creation of a strike committee, elected by the rank and file and not designated by the transport union and the SDAP, even if their members participated in it.
All these characteristics meant that the mass strike ceased to be a purely trade, economic strike; little by little, through its direct confrontation with the state it became political. On 6 February, a decree of the Dutch government's war ministry declared the mobilization of the army; it also created an organism, within which the Catholic and Protestant unions were active, to regroup the strike breakers. This bourgeois offensive culminated on 25 February with the proposition of a law against the strike: the strikers were threatened with imprisonment, and the government decided to set up a military transport company to break the strike.
But, worse than all the threats and government measures, the strike was undermined from the inside by Troelstra's SDAP. On 20 February, at a meeting representing 60,000 strikers, and which was not held in open session - unlike the strike committee - Troelstra proposed the creation of a ‘Defense Committee' made up of different political and union organizations. This committee was composed of the NAS, and anarchist followers of Nieuwenhuis, the latter having committee was composed of Vliegen, a SDAP revisionist, the transport boss Oudegeest, the NAS, and anarchist followers of Niewenhuis, the latter having refused to take part in such an organism. Its orientation was to prove damaging for the conduct of the proposed strike against the government's measures. Vliegen declared that the strike could not be called, because the liberal Kuyper government had not yet published its decrees. In fact, the attitude of this ‘Defense Committee', self-proclaimed by different organizations, and by the SDAP in particular, rapidly revealed itself as negative. Not only was the committee paralyzed by the opposition between Niewenhuis' libertarian followers; the overbearing weight of Troelstra, who although he had initiated the committee was not a member, meant that it remained an organism outside the struggle. Using the pretext of the struggle against "anarchist adventurism", Troelstra came out against a political strike: he claimed that if the workers were to decide on a political strike in reaction to the "scandalous laws", this would only make them worse in Parliament. This was written in the social democrat daily without any reference either to the Defense Committee or to the Party authorities. This act of indiscipline was clear proof that the revisionist leadership did not consider itself accountable, either to the workers or to the party militants. It acted autonomously, the better to place itself on the terrain of conciliation with the bourgeoisie. Through Pannekoek's pen, the Left vigorously criticized this behavior, which was the beginning of a long series of betrayals of the struggle: "Your flabby and hesitant conduct cannot but serve the possessing class and the government" wrote Pannekoek, against Troelstra.
This betrayal came out into the open during the second transport strike, in April. The government had carried the vote in favor of its anti-strike laws, forbidding all work stoppages in public transport. Instead of adopting an energetic attitude, the social-democrat leaders on the committee, such as Oudegeest, came out against a general strike to include all workers throughout Holland. And yet, at that very moment, strikes had broken out, creating a social context far more favorable to the class struggle than it had been in January/February: in Amsterdam the bargees, blacksmiths, roadworkers, navvies and the engineers were all out on strike, while the municipal workers had walked out in sympathy.
In spite of everything, the general strike was called, under pressure from the rank and file. Its initial weakness lay in the fact that the railway workers' meetings were held in secret, and were therefore closed to workers from other trades. Despite the occupation of the stations and tracks by the army, which should have developed the spreading of the strike, it failed to become general. The movement to extend the struggle was nonetheless spontaneous: in Utrecht and Amsterdam, the engineers and masons joined the solidarity movement. Neither the presence of the army, nor the threat of five years prison for ‘agitators' and two for strikers, provided for by the new laws, were enough to cool the ardor of the striking workers, who since January had experienced "the joy of the struggle".
The workers' impetus and fervor were broken by the decisions taken by the social-democratic leaders of the ‘Defense Committee', which claimed to be directing the struggle. On the 9th of April, Vliegen forced the decision to halt the strike movement. Faced with the transport workers' fury and incredulity, the Committee disappeared. At a mass meeting, the workers shouted down Vliegen with cries of "He's betrayed us!". Even the Left was prevented from speaking: the workers made no distinction between marxists and revisionists, and Roland-Holst's speech was met with the cry of "Strike!". The attitude of the revisionist leaders was thus to provoke a long-lasting rejection by the Dutch working class of the whole social-democracy, including its marxist wing, to the profit of anarcho-syndicalism.
The 1903 transport strike did not have purely ‘Dutch' roots; it marked a turning point in the European class struggle. It broke out as a spontaneous mass strike, becoming a conscious force capable of pushing back the bourgeoisie politically, and giving the workers an unquestionable feeling of victory. But its failure was that of a general strike launched by the unions and parties.
This strike fell within a whole historical period marked by a combination of political and economic strikes, and culminating in the Russian revolutionary movement of 1905. As Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, "only in a revolutionary situation, with the development of the proletariat's political action, does the full dimension of the mass strike's importance and extent appear". Rosa Luxemburg, in her polemic against the revisionists, demonstrated better than anyone except Pannekoek the struggle's homogeneity, that is to say, an identical and simultaneous phenomenon at the turn of the century spreading throughout Europe, including Holland, and as far as the American continent:
"In 1900, according to the American comrades, the mass strike of the Pennsylvanian miners did more for the spread of socialist ideas than ten years of agitation; again in 1900 came the mass strike of the Austrian miners, in 1902 that of the miners in France, in 1902 again a strike paralyzed the whole productive apparatus of Barcelona, in solidarity with the engineers' struggle, while, still in 1902, a mass strike in Sweden demonstrated for universal suffrage; similarly in Belgium during the same year, while more than 200,000 farm workers throughout eastern Galicia struck in defense of the right to form trade unions; in January and April 1903, two mass strikes by Dutch railwaymen, in 1904 a mass strike by rail workers in Hungary, in 1904 strikes and demonstrations in Italy, to protest against the massacres in Sardinia, in January 1905, mass strike by the Ruhr miners, in October 1905, strikes and demonstrations in Prague and the surrounding regions (more than 100,000 workers) for universal suffrage in the Galician regional parliament, in November 1905 mass strikes and demonstrations throughout Austria for universal suffrage in the Imperial Council, in 1905 once again a mass strike of Italian farm workers, and still in 1905, a mass strike of the Italian railway workers..."
By preparing the political confrontation with the state, the mass strike poses the question of the revolution. Not only does it demonstrate the "revolutionary energy" and the "proletarian instinct" of the working masses - as Gorter emphasized after the 1903 strike - it profoundly altered the whole situation at the turn of the century:
"We have every reason to think that we have now embarked on a period of struggles, where what is at stake is the state's power and institutions; combats that may, through all kinds of difficulties, last for decades, whose length cannot yet be foreseen, but which will very probably in the short term usher in a fundamental change in favor of the proletariat in the balance of class forces, if not its seizure of power in Western Europe."
These remarks by Kautsky in his book The Road to Power were to be taken up by the Dutch left against Kautsky and his supporters in the Netherlands, such as Troelstra and Vleigen. The 1903 strike did indeed pose the question of ‘reform or revolution', and inevitably led, within the SDAP, to a confrontation with the reformists, who were betraying not only the Party's revolutionary spirit, but the immediate struggle as well.
C) The opposition within the Party (1903-1907)
The opposition within the Party was to be all the more vigorous, in that the consequences of the defeat of the strike, sabotaged by the Troelstra-Vliegen leadership, were a disaster for the workers' movement. About 40,000 workers were fired for strike action. The membership of the NAS, despite its militant position in the struggle and its opposition to Vliegen, fell from 8,000 in 1903 to 6,000 in 1904. Troelstra's SDAP, now with a reputation for treason, also suffered a considerable drop in membership: from 6,500 members at the end of 1902, to 5,600 at the end of 1903. By contrast, a sign of the reflux or even demoralization at the end of the strike could be seen in the rapid growth of the religious unions. Politically, the most combative union movement, the NAS, which could have become the SDAP's economic organization, drew closer to the anarchist positions of Niewenhuis. The fall in membership continued until the appearance of the Tribunist movement, which increasingly influenced it. By contrast, in 1905 the socialist unions linked to the SDAP created their own central union federation: the NVV (Confederation of Trade Unions of the Netherlands). Strongly influenced by H. Polak's reformist diamond workers' union, it quickly became the major union federation in the country. Right from the start, the NVV refused to help spread the struggle in the building industry; in the years that followed, it adopted the same attitude of holding back and avoiding solidarity with striking workers.
Faced with the development of reformism in the party, and its weakening as a workers' party, the marxists at first adopted a moderate attitude. Not only did they hesitate to form a determined fraction to conquer the leadership of the party, but their attacks on Troelstra remained extremely cautious. Although Troelstra had actively betrayed the strike, they still hesitated to talk of treason. When the balance sheet of the transport strike was discussed at the SDAP's 9th Congress at the end of 1903, Gorter spoke in measured terms. While insisting that he was "an opponent of the Troelstra leadership, not only in this strike, but also in other important matters", he hesitated to speak of the betrayal of the leadership:
"Naturally, there is no question of betrayal, but of the weakness of Troelstra's political conceptions, and of his constant wavering."
The 1903 Congress of Enscheden did not have the salutary effect that the marxists of the Nieuwe Tijd had hoped for. Although Troelstra had to give up the editorship of Het Volk ("The People"), to be replaced by Tak, Gorter was forced to shake his hand in the name of "solidarity" and "unity" in the Party against the "common enemy" outside. He managed to get it believed that Gorter and his partisans were attacking him personally, not politically. Complaining that there were those who wanted to deprive him of his leadership responsibilities, he raised the question of confidence. Instead of appearing as one of the elements most responsible for the opportunist orientation of the Party, he posed as a victim, and thus obtained the ‘confidence' of the party as a whole. In this way the revisionist leadership avoided a discussion of vital questions of principle and tactic in the class struggle. Although it was completely isolated, the marxist minority didn't capitulate and resolutely carried on fighting. From 1905 to 1907, the marxist current found itself confronted with a vigorous counteroffensive by the revisionists.
1. The Consequences of the Utrecht Congress 1905
The parliamentary fraction, which was the real leadership of the party, went further and further in collaborating with the bourgeoisie. In 1905, during the elections for the provincial states, the revisionists raised the question of supporting the liberals against the Kuyper government, which had broken the transport strike. The Left, like the Left in other parties, did not refuse, during the course of the elections, to support liberal candidates who took a stand in favor of universal suffrage against property-based electoral rights. It adopted a resolution in this sense during the 1905 Hague Congress:
"(the party) declares that during elections it will only support candidates who stand for universal suffrage."
But for the marxists, there could be no question of turning this tactical and temporary support into a principle. Contrary to what Troelstra wished, it wasn't at all a matter of calling workers to vote for "liberals of any stripe", just because they were anti-clerical. From a class standpoint, the fight wasn't against a particular capitalist party but against capitalism as a totality. In order to avoid any confusion about the petty bourgeois and small peasant elements, the workers had to be clear about their true identity:
"On every occasion the party must show the workers that their enemies sit on the left side of parliament just as much as on the right."
But instead of respecting the resolutions of the Congress, the party leadership, the parliamentary fraction and the socialist daily Het Volk left socialist electors free to vote for any liberal candidate who seemed to be all right. Although firm on positions which had been classical ones within the workers' movement, the marxists found themselves isolated from the working masses. Troelstra played on this as much as he could.
There were, however, reactions within the party. Despite the events of 1903, the party was far from having succumbed to revisionism; it was still capable of proletarian reactions against Troelstra's parliamentary fraction. The Hague Congress of 1905, no doubt under the pressure of the revolutionary events taking place in Russia, nominated a new directing committee of the party, this time composed of a majority of marxists, including Gorter. Opposition then grew between the new committee and Troelstra's parliamentary fraction. The latter wanted to support the new liberal government in order to "push it along the road of reform". For the directing committee, based around the Nieuwe Tijd group, this was out of the question. The real issue was to develop an agitation against the limitation of the right to strike, no matter what the government, liberal or clerical. Once again, Troelstra violated party discipline, by taking up a position which condemned workers' agitation. On 9 March 1906, in front of the bourgeois parliamentarians, he openly disclaimed the actions taken by the workers and supported by the party, despite the fact that he was a member of the directing committee.
This conflict posed a vital question in the workers' movement: was it the parliamentary fraction or the directing committee, elected by the party, which determined the policy of the organization? It was a question of whether the party was in the service of an uncontrolled group of parliamentarians conducting a policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, or whether the activities of this group were to be tightly controlled by the decisions taken at the Congress. This conflict over influence and decision-making wasn't unique to Holland. In Germany, for example, Rosa Luxemburg had to fight against the parliamentary leadership[4]. The problem of the real leadership of the party was the problem of preserving its revolutionary character. In Russia, after 1905, when the Bolsheviks had deputies in the Duma, their parliamentary fraction was tightly controlled by the central committee; and it wasn't at all accidental that it was one of the few who in August 1914 voted against war credits.
This opposition between Troelstra and the directing committee was to pose the real underlying question: reform or revolution. In a pamphlet which he brought out before the Utrecht Congress, Troelstra attacked the new party leadership, pretending as usual that he was being attacked personally, that the new marxist Centrale was "doctrinaire" and "dogmatic". Presenting himself as the ‘innocent' victim of persecution by the Gorter group, he could not however hide what really lay at the root of his thinking: that the SDAP should be a national party and not an internationalist one. The party had to make compromises with the small and big bourgeoisie: not only did it have to take account of the petty-bourgeois prejudices existing within the proletariat - "the religious and partly petty-bourgeois character of the proletariat" - but it also had to make this reformist orientation more acceptable. Troelstra didn't hesitate to resort to anti-intellectual demagogy: the marxists were "ultra-infantile" and wanted to transform the party into a "propaganda club". The marxist dream had to be countered with the ‘solid' reality of parliament:
"Will the party float above the heads of the real workers, basing itself on a dream-proletariat or, as it has done since the beginning of its existence and its activity, in parliament and in the municipal councils, will it penetrate ever-more deeply into the real life of our people?"
Thus for Troelstra, the only possible life for the proletariat - which, what's more, he willfully mixed up with other ‘popular' strata - took place not in the class struggle but in parliament.
To achieve his goals - making the party a purely parliamentary Dutch national party - Troelstra proposed nothing less than the elimination of the marxist leadership, the reorganization of the party giving full powers to the parliamentary fraction, which up to then had according to the statutes only two representatives on the directing committee. The executive of the party committee, elected by the militants, was to be replaced by the ‘executive' of the parliamentary fraction; the latter - according to him - "represents the party - not officially, but in fact, in parliament and in practical policies". The aim was in fact to establish a veritable dictatorship of the revisionist fraction; it wanted nothing less than to direct all the organs of the party in order to deprive the Left of any freedom of criticism.
A whole skilful campaign waged by Troelstra, Vliegen and Schaper among the militants allowed them to pose as victims of a witch-hunt not against revisionism but against themselves personally. They did it so well that a resolution adopted at the Utrecht Congress proposed to limit freedom of discussion and criticism in the party:
"(Considering) that the unity of the party is necessarily under threat, the Congress deplores this abuse of the freedom to criticize, which in our party is something beyond doubt, and imposes on all comrades the need to keep criticism within such limits that comrades respect the dignity and unity of the party."
2. The New Revisionist Course (1906-1907)
There could be no doubt that this resolution was a veritable sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the marxists, with the aim of terrorizing them and, if possible, making them capitulate to revisionism. After the Congress, Troelstra was able to threaten Gorter openly:
"if Gorter talks once more about a ‘rapprochement with bourgeois democracy', the sting in this assertion will be removed by the Resolution."
This triumph of revisionist diktats cleared the way for a revision of the marxist program of the party. A commission for revising the program was formed in contempt of the party's rules of functioning: the party committee which decided to nominate the commission did so without a mandate from the Congress, the only organ with the authority to decide to revise the program. The commission, under the influence of the revisionists, proposed nothing less than changing the marxist conditions for joining the party: if the party was to be based on Marx's system, it was not necessary to accept the underlying materialist philosophy in order to join it. The door was thus open to non-marxist, religious and even bourgeois elements.
The Haarlem Congress of 1907 merely confirmed the triumph of revisionism. The few marxists who were on the commission served merely as a cover for it, hardly making their voice heard. Out of the Congress came a declaration situating the party in the centre, between marxism and revisionism: "The program can be neither orthodox marxist nor revisionist nor a compromise between the two orientations". As for marxism as represented by Gorter, Pannekoek and Roland-Holst, it could only be a matter of "private opinion".
The defeat marxism suffered at this Congress was such that neither Pannekoek nor Van der Gies could distribute their own pamphlets against the party leadership. A Congress resolution, adopted unanimously, made things even harder than the Utrecht Congress: the right to criticize was suspended in the name of the ‘unity of the party'. Party democracy was openly trampled underfoot with the agreement of the great majority of its members, who hoped for an end to what they saw as "mere personal quarrels".
For the marxists, a very small minority, the choice was between capitulation and combat: they chose combat, to fight for the old marxist orientation of the party. They thus founded their own review De Tribune ("The Tribune"), which would give a name to the marxist current.
Chardin
[1] In France on the other hand, the bourgeoisie - in order to combat the development of the workers' and socialist movement - through its ‘radical-socialist' faction, used the anticlerical card to the utmost. It thus hoped, given the ‘popularity' of anti-clericalism in the workers' milieu, to lead socialism away from its own terrain.
[2] It wasn't rare to find workers working six days a week, more than 14 hours a day. On the inhuman conditions of the transport workers and the development of the Dutch workers' movement in this period, see De Spoorwegstakingen van 1903 - Een spiegel der arbeidersbeweging in Nederland ("The railway strikes in 1903 - a mirror of the workers' movement in Holland"), a study by AJC Ruter, Leiden, 1935, re-published, in the 70s, but with no precise date, by SUN reprints, Nijmegen.
[3] These craft unions, a vestige of the artisan period of the workers' movement, were progressively replaced by industrial unions. The latter regrouped all the workers in an industrial branch, whatever crafts they had. The development of the mass strike at the beginning of the century would however show that, in the open struggle against capital, organizing by industrial branches had been superseded by the massive organization of the workers of all branches. The idea of ‘One Big Union' propagated by the American IWW would quickly be shown to be inadequate, since it foresaw only an economic struggle in this or that branch, whereas the mass strike tended to become political, through the confrontation of a whole class, and not just some of its parts, with the state.
[4] Rosa Luxemburg was able to pose the real underlying question: reform or revolution. Thus she could write: "...what counts above all is the general organization of our agitation and our press in order to lead the toiling masses to rely more and more on their own forces and autonomous action and no longer to consider the parliamentary struggle as the central axis of political life." From the revolutionary point of view, it was vital to "warn the conscious working class against the pernicious illusion that it's possible to artificially reanimate democracy and the bourgeois opposition in parliament by moderating and watering down the social democratic class struggle." (Sachsische Arbeiteizeitung 5-6 December 1904).
% share in exports 1984 | ECC | Japan |
to | ||
USA | 9.4 | 35.6 |
OPEC | 6.9 | 9.2 |
COMECON | 2.9 | 2.0 |
TOTAL | 19.2 | 46.8 |
Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1936, a wave of spontaneous strikes exploded in France against the aggravation of exploitation provoked by the economic crisis and the development of the war economy, In July, in Spain, in response to Franco's military rebellion, the whole working class came out on strike against this attack. Trotsky believed he was seeing the beginning of a new international revolutionary wave.
However, in a few months, the political apparatus of the left of capital, by putting itself at the head of these movements, was able to sabotage them from within, to participate in their repression and shut the workers up in the false alternative between fascism and anti-fascism, thus playing the role of ideological recruiting sergeant for what would be the second worldwide inter-imperialist butchery.
On the anniversary of these events we are publishing two articles about them, because today it is indispensable:
-- to denounce the lie put about by the left of capital that during these events it embodied the interests of the working class, showing on the contrary that the left was the proletariat's executioner,
-- to recall the tragic lessons of these experiences, in particular the fatal trap of the working class abandoning the intransigent defense of its specific interests in order to submit to the requirements of one bourgeois camp against another;
-- to point out what distinguishes the 1930s - a period marked by the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave and by the triumph of the counter-revolution - from the present period in which new generations of proletarians are seeking to detach themselves from counter-revolutionary ideologies through a permanent and growing confrontation with capital and this same left; a confrontation which the proletariat won't be able to take to its conclusion - the communist revolution - unless it reappropriates the lessons of its past experience, which it has paid for so dearly.
The Spanish Civil War,
a rehearsal for the 2nd World War
1986 marks the 50th anniversary of the events in Spain 1936. The bourgeoisie has been commemorating this date with campaigns of falsification, launching the pernicious message that while the events of 1936 were a ‘proletarian revolution', today, by contrast, we're in a situation of ‘retreats and defeats', of a ‘crisis of the working class', of an ever-increasing submission to the laws of capital.
It's obvious that the lessons the bourgeoisie wants us to draw from past events are part of its whole tactic against workers' struggles, aimed at keeping them dispersed, isolated and divided. The object is to prevent them from extending and unifying by drowning them in a climate of so-called apathy and demobilization.
Against these maneuvers, our militant position is to defend the immense potentiality of the present struggles of the proletariat with the same force as we reject the lie of a ‘social revolution' in 1936. We link ourselves to the courage and lucidity of Bilan , who, against the stream, denounced the imperialist massacre in Spain, and provided us with the method which enables us to affirm the potentialities of the class struggle in the ‘80s and carry out a determined intervention within it.
Imperialist war or proletarian revolution?
How can we characterize the events which took the place in Spain after 1931 and which accelerated from 1936 on?
Our method isn't just based on the violent and radical nature of the class battles which shook Spain in this period, but on an analysis of the balance of forces between the classes on an international scale and over a whole historical period.
This analysis of the historic course allows us to determine whether the various conflict and situations were part of a process of defeat for the proletariat, were contained in a perspective of generalized imperialist war, or, by contrast, part of a process of rising class struggle, opening the way to revolutionary class confrontations.
In order to see what course the 1936 events were part of, we have to answer a series of questions:
-- what was the world-wide balance of forces between the classes? Was it evolving in favor of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?
-- what was the orientation of the political organizations of the proletariat? Towards opportunist degeneration, disintegration or integration into the capitalist camp, or, on the other hand, towards clarity and the development of their influence? More concretely: did the proletariat have at its disposal a party capable of orienting its struggles towards the seizure of power?
-- did workers' councils develop and affirm themselves as an alternative power?
-- did the proletariat's struggles attack all the forms and institutions of the capitalist state?
Faced with these questions our method is that of Bilan and other left communists (for example the minority of the International Communist League of Belgium, headed by Mitchell); they began from a world-historic analysis of the balance of forces within which the events in Spain were taking place; they registered not only the non-existence of a class party, but the disarray and passage into bourgeois camp of the great majority of workers' organizations; they denounced the rapid recuperation by the capitalist state of the embryonic workers' organs of July 19, and, above all, they raised their voices against the criminal trap of a so-called, ‘destruction' of the Republican capitalist state which ‘disappeared' behind the mask of a ‘workers' government' whose function was to destroy the workers' class terrain and lead them into the imperialist butchery of the war against Franco.
What was the balance of forces after the terrible defeat of the 1920s? In what way did the death of the Communist International and the accelerated degeneration of the Communist Parties condition the situation of the Spanish workers? What was the definitive result of all this in the 1930s? A course towards confrontations between imperialist bandits or a course towards confrontations between the classes?
The reply to these questions was vital for determining whether or not there was a revolution in Spain and, above all, for pronouncing on the nature of the violent military conflict between the Francoist and Republican forces, for seeing how they fitted in with the aggravation of imperialist conflicts on a world level.
Abandoning the class terrain
On 19 July 1936, the workers came out on strike against Franco's uprising and went en masse to the barracks to disarm this attempt, without asking permission from the Popular Front or the Republican government who put as many stumbling blocks in their way as possible. By uniting the struggle for demands with the political struggle, the workers thus held back Franco's murderous hands. But other murderous hands paralyzed them by appearing to offer a hand of friendship: the Popular Front, the Republican government of Companys who, with the aid of the CNT and the POUM, managed to get the workers to abandon the class terrain of a social, economic, and political battle against Franco and the Republic, diverting them onto the capitalist terrain of an exclusively military battle in the trenches, a war of positions exclusively against Franco. Faced with the workers' response of July 19, the Republican state ‘disappeared', the bourgeoisie ‘ceased to exist', hiding itself behind the Popular Front and the more ‘left wing' organs like the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias or the Central Council of the Economy. In the name of this easily-conquered ‘revolutionary change', the bourgeoisie demanded, and obtained from the workers a Sacred Union devoted to the single objective of beating Franco. The bloody massacres which then followed in Aragon, Oviedo, Madrid, were the criminal result of the ideological maneuver of the Republican bourgeoisie who had aborted the class embryo of 19 July1936.
Having left its class terrain, the proletariat was not only plunged into the war but, as a consequence, more and more sacrifices were imposed on it in the name of the ‘war of liberation'; wage cuts, inflation, rationing, exhausting working days ... Disarmed politically and physically, the proletariat of Barcelona launched a despairing uprising in May 1937 and was vilely massacred by those who had so basely deceived it:
"July 19th 1936 - the workers of Barcelona, barehanded, crushed the attack of Franco's battalions which were armed to the teeth. May 4th 1937 - the same workers, now equipped with arms, left many more dead on the streets than in July when they had to fight back against Franco. This time it is the anti-fascist government - including the anarchists and receiving the indirect solidarity of the POUM - which unleashes the scum of the forces of repression against the workers....Are the military fronts a necessity imposed by the current situation? No! They are a necessity for capitalism if it is to contain and crush the workers: May 4 1937 is stark proof of the fact that after July 19 1936, the proletariat had to fight Companys and Giral just as much as Franco. The military fronts can only dig a grave for the workers because they represent the fronts of capitalism's war against the proletariat. The only answer the Spanish workers can give to this war is the one given by their Russian brothers in 1917: revolutionary defeatism in both camps of the bourgeoisie, the Republican as well as the ‘fascist'; the transformation of the capitalist war into a civil war for the total destruction of the bourgeois state." (Bilan, ‘Bullets, Machine Guns, Prisons: this is the reply of the Popular Front to the workers of Barcelona who dared to resist the capitalist offensive').
The ‘argument' that Spain 1936 was a ‘revolution' has no foundation and implies a total ignorance of the conditions for a real proletarian revolution.
The international context was one of defeat and disarray for the working class:
"If the internationalist criterion means anything, it must affirm that under the sign of a growing counter-revolution on a world scale, the political orientation of Spain-between 1931 and 1936 could only go in a parallel direction and not in the opposite direction, towards a revolutionary development. The revolution can only reach its full development as the product of a revolutionary situation on an international scale. It's only on this basis that we can explain the defeats of the Paris Commune and the Russian Commune of 1905, as well as the victory of the Russian proletariat in October 1917." (Mitchell, ‘The War in Spain', Jan ‘37).
The immense majority of proletarian political organizations were going through a terrible rout: the Communist Parties were being definitively integrated into their respective national capitals; Trotskyism was dramatically losing itself in opportunism; the rare organizations who remained loyal to the proletariat (Bilan, etc) were suffering a dreadful isolation:
"Our isolation is not fortuitous: it is the result of a profound victory by world capitalism, which has succeeded in contaminating with its gangrene even the groups of the communist left, of whom up to now the Trotskyists have been the main spokesmen." (Bilan, ‘The Isolation of Our Fraction in Front of the Events in Spain').
"If there was any doubt about the fundamental role of the party in the revolution, the Spanish experience since July 1936 is enough to eliminate it definitively. Even if you assimilate Franco's attack to that of Kornilov in August 1917 (which is false historically and politically), the contrast between how the two situations evolved is striking. The one in Spain led to a growing class collaboration culminating in the Sacred Union of all political forces; the other, in Russia, led to the heightening of the class struggle culminating in a victorious insurrection, under the vigilant control of the Bolshevik party which had been tempered by fifteen years of criticism and of armed struggle." (Mitchell, ‘The War In Spain').
There can't be an opportunist rout of all the revolutionary forces towards the bourgeois camp at the same time as the working masses are going from victory to victory. It's quite the opposite: the rising class struggle is both the result of, and the impulse behind, a movement towards clarification and regroupment among revolutionaries; but when the revolutionary forces are reduced to their lowest ebb, this expresses and reinforces a course of defeat for the working class.
Submission to the bourgeois state
Despite all the propaganda about the ‘revolutionary value' of the factory committees, the collectives, etc, neither did any workers' councils exist in 1936:
"Immediately smothered, the factory committees, the committees of control in enterprises that had not been expropriated (in consideration of foreign capital or for other considerations) were transformed into organs which had to activate production and thus their class meaning was also deformed. They were no longer organs created during an insurrectional strike to overthrow the state, but organs oriented towards the organization of the war, essential to the survival and strengthening of this state" (Bilan, ‘The Lessons of the Events in Spain').
In order to dragoon the workers into the imperialist slaughter, everyone, from Companys to the POUM, from Azana to the CNT, ‘ceded power' to the workers organs:
"Confronted with class conflagration, capitalism cannot even dream of resorting to the classical methods of legality. What threatens capitalism is the independence of the proletarian struggle, since that provides the condition for the class to go on to the revolutionary stage of posing the question of destroying bourgeois power. Capitalism must therefore renew the bonds of its control over the exploited masses. These bonds, previously represented by the magistrates, the police and prisons, have in the extreme conditions which reign in Barcelona taken the form of the Committee of Militias, the socialized industries, the workers' unions managing the key sectors of the economy, the vigilante patrols, etc." (Bilan, ‘Bullets, Machine Guns, Prisons...').
In the final analysis, the worst lie of all was the criminal mirage of the so-called ‘destruction' or ‘disappearance' of the Republican state. Let's leave the marxists of Bilan and the minority of the ICL to denounce this lie:
1) "Concerning Spain, there has been much talk of a proletarian revolution on the march, of dual power, the ‘effective' power of the workers, ‘socialist' management, the ‘collectivization' of the factories and the land, but at no point has the problem of the state or of the party been posed on a marxist basis." (Mitchell, ‘The War in Spain').
2) "This fundamental problem (he refers to the question of the state) was replaced by that of destroying the ‘fascist bands' and the bourgeois state remained standing while adopting a ‘proletarian' appearance. What has been allowed to predominate is a criminal equivocation about the ‘partial' destruction `of the state, with much talk of a ‘real workers' power', and the ‘facade of power' of the bourgeoisie; this has been concretized in Catalonia in two ‘proletarian' organs: the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias and the Council of the Economy." (Mitchell, ibid).
3) "The Central Committee of the Militias was the weapon inspired by capitalism to drag the proletarians away from their towns and localities towards the territorial fronts where they were pitilessly massacred. It was the organ which re-established order in Catalonia, not with the workers, but against the workers who were dispersed to the fronts. Certainly the regular army was practically dissolved, but it was gradually reconstructed with militia columns whose general staff remained openly bourgeois - Sandino, Villalba, and their consorts. The columns were based on volunteers and could remain so until the illusion of revolution gave way to capitalist reality. Then there was a rapid march towards the official reestablishment of a regular army and towards obligatory service." (Bilan, ‘Lessons of the Events in Spain').
4) "The essential components of the bourgeois state remained intact:
-- the army took on other forms - the militias - but it retained its bourgeois content by defending the capitalist interests of the anti-fascist war;
-- the police force, formed by the assault guards and the civil guards, wasn't dissolved but hid behind the barracks for a while to return at an opportune moment;
-- the bureaucracy of the central power continued to function and extended its grip into the militias and the Council of the Economy. It wasn't at all a mere executive agent of these organs - on the contrary it inspired them with directives in accord with capitalist interests." (Mitchell, ibid).
5) "The tribunals were rapidly re-established with the aid of the old magistrates, with the added participation of the ‘antifascist' organizations. The popular tribunals of Catalonia were always based on collaboration between the professional magistrates and the representatives of all the parties ... The banks and the Bank of Spain remained intact and everywhere precautionary measures were taken to prevent them (even by force of arms) from falling into the hands of the masses." (Bilan, ibid).
From the ‘30s to the ‘80s
We've already seen that, as Marx said, bourgeois ideology turns reality on its head: it presents the 1930s as ‘revolutionary' years whereas today we are in a ‘counterrevolutionary' period.
If the bourgeoisie insists so much on this upside-down reality its precisely because of its profound fear of the potentiality of the workers' struggle today and because, at the same time, it mourns the passing of the ‘30s when it was able to enroll the proletariat into the imperialist butchery and present each of its defeats as ‘great victories'.
A that time, in 1936, the mystifications about anti-fascism, ‘defending democracy', taking sides between contending capitalist factions (fascism/anti-fascism, right/left, Franco/Republic) were increasingly polarizing the world proletariat, augmenting its demoralization and its enthusiastic adherence to the war-plans of the bourgeoisie, culminating in the terrible butchery of 1939-45.
Today, the mystifications about anti-fascism, national defense, supporting the ‘socialist fatherland' in Russia, convince less and less workers who are increasingly distrustful and hostile towards such lies. It's true that, for the moment, this hasn't been translated into a massive understanding of the necessity to put forward a revolutionary alternative to the bankruptcy of capitalism; there is still a skeptical, wait-and-see attitude prevailing. But this attitude can and must be transformed through the development of workers' struggles against the increasingly brutal and massive attacks of capital, and through the intervention of revolutionaries within these struggles.
At that time, the left governments, the Popular Fronts, had wide support amongst the working class, to the point that in many countries (France, Sweden, Spain), it was they who convinced the workers to accept every imaginable sacrifice ‘for the good of the country'.
Today, the working class is defending its class interests against all governments, whether right or left, applying in practice the watchwords that Bilan put forward without success in the ‘30s: "Not to play the game of the left when struggling against the right and not giving any benefit to the right when struggling against the left." A conclusive demonstration of this is that the ‘socialist' governments in France, Greece, Spain, Sweden, etc, have been faced by massive and determined responses by the workers, who haven't been taken in by the line that they have thereby been fighting ‘their own' government.
At the time, the proletarian parties which had been created round the time of the formation of the Third International, the Communist Parties, were reaching the end of a tragic process of opportunist degeneration and were integrating themselves into the capitalist camp, using their undeniable working class past to excuse a policy of defending the bourgeois state. As for the communist fractions which broke from them and continued the intransigent defense of class positions, they were increasingly isolated and came up against the growing incomprehension of the workers.
Today, the organizations which have remained loyal to the historic continuity of communist positions are enlarging their echo in the class; at the same time, we are seeing the emergence in a whole number of places of nuclei, groups and elements who are clearly posing the question of breaking with the left of capital and seeking a communist coherence. All this, though still at its beginnings and accompanied by all sorts of doubts, hesitations and confusions, constitutes the basis for a process of political decantation which will lead to the formation of the world communist party, the new proletarian International.
In other words, while the workers' struggles in 1936, in particular in Spain, took place within the course opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the triumph of the counter-revolution in Germany, Italy, central Europe and Russia, today's workers' struggles are p art of a process of the reconstitution of the unity of the world proletariat, which is breaking out of the grip of the ideology of the ruling class and entering upon decisive battles against capital.
The maneuvers of the Left: an experience never to be forgotten
The comparison between the two periods leads us to another fundamental lesson: the continuity in the anti-working class activity of the left parties and the unions, both then and now. Their tactics aren't the same because, as we have just seen, there are obvious differences in the balance of forces between the classes and in the state of consciousness of the working class, but what hasn't changed is their anti-working class function as a fundamental bastion of the capitalist state against workers' struggles.
Despite the different historical conditions, an examination of the maneuvers of the left parties and the unions - especially the CNT - in Spain ‘36 can provide us with a perspective for fighting against their maneuvers and traps in the present struggles.
In 1931, the PSOE, which had already demonstrated its integration into Spanish capital through its open collaboration with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (Largo Caballero was the dictator's state adviser and the UGT played the role of stool pigeon in the factories), made an alliance with the Republicans and, up until 1933, participated in the ferocious repression of the workers' and peasants' struggles, the high point of which was the cruel massacre of Casasviejas. Today the PSOE has been at the head of the government since 1982 and, as in the ‘30s, has left no doubts about its capitalist nature and its fierce hatred for the workers, assassinating a worker during the shipyard strike in Bilbao.
But, as we have indicated:
"The left doesn't accomplish this (capitalist) function only or even generally when it's in power. Most of the time it accomplishes it when it's in the opposition because it's generally easier to do it when in opposition than when in power ... In the ‘normal' situation of capitalism, their presence in government makes them more vulnerable; being in power wears out their credibility more quickly. In a situation of instability this tendency is even more accelerated. Then, their loss of credibility makes them less able to carry out their task of immobilizing the working class..." (International Review 18, ‘In Government or in Opposition, the ‘Left' Against the Working Class').
For these reasons, the PSOE, which in January 1933 had wet its hands with workers' blood at Casasviejas, left the government in March and, followed by the UGT, ‘radicalized' its language to the point where Largo Cabellero, the former state adviser to Primo de Rivera and Minister of Labor between 1931 and 1933, became the ‘Spanish Lenin'.
In opposition, the PSOE promised the workers ‘revolution' and talked about ‘huge arms depots ready for the right moment to carry out the insurrection.' With this celestial music, it opposed the workers' struggle for immediate demands, since they supposedly ‘prejudiced the plans for insurrection.' In fact, like its compatriots in Austria, it was deliberately leading the workers towards a suicidal clash with the bourgeois state.
In October 1934 the workers of the Asturias fell into this trap. Their heroic uprising in the mining areas and in the industrial belt of Oviedo and Gijon was completely isolated by the PSOE which used all the means at its disposal to prevent the workers in the rest of Spain, particularly in Madrid, from coming to the support of the movement. It played the trick of tolerating ‘peaceful' strikes which couldn't extend the front opened up by the Asturias miners.
This criminal maneuver of the PSOE and the UGT allowed the Republican government to crush the workers' revolt with the most savage repression, At the head of the troops sent to carry out the massacre was Franco, qualified by the parties of the time as a ‘professional general, loyal to the Republic'.
But the maneuver in the Asturias opened up a phase of ferocious repression throughout the country; any known working class militant was put in prison without the ‘Spanish Lenin', Largo Caballero, raising a finger.
The finger that the PSOE did raise, in accordance with a general tactic put into practice in other countries, was the famous ‘Popular Front'. This leagued together the PSOE and the UGT, the Republican parties (Azana and co.), the PCE (in this way definitively integrating itself into the capitalist state) and the CNT and the POUM, two organisms which had been working class up till then, and which supported it in a ‘critical' way.
The Popular Front openly advocated replacing the workers' struggle with the electoral farce, the struggle of the class as a class against all factions of capital, with a struggle on capital's terrain, against the bourgeoisie's ‘fascist' faction and in favor of its ‘anti‑fascist' faction. In opposition to the struggles of the workers and poor peasants for their own demands, it put forward an illusory and ridiculous ‘reform program' which would never be applied; in opposition to the only perspective possible for the proletariat (the communist revolution), it put forward the phantasmagorical specter of a ‘democratic revolution'...
This was a criminal demobilization of the workers, a way of derailing their combat onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie, of disarming them, of breaking their unity and consciousness and delivering them, bound hand and foot, to the military, who since the very day of the triumph of the Popular Front (February 1936) had been calmly preparing a bloodbath for the workers with the tacit approval of the ‘peoples' government.
When Franco finally staged his uprising on 18 July, the Popular Front, showing its true colors, not only tried to calm the workers, telling them to go home, but categorically refused to hand out arms. In a famous declaration, the Popular Front appealed for calm and coined the slogan: ‘The Government Commands, The Popular Front Obeys', which concretely meant calling on the workers to remain passive and obedient so that they could be massacred by the military.
This is what happened in Seville, where the workers followed the advice of the very ‘antifascist' PCE to remain calm and await government orders; this allowed general Queipo del Llano to take control very easily and organize a terrible bloodbath.
As we've seen, it was only the uprising of the workers of Barcelona and other industrial centers, on their own class terrain, uniting the struggle for demands with the political struggle, which paralyzed the executioner Franco.
But the forces of the left of capital, PSOE, PCE and co were able to react in time and set in motion a maneuver which proved decisive. Rapidly, within 24 hours, they put themselves at the head of the workers' uprising and succeeded in derailing it into a struggle exclusively against Franco - thus giving a free hand to the Republic and the Popular Front - and exclusively on the military terrain, outside of the social and political terrain of the working class, away from the major industrial and urban concentrations.
In 24 hours, the government of Martinez Barrio - formed to negotiate with the military rebels and jointly organize the massacre of the workers - was replaced by the Giral government, more ‘intransigent' and ‘antifascist'.
But the essential thing was to gain the unconditional support of the CNT, which regrouped the major part of the Spanish workers and which had quickly called off the strike and oriented the workers' organs created spontaneously in the factories and working class neighborhoods - the committees, militias, patrols - towards ‘antifascist' collaboration with the Republican authorities (Companys, Azana, Popular Front, etc) and towards transforming them into agencies for recruiting the workers to be butchered at the front.
With this step, the degeneration of the CNT was complete and it integrated itself definitively into the capitalist state. The presence of CNT ministers first in the Catalan government, then in the central government, presided over by the inevitable Largo Caballero, merely sealed this trajectory. All the leading organs of the CNT declared a ferocious war against the rare currents who, despite terrible confusions, struggled to defend a revolutionary position, such as for example the groups around the publication ‘The Friends of the People'. These elements found themselves being isolated, expelled, sent to the most dangerous positions at the front, denounced indirectly to the Republican police, by the whole band of Garcia Oliver, Montseny, Abad de Santillan, etc.
The Popular Front's maneuver, the ‘antifascist war', was definitive. It led the Spanish workers to a slaughter of monstrous proportions: more than a million dead. But the killing was also accompanied by incredible sufferings behind the lines, not only in the Francoist zones but the Republican ones as well. In the name of the ‘antifascist war', the few workers' gains conceded to pacify the workers' uprising of 19 July ‘36 were immediately annulled, with the CNT being the first to demand it. Starvation wages, exhausting hours of work, rationing, the militarization of labor, in short the savage and total exploitation of the workers.
The PCE was then the main party of exploitation, of sacrifice for the war, of anti-working class repression.
The slogan of the Stalinist party was ‘No To Strikes in Democratic Spain.' This was in fact more than a slogan. It was the banner under which, by means of the police, the majority of which were under its control, it aimed to put a stop to all strikes and class demands in the factories. It was the PCE's Catalonian front organization, the PSUC, which in January 1937 organized a ‘popular' demonstration against the factory committees which were too reticent about accepting the imperatives of militarization.
In Republican Spain the PCE was the party of order. This is why so many military men, agricultural and industrial property owners, police functionaries and numerous ‘senoritos' of the extreme right joined it or supported it. Through such elements it rapidly gained control of the repressive apparatus of the Republican state, emptying the prisons of fascists and bosses and filling them with militant workers.
The culminating point of these outstanding services to capitalism was the killings of May 1937. The workers of Barcelona, having had enough of suffering and exploitation, rose up against a police provocation against the telephone workers. The PCE immediately organized a ferocious repression, dispatching troops from Valencia and the Aragon front. The CNT and the POUM, appealing for ‘calm' and ‘reconciliation between brothers', etc, collaborated in all this by immobilizing the workers. Franco momentarily stopped hostilities in order to facilitate the crushing of the workers by the Stalinist executioners.
The war in Spain went on until 1939. It ended in the victory of Franco and the establishment of the political regime that we all know about.
The dreadful repression which then descended on the workers who had participated in the war on the Republican side completed the bloodletting that the bourgeoisie had imposed on one of the most combative sectors of the proletariat at that time.
The horrors of the obscurantist dictatorship to some extent effaced the memory of those of the ‘democratic dictatorship' of the Republic at the beginning of the ‘30s, and the whole work of sabotaging and repressing workers' struggles carried out by the ‘left' forces of capital (PCE, PSOE, CNT) during the civil war years.
Fifty years later, the Spanish workers are again subjected to the power and exploitation of capital in the form of bourgeois democracy. The Francoists and Republicans are reconciled behind the same police and the same army in order to preserve and manage the existing social order.
Fifty years later, when the workers are again resisting the effects of the world capitalist crisis and are constituting anew, in the four corners of the planet the world proletarian army, the warnings of Bilan in 1936, the lessons of the Spanish tragedy, must be clearly assimilated: the workers can only defend themselves by counting on their own forces, by building their own class autonomy. Any abandonment of the class terrain, of the intransigent defense of their class interests, in favor of an alliance with any faction of the ruling class, will be at the workers' expense and will end in the worst defeats.
Adalen
The "Popular Front" in France,
from sabotaging to "national unity" (extracts from Bilan)
"The Popular Front shows itself to be the real process of the dissolution of the class consciousness of the proletarians, the aim of which is to keep the workers on the terrain of the maintenance of bourgeois society in each and every aspect of their social and political life." (Bilan No 31, May-June 1936).
At the beginning of the 1930s, the anarchy of capitalist production is complete. The world crisis throws millions of proletarians onto the streets. Only the war economy - not just the massive production of armaments but also the whole infrastructure required by this production - develops strongly. Industry organizes itself around it, imposing new methods of toil of which ‘Taylorism' will be one of the finest emanations.
On the social front, despite the powerful counter-revolution ‘from within' in Russia, despite the routing of the world's most powerful proletariat, the working class in Germany, the world vacillates, still seems to hesitate at the crossroads between a new world war or a new revolutionary upsurge which alone would be able to overcome this terrible perspective and open up a new future. The defeat of the workers' movement in Italy, the popular fronts[1] in France and Spain, the ideologies of national unity, nourished by the most colossal dupery and ideological swindle of the century -"anti-fascism" - finally put an end to these last hesitations. In 1939 the world will be plunged into butchery, the darkest hour of the century. The future no longer has a future; it is entirely absorbed and destroyed in a present of hate, murder and massive destruction.
The credit for this great service rendered to capital, of having wiped out the last pockets of workers' resistance in imprisoning the proletariat in a nationalist, democratic ideology, making it abandon its terrain of struggle against the consequences of the historic crisis of capitalism, must go to those who today celebrate this sinister anniversary: the capitalist left and its union guard dogs.
To celebrate the anniversary of the Popular Front is to celebrate the anniversary of war, of the final victory over the international proletariat of nationalist ideology and of the class collaboration which three years later led the workers of all nations into the colossal fratricide of the second world-war.
************
The history of the Popular Front has been raised to the status of a myth and the truth, whether about its deeds, its real content, or above all its real consequences, is far from the picture painted by those who lay claim to this glorious past and who evoke it nostalgically today.
To reveal the truth about these dark years in which the consciousness of the working class was pierced by those who, claiming to be on its side, sunk to the lowest servitude, that of nationalism, we have chosen contemporaries of that sad epoch who avoided and opposed the large-scale and hysterical ideologies, who held high the banner of workers' emancipation and of its cornerstone, internationalism. We therefore let the review Bilan speak of the content, the unfolding and of the attitude of the official left to the workers' struggles, as well as on the ‘workers' acquisitions' of the Popular Front.
Of all the myths about the history of the Popular Front, that of the workers' acquisitions, above all of ‘paid holidays', is the most widespread.
The acquisitions of the Popular Front: one big smokescreen
The reader of the long quotations from Bilan will note, if he didn't already know it, that there was nothing idyllic about the conditions of the workers during the period of the Popular Front, as the long and hard strikes which punctuated its entire history prove best of all. As far as paid holidays are concerned, to take but one example, we should say straight away that the struggles which obtained these were always conducted spontaneously by the workers in refusing the militarization of labor:
"It's not a coincidence that these big strikes have broken out in the metal industry, beginning with the aircraft factories. These are the sectors which today are working full steam as a result of the policy of rearmament pursued in all countries. This fact, sensed by the workers, leads to them launching their movements in order to reduce the brutal rhythm of the assembly lines; for the improvement of their wages; in order to obtain a collective work contract, and for the recognition of the unions by the employers; for paid holidays, on the basis of an intensification of work in the metal sector linked to the war. It is therefore a painful paradox, for which the workers are not responsible, but which has to be put down to the forces of capital which have put the workers in this situation." (Bilan No 31, May-June 1936, p. 10-15).
In the face of the tension of the work force in the framework of the reinforcement of the war economy and of the new organization of work flowing from this, the workers took up the struggle, among others, in order to obtain an annual break. But in the hands of the unions this victory, to which they themselves have not contributed, becomes a final goal, an institution to allow for the integration of the working class into the framework of the militarization of labor.
On the eve of the Popular Front: the nationalist poison
The articles of Bilan throw a different light on the period from July 1934 to the spring of 1937 than the traditional fairy tales told by the left. On what basis was the Popular Front constituted?
"Under the star of July 14"
"Under the imposing star of mass demonstrations the French proletariat is being dissolved into the capitalist regime. Despite the thousands and thousands of workers marching in the streets of Paris, it can be said that in France just as much as in Germany, there is not a proletarian class fighting for its own historical objectives. On this subject, July 14 marks a decisive moment in the process of disintegration of the proletariat and in the reconstitution of the holy unity of the capitalist nation. It's been a true national festival, an official reconciliation of class antagonisms, of exploiters and exploited. In this complete triumph of republicanism the bourgeoisie, far from imposing limits through a heavy-handed stewardship, allowed it to unfold in all its glory. The workers thus tolerated the tricolor flag of their imperialism, sung the ‘Marseillaise' and even applauded Daladier, Cot and other capitalist ministers who, along with Blum, Cachin, solemnly swore ‘to give bread to the workers, work to youth and peace to the world' or, in other words, lead, barracks and imperialist war for everyone.
"It can't be denied that events are moving fast. Since the declaration of Stalin, the situation has rapidly been clarified. From now on the workers have a fatherland to defend, they have reconquered their place in the nation, and, from now on they admit that all the revolutionary proclamations concerning the incompatibility between the Internationale and the ‘Marseillaise', the communist revolution and the capitalist nation, are nothing but fine phrases which the October revolution launched in vain, since Stalin has shown their insufficiency ...
"July 14 is therefore the final summit of the devouring of the proletariat by the democratic republic. It's the example of militant communists and socialists which convinces the workers - quite rightly hesitating - to sing the ‘Marseillaise'. What an unforgettable spectacle, writes Populaire. What a triumph, adds L'Humanite. And both refer to the ‘typical' old worker who, "with tears in his eyes", expresses the joy of hearing the hymn of his exploiters, the hangmen of June, the murderers of the communards, the civilizers of Morocco and the war of 1914, become proletarian. Duclos, in his speech, said that in saluting the tricolor flag, the workers salute the ‘revolutionary past' of France, but that his red flag represents the future. But this past continues in the present, in other words, in the fierce exploitation of the workers, in the robber wars of capitalism massacring entire generations of proletarians, In 1848 too, the bourgeoisie tried to revive the past, the traditions of ‘93, the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, in order to shroud the present class antagonisms: the killings of June were the consequence of proletarian illusions ...
"And after this imposing demonstration, the defeat of the class called upon to overthrow bourgeois society, to install a communist society, we have to ask ourselves if a fascist menace is really posed in France. Until now, it seems that the Croix de Feu has been more a means of blackmail, a scarecrow to accelerate the wearing down of the proletarian masses through the united front, than a real danger. But the raising of anti-fascism to a supreme law has justified the vilest capitulations, the lowest compromises, in order to end up diverting the workers far away from their organization of resistance towards an antifascist front including even Herriot. It's not by coincidence that the decree-laws came immediately after July 14 and that they found the proletariat clearly incapacitated, whereas thousands of workers had marched a few days beforehand shouting for ‘the workers' councils'." (Bilan, July-August 1935).
In face of the defensive struggles
The preparation of the Popular Front thus already announced its future evolution, in particular in face of the defensive struggles of the workers. How did the famous year 1936 unfold on the social front?
"The reconciliation of the French and union unity"
"A breath of fresh air has crossed France on December 6th: parliament achieved an "historic day" since Blum, Thorez, Ybarnegaray have sealed the ‘reconciliation of the French'. From now on, no more murderous struggles will stain republican and democratic France. Fascism has been vanquished. The Popular Front has saved the republican institutions. If these events hadn't drawn millions of French workers behind them, if they weren't so repugnant, one could almost laugh at all this buffoonery. Nobody is menacing the bourgeois republic and everybody is menacing it. The right accuses the left and vice versa. The Popular Front proclaims its republican civil spirit, whereupon La Roque and his Croix de Feu repeat the same litany. The formations of the Croix de Feu - certainly more powerful and infinitely better armed than the workers - no more menace the Republic than do the combat and self-defense formations of the Popular Front, since both put themselves at its service to reinforce the capitalist domination which is all the more republican the better it pays to be so ...
"From the point of view of the immediate situation, the dupes of the historic day December 6 are incontestably the workers. Already, after their resistance at Brest and Toulon, they are called ‘provocateurs' by the chained dogs of the Popular Front. After the ‘reconciliation', the proletarian who tries to violently resist capitalist violence will be beaten up, injured and delivered by the agents of the Popular Front into the hands of the police. Rosa Luxemburg said that against the Spartakists, the social patriots mobilized heaven and earth, unleashed sword and fire. Spartakus had to be massacred! In France, the Popular Front, loyal to the tradition of treason, doesn't hesitate to provoke murder against those who don't yield to the ‘disarmament of the French' and who, like at Brest and Toulon, launch defensive struggles, class battles against capitalism and beyond the pillars of influence of the Popular Front." (Bilan No 26, December-January 1936).
This attitude and this beginning to the year 1936 are but the prelude to a fantastic work of attrition by the left and the unions during the movement of the spring.
"The conditions which accompany the triumph of the Popular front are thus those leading to the annihilation of the consciousness of the working class. The triumph of the government of the Popular Front signals the disappearance of any proletarian resistance to the bourgeois regime, at least of all resistance organized by the proletariat. From the centrists[2] to the socialists, all are forced to admit that the Blum government will not be a revolutionary government, that it will not touch bourgeois property, that we shouldn't take too seriously the centrist formula: make the rich pay. The program of the Popular Front has the amnesty as its first point, and not the revolution; the cleansing of the administration, the dissolution of the Leagues, and then economic measures, public works to be carried out, like those of de Plan in Belgium, to reabsorb the unemployed. The centrists will be satisfied by the last decisions of the radical party, declaring its participation in the Blum government and demanding a united vote for its election to government. Two good decisions according to L'Humanite which is impressed enough to dectare that the Popular Front finally represents the revenge of the Communards over Versailles.
"The whole bourgeois press praises the moderation of the socialists and centrists and doesn't take too seriously the claim by the extreme right that the CP is preparing a seizure of power by the soviets in the form of its Popular Front committees. But there is one discordant note in this idyllic atmosphere: the menace of wage conflicts by proletarians fed up of promises of ‘humanization' by the decree laws. The CGT has gone to great lengths to liquidate the threat of a general strike in the mines of Pas-de-Calais, a threat which could have created dangerous ripples in the period between the two electoral rounds. After the victory of the Popular Front, strike movements developed progressively, going so far as to embrace the whole Paris region recently. A Belgian journalist remarked quite rightly that the movements in France have broken out just like the May ‘36 strikes in Belgium: outside of and against the unions, and are thus ‘wildcat' movements ...
"From May 14 on, the movement reached the Paris region. At Courbevoie, the workers went on strike in the factory and won a 0.25ff increase and a collective contract for six months. At Villacoublay, the workers obtained paid holidays, then at Issy-les-Moulineaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers. Everywhere the movements broke out without any union prompting, spontaneously, and took on the same character: strikes inside the factory.
"On Thursday May 28, at lasts the strike at Renault where 32,000 workers moved into action. On Friday and Saturday, the metal plants of the Seine entered the movement ...
"In L'Humanite and in Populaire a particular effort is made to prove that the Popular Front isn't in these movements for nothing, and above all can affect their focus. It's necessary at all costs to reassure the bourgeoisie, which, as the article of Gallus in L'Intransigeant proves, got quite a scare. Capitalism understands perfectly well that it's not a question of a real occupation of factories, but of a workers' struggle using the inside of the factory as a field of battle, and one where the intrusion of the parties of the Popular Front, of the CGT, is less to be feared. In Belgium too the miners' strike of May 1935 took on this character and clearly expressed it in refusing to receive the official delegates of the socialist unions of the POB or the CP in the mines.
"Such movements are symptomatic and full of dangers for capitalism and its agents. The workers sense that their class organizations are dissolved in the Popular Front and that their workplace becomes their specific terrain of action where they are united by their chains of exploitation. In such circumstances, one false maneuver of capitalism can lead to clashes and shocks which could open the eyes of the workers and distance them from the Popular Front. But Sarraut once again understands the situation. He leaves things as they are. No mobile guards, no brutal expulsion of workers from the factories. Negotiate, and leave the socialists and centrists a free hand.
"May 30, Cachin tries to link these class movements in opposition to the Popular Front to the latter. He writes: "The tricolor fraternizes over the factory with the red flag. The workers are unanimous in supporting the general demands: Croix de Feu, white Russians, foreigners, socialists, communists are all fraternally united for the defense of bread and respect for the law." But Populaire of the same day isn't completely in agreement with this appreciation, since after having called the return to work at Renault a victory, it writes: "This is the end. It's victory. Only at the Seguin some fanatics - there are sincere ones among them, but also provocateurs of the Croix de Feu - seem to doubt it." It's probable that the "victory at Renault hasn't been approved by numerous workers who don't want to partake of the ‘spirit of conciliation of which Frachon speaks in L'Humanite and who very often returned to work ‘with only part of what they fought for'". These will be the ‘provocateurs', the ‘Croix de Feu'.
"These gentlemen of the Popular Front have demonstrated not only to the bourgeoisie but also to the workers themselves, that no revolutionary events are taking place. Here, ‘a revolutionary occupation', writes Populaire, ‘goes on. Everywhere: joy, order, discipline.' And they show photos of workers dancing in the factory yards; talk about pleasure parties: ‘the workers go swimming, play games, or flirt'" (Bilan No 37, May-June 1936).
From sabotage to direct pitiless repression
Thus, before and during its reign, the Popular Front never made a workers' front against capitalism, but the front of the bourgeoisie against the working class. It's as such that it signs its counter-revolutionary work with the blood of the Parisian workers. That's what the repression of spring 1937 shows us.
"The ‘free, strong and happy' France assassinates the proletarians"
"The whistle of bullets has torn the mask of the Popular Front. The workers' bodies explain the ‘pause' of the Blum government. In the streets of Clichy the program of the Popular Front has been expressed through the salvoes of the mobile guards, and nothing could have better illustrated it.
"Ah! the defenders of republican order, the hangmen of bourgeois democracy can cry in jubilation. The mutiny has been broken and the old traditional cry "order reigns in Warsaw" echoes once again with the Cossacks of Max Dormoy.
"But workers' blood hasn't stained the streets of Paris for nothing, this Paris ready to commemorate the Communards of 1871. From now on, the Union Sacree has acquired a bloody significance and the workers can draw from this tragic experience a precious class lesson. Notably that there cannot be a ‘reconciliation of the French' through the voluntary capitulation of the workers' movement. The mobile guard will beat hand to impose it with bullets. That bourgeois democracy, the ‘free, strong and happy France' and the famous slogans of the ‘Popular Front', ‘bread, peace and liberty' really signify: the jurisdiction over the workers' demands, the falsehood of national defense, and bullets of the mobile guard for proletarian demonstrations which go beyond the framework traced by the social-centrists ...
"That's what the workers have learnt with the Popular Front, and the song begins to get worn out. Why didn't Blum put a stop to this fascist danger he says is imminent? Why does he take back from the workers all they have gained with their strike movements? Why does he treat them as ‘provocateurs', going over to the attack despite arbitration? Blum makes his ‘pause' solely so the workers can be compelled to continue to make sacrifices.
"All of this has created a state of irritation among the workers which expresses itself particularly in the Paris region where the reformist-centrist top brass are cornered in the union assemblies. Already, in the face of this state of tension, it was decided to organize two demonstrations in the Paris area: one for the unemployed and the other for the workers. Finally, in the metal sector, they were confronted with workers' demands for a general strike to protest against the decisions of the deciding umpire.
"It's in this tense situation that the social-centrists gave the last touch of anti-fascism in order to keep the workers on the path of the Union Sacree, ‘voluntarily' agreed to by the workers. The counter-demonstration at Clichy was to be imposing: La Roque could be shown that ‘the French nation' lives and fights for the bourgeois democracy of which Messers Daladier-Herriot are authentic representatives. The bourgeoisie too prepared itself, since, knowing the situation among the workers, it suspected somehow that the social-centrist bosses might be swamped by their troops. The mobile guards were seriously armed, as if to go to war. Among the leaders of the repressive forces there was a conviction that Blum's ‘pause' was also the pause of the workers' movement. The directive was therefore to ferociously repress the latter and the necessary ambiance was certainly stirred up among the mobile guards. There was not and couldn't have been any contradiction between the ‘fascist' police chiefs and the Popular Front government. The latter talked of the ‘pause' in explaining this necessity to the workers, whereas the former did no more than apply it with their stupid cop mentality, brutally carrying out instructions without caring about the consequences ...
"Two forces collided at Clichy: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The workers concentrated in masses for anti-fascist goals discovered in their numbers the exalting force to impose their anger and express the tension implanted in their flesh as eternally duped proletarians: the bourgeoisie went over to repression where the Popular Front could no longer maintain the workers on the front of the interests of capital ...
"Nothing can change the battle of Clichy. Like nothing can change the massacres in Tunisia and those carried out in recent times in Algeria, in Indochina. It's the Popular Front, which in wanting to stay in power during the ‘pause' went over to massacre the proletarians of the metropole and the colonies, where the accumulation of set-backs imposed upon the workers by Blum pushed towards more and more violent battles. The demagogic program of the Popular Front arrived at the end of the line, and the new program passes away via the massacre of the workers. And where else would one search for ‘provocateurs' than in a situation created by workers?
"The truth comes out with a clarity above and beyond any commentary: the workers going on strike come up against the capitalist state, and with it the Popular Front which opens fire. The social-centrists, conscious of this situation (which could prompt the bourgeoisie to employ material other than Blum to maintain its domination) tried to organize a vulgar anti-fascist demonstration. That's why it was to be strictly limited time-wise (until midday); it should be noted that the point was not to take up the calls for a general strike to defend the workers' demands (communiqué of the CGT and the Parisian union syndicate).
"And finally, the point was not to fight against the Popular Front government but to consolidate it" (Bilan No 40, April-May 1937). PRENAT
Glossary
Popular Front: electoral, then governmental coalition-(1936-37) regrouping the Socialist Party (SFIO) the Radical Party (or ‘Radicals') and the French Communist Party.
Croix de Feu: war veteran organization of the extreme right. Founded in 1927, it was dissolved in 1936.
Some political figures
Duclos, Cachin: French CP leaders.
Thorez: Secretary-general of the CP.
Daladier: leader of the Radical Party.
Blum: leader of the socialist party, SFIO, heading the coalition government of the Popular Front.
Herriot: President of the chamber of deputies from 1936-1940, leader of the Radical Socialist Party.
La Roque: leader of the Croix de Feu.
Newspapers
L'Intransigeant: the standard right-wing paper.
L'HumaAite: daily organ of the CP.
Le Populaire: journal of the Popular Front.
[1] A brief glossary giving the principal parties and movements, politicians, papers, etc, is to be found at the end of this article.
[2] The communist left and Bilan considered the Stalinists and the communist parties affiliated to the International to be ‘centrist'. On ‘centrism and opportunism', see the International Review No 44.
Since its formation, this organization, made up of former members of the ICC, has engaged in a campaign of calumnies against our Current. In our International Review 45 we refuted some of these lies (to have refuted them all would have taken far too much time and would have meant filling up the entire issue to the detriment of much more important questions). Among these lies, there was one which really went beyond all limits: that the ICC excluded these comrades, when it was they who voluntarily left the organization despite our insistence on the irresponsibility of such a course. In no. 3 of Internationalist Perspective, the organ of the EFICC, there is an article which proposes to explain the reasons "why we (the comrades of the minority) had to leave the organization". Although the article is a tissue of ridiculous little lies and stupid corridor gossip, at no point does it talks about an exclusion (which would after all have been a good explanation for their departure). Furthermore, the next article, ‘Why Do We Call Ourselves a Fraction' attempts to explain with so-called ‘theoretical' and ‘historical' arguments why the minority had to leave the ICC. It would be a waste of time going once again over these calumnies and the specious arguments that accompany them.
Nevertheless, we take note of the EFICC's rectification of its previous assertions about being excluded. We encourage them to go further in this direction and in their ensuing issues withdraw all the other lies which up to now they've been circulating about the ICC.
The formidable class combats that shook Belgium last April/May - the most important since Poland 1980, and since the end of the ‘60s in western Europe - have revealed the poverty of the bourgeois speeches about the "working class' realism in the face of the crisis", its "understanding of the need to make sacrifices" and other such nonsense aimed at demoralizing the workers, at preventing them from seeing the force that they represent when they struggle and unite against capitalism. These combats have highlighted the fact that the bourgeoisie's hands are not free to deal out the brutal blows against the working class that the increasing collapse of its economy demands. And this is true not only in Belgium, but throughout the countries of Western Europe, which are already, or soon will be, in the same situation. But there is more to this movement. Just as the struggles in the state sector in September 1983 - in Belgium once again - gave the signal for a powerful renewal of the workers' struggle in the major capitalist metropoles after the retreat that had followed the proletariat's defeat in Poland 1981, so the combats of spring ‘86 are the proof that the struggle of the world proletariat has entered a new phase in its development. Whereas in 1985, the bourgeoisie in the central countries succeeded .in splitting up the signs combativity, and succeeded in dispersing the workers' fight-back by keeping its attacks separate in both time and space, the workers' struggles in Belgium have highlighted the limits of this kind of policy. The imminence of a new recession, far deeper than that of 1982-83 (see the article ‘The Dead End' in this issue), is increasingly forcing the bourgeoisie to give up its dispersed attacks in favor of massive, head-on ones. As in Belgium in April/May 1986, the workers' struggles against these attacks will more and more tend to be massive and unified across branch and regional divisions.
This is the crux of the article ‘From Dispersal, Towards Unification' in the previous issue of the Review, and of the resolution adopted by our organization in June 1986, which we are publishing in this issue. Since the resolution was adopted, events have clearly confirmed its analysis. Whereas the holiday break discouraged the development of widespread movements on the part of the working class, the bourgeoisie on the contrary seized the opportunity to unleash anti-working class attacks of unprecedented brutality. As we shall see ...
Unprecedented attacks
During the summer, the most spectacular blows have been dealt in Holland - a country famed for its high living standards and social ‘protection'. A few months after its Belgian neighbor, the Dutch bourgeoisie announced attacks comparable in every way to those that, in Belgium, had provoked the massive movements in the spring. No sooner had it come into office on July 14th, than the centre-right government that emerged from the May elections announced the need to reduce drastically the budget for 1987: 12 billion florins were to be saved (the equivalent of $360 per person!). The government declared that 1987 would be "tough", but that things would improve afterwards, and that in 1990, wages would return to the level of 1986. We know what this kind of promise is worth. In the mean time, the planned measures need no comment:
-- disappearance of 40,000 out of a total of170,000 jobs in the state sector, and of more than 100,000 jobs among regional and council employees;
-- setting up a ‘self-contribution' scheme for health care (eg: payment for the first day of a stay in hospital);
-- a 5%Q increase in social security contributions which corresponds to a 2% fall in wages;
-- reduction by 25% of the sum made available for council housing (which hits above all the unemployed and the poorest workers);
-- reduction of the number of state-built houses from 41,000 to 30,000 a year (in a country which suffers from a permanent housing crisis): these last two measures will lead to the loss of 30,000 jobs in the building industry;
-- massive reduction in unemployment benefit to 60% of wages (whereas previously it stood at 85%, during the first six months, 70% for the next 18, then 60%);
-- in the private sector, limitation of wage in creases to 1.3%, with inflation at 2.3% for 1985, and rising;
-- again in the private sector, reduction of the working week to 37,5 hours, without compensation.
All in all, these measures mean a 10% fall in wages for the working class, and a 15% increase in the number of unemployed. As in Belgium, every sector of the working class (the private and state sectors, as well as the unemployed), and every element of working class income (whether it be direct or ‘social' wages) is coming under heavy attack.
Although to a less spectacular degree, the same kind of measures has hit workers in many other countries over the last few months:
-- job cuts amongst state employees in Spain and France (30,000 for 1987 in the latter country);
-- massive job cuts or redundancies in state- owned companies (50,000 in Spain's INI, 20,000 at Renault and 9,000 on the railways in France);
-- continued and intensified lay-offs and factory closures in the ‘lame duck' sectors like steel (job cuts Of 10,000 in west Germany, 5,000 in Spain, 3,000 in France, the shutdown of USX steelworks in 7 states of the US), shipbuilding (again, 10,000 job losses in Germany, 5,000 in Spain, and the closure of 3 Normed shipyards in France with 6,000 lay-offs as a result), or coal mining (example, 8,000 lay-offs in the German Ruhr.);
-- wage freezes or cuts (state employees' wages and old age pensions frozen in France, widespread wage cuts in the US, etc, );
-- rising social security contributions (0.7% tax surcharge for pension contributions, plus a 0.4% ‘exceptional' tax on all wages in France, similar measures in Spain, etc);
-- dismantling of ‘social insurance' (new reduction in the list of medicines paid for by the health service and suppression of the 100% repayment of health expenses by cooperative health schemes in France, similar but far more brutal measures in most US companies);
-- reductions in unemployment benefit (eg: elimination of special food, clothing and housing benefits in Britain).
This list could be lengthened much further without fully accounting for the terrible attack the working class is undergoing today in every country in the world. And although such attacks may make it possible for each national ruling class to escape suffocation at the hands of its competitors in the trade war that all are engaged in, in no way can they prevent the overall collapse of the world economy; they will inevitably be followed by further, still more brutal, massive and head-on attacks. The worst is yet to come.
The class struggle
Announced, for the most part, during the summer holiday period, these anti-working class measures have not yet provoked any significant response in the large industrial concentrations of Western Europe. This impression, however, is deceptive: everywhere, workers discontent is explosive, all the more so because these blows have been dealt in such an underhand way, behind the workers' backs, at a time when they could not defend themselves. The bourgeoisie moreover, is well aware of the situation: everywhere, it has entrusted its unions and left parties to prepare the ground. The same phenomenon can be seen in every country: the unions are adopting a more and more ‘radical', or even ‘extremist' language. The Swedish union L0, for example, despite being controlled by the social democratic party at present in power, has adopted an unprecedented tone of ‘combativity' and ‘intransigence'. The French CGT, controlled by the CP, has adopted a language and behavior that it would have denounced as ‘leftist' and ‘irresponsible' only a short time ago. It declares loudly that "struggle pays"; it calls for a "massive and unified counter-attack everywhere" against the government's "heavy blows"; it denounces vigorously the policies of the previous government (which it had nonetheless supported for 3 years); it is not afraid of organizing actions that are illegal (eg: blocking railway lines or motorways, or violent confrontations with the police) . If the trade unions are everywhere adopting a ‘tougher' line, it is for one very simple reason: they must keep one step ahead of the movements that are brewing, to be able to sabotage and divide them.
But whereas in Western Europe it is essentially through the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie that we can gauge the class' potential for struggle, in the US - the world's major power - the workers themselves have proven their combativity and their developing consciousness of the need for unity. In a country subjected to a deafening propaganda on the economic ‘success' of liberal ‘Reagonomics' and the ‘recovery', there have been no holidays for the class struggle:
-- in the telephone industry, 155,000 AT&T workers were out on strike for 26 days during June; 66,000 workers from other companies came out during August;
-- in the steel industry, LTV (the USA's second largest producer) was strike-bound in July; 22,000 USX workers were on strike on July 1st for the first time since 1959;
-- several other movements broke out or continued, in the airlines, the paper industry (7,500 workers), the food industry (the Hormel meat packing plant in Minnesota and the Watsonville canning factories in California); .
-- in the state sectors, 32,000 municipal workers struck in Detroit and Philadelphia (two of the biggest industrial metropoles in the East) during July/August, in particular the transport and health workers, and the dustmen.
In these last two strikes, acts of solidarity were frequent among the workers, and to some extent defused the maneuvers of division conducted together by management and unions (separate agreements being signed for each category of workers). And whereas in Philadelphia the workers' combativity and solidarity was finally defeated by lay-off threats from the law-courts after a three week strike, in Detroit they were strong enough to prevent the ruling class from resorting to such measures, and to force it to abandon one of its main objectives: making wage rises dependent on the municipality's ‘financial health' for three years to come.
In a country where the bourgeoisie has always been renowned for the cynicism and brutality of its attitude towards the working class (eg: the sacking of 12,000 air traffic controllers in August ‘81), this retreat before the Detroit strikers is a new illustration of the resolution published below:
"(The struggle) ‘pays', and ... it ‘pays' all the more when it is widespread, united, and fought with solidarity ... the stronger the working class that the bourgeoisie confronts, the more it will be obliged to dampen and put off the attacks that it intends to carry out."[1]
These workers' struggles in the US, and the extreme tension prevailing in western Europe, demonstrate that this is no time for the whining about ‘the passivity of the working class', or it being ‘under the control of the trade unions' that so many revolutionary groups still like to indulge in. In the near future, the working class is going to engage in combats of great importance, where revolutionaries will be confronted with their responsibilities: either they will take part in these combats in order to push them forward, which presupposes that they are aware of what is at stake and of the role that they must play, or else they will be mercilessly swept aside by history.
FM September 7, I986
[1] This is not contradicted by the fact that, after a brief retreat in the face of the spring strikes, the Belgian government has finally decided to apply all the proposed budget cuts. This only shows: the skill of the bourgeoisie, whose government announced the measures just before the holidays, so as to confirm them once the workers had demobilized; the continued ability of the unions to sabotage the workers' struggles, and therefore the necessity for the workers not merely to insult them as they did in Belgium, but to confront them, not to leave them the initiative, constantly pushing forward the search for unity, and in so doing to take their struggle in their own hands and to organize it themselves.
1) The resolution on the international situation from the 6th Congress of the ICC in November ‘85 was placed under the heading of the denunciation of a whole series of lies put forward by the bourgeoisie in order to mask what's really at stake in the present period:
-- "the myth of an amelioration in the situation of world capitalism, incarnated in the ‘success' of the American recovery in ‘83 and ‘84";
-- "making people believe that there is an attenuation of imperialist tensions: Reagan's speeches in ‘84 were presented as being more moderate, ‘holding out a hand' to negotiations with the USSR, and this had its equivalent in the line of diplomatic seduction being pushed by the newcomer Gorbachev";
-- campaigns to spread the idea "that the proletariat isn't struggling, that it has given up defending its class interests, that it is no longer an actor on the international political stage" (International Review 44).
If at the time these lies were based on a semblance of reality, eight months later this same reality has openly refuted all the previous campaigns, confirming once again that the ‘80s are indeed years in which the historic bankruptcy of capitalism, its barbaric and decadent nature, are being revealed in all their nakedness, and in which the real stakes of the period we're living through are being made more and more clear.
Moreover, the speeds with which events have shattered the lies of ‘85 illustrate another fundamental characteristic of these years of truth: the growing acceleration of history.
Thus the present resolution does not seek to repeat the work of the previous one in demolishing the whole inanity of what the bourgeoisie is saying. It seeks to use the November resolution as a point of support, to complement it by showing that the last 8 months have confirmed its orientations, by underlining this acceleration of history, and also to draw out the main lessons of the experience of the working class in the recent period.
The acceleration of economic collapse
2) The resolution of the 6th ICC Congress pointed to the limits of the US ‘recovery' and of America's capacity to act as a ‘locomotive' for the economies of the other countries in its bloc:
" ... it was mainly the phenomenal indebtedness of the third world in the second half of the ‘70s which allowed the industrial powers to temporarily boost their sales and relaunch production:
-- after 1982, it was the even more major debts of the USA, both external...and internal...which allowed that country to reach record growth rates in ‘84, just as it was, its enormous commercial deficits which momentarily benefitted the exports of a few other countries (such as West Germany) and thus the production levels...
In the final analysis, just as the astronomical indebtedness of the third world countries could only result In a catastrophic rebound shock, in the form of unprecedented austerity and recession, the even more considerable indebtedness of the American economy can only lead, under the threat of an explosion of its financial system....to a new recession both of this economy and the other economies whose external markets will be subject to a severe shrinkage." (ibid)
The evolution of the situation in recent months constitutes a concrete illustration of these limits:
-- the US federal budget deficit, which made it possible to create an artificial demand for US enterprises ($380 billion in ‘83 and ‘84) will simply have to be reduced (Congress has even adopted legislation in order to underline the urgency of and for this measure);
-- even more important, the 30% fall in the dollar over a few months (a fall deliberately organized by the authorities) means that the US is determined to reduce drastically its now astronomic trade deficit (which has put it at the head of the most indebted countries in the world) and thus to reconquer both its internal and external markets.
This latter fact thus signifies an intensification of the trade war against the competitors of the US (which are also its allies) - Japan and Western Europe. The latter will see their own markets collapsing, without this bringing new health to the US economy because it will mean a general restriction of the world market. Similarly, this fair in the dollar means that these countries will get their debts repaid at a rate 30% less than their initial value.
3) Similarly, the fall in the dollar in no way implies a respite for the countries of the third world. If on the one hand their 1000 billion dollar debt (most often to be paid in dollars) will be partially reduced, the revenue from their exports which is used to reimburse this debt will be amputated even more, since it's also expressed in dollars. Furthermore, their situation can only be aggravated by the often considerable fall in the price of raw materials which, under the pressure of generalized overproduction, characterizes the present period, since raw materials are generally their main if not their exclusive export. This situation is particularly spectacular and dramatic with regard to the most crucial of all raw materials, oil (the collapsing price of which shows that the price rises of ‘73 and ‘79 were based solely on speculation and not on any kind of ‘shortage'). Countries like Mexico and Venezuela, already incapable of coping with their phenomenal debts when they were selling oil at $30 a barrel, will be plunged into total bankruptcy by the $15 barrel. Thus there will be an intensification of the hellish and permanent barbarism which reigns in the third world, which the November ‘85 resolution presented as one of the most eloquent indices of the downfall of the world economy.
Again, the countries of the Russian bloc beginning with the USSR itself whose main export is raw materials just like the under-developed countries, will also see the deterioration of an already deplorable economic situation, and will once again have to give up the hope of buying from the west the modern industrial equipment they so sorely lack (which will in turn reduce the outlets of their western suppliers).
4) As regards Western Europe whose grave economic situation was underlined by the November resolution, the fall in the price of raw materials, notably oil, will not bring any hope of improvement. Contrary to the smug declarations which present these price reductions (in conjunction with the fall of the dollar) as a ‘shot of oxygen' because of the cuts in inflation and trade deficits they are supposed to bring about, what really lies in store is a further worsening of the whole situation. One the one hand, countries like Britain, Norway or Holland are direct victims of the fall in oil prices (and of natural gas whose price is linked to that of oil). On the other hand, and above all, all the western European countries who export an important part of their production to the third world countries and in particular the oil producing countries, will increasingly see the markets in these countries closing down as the latter's' financial resources run dry. Rather than ‘oxygen', what's really contained in the fall in price of raw materials and of oil is a dose of poison gas. What's more, behind the facade of euphoria, the bourgeoisie of the western European countries is aware that there is an extremely bleak economic prospect opened up by the joint effect of the growing closure of the US market (because of the fall of the dollar and the protectionist measures taken by the Americans), the anemia in the COMECON market and the running out of the ‘fabulous' contracts with the OPEC countries. The official - thus under-estimated - figures already indicate that 11% of the labor force cannot be employed. It's precisely because it doesn't have any illusions that in all the western European countries the bourgeoisie is pushing through brutal austerity measures (like the ones taken by the Martens government in Belgium), in order to preserve as best it can its already weak competivity in the face of the terrible economic war which is going to be unleashed by the recession now gathering pace.
In these vital centers of capitalism, which contain the biggest and oldest concentrations of industry, and thus of workers, the only short-term perspective is therefore a new and considerable deterioration of the economic situation with all the terrible attacks on the working class this implies. This deterioration cannot fail to have its repercussions on countries which hitherto have been in a stronger position, such as the USA and Japan.
The intensification of imperialist conflicts
5) As the ICC, along with all the marxists, has always stressed (and this was repeated in the November ‘85 resolution), the collapse of the economic infrastructure of capitalist society can only lead to a headlong flight towards generalized imperialist conflict. Hardly six months after the great ‘show' of the Geneva summit, the embraces of the Reagan and Gorbachev duet have been completely forgotten (as the November resolution said they would). Just as quickly as he abandoned it during his electoral campaign, Reagan has returned to his diatribes against the ‘evil empire', denouncing with renewed vigor Russia's ‘violation of human rights' and its ‘war-like intentions'. Forgotten also are his hypocritical proposals about arms reductions, as can be seen most recently by the abandonment of SALT 2 by the White House. Here is a striking confirmation of the offensive of the US bloc with its aim of "completing the encirclement of the USSR, of depriving this country of all the positions it has been able to maintain outside its direct area of domination" (ibid). At this level, a particularly significant expression of the general acceleration of history brought about by the economic disintegration of capitalism was the US bombardment of two major cities in Libya as well as the main military bases of this country. This was a new illustration of the fact that "one of the main characteristics of this offensive is the western bloc's more and more massive use of its military power" (ibid).
6) While the American raid of April ‘86 was not directly aimed against the USSR or one of its strategic positions, in that Libya has never been part of the eastern bloc, behind this spectacular action is the global offensive against the Russian bloc. The aim of the raid was:
-- to confirm forcefully and unambiguously that the from now on the Mediterranean is an American ‘mare nostrum' (on the eve of the raids, Russia prudently removed its ships from the Libyan coast, which clearly indicates that it has given up contesting the USA's total hegemony in this region);
-- to serve as a warning to all countries (and not only Libya) who, without belonging to the eastern bloc, show too much independence or an insufficient degree of subordination vis a vis the USA.
In particular, it was a sign to Syria that it had to get on more effectively with implementing the deal drawn up with it in exchange for the removal of the western task force from Lebanon in 1984 - a deal stipulating that Syria, along with Israel, should act as a ‘gendarme' in the Lebanon, notably by disciplining the pro-Iranian factions. But above all the message carried by the F-111s was once again for Iran. The reinsertion of Iran into the US bloc constitutes the main objective of the present stage of the western offensive. And indeed it seems that the message got through: its recent diplomatic rapprochement with France (which made a gesture by pushing dissident Iranian leader M. Radjavi out of the country, while still maintaining full military support for Iraq), indicates that the Tehran regime is beginning to understand where its interests lie.
However, the function of the American raid wasn't limited to the question of imperialist strategy. With all the media noise that accompanied it, notably around the ‘denunciation of terrorism', this operation was also a contribution to all the ideological campaigns aimed at diverting the working class from the struggles which it is obliged to launch in response to the intensification of the attacks on its living standards.
Because, for the bourgeoisie of all countries, more important than the problem of commercial antagonisms between nations, more important than the imperialist confrontations between the blocs, is the problem posed to it by the huge stores of combativity, which exist in the proletariat, notably in the central countries of capitalism, and which constitute the key to the present world situation, the determining element in the current historic course.
The acceleration of the class struggle
7) If there is one sphere where the acceleration of history is being expressed in a particularly lucid way it's that of the development of the working class struggle. This "is expressed in particular by the fact that the moments of retreat in the struggle (as in 8I-82) are getting shorter and shorter, whereas the culminating point of each wave of combats is situated at a higher level than the previous one" (6th Congress resolution point 15). Similarly, within each of these waves, inevitable "moments of respite, of maturation, of reflection" (ibid, point 11) are themselves more and more short-lived. Thus the whole recent campaign about the ‘passivity' of the working class, based on an apparent drop in combativity in 1985, has come to grief against the formidable movements which took place in April and May in Belgium. These struggles, which followed widespread movements in Scandinavia and particularly Norway (and, given the low level of workers' struggles in this region in the past, this indicates the depth of the present wave of struggles), constitute a striking confirmation of what was said in the 6th Congress resolution, (point 11):
"...the present moments of respite...which the class may go through are limited in time and space; and although the bourgeoisie does everything it can to turn the workers' efforts of reflection into a wait-and-see, passive attitude, the situation remains characterized by an accumulation of discontent and of potential combativity which can explode at any moment."
But what the movement in Belgium expresses especially is the limitation of the bourgeois policy which, in 1985, allowed it not to extinguish the workers' combativity, but to disperse its manifestations into a series of isolated struggles carried out by a more limited number of workers than in the first phase (‘83-‘84) of the third wave of struggles since the historic resurgence of 1968, which began with the massive public sector strikes in Belgium in September ‘83.
8) This policy of dispersal was based essentially on the dispersal of the economic attacks themselves, on a careful planning which staggered the attacks in time and space. This was made possible by the slight margin of maneuver granted by the effects of the American ‘recovery' of ‘83-84, but this also posed the objective limits of the policy since this respite of the capitalist economy could only be short-lived. What's more, this policy contained a number of other limitations:
-- to the extent that, in the most advanced countries, a considerable part of the price of labor power is made up of all sorts of social benefits (social security, family allowance, etc), any reduction of this part of the wage could only be done in a global manner, to the detriment of all workers and not of those in this or that sector;
-- in these same countries, an enormous proportion of workers (often the majority) depend on a single ‘boss', the state, either because they work in the public sector, or because they are unemployed and need state subsidies for their very survival. Thus the field of application of this policy is limited essentially to a particular sector of the class, those who work in the private sector (which explains to a large extent the efforts of many governments to ‘reprivatize' the economy as much as possible).
What has just happened in Belgium confirms that all these limits are beginning to be reached, that the bourgeoisie is now obliged to mount its attacks in an increasingly massive and above all frontal manner, that the main tendency in the struggle isn't dispersal but the overcoming of wave this dispersal. This is particularly clear when you consider that the measures which provoked this terrific response from the class:
-- were forced on the bourgeoisie by the almost total absence of any economic margin of maneuver, by the urgent need to adapt the economy to the perspective of an unprecedented intensification of the trade war that the coming recession is going to bring about. It is no longer possible for the attacks to be staggered or put off;
-- concern all sectors of the working class (private, public, unemployed) and threaten all elements of workers' wages (the nominal as well as the social wage).
It's even more clear when you see that practically all sectors of the working class participated massively in the movement, not just in a simultaneous way, but with increasingly determined attempts to seek solidarity from other sectors, to unify the struggles.
9) Just as the strike in the public sector in Belgium in ‘83 announced the entry of the world working class, and particularly the workers of western Europe, into the first phase of the third wave of struggles, the phase marked by massive movements and a high degree of international simultaneity, the recent strikes in this same country announce the beginning of a third phase in this wave; after the second phase marked by the dispersal of the struggles, this new phase is going to exhibit more and more tendencies towards the unification of struggles. The fact that in both cases it's the working class of the same country which has been in the front line is not without significance. Despite the small size of the country, Belgium is a resume of the fundamental characteristics of all the countries in Western Europe;
-- a developed national economy in a catastrophic situation, and one which is extremely dependent on the world market (70% of production is for export);
-- a very high level of unemployment;
-- very strong industrial concentrations in a limited area;
-- old established bourgeoisie and proletariat;
-- a long experience of confrontation between the two classes.
Because of this, the battles which have just taken place in this country can't be seen as a flash in the pan, an event with no European or world-wide significance. On the contrary they augur what awaits the other countries of Western Europe, and more generally the main advanced countries, in the period ahead. This applies particularly to the main characteristics of the coming struggles, most of which have been identifiable since the beginning of the third wave;
"-- a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one country, thus posing the basis for the geographic extension of the struggle;
-- a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions ...
-- a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists." (6th Congress Resolution, Point 10).
-- the search for active solidarity and for unification across the boundaries of factory, category and region, in the form of street demonstrations and in particular of massive delegations from one workers' centre to another, a movement which takes place through a growing confrontation with all the obstacles erected by trade unionism, and during the course of which, "the necessity for self-organization is being imposed more and more on the workers in the great capitalist metropoles, notably in western Europe." (ibid, point 13).
10) This necessity for and tendency towards the active search for unification, going beyond the simple extension of struggles, constitutes the major trait of the third phase of the third wave of struggles. This trait (which hadn't yet been indentified at the 6th ICC Congress at the beginning of November ‘85) derives from the bourgeois policy of dispersing struggles based on the dispersal of its economic attacks (an element noted at the beginning of ‘86 in the editorial of International Review 45).
By the very fact that it is following a bourgeois offensive which aimed to break the élan of the third wave of struggles, and that it expresses the attempt to overcome the difficulties posed by this offensive, this trait introduces into the third wave of struggles a general dimension of the highest importance, comparable in significance to the other characteristic of this wave which we identified from the beginning: "the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the future world-wide generalization of struggles." (IR 37, first quarter of ‘84). However, though of comparable importance, these two characteristics don't have the same significance from the standpoint of the concrete development of workers' struggles and the intervention of revolutionaries within them. International simultaneity, despite its historical dimension as the prefiguration of the generalization of the future, is today much more an objective fact deriving from the simultaneity of the bourgeoisie's attacks in all countries than a deliberate approach taken in hand in a conscious manner by the workers; this is notably due to the systematic policy of the black-out carried on by the bourgeoisie. By contrast, the tendency towards the unification of struggles, while having a historic significance as a step towards the mass strike and thus towards the revolution, also constitutes an immediate element within the present proletarian combats, an element which of necessity the workers have to take up in a conscious way. In this sense, if the international simultaneity of struggles poses the bases, the historic framework for their future world-wide generalization, in so far as this generalization can only be a concrete act, the concrete road that leads to it necessarily passes through the tendencies towards unification. This is why in their intervention revolutionaries must stress the whole importance of this push towards unification. And this is all the more so because it's in this process that the class will be forced to develop its self-organization through repeated confrontations with the union obstacle.
11) One of the components of this movement towards self-organization, and one which has already manifested itself in recent struggles, was expressed very clearly in the combats in Belgium: the tendency towards the spontaneous upsurge of struggles, outside any union directives, a tendency which we pointed to at the very beginning of the third wave. The following points should be made about this tendency:
1. It is an aspect of one of the general characteristics of the class struggle in the period of decadence, one identified long ago by revolutionaries: "The kind of struggles that take place in the period of decadence can't be prepared in advance on the organizational level. Struggles explode spontaneously and tend to generalize...These are the characteristics which prefigure the revolutionary confrontation." (‘The Proletarian Struggle in Decadent Capitalism', IR 23).
2. However, spontaneous movements don't necessarily express a higher level of consciousness than movements which are called by the unions:
-- on the one hand, many struggles which begin spontaneously are easily taken over by the unions;
-- on the other hand, the systematic occupation of the social terrain by the left in opposition often leads the unions to put themselves in the forefront of movements which have a strong potential for the development of class consciousness;
-- finally, in certain historical circumstances, notably when the left is in government, as was frequently the case in the ‘60s and ‘70s, spontaneous or even wildcat strikes may be no more than a simple translation into practice of the unions' overt opposition to any struggle, without this expressing a high level of consciousness in the class.
3. However, the fact that the tendency towards the multiplication of spontaneous struggles is developing when the bourgeoisie has placed its left forces in opposition, when these forces have been radicalizing their language to a very marked degree, gives the spontaneous struggles of today a very different significance to that of the struggles mentioned above. It reveals in particular a growing discrediting of the unions in the eyes of the workers. This discredit, resulting from the maneuvers in which the unions present themselves as the ‘vanguard' of the struggles, even if it doesn't automatically result in a development of consciousness about the real nature of the unions and the necessity for self-organization, does create the conditions for such a development.
4. One of the major causes of this tendency towards spontaneous struggles resides in the accumulation of an enormous discontent which often explodes in an unexpected manner. But here again, one of the reasons for this accumulation of discontent is that the discrediting of the unions prevents them from organizing ‘actions' whose aim is to serve as a safety valve for the workers' anger.
Thus, by expressing an overall maturation of combativity and consciousness, notably at the level of a growing understanding of the role of trade unionism and of the necessity to struggle, the present development of spontaneous movements is fully inscribed in the historic process which leads to revolutionary confrontations.
12) This discrediting of the unions, the growth of which is a condition - not sufficient, but certainly indispensable - for the development of consciousness in the class, is going to broaden to a significant degree in the present phase of class struggle. The central contribution the unions and the left have made over many years to the bourgeoisie's policy of dividing the class, of derailing and exhausting its struggles, already explains the considerable distrust the workers have right now in the unions. The beginning of the third wave of struggles already expressed a certain wearing out of the left in opposition after this card, put into use after 1978-79, had been largely responsible for the premature grinding down of the second wave and the disarray which accompanied the defeat in Poland in ‘81. But the period in which the bourgeoisie was able to disperse its attacks made it possible, in most countries, to avoid a too obvious deployment of the left and the unions. During this period it was the right and the private bosses who were in the front line of the strategy of dividing workers' struggles, in that this strategy was based above all not on the maneuvers of the left but on the way the direct attacks were themselves carried out. The unions' job was merely to accentuate the dispersed character of the struggles which derived from the very nature of the attacks they were responding to.
However as soon as it's narrowing margin for economic maneuver compels the bourgeoisie to give up its dispersed approach and attack in a frontal manner, it can only carry on its policy of dividing the workers (a policy it will continue until the revolution) through the left and the unions. But this more open contribution to the bourgeois strategy of division can only result in further unmasking of the unions' real function. The numerous maneuvers undertaken by the unions in the recent struggles in Belgium (notably the cutting up of days of action sector by sector), their efforts to cut into pieces the workers' response to the government's measures, the clear development of consciousness among the workers about the divisive role of the unions, constitute a first concretization of this general tendency towards the discrediting of the left and the unions, which is a feature of the present phase of the development of the class struggle.
13) The workers' growing distrust in the left and the unions is, as we've seen, rich in potential for massive outbreaks of proletarian struggle, for the development of the workers' self-organization and class consciousness. In particular, the coming period will see clear tendencies towards the formation within the class of more or less formal groupings of workers seeking to counteract the paralyzing influences of unionism and reflecting on the more general perspectives of the struggle.
It is for this reason that the bourgeoisie will more and more put forward the weapon of ‘rank and file' or ‘militant' unionism - as was shown in the struggles in Belgium recently - trying, with its ‘radical' language, to lead back into the union prison (whether the existing trade unions or trade unionism as such) those workers who have been trying to break out of it. In this situation it's important to be able to distinguish what expresses the vitality of the class (the appearance of groups or committees of combative workers engaged in a process of breaking with the left and the unions) from the bourgeoisie's attempts to bloc this process (the development of rank and file unionism). This is all the more true in that at the beginning of such a process the elements of the class who have embarked upon it may adopt positions which appear to be less advanced than those of the leftists and rank and file unionists who specialize in ‘radical' phraseology. Thus it is up to revolutionaries not to have a static view of these two kinds of phenomena which appear during the course of struggles but to consider, on the basis of an attentive study, the dynamic of each particular phenomenon in order to be able both to combat with the greatest vigor every ‘radical' maneuver of the bourgeoisie but also to encourage and push forward the still embryonic efforts of the class to develop its consciousness, and not to sterilize these efforts by confusing them with bourgeois maneuvers.
14) One of the other lessons of the recent combats in Belgium, which confirms what marxists have always defended against the Proudhonists and Lassaleans, and more recently against the modernists, is that the working class not only can and must struggle for the defense of its immediate interests in preparation for its struggle as a revolutionary class, but that it can also push back the bourgeoisie on this level. While the decadence of capitalism makes it impossible for the capitalists to accord real reforms to the working class; while phases of acute crisis - like the one we're going through now - compels them to attack the workers more and more brutally, this in no way means that the working class has no choice between immediately making (or preparing) the revolution and massively submitting to these attacks without any hope of limiting them. Even the when the situation of a national capital seems to be desperate, as is the case with Belgium today, when it seems that the situation doesn't permit the attacks on the class to be attenuated the bourgeoisie still retains a small margin of maneuver which allows it to momentarily - even the cost of worse difficulties in the future to put aside some of these attacks if they encounter a significant level of resistance on the part of the working class. This is what happened in Belgium with the ‘re-examination' of the measures affecting the Limburg mines and the shipyards, and the delay in applying the Martens government's austerity plans.
In the final analysis the urgency and gravity of capital's attack depends on the degree of the saturation of the market. But while the latter tends to become more and more total, this saturation never reaches an absolute point, and so the economic margin of maneuver available to each national capital, while tending more and more towards zero, never reaches such a limit. It's thus important that while revolutionaries must show that the perspective is more and more towards the collapse of capitalism and thus that it is necessary to replace it with a communist society, they must also be capable of pushing forward the immediate struggle by showing that it ‘pays' and that it ‘pays' all the more if it is conducted on a broad scale, in a unified manner, that the more the bourgeoisie is confronted with a strong working class the more it will be compelled to attenuate and delay its attacks.
15) Another thing confirmed by the April-May events in Belgium is the growing importance of the struggle of the unemployed, the capacity of this sector of the working class to integrate itself more and more into the general combat of the class, even if this phenomenon has as yet only appeared in an embryonic form in this period. Along with the appearance and development in recent years of numerous unemployed committees in the main countries of western Europe, this is a confirmation of the analysis which holds that:
-- unemployment will be "an essential element in the development of workers' struggles right up to the revolutionary period...
-- the unemployed workers will more and more tend to be at the front line of the class struggle." (6th Congress resolution, point 14).
A further point confirmed by the recent period concerns the organization of the unemployed: what has been shown by the Gottingen conference in Germany in ‘85, by the experience of a number of unemployed committees like the one in Toulouse in France, is that, fundamentally, the organization of the unemployed follows the same pattern as that of the rest of the class: it arises and centralizes itself in the struggle and for the needs of the struggle. Even if unemployed committees can exist in a more durable manner than strike committees, any attempt to maintain the life of such organs, to give them a centralized structure outside of such needs, can only lead them to become something very different from unitary organizations of struggle: in the best of cases, workers' discussion groups, in the worst, new trade unions.
16) Finally, the struggles in Belgium confirm something that revolutionaries have been saying since the historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the ‘60s, and more particularly with the considerable acceleration of history that has taken place in the ‘80s: because the crisis leaves less and less respite to the bourgeoisie, and because the latter is obliged to leave less and less to the working class, the present generation of workers is accumulating a wealth of experience in the struggle against capital, and "this accumulation of the experience of struggle by the proletariat, as well as the proximity between each experience, is an essential element in the coming to consciousness of the whole class about what's really at stake in its struggles." (6th Congress resolution, point 15).
Thus it's clear that in Belgium the workers were able to struggle on such a wide scale in Spring ‘86 because they had drawn and conserved many lessons from the struggles waged three years before. This is a phenomenon which will tend to generalize and intensify in all the central countries of capitalism, and is key to the enormous and untapped potential for the struggle in these countries, a potential which must not be underestimated by revolutionaries. And this is all the more true in that, in contrast to what happened in the past, in ‘74-75 when the recession hit a class in momentary retreat, or in ‘81-82 when it intersected with a proletariat still suffering the effects of the defeat in Poland in 1981, the recession opening up today is going to meet up with and further intensify an already mounting class movement. Nevertheless, it would be false and dangerous to imagine that, right here and now, a straight road to the revolutionary period has opened up. The working class is still far away from such a period. In order to reach it there has to be a whole transformation within the proletariat, which will turn the exploited class which it is within capitalism - and through its struggles as an exploited class - into the revolutionary class capable of taking charge of humanity's future. This indicates the scale and difficulty of the road it still has to go down, notably at the level of undoing the whole pressure of the dominant ideology which weighs on it, of overcoming through repeated and increasingly conscious confrontations, the many traps and mystifications which the bourgeoisie, its left and its unions, set and will continue to set against its struggles and the development of its consciousness. Though historically doomed, the bourgeoisie, like a mortally wounded wild beast, will continue to defend itself tooth and nail to the very last, and experience shows just how capable it is of inventing new traps aimed at undoing the proletariat or at least slowing its advance.
This is why it's important to underline the uneven character of the working class struggle, to remember the lessons already drawn by Rosa Luxemburg from the battles of 1905 in the Russian Empire, in particular the fact that the mass strike which marks the opening up of a revolutionary period, is "an ocean of phenomena", of apparently contradictory elements, of multiple forms of struggle, of advances and retreats during the course of which the flame of struggle seems to go out, while in fact the class is preparing for even vaster combats.
Despite their limitations and even if they are still far away from the mass strike (which is still a long-term perspective in the advanced countries), the recent struggles in Belgium, with their various ups and downs, confirm the necessity to remember the uneven nature of the class movement, remind us not to bury a struggle when it meets its first setback, to remain confident in all the potentialities which can be contained within it but which may not be immediately expressed.
If revolutionaries have to show their class the whole importance and potential of its present struggles, they also have to show the length and difficulty of the road ahead, not to demoralize the class, but on the contrary to struggle against the demoralization which threatens after every setback. It's up to revolutionaries to express to the highest degree the qualities of a class which bears the future of humanity: patience, a consciousness of the immense scope of the tasks to be accomplished, a serene but indestructible confidence in the future.
25.6.1986
This article is the last part of a study on the history of the Dutch Left between 1900 and 1914. Having dealt with the difficulties in the emergence of a marxist current in the conditions of Holland at the beginning of the century and with the beginnings of what would become the Dutch Left (International Review, no.45), then with the fragility of the political organizations of the proletariat confronted with the permanent pressure of bourgeois ideology (IR, no.46), this part of the study looks at the birth of the ‘Tribunist' current until its exclusion from social democracy (the SDAP) by the latter's opportunist wing.
The birth of the Tribune movement
In October 1907 the radical marxists began to publish their own social democratic weekly. In charge of De Tribune here the future leaders of the Tribune organization: Wijnkoop, Ceton and van Ravesteyn, who had the unconditional support of the third Amsterdam section, the most revolutionary one in the party. Pannekoek and Gorter regularly contributed to it, providing some of the most theoretical and polemical texts. They were all inspired by the hope of the future revolution: historically it was the most favorable period ever, with the beginning of an economic crisis which they didn't yet analyze as the general crisis of capitalism.
The orientation was already anti-parliamentarian: the workers' struggle should link up with the international struggle by freeing it of any parliamentary or national illusions. The aim was indeed:
"Firstly, to unmask the real meaning of the treacherous maneuvers of bourgeois democracy in the realms of the right to vote and social transformation; and secondly, to give workers an idea of the real meaning of the international situation and the class struggle abroad." (Gorier, Sociaal-democratie en revisionisme, 1909)
It is remarkable to note that this political line is very close to that of the future Bordiga current, with the proclamation of the political and theoretical struggle against bourgeois democracy and the affirmation of internationalism (cf ICC pamphlet, The Communist Left of Italy, 1981). The essential difference however, and this was linked to the period, was the fact that the organized struggle of marxism against revisionism was seen to take place around a theoretical review, under the form of an opposition. It was very much later in the workers' movement that little by little the necessity was imposed to form an organized fraction, and not an opposition in the party. The Bolsheviks were the first to understand this, even though they too were late in doing so.
It is clear that the Tribunists would have found it extremely difficult to have had an organized activity, apart from in the sections-like that of Amsterdam - where they were in the majority. Driven out of the central organs by the revisionists, they conceived their struggle as essentially theoretical. The theoretical contributions of the marxist Tribunist current from 1907 to 1909 were in any case extremely important and decisive in the constitution of an international communist left.
But the political struggle - with the publication of De Tribune which made no concessions in its struggle against revisionism - very quickly hardened and soon posed the question of a split in the party. A drive to hunt out the Marxist ‘witches' was undertaken. In Rotterdam, the revisionist leaders dismissed the marxist editors from the local organ and that was just after the Arnhem Congress (1908) which had rejected Troelstra's proposition to ban De Tribune. After this, the process of banning other Marxist inspired local organs became generalized.
The crisis in the party was opened up; it was going to be pushed forward with Troelstra's public intervention against marxist positions in parliament in front of the bourgeois political parties.
a. The question of the period and the crisis
The confrontation with the Tribunists took place in the autumn of 1908 when Troelstra took up certain positions in parliament: namely, he denied publicly the necessity for workers to understand the evolution of capitalism in a theoretical way, within a marxist framework; he maintained that there was "no need for abstract, logical theory" the class struggle. Finally, he defended the idea that "capitalism would, lead of itself to socialism" - without the necessity of a revolution and therefore in a peaceful and automatic manner. It was tantamount to saying that socialism was no longer determined by the existence of the objective conditions of the crisis and the proletariat's maturation of consciousness; it became a simple religious belief. De Tribune responded to these affirmations in a very violent and biting manner against Troelstra, symbol of revisionism in the party:
"A practical politician of social democracy must also understand theory; he must know it and have the power to defend it. For a ‘ bourgeois' it is perhaps a heavy task, but the working class demands no less of its leaders. This knowledge, this socialist science, is certainly very often easier for a worker to understand than for a man coming out of the bourgeoisie. The worker can understand immediately from his own life what socialism means, whilst the bourgeois must first of all understand the theory; for example, what isn't yet clear for Troelstra, namely that the economic gap between the classes must always. widen ... If the possibility exists that the gap between the classes doesn't become deeper, then our socialism dissolves into a belief; certitude becomes passive hope. The workers are already awash with ‘hopes' and ‘beliefs'. They don't need socialism for that. The church also supports them in the belief that all will be better in heaven and the brave liberals and democrats hope that it will be better soon." (Die Grundung der SDP)
But what was most important in the Tribunists denunciation of revisionism was the theoretical affirmation of the historic course of capitalism towards a world crisis. In this, the Dutch Left - except Pannekoek much later on - joined up with Rosa Luxemburg's position which she expressed in 1913:
"The so-called ‘prophecy' of Marx is also being fully realized in the sense that modern capitalism's periods of development are growing shorter and shorter, that in general ‘crises' as a force of transition from strong production to weak production are still persisting and with the development of capitalism are becoming more prolonged and extensive, so that ills that were once limited locally are more and more becoming world-wide catastrophes."
These attacks against Troelstra's revisionist theories were considered by the majority of the SDAP to be no more than personal attacks. After this the revisionists forbade the selling of De Tribune at a public meeting where Troelstra was speaking, thus committing an extremely serious deed in the history of the workers' movement and in contradiction with the freedom of criticism in a workers' party. This was the beginning of the process of the exclusion of marxist positions, a process which was going to brutally accelerate in the years following 1909.
b. Gorter against Troelstra on the question of a proletarian ‘morality' (Dec. 1908)
During 1908, De Tribune published a collection of Gorter's major contributions on the vulgarization of marxism: Historic Materialism Explained To Workers. Taking the example of the 1903 strike, Gorter showed that the class struggle produced an authentic class morality which entered into contradiction with the ‘general' morality defended by the tennents of the existing order. The materialist conception, defended by Gorter, which undermined the fundamentals of any religious morality, was violently attacked in parliament by the Christian delegate Savornin Lohman on 19 and 20 November. In defending the unity of the nation, he accused social democracy of wanting to incite the war between the classes and thus intoxicate the working class with marxism.
Instead of making a bloc with Gorter in the face of attacks by a representative of this bourgeois conception, Troelstra launched into a diatribe against Gorter, whom he presented as non-representative of the party and a simple caricature of marxism. For him, morality wasn't determined by social relations; it was equally valid for the proletariat as for the bourgeoisie.
To support this he drew on the ambiguous concepts that Marx had used in the statutes of the Ist International: those of rights, duties and justice. But Troelstra, by deliberately confusing values common to mankind and the official morality which he presented as universal, transformed the morality of the class struggle - guided by common interests and an activity aiming at victory - into a monstrosity. Gorter's materialism was a pure appeal to murder and ended up in a vision of barbarism. According to him, Gorter, for example, would be against "a worker saving a capitalist's son from drowning". Troelstra's demagogy in this argument was identical to Lohman's, with whom he sided.
Gorter replied furiously, as was his style, as much against De Savornin as Troelstra, with a rapidly written pamphlet, published for the needs of the struggle: Class Morality: A Reply to Savornin Lohman and Troelstra, Members of the Second Chamber. After a period of political isolation, he threw himself into the struggle for the party.
Gorter focussed sharply on the person of Troelstra who "in reality, in the essence of what he's saying, has chosen the camp of the bourgeoisie". He also showed that Troelstra was betraying Marx's real thinking by using the ambiguous terms of the statutes of the Ist International. The correspondence between Marx and Engels, published some years later, gave a triumphant justification to Gorter's arguments. In a letter of 4 November 1884, Marx explained that he had been obliged to make some concessions to the Proudhonists: "I was obliged to include in the preamble to the statutes two phrases containing the words ‘duty' and ‘right' as well as ‘truth, morality and justice', but I placed them in such a way, that they could no harm".
At the same time, Gorter replied vigorously to the accusation that the morality of the proletariat meant attacking individual capitalists without any concern for human feelings. The morality of the proletariat was essentially a fighting morality which sought to defend its interests against the bourgeois class an economic category and not as a sum of individuals. It was a morality which aimed to abolish itself in a classless society, leaving in its place a real morality, that of humanity as a whole liberated from class society.
Following this polemic, a split became inevitable. It was what Troelstra himself wanted, in order to rid the party of any critical marxist tendency. In a letter to Vliegen on 3 December he wrote: "The schism is there; the only recourse can be a split".
The split at the Deventer Congress (13-14 February 1909)
In order to eliminate the Tribunists and their review, the revisionist leaders proposed a referendum to examine the question of suppressing the De Tribune review at an extraordinary congress. The party committee was hesitant about and even opposed to such an extraordinary measures. Troelstra went over the committee's head and through a referendum obtained the two-thirds vote needed to convoke a congress. It thus became apparent that the great majority of the SDAP was gangrenous with revisionism; it was even more revisionist at the base than at the summit.
Furthermore, the marxist elements who had come out of Nieuwe Tijd and had collaborated with De Tribune capitulated to Troelstra. During a conference held on 31 January, to which the main Tribunist editors weren't even invited, Roland-Holst and Wibaut declared that they were ready to quit the editorship of their review in order to run a future weekly supplement (Het Weekblad) of Het Volk, the SDAP daily. The new publication would be free of any marxist critique of revisionism. Instead of solidarising with their comrades in struggle, they made an oath of allegiance to Troelstra, declaring themselves in favor of "a common work of loyal party comradeship", trying to take refuge in a centrist attitude of conciliation between the right and the marxist left. In the marxist movement in Holland, Roland-Holst constantly maintained this attitude.
The Tribunists didn't fail to reproach Roland-Holst for this capitulation; it was an attitude that only made more certain the split that the revisionists wanted.
It's true that, for its part, the marxist minority was far from homogeneous about taking the struggle inside the SDAP to its ultimate conclusion. Wijnkoop, van Ravesteyn and Ceton, who constituted the real organizing head of the minority, had already resolved on a split before the Congress, in order to keep De Tribune going. Gorter, on the other hand, who wasn't formally on the editorial board, was much more reserved. He distrusted this triad's impetuosity and did not want to precipitate a split. He hoped that Wijnkoop would moderate his position and that the Tribunists would stay in the party, even at the price of accepting the suppression of De Tribune if they failed to stop this at the Deventer Congress:
"I have continually said against the editorial board of Tribune: we must do everything we can to draw others towards us, but if this fails - after we've fought to the end and all our efforts have failed - then we'll have to yield." (Letter to Kautsky, 16 February 1909)
In fact, at the Extraordinary Congress at Deventer, the Tribunists fought bitterly for two days and in extremely difficult conditions. Often interrupted by Troelstra who systematically used an anti-‘intellectual' demagogy, with his irony about the ‘professors of De Tribune', often encountering the laughing incomprehension of the Congress, they stayed on the offensive. They fought to maintain the revolutionary essence of the party, the "salt of the party" in Gorter's phrase. Without freedom for a marxist critique of opportunism - a freedom which did exist in the big parties, such as the German - you were suppressing the possibility of "awakening revolutionary consciousness". More than any other, Gorter was able to express at the Congress the revolutionary conviction of the Tribunists: a decisive period was opening up, a period of menacing war and of revolution in Germany, which would draw Holland into the ferment:
"Internationally, the period is very important. An international war threatens. Then the German proletariat would make the insurrection, and Holland would have to choose its colors; so the party should rejoice that it has in it men who put the revolutionary side of our struggle at the forefront."
Aware that the SDAP was sinking fast, Gorter concluded at the end of the Congress with a vibrant appeal for the regroupment of revolutionaries around De Tribune: "Come and join us round De,Tribune ; don't let the boat go under!" This appeal was not however an invitation to split and set up a new party. Gorter was still convinced of the necessity to stay in the party - otherwise the Tribunists would lose any possibility of developing: "Our strength in the party can increase; our strength outside the party can never grow".
But this battle to remain within the party failed. The splitting process was irreversible given the decisions taken by the Congress majority.
The Congress decided overwhelmingly - 209 mandates against 88, and 15 blanks - to suppress De Tribune and replace it with a weekly run mainly by Roland-Holst. But, above all, it excluded from the party the three editors of Tribune: Wijnkoop, van Ravesteyn and Ceton. In the view of the revisionists, it was necessary to cut off the organizing ‘head', to separate the ‘leaders' from the mass of Tribunist sympathizers in the party.
This maneuver failed. After the shock of the exclusion of these spokesmen for Tribunism, in the sections the militants got back on their feet and solidarised with the three editors. Very quickly, what until then had been an informal tendency became an organized group. Immediately after the Congress - proof that the Tribunists had envisaged this possibility before the split - a permanent organization commission was formed to regroup the Tribunist tendency. Members of the group Nieuwe Tijd, including Gorter, ended up joining the commission. Gorter, after six weeks of doubts and hesitations, finally resolved to commit himself wholeheartedly to working with the expelled Tribunists. However, Gorter warned against the foundation of a second party on a purely voluntarist basis.
It was in fact the SDAP's publication, on 13 March, of the party referendum approving the decisions at Deventer, which pushed the excluded comrades to form a second party. By 3712 votes against 1340, the SDAP confirmed the expulsion of the whole editorial board of Tribune.
In the meantime, on 10 March, before this definitive announcement of expulsion was known, Gorter and Wijnkoop had gone to Brussels. They were met by three members of the Bureau of the Socialist International - Huysmans, Vandervelde and Anseele, all known to belong to the right - which resided in the Belgian capital. The aim of the meeting was to resolve the ‘Dutch' question'. Contrary to their fears, Gorter and Wijnkoop got a lot of understanding from the BSI; it was indignant about the expulsions decided at Deventer, and tried to obtain the reintegration of the excluded members as the free expression of marxism within the SDAP. To act as a mediator, Huysmans, the secretary of the Bureau, went to Holland to obtain the following decisions from the SDAP:
-- annulment of the Deventer exclusions
-- the acceptance of one of the excluded editors in the new weekly run by Roland-Holst
-- the recognition of the right of expression for the marxist minority.
On all these points, the leading organs of the SDAP seemed to be shaken by Huysmans opinions, put forward on 15 March. But the day before, 14 March, in Amsterdam, had been held the Founding Congress of the Tribunist party, which took the name SDP (Social Democratic Party). Its foundation had thus been decided on by its members without even waiting for the results of the BSI's negotiations with the SDAP. The latter, though aware of the discussions since 10 March, had confirmed the exclusions on 13 March.
Thus the SDP was- born in a situation of extreme confusion. It was a small party of 419 members divided into nine sections. Its program was that of the old party prior to 1906, before the revisionist modifications.
Wijnkoop was nominated by the Congress as party president, because of his organizational capacities. Gorter became a member of the SDP leadership. But his organizational weight was too weak to counteract the personal, ambitious policies of Wijnkoop, who was ready to sacrifice any possibility of unity on the altar of ‘his' group. Such a policy was only too convenient for the revisionist majority of the SDAP who wanted a definitive split with the marxist current.
For all these reasons, the BSI's efforts to put an end to the split failed. An Extraordinary Congress urgently convoked for 21 March, a week after the Founding Congress, rejected by a majority Huysman's proposal to return to the SDAP. Gorter, along with a few of the SDAP old guard, was in favor. He judged the attitude of Wijnkoop to be particularly irresponsible, denouncing him in private as being "opinionated without limits". He was so demoralized at this point that he even momentarily considered leaving the SDP. However, the rejection by the BSI and the SDAP of the conditions for the reintegration of the Tribunist militants made him decide to commit himself fully to the activity of the new party.
The Congress of 21 March, despite Wijnkoop's far from clear attitude, had in fact left the door open to a reintegration into the new party. A Congress resolution expressed the majority's desire to maintain a single party in Holland; therefore the Congress put forward the conditions that would allow the Tribunists to carry on their marxist critique and activity within the SDAP, if they were accepted:
"(the Congress) wishes there to be a single social democratic party in Holland and charges the Party committee, in the interests of unity, to give itself the full power to dissolve the SDP as soon as:
-- the SDAP, through a referendum, cancels the exclusion of the three editors;
-- the SDAP recognizes in a clearly formulated resolution the freedom of all its members or any group of members, openly, in any form, written and oral, to proclaim the principles consigned in the program and to express their criticisms."
The rejection of these conditions, which appeared as an ultimatum, by the BSI and the SDAP, created a new situation in the International: in one country there were two socialist parties, both claiming adherence to the IInd International. This situation was an exceptional one in the IInd International. Even in Russia, after the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the two fractions remained adherents of the same party: the Social Democratic Labor Party of Russia. But in Holland, it proved politically impossible to remain members of the same party; and neither the revisionist majority nor the Tribunist minority had the will to do so.
It was however very clear for the marxist militants of the SDP that their party was a party of the International. The split was a local one, not a split with the IInd International.
Up until the First World War
Up until the first world war, when it was to gain a growing audience in the proletariat, the SDP was ‘crossing the desert'. It remained a small party without much influence in the Dutch proletariat: a few hundred militants against several thousand in Troelstra's SDAP. Its numerical growth was very slow and limited, despite its militant spirit: at the time of the split, the SDP had 408 militants; in 1914, 525. The number of subscribers to De Tribune was limited and fluctuating: 900 at the time of the Deventer Congress; 1400 in May 1909 and 1266 in 1914. Because of its limited audience, the SDP was never a parliamentary party - it became one at the end of the war; its participation in elections was always a debacle. At the June 1909 elections, it obtained 1.5% of the votes in each district. Even Gorter, reputed to be the best orator in the party, the only one able to arouse the workers' enthusiasm, met with a resounding failure: pushed to be an election candidate in1913, in Amsterdam and the industrial town of Enschede, he won 196 votes for the SDP as against 5325 for the SDAP in the latter town. But even if it participated in elections, this wasn't the real terrain of the SDP, in contrast to the SDAP which had become completely bogged down in it.
Reduced to the size of a small cohort, the SDP - owing to the unfavorable conditions in which the Deventer split had taken place - was unable to rally to its side the youth organization, which had traditionally held its ground actively and radically in the struggle against capitalism and war. The youth organization De Zaaier (‘The Sower'), which had been created in 1901, wanted to remain autonomous: its sections were free to attach themselves to one or the other of the parties. When, in 1911, the SDAP created its own youth organization, essentially to counteract the anti-militarist activity of Zaaier, the latter broke up. The few remaining militants (about 100) nevertheless refused to follow the SDP, despite the common orientation.
Despite the party's theoretical solidity, there was a risk that the SDP would slide into sectarianism. The party's links with the industrial proletariat had become distended since the split. Less than half its members worked in factories or workshops; a considerable part was made up of employees and teachers. The summit of the party - at least until 1911 - was composed of intellectuals, solid theoreticians but - except for Gorter - often sectarian and doctrinaire. This leadership of teachers was tending to transform the SDP into a sect.
The struggle against sectarianism within the SDP was posed from the beginning. In May 1909 Mannoury - one of the leaders of the party and a future Stalinist chief - declared that the SDP was the one and only socialist party, since the SDAP had become a bourgeois party. Gorter, the one who had fought most bitterly against Troelstra, vigorously opposed this conception, at first as a minority; he showed that, although revisionism did lead towards the bourgeois camp, the SDAP was above all an opportunist party within the proletarian camp. This position had direct implications at the level of propaganda and agitation in the class. It was in fact possible to fight alongside the SDAP, whenever the latter still defended a class position, without making the slightest theoretical concessions to it.
‘Sect or party?', this was the question Gorter posed very clearly in front of the whole party in November 1910. The question was whether the to associate itself with a petition for universal suffrage launched by the SDAP. The SDP, like all the socialist parties of that time, was fighting for universal suffrage. The central question was therefore the class analysis of the SDAP, but also the struggle against sectarian inaction during political battles. At the beginning, only a small minority, led by Gorter, supported the idea of the petition and agitation for universal suffrage. It needed all Gorter's weight for a small majority to emerge in favor of common activity with the SDAP. Gorter showed the danger of a tactic of non-participation, which ran the risk of pushing the party into total isolation. Towards the SDAP, which was certainly "not a true party" but "a conglomeration, a mass trooped together under a band of demagogues", the tactic had to be that of a ‘hornet' stinging it in the right direction. This attitude was finally that of the party until the war, when the SDAP crossed the Rubicon by voting for war credits.
The evolution of the SDAP in fact confirmed the validity of the combat which the Tribunists had waged against the revisionists since the beginning. The latter were being progressively drawn into the ideology and state apparatus of the bourgeoisie. In 1913, the SDAP pronounced itself in favor of military mobilization in case of war, and Troelstra openly proclaimed adherence to nationalism and militarism: "We must do our duty" he wrote in the SDAP daily.
Strengthened by its electoral success in 1913, the SDAP, which had won 18 seats, declared that it was ready to accept ministerial posts in the new liberal government. The participation in a bourgeois government would have meant the total abandonment of the remaining proletarian principles by Troelstra's party. However, there was a last, weak proletarian reaction within the party: at its Congress in Zwolle, against Troelstra's advice, there was a small majority (375 against 320) against ministerial participation. It's true that the agitation against participation carried out by the SDP - in the form of an open letter written by Gorter and addressed to the Congress - was not unconnected to this reaction, even though the letter wasn't made known to the Congress.
The SDP's activity wasn't limited to the critique of the SDAP. It was essentially grounded in the class struggle, in economic struggles and in action against war:
-- the international resurgence of class struggles after 1910 favorised the activity of the party, giving it enthusiasm and confidence. Its militants participated with those of the NAS in the struggles of the Amsterdam masons in 1909 and 1910, in defiance of the SDAP which the workers judged as a ‘state party'. In 1910, the party formed with the NAS an ‘Agitation Committee against High Living Costs'. Thus began a long joint activity with the revolutionary syndicalists, which helped the SDP develop its influence in the Dutch proletariat before and during the war. This joint activity had the consequence of progressively reducing the weight of anarchist elements within the small union and of developing a receptivity to revolutionary marxist positions.
It was obvious for the SDP that the IInd International remained a living body for the international proletariat and that it had not at all reached a state of 'bankruptcy. The bankruptcy of Troelstra's SDAP was not at all that of the International. For the SDP, the ‘model' party was still, as it was for the Bolsheviks, the German social democracy, with which it had close links. Gorter, as a member of the SDP leadership, was in regular correspondence with Kautsky, at least until 1911, when the left broke with the Kautskyist centre. Pannekoek, who had been living in Germany since 1906 and had been a member of the SDP since the split, was also a member of the Bremen section of the SPD, after having taught at the party school.
To become a section of the International, the SDP had promptly applied to the BSI. Gorter and Wijnkoop were mandated to explain to the BSI the reasons for the split, basing themselves on reports specially drawn up for the purpose. The request for the new party to be accepted as a full section was the object of a conflict between a left represented by Singer (SPD) and Vaillant, and a right whose spokesman was the Austrian Adler. By a small majority the SDP's application was rejected: Adler's resolution against acceptance got 16 votes, Singer's 11. Thus, on 7 November 1909, through this vote, the SDP was de facto excluded from the international workers' movement, by a BSI majority which had taken up the cause of revisionism.
The SDP nevertheless had the unconditional support of the Bolshevik Left, Lenin - who had made contact with Gorter before the BSI - indignantly condemned the BSI's decision. For him there was no doubt that the revisionists were responsible for the split. "(the BSI) has adopted a formalist decision and, clearly taking the side of the opportunists, has placed the responsibility for the split with the marxists." He unreservedly approved the Tribunists for not accepting the suspension of De Tribune. Like them, he condemned the centrism of Roland-Holst "who has unfortunately shown a dreary spirit of conciliation."
Thus there began between the SDP and the Bolsheviks a community of action which was to become closer and closer. In part thanks to the Russian left, the SDP was finally accepted in 1910 as a full section of the International. Granted one mandate against the SDAP's 7, it was able to participate in the work at the international Congresses at Copenhagen in 1910 and Bale in 1912.
Thus, despite the maneuvers of the revisionists, the SDP was fully integrated into the international workers' movement. Its struggle for the defense of revolutionary principles would be carried out conjointly with the international left, particularly the German left.
The political struggle against the threatened war was a constant activity of the SDP. It participated very actively in the Bale Congress of 1912, a Congress whose central issue was the threat of war. The SDP, like other parties, proposed itself in favor of protest strikes in case war broke out. This amendment, which was rejected, took care to distinguish itself from the idea of the ‘general strike' launched by the anarchists. Unfortunately, following the ban on debates at the Congress, the speech that Gorter had prepared against pacifism wasn't read. The revolutionary voice of the SDP wasn't heard in the International, while the pacifist Jaures held forth from the Tribune.
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On the eve of the war, the SDP - after a crisis of sectarian isolation - had undeniably developed an activity in the Dutch proletariat which was not without its fruits. The SDAP's evolution towards ‘ministerialism' - ie participation in bourgeois governments, its acceptance of ‘national defense' had incontestably confirmed the analyses of the marxist current. But given the very unfavorable conditions of the Deventer split, this current remained very weak numerically: the revolutionary current was hidden behind a revisionist current in full numerical and electoral expansion.
In such a small party, the political orientation remained partly determined by the weight of personalities. The theoretical clarity of a Gorter and his active support were vital in the face of the organizational ambitions and lack of principles of people like Wijnkoop and Ravesteyn. This opposition was pregnant with a new split.
However, the strength and echo of the Dutch marxist current went beyond the narrow confines of little Holland. It was in the International and alongside the German left that Dutch marxism contributed decisively to the birth of the communist left. This contribution was less organizational than theoretical, and was determined by the work of Pannekoek in Germany. This was at once a strength and a weakness of the Dutch ‘Tribunists'.
Chardin
The debate on the period of transition has always been the object of fierce polemics between revolutionary groups. With the development of the class struggle, revolutionaries have been compelled to focus their attention on more immediate questions, in particular the question of organization and intervention. But in playing its role of advancing concrete proposals in the workers' struggles, the revolutionary organization, because it is based on what is ‘general', on what concerns all workers, the whole class, can't afford to neglect the problem of the historical goals of the struggle: the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the communist transformation of social life. In devoting this article to the positions of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt - Battaglia Comunista) on the period of transition, as expressed in the document from their 5th Congress (Prometeo No 7), we are aiming to help reanimate this important discussion in the revolutionary movement. (For further reading on this question see the ICC's pamphlet ‘The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism').
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For our part, we have no doubt that the PCInt's text does share with us an important extent of common ground in the historical acquisitions of marxism. In particular:
* against the idealist theories typical of bourgeois historiography, it locates the origins of the state in the real historical and material evolution of class society;
* against anarchist utopianism, it affirms the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a state in the transition period, which will still be marked by class divisions;
* against reformism, now a counter-revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie, it affirms the lessons of the Paris Commune about the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a state of a new type, a semi-state destined to disappear with the overcoming of class antagonisms
* following Lenin's State and Revolution it affirms that the semi-state must be based on the soviet form discovered by the working class in 1905 and 1917;
* and finally, in line with the contribution of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s, it draws a certain number of critical lessons from the Russian experience:
-- the causes of the decline of the Russian revolution and of the transformation of the Soviet State and the Bolshevik party into a counter-revolutionary capitalist machine reside first and foremost in the failure of the revolution to spread internationally;
-- within the objective framework of the isolation of the revolution and the conditions of backwardness and famine facing the Russian proletariat, certain errors of the Bolshevik party acted as "accelerators" of the process of degeneration;
-- the first of these errors resided in an identification between the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, resulting in the entanglement of the party with the state, the growing rift between party and class, and the increasing inability of the party to play its real role as a political vanguard.
There is also an echo - though, as we shall see, a faint and inconsistent one - of the position, developed by the Fraction and further elaborated by the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC, that not only can the party not be identified with the state, but also that the transitional state and the dictatorship of the proletariat are not identical.
The importance of these shared points is not to be underestimated because they constitute the basic class lines on the problem of the state, the essential ‘starting point' for a marxist understanding of the question. The exception to this is the question of the non-identification of the state with the dictatorship of the proletariat which, as we have always maintained, is an ‘open question' which cannot be definitively settled until the next major revolutionary experience.
Having briefly defined these areas of agreement, we can now develop our criticisms of the PCInt's inadequacies and inconsistencies which weaken their capacity to defend or develop the marxist position on these questions.
An incomplete assimilation of the work of the Italian Left
The PCInt claim that: "The political positions mentioned here represent the theoretical baggage and traditions of struggle of the Italian Left, whose historical presence has been ensured through the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy and the consecutive acquisitions of the Fraction and the PCInt constituted during the course of the Second World War."
As we have said, the text undoubtedly reflects the influence of the Fraction. But while the PCInt doesn't merely sweep the work of the Fraction under the carpet like the Bordigists do, neither can it be said that it has fully assimilated its work and above all its method, which enabled it to initiate a fundamental critique of the positions of the Communist International. But in a number of areas the PCInt reverts back to the ‘Leninist' orthodoxy which the Fraction dared to call into question. This is especially clear on the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the transitional state.
According to the PCInt, the ICC digresses from marxism into opportunism when it argues that a crucial lesson of the Russian revolution is that the transitional state, emanating from a social order still divided into classes, will have a conservative rather than a dynamic character, at best codifying and administrating the push towards communism deriving from the revolutionary class, at worst opposing it and becoming a focal point for the renascent counter-revolution. That, consequently, the proletariat must not identify its class rule with the state machine, but must rigorously subordinate it to the control of its own class organs.
The PCInt want to be very ‘orthodox' on this question and so go back to Marx's statement that in the transitional period, "the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" (in which Marx was essentially attacking reformist deviations about the state). For the PCInt, the state is "a workers' state", even "a socialist state" (in the sense that it permits the realization of socialism). It is the same thing as the soviets: "The error is to see the soviets (which hold all power) distinct from the state; but the proletarian state is none other than the centralized synthesis of the network of soviets."
In fact, the PCInt can only remain ‘orthodox' on this question by ignoring some of the fundamental issues posed by the Fraction and the continuators of its method. The text does have a glimmering of the Fraction's developments in this area, in that certain passages imply that the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat are not identical: for example, the text begins by saying:
"To talk about the period of transition is to talk about the workers' state and its political and economic characteristics, and about the relationship which has to be established between it and the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the soviets."
But this insight is then contradicted by the PCInt's insistence on defining itself against the positions of the ICC. And in doing so, it inevitably defines itself against the work of the fraction.
The pages of Bilan (organ of the Italian Left in exile, 1933-38) contain many profound studies on the question of the state. Its historical origins, the different forms of the state in capitalist society, and so on, are analyzed in the series ‘Party-State-International'. The political and economic questions posed by the transition period are examined above all in Mitchell's articles ‘Problems of the Period of Transition' (which the ICC intends to republish). In the light of the Russian experience, where the Soviet state was transformed into a monstrous bourgeois apparatus, Mitchell returned to some of Marx and Engels' warnings about the transitional state being a necessary evil, a "scourge" which the proletariat is compelled to use, and concluded that the Bolsheviks had made a fundamental error in identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the transitional state:
"Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilized them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance.
"Even in Lenin's thoughts the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the state' began to predominate. At the end of 1918, in his polemic against Kautsky (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky), he was unable to distinguish between two conflicting concepts: the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat." (Bilan No 31). Or again:
"The safeguard of the Russian revolution, the guarantee that it would stay on the tracks of the world revolution, was therefore not the absence of all bureaucracy - which is an inevitable excrescence of the transition period - but the vigilant presence of proletarian organs in which the educational activity of the party could be carried out, while the party itself retained a vision of its international tasks through the International. Because of a whole series of historical circumstances and because of a lack of indispensable theoretical and experimental equipment, the Bolsheviks were unable to resolve this basic problem. The crushing weight of contingent events led them to lose sight of the importance of retaining the Soviets and trade unions as organs which could be juxtaposed to the state, controlling it but not being incorporated into it." (ibid).
The link between this position and that of the ICC is clear. The class organs of the proletariat are not to be confused with the state. Thus, the PCInt should take issue with Bilan on this matter.
Of course, the ICC's position is not merely a repetition of Bilan's. By assimilating the work of the GCF, it has made it clearer on a number of points:
* on the party question: Bilan saw the need to distinguish the proletariat and its party from the state, but tended to identify the party with the proletarian dictatorship. For the ICC, the party is not an instrument for wielding political power. This is the task of the workers' councils and other unitary organs. The function of the party is to conduct a political fight within the councils and the class as a whole against all the vacillations and bourgeois influences and for the implementation of the communist program;
* on the union question: while the proletariat in the period of transition will still require organs to defend its immediate interests against the demands of the state, these will not be trade unions, organizations which arose on the basis of specific trades in the struggle for reforms last century, and which have proved themselves antithetical to the needs of the class struggle and have passed over to the capitalist camp in the epoch of social revolution, but the workers' councils, factory committees, militias, etc, (see below);
* on the question of the state itself: the GCF and the ICC, inquiring more deeply into the origins of the state in history and in the transitional period, have rejected the formulation ‘proletarian state', which still appears in Bilan's work.
In the passage in their document dealing with the historical origins of the state, the PCInt correctly summarizes Engels' writing on the subject by saying that:
"1) the state is the product of a society divided into classes
2) the state is the instrument of domination by the economically dominant class."
However, they do not draw all the appropriate conclusions from this, in particular, that the state did not emerge as the simple, ex nihilo creation of a ruling class but arose ‘spontaneously' from the inner contradictions of a social order dividing into classes. It is this understanding of the state as first and foremost an instrument for the preservation of social order which makes it possible to explain how, in the phenomenon of state capitalism, the state can ‘substitute' itself for the traditional ruling class. And it is this understanding of the fact that the state arises from a class-divided social situation which enables us to see that the transitional state doesn't emanate from the proletariat but from the exigencies of the transitional society itself. In a sense, the destruction of the bourgeois state represents a break in a millennial continuity which takes us back, on a higher level, to the situation preceding the emergence of the first state forms. The transitional state coheres out of the ‘disorder' bequeathed by the smashing of the bourgeois state power. But in contrast to all previous states, this state won't ‘automatically' become the organic expression, the prolongation of an economically dominant, exploiting class, because such a class will no longer exist. The proletariat will have to wage a constant political struggle to ensure that the state remains under its control: no automatic unfolding of economic laws will ensure this. On the contrary, the period of transition will be the battleground between conscious human will and economic automatisms of all kinds, and thus between the communist proletariat and the state which will tend to reflect the continuing pressures of economic laws in a society still marked by scarcity and class divisions.
To be more precise, the emanation of the state from the transitional society means that it will be based on organisms - the territorial soviets - that regroup the whole non-exploiting population. Though containing proletarians these organs are not proletarian in themselves and the proletariat must always maintain a strict political independence through its specific class organs, the workers soviets, which will exert a rigorous control over the territorial soviets and all the administrative or repressive organs which emerge from their centralization.
It is striking that the PCInt's text almost entirely evades the problem of the organization of the non-proletarian, non-exploiting strata in the transitional state - particularly in view of the PCInt's self-proclaimed ‘sensitivity' to the problems facing these strata in the peripheries of capitalism, where they greatly outnumber the working class and thus pose a central problem to the revolution. Consequently, when it is compelled to touch on this problem, it falls into two symmetrical errors:
-- the ‘workerist' error (which has in the past been particularly marked in the Communist Workers Organization), of denying that these strata will have any participation whatever in the transitional state. Thus they write:
"The soviets will be elected exclusively by workers, excluding any electoral rights to those who profit from wage labor or who, in one way or another, economically exploit the labor of the proletariat".
The exclusion of the exploiters from participation in the soviets is one thing and we agree with it. But this passage gives us no idea at all about what is to be done with the vast mass of humanity - peasants, artisans, marginalized elements, etc, etc who belong neither to the working class nor the bourgeoisie. To have attempted to exclude these masses from the soviet system would have been unthinkable to the Bolsheviks in 1917, and so it should be to communists today. To draw in these strata behind the workers' revolution and not against it, to raise their consciousness about the aims and methods of the communist transformation, to push forward their integration into the proletariat - these strata must be incorporated into into the soviet system through a network of soviets elected on the basis of neighborhood or village assemblies (in contrast to the workers' soviets which will be elected by workplace assemblies);
-- the interclassist error, which consists of fusing or submerging the class organs of the proletariat into the organs regrouping the entire non-exploiting population. This confusion raises its head when the PCInt talks about the transitional state as "the state of all the exploited... directed politically by a working class organized on an international basis." Again, the formulation itself is not totally incorrect; the confusion arises out of what is not said. Who are "all the exploited"? Only the working class, or, as the passage seems to imply in the phrase "directed politically by the working class", the other non-exploiting strata as well? And if the state is to be the state of all the non-exploiting strata, how will it be "directed politically" by the working class if the working class is not organized in an independent manner?
Both these errors reinforce each other, since they spring from the same source: an incapacity to analyze the real social conditions giving rise to the state in the period of transition.
On the trade union question, it is normal to expect today's revolutionary groups to be clearer than the Italian Fraction, since the absence of autonomous class struggle for most of the ‘30s did not provide the latter with all the material required to resolve this question. As we have said, both Bilan and (in an initial stage) the GCF considered that the necessary defense of the proletariat's immediate interests against the demands of the transitional state would be carried out through the trade unions. What is strange, however, is to read that the PCInt - which says the trade unions are no longer proletarian organs and will have to be destroyed in the revolution - also argues in its period of transition document, written in 1983, that:
"The soviets are really revolutionary and political organs. They should thus not be mixed up with the trade unions which, after the revolution, will still have the function of defending the immediate interests of the proletariat and organizing struggles against the bourgeoisie during the difficult process of the ‘expropriation of the expropriators'. Neither should they be confused with the factory councils which have the task of ensuring workers' control over production."
We have often said that the PCInt and the CWO retain certain confusions about the unions as ‘intermediary' or even ‘workers' organizations in this epoch, and this quote confirms it: they seem unable to understand why the trade union form no longer corresponds to the needs of the class struggle in this epoch, the epoch of capitalist decadence and of the proletarian revolution. The essential characteristics of the class struggle in this epoch - its massive character, its need to break down all sectoral barriers - won't change after the seizure of power by the workers. We have already said that we recognize the continuing necessity for the workers to be able to defend their immediate and specific interests against the exigencies of the transitional state, but to do this they will require organs that regroup proletarians irrespective of trade or sector: the factory committees and the workers' councils themselves. In the PCInt's view of things, where the workers' councils ‘are' the state, we are presented with the bizarre scenario of the workers using trade unions to defend themselves ... against the workers' councils!
In conclusion
This article in no way claims to be an exhaustive study of the question of the period of transition, or even of the PCInt's view of the matter. It's aim has rather been to give a new impetus to the discussion of the transition period, to define certain basic starting points, and to criticize the confusions, contradictions, or outright concessions to bourgeois ideology contained in the positions of another revolutionary organization. The PCInt's positions, though setting off from this marxist starting point display on certain crucial issues - the relationship between class and state, party and state, the union question - a difficulty in moving from this point of departure to its most coherent conclusions. They stand half-way between the most advanced positions of the communist left and the depasse theses of the Communist International under Lenin. But as even the revolutionary bourgeoisie understood, you can't make a revolution half-way. All confusions and contradictions about the revolutionary process will be exposed mercilessly by the revolution itself. This is precisely why the debate on the period of transition can't be ignored today: when we are launched on the ocean of the communist revolution, we will have to be equipped with the most accurate compass permitted by the present evolution of Marxist theory.
MU
The crisis deepens, trade wars heat up, the attack on the working class intensifies
At the beginning of 1986, before an audience of skeptical workers, fed up both with 15 years of inexorably rising unemployment and with the endless refrain that “we are nearly at the end of our economic difficulties”, the world’s governments shouted from the rooftops that this time the end of the tunnel really was in sight - as long, of course, as the workers were prepared to accept a few more sacrifices. Why? Because the price of oil was collapsing on the world market and because the dollar’s exchange rate was dropping. The press spoke of the “oil counter-shock” and the “oil windfall” which were to solve all our problems. The nightmare was at last coming to an end.
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